So They Say: Protests too much (1977)

The So They Say Column from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Protests too much

An article in The Spectator of 12th November entitled “The irrelevance of class” which attempts to justify its title by showing how various important men have risen from what are discreetly referred to as “humble births”, reminds us that the class war still prompts professional hacks (and quacks) to issue it, at regular intervals with a formal death certificate. The entire irrelevance of class structure within society led the writer of the article to over 50 column-inches to make his point and if The Spectator is prepared to pay for and publish this sort of thing, we have high hopes for our own submission entitled “The irrelevance of air—hot and cold.”

The inconvenient obstacle to the claim however is one of fact. Obstacles of this nature may or may not impress Spectator’s writers who are prepared to spend a good deal of time apparently in dealing with what they consider “irrelevances”, but it cannot seriously be denied that capitalist society is divided, on the one hand into those who own and control the means of life and on the other, into those who must work for a member of the owning class in order to live. If this class division were non-existent, or irrelevant, we could only express surprise at the great deal of verbiage mustered to assure us of the claim.

Not cricket

Although the owning class as a whole have class interests in common, namely the retention of private- property society and they will unite on issues which may threaten this, each member also has individual interests in the day-to-day business of increasing their particular share of the social wealth, and this process obliges them to enter into battles among themselves. Whereas the working class, the non-owners, represent a class enemy to be held off by a variety of means, other members of the capitalist class are rivals and as such require direct attention.

Fresh diplomatic protests have been tendered by the Government over breaches in agreements by Japanese (Motor) manufacturers to hold down sales in Britain.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

The British motor manufacturers claim that the Japanese are carrying out an “invasion” of the British markets contrary to an undertaking given by the Japanese to restrain sales to the UK. It all sounds very reasonable—an arrangement between friends. The Japanese motor men have argued before that it had all been a misunderstanding and they may well do so again. The fact that the British government now argues the case on behalf of its own national manufacturers shows that they are not deceived. Both parties are aware that “undertakings” are weak restraints on the pressures of capitalist expansion.

Making the point, in the same newspaper, was the Chairman of the Welsh council of the CBI who advises his members that British manufacturers can satisfactorily meet Japanese competition by putting in “the same intensity of effort as the Japanese”, by which he means a greater degree of exploitation of the British working class. This gentleman was speaking from experience. He is the chairman of a machine-tool company.

Last year I put one Japanese firm out of business and two other Japanese firms have given up their markets to me.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

It seems probable that the aforementioned Japanese firms may be petitioning him soon to give an “undertaking” for restraint.

Plenty of problems

The Japanese Prime Minister has become increasingly concerned at the economic problems he faces as the yen rises against other currencies and the exporters are finding it more difficult to compete successfully in overseas markets. He now refers to exports as a “negligible factor in expanding economic growth in future.” The new strategy he revealed is to be the stimulation of home demand by increasing public spending, which we seem to have heard somewhere before.

Mr. Fukuda neatly put his finger on one of the major difficulties facing the Japanese, who are by no means alone in the matter, and shows that capitalism, despite the efforts of so-called planning, simply continues to produce problems and contradictions. The profit motive governs production.

The important thing is to create demand in the midst of the problems of overcapacity and unemployment.

(The Times, 11th November 77)

Capitalist ideologies

The Chinese are said to have approached the British government with a view to ordering Harrier jump-jets. Apparently the so-called socialists are faced with a build up of forces on their border with the other so-called socialists, the Russians. The fact that the British government also refers to itself as “socialist” no doubt lends justification to the approach and completes the picture of this happy socialist band who act so differently from the capitalist governments. To an un-trained eye it would appear to be a straightforward business arrangement.

However Britain is a member of a NATO organization called Cocom whose function is to prevent the sale of weapons and plant for producing them, to “communist” countries. America is also a member and it might be thought that they would, as they are entitled, veto consideration of the order. Surely the Americans would not permit any hole-in-the-wall arrangement between all these “socialists". It appears however that the Americans have an un-trained eye in the matter. They have their reasons too.

