A note to a friend (2022)

From the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am rather hoping that anyone reading this article does not share the views contained within, at least at the outset. If they do, then perhaps they might be persuaded to take a different, and perhaps more challenging, view of how society could be organised. So, with this in mind, whether you are inclined to vote Conservative, SNP, Labour, Green, Liberal or indeed any party that believes that capitalism can be made to work in the interests of people and society, then I wish to share my thoughts with you as a friend, a fellow human being and someone who, if we met by chance, would chat about our families, interests and worries in much the same manner as most friends do.

Friends, at least close friends, tend to share problems – the concern I feel at the moment (and it is increasing year on year) is that I am beginning to lose hope for humanity and society in general. It is rather a ‘dangerous’ state of mind to share with others as they tend to immediately categorise you as a depressive or ‘miserable’ or the new media moniker ‘doomer’ and, to be frank, they probably feel uncomfortable in your company – and who can blame them? Often, and this phrase is conveniently trotted out, they say ‘you’ve got to have hope or what’s the point of living?’. Well, I absolutely love life, but that’s just the point – right now, I feel I am living a life of sorts but being denied the life that I, and I should say every other person in the world, including you, should be living. By most standards my life (or existence) is comfortable enough so perhaps you might think I should be thankful for what I have, but thankful to whom? Society in the past (at least since agrarian times) has allowed those in power – I guess by dint of wealth, armies and the power of religious doctrines – to gain control over the majority of people. The form of society has, to some extent, changed, but this still holds true: in fact, now far fewer powerful and wealthy individuals control the entire world society. Incidentally, and I felt this was a good time to mention this, those that are ‘controlled’ and who are forced by dint of circumstance to obey society’s rules are referred to as ‘workers’ a bit like an insect colony and clearly indicating that another (much smaller) group of people are not ‘workers’ – why should that be? Why do not all human beings co-operate for the general well-being of society as a whole? Yes, work will have to be done obviously, but people could be doctors, artists or scientists as well as other useful pursuits, but they would be called ‘people’, not ‘workers’.

So why am I feeling a loss of hope? Well, and I hope this doesn’t make me sound too arrogant, but I genuinely believe I know the answer (and I should point out that I am not for one minute claiming that this was my idea) – in fact, there are others that share these ideas for a solution but, as I mentioned, I want to share them with you and not them. But, being confident that you have the answer doesn’t mean that others will agree with you – on the contrary, when I have discussed these ideas, even with people close to me, they can get very agitated even aggressive at times. To be fair, very few people are comfortable with change and when one suggests that the awful things that are hardwired into current society (or to be specific capitalism) could become a thing of the past, they give you a look, either of pity or they immediately spring to defend our current way of living, because not to do so means discarding a lifetime of conditioned thought, whether through schooling, media or by indoctrination through the workplace and clearly they are uncomfortable with this prospect.

Another reaction – when the person says ‘Oh, that’s utopia or just pie in the sky’ is quite odd really, particularly when, on occasion, the very same person will agree that warfare, starvation and homelessness (to name just a few of capitalism ’s ills) are dreadful, but still vigorously defend the very system that spawns such abominations. In fact, in the most recent copy of Resurgence, Jonathan Porritt stated that for society to change entirely (i.e a new world order) was, to quote, ‘Cloud cuckoo land’. Well, for what it’s worth, my opinion is that to think that capitalism can be made to work is cloud cuckoo land on steroids.

Before sharing my solution with you – and I use the term somewhat guardedly as the longer the car- crash that is capitalism goes on, the more difficult it will be to set a form of recovery in motion – I need to open up a little. I mentioned earlier my feelings of hopelessness and despair: I have thought about this in considerable depth and, I have to be honest, it comes down to a complete inability to understand why so many people, the vast majority actually, believe that our current system can be reformed, altered, tinkered with or somehow adjusted and thereby be made to work in the interests of humanity, the environment and the other species with which we share the planet. To me, the problem always demands the same answer – get rid of capitalism. So why do we not dispose of it?

Well, if there is one amazing thing about capitalism, it is its astonishing ability to ‘self-reinforce’ or to put it another way, to brainwash people into thinking that it is the only game in town. It is, in my opinion, a system that defies logic in as much as it is killing the very people who, with absolute enthusiasm, support and nourish it.

Please allow me to share some examples of things that send me head into my hands and question my sanity …

In July, BBC news reported that America’s Joe Biden flew to Saudia Arabia to persuade Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to produce more oil. This news item followed an extreme and ‘unprecedented’ weather warning which, with temperatures expected to exceed 40˚C in the UK, will lead to many deaths as people are unable to cope with the heat. Scientists tell us (and have been doing so for years) it is a direct result of the burning of fossil fuels. I can honestly say that not a day goes by when the BBC news does not contain an item which, in any sane society, would give rise to immediate and serious concern and trigger action to address the consequences (often major climate-related issues), and that is not then followed by some item of trivia such as a ‘celebrity’ divorce case for example; both are given equal weight and often the ‘divorce case’ more. This was exactly what happened on the Today programme on July 12, when Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency stated on air that ‘the biodiversity crisis joins the climate crisis as an existential threat to our survival …’. This was followed by coverage of back-stabbing Tory tales as the candidates began the fiasco of bad-mouthing their opponents in the race for leadership of the party, none of whom has made any commitment to addressing the climate or any other existential threat. Incidentally, the biodiversity issue was not mentioned again that day and I could not find it on the BBC website – obviously not that important.

The subject of mental health has, however, over the last few years, occupied regular coverage in the media. As someone in my mid-sixties, I don’t remember this at all in the past – one would hear about people suffering with mental illness, but certainly not at the level it seems to be happening now. The young seem to be particularly badly affected, and who can blame them? I have to be honest here and admit to really struggling with this myself, to the extent that on occasions sleep becomes a welcome escape from the world and the idea of waking up becomes less and less appealing. Some have suggested that I might be suffering from depression; I am utterly convinced that this is not the case, although I do feel despair, anger and an absolute feeling of helplessness at having to bear witness to the horrific destruction of our very means of survival as a species that is being wrought day in, day out when, so easily, it could all be changed; it doesn’t even need a violent revolution – just a simple understanding and belief by the majority of the world’s population that capitalism needs to be ended. But it seems my feelings of being alone, apart from a very small number of other people who share these views, continue to feed the sense that perhaps I have been unfortunate enough to have been born into a species incapable of organising itself in a manner that does not put profit and the power of a tiny group before its own well-being – let alone that of the environment.

Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, maybe I should share that sense of confidence and optimism voiced by some that somehow it will all be fine – but I don’t, even leaving aside the awful spectre of climate breakdown now playing out before our very eyes alongside whether someone should have had a party or not. Should a society be comfortable with homelessness, extreme poverty or the plundering of the Earth’s resources in the pursuit of profit? Indeed, can any society call itself ‘civilised’ if it needs charitable organisations set up to address these issues? Most of us, I imagine, feel that subtle sense of personal guilt, usually reinforced by the sad and plaintive tone of voice employed by the ‘celebrity’, when asked on the Radio 4 Appeal to give a fiver for some poor child to help give it education/medicine/water/clothes – it’s not dissimilar to our religious leaders (who are also given a platform on the BBC) whose ‘Thought for the day’ usually points out that ‘we’ are responsible (personally that is) for various destructive ills, and that by believing in the supernatural these ills will miraculously disappear. There’s never a mention of what is actually causing all these awful things to happen, and thus, once more, to the listening public it becomes the ‘norm’ and ‘human nature’.

