A Look Round. (1930)

From the April 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Red” Leader turns Green! Another “Communist Hope” gone.

Under the heading of “Larkin not a Communist,” the Communist Daily Worker, March 12th, reports a meeting addressed on March 9th in Dublin for the Workers’ Union. Talking of the approach of St. Patrick’s Day, Larkin said, “This nation needs a spiritual uplifting.” He then praised the Government’s famous prison, Mountjoy—as “the best prison in the world.”

Another statement was, “I am not a Communist and I know very little about Capitalism.” Larkin finished by asking the audience to remove their hats and sing the Free State national anthem.

The Daily Worker, with its usual confusion, says : “Larkin’s renegacy removes one of the obstacles to the formation of a real Communist Party in Ireland.”

It is not long since Jim Larkin went to Moscow and was elected to the Executive of the Third International. To give an International flavour to this body the five or six calling themselves the Communist League of Ireland were taken into the Third International, and Larkin, with his notorious nationalism, Catholicism, and Labourism, was at once pushed on the Executive of the “World Communist International.” That alone shows how anti-revolutionary the Third International is, apart from the long string of adventurers who became leaders in its ranks. Willie Gallacher and Larkin were usually in close company and the anti-Socialist ideas of Larkin were well known to the other “Communist” Leaders.

It was common knowledge that Larkin in New York was busy supporting the formation of a Labour Party there, and talked of the great work of the British Labour Party, keeping silent on how the Labour Party here had betrayed the transport workers in 1913, when appealed to by Larkin himself for assistance in the struggle.

Larkin is a member of the Catholic Church and always pointed out that he was “a good member of mother church.”

That did not stop his enlistment into the Bolshevik International, but now, when his church is busy denouncing Bolshevism, Larkin falls in to the Pope’s call. Such are the great recruits to the Communist Party. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear from such a Catholic stronghold as the Free State that Bob Stewart, the Communist official in Dublin, recently spoke there, and said that Russia was fighting the Greek Orthodox Church only, and not the Holy Catholic Religion. How similar are Jesuits and “Communists” in their handling” of truth, with their doctrine,” “the end justifies the means.”

* * *

Capitalist can't give details—But they ask us for them.

How often do opponents demand details of life under Socialism? They insist upon blue prints of the future before they will support Socialism, regardless of the fact that those details depend upon the conditions, knowledge, and wishes of the population under Socialism.

The Capitalists, however, ask for support of their policies, but even on trumpery reform measures they decline to prophesy details. Listen to Lord Melchett in his book on “Imperial Economic Unity,” advocating Empire Free Trade and asking for support now :

“If at this stage I am asked whether my policy involves a tax on this or that, I decline to answer, because that is a question which can be answered only after the problem of each commodity has been investigated from every point of view.”

Push that in front of the next anti-Socialist who wants details of an entire social system.

* * *

Who's to have the best poison gas ! 

The Duchess of Hamilton in her article in the Sunday Express (March 2nd) against Vivisection complains bitterly against the War Office under a Labour Government, experimenting by means of poison gas on animals at a Salisbury Plain military experimental camp. Cats, monkeys, goats, horses, etc., are used to test the efficiency of poison gas. The Editorial of the same paper, commenting on the leisured lady’s article, says that “it is no use suggesting that such experiments should not be conducted in this country when they are conducted in other countries. Such a course would merely place this country at a disadvantage.”

Has not Professor Levinstein, of the Chemical Industry, told us that poison gas in war is more humane and kills quicker—possibly more.

What would the noble lady have the Labour Government do ? What is a War Office for ? It is to prepare for War—for markets, territory, etc., wanted by Capitalists.

She doesn’t oppose war, but war on cats, etc. A Labour Government must carry on the research, or how otherwise would they get the best poison gas ready for the next war. These scientific men employed by the Government used 1184 animals for poison gas experiments between November 1st, 1926, and April 20th, 1929.

The Duchess asks that poison gas should be suppressed. She expects war to be carried on more “humanely.” She doesn’t suggest war should be abolished by removing the cause. That would be Utopian. It is quite scientific to agree to preparations for wars as long as you kill in a gentlemanly way, such as sticking a bayonet in another man’s stomach or dropping bombs. The Labour Government must continue poison gas experiments, of course, because every other capitalist government is doing the same ! So the Sunday Express comes to the defence of the Labour Government !

* * *

“The Community Spirit.”