The fact that there is a company to company agreement between Hawker Siddeley and Macdonald Douglas to manufacture the Harrier under licence in no way interferes with the sale of the Harrier by Britain to other states, I was authoritatively informed yesterday. A non-British member of Cocom’s coordinating committee told me a few days ago that the United States rarely raised any objection to the export of strategic materials to a Communist country if it was produced or manufactured in America.

(Daily Telegraph, 9th November 77)

Mad Monx (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1327 a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy suffered a calamitous fire which destroyed a magnificent collection of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. It was determined that the cause was arson. The perpetrator was an aged fanatical monk who sought to keep certain knowledge hidden away. Oh, that was fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Marx was one of those whose books were destroyed by the Nazis, also keen to keep knowledge hidden. Burnt too were the works of Heinrich Heine. Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, contains the line: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too’.

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was also queasy at the repression being practised by the Soviet Union. Russians resorted to manual copying of literature (samizdat) and passing it from hand to hand.

In 1953, Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which books burn. Set in a future America, it was the job of firemen not to extinguish conflagrations but to initiate them for the purpose of book burning.

‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ goes the old anti-bullying children’s rhyme, but publishing words can certainly lead to the violence it rails against.

Recent burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden, which have freedom of speech enshrined in their constitutions, have led both countries to contemplate introducing laws to stop such actions. This is not the first time that such events have occurred and the consequences have, in some cases, resulted in extremely violent protests. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson warned that a spate of Koran burnings in the country has triggered ‘the most serious security situation since the Second World War’. One cannot believe he is referencing the Religion of Peace (sic).

Violent protests followed the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, called for the death of Rushdie. In August 2022 a stabbing attempt was made resulting in Rushdie losing the sight of one eye and the use of a hand.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40 percent) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of a god or of people or objects considered sacred. Twenty-two countries (11 percent) had laws against apostasy (abandoning one’s religion).

In March 2023 the Spectator wrote:

‘No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag’ (tinyurl.com/bdebukkd).

Theory at odds with reality?

Earlier in 2023 an American Tennessee pastor live-streamed a book-burning event urging his flock to throw their Harry Potter and Twilight copies into a bonfire. Because why? Because, he said, ‘IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT! All your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism. Stop allowing demonic influences into your home’. Does he know it’s 2023 not 1933? Or perhaps he thinks it’s 1633.

Whatever the literary merits, or otherwise, of J K Rowling’s works – Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies since 1997– in an example that modern heresy will still get you burned at the stake, metaphorically, Rowling’s defence of biological women has seen her banned from events celebrating her own books and films. The three main actors whose careers were kickstarted in the Potter film series have been vocal in condemning her.

Not much support for Voltaire’s ‘I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend with my life your right to say it’ there. Nothing is free under capitalism but free speech increasingly comes at a price.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. In George Orwell’s 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith is employed in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. Here he altered historical newspapers and photographs to concur with whatever the Party line was at the time. The removal of ‘unpersons’ was often carried out in this manner in the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union statues of Lenin were systematically removed from the state the Soviets had previously controlled. Understandable if you’ve been subject to repression for many years but the removal of literary figures seems churlish.

As part of its de-Russification, Ukraine has been removing monuments to Alexander Pushkin the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, thought to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature.

A few years back Iran was, allegedly, (the report comes from the American-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) considering removing Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam from its education curriculum. Changes were because ‘Officials believe that in order to attract the younger generation they must increase the intensity of their religious and ideological propaganda in schools. They think that a large proportion of young people are turning away from religion and government ideology because of the weakness of propaganda in the education system and the mass media’. Shades of Goebbels?

When William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476 he would have been unaware of the law of unintended consequences. Pity that so many are now experiencing them.

Dave Coggan

Rear View: No gods (2020)

The Rear View Column from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

No gods

‘China is set to censor all translated versions of classic religious books to make sure that their messages reflect the principles of Socialism’ (dailymail.co.uk, 27 November). Such news concerning Emperor Xi’s regime comes as no surprise to socialists. Kautsky in his Foundations of Christianity shows how its teachings were turned from those of a rebellious sect into a state religion, suitably servile and cringing. All religions have been, in all phases of history, the allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses bent under the yoke. Churches have crowned the peoples’ oppressors, and crucified our forebears. New Age religion is merely the old repackaged in a new, modern form.

