Chrysler and the Cabinet: How the Deal was Done (1976)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Chrysler and the Cabinet: How the Deal was Done. Granada Television, 35p.

This is the transcript of a TV programme shown on 9th February 1976, in which the Cabinet discussions of the Chrysler UK motor company were simulated. The parts of Wilson, Healey, other Ministers and the Chrysler officials were played by political and financial journalists, and the programme was generally thought to have come close to the reality.

The Chrysler Corporation of USA proposed closing down its British subsidiary which had made losses in six of the last nine years, amounting to £60 millions, and was expected to lose another £40 millions in the next year. The Government’s concern was with the unemployment — 25,000 jobs or more — which would be created by the close-down. However, the Government’s newly agreed “industrial strategy” prohibited financing obviously unprofitable companies; at the outset of these discussions the only voice in favour of giving help is that of the Secretary of State for Scotland, where Chrysler is a major employer.

A report from the Central Policy Review Staff (the “Think Tank”) had said the British car industry had already 25 per cent, over-capacity. From the viewpoint of the British Leyland company, which the Government had recently bought for £1,300 millions, Chrysler was an undesired rival; nor, for the same commercial reasons, was there any case for merging Chrysler with Leyland. The loss of jobs was agreed to be a regrettable necessity, summed up thus by Healey’s impersonator: “There’s nothing socialist about preserving existing jobs for their own sake.”

The conclusion was foregone — and yet the Government did undertake to support Chrysler, to the extent of about £145 millions. Why, with everything apparently against it? First, political fear of losing votes, in Scotland particularly. Second, the existence of a Chrysler contract to export to Iran (Healey: “Persia is becoming an increasingly important trading partner with us and the Shah is a touchy fellow.”).

The third reason was not stated explicitly in the TV programme but emerges implicitly from it. This is the inability of governments to manage capitalism even on its own terms. The sapient Ministers talked of “the long term” and “the future”, meaning “if we can keep out of trouble this afternoon perhaps tomorrow’s mail will bring an unforeseen lucky break”. While the discussions with Chrysler went on, attempts were made (fruitlessly) to attract Japanese car manufacturers to Scotland. If unemployment was prevented by the Chrysler deal, how will its transfer to other companies be prevented? What sort of “strategy” is firmly agreed, then has to be abandoned at the first engagement?

This is an interesting booklet, more relevant to what goes on in capitalism than some expensive volumes of retired Ministers’ memoirs.

Between the Lines: Primitive . . . (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Primitive . . .

Marx wrote about the increasing misery of the working class. By this he did not mean, as some who have tried to refute him have suggested, that wages would fall lower and lower, material conditions ever more harsh. Marx was right: the quality of living under capitalism becomes ever-more impoverished.

Country File (C4) provides a pleasant diversion on the bleakest of urban Sunday lunchtimes. It has features on farming and conservation and the world of animals: it reminds the viewer that, stuck with the noise and dirt of an artificial city, there is an environment beyond which is richer in what is natural and more in harmony with the senses. On 8 January it had a report about a growing social problem: rural violence committed by young frustrated workers in small country towns and villages — the children of the land whose daddies do not own the fields and whose futures are in the cities, where there is more chance of jobs. Others involved in recent acts of rural criminality are farm labourers whose jobs have been made more tedious by mechanisation and who are often paid below-poverty wages for making landowners rich. A police officer from Avon and Somerset spoke of how Saturday-night gangs were terrorising villages and vandalising beauty spots. There have even been reports in the press of the senseless slaughter of farm animals for fun.

No doubt there were irritated viewers in Devon or Yorkshire who switched on expecting to see how big turnips can be and how green fields can look in the right light. Such people would do well to ponder that life is becoming increasingly empty for vast numbers of young workers, squashed as they are between the obscenities of the bomb and the social mind of a world which is civilised only to degree that it offers hope when there is a likely profit attached.