Mr. Ramsay McDonald presided at the Annual Dinner of the London Morayshire Club on March 1st, and among the guests were Lord Inchcape, Lord Furness, Sir Alex­ander Grant, and several other millionaire exploiters and opponents of the working class. So we learn from the Daily Herald (March 2nd).

This is the “United Front” of “Labour” and Capital. No class war spirit there.

* * *

The small shopkeeper finished !

“10,000 shopkeepers mainly trading in the villages and small towns of Britain, have gone bankrupt during the past year.”

“Bankruptcies among small shop­ keepers have increased 50 per cent. since the war,” said the manager of a trade protection agency.”

These two quotations from the Sunday Express (March 2nd), shows how the large stores have benefited by increased travelling facilities which brings the customers into the bigger cities.

The Capitalist Press are compelled to admit that the “small man” has no chance to-day. Only a week before the same paper told us about the rich men who started with nothing. Now they confess that modern competition causes large numbers to finish up “with nothing.”

C.

Animal rights? (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every day over ten thousand animals die in laboratories in Britain. They are burned, blinded, scalded, poisoned, cut up, and many of the other unpleasant things you can think of. Eighty per cent of the experiments take place without anaesthetic. This is what is known as "vivisection".

Recent times have seen the rise of vociferous campaigns against this and against other forms of animal cruelty. Today, we not only have the RSPCA and League Against Cruel Sports, but also an active National Anti-Vivisection Society, Animal Aid, Compassion in World Farming, Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front, and others. Nothing — not even the nuclear threat — is more calculated to fill the postbags of newspapers than the appearance of a letter or article on the subject of animals. When my own local paper recently published a letter about the use of animals, readers wrote in in large numbers. The writer of the original letter had said that his wife had died of cancer and had more experiments been allowed to take place on animals, a cure may have been found and she might still be alive. He went on to say that campaigners against animal experiments were killers because their efforts to limit such experiments were condemning many sick people to death. One of the replies, from Brian Gunn, General Secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, showed that the writer had little to fear. Gunn pointed out that new parliamentary legislation against vivisection was leaving the situation very much as it had been since the first Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. It would not stop the experiments at present taking place. The main difference in the new (1986) law is the fact that it grades experiments from one to five according to the intensity of pain they cause. And in one sense, say the animal campaigners, the new law is worse than the old one as it no longer insists that animals be killed after they have been experimented on but allows them to be used for a second experiment if they are still in fit condition.

Brian Gunn also mentioned that animals are not just used for medical purposes but figure on a large scale in tests on cosmetics, alcohol and tobacco and in warfare and behavioural and psychological tests. And if we look a little more closely, we can add to the animal-tested list innocuous seeming products like oven cleaner, candles, shampoo, polish, anti-freeze and detergents, as well as the cosmetics which the campaigners frequently condemn and which they are trying to combat by their own list of "cruelty-free cosmetics".

But the campaigners' concerns stretch further than just vivisection. I recently received through the post a letter from the Save the Seals campaign of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which graphically described the clubbing to death of baby seals. It appealed for a donation and asked me to pledge myself to boycotting Canadian fish products. In the letter was a small folded brochure showing Canadian fishermen killing baby seals. A notice on the outside said I would find the scenes "extremely disturbing". and I did. Not long before, I had received a similar request from Greenpeace to help its work of trying to save the whales from extinction. And when the Socialist Party debated with the local Animal Rights group last year in Swansea, it was this kind of literature our opponents gave out as well as material on vivisection.

Different pro-animal groups have different methods. The more conservative try putting pressure on governments, firms and educational institutions by letters to the press and MPs and organising petitions. Others picket fur shops, circuses and research establishments. The most "radical". like the Animal Liberation Front, favour "direct action" such as "liberating" animals from laboratories, damaging equipment and sabotaging hunts. One thing that unites them all, however, is the idea that, since animals cannot organise their own protest, they must be protected by those who can. "We are the voice for the voiceless", as they put it, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to that voice and indeed to the millions of tortured creatures it speaks for.

But can the voice be an effective one? The animal campaigners point in particular to the other methods of experimentation that can and already are being used. First there is the use of cell and tissue cultures which avoid the direct use of animals and can utilise human samples taken from such sources as placenta and parts of the uterus removed during hysterectomy. The human cultures are said to be more reliable for research into illness since animal bodies often react differently to drugs than human ones and examples of animal-tested disaster drugs like Thalidomide and Eraldin are easy to find. Cultures have already been used for work on cancer, diabetes and arthritis and the production of vaccines, hormones and enzymes. Then there are a number of computer assisted techniques, in particular the mathematical modelling and quantum pharmacology methods, which have already been used. Finally, among other methods still in their early stages but being developed are chemical analysis by mass spectrometry, genetic engineering, and scanning by sophisticated photographic techniques.

