Kenya and Berlin (1953)

From the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enemy of an Enemy

Cardinal Richelieu was credited with basing his foreign policy on the maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The capitalist groups in the modern world work on the same slogan. In present world conditions Russian capitalism and its allies in the Soviet bloc, is in conflict with the capitalists of the Western world. The latter in their turn are engaged in struggles against the working class in each of the Western countries. Therefore the working class of the Western countries are the potential allies of the Russian rulers. This is the reason why the Russian rulers hold themselves out as the friend of “the toilers of Britain and America" and try to enlist the sympathy of the latter by means of the Communist Parties in those countries. The assiduity with which the Communist Party of Great Britain has built up the legend of “The Jolly George"—in which incident the workers of Britain are supposed to have prevented the British ruling class pursuing the war against the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Revolution—shows, in spite of the fact that the story as related by them is not true, the direction in which their thoughts are moving, For the Russian rulers realise that, however powerful the Anglo-American ruling class might be, it could not, without the active support of the British and American workers, embark successfully on any war against the Soviet Union.

Vast Subversive Network

On the same principle, the ruling class of Britain and America show great sympathy for the oppressed workers in the countries under Soviet regimes, and try to stir up discontent and organise opposition. In the conditions obtaining in the Stalinist countries, this work has to be done underground, in exactly the same way as the Communist Parties have to work secretly in many western countries, among them Spain and Portugal, some of the South American republics, and (to an increasing degree) the United States itself. Thus an article in the “Readers' Digest” of October, 1952, says "West Berlin, an enclave deep in the Soviet Zone, continues to be headquarters for a vast subversive network radiating throughout Red Germany, warning police officials of the punishment in store for them, smuggling refugees to the West, ceaselessly distributing propaganda.”

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

But, one need scarcely add, the sympathy felt by the ruling class of Russia, and of Britain and America, for the struggle of the workers against their masters, stops at their own boundaries. The workers of an enemy country are fit subjects for sympathy; but never the workers of your own. Chapter and verse for these statements can be found in the recent events in Kenya and East Berlin. When in East Berlin and other German cities, on June 16th and 17th, the workers turned on their masters and protested by mass demonstrations against their wages and working conditions, the German Stalinist police, supported by Russian tanks and machine-guns, suppressed the demonstrations by force, killing a number of demonstrators. This was the signal for a barrage of sympathy from the rulers of the Western world. Dr. Adenauer said, “betraying deep emotion,” that “even in a cynical age there were still men prepared to die in the streets for an idea. They did not fear Russian tanks and machine-guns; they had shown to the world that they would not be slaves, and that the age of tyranny was over.” (The Times, 24-6-53; subsequent references are also to The Times, unless otherwise stated.) In Parliament Mr. Maclean, a Conservative, called the Russian action a “barbarous massacre” (25-6-53); and a group of Labour members tabled a motion reading: “That this House notes with intense interest and deep sympathy the struggle of the German workers against the Russian military dictatorship in Eastern Germany and deplores the execution without trial of the leaders thrown up by the workers in the struggle for bread and liberty” (24-6-53). Mr. Dulles, the American Secretary of State, found that the episode "demonstrates that the people do retain their love of God and love of country and their sense of personal dignity. They want to run their own affairs and not be run from Moscow. The unquenchable spirit of the people was dramatised in East Berlin, where unarmed youths tore up paving stones from the streets to hurl in defiance at tanks . . . The people want to be governed by those whom they select as responsive to their needs and desires, rather than to be ruled by those who take their orders from aliens and who give their orders with a view to achieving their own ambitions without regard to the welfare of the people concerned ” (1-7-53).

Kenya

If this is the attitude taken by the Western rulers to the events in East Berlin; why do not they deliver the same kind of stirring speeches about the disturbances in Kenya? Mr. Dulles thinks the East Germans want to run their own affairs; but the East Germans are at least allowed the semblance of free elections (skilfully manipulated though they may be by Herr Ulbricht and his friends) whereas in Kenya the Kikuyu and other Africans are openly barred from the franchise. A defender of the attitude of the Anglo-American ruling class might say that the two cases were different; the Kikuyu, in rebelling, did not stop short at peaceful demonstrations, but actually killed those whom they thought were oppressing them. The answer to this is— so did the East Germans: a number of police and state-officials were reported shot or beaten to death during the riots of June 16th and 17th (1-7-53). And this should cause no surprise; when workers are driven to desperation point, be their skins black or white, they often try to seek escape by using violence against individual members of the oppressing class or their hirelings.