The following evening World In Action (ITV, 8.30 pm) reported the results of a nationwide survey which revealed that women were more afraid of violent assault in the streets than death from cancer, being killed on the roads or nuclear war. Ninety per cent feared being attacked if they went out at night. Sixty-seven per cent said that they never go out at night alone. What an indictment of a so-called civilised society it is that the majority of women — the majority of the population — are too frightened to go out alone in the evening. This is the social-pay-off of the competitive society. The streets become a jungle where anyone with money, however old, frightened or disabled, is prey to the muggers. Women workers are right to be scared. Street assaults are frequent: more dangerous weapons are now used by the muggers (in imitation of our rulers who also like to sophisticate their murder instruments regularly); and most of us live in badly lit environments, which assist the fast-money attackers. The thief thieves because it is an easy way to make money. Ethics do not enter into it; he is a reflection of the economic motives of the more successful robbers in the City, whose activities are strictly legal.

It is not just that women are likely to be attacked, but that they feel threatened. Every walk in the dark streets feels like preparation for an attack. Young men are eight times more likely to be mugged than women, but this is a deceptive statistic: women are less likely to be mugged because so many are forced to seek refuge in their homes every night. They are under curfew. There is no way that a society which scares its inhabitants to that extent can ever be worthy of the description of “civilisation". The simple-minded blame the muggers, as if knife-carrying kids have chosen such a way of life as an alternative to the gentlemen's club. Socialists blame the profit system.

. . . and civilised

The same people that the profit system twists into muggers could, in different material circumstances, behave like the people of the Baka tribe, shown in three programmes by Channel Four called Baka — People Of The Rainforest. Modern society sneers at such primitive social relationships. The programmes allowed us to glimpse into the moneyless, wageless, stateless world of one of the few extant pre-property societies. Of course, the Baka are productively unsophisticated and have to work harder than they would need to do had they access to labour-saving technology. They are still innocently religious, regarding Nature as something above them and largely beyond control. It would be foolishly romantic — although very tempting — to depict primitive communism as The Way We Should Live. But what if we took all of the machinery of production which exists in modern Britain (where women are afraid to walk city streets and rural areas are echoing to the sound of furious working-class frustration) and combined it with the human relations of classless equality which characterise primitive communities? That is the prospect which world socialism holds before us now. We could have a society where people co-operate to produce the best that there can be to satisfy the needs of all; instead we have a society shown to us in a documentary by Clive James called Postcard From Chicago (11 January, BBC1, 9.30 pm) in which we were introduced to the gangs which inhabit the city's slum areas. These gangs — The People and The Folk — do not merely shout abuse at each other. They shoot — to kill.

Gang warfare, born of urban poverty, is a game that ends in murder. Often the killers and killed are in their mid-teens. Now. James is one of those "witty" types who likes to enchant the half-witted with empty aphorisms. It's seductive viewing, but a lot of tripe is squeezed into the maxims. For example, in watching workers making hamburgers in Chicago (note: you will always see James watching people work) he stated that “Marx had it all wrong”. There is no alienation; these descendants of Polish immigrants feel close to their work and are grateful to be close to food — unlike in Poland where they would have to queue for it. This self-evident rubbish is supposed to pass for serious social commentary. By the same reasoning. Rolls Royce car producers are not alienated from the luxury cars they produce — even though they may travel home from work in a second-hand Cortina. Clive James is, in fact, a virulent anti-socialist. That he is witty and entertaining makes him an all the more potent one.

Is Britain free?

Panorama (BBC1, 9.25 pm. 9 January) was all about the diminishing freedom which many of us perceive in Britain at the moment. The government, in the name of freedom, has made numerous moves to curtail trade union and civil freedoms which workers fought hard to win. But even without the much-discussed Thatcherite assault, a society without free access to goods and services can never be free. That conception of freedom was not once mentioned in the programme. It is as if the fullest extent of “freedom" can only ever mean a loosening of the chains. I fell asleep after ten minutes of the great debate about whether Britain is unfree, woke up to see Willie Whitelaw sounding silly and switched over to Minder (ITV), where one can see a far more vivid picture of phoney freedom and increasing misery under the capitalist social system.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

For some reason the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard misnamed 'Baka — People Of The Rainforest' as 'Baka — Children Of The Rain Forest'. I'm not sure what happened there. In 2012 the writer/director of the original documentary, Phil Agland, wrote and directed a follow up documentary entitled, 'Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest'. It can be viewed at the following link.