I realise that by sharing these thoughts, unlike in a conversation, a reply cannot be given. I apologise for that and in all honesty, I want someone to give me a reason to have hope when all the evidence I see around me incontrovertibly confirms anything but a hopeful outlook. I expect you are thinking ‘but what about all the people who are doing good things?’ or ‘change has to come slowly and we can only do what we can in our own small way’ – when I hear these sentiments again and again (and I have for the last 50 years), I do wonder why I bother trying to suggest that a new world order could be created almost immediately; a society where there are no leaders, no money and where all produce, whether food, clothes, houses, medicine, infrastructure, furniture and all other things produced by human effort are made freely available to those that need them, and are of a standard that will last and be of the best that the designer and maker can produce, and as a result be proud of. Just imagine a society when money, an ‘economy’, profit and everlasting ‘growth’ were things of the past – can you imagine this? If profit was no longer a motive (or to be more accurate an essential force) driving the creative species that is our human race then, we could, with absolute certainty, make these things history which, in time, we as caring people would shudder to think ever existed.

Warfare

There would no longer be ‘countries’ to fight over, or more specifically the wealth or trade routes contained within their borders. Instead, there would be different regions where people chose to live, happy with their links to the land and proud of the knowledge and skills particular to that place. Neither would they or anyone else be forced into killing their fellow humans in the interest of a money class or ‘for their country’.

Slavery (yes, it does still exist)

Who would feel the need to force someone to travel miles to work for some criminal employer if ‘employment’ ceased to exist? All of us would work by sharing more menial work with other personal skills that we felt best able to do to contribute to the well-being of society as a whole.

Hunger

Ask yourself why people are hungry now in this society. Is there enough food to feed all people – yes. So why do they starve then? The simple two answers are:

Farmers do not grow food for people to eat. Before you get defensive here, I remember as a child seeing reports of heaps of cauliflowers at the side of fields being covered with kerosene to make them inedible. There had been a glut and so they had been dumped as they could not be sold at a profit, and so people had started helping themselves. Remember, profit comes before hungry people. There have been countless similar occurrences since – pigs recently.

Starving people can’t afford food. If food was produced for people to eat, no one need go without. It would be wonderful if farmers grew food for people to eat but they don’t, they grow food for profit – even the organic vegetables at the ‘farmer’s markets’.

Homelessness

Homes would cease to be investments or stand empty next to people begging on the streets. There would be no need for poorly designed houses crammed cheek by jowl to make the most profit out of a small, often unsuitable space and no need to fell beautiful trees to make room for the last ‘executive’ house. Would everyone want a palace? Well, would you? Would you not feel a little odd having a place with 20 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms and 4 kitchens? Would such a ‘house’ be better suited for those who desire a more communal life? Perhaps artists, or others with a shared interest. Anyway, think of all the housework you would have to do. After all, servants would also be a thing of the past.

Species decline and climate breakdown 

It is true that ridding society of the dreadful legacies of capitalism and the profit motive would, in some cases, be impossible. Extinct creatures cannot be brought back, rainforests or glaciers cannot be replaced, but one could reasonably hope for some sort of recovery; there would no longer be the need to put profit before the environment (which happens now). No more would the ‘economy’ take preference over acres and acres of ancient woodland to shave a few minutes off a train journey and to provide jobs. Goods would be made to last and not to fail and thus massively reduce waste – possibly entirely.

Crime

It is unlikely that in any form of society anti-social behaviour would cease to exist entirely, but I would suggest that the vast proportion of ‘criminal acts’ involve property or the taking of someone’s money in one form or another, eg scamming, people trafficking, burglary, fraud, poaching would cease. In a society where goods were made freely available for use, how could one steal?

Poverty

Need I say more? If there was no money there would be no poverty. The list could go on. There are so many parts of our current manner of organising society that are dreadful, whilst at the same time totally unnecessary. Humans do not have to live this way. Can we change? If the majority of people, which is how things are right now, believe that an ‘economy’, profit and the money system is the only way and can be reformed, and thus benefit all humanity, then please tell me how. No past reforms have worked – everything is getting worse, not better. Should we, or can we, just let an abstract idea continue to play out before our eyes while we sit and witness the destruction of beauty and the last vestiges of what makes our planet such a wonderful place? Surely we are more than that. Surely we are now at a time when we can truly cooperate with each other – all people – and share with absolute equality the wonder and wealth of the world. Are we really not able to do this? Many people have said that it will take an apocalypse to bring about world change. That does seem an awful thing to contemplate – countries on fire, trees dying in their millions, people fleeing countries desperate to find safety, people dying in their thousands of starvation, vast areas of the world becoming uninhabitable and children and civilians being blown limb from limb as their fellow human beings unleash unimaginable horrors with weapons of war. Yes, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that … Well, I did say I had the answer, arrogant maybe, but it’s quite simple really … you. And if that sounds accusatory, I apologise, it isn’t; it’s just that I can’t change society on my own.

Glenn Morris

Why I’m a socialist (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every morning, as the sun is still rising, a crisp 5am where I am awakened by noise coming through the paper-thin floors and walls of my flat complex, I open the blinds and take in the beauty outside my window. Of course, this beauty is the litter flying out of our bins and dancing around, a private circus show! And, as I hear my dad grumbling, and getting his crappy grilled cheese breakfast made in the George Foreman, I can practically already smell the rust coming from his steel-capped shoes and the electrical smoke on his carpenter pants. I often wonder, isn’t there a world better than this?

Is there not a world where my dad is fairly compensated for the hours he spends, a world where I don’t have to live in a dump surrounded by affluence? Walking to school, I never understood that I was different to the others, but now it’s so clear. I go past family homes every morning, decorated with BMWs and Chevrolets parked outside with their licence-plate-teeth grinning at me, and every morning I’m jealous that people have an upstairs. I’ve never had an upstairs of my own, a room which wasn’t practically transparent for everyone to listen in on because of how small the house is. I’ve never been to a private school, nor have I the outfits or the latest fashion which all my peers covet. I’ve always been what they would consider an outsider, inadequate and an outlier to their inner circle.

My friends don’t really get it. Sure, they’re not rich, but they’re well-off enough to have a house – I mean how lucky is that? Never in my parents’ lives have they had the money to actually buy property, yet some people in the world have dozens of homes, which they don’t even live in. What do they have them for? To showcase? To boast? Meanwhile, I need a place to live which doesn’t have mould in every corner, or a boiler which isn’t straight from 1940, and what do they need it for?

Perhaps because I’m not one of them, I don’t understand the reasons behind it – I probably never will – but to me, this world is black and white. There shouldn’t be an argument over who deserves housing, we are all deserving of at least that – shelter. And I find it so hideous that people like us are out on the streets while landlords hoard their property, boasting about how smart it was to get into real estate. It’s not ‘smart’, it’s just the exploitation of a broken system.

What does this party offer to me, specifically, as someone who is both transgender and autistic? Genuinely, what does this article have to do with either of those things? What are you talking about, Jame? Well, I think the answer lies in the fact that both of these things will forever be intertwined with my status as a working-class citizen. I don’t have the money to afford private gender-affirming care, of course, so I’ve had to rely on the wonderful Conservative-run NHS for help.

Denied

I’ve been on the waiting list for about two years. Of course, when profits and tax cuts are prioritised over actually helping the people, and healthcare is neglected, this is what you end up with. I’ve had to wait a similar amount of time to get my autism diagnosis, on top of that.

So what, Jame? What does this have to do with anything, why the Socialist Party?