Savagery

But again it might be alleged (by a supporter of the British ruling class) that the behaviour of Mau Mau adherents in Kenya has shown them to be savages at heart, and to be therefore beyond the sympathy of “civilised” men. But this is the last argument .which could be used by members of the British ruling class. If individual acts of barbarity are to blacken for ever the character of the nations to which their perpetrators belong, and place those nations for ever beyond the pale of civilisation and civilised rights, then why this sympathy and support for the Germans? These Germans are exactly the same as those against whom our rulers were lashing us into furious enmity only eight years ago, on the grounds of the savagery, the barbarity, the bestiality they had shown in the treatment of minorities inside Germany and of the populations of the occupied countries. Our rulers cannot now ignore the six years of unending propaganda with which they overwhelmed us in the second world war. The truth is that neither the East Germans nor the Kikuyu are any more brutal by nature than other human beings, though some of them have been driven by oppression and bad conditions into brutality (as were the East Germans on June 16th and 17th, and as the Kikuyu have been from time to time since a year ago).

“Fatherland of the Proletariat”

Just as East Berlin has shown up the hypocrisy of the rulers of the Western world, so it has shown up the hypocrisy of the Stalinist leaders. The Communist Parties of the world claim to be parties of the workers, organised in the interest of the workers; the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the other Soviet countries are always to the fore with denunciations of “capitalist oppression” whenever the workers of the Western world are suppressed by force. In East Berlin the German and Russian Bolsheviks had the opportunity to show how they themselves deal with similar situations; and the outcome was as one would expect, for no capitalist system, whether its superstructure is of the Stalinist or the Western kind, can tolerate insubordination among its workers. By using the rifle, the machine-gun, and the tank against striking and rioting workers, the Stalinists have once more demonstrated the division between the master class and the working class in the countries under their control. 

Worse Than Useless

The Socialist attitude to these events can be explained in a few words. While we have sympathy with workers who are driven to break out in open violence, whether against Stalinist or a western ruling class, the killing of individual members of a ruling class does nothing at all to alter the economic basis of society; so long as that basis is unchanged, so long will there be a master class and a working class. Acts of violence on the part of the workers merely provoke the ruling class and its armed forces, and give it the excuse for bloody reprisals. In Eastern Germany, scores of workers are reported to have been killed; in Kenya, the “security forces" boasted that in three days last month they had killed a hundred “terrorists,” which is far more than the total number of whites killed by the Mau Mau since the beginning of the troubles (27-6-53). When workers become Socialists, they use their resentment at their conditions to spur them on towards ending the society that causes them, not in sporadic and pointless acts of violence. The Western leaders claim to be opposed to violence and murder as political weapons; but they reveal themselves as double-dealers when they incite the workers in Stalinist countries to use these weapons, although they know that the result can only be a slaughter among those who try to fight their political battles in the streets.

Alwyn Edgar

Slings and Arrows: “ Rats, Lice and History ” (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Rats, Lice and History ”

When the news burst upon an incredulous world that fourteen doctors had been arrested in Moscow for plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders; when furthermore these charges were added to by the accusations that they were in the pay or under the influence of international Jewish organisation, the Daily Worker, ever faithful to its masters in the Kremlin, rushed into print with stout assertions of the truth of all the charges. They denied that any anti-semitic motives were involved. They fervently expressed their belief that in the Soviet Union innocent people could not.be falsely accused and imprisoned. But unfortunately for the Daily Worker, within a few months the Russians themselves changed their tune and the doctors were released. Those who had accused them were imprisoned and charged with almost every crime from faking evidence to exacting, by illegal means, confessions from innocent people; from denying civil liberties and violating the Soviet constitution to fomenting racial prejudices. The Daily Worker, still faithful to their masters announced with pride that these events proved what safeguards there were in the Soviet Union and forgetting their previous support of the charges against the doctors, joined in denouncing the original accusers.

When strikes broke out in East Berlin, and workers were shot in the streets, when an unemployed worker was condemned to death and executed within a half hour of sentence being pronounced, once again the Daily Worker rushed into print to justify the ruthless savagery with which the workers of Berlin had been treated. Nothing is too vile for the Communists to swallow. Once again their masters had let them down, for Dr. Grotewohl, premier of East Germany, admitted that no amount of outside agitation would have succeeded if there had not already existed in the Soviet Zone “an explosive situation caused by misunderstanding.” So much for the Daily Worker's accusations that the strikers and rioters were “fascists and riffraff ” sent in by the Americans to foment trouble.

