SPGB Summer School (1994)

Party News from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

An audio recording of Ralph Critchfield's talk on Living without the Law is available on the SPGB website.

The Futility of Reformism (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Labour in Crisis – The Second Labour Government, 1929-31’. By Neil Riddell. (Manchester University Press)

The Labour Party, they used to say, was a broad church. Tony Blair, though he has sanctimoniousness in buckets, has spent much of the last five years trying to narrow it down a little. But he has not always found this easy. The strength of Riddell’s book is to show clearly just how much of a compromise the Labour Party always was.

First the facts of the second Labour government. It was elected as a minority in 1929 under the clouds of the impending crash. It imploded in 1931 amid squabbles over a cut in the dole, and after the desertion of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to form the National Government (a Tory-dominated coalition).

This much is well known. What Riddell does that is new is to trace relationships between different sections of the Labour movement (the part, that is, which constituted the Labour Party) as capitalism’s latest crisis left the politicians gasping. Except “relationships” isn’t always the right word. “Hatreds” might sometimes be better. Senior trade unionists (who Sidney Webb called “pigs”) and politicians came close to blows at least once. A broad church maybe, but saintly it was not.

What were the aims of different parts of the movement, which Riddell maintains never could have been reconciled? The TUC wanted a government answerable to them, committed to removing the anti-union laws passed after the general strike. MacDonald, of course, had no intention of giving it them.

Local Labour parties with union backing agreed with the TUC. The rest, always broke because of union resistance to pooled funds, just tried to stay afloat. Union-sponsored MPs generally went along with the TUC line too. Other MPs split, some supporting the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in its quest for “a living wage”. This was proposed first as a remedy for under-consumption, later as a “transitional demand” by which capitalism would be bankrupted. Some for a while were sympathetic to Mosley. Most could only hope that their seats would be safe when the fiasco ended.

Riddell devotes much space to what he calls “the intellectuals”. Looking at what they supported, now and later, this is surely to flatter them. Generally, they plumped for some sort of nationalisation as the way ahead.

Different again was MacDonald himself, a keen proponent of “the inevitability of gradualness”. He believed that meaningful change could come about through piecemeal reforms of capitalism. Snowden, his chancellor, was firmly committed to balanced budgets, free trade and the gold standard. Both craved respectability. (Sound familiar, anyone?).

No wonder R. H. Tawney could call their 1929 manifesto “a glittering forest of Christmas trees, with presents for everyone”. And it was undeliverable. As for the alternative, propagated in the pages of this paper then as now, there was not a whisper from anyone.

Disappointments were inevitable, and MacDonald’s non-spin doctored public relations only made things worse for him. What really knocked the apple from the tree though was capitalism’s slump. When the government did crash, it was spectacular.

The movement, of course, resolved that such a thing must never happen again. Webb went off to look for a different dream, and found it in the USSR. (Soviet Communism: a new civilisation? was published in 1935, but reprinted two years later without the question mark). Generally, the party took up a different brand of reformism in the 1930s and 1940s, looking ever more to nationalisation, finance controls and management by “experts” working through a benign state. “Gradualism” was too slow; and the next Labour government was quicker off the mark.

But what difference would it make? It wasn’t just MacDonald’s leadership which was found wanting in 1931. It was the whole idea that capitalism could be reformed into something kindly and user-friendly. It couldn’t and it can’t. Blair is the face of a Labour Party that accepts this basic truth.

Toby Crowe

Raging Hormones (1994)

Book Review from the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Raging Hormones, Do They Rule Our Lives? by Gail Vines. Virago, 1993, £6.99.

If Gail Vines is right, "the 1990s seem set to witness a resurgence in ’biological’ explanations of human capabilities and frailties". Her book is a timely attack on a scientific determinism which seemed long dead. Although primarily a feminist critique of the medical profession’s supposed objectivity, her arguments work equally well against all attempts to treat science as a thing unbiased by the perceptions of its time, to "push human agency and the social context of our lives out of the picture".