Because capitalism doesn’t care about people like me. Not one day in this world have I ever felt like I’ve truly mattered, simply just another burden to the government, never somebody worth fighting for. Never have I felt reassured by government when they say they’ll repeal conversion therapy, never have I felt safe when I’ve walked through CAMHS’ doors and I’m met with stark-empty hallways and a dilapidated counselling service. Never have I felt equal, and sure my superiors can smile and make me feel comfortable all they can, but to them I’m just a pawn they need to wrangle in place so that their bosses don’t decrease their pay for not managing me well enough. Do I really want to continue living in a system where the worker is so undervalued and overworked, that they are not even considered human? We are just products, who need to be maintained and placated so that the higher-ups aren’t faced by union strikes.

But it hasn’t been working. It hasn’t been good enough. Concessions are not being met, and I’m tired of being ignored as a transgender, autistic, working-class teenager. My needs, most people’s needs, are not being met. We’re in a world where the difference between the mega-wealthy and the poor is so discouraging that it’s hard to think that we can carry on this way.

I don’t see the world in the same way that you do, most likely. And in my eyes, things are either good or bad. Things are unbelievably bad. I see the world as being in a massive stalemate, torn between what’s right, and greed. There are solutions, but nobody is jumping at the opportunity to use these solutions, because they are too distracted by greed. Yet, nobody is speaking out? Everyone is just sitting around, letting our leaders do nothing? When will change come? When will things actually be good? I just don’t understand. People will flagrantly defend our leaders, capitalism, the free market, but what has it ever done for us?

What has it ever done for us trans, autistic, working-class teens?

That’s why I joined the Socialist Party, because I’m tired of the way I’m treated. I’m tired of being exploited, ignored, disparaged, and I want to make a change. I don’t want to be part of a system which hates me for my uniqueness.

Jame(s) Witkowski

Why We Are Socialists. (1927)

From the July 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is by no means uncommon for anti-Socialists of various types to try to explain away Socialist principles as a result of a mental kink, as a symptom of pure cussedness, so to speak. This attitude finds considerable encouragement in the posturing of the sentimentalists of the Labour Party and kindred bodies. To judge by the speeches and writings of many of these worthies, they "thank God that they are not as other men are”—that their pure and lofty aims spring from hearts brimming over with loving-kindness to all mankind—in vivid contrast with the base machinations of their "hard- faced” opponents.

The members of the Socialist Party, however, make no such angelic pretensions. Our temperaments are as varied as our physical qualities, and these, again, are as numerous as those of the rats in Browning’s "Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Attend one of our annual conferences and you will observe the lean and the fat, the tall and the short, the bald and shock-headed, the ugly and the—well, we will not claim that anyone is pretty; somehow capitalism doesn’t have that effect. As for mental disposition, you will find the verbose and the reserved, the calm and the excitable, the artistically loose and the mechanically precise, all contributing their quota to the discussion, and either impeding or expediting the business to the best of their ability; and while this is not the place in which to disclose unofficial secrets, we may perhaps admit that there are to be found in our ranks both the austere and abstemious, and those who indulge not wisely but too well—tho’ in this respect, again, the system we oppose involves obvious limitations.

Whence, then, arises this tendency to regard the Socialist as a crank—a conceited meddler with the welfare of the human race? The answer becomes obvious the moment we consider just what it is that Socialists have in common.

Despite the variety of their physique and character, almost all, without exception, are drawn from a certain class in society, i.e., the working-class. The Socialist may be distinguished from his fellows perhaps by his greater sensitiveness to certain aspects of his environment, by his keener insight into conditions, and his greater readiness to grasp general causes; but that in itself does not explain the ideas he has.

There are adaptable men and women of mental vigour among the members of the capitalist class, but they do not become Socialists. On the contrary, their class interests lead them to oppose the Socialist movement with all the greater steadfastness the more they understand the conditions under which they live.

There have been, it is true, capitalists who have accepted the Socialist outlook through the operation of exceptional circumstances, but in order to do this they have had to forsake the standpoint of their own class and to study the position of the workers. That is the crux of the matter— the struggle between workers and capitalists forms the basis of Socialist ideas.

The Socialist is discontented, but so are many non-Socialists.

There has been widespread discontent under previous forms of society. The serfs and burghers under feudalism, the slaves under the Roman Empire, were the victims of oppression, and occasionally revolted; but their revolt did not form a Socialist movement. Their aims were either personal freedom and more private property, or some vague Kingdom of God in which all material problems would find magical solution. Scientific Socialism could arise only when the development of machinery had rendered antiquated all the old utopias and made the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life both possible and necessary.

So long as the means of production were small and could be operated by individuals or groups in isolated villages, the total wealth produced was insufficient to provide all with comfort and leisure. Hence private property was the necessary condition of security for producer and parasite alike, and the struggle between them was a struggle for one form or another of private property. The feudal lords struggled with their peasants over the land, but whichever side won held to the private form of ownership. The merchants and the handicraftsmen struggled over conditions of trade and production, but each side saw their “beau ideal” in the individually owned workshop or sum of money.

What is the position to-day? Millions of wage-earners co-operate, directly and indirectly, in the production of the wealth of the world, which is so abundant that it suffocates the markets. The means of production are so huge that they have long ago passed out of purely individual control. The individual capitalist only holds so many shares in a giant concern which may extend its operations over the whole earth. The vast mass of the producers are disinherited. For them private property has long ago ceased to exist. They have nothing to struggle over of an individual nature except wages; and these can only be defended (and but seldom extended) by collective action.

If under these conditions the workers still idealise private property, that is only because they have not yet fully realised their position. If the grasping of new facts is the hall-mark of the crank, then Socialists are cranks; but the only people whose interests are served by the worker’s ignorance are the parasites.

Eric Boden

Why you should be a socialist (1993)

From the July 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Queen Mother gets some food stuck in her gob—headline news; but at least it wasn’t a fish bone this time.

Ten thousand children die of hunger—or was it a hundred thousand? They have starved in a world where farmers are paid to throw food away and “set-aside” land because there are too few people with money to buy it.

Continuing the Royal theme. Granny Parasite’s daughter, Lizzy the Second, is currently paid £300,000 a year by the Common Market as a subsidy for not growing food on her land. She is just one of thousands of privileged owners who are paid to destroy what other people need.

These starving kids whose last screams of uneconomical need hardly ever make the headlines—why should they perish in a world of plenty?

Why: the longest word in the English language. A subversive word. It can only be a matter of time before it is removed from the National Curriculum (what the government wants us to be taught). Too many people asking “Why” and they might just start coming up with some answers.

The pot-bellied corpses, whose skeleton mountains are the mirror reflection of the food mountains, are the real monuments to the profit system. Nelson stands like a frozen relic from a fancy dress ball, commemorating for wage slaves the wars that their forefathers were butchered in, but the real centrepiece symbol of this system should be a dead baby whose mother watched as nourishing food and clean water were labelled as “bad investments”.

So why is it such a good investment for millions of workers every day to give our mental and physical energies so that a relative handful of millionaires and billionaires may live off the fruits of our labour? Who put the food into the Queen Mother’s mouth—and why should we?

In a world where workers on tea plantations could never afford to have tea at the Ritz and gold miners cannot afford basic dental treatment, let alone gold fillings, why should we, the wealth-producing majority, sit back and let a minority have it all?

It has been said that the rich and powerful are what they are because there is something of quality about them which we have not got. Is this so? Is it really the case that a child of one whose name was put down for Eton at the age of six months has a naturally greater right to the good life than a baby born to a mother who cannot feed it—or one of the third of all British children living on or below the poverty line?

Is the overfilled mouth of the Queen Mother really so much more worthy of social concern than the malnourished diets and poorly heated homes of the millions who survive on a state pensions? And if not, why do we not respond with as much energy when old workers perish in poverty as when old parasites survive to have ninetieth birthdays?