These swift and sudden reversals of attitude should have taught the Daily Worker the need for caution. But when the second in command of the Soviet Union was arrested and charged with treason and plotting, and was heaped with the most virulent execration, the Daily Worker again came to the defence of the accusers of Beria. “Beria—The Truth,” was the headline splashed across the front page. Are they sure it is the truth? Is it not on the cards that the accusers of Beria may shortly be arrested and charged with extorting confessions, and using illegal means as is the case with the doctors? May it not be possible that Beria will be released and this former hero, present scoundrel become the future hero? Another question poses itself. Will the Daily Worker issue any guarantee as to the integrity of any Soviet leader, and why is it that when the Communists choose leaders, almost one by one they turn out to be traitors? 

Let it be remembered when next the Daily Worker and the Communist Party pretend to represent the interests of the workers, that they are prepared to defend and also to perpetrate any infamy as long as it suits the Russian riding class. They demonstrated this in their support, opposition, and then support of the War; they showed this when they condemned striking miners at Grimethorpe, and they have shown this in their support of the shooting down of strikers in East Berlin. And also be it remembered that when workers struck for more tolerable conditions, the Russians showed themselves to be as ruthless, as anti-working class as any state they term “Capitalist cannibals,” but whose treatment of workers they not only emulate but surpass.

Readers may remember that before the war a book was published dealing with the effects of plague carrying vermin on history. We apologise for stealing its title for this paragraph but could think of nothing more apt.

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Who are the Workers?

Who has not heard the assertion that the workers are those who do the least work, and constantly demand more money for less effort? Many and varied have been the appeals for increased production, harder work, wage freezes and so on. Yet, although some sections of the working-class have responded nobly to the call, others have turned a deaf ear and pointed out that increased production coupled with wage freezes mean only more dividends for the bosses, and eventual unemployment for themselves. It is to such curmudgeons that we quote the example of a man who has not one job but well over a gross. Mr. J. Arthur Rank, according to the City Man's Diary in the Evening Standard (July 14th, 1953) is a director of one hundred and eighty seven companies. In the face of such supreme effort can any worker fail to give of his best?

The City Man with a fine show of industry himself, works out that if Mr. Rank does a forty hour week he is able to devote 12½ minutes to each company providing he does nothing else. “Over a year, allowing him a month’s holiday he could spend one and a quarter days on average on the affairs of each company.”

You miners who labour in the bowels of the earth, you stokers who work in hot furnace rooms, you clerks who become prematurely bent over your ledgers and all you who bemoan your lot; you with only one job to do and forty or forty-eight hours in the week to do it in spare a thought and perhaps a tear for the man who has one hundred and eighty seven jobs, all of them vital and important, and who can only devote 12½ minutes to each in the week. Think with awe and respect of a man who is such a genius that he can direct the fortunes of all those companies in as little time almost as it takes to make a cup of tea. No wonder he is the wealthy Mr. Rank, while we wallow in the poverty of only one job.

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Jolly Old Pals

At every General Election since the war, the Labour Party has claimed support on many grounds. Not least of these is the claim that a Labour Government would minimise industrial strife and that the Unions would get such a square deal from their pals in the Labour Government, that strikes would become extinct as a method for settling industrial disputes. They made our flesh creep with tales of what would happen in the event of the return of a Tory Government. Those who remembered the past might well be forgiven for believing these tales.

Just as other claims made by the Labour Party have been exposed as sham and hollow, so this one has received a nasty blow and from none other than Mr. Arthur Deakin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. At the Annual Conference of the Union Mr. Deakin rose to defend himself against the charge that he had said the Tories were not all “a bad bunch.” He admitted expressing these 'sentiments but continued:—

“With Sir Walter Monckton as Minister of Labour we have had a square deal, and done things which were difficult to do when our own people were in that position."

(Manchester Guardian, 16/7/53.)

Not for the first time has a Trade Union leader discovered that whatever the intentions of his friends in a Labour Government may be, the task of administering capitalism, as well as political considerations, compel a Mr. George Isaacs to say “no,” where a Sir Walter Monckton would say “yes.” And in reverse the Trade Union leader would not wish to put his friends in a difficult position by threatening action, where he could use that weapon on a Tory Minister with possibly good effect.

Will we see Arthur Deakin and others stumping the country asking support for Tories, because they give a “square deal”? What will happen to the Labour Party then?

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Without Comment

“Would not the Prime Minister agree that the only way to improve the standards of living of the backward races and to avert economic world disaster is to allow all peoples to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest markets because if goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will. Will he set the people free?” Sir Waldron Smithers.

