Papal bull (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The weekend visit of the Pope to Ireland at the end of September was a spectacular occasion. Following a careful build-up by the media, ‘his holiness’ landed to a reception that football stars and pop groups dream of. Crowds were estimated at more than one million; people collapsed in the crush and women gave birth in the excitement; and a mint was made from the sale of blessed knick-knacks, from gnome-like effigies to embossed papal scribblings. The whole show was managed with a TV professionalism that must have made Lord Grade envious.

Medieval pageant

But the visit was not just a twentieth century version of a medieval pageant — although it was about as relevant. Desperate politicians and churchmen fell over in the rush to humble themselves at the papal feet. A revitalisation of the catholic faith (and obedience) was hoped for by some; and they all prayed for an end to the misery of the war in the north that spills over into the south. Well briefed by his Vatican ministers of state, the Pope knew he had been sent to create the illusion that the catholic church somehow cares about peace. It is noteworthy that, while papal visits to politically sensitive spots have the effect of reinforcing the status quo (the American visit took in the slums of Harlem and the Bronx), the area must not be too sensitive. Northern Ireland, for example, was not left off the itinerary because workers there weren’t suffering enough.

The Pope sought, in the course of his stay, to impress upon the Irish people the need to reject “materialism “in favour of “spiritual values”. By this of course, he did not mean that the capitalist class in Ireland should cease their insatiable quest for profit, but that the workers should reconcile themselves to their poverty. Neither could he find it in his heart to remind his flock that the organisation he represents is one the richest in the world, and invests a portion of its loot in that most worldly of profit-making enterprises, the arms industry. The Economist magazine estimates the Vatican’s wealth at around 9,000 million dollars, while the American economist Nino Lo Bella (in his carefully researched book, The Vatican Empire) states that the Vatican state now possesses assets equal to the gold and dollar reserves of France. So much for Christian charity.

Hypocrisy

The first major speech was at Drogheda where, predictably, the Pope pitched into the cameras and the swooning crowd with a long plea for peace. Unfortunately, the history of the catholic church exposes this for the hypocrisy it is; from its inception it has either directly waged war or urged others to do so, often being active on both sides at once.

But leaving aside the blood-drenched hands of the Church of Rome, what relevance did the Pope’s visit have to workers of Ireland? How does his message bear on the political reality they, and workers everywhere, face?

The first thing to note in all this is that god, whom the Pope is supposed to represent, does not exist. The Pope kept calling for prayers for peace: “a prayer from the heart for the peoples who live on this earth, peace for all the people of Ireland. He can hardly have forgotten catholic church has been continuously praying for peace (except of course when involved in wars, when it prays for victory) ever since its establishment. There is only one possible conclusion: if that god of theirs is not deaf he is a very good non-listener. Not that the Pope’s own confidence in god very deep. He was so concerned for own skin that, rather than leave his protection to a non-existent deity, he wore a bullet-proof vest throughout the the trip (Sunday Mirror 30.9.79).

Property baron

If one thing is abundantly clear it is that peace is not going to be brought to Ireland (or anywhere else) merely because some descendant of a medieval property baron dressed in a funny hat drops from the sky to ask for it. The Irish situation ration is a complex result of more than one hundred years of barbaric treatment of a largely peasant by mainly absentee capitalist landlords (all of them no doubt good christians). The misery has been whipped up by this same catholic(and by the protestants) into Irish bog of prejudice that is not going disappear in the face of a disingenuous mass of words, however, very much in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole that workers heed the advice of the Pope, so that a minority may continue to live lives of idle luxury amidst poverty. The catholic church, like all other religious bodies, is an enemy of the workers and a long-time friend of ruling classes. Its oppressive and exploitative nature is a reflection of ignorance and superstition.

Bad for business

Clearly it is no longer the wishes of any but a small, demented handful that the atrocities in Ireland continue. The Capitalist class in the north and south are fed up with their property being destroyed and their expensively trained workers maimed and killed. The disruption of trade is bad for business and makes capitalist politicians look as in effectual as indeed they largely are.

The majority of workers on both sides of the border do not want the killings either. They suffer from them and are certain to lose, whichever side wins. The one thing that is absent from the argument about war and peace in Ireland is this: what are the prospects for the Irish working class? The Pope could not be expected to point out to the workers that apart from the fact that one group of workers is busy killing another, both sides support the same social system. He omitted to mention that this means a society of exploitation of the majority; of second rate existence for the class that produces a first rate existence for the exploiters. A world of insecurity and, inevitably from time to time, violent conflict. The Pope’s message boiled down to a plea to the working class to behave like good little workers and stop disrupting the arteries of profit with unnecessary clots of blood.

RAW/VM

SPGB Meetings (1990)

Party News from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Obituary: Valentine McEntee (2008)

Obituary from the September 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Irish comrades report the sudden death in May of Val McEntee. Val joined the Islington branch of the party in London in 1982 as a young man in his mid-twenties. At the time this was perhaps the party’s most dynamic branch and Val was one of its active members. He worked in the accident investigation department of British Rail, and was a keen photographer, building up a collection of photos of party speakers at Hyde Park and elsewhere as well as tape-recording meetings. In the mid-90s he moved to Ireland, in a sense back to Ireland since though bought up in England he was of Irish traveller origin, to live in a small village in Co. Limerick where he earned a sort of living as a professional photographer. In Ireland he took part in the leafletting and other activities of the members there. His death was sudden and, with the authorities unable to contact any relatives, he was buried in the local Catholic church, even though the priest later told a member that he thought he was an Anglican, no doubt because of his English accent and because he didn’t attend mass. The member decided that discretion was the better part of valour and didn’t tell the priest the truth: that he had buried a non-believer in consecrated ground.