Why do we live in a world of such contradictions? Must it be like this forever?

We live in a social system. It has not always existed; it will not go on for ever. In this system there is a minority who own and control the major resources of the world. The majority of us, owning no more than our ability to work, have no choice but to work for the minority. We are paid wages and salaries which are less than the value of what we produce. The difference between what we produce and what we are paid goes to the capitalist minority as profit. We make—they take. It is a bloody good system for them. For us it is lousy.

Production for profit means that we work to make the owners richer. Our pay is enough to keep us on the working treadmill from week to week, month to month, year to year, cheap holiday to co-op funeral.

Why do the workers put up with it? Why did slaves put up with being owned by their masters? Rulers can lord it over us only as long as we think that they are more important than us. And every time we vote for their parties, admire their business operations. cheer their figureheads and refuse to think of a world where power belongs to everyone, we are proclaiming the view that our masters must remain our masters.

Why do we put up with it? We were taught to do so; we grew up with morals and religious gobbledygook which told us to submit; workers have been conditioned not only to be, but to want to be, second-class. Old Ernest Jones, the Chartist, summed it up well:

We're low—we’re low—we’re very, very low.
As low as low can be;
The rich are high—for we make them so—
And a miserable lot are we!

People who think that they are low will be treated low. That is why TV ads tell wage slaves attracted to the cheap proley fodder of Big Macs that they are "eating out in style”—working-class style; the lowest that can be produced. We live in low homes, drive low cars and read the low-down from the low-down tabloid lie-sheets.

The socialist is a worker who refuses to be a slave, to be low. to submit and cheer the foolery of a system which spits on us. The socialist knows that to be human is to be conscious, with a potential for creativity and cooperation. We can join together and live as equals in a world where all production is for use and all life for living, not buying and selling. The socialist refuses to lie down and take it; we know that united in our millions we will be so strong that the parasite class will be forced to surrender their privilege and either share the world with us or else leave it for another place.

But socialists were not born socialists. No member of the Socialist Party emerged from the womb complaining about wage slavery and singing The Internationale. Socialists are workers who once believed that Queen Mothers were important and bosses must own the world and children must starve and capitalism is the only way for humans to exist.

Socialists are dangerous men and women who asked the question “Why?” and hit on a revolutionary answer. They are people who could see that the profit system will never meet the workers’ needs and that a sane world of production for use would and could.

There can be no compromise between the agenda of the Queen Mothers over-stuffed mouth (or concern about the pound and who the Chancellor is and whether the British thieves sign a treaty with their fellow Euro-thieves) and the plight of the starving child, the poverty-stricken worker, the wage-slave for whom life under the money system is one long headache.

In short, you will never solve the problems of the poor if you allow the rich to keep the world for themselves. Only when the wealth-producing majority decide that we will all be rich, in the sense of commonly owning and democratically controlling the world we inhabit, will it all change.

What do workers need to do? To begin with, a lot of asking “Why?” When you hit on the answers you will be angry. So you should be—but anger on its own leads nowhere. What we need to do is unite, with knowledge as our weaponry and cooperation as our guarantee of victory. Why not join us? Why leave it any longer?

Steve Coleman

Why do we become Socialists? (1951)

From the January 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has often been suggested to us by our opponents that socialists constitute a group (though they emphasize it is a microscopic one) apart from the rest of society. The path has been made easy for propagating this idea because it is one of the few points on which they are unanimous. They are all prepared to agree that to work for socialism is out of the question as far as that famous nonentity, the average man-in-the-street is concerned.

Even those among our critics who claim that socialism is their ultimate aim insist that other so-called practical measures must come first These always take the form of actual or proposed alterations to certain unpopular features of the present system, whilst leaving untouched the basis which determines these features.

This economic basis of ownership and control of the means of production by a privileged few, and wage-labour by the majority, defies all the efforts of politicians to abolish poverty, war and other social ills. To the extent that their reformist measures gain misguided support from the working class capitalism is strengthened by virtue of the lack of interest shown in its supersession by socialism.

It must not be thought that we insist upon the understanding of socialism, as a necessary pre-requisite to its establishment, for the sake of being academic or exclusive. If we could have achieved our object by other means we should have adopted them long ago.

We hold that it is just as necessary to show why the ideas and policies of our opponents fail to solve social problems as it is to explain the socialist solution. We do not under-estimate the factors which work against die spread of socialist ideas, but we maintain that these factors arise out of contemporary conditions and lose their potency as the workers become conscious of the source of their troubles. Disregard of this is evidenced by the claim that wage-workers will never agree to work in a society in which no wages are paid.. The fact that they will lose all the disadvantages, such as enforced unemployment, as well as the dubious advantages of the wages system, is completely ignored.

To socialists it is not only the keeping of an idle class in luxury that is irksome about employment. A cogent objection is the large number of unproductive jobs—advertising, insurance, banking, soldiering, in fact every activity which produces nothing useful, and is often positively harmful to mankind.

The only reason for all this is one which is never mentioned except by socialists. It is simply to keep the present system going—to separate the workers as a whole from the products of their labour, to determine their meagre ration of the world’s wealth, and to get them to fight their master's battles over possession of the remainder.

The development of the techniques of production means that an ever-decreasing proportion of the worker's time need be spent in producing and distributing a given amount of wealth. It is reasonable to suppose that there will be an increasing tendency to question the burdensome complexity of life at present. Even assuming that the majority of people were content with their conditions of work the consequences of producing goods which cannot be sold are disastrous. Recurring unemployment and war and perpetual poverty in relation to what they produce is the lot of those who do not live by owning the means of production.

Those members of the working class who are rather less gluttonous for punishment than their fellows are thus impelled to seek the cause of their unhappy condition. Unfortunately most of them find it easier to blame individuals or sets of individuals, such as Stalin or the Jews, probably because scapegoats are easy to hurl abuse at, and relieve outraged feelings.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that most of what is said to-day about Stalin is merely a re-hash of what was said about Hitler not so long ago. Similarly the substitution of a gentile for a jewish boss does not make the sack any more acceptable to the worker.

In time all such prejudices will cancel each other out. The idea will be grasped that it is the social system itself, in which the majority acquiesce, that is the root of the trouble. Inseparable from this will be the understanding that new social relations will replace the present capitalist ones.

One of the biggest obstacles to the acceptance of socialist ideas is the under-estimation of the influence of environment on all thoughts and conduct. Most of us, joining the party did not have nearly as clear an understanding of socialism as we have since gained. It may be compared to learning French. More progress can often be made in a week by living in France than in a year by studying textbooks. In the same way, points that present difficulties to those who are accustomed only to contemporary capitalist ideas find the socialist case hard to accept, until mental barriers of prejudice and conservatism are removed.

It is on the whole true to say that the ideas of men evolve slowly, but eventually society is more or less quickly revolutionized. Although the spread of socialist knowledge may appear to be slow, the development of the present world set-up must eventually lead to a point when all other “ practical" cures for our social ills will have been tried and failed.

There are contradictions within capitalism itself which tend to become greater and are not capable of being resolved, except by a fundamental change. The contradiction of poverty in the midst of actual or potential plenty is still with us, despite the efforts of reformist politicians of all parties. Capitalism decrees that the workers receive on average just sufficient to keep them in working order from week to week (or month to month).