Rather than obeying a priest, they choose the form of our own mental domination and the flight from reality into a magical world. Socialists, by contrast are scientific materialists. We argue that the origin and development of the universe, of life, of society and religion itself can be explained adequately without recourse to the so-called supernatural, and that this is an integral part of socialist theory.

Mao stated in 1949 ‘China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and the people’s livelihood, and we must unite with the national bourgeoisie in common struggle. Our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it’. Time to banish gods from our minds and capitalists from the Earth.


No masters

During the election SPEW, formerly Militant, stated that the Labour manifesto ’offered ’a glimpse of jobs, homes and public services for the 99%, protection for our environment – and making the capitalist class pay. No wonder the boss class and their representatives in politics and the press attack it – they will do anything to prevent a Corbyn victory’ (socialistparty.org.uk, 27 November).

No and no. The manifesto was for reforming capitalism. A real socialist revolution would see all means of production transferred to the community to be used, democratically, to directly satisfy people’s needs without any top-down control.

Corbyn was as little a threat to the status quo as earlier Labour leaders. What did they do for us? Just look at Labour’s record. Wage freezes, benefit cuts, racist immigration controls, strike-breaking, student tuition fees, etc, etc. Briefly, running capitalism on its terms of profits first. Corbyn in office would have ended up doing the same as all previous Labour governments have. Capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the many.


Free access

‘Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are part of a breed of socialists who argue that this time will be different. Socialism never failed, they insist: only the walls, barbed wire and jackboots did. So what they plan for Britain, while radical, is bound to work! True, it’s more radical than anything done in any European country today. Comparisons with Venezuela or Cuba or Soviet Russia are unfair, they say. But there is one model that today’s socialists talk fondly about: the Israeli kibbutz’ (spectator.co.uk, 30 November).

Yet more nonsense. ‘Maduro recognizes Venezuela is still a capitalist-based economy…” (mintpressnews.com, 31 May, 2018). Fidel said in 1988: ‘We are capitalists, but state capitalists. We are not private capitalists’ (Daum, Walter, The Life and Death of Stalinism, 1990). Lenin wrote of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time).

Socialism can only be a world community without frontiers. It cannot be established in one country let alone on one farm. The kibbutzim do show that human beings can live without money and can work without wages, but their small scale means that what they can offer is very restricted. In practice they have paved the way for the development of capitalism in Israel and some have themselves become capitalist institutions employing outside wage labour and producing for the market with a view to profit.

Sting in the Tail: Too many kids? (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column rom the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too many kids?

The Socialist Party has always insisted that capitalism and not overpopulation is what causes poverty.

Our view is supported from time to time by TV programmes and items in the press etc. The latest example is a remarkable article in the Guardian on 25 September by Dan Atkinson and Sarah Whitebloom titled ’Don't blame birth rates'.

The article rebuts the myth spread by the Prince of Wales and other ignoramuses that there is "an iron link between high population/birth rate and poverty".

The writers point out that parts of Britain which have low population density have "the lowest living standards in the UK" while;

  "Thinly populated Canada boasts one of the world's seven largest economies. Singapore — which accommodates three million people within a few acres — is similarly one of the richest economies in the world."

Thus the writers show that "poverty and population are not linked in any way whatsoever" and conclude that "Capitalism, not people, causes poverty". Right on, Dan and Sarah, but do you have something to put in capitalism's place? We do.

We still like kids

Anti-abortionists in the USA are turning more and more to violence in order to get their way.

One doctor who performed abortions was shot dead in March by a man who yelled "Don’t kill any more babies". After another doctor was shot and wounded the founder of Rescue America, an anti-abortion group, said "this shooting, while unfortunate, will result in babies lives being saved", while a Roman Catholic priest urged the killing of doctors who performed abortions, calling it "justified homicide" (Independent, 21 August).