Answer by the Prime Minister: “Those seem to me, on the whole, to be unobjectionable sentiments.”

S.A.

Editorial: The Lessons of East Europe (1990)

Editorial from the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the end of 1989 few people had heard of the Rumanian town of Timisoara. Since then it has added its name to Tiananmen Square and the many other places where workers have been gunned down in their struggles for democracy; such blood has stained the streets of cities throughout the world. In Rumania the price was high and we salute the selfless courage and the sacrifice of men and women who put their lives on the line demanding freedoms which are vital to the interests of workers everywhere. There would be many political points on which Socialists would disagree with those who rose against their oppressors in Eastern Europe but we also acknowledge that they risked their lives trying to establish the conditions in which free trade unions and a genuine socialist movement could operate.

Since the second world war, the enforcement of political tyranny in Eastern Europe has cost the lives of incalculable numbers of workers and brought untold misery.

A further crime that has been perpetrated has been against the integrity of ideas in the claim that socialism exists in Russia and Eastern Europe. A distinction must always be made between the fraudulent claims of ideology and the real facts of productive relations. In Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe there is commodity-production, wage-labour and capital, the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of workers, the market, rent, interest and profit; that is to say, all the economic features of capitalist society, organised mainly through the state for the benefit of a privileged class. The wealth robbed from the workers and enjoyed by the Ceausescu family with its millions of pounds deposited in foreign accounts was only one example of the luxury lifestyle enjoyed by the rich in the state capitalist countries.

Despite these facts it has suited the propagandists of both East and West to describe those systems as socialist. The Russian rulers needed to cloak the reality of their vile system with an acceptable ideology and for Western propagandists, this gave them an ideal opportunity to discredit the name of socialism.

It was inevitable that the oppressive forms of state capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe would degenerate into chronic inefficiency. It is impossible to allocate such vast resources to repression, to engender corruption, cynicism, low morale and outright lack of enthusiasm and at the same time expect to be well ahead in the world league of rates of productivity and industrial growth. However, it would be wrong to say that the pressures for changes have originated at the top. Leaders like Gorbachev have reacted to a situation created by Russian workers through their many forms of passive resistance including their unwillingness to apply themselves conscientiously at work.

In Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania despite the intimidation, the workers took courage into their hands, came onto the streets and openly defied their oppressors. What has been impressive has been the sophistication of the ways in which these workers have conducted themselves. By their nature these events could not be well planned in advance, the movements had little structure of organisation behind them, yet despite these disadvantages in every case except Rumania (which was not the fault of the workers) they managed to conduct themselves without great bloodshed in a dignified and self-controlled manner.

With greater freedom of movement and expression, for the first time in many years, the genuine voice of socialism can now be carried to those countries. When we see these oppressive structures collapsing, what is being demonstrated is the power and force of popular consciousness. So, when we say that a majority of socialists will be able to take over the state and establish a system of co-operation and direct production for human needs on the basis of common ownership, the workers’ ability to carry this through has been demonstrated in Eastern Europe over the past few weeks.

When we say that in recognition of their common interests throughout the world, workers can co-operate and act simultaneously in each country; that a socialist majority will be able to organise this great revolutionary change through a series of fast-moving events in a level-headed and self-controlled manner, the ability to achieve all these things has also been demonstrated by the working class in Eastern Europe.

These are the grounds on which Socialists can be greatly encouraged by recent events. Having seen these vile and despotic structures continue intact decade after decade, we might have been excused for thinking that they were so firmly in place that they would last for ever. In fact, they were so fundamentally weak that they collapsed overnight.

Having seen world capitalism stagger on decade after decade, similarly we could get the impression that it is so firmly entrenched that it will remain for ever. In fact, confronted by a socialist majority, the lesson is that it will prove so fundamentally weak that its abolition will be a mere formality causing it to dissolve into history.

Turmoil in Tibet (1959)

From the May 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rebellion in Tibet, its draconian suppression, and the escape of the Dalai Lama, have exploded like a star-shell to illuminate a world in the Iron Curtain's dark shadow. Events in Tibet have been compared with the recent suppression in Hungary and while there is a resemblance, both revolts and the backgrounds have been reported everywhere befogged with misunderstanding or misrepresentation by people who do not seem to have a clue as to what the factors are that make society tick.