Anyone for change? (1990)

From the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dramatic social and political upheavals in Eastern Europe led to almost daily images of public demonstrations and popular uprisings against long-established dictatorial state regimes. Coming as it did over the Christmas period, the fall of the tyrant Ceausescu in Rumania presented the western news media with a golden opportunity to make the most of a normally slack period for hard news. We were told repeatedly that "democracy" was breaking out all over Eastern Europe; that workers there were finally tasting "freedom", and that "communism" was literally falling apart. The same newshounds were far less vocal in explaining what these terms meant, and why the changes in countries such as Rumania. Hungary. Czechoslovakia and East Germany had occurred.

The Socialist Party has a very clear and practical conception of what is meant by socialism or communism; to us, both these terms mean the same thing and have nothing whatsoever in common with what are called socialist governments, countries or states. By socialism we mean a fundamental change in the economic basis of society, that is, the way in which the members of society are organised to produce and distribute the things they need to exist. It means a world-wide social system where the entire productive and distributive resources of the planet are commonly owned, consciously controlled and democratically operated by the world community as a whole. It means a society where social wealth is produced solely to meet the needs of the community, on the basis of free and equal access by all, without money or any other medium of exchange taking place.

Class Ownership

This outline contrasts sharply with the present world social order of capitalism, which grew historically out of previous social systems and now dominates the world. Its underlying features are the class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution by a small minority of people in all countries of the world, and the exclusion of the great majority of people from any significant ownership and control of these means. Having little or no resources at their disposal, the working class majority are forced by economic necessity to sell their working abilities to the capitalist minority in order to live. Wealth produced by the workers takes the form of commodities which are sold on a competitive market with a view to profit for the capitalists. In return for selling their labour power—which itself becomes a commodity—workers receive payment in the form of wages or salaries. However, in the process of production generally, these payments represent less than the value which the workers as a class create, and the difference between them is surplus value, which the capitalists repeatedly accumulate and which is the source of their monetary profit, realised through sales.

So capitalism is a class-divided, profit-generating system governed by impersonal market forces and not the needs of the human community. The useful, producing majority are in a subordinate position of wage slavery, whilst the useless, non-producing minority enjoy a privileged unearned income from their economic exploitation of the workers. The capitalists wield power through their control of governments, together with the legal and military might of the state machine. This apparatus ensures that, firstly, workers are legally robbed when they produce wealth and, secondly, it conditions them by force and ideological persuasion to accept these social arrangements as necessary, inevitable and. indeed, natural.

Since its formation the Socialist Party has consistently opposed the profit system, no matter how its supporters or apologists have tried to disguise it as something else. In this country and the United States of America, for example, the classic free market form of capitalism developed. with the ownership and control of resources in the hands of predominantly private shareholders holding legal property rights backed up by the state. In Russia, starting with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, another form of capitalism came into being: the state-managed variety. This soon spread to most of Eastern Europe and as far afield as Cuba and China. The rulers of these countries, using the rhetoric of Marxism and the theories of Lenin, labelled these countries communist or socialist, but in reality they were state-capitalist systems of class monopoly and control, where the state itself was the collective employer of wage labour. A minority of top officials in these '‘communist’’ parties personified the capitalist class: they directed the production of goods and services which did not belong to the "people" but were sold within a buying and selling framework. The majority of people were excluded from access to this wealth, and like their counterparts in the ‘free" west could only buy back what their wage rations would allow. The Socialist Party is just as hostile to this arrangement of social affairs as we are to the supposedly liberal free market with which we are only too familiar.

Reforms No Solution

Because it is not primarily geared to satisfying people's needs but with producing saleable commodities, capitalism inevitably generates insoluble social problems, like starvation, homelessness and war. the latter being the outcome of competitive economic rivalry between capitalist states over trade routes, raw materials and sources of profitable investment. For the working class this means lives of relative poverty, fear, insecurity and frustration, arising out of our alienation from real social power and control over our lives.

Socialists argue that these problems cannot be reformed away, as the various conventional political parties continually advocate. Whether capitalism is run by those on the right, left or centre, the problems arise directly from production for sale and profit, and will only disappear when workers in a majority become conscious of their class interests and abolish capitalism.

It is workers who keep capitalism in being through their misguided support for its political representatives, including the many misnamed socialist and communist parties which have done so much to obscure and distort the concept of socialism. Part of the ideology of capitalism is that society cannot function without government and leaders, and that workers at election times can register their votes to put into power the political party of their choice. In the state capitalist countries, workers do not possess this much vaunted "democratic freedom" to swap their political leaders around, even though this right would still leave them in the position of being wage-slaves.

When a majority of the world's workers understand what socialism is and want it, they can organise themselves to take the necessary democratic political action to abolish the capital/wage-labour relationship and bring in common ownership of all resources, democratic control by the majority, and production solely for use in accordance with their self-defined needs.

Socialism is an exciting vision of a world freed from artificial, market-based restrictions which will allow human beings to live in peace with each other. With the problems of social living solved, we will be able to determine for ourselves the kind of relationships and lifestyles most suited to our changed conditions, relationships not imposed from above but freely chosen by ourselves.

So the real choice facing workers all over the world is not between private and state capitalism but between production for profit and production directly for need. The scale and growth of modern technological developments make socialism a practical possibility now. and not some distant utopian fantasy—the missing element is the political awareness of the majority. The real utopian fantasy is capitalism working without its inherent problems, and we therefore urge you to consider seriously the revolutionary socialist alternative which has never been tried anywhere. Join us and help to make it a reality.

Valentine McEntee