Our opponents often point out individual exceptions to it, such as the occasional worker who makes good by thrift or industry. They forget that these comparatively fortunate ones are counterbalanced by some who cannot even afford enough food to keep their families from illness. That a few workers can escape into the capitalist class (the football pools are a “ popular" way) does not make any difference to those who have to continue the struggle along on £5 or £6 a week. The capitalists naturally seek to maintain their dominance and employ members of the working class—journalists, script writers, teachers, to do most of the routine work connected with stuffing the “right” ideas into the workers’ heads. Capitalism not only gives us poverty, but a way of looking at it so that it appears to become, as Mr. Morrison would put it, not-poverty.

Nevertheless many of the false notions of men about past and present society are being displaced by the growth of all branches of scientific knowledge. This must lead to a realisation of the opportunities of a better life opened up, but held back by ignorance of how to achieve it.

To non-socialists there appears to be no practical alternative to capitalism, but it must be emphasised that this is only so because of the acceptance of its institutions by the majority of those outside the socialist parties of the world. These institutions—private property, money, wage-labour, etc.,—are not permanent features of human life. They evolved from other forms such as primitive communism, and chattel slave-labour. There is no reason to doubt that from them will evolve a new set in keeping with the new basis of society, i.e. common ownership of the means of production.

It is up to you at present outside the party to join us in the work of bringing Socialism into being—no special attributes, virtues or sacrifices are necessary.

One thing we would particularly ask of you. Do not make objections to socialism which rest upon projecting present conditions into the future. When we first heard the socialist case most of us looked for all the possible snags. We found that there are none except in the minds of non-socialists, who mostly do not connect the necessity of changing the present system with the solution of their common problems.

We are confident that the failure of all other political parties to make any worthwhile improvement in the condition of the exploited masses will lead the latter to the realisation that the answer—socialism—lies in nobody’s hands but their own. What we, as a party, do is to propagate the knowledge of how it can be brought about. We are certain that man, having come so far since descending from the trees, will continue the conquest of his environment, and will not find the achievement of socialism beyond his powers.

Stan Parker

Why I joined the SPGB (1975)

From the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the nineteen-thirties it was commonplace for meetings to be held at street corners. Many sites became well-known. There were fewer cars and no TV. The audiences were attentive, asked questions and took part in discussion. Many workers became interested in politics at such meetings. I was an example. Apart from a critical attitude to Religion, as a youth, I took most things for granted.

It was in 1933 that I first stopped to listed to a meeting. I was eighteen years old. When I heard the speaker say we were "slaves" I stayed to hear more. I may have heard words like "capitalism", "socialism", "wage-labour" before but never thought much about them. The speaker urged workers to organize themselves as a class and end the system that exploited them and was the cause of their poverty". This impressed me as I had often wondered what gave other people the right to order me about, so I was in the right frame of mind. I stayed until the end. I bought a pamphlet for 1d called From Slavery to Freedom and that title suited me fine. I could use a bit of freedom. It gave me an inkling as to what Socialism was all about. I went back to Rushcroft Road time and again. Meetings began to act like a magnet. I was drawn to them. I was out every night listening and learning. I was soon familiar with the various parties. Amongst them the SPGB and I listened to their speakers. It was one of them that I heard the first time. I had become a "Political Animal".

However, if there was a wrong turning, I took it. I was going to have to learn the hard way. I was attracted by the rallies in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square which were always "Against Fascism". I got the idea that this was helping Socialism. This was unfortunate as I was going off at a tangent. But I wanted action. I wanted to be in the middle of things.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, whilst crossing Westminster Bridge, our long rambling columns were confronted by arm-raised lines of BUF (Mosleyite) supporters. There were thousands in our demonstration and we outnumbered and out-shouted the "Blackshirts". We held up clenched fists in reply to the "Hitler salute". With our chanting and banners proclaiming "Arms for Spain" we felt we had won a victory for the forces of "peace and socialism".

In 1936 I joined the Labour Party because I considered it "the mass party of the working class". I was not sure what they meant, but it sounded fine at the time. Anyway I was only joining to help turn it into a genuine socialist party. My fellow members were reformists and I was going to win them over to socialism. I now regarded myself as a sound revolutionary. I did not entertain any doubts on that score.

I soon found myself engaged in other activities. Soon after becoming a member of the LP I came into contact with the "Militant Labour League" and joined. They were one of several Trotskyist factions. I was in fact a member of a party within another party. The atmosphere was very conspiratorial. Secret meetings were held regularly to decide strategy. The object was to try and get control of local Labour Party Branches. The so-called Communist Party was playing a similar game. According to the MLL the basis of socialism had been laid in Russia in 1917 by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, usurped power and built up his bureaucracy. The USSR was a "degenerated workers' state". The object of the League was to defend the basis of this "workers' state", build up a fourth International, work for world revolution and overthrow Stalin, at the same fighting against the Labour leadership in Britain. We sure had plenty to get on with. But we were not deterred: we were Bolsheviks ready for any task. With the "deepening of the crisis of world capitalism" the working class would rally to the Vanguard of the Masses. That was us. We were all set to win the "leadership" stakes.

We did not bother to explain to other workers what socialism was. That was a waste of time. The workers would trust and follow us. We would raise the right slogans at the right time and we were the right leaders. Had not the mantle of Lenin and Trotsky fallen on us? The tasks in the "coming period" was immense. Programmes dealing with "perspectives" were constantly issued. We would be dealing with world-shattering events. Hitler came to power because of false leadership of the German workers. Victory for the world working class would come, under the Banner of the Fourth International. Each of us saw himself as a potential Trotsky directing Red Armies all over the world. We did not have long to wait for events to start moving. "The death agony of capitalism" started getting under way, or so we thought, when World War Two began in 1939.

During the war, at a conference, all the groups united to form the "Revolutionary Communist Party". We listened to a recording of Trotsky's voice. Delegates were overcome and had tears in their eyes as they heard the "Old Man's" voice. We, the self-appointed leaders, then all shook hands and sang the Internationale. The ruling class did not have time to tremble, however, for this new party sank soon after this emotional launching. All the "perspectives" were wrong. None of the forecasts of world revolution materialized. It was the RCP that collapsed and not capitalism. There was no turning of the masses to the vanguard, and there was no death agony of capitalism.

Disillusioned, it came to me in 1945 that the workers of the world were not class-conscious. They did not want Socialism. I had to adjust my thinking. After the dust settled it was clear the post-war world was not going to be different. The working class supported capitalism and it was going to continue. At the end of the war it was "back to work" as usual for wages. The only crisis that occurred was if workers could not get their old jobs back.

My pipe-dreams were coming to an end. I could not agree with the Trotskyist slogan "For a Third Labour Government". I refused to vote for it at the 1945 General Election. I left the Labour Party and, at the same time, broke with Bolshevism although this was regarded as "impossible". It was like breaking out of a stifling prison and coming back into the real world.

I avidly started reading the SOCIALIST STANDARD again. In the light of bitter experience, I had to re-learn all the fundamentals of Socialism. I listened again to what the SPGB had to say. Hearing their speakers was like a breath of fresh air. I went to their lectures and classes. I was thoroughly routed in arguments about Russia. I felt confused when members of the SPGB asked me what a "workers' state" was; why did the Russian workers pay themselves wages? Did Karl Marx write a book called Capital or a book called "Dialectical Materialism"? And much else besides. Understanding, at last, the materialist conception of history I was able to refute the "workers' state" nonsense, and beginning to see the Trotskyite so-called "theories" were ridiculous.

I never met one Trotskyite who advocated the abolition of the wages system or understood its implications. No-one ever spoke about production solely for use. They do not know the difference between the common ownership of the tools of production with democratic control by the whole of society and what they call "nationalization under workers' control". The followers of Trotsky are anti-working class because they distort the meaning of Socialism. They hinder the spread of genuine Socialist knowledge.