A Britisher says his piece
Mr. Hugh Richardson, the last British representative as Officer-in-Charge of the British Mission in Lhasa from 1947-1950 writing in The Observer, 5th April, 1959, gave a sincere, emotional, but woolly-headed review of the happenings and the historical background there. He said that the benefits of science conferred by the Chinese were illusory to the Tibetans when compared with the freedom to retain their old customs. He also naively berated Mr. Nehru for the part he played, “There is still no word from him of condemnation of the use of force beyond anything that an internal affair could warrant. Is such circumspection necessary or honourable?” He also makes out a case against the Chinese invasion on grounds of pure illegality.

Because Tibet has been off the beaten track of world trade, surrounded by land and without any ports conveniently available, she has been left severely alone by the great Capitalist groupings of the world whose main basis of transport is the steamship. Trade with Tibet had to be carried on with the aid of caravans for moving the merchandise, and this obsolete method renders out of the question cash crops and mining ventures, two of the great standbys of this profit-making age.

But there is a certain amount of trade with the contiguous countries, and this is to a large extent in the hands of the Tibetan nobles who, unlike the British aristocrats of last century, do not consider indulging in trade to be beneath them.

Tibet entered the Twentieth Century committed by the leanings of its ruling theocracy towards isolationism, and straining to get rid of its vassalage to Peking. The nobles wish to keep all of the profits of exploitation. The Tibetan ruling class is closely supported by the princes of the Buddhist church, who co-operate to preserve a subject-class docile, and amenable to the demands of their masters. Marx was by no means the first to realise that religion is the opiate of the people! Both British and Russian governments at that time had ambitions which extended to Tibet. But Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour stated the British case simply, “It would be a serious misfortune to the Indian Government and a danger to our northern frontier, should Tibet fall under any European influence other than our own ” (Eastern World, December, 1956).

Tibet, a weak country, was but a pawn in the game of power politics then, as in the present fracas.

Would the Chinese Nationalists act the same ?
Chiang Kai-shek, the discredited Nationalist from his retreat in Formosa, criticised the Chinese government for their part in the affair and promised the Tibetans his support. He also proposed to organise an airlift, but the Tibetans, though they have not studied the Bible, probably know better than to lean upon a broken reed. Both the “Communist” and the Nationalist governments of China act on behalf of Chinese Capitalism. The “Communist” government of China has taken over from the Nationalists the map of China showing Tibet as being included within the country's boundaries.

But the tongue-in-cheek protestations of Chiang Kai-shek ring hollow to those who remember his activities in 1950, when the Chinese “liberated” Tibet. Lhasa's appeal of November 7th, 1950, to the United Nations for help against “the armed invasion of Tibet for the incorporation of Tibet within the fold of Chinese Communism, was presented in the United Nations, as a resolution by El Salvador. The Chiang Kai-shek delegate from Formosa opposed entering the item on the agenda on the challengeable grounds that Tibet had been part of China for 700 years.” In fact, as hollow as the sympathy for Tibet expressed by the press both here and in America. Chiang Kai-shek was allowed to have his way: neither Britain nor the United States rose to make an issue of the Tibetan nobles' right to self-determination, i.e., the right of the Tibet ruling-class to exploit the subjugated and keep the loot all to themselves. Apparent good intentions on the part of ruling-classes, when probed in the light of Socialist knowledge, so frequently appear as having economic motives. Whenever principles conflict with self-interests it seems as though it is always the principles that are jettisoned. The right to self-determination becomes the right to exploit: a rose by another name! The Tibetan government, standing alone, was forced in May, 1951, to submit to "Peaceful Liberation,” otherwise known as invasion and subjugation.

“Liberations”
The “liberation” of Tibet by the so-called Communist government of China in 1950-1 was by no means the first time that the country has seen invaders. The first Gurkha invasion from the south was in 1788, but in 1792 the Chinese government despatched an army of both Tibetans and Chinese under Chinese leadership and in the arctic cold of winter forced the Gurkhas to retire. The Chinese closed the frontier, but in 1841 an invading force from Kashmir were almost exterminated by the Tibetans. A Gurkha invasion of 1855 opened the country up to trade with the Indian sub-continent which was then governed by the British.

But Tibet, long regarded romantically by Europeans as the Land of the Lamas, is of strategic importance in the virtually New World that is Asia, and the country can be compared there much in the same way as control of the Middle East is regarded as vital by Western interests. Fairly recent events surely underline the truth of this contention. But Tibet no longer acts as a buffer zone; instead, it constitutes a forward area for Chinese penetration into South Asia.