Thus, we find that men who are dominated by their hormones are "deviant", yet for women it is expected. The "feminine" hormone, oestrogen, even takes its name from the Latin for gadfly, "that which causes a frenzy". Gender roles are socially constructed, so society covered its tracks with the ideology of the hormone, giving an unchangeable basis on which these roles could be justified.

It is an ideology, moreover, well suited to late twentieth century capitalism. The study of hormones betrays a fascination with the uncontrollable within us, a deep psychological anxiety which stems (Vines convincingly argues) from instability in the social and economic spheres.

The Victorian medical profession — male, of course — was obsessed with menstrual bleeding, the fear of obstruction and accumulated waste mirroring the laissez-faire economics of free-marketeers like Herbert Spencer. The fad of today, fatness, symbolises our modern concern with self-control and the "correct" management of desire. Women cope with fears for their role in a consumption-driven society by dieting, men by transposing them on to the unstable "other" woman: woman herself.

The menstrual cycle is seen as defining the essence of womanhood, and its end at the menopause as a loss of allure. Nevertheless, from puberty onwards, girls are conditioned not to let their "private" time encroach on the "public" time of their working environment, whether school, home or workplace. Any conflict between the two is met by attempts to "get the woman regular".

Many accounts of pre-menstrual tension (PMT) stress the loss of mental and physical discipline, the very things which capitalism demands. Another classic symptom, anger, is usually the cue for therapy. Rarely is it hinted that women have anything to be angry about. Vines questions the hormonal basis of PMT (there seems to be no link between its occurrence and hormone levels), and explains its survival in medical folklore partly through casual sexism, but also through a more easily quantifiable reason: the drugs companies enjoy having such a large market for their “cures". The causes of stress, too, come less from within than from the inability to control and predict the environment, most noticeably the working environment. Again, capitalism’s problem becomes a women’s problem in particular, because they are urged to conquer stress not just for their own sake, but for others — boyfriends and husbands (in advertisements), and customers and clients at work (contact work, for example in shops, is done most often by women).

Likewise, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has two faces. Originally introduced to combat the short-term symptoms of the menopause, its pioneer, Robert Wilson, claimed rather more. His 1966 book was entitled Feminine Forever, a ploy followed by modern HRT evangelists such as Teresa Gorman MP, who tells women that "if they want to keep the older man from leaving home for a dolly bird, they too will get smart and use HRT" .

As with PMT, powerful pharmaceutical interests stand to gain from hormone replacement treatments. A mere $1.3m of their money paid for the establishment of the Wilson Foundation in 1963, while by 1991 American women alone bought $730m-worth of oestrogen products every year. Better still, the market is set to expand as the baby boom generation reaches middle age.

Like PMT too, however, the menopause itself is, at least in part, a creation of our society. In Mayan villages, women look forward to it as the end of child-bearing and lack the symptoms found in the West, such as hot flushes. It is only now appearing in Japan, at a time when their gynaecologists’ traditional income from abortions has fallen because of better contraception. In this, the situation is similar to that in the US, the biggest market. In Britain, at least until recently, doctors under the NHS had no need to sell drugs to give them an income, and HRT was consequently much less popular.

Vines maintains that gender and sexuality are the result of upbringing, and no more determined by our hormones than aggression is, or (we might add) greed. There is no "brain sex" which determines, for example, that women have poor spatial awareness, and therefore make bad drivers or bad engineers. In most cultures, boy and girls are treated very differently from their first months, and it is therefore impossible to distinguish biological and cultural factors.

To pretend that people are as they are because of their biological programming, whether by hormones or genes, carries obvious risks of discrimination and worse: it oppresses the individuality of all of us, and takes our sexuality "out of its lived context". This book is designed to give us a better idea of how hormones, and scientists, work. It is designed to put us back in touch with our bodies. "Such empowerment will come only with the knowledge that in reality, collectively and individually, we are continually creating ourselves."

Toby Crowe

Three Days in Calcutta (1995)

Party News from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new party advocating world socialism was founded in Calcutta at the beginning of March when a previously existing organisation, the Marxist International Correspondence Circle, publishers of the Bengali-language Lal Pataka, adopted the principles of the World Socialism Movement and changed its name to the World Socialist Party (India). 