Slavery in Bangkok (1984)

TV Review from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Song of the Shirt 1984

A recent report on ITV’s “World in Action” programme showed the misfortunes of employment in the “sweat shops” of Bangkok. Here for less that £1.00 a day, girls often as young as eleven or twelve manufacture clothes for sale in the West. The hours are long, usually fifteen a day, and many work through the night. Food is provided by their benevolent employer, who of course makes the appropriate deduction from their wages. Often the girls sleep on the premises, which can shelter as many as one hundred and have no chairs, tables or even beds. The girls are often beaten and abused by their employers. So why put up with such conditions? The only alternative in the sex capital of the world is prostitution. Brothels arc plentiful and girls as young as ten or eleven are individually numbered and priced depending on their age and maturity.

The clothes produced by these “sweat shops" are sold through stores such as Debenhams, C & A. Littlewoods and Great Universal Stores, whose profit last year was £200 million. By patronising such stores, are we supporting those who are enslaved in the Far East? What should we do? Perhaps only buy those goods manufactured in “respectable" European countries? Is it realistic in a world whose values are dominated by money to expect that people will pay more for clothes produced elsewhere when they can save by purchasing the cheap clothes produced in Bangkok?

Ironically, if the working class were prepared not to support the capitalists who enslave such people, there would be nothing in the shops for them to buy. Slavery is not confined to the Far East. As society is presently constituted we all sell our abilities to other people. Our “democratic” society tells us that we must spend our lives producing wealth for others if we are to live at all. In return for the sale of our abilities and talents, capitalists will provide us with the means by which we can survive and produce yet more wealth for them. So what is the alternative? In a rational society, people would both produce and possess the wealth they create. Such a society would create the things that were needed, rather than for profit. This would be a socialist society.

Ian Stuart

Between the Lines: The Born Villain (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Born Villain

Is Nick Cotton trying to poison his mother? (EastEnders, BBCl. Tuesday and Thursday. 7.30pm). This is not the most significant question of the early 1990s. It is not like asking, Will the Russian Empire survive under Gorbachev or Will Germany re-unify or Will Dr Habgood become the new Archbishop of Cant. Less important maybe, but a lot more workers are concerned about the case of Nick Cotton.

Let us try to explain to readers who are used to only watching TV documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine or televised operas on BBC2. EastEnders is one of the most watched programmes in Britain. Millions of workers relate to the made-up goings-on in Albert Square with a passion which we socialists usually reserve for the Paris Commune. Dot Cotton is a familiar character in this soap opera She is the sort of woman that we have all encountered once, usually for too long. She invents illnesses to torment herself with, indulges in futile gossip and is a dedicated Christian. She is the sort of person that every soap opera needs. Her husband. Charlie, is a cockney ne'er-do-well: the sort of hapless proletarian dope one might expect to find in a George Gissing novel. Charlie is a petty-crook and adulterer and he makes Dot's life more miserable than it would otherwise be We are supposed to laugh at Charlie—the affable old rogue. Now, Dot and Charlie have a son called Nick. He is a villain. A real soap opera villain. A proletarian Flashman. The sort of lout who would have sharpened the knives for Reggie Kray in' the Sixties and carried the leaflets for the National Front in the 1970s. Where Charlie is pathetic. Nick is dangerous. Over the years Nick Cotton has served as the East Ender without a heart of gold—heartless, conscienceless, morally off the edge.

As we have pointed out in this column on previous occasions, EastEnders is essentially a twentieth-century version of a medieval morality play. Its function is to show the proles what is right and what is wrong and how it shall come to pass that wrongdoers shall perish. (In Coronation Street the adulterous thief, Alan Bradley, literally did perish—knocked down and killed by a Blackpool tram as he was about to murder Rita). Some weeks ago Nick Cotton returned to Albert Square after a lengthy absence at Her Majesty's Pleasure He returned at a time when the ever-miserable Dot was rather less miserable because she had just won a fortune in a local newspaper competition. (Documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine are so much easier to follow, for a start) Anyway, Nick returned.