Why then, given the existence and use of other methods, are animals still dying in their millions? The answer is quite simply that animals are cheap. Since the aim of research in today's world is not primarily to alleviate suffering but to yield products that can be sold on the market at a profit (or at least to smooth the overall running of the profit process), then clearly the single most essential factor is cheapness. No firm producing drugs, cosmetics, oven cleaner, or detergents will pay for research without the prospect of a product they can sell at a profit. And since it must also be assessed whether the amount of resources being put into a research project is worth the profit it will finally produce, research sponsors will inevitably want the work to be carried out as cheaply as possible. And if cheapness means using animals rather than other methods that may be available. then animals will be used, regardless of their suffering.

The Animal Rights movement's literature often recognises that profit is the driving force of animal exploitation. But. curiously, they never seem to look beyond the profit system for a possible solution to the problem. They would like "compassion" to enter into the production process (the organisation. Compassion in World Farming, encapsulates this in its title), but if the driving force of production is profit, is compassion for animals likely to come anything but a poor second? Especially when we consider that compassion for humans comes a very poor second to profit. Every year millions of human beings are killed, maimed, ill-treated or driven from their homes in the wars and power struggles associated with the pursuit of profit in many parts of the globe. Every year millions of human beings are allowed to die of starvation because they can't afford to buy food at a price that would allow its production or distribution to be profitable. Every year millions of human beings, even in so-called civilised countries like Britain, are set at odds with one another by profit society's competitive ethic and hostile social environment. Many are victims of material want and mental distress leading to such problems as violence, theft, drug addiction, suicide and death by hypothermia. Can we expect compassion for animals on any significant scale in a society whose social organisation so militates against compassion for human beings?

The necessary change is to a society where production is for use not profit, where people co-operate voluntarily to produce what they need and enjoy free and equal access to what they have produced. What we are talking about is a society without wages and salaries, without buying and selling, without money and banks and stock exchanges. It may seem a tall order, but it's certainly less of a tall order than emancipating animals in the framework of the present society, and in fact socialism is entirely within our grasp once the majority of us decide we want it and are prepared to take democratic political action to bring it about.

How will the position of animals be different in such a society? It is hard to imagine that, just as the peace and security of socialism will change people's attitudes towards their fellow human beings, their attitudes towards animals will not change too. In a truly human society, compassion for other living creatures can hardly fail to be something that will concern us. On a practical level alone, many of today's experiments will simply be unnecessary. For instance, weapons won't be needed, so animals won't be used in their development or testing. Many of the drugs used today will probably not be produced, since so many illnesses are produced by the conditions we live in rather than by intrinsic human factors. Socialism will not be a society of tranquillisers, antidepressants or pain killers. Nor will it be a society in which today's killers — cancer and heart disease — are widespread. According to Philip Churchward, "it is widely accepted that cancer is a largely preventable disease. Seventy to ninety per cent of cancers are caused by environmental factors, with smoking and diets high in animal fat as the two main offenders".

But wouldn't animal experiments be needed for the remaining 10-30 per cent of cancer victims? And what about the production of candles, weedkiller, polish and (if we still use them) cosmetics and tobacco? Well, first of all in a society where there are no cost factors to be placed above human need, all methods of research that exist will be used in preference to making animals suffer. Then, even where there seems to be no alternative to the use of animals for a particular purpose, we will think carefully before condemning other sentient beings to suffering or death. When people take their democratic decisions on such matters (and all decisions in socialism will be democratic), they will have to weigh the benefit to themselves and to the community as a whole of using animals against the debasement of humanity this involves. They will have to ask themselves whether the benefit to humanity is so vital as to be worth causing defenceless creatures to suffer. This writer's guess is that it will rarely, if ever, be.