Two delegates from the Socialist Party of Great Britain were present at this conference. One of them, Richard Donnelly, gives his impressions.

The streets of Calcutta are alive with the harsh throb of poverty and desperation. To visit Calcutta for the first time is to experience the sharp pain of human helplessness in the face of such deprivation.

In Sealdah railway station families sleep on the concourse, counting themselves fortunate not to have to face the relentless onset of the monsoon that has to be endured by the pavement dwellers outside.

I have felt the unforgettable rage of seeing young women suckling their young on the pavements of these filthy streets, where dead dogs lie rotting in the sun and rats scamper in the rubbish heaps in competition with human beings.

It was amidst these awful scenes, where starving children follow you from street to street begging for a few coppers, that I arrived at Bankim Jatterjee Street for the inaugural meeting of the World Socialist Party (India).

There I heard young men speaking of threats of violence, of loss of jobs, hounding of their parents, and their pledge to work for World Socialism. It was the most crushing indictment that I have ever heard of the money-grubbing, self-aggrandisement of all reformist parties.

Truly, to have been in that hall was to be proud that you were part of a movement that said "To hell with reformism, we are dedicated to win this planet for World Socialism."

Those days, from 1 to 3 March, may not have been "three days that shook the world", but they have undeniably shaken the writer of these so inadequate words.

Richard Donnelly

Tory chickens come home to roost (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Explaining Labour's Landslide. By Robert Worcester & Roger Mortimore. Politico's.

Opinion polling has been a feature of British political life since 1938. (57 percent of people were satisfied with Neville Chamberlain's performance as Prime Minister). By the last general election, however, the pollsters were on trial as never before. They had, horror of horrors, got the result of the 1992 election wrong.

In the end, their predictions of Labour's victory in May 1997 turned out to be creditably close to the mark. The Tories lost 177 seats. Labour won its highest ever number of MPs, and had a majority of 179. Worcester, who founded the MORI agency in 1969 and has been closely involved with political polling ever since, and Mortimore tell the story of that election through the data the polls provided.

The Tories were doomed long before the campaign began, they argue, because of problems almost entirely of their own making. To any socialist, this is deeply uninteresting stuff. The high point of this part of the book, as it was of the campaign, is the man the Tories paid to dress up as a chicken and follow Blair around. Which of them talked more sense is still hotly debated.

And yet, this is not a boring book. It argues strongly from a position of hard facts supplied by the polls that bias in the press does swing votes. During the 1979 election, two thirds of Sun readers didn't know its political allegiance. (Its front page on polling day consisted of two words: "VOTE TORY"). By 1997, "the print media did . . . have significant influence on the voting behaviour of their readers". In this case at least, greater political awareness seems to be a handicap.

The authors are suitably cutting about the cynical and meaningless astrological "predictions" spouted by several papers. The Express, for example, claimed that "a Tory victory is written in the stars . . . Tony Blair is doomed due to the poor positioning of something called the planet Rahu". Shelley von Strunckel in the Evening Standard was cleverer, taking a whole page to hint at a hung parliament without actually committing herself to anything at all. This under the headline "Forget polls, the result is in the stars".

Most interesting for socialists though, is the section What is public opinion? Clearly for anyone concerned to see a huge shift in human consciousness, this is an important area. The book gives much food for thought. "Public opinion", it maintains, comprises three things. There are "opinions: the ripples on the surface of the public's consciousness, shallow and easily changed; attitudes: the currents below the surface . . . and values: the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful". Political convictions generally (we are told) come from this third element. To dump our upbringing for capitalism frequently entails a shift in these deep values. It is possible, as the existence of the membership of the World Socialist Movement proves. But it may not always be easy.

The book of course was not written to give us ideas about how to speed up this process of human change. But what is the alternative? A man dressed as a chicken, pecking at the heels of another man who would soon be sending bombers round the world to serve British capital's interests. Pathetic, maybe; but nine out of ten people think it was childish too—the chicken bit, at least.

Toby Crowe