All this concern for unborn children and yet we wonder if these anti-abortionists expressed anything like the same concern over the killing of living children in Vietnam and Iraq by the US government or its stooges in Nicaragua, Angola and elsewhere.

Come on you reds

"Red tide sweeps across eastern Europe" was one of the headlines which greeted last month's electoral success by Poland’s ex-communists.

Ex-communists have also won an election victory in Lithuania last year, enjoy growing support in Hungary and eastern Germany as well as uninterrupted rule in large pans of what were Yugoslavia and the USSR. There is a big difference, however. They now have to embrace the market economy and political democracy, both of which they had spent decades denouncing.

No-one should be surprised by this conversion. The norm in all one-party dictatorships, left and right, is for everyone who wants to "get on" to join the party, no matter what their own ideas may be. Thus all those CPs were full of careerists, crooks, egotists and other self-seekers, so it has been easy for them to make the change.

A touch of class

For years now the Spectator has churned out its nonsense about what a lovely society capitalism is and what interesting and worthwhile people make up the capitalist class.

Imagine Scorpion’s amazement then, when some kindly reader (readers of this column read everything) sent in a spoofy Spectator article by one Charles Moore entitled "It’s time for the bourgeoisie to rise against the Capitalist oppressors". It was in a heavy-handed way supposed to be humorous and satirical. Like most things in the Spectator it was as light as a lead balloon. But surprise, surprise it did contain one gem of truth amidst the usual "All forms of socialism are useless" nonsense:

  "The thinking should start with a redefinition of the working class . . . But why shouldn't the working class mean 90 per cent of those who work or are available for work — the great mass of people who have to live by selling their labour. " (4 September)

Spot on, Charlie. For more information write to Clapham High Street and ask for a copy of "The Socialist Party, Principles and Policy". It is clear, precise and honest. Something that should prove a novelty to all writers in the Spectator.

Doffin the tammy

From time to time socialists run across members of the Scottish Nationalist Party who claim that they are "a bit of a socialist myself", or even more outrageously "the only way to get socialism in Scotland is by voting SNP".

An item in the Daily Record shows how stupid such claims are:

 "A bid to turn the SNP into a republican party failed miserably. The motion which was taken in private session, followed a full scale debate at the Party's National Council in June, then, it was remitted back, and the call to get rid of the royals failed by 216 votes to 131. Later John Swinney, the party's publicity vice convenor, said: We felt it was a dangerous course!'" (25 September)

No dangerous course for these lickspittle tammy doffers. God save the Quine!

Bedtime reading

In the quiet of his hotel bedroom the worker who is in transit selling something useless, attending a seminar about how to con people or just being brainwashed in some staff training course can console themself with a Gideon bible.

Ever wondered how that bible got there? It is all due to as association of businessmen who formed the Gideon International in 1899. We are talking big bucks here:

  "The association distributes 1 million bibles every 10 days at an annual cost of $53m (£35m). Worldwide there are 600 million Gideons. 'We are still battling with other competitors like the Koran', said Brian Hickford, manager of Gideons in the UK." (Independent, 3 September)

You think that is competition, Mr Hickford? What about the day when there is a Socialist Standard in every hotel bedroom? Put there by men and women of the working class not businessmen.

Common Ownership — the Party hasn’t begun (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the heading "The Party's Over" the Spectator (14 January) published a leading article on the Labour Party and its Clause Four. The article contains a generous number of unwarranted statements and false assumptions, but is mainly of interest because of the rhetorical questions it puts:

• "Without it [Clause Four], what, distinctively, does the Labour Party have to stand for?”
• “What does that modest aspiration [running capitalism more efficiently and less stupidly] have to do with anything recognisable as a socialist party?"
• "Mr Blair's problem is that if Labour is not struggling to achieve the collectivist paradise of which its founders dreamt, what is there to unite the party, other than the mere desire for political power?"