The inhabitants of Albert Square were less than happy to see that this born villain had resurfaced. But there lies the question. Was Nick Cotton a born villain? Is anyone born to be anti-social? Nick claimed to have transformed his personality and been "born again". The street-wise locals were unconvinced. "Once a villain always a villain", concluded Pete Beale, the fruit stall-holder and moral philosopher. Well, to cut the story short—bearing in mind that your reviewer and several million others followed the saga for many weeks—it turned out that Nick Cotton was far from a changed being. In fact, his reason for returning to his mother was to poison her so that he could get her money. The details of this tedious plot are not important. But the message should not escape us: the conservative belief that leopards never change their spots. Rogues are just like that—it's in their genes or something. Capitalist ideology is obsessed with the illusion of innate evil. EastEnders has served to fuel a sense of popular cynicism which sustains that ideology and helps to prop up those old myths about human nature

Old Myths and Ancient Bigots

Last month saw the unelected Lords' decision to prevent the prosecution of the old Nazis who had taken refuge in Britain, and also we witnessed the sick activities of newer Nazis who desecrated a Jewish cemetery in North London, leaving swastikas behind as a mark of offence. Two TV programmes made it clear that such mindless racism is still alive and . . . kicking is the appropriate verb, it would seem.

In Russia the Jew-hating racists of Pamyat are spewing out their poison in the new atmosphere of glasnost. World in Action (ITV, 4 June. 8.30pm) showed how Jewish workers in Leningrad were being indiscriminately attacked by these fascists. One boy in a Leningrad school was kicked down a flight of stone stairs by a PE teacher who had told him that he did not like Jews; a Jewish woman interviewed explained how her flat was broken into by Pamyat racists who killed her husband in the course of the vicious attack. Dmitri Vasiliev, a personification of poisonous ignorance who leads Pamyat, blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik revolution; "They may denounce Communism today, but they gave it to us as a present. Because Marx is a Jew and, I might add, they crucified Christ". So, after over seventy years of state-capitalist rule in the name of socialism the state has not even succeeded in wiping out the cancer of racism inside Russia. On the contrary, the utter failure of the Bolshevik experiment has led workers to seek scapegoats in order to take out their anger at the wretchedness of their impoverished lives.

But why make Jews the scapegoat? Shadow On The Cross (C4. 6 June, 9pm) was a very informative documentary about the historical role of Christianity as a machine for propagating anti-semitic racism. The programme quoted from the bigoted writings of the Christian saints (St Gregory: "The Jews are murderers of the Lord, rebels and detesters of God companions of the devil, darkeners of the mind . . . enemies of all that is beautiful" ) and showed how most of the anti-Jewish actions of the Nazis had been predated by papal edicts. For example, in medieval Europe, Jews were forced to live in ghettoes and wear yellow circles as marks of inferior identification. Luther, the father of protestantism. was quoted as asking: "What shall we do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? First, to set fire to their synagogues and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man need ever again see a stone or a cinder of them. This is to be done in honour of our Lord and of Christendom. so that God might see that we are Christians".

Is it any wonder, the programme asked, that when the leading Nazi anti-semite, Streicher, was on trial at Nuremburg he pleaded that he was only obeying the teachings of Luther? It is a decadent and outmoded social system which concocts such poisons for workers to swallow.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The food problem (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The food problem

The lunatics are most definitely running the asylum. This Week, Next Week (BBC1. 6 April) devoted one hour to a studio discussion about the problem of food surpluses. You see, there is too much food in Europe — 14 million tons of EEC grain is currently locked away in store and by 1990 the grain surplus is predicted to reach 90 million tons Minister of Agricultural Lunacy, John Selwyn Gummer, stated that "Now we're producing too much . . .  it's damaging the rest of the world, especially the poorest people" Funny that: I thought that "the poorest" people were dying in their millions for lack of food. Grain production has increased from two to four tons an acre in a very short time, moaned NFU spokesman David Naish. and this is causing major problems. Indeed, it seems that the British government is now storing beef in secret warehouses in London — Gummer admitted that this was the case but not one of the experts presented proposed that this beef and grain and all this other "surplus" food should be available immediately for free access. Had someone made such a suggestion — the idea of forgetting about money and profits and the nonsense of the market and producing food solely to eat — they would no doubt have been dismissed as a utopian crank. So the lunatics proceeded to think of ways to solve the problem of food over-production and the starving continued to starve and we have no doubt that Selwyn Gummer and the company had a pleasant Sunday lunch when they left the studio.