I could see now how wrong I had been been, and I had much to learn. Despite my mistakes I had not turned sour about Socialism. I applied to join the SPGB and was accepted in 1946. Socialist understanding expands when you become a member. I recall meeting again in the Camberwell branch our late Comrade Frank Dawe, whom I had known very slightly over the years. He had asked me what I had been up to, and I told him. He gave me a quizzical smile and said: "You have been doing what I call 'boring' in the Labour Party. All you do in fact is to 'bore' in at one end and then 'bore' out again at the other, without achieving anything. Put it down to experience!" That just about sums it all up.

J. C. Gormley

The Last Word: Why I am a Socialist (1997)

From the November 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was not born a socialist. Although I was born social. We all are. As members of the human species, we are uniquely interdependent social animals, dependent for our survival upon co-operation. Born into that species, there was no option but to be a social being.

Years of conditioning tear to pieces the social part of most of us. We learn to translate We Are into I Am and then I Have: the insidious language of an anti-social system drains us of our humanity. We become alienated from our social selves.

The response we adopt towards this alienation and dehumanisation depends upon many factors. Who are our parents? What kind of teachers do we have? What economic opportunities exist in the time and district in which we grow up? How do friends influence us? What do we read or see in the cinema or on TV?

A million other factors come into play. Luck, whatever that is. (Luck is simply a term to describe those factors which scientific reason has not yet explained in terms of objective causation.)

The details of my biography are of no particular importance. Loving parents. Lousy schools which I learned to fear, hate and finally resist against. Freedom from dire poverty, but freedom from security too. Some interesting friends, mainly comprising the kids who didn't like kicking balls but preferred to talk. A passion for books (my father read them to me aloud from an age when A. L. Morton and Noddy were both appealing) and an equal passion for radio and television, for which I was in the first generation of addicts. The Socialist Standard was always around my home. My father would buy it religiously from elderly men who wore macs all year round. They stood at the gates of Hyde Park and seemed to represent a statue of integrity in a political junk yard.

At a very young age I became fascinated by the simple fact that history was not Back Then or Out There but part of us. We were actors within the unfolding epic of history. Actors before us had lived and died never quite knowing their role in the plot. To know what one was doing in history and, better still, to know that history is ever-changing, transient and replete with the seeds of the future was a highly exhilarating recognition. It made me want to think about making history rather than being made by it. But how to make it?

A close friend when I was a teenager was obsessed by the belief that great men who understand history are those who mould it into the future. He was, quite perversely given the century in which he lived, an Italian nationalist who worshipped the memory of Mazzini. I found this obsession with Great Men faintly ridiculous and not in line with the way history had actually unfolded. People made history out of the circumstances of their material environment, and in so acting upon society changed it. The plasticity of history and the force of the many as a means of changing it became a fascination.

I read Marx because I wanted to know more about democratic change. Marx was not always the greatest democrat (although his objective was realisable only by democratic action), but it was hard to read him without concluding that the problems to be addressed by the many were essentially interlinked. The problem was The System. Capitalism was historically outdated. It would hang around for decades or even centuries, but only by causing harm to the majority in whose hands the capacity to overthrow it lay. The obvious political conclusion was that the majority needed to overthrow the system which enslaved them.

I had listened to those who tried to persuade the majority to overthrow capitalism and was largely unimpressed. The left-wing orators of anti-capitalism were mainly terrible windbags who either believed that capitalism should be patched up or that it had been overthrown in the manifestly state-capitalist "Communist" police states. These views were so stupid that it occurred to me that the greatest opponents of overthrowing capitalism were the so-called socialists.

I had encountered the speakers whose party published the Socialist Standard. Some were terrifically good and as I listened I entered, unknowingly, into the greatest university I would attend. Others were bores, loudmouths or egotists and I was convinced that they did their cause little good. Rightly or wrongly, I allowed this latter thought to nourish a mild hostility towards the Socialist Party which was only overcome when I concluded, as others had before, that the movement for socialism mattered more than its parts or parties, and in the end the only right course is to join with those whose principles are uncompromisingly for the overthrow of an oppressive system and for the democratic establishment of a co-operative alternative. There was only one such party. There still is.

There were many lessons to learn along the way. Joining the cause is not to know all the answers but recognise the questions. Reading William Morris's vision of socialism was to have a profound affect. So, in other ways, did numerous other writers—and also the voices and actions of men and women who seemed to embody the very essence of what it is to be a socialist.

But there has never been a substitute for that desire for socialism, and that understanding of its necessity, which is born of experience. It is the lived history of capitalism—the frustration of lives wasted, humanity stunted, democracy denied and history both pregnant with the future and stillborn by the fear and political ignorance of the many, which makes it unthinkable to respond to life by being anything but a socialist.

Steve Coleman 

Why I Joined The S.P.G.B. (1975)

From the July 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the stormy period of the economic crisis of 1928-33 I was a member of the Communist Party. I joined in 1928, the year of the commencement of the first Russian Five-Year Plan. This plan inspired me, and as I thought that they were building Socialism — I wanted to support it. I was enthusiastic and arrogant, and walked into a Communist Party meeting and said that I wanted to join. No questions were asked me, except for my name and address, and I believe a few pence for a membership card, and I was in.

In 1931 at the time of the hunger marchers, many party members believed that the revolution was just "around the corner: and that we could expect that the country would soon be involved in some sort of civil war as a transition to Socialism. I found this idea extremely hard to swallow, and made myself unpopular by saying so.

During my membership of the CP there were the mysterious Moscow trials when many of the "old guard" of the Bolshevik Party confessed that they were wreckers, saboteurs, spies and fascists, and many heaped abuse upon themselves. They were mostly shot on their own evidence, just as happened in the Middle Ages to witches who confessed to causing storms at sea and spreading plagues. Stalin murdered about twenty of the twenty-eight old Bolsheviks who sat round the table with himself and Lenin at the meeting of the Third International in 1919. Men like Radek, Zinovief, Kamenef, and Bukharin. I was unable to accept that Stalin alone was right and that he had been surrounded by wreckers.

When I tried to discuss this point in the party I was accused of Trotskyism. I then knew my days in the party were numbered. Had I been living in Russia, these line would never have been penned — it would have been Siberia or a bullet.

I made many visits to Germany during my Communist Party days, both before and after the Nazis came to power. I watched the Nazis and Communists fighting each other, and could not figure out how Socialism could come from such methods. The Nazis called themselves National Socialists and the Communists also claimed to be Socialists.

I noted that the Nazis after they took power ruled with the aid of the Gestapo and the concentration camps — plus of course the support of millions of thoughtless workers who had voted for them. Russia also had its Gestapo, the KGB (or NKVD as it was then) and their concentration camps. Both systems were headed by a ruthless dictator who showed the world that they were prepared to stop at nothing to hold the reins of office. Both regimes were totalitarian, and held fake elections in which Hitler and Stalin polled 99% of the votes. Both countries marched into Poland and both into Czechoslovakia with the pretence of going to the aid of the Czechs.

Lenin's books (I've read the complete works) are little more than a verbal attack on Kautsky and Bernstein, and of course any Russian who ever opposed him. Hitler's Mein Kampf is also a tirade of abuse against the Jews and Communists. Both Russia and Germany had trade unions — not to protect the workers' wages or hours of work, but to make them work harder and not to grumble. Both Stalin and Hitler persecuted intellectuals. The Russian trade unions and the persecution of dissidents still continue.

While still a member of the CP I went to a meeting of the SPGB on Russia. After the lecture there was the usual allotted time for questions, and I lost no time in seizing this opportunity.