The leader writer’s fundamental error (and we credit him with error rather than knowing distortion) is that common ownership means collectivisation or nationalisation. He asserts that experiments in common ownership have failed everywhere they have been tried, bringing destruction and impoverishment. The "experiments" he lists are Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture, the nationalisation of the British car industry, and for good measure he throws in the names of Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Tony Benn.

None of these “experiments" or "experimenters" has anything to do with common ownership. They were, or represent, ways in which capitalism — the system of wage-labour and capital, the working class and the owning or privileged class — can be reformed, allegedly in the interest of the majority. The “experiments" have failed to achieve that limited objective. But they have not failed to achieve common ownership because they have not had that aim.

The writer does show some signs of understanding what common ownership is: "everything is shared and individuals’ activities are organised by, and for the benefit of, the community". This is not how we would prefer to put it, because it implies that the community is somehow apart from the individuals who make it up, but it’s clearly not collectivisation or nationalisation. And the writer also recognises the existence of the class struggle and how it might be ended: "The only way to overcome the fundamental conflict between the two classes was for the workers to take possession of the economy, and run it for themselves."

It is not a question of the common ownership party being over - it hasn’t begun. It can begin, just as soon as there are enough socialist partygoers. To clarify the answers to the Spectator's questions:

• With or without Clause Four, the Labour Party stands only as the B team to run capitalism.
• This has, of course, nothing to do with what the Socialist Party stands for, which is genuine common ownership.
• Because Labour is not struggling to achieve common ownership (socialism), there is nothing to unite it other than the mere desire for political power.

Stan Parker

The Only Reply. (1914)

From the July 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years political quacks and others have been energetically demanding greater efficiency from the workers. The Socialist Party have repeatedly pointed out that the same results follow greater efficiency that inevitably follow the introduction of labour-saving machinery and more up-to date methods.

A moment's thought should convince any sane person. If nine hundred men increase their efficiency to that extent that they can do the work previously performed by one thousand, then one hundred become unemployed. Extend this higher efficiency over the whole of the working class and the number of unemployed increases enormously. The figures used are suppositious, but it is questionable whether the increased efficiency, say of the last twenty years, has not had a far greater effect. Speeding up has become common in every occupation, and unemployment increases in spite of the much-boomed trade prosperity. The theory is proved by practise and experience.

All that politicians and economists do is to reiterate their unsubstantiated assertion that it is a remedy for poverty. They seldom attempt a reply to what most of them know to be the truth. Occasionally, however, a literary desperado with more courage than wisdom, breaks a lance on the solid rock, and as the splinters fly, the poverty and weakness cf capitalist argument are exposed.

Neither is it necessary for the Socialist to rake over the garbage of the gutter Press, or hastily published daily papers.

“The Spectator,” classic defender of the faith, champion, par excellence, of a rotting and useless class— enters the lists against the Socialist indictment.

“The Spectator” has found “the only way." “The Spectator" refers to “the absurd superstition that the increased efficiency of one work man means less employment for another."

“The Spectator,’’ June 6th, 1914, says “A fallacy which can only be answered, as we have answered it many times before, by pointing out that if this proposition were true, it would follow that the best way of making work for everybody would be for nobody to do any work at all."

Deep, profound, almost omniscient must be the wisdom of “The Spectator." Let us try it. 

F. Foan

The "Spectator" On Courage. (1908)

From the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spectator has eulogised Burns of Battersea mainly because he has had the real but unusual courage to do those things that a man might not be expected to do from his previous record. Titus Oates and Judas Iscariot were possessed of the same heroic quality. The parallel between Burns and Judas may, indeed, be pursued to greater length. Both sold themselves for a price. That Burns was able to demand a higher fee and get it shows that the market value of Burns was greater than the market value of Judas; that Bums was worth more to his purchasers than Judas to his. But then Judas, as if anticipating that competitors would arise to challenge his claim to the highest niche in the temple of Spectatorial courage, enormously strengthened his position by going out and hanging himself. When Burns has the courage to follow so excellent an example, he may be sure that the verdict of history, as well as of his friends, will be unqualified and enthusiastic approval of the thing above all others that he was not expected to do from his previous record.