Missiles from the Roof of the World

The Chinese are constructing airfields in Tibet. The Tibetan plateau of 12,000 foot altitude provides, in this age of jet bombers, an air base unique in the world. Calcutta is only about 550 miles from Lhasa. According to a report in the Eastern World, December, 1956, north of Tibet, through Kansu and Sinkiang, work is progressing on the Lanchow-Urumchi Railway, scheduled for completion (with a link to the Soviet Turk-Siberian Railway) in 1960. In August, 1956, Georgi Pokrovsky, a Soviet natural scientist, in a magazine article, proposed the construction of a Trans-Hymalayan railway running from the Soviet Union across Sinkiang to Kashmir and on to Delhi, thus connecting the Soviet Union, China and India by rail.

Those are all tremendous undertakings, and some of them are only projects for the future. But it is to the future that Peking and Moscow are looking, and the blueprints fit together. And in that context Tibet is being developed as a base from which China would be enabled to manoeuvre. For land power, not sea power, dominates Asia. Tibet thus becomes a factor in world strategy.

China and Tibet

Most of the 4,500,000 Tibetans actually live within the confines of China in the areas bordering on Tibet. Only about 1,000,000 live in Tibet proper, under political allegiance to Lhasa. Their social classification is roughly: 50,000 nobles and merchants, 150,000 monks, 800,000 serfs. About one-seventh of the population is in the monastaries—more than one man in four. Those who are not in the church have mostly swallowed the religious bait, hook, line and sinker, and live in subjection to the nobles. They live, imprisoned by the ties of their religious convictions.

A Reuters report published in the Far Eastern Review (November 1952) on developments in Tibet describes how the Chinese, using the Tibetan ruling-class governmental control of the population, are developing the country. As a reprisal for the Chinese occupation, the U.S.A., who are the main buyers of the wool crop (the chief item of export to the outside world), stopped purchases, in conformity with their policy of no trade with Communist countries. This brought about a minor crisis among the Tibet traders, but the Chinese met it by buying about 4 million pounds of wool for the China home market. While the Tibetan ruling-class co-operate with the Chinese government and the latter rally to their aid in time of trouble, it is only those who believe the State Capitalism of China is really Communism, that would consider these two groups to be other than two of a kind.

Industrialisation goes on apace

  Many factories, including an automatic repair plant, an iron works, bricks and tiles plants, saw mills, and a chemical plant, are now in operation. Hydro-electric or steam power stations have been built in Lhasa, Shigatse and Chamdo. Many Tibetan homes which once used yak-butter lamps or had no illumination at night at all, are today using electric light. Over 4,000 miles of motor roads have been constructed and many bridges built; some of them are remarkable feats of engineering skill. These roads link up all the major cities and towns and the principal agricultural, pastoral and handicraft areas which seven years ago were solely dependent on yak, horse and donkey caravans for the transportation of goods. They also connect Tibet with Chinghai, Sinkiang. Szechwan and other parts of China. A passenger air service is now running between Lhasa and Peking. Several airfields have been constructed both for civil and military aviation. Many towns and settlements have sprung up along the newly built highways. Nagchuka, a point along the Chinghai-Tibet highway where there were only a few cottages and tents before, today has become a town with banking, postal and telegraph, trading and health services. A free primary school has also been opened. New dwellings in great numbers have been added in Lhasa, Shigatse, Chamdo and Gynagtse. Industrial activities have given Lhasa a modern look. Its uninhabited northern outskirts are now dotted with factories and living quarters.
  More than 500 species of farm crops and vegetables have been successfully cultivated by the three agricultural experimental farms located on the high Tibetan plateau. Corn has been grown in Shigatse, nearly 12,000 feet above the sea level. Tibetans are being helped by Chinese workers to develop agriculture and livestock breeding. There are now about 80 primary schools attended by more than 6,000 pupils. Last year the first secondary school was opened. Students are given free board, clothing and books. During their study period they get pocket money. There are now three well-equipped general hospitals and several smaller hospitals and clinics in Tibet. About 4.000 Tibetans are now studying in higher institutions in Peking and other cities of China. More Tibetans are being trained locally and in China as doctors, nurses, teachers, radio-operators, tractor drivers and skilled workers.
 The China-geared economic revolution is gradually creating a new social consciousness. Radio, newspapers and cinema are gradually breaking the long-standing barrier of backwardness.

But it must not be thought that China is acting from purely altruistic motives. Tibet is rich in a range of minerals, including uranium—the raw material of atomic power and atomic bombs—according to Chinese surveys.