Make ’em work

This was the title of a Panorama programme (BBC 1. 7 April) about new policies in certain states of the USA to make it compulsory to work for the state before any welfare payments are granted. In Oklahoma it is compulsory for single women to seek work, even if they have given birth within the previous two months. No work, no payment — no payment, no money to spend — no money to spend, no food for them or their children. It's known as Workfare — a better term is wage slavery In West Virginia unemployed miners are forced to sweep the streets or help the police force as uniformed agents of coercion if they want to receive benefits. So much for the "land of the free" In California unemployed wage slaves are forced to go on courses designed to "make them want to work for wages". In the room where this course is being run is a large sign saying "THINK EMPLOYER". What can be better for capitalism than to educate the working class to be desperate for wage slavery to take whatever jobs are on offer — to look at themselves at all times from the angle of how exploitable they can be? In Britain young workers are already pushed on to YTS schemes where they are ripped off because of their economically insecure and unprotected position. How long might it be before "Workfare" is tried on the unemployed of Britain? Watching this programme showed just how unfree and vulnerable to economic coercion the wage-slave class is.

An orange fool

World In Action (ITV, 7 April) offered an introduction to a political leader who is arguably crazier than Ian Paisley. Peter Robinson, an MP who has close links with the para-military UDA, was shown to be a calculating, bigoted nationalist who is quite happy to let workers stone and kill one another for the sake of obsolete national aims. Robinson was asked why he attacked the IRA for its murders when he failed to criticise the recent violent rampages of the Loyalist thugs. We can answer the question: under capitalism a leader needs to be a committed hypocrite who will justify the indefensible when it is being carried out by his followers for the sake of his political interest. Anti-working-class leaders like Peter Robinson would not know a genuine political principle if it smacked them in the face Unfortunately for the workers of Ireland, it is they who are receiving the body blows and not well-protected, well-salaried stirrers of sectarian hatred like Robinson.

Update

Readers who followed our reference to the C4 Diverse Reports programme which was given over to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers" Party will be interested to learn that Channel Four have felt unable to deal with our complaint of being excluded and have passed our message to the IBA. We await their considered response.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The Yawn of Capitalist History (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Yawn of Capitalist History

"Politics" is boring. This might seem odd coming from a socialist, but the more TV presents what it calls "politics" the more this reviewer yawns. On Sundays we are treated to two consecutive hours of heavy political discussion: Weekend World (midday. ITV) and This Week, Next Week (1pm. BBC1). In these programmes the supposed "matters of the moment" are analysed, discussed and debated in a manner which leaves viewers who want to be informed believing that they are watching history in the making. Not so: they are in fact watching two hours of sterile political drivel of no importance whatsoever for the working class who constitute the overwhelming majority of society.

Take the programmes of Sunday, 30 November as an example. On Weekend World the Big Issue was Reagan's credibility as a leader after being caught flogging arms to terrorists. The forgettable, dull presenter rambled for a while about international consequences and whether this affair "could reach Watergate proportions" — whatever they are. Fleet Street hacks were called in and twenty-second bits of edited wisdom were shown: "This is the biggest political crisis of Reagan's Presidency" declared one of them. Who the hell cares whether it is the biggest or the smallest; what is it that the President is supposed to be credible at doing anyway? Six American political commentators participated in a studio discussion: "What do you have to say about what Mr Himmelfarb says?" asks the boring presenter. "He has a point, but I don’t go along with him all the way. I think big heads in the State Department will have to roll''. Let them roll. I thought to myself: let them rock, let them roll, let them do the hokey-cokey as far as I’m concerned. Are workers really supposed to care about how the bosses manage their deceit and allocate the seats on the Boards of National Governments?