The answers to my questions did not satisfy me, and I said so. Then came a period of discussion and I was invited to take the platform for five minutes and put my case. Without hesitation, and full of cock-sureness I mounted the rostrum and let off my steam. Then came the answers of the SPGB. This did not convince me — but it shook me, for I never imagined that anybody else but CP-ers knew anything about Russia, Marxism or Socialism.

At a meeting of the Communist Party a few days later a critic asked a few questions in a perfectly orderly manner, and he was pounced upon and silenced and called a fascist. As for taking the platform in opposition — that was quite unthinkable. This showed who was democratic, and it did much to convince me which party had a sound case.

When I decided to join the SPGB I was surprised to learn that there no "sign your name and you're in". I was carefully questioned on my ideas about Russia, and my understanding of Socialism.

This procedure keeps the party small, but if we admitted all and sundry, we may have a larger membership, but we would soon cease to be a Socialist Party.

H. Jarvis

Why I Joined the S.P.G.B. (1938)

From the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like most of you, I was always interested in politics to a certain extent. My first object of affection was the Labour Party, and whilst I never joined, I always gave them my vote and between elections occasionally went to meetings and applauded Labour speakers. That was before 1929—when the Labour Party took office for the second time. I had not thought deeply about the issues involved, it was just a matter of instinct and sentiment with me—just as it is with millions of working-men and women.

After a year of Labour Government my enthusiasm for the Labour Party had vanished. but, unlike others, I never got it back again. Instead I began to look for something different, something more "extreme." I found it in the speeches of Harry Pollitt. Perhaps you, too, remember some of them, when, in 1930 and 1931, Mr. Pollitt contested Whitechapel and St. George's as Communist candidate for Parliament? By his fiery outbursts against the Labour Party and wholesome condemnation of working-class poverty I was won over. But, had I been asked whether I wanted Communism, or whether I understood it, I could not have given a satisfactory answer. No doubt I could have read the works of Marx and Engels had I wanted to, but the issues around which the Communist Party was arousing attention, and the general impression given by their propaganda, did not stimulate an interest in works on Socialism.

Yesterday's Problems—and To-day's

Then I came across an S.P.G.B. meeting. I immediately noticed the fundamental difference in approach used by the speaker. Everything he dealt with—political parties, topical events—looked so much different in the light of his reasoning. Of course the issues were not of "the day-to-day struggle," or so it seemed. For I have discovered this fact: capitalism can find something new every day, some problem which can occupy your time until another comes along to take its place in your mind. That is the trap which capitalism sets and into which reformist parties are continually falling. They said then, just as they are saying to-day: "This problem can't wait until we have Socialism, so we must deal with it first." And capitalism continues to produce problems of apparent immediate urgency; so that somehow they never get to Socialism—and, in the MEANTIME, CAPITALISM REMAINS.

Socialism Demands Knowledge

When I first listened to those S.P.G.B. meetings I did not understood this much. I've learnt it since, and it's about time some of you who are always asking us to do this, that, and the other, found it also.

Perhaps the most important fact that speaker brought home to me right at the beginning was the impossibility of Socialism without a majority of Socialists. Socialism, he pointed out, meant such a revolutionary social change, that to achieve it was out of the question unless most of the people understood what it was all about and wanted it. That's heart-breaking for those who are looking for a short cut. But has anyone found that short cut so many were talking about ten, twenty and thirty years ago? I didn't argue with that speaker about the impossibility of the workers ever learning what Socialism really meant. I set to work learning it! Perhaps some of our hecklers will take a tip from that and, instead of continually interrupting our speakers with that bogey question, keep quiet and give themselves a chance to learn!

The Importance of Numbers

Another matter. It simply did not occur to me to ask how many members the S.P.G.B. had got. That was the problem to tackle when I was inside the organisation. It has certainly nothing to do with the merits of the S.P.G.B.'s policy, except as a measure of its popularity with the working class (and, remember, the Labour Party's popularity was at its height at the very time when that Party became an instrument of attack on working-class wages and conditions!). So when you hear or read about the smallness of the S.P.G.B., try to be logical. If our policy is right, and you are convinced of that, then it's your job to help us put it across; and if you don't agree with us, then remember our size does not alter the merits of our policy in any way whatever. I would assert, moreover, that there is not another organisation which is as active as the S.P.G.B., considering that all the work of speaking, writing, literature-selling, and the hundred-and-one other jobs, are all done voluntarily in members' spare time without payment. How would some parties look if they had to carry on under similar circumstances?

Are We Sectarian?

Another factor that added to my resolve to join up was the way in which all kinds of objections to Socialism were dealt with by the S.P.G.B. (It is amazing how many so-called "advanced" people oppose Socialism!)

Those who argue that all we need do to-day is get rid of the National Government and replace it by a Labour-Liberal Coalition (euphemistically called a "Popular Front") in order to "keep open the door to Socialism," are begging the question. That "door" (Democracy) has been open for a long time. Why hasn't it been used? Why isn't it used to-day? There is only one answer: the workers don't want to use it to establish Socialism, because they're not Socialists. If you don't believe me, come to some of our meetings and hear their protests when Socialism is explained. That is why I endorse the S.P.G.B.'s attitude when they insist that, when joining the Party, applicants should know what Socialism stands for. Otherwise they would be a hinderance to the work of making Socialists. And that, after all, is the only justification for the existence of a Socialist Party.

Of course, this means that our membership is limited—to Socialists only. Our opponents say this question makes us a sect. It depends on the way the question is looked at. For instance, the New Leader has been featuring some letters from people who recently joined the I.L.P. In several cases the writers as good as stated they were not quite satisfied with the I.L.P., but joined because they could find nothing better. One writer went further. He actually disagreed completely with the I.L.P. on a fundamental question.

Well, that's perhaps one way of showing that the I.L.P. does not intend to be a sect. But then, a Socialist Party cannot be built up that way. Labourites, Pacifists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, and others banded together in an organisation might give themselves a Socialist label, but they cannot work for Socialism. That much is evident when you know what the I.L.P. is and has been. Such a situation could not arise in the S.P.G.B. We are a small organisation because membership is recruited on the basis of a clear understanding of Socialism and how to obtain it. Those who accuse us of being a "sect" produce no evidence except that we are small.

Many people who appreciate the quality of S.P.G.B. propaganda say: "You should be in the movement" . . . "get inside the Labour Party and put your Socialism across in there."

It is difficult to believe that anyone really thinks that that is possible. Would we be allowed to join as an organisation? And, having joined, what could we do there? Get busy telling the members that the Labour policy is completely wrong, anti-Socialist, and that their leaders are simply politicians depending upon mass political ignorance? That would be the truth, but we would certainly not be allowed to say it.

The I.L.P. was never Socialist. They left the Labour Party when they found it too awkward to defend what the Labour Government had done during their two years of office in 1929 to 1931. To-day, when the memory of that fiasco has dimmed, the I.L.P. is trying to crawl back again into the Labour fold. So little do they differ from the Labour Party that a welcome should be certain!

Fellow-workers, the Socialist Party has to stand on its own feet, even if it means that, for the time being, we can't make a big noise. Big demonstrations are excellent things, we would like to indulge in them, but we want demonstrations of working-class understanding, not political dupes whose flags are beginning to look very much like the Union Jack!

Pity—or Power?
And the pity of it all is that the workers really feel that they are doing something useful when they march in demonstrations and attend huge meetings. They really believe they are contributing towards the alleviation of the terrible distress that exists the world over. Many come to our meetings and ask: "What is the S.P.G.B. doing about China, Spain, Abyssinia, Germany, Austria?"—and we could add many other countries to that list ourselves: Palestine, Jamaica, Trinidad, India—why, the whole world is a crying indictment against the system and the class responsible for it. Do we not feel the horror of it all, too?