  China is doing a very commendable job in improving the economic conditions of Tibet. Industries are being developed, agricultural reorganisation is being carried out, the transportation and communication system is being rapidly extended, illiteracy is being removed and health improved, and, above all, mineral surveys are being conducted to utilise vast untapped resources. So far the surveys have revealed that there are more than 30 kinds of mineral resources of industrial value in Tibet. Besides precious metals, coal and iron, Tibet is said to be rich in uranium. There is no doubt that preliminary exploitation of Tibetan mineral resources will be undertaken before 1962. When the envisaged industrial revolution takes place Tibet will become an important economic unit of China. Already it has been established that about two-thirds of the northern Tibetan plateau is very good cattle grazing ground. Hence plans are afoot to make the area China’s major livestock breeding zone in the future. Specially picked Chinese families are being settled in Tibet to help the projected industrialisation of the region and to render smooth the Sino-Tibetan racial unification. The region therefore has become a reservoir for Chinese settlers. Tibet, which has an area of about 12.3 per cent, of that of China, has a total population of only about 1,200,000.

—Eastern World, August, 1958.

Chinese in Mongolia—a foretaste of happenings in Tibet

Mongolia bordering China in the north has already experienced a full-dress rehearsal of what is now taking place in Tibet. The former country, also remote, with a lama dominated population, has already had a taste of "liberation,” Chinese style. Mongolia, a vast country dominated by its cattle baron aristocracy, who look askance at the teeming Chinese settlers. As in Tibet, some are engaged in mining. The coal deposits there, for instance, are estimated at 2,000 million tons. Chinese agriculturalists are swarming in, turning the ancient open pasture lands into farms. Mass trials of Mongolians and killing off the disaffected have been the order of the day, and make a mockery of Article 72 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China dealing with the protection of minorities.

In Mongolia as in Tibet when economic motives beckon, all other considerations have to give way, and the Chinese government behave like any old-time colonial power, except that they falsely act in the name of Communism. 

Who are the transgressors in Tibet ?

The Chinese authorities, probably feeling more secure in their grip of Tibet, and therefore more independent of the services of the Tibetan ruling-clique, had begun clamping on taxes, especially on the monasteries, which have tremendous influence, and had never before been taxed. The Tibetan court, steeped in traditional ways of thought, probably found that a conversion of their feudal economy, almost overnight, into a colonial appendage of a Capitalist power, was a bit too much to stomach, and that they could no longer co-operate, and so they went whilst they still had the chance to get away.

The Dalai Lama and his retinue has been reported as having crossed the Indian frontier, no doubt with heavy hearts, but also with a caravan loaded with gold and jewels. Moreover, it appears that the contents of his palace, reported as having been looted, are insured in India for a vast sum. The Indian government are considering whether they will allow him to build a palace there. Whilst the Dalai Lama may feel miserable he will, apparently, at least be able to be miserable in comfort.

But what is the lot of those who have been left behind: Newspapers report that practically all the young able-bodied men in Lhasa have been separated from their families and driven off by the Chinese apparently to forced labour camps. The Chinese appear to be trying to close the frontier, when, liquidation, a euphemism for extermination, will become the order of the day. The sum total of human suffering there mounts up. Once again, there is a resemblance between the fairly recent events in Hungary, in the plight of the refugees, who, for the moment, are fleeing across the frontiers. Once again, there is a break-up of families and the horror of both young and old at being uprooted and driven out, but this is an almost continuous process in a class-dominated society. The Tibetan refugees now join the grim procession: before them the Dutch from Indonesia, the Hungarians, the 900,000 Arab refugees in the Middle East, the Muslims who fled from India, the Hindus from Pakistan and the continuous stream from East Germany. This column of spectres will go on, it seems, while Capitalism lasts.

The trouble in Tibet is a revolt of the feudal rulers against the imposed rule of State-Capitalist China—these are the transgressors in Tibet. Whichever side wins, the underprivileged on either side will still continue to be exploited, even though serfs become wage-slaves. Tibet compares with Hungary in that, once again, it is a quarrel between ruling-cliques and is not worth the shedding of one drop of workers' blood on either side.

Frank Offord

The Vienna Butchery (1927)

From the September 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader who lives in Vienna sends us the following letter on the so-called "Revolt" in Vienna, which ended so tragically. The letter arrived too late for insertion in August issue.—Ed., Comm.

Vienna,

July, 22nd, 1927.

Last year a Russian film called "Potemkin" made the round in Germany and Austria; its main feature were a successful revolt of Czarist Russian marines in the battle cruiser "Potemkin," and its sequel in Odessa—the crushing by Czarist soldiers of a people's manifestation of sympathy.