In their letters to the press, the anti-vivisectionists have the habit of signing off with a "Yours for Human and Animal Rights", and in so doing they highlight the similarity of their position to the countless other organisations campaigning not for animal reforms but for human ones — Shelter, Help the Aged, Oxfam, Amnesty International, War on Want, Child Poverty Action and so on. And both sets of "rights” campaigners have the same dilemma. They are campaigning for rights within the framework of a system where any such notion must always be subordinated to the needs of profit. In other words, they are fighting to get rid of problems without aiming to get rid of the system that produces the problems. Their fight must always therefore be a losing one. Calming the symptoms is the best they can hope for, because as long as the root cause of the pain is still there, then the pain will keep coming back, and indeed will break out in other places too.

The answer, as perceived by the anti-vivisectionists themselves, is political. But not political in the sense of demanding, as they put it, "open government", or of appealing to governments to act in the interests of animals and against the interests of profit. Political in the sense of our taking the situation into our own hands and peacefully and democratically voting to get rid of governments, to get rid of the profit system, and with it to get rid of the bottomless pit of problems, for both humans and animals, that it inevitably produces.

Howard Moss

Animal cruelty (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vivisection means literally "cutting alive" and is a worldwide practice involving millions of animals. Live animals are used in experiments to further scientific knowledge, to manufacture drugs, to test the safety of cosmetics, household and industrial products. Many of the experiments are unnecessary, unpleasant and involve varying degrees of suffering to the animals. These experiments have been taking place since the seventeenth century and today the treatment of animals in the course of such activity is the subject of concern among many welfare groups who campaign for an end to experiments on live animals.

Beauty Without Cruelty oppose commercial exploitation of animals especially for cosmetics and furs. Animal Aid would like to see abolition of all live animal experiments. The Humane Research Trust aims to promote essential research in which the use of animals will be replaced by advanced techniques. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection have minimum demands for a ban on alcohol and tobacco experiments as well as cosmetics, warfare and behavioural/psychological experiments. All of these organisations have in common a desire to alleviate animal suffering and some act as pressure groups seeking legislative change. Obviously it is an emotive subject among those who take a moral stance on the issue of vivisection and argue for animal rights.

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is the most militant of these groups and has pointed out that

  For many decades, people have attempted to stop these atrocities through legal peaceful means such as petitions, leaflets and writing to politicians. Sadly, these methods . . . have failed . . and the situation for animals has got gradually worse.

Therefore, their policy is to take

  direct action in rescuing animals from . . . cruel establishments and also causing damage to property belonging to animal abusers . . . and financial ruin to those who persecute defenceless creatures. . . ALF is bringing the day closer when all cruelty to animals is ended. (ALF leaflet)

They neglect to mention exactly how they aim to go about ending cruelty to animals other than by episodic action just described which, since it is thought that one animal dies every six seconds in a British laboratory, can have very little effect.

Around 80 per cent of animal experiments are related to medical research drugs. However, of the 40,000 drugs on the market the World Health Organisation regards only about 220 as essential. Most are duplications of already successful products. Nevertheless manufacturers must test each one for possible side-effects and as a protection against claims for damages which could ruin a company. The most controversial tests in this respect among animal rights groups are the LD50 and Draize tests used to test the safety of drugs, household and industrial products.

The LD50 test represents the single lethal dose required to kill 50 per cent of animals involved in the experiment, the purpose being to predict the drug's lethal dose and to recognise the symptoms of overdose. The Draize test involves dripping solutions such as perfume or shampoo into the eyes of animals. usually rabbits, to ascertain safety of use for human beings.

Such tests are not infallible. Some studies have claimed that animal drug tests predict only one side-effect in four. Thalidomide, for example, cause deformities in human babies but was harmless to most animals. Insulin does not harm human beings but can deform baby rabbits and mice while penicillin poisons guinea pigs. So the value of such tests can be questioned on two counts. Firstly, many are used to produce unnecessary duplications of already successful products and are therefore simply an attempt by drug companies to grab a slice of the lucrative market. Secondly, such tests do not always predict correctly.

Apes and monkeys are widely used for psychological research. This type of experiment is carried out to find solutions to some of the problems created by the type of society in which we live. Monkeys are turned into drug addicts and alcoholics, force-fed sweets for dental research and are used as victims in car crash tests. In military research monkeys and apes are used to determine the effects of nuclear radiation and along with other animals to test the effects of weapons and chemical and biological warfare such as nerve gases and viruses.

The ruthless exploitation of animals for experimental purposes is another vicious effect of the profit system. Groups like AI.F have gone some way towards recognising the futility of reformist action but have stopped short of the socialist conclusion. The fact is that capitalism maltreats animals because it has a vested interest in cruelty.

Cathy Gillespie