The brutal truth us that these demonstrating masses can do nothing to end the real trouble. They are frequently merely the playthings of politicians. Posing as the Messiahs of the world, so-called leaders cannot even find a solution for the problems on their own doorstep.

So that is another lesson the S.P.G.B. has taught me. In the words of Marx: "In every country the workers must settle matters with their own ruling-class first."

Our job here is to win power for Socialism; then, and not before, will we be able to help others.

Now I put the question to you: Are my reasons for joining the S.P.G.B. sound? Do they tell the truth? Without exaggeration, I honestly assert that, on the answer the working-class gives, the fate of the world depends.

Sid Rubin

Why I joined the S.P.G.B. (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Saying that one met members of the SPGB does not lead far — Winston Churchill was once chatted up by a member, but he never joined. The question is what made the Socialists' words acceptable: what chord of consciousness awaited being touched by them?

I was raised in East London between the wars, where everyone was poor. I knew jews, gentiles, black men, yellow men and the man in the sweetshop who loved Dickens, and they were all poor. There was a place in the town called "up the Labour" where everybody went, and when people met they didn't say How do you do; they said "Working?"

We lived on a corner near the main road, and sometimes men knocked at the door and asked for a drink of water. They had walked to London to look for work. I heard my parents say that one man had walked from Middlesbrough, and I looked on the map and saw where it was. Jesus! Yet even in this land of misfortune people thought they were better than others: some were said to be "common", and there were children one was not supposed to play with.

When I was I ten I was socially estranged myself. I got a scholarship to the grammar school, from my scruffy down-the-road school — I think it was the first one they had had since the 1870 Education Act. I had to fight nearly every boy in the neighbourhood. The scholarship was an opportunity, the grown-ups said. So it was: to find out that the paying pupils and the staff —M.A. Cantab., etc. — despised scholarship boys with Cockney vowels.

The effect on scholarship boys was interesting. Most became imitators, seeking to please and be accepted so that they could feel yes, they'd risen. But several joined the Young Communist League and the Fascists: having themselves been kicked, they wanted to kick someone else. I was in a thing called the Schoolboys' United Front, where we passed ferocious resolutions about the Means Test and the dole.

The school gave us languages dead and alive, and literature, because it was conducted as if we were all going to universities. Whereas for four-fifths the labour market waited: they were going to be office boys. Even for that, you had to pass "Matric". Some had several goes; their future—a life's penal servitude in a shipping office—was held to depend on it.

Unfortunately for the school as well as me, I liked the lit. and language and didn't want to be an office boy. The only alternative was manual labour. I humped heavy loads, scrubbed floors, became a packer, a builders' labourer, a gravedigger. I learned a trade: drawing the innards out of chickens. I was a small-time professional boxer and won more fights than champions have now, most of them for twenty-five shillings a time.

And everywhere I saw people were exploited and to be born in the working class was to be damned. I met men from whom I learned more about books than a university could have taught me — as Henry Miller says, "men who were fit to rule the world", only they weren't in that way: they were working for wretched wages, being hired and fired and treated like dirt. And the ones who were truly degraded: who scraped to the boss and thought how generous he was to employ them for two or three pounds a week, and what heights of magnanimity were in giving three minutes on the clock before stopping a quarter.

I heard about the system. The Communist speakers preached to crowds on Saturday nights. Their sermon was the one attributed to William Jennings Bryan, "that every man who has a clean shirt is a thief and should be hanged". They said, regularly, that the British Empire was at the crossroads. It had a thrilling, ominous ring, but what did it mean? They didn't seem to know themselves. The Labour Party had clean shirts and were always promising: promises were what the working class lived on. Or one could read Bernard Shaw, all aphorisms like toys and mottoes coming out of crackers, and about as useful.

What engaged my attention most in the SPGB was that it made no offer to do benevolent things and did no urging to love one's neighbour. It said the working class had got to see to its own salvation. The members were not even propitiatory. They found the working class and me both intolerably ignorant, and said so. When I showed my knowledge, they told me my brains were elsewhere than in my head; I voiced my opinions about society, and they told me to go and read my Marx.

I learned, in fact, that indignation and rebellion are only starting-points. Conscious that a great deal is wrong, you have to find — exactly — what it is; or confusion reigns. What is more, the truth can be unpalatable. Political parties and leaders achieve popularity by telling people what they want to hear, and the more passionate you are the more strongly you will insist on hearing it. "Something must be done" is the conviction: but what?

I approached the SPGB because I wanted the right answers. I joined it when they had knocked the impulse to the wrong ones out if me. The story does not have to be everyone's, but it is characteristic for a good many of my generation. And, though times have changed in some respects, the capitalist system and the truth about it have not altered at all.

Robert Barltrop

My road to socialism (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

I first encountered the Socialist Party in a South Wales valley town. It was late 1972, and I was at a loose end politically. Years before, I had flirted with the Communist Party, to the outrage of my parents, despite my maternal grandparents having been CP supporters from the time of the Russian Revolution.

I used to read Soviet Weekly, and a lavishly illustrated magazine sent to me direct from Moscow, Soviet Union, full of happy smiling Russian workers on their way to exceeding the norms of the latest Five Year Plan. Nothing about Stalin having murdered thirty million or so of his own people. Nothing about the string of slave labour camps dotted around the Arctic Circle, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, where political dissidents ended up.

What cured me of Bolshevism was the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. My family possessed one of the few televisions in our street in those days. Here was film, direct from Budapest, of Russian tanks slaughtering Hungarian workers, whose only offence was to try to shake off Soviet tyranny. I wrote a blistering letter to Soviet Weekly but, of course, I never got a reply. One of the maxims of capitalist society is obviously ‘when faced with the truth, ignore it.’

For the next sixteen years, except for one brief episode, I was more or less in the political wilderness. My father was a lifelong member of the NUM and its local predecessor, the South Wales Miners’ Federation, the “Fed” whose subs had to be paid in secret, lest you ended up on the colliery owner’s blacklist, then being unable to get a job in any colliery in the valley. Dad was an admirer of Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Health Minister, a former miner himself, and MP for a local constituency, Ebbw Vale. Bevan’s stock went even higher in our house when he described the Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.

The watershed came in 1964. For the first time since 1951 a Labour government was elected. But it didn’t turn out to be the promised land that some had thought. Far from it. Labour proved itself incapable of solving the intractable issues of capitalism, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, warfare and a host of other working class problems too.

Somewhere between 1964 and 1972, still looking for an alternative to capitalism, I joined Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. Out of the frying pan into the fire! Some forty years later there are only one or two aspects of their policies I can recollect. They regarded themselves as a socialist party, by which they meant state capitalism, and they had the curious belief that the little countries of Europe were all doing better than the larger ones, as if capitalism was particularly considerate in this respect. Of course, it was twaddle. What Plaid didn’t say was that in an independent Wales, the situation of the worker would be no different from in a larger political unit, i.e. they would have only their ability to work to sell, and so would be shut out from the wealth of society, which would be appropriated by a Welsh capitalist class. For the worker, nationalism is a total waste of time.

And so to 1972. On a November day I picked up a copy of the Socialist Standard in the local library. It came like a political thunderbolt. Here were ideas I had never encountered before. Free access to the wealth of society. Production for use. The workers have no country. Abolition of money. No more governments, no more states, no more frontiers, no armies, no war.

For the first time in my life, I felt politically free.

Greenie