Little did the people of Vienna dream that they would so soon have a real life experience of the terrifying scenes they saw last year from a comfortable chair in a picture palace. And if the numerous English, American and other foreign visitors who stop in this city at this time of the year on their continental pleasure trips, and whom a considerate censor had prevented from seeing the Potemkin film in their own countries, they have now been able to learn and to appreciate Czarist Russian manners and methods in grim reality in the fair city of Vienna, "the city of songs and music on the blue Danube, the centre of art and of culture."

Anyone who, like the writer, happened to be on the Friday (July 15th) afternoon on the beautiful Ringstrasse, could not but become the terrified witness of scenes not one whit less revolting and gruesome than those he had seen in the said film. Police. mounted and on foot, and gendarmes firing into a mass of unarmed and fleeing civilians, screams of falling men, women and children, under a sky laden with the smoke-clouds from a burning building. And a hundred men, women and children are now lying in their graves,  a mass grave, as befits members of the working class to which they all belonged; a thousand others left to continue the battle for life with broken limbs and shattered nerves, many of them still in the hospitals at the time of writing, fighting between life and death; two hundred in prisons awaiting trial fro lawlessness and incendiarism; such is an episode in Capitaism's career—the sequel to "Bloody Friday in Vienna."

What had happened? What was it all about? What had aroused this special anger and fury of the powers that be?

Had the poverty-stricken mass of the city's workers suddenly lost their patience and their temper, and broken into the comfortable quarters of the rich and wealthy? Had they tried to ease their and their families' wretched lot by forcibly seizing some of the goods with which the countless stores are filled to the roof tops? Had they made a determined attempt at gaining access to the good things of life they produce and store up for a favoured few? Had the workers suddenly come out of their dens and hovels with the set purpose of establishing themselves in the elegant and spacious garden villas and mansions of the "Cottage" or the "Ambassador's quarters"?

Had the sumptuous palaces of the Rothschilds', the Fürst Liechtenstein, and the innumerable other palaces of the city been seized by the "common" people? Had the warehouses been attacked and plundered? Was property in danger? Could it be that the workers marched up to overthrow the Capitalist order and to proclaim the Socialist Commonwealth?

But though the fear of these things, which was stimulated by a general shutting of shops, betrays the existence of great social inequalities—"injustices," if you like—that will sooner or later force a correction, not one baker's or tailor's shop, and not one villa in the "Cottageviertel!" was in danger. And even the fact that the scene of that terrible collision between working men and the powers that be was the "Palace of Justice" (the Law Courts of Vienna) does not do more than provide an accidental omen.

This attack, however, of July 15th, silly and stupid as it would be in any circumstances had nothing to do with Socialism. though the party that pretends to stand for the interests of the working class in this country, namely, the Social Democratic Party, cannot be acquitted of a large measure of the guilt for the massacre of so many working class lives. This guilt lies in the awful confusion which that party creates among working men and women by identifying them with, and wasting their energies on, all kinds of minor issues and reforms. The workers are dragged into every kind of political fracas, the petty squabbles of the innumerable organisations, and thus become easy preys of Bourgeois intrigues.

Only class-unconscious workers could have been so staggered by the acquittal of the two nationalists who shot dead a social democratic working man and a boy at Schattendorf last January as to begin a "wild strike" and a march to Parliament with the disastrous consequences that followed.

For let us make it clear that these thousands had come for no other purpose but to protest against the acquittal of the two murderers; they soon found the police, mounted and on foot, confronting them and moving them on in the usual police style, until the sight of the "Palace of Justice," with more police and showers of bullets, provided the signal to a maddened crowd to set fire to the building. In vain did the well-tried "leaders of labour" endeavour to appease the infuriated masses from resurrected barricades, in vain did the Social-Democratic mayor himself mount a fire-engine to save the burning building, but—is it necessary to say—after an all-day and night struggle the police and military eventually "cleaned" (as they put it here) the streets.

With a more or less obscure object the Social Democratic Party declared a partial "general" strike. On Wednesday, the 20th, the victims were laid to rest, and now things are "normal" again. The "labour market" is relieved to the extent of the murdered and mutilated workmen, and by an increase of the police force supplied by members of the S. D. Party, ready, as that party always is, to assist the Capitalist class in maintaining and perpetuating Capitalist order.

The Communists saw in the march once more the advent of the social revolution, though it is not all certain whether they will survive its defeat.

Frank.