Then on to This Week, Next Week which was all about Europe and NATO. A Tory Minister called Stanley — perhaps a cousin of Sid the Gas — was all in favour of more bombs — the only way to-preserve peace, don’t you know. Denzil Davies, the Labour man, said that Britain needs more bombs and the Tories were underspending on defence. (But not nuclear bombs, because they hurt people.) The Liberal speaking from a screen because he was in Bristol could not be heard at first, and then he could be heard but not understood. I think that he was saying something about a moderate approach to blowing up cities. A couple of Americans — again, on screens — said that more bombs are needed in Europe, and just to balance the programme there was a Minister who looked like he was sitting on an uncomfortable chair — on a screen from Hamburg — who favoured more bombs in Europe. None of them disagreed for a moment that war is on the agenda; none of them disagreed that more bombs, of one sort or another, were the way to achieve peace. This was "politics". Workers were invited to take sides. At 2pm it ended and the East Enders omnibus came on: Michelle had married Lofty. Into the land of make-believe we go; but where had we been for the previous two hours?

Boys in Black and Blue

Did you know that British police use unfed dogs to terrorise unconvicted prisoners? Or that they point guns through prison cell doors at men from whom they want confessions? Or that they beat up grown men until they scream? World In Action (8.30pm. ITV. 1 December 1986) presented a clear report on how the men convicted of the Birmingham pub bombing in 1974 were the victims of police brutality which would have been expected in Nazi Germany or modern South Africa. What was unusual about the programme and therefore worthy of note — was that the evidence given of these acts being committed by the police was offered by an ex-policeman, Tom Clark, who was on duty at the police station on the night that the men who are now serving life sentences for the bombing were allegedly forced to confess to a crime they did not commit.

In fact, this latest programme is one of a series which has demonstrated very forcefully the degree to which the state appears to have framed innocent workers in the early 1970s for IRA bombings which they had no part in. This shows three things: firstly, that the power of the state to arrest and imprison workers is always going to be open to abuse as long as there is a need to get someone behind bars as revenge for the crime; secondly. it shows how campaigns of indiscriminate violence against workers, such as those which the IRA and 1NLA have pursued, create a situation in which it is easy for the police to persecute workers who take no part in violent activity; thirdly, it demonstrates that the undemocratic, anti-working-class methods of dishing out "punishment" for which the IRA is notorious are amateur in comparison with the dirty tricks and covert brutality of the official state terrorists: the police. It is just possible that as a result of exposing the alleged framing of the men convicted for the Birmingham bombing a few innocent men will be released from prison. But how many will remain there and how secure does their remaining there make you feel?

Enlightenment and Dogma

The age which historians have come to call the "Enlightenment" — the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — was marked above all by the abandonment of hitherto sacred dogmas. Religion came to be questioned and science permeated social thought with an obsessive determination to arrive at truths. In fact, as Engels was to demonstrate so well in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (a classic which has yet to be serialised on BBC2). the enlightened truths were only partial truths and that which was obscured was what was ideologically unpalatable to the capitalist class who appropriated science for their own ends.

Channel Four ran a four-week series, funded by a right-wing American foundation, called The New Enlightenment (8.30pm. C4. November/December 1986) with the purpose of expounding the "new" ideas of the so-called libertarian economists — the apostles of the illusory free market. But this was no account of enlightenment, even of a partial kind. This was dogma. The newly-enlightened followers of Hayek and his kind seek to perpetrate the myth that, left to itself without state interference, capitalism can adjust to meet the needs of the majority. Of course, there will still be deprivation and inequality and insecurity caused by wars and a lot else, but at least it will be "practical".

Socialism is rejected by the newly-enlightened dogmatists. But it was abundantly clear from the programmes that these defenders of capitalism are clueless — not enlightened — as to the meaning of socialism. Not once did these dogmatists use the term socialism without in fact describing state capitalism. One of the first principles of science concerns definition, but it clearly did not occur to Professor Minogue (presenter of the programmes) that in attacking the deficiencies of what he called socialism, he was in fact attacking a system of wages, profits, money, nations — capitalism. In saying that socialism offers no alternative these pro-capitalists are trying a victim who is not even allowed to appear in the dock and, worse still, is represented in the dock by a witness guilty of the same offence as the prosecutor.

The whole concept of "balance" is spurious and there is no reason why one-sided programmes should not be shown. Our objection is to one-sided programmes which distort that which they purport to be opposing. When socialists are given our chance to put out a four-part series on the case against capitalism and for socialism — and we will be a long time waiting for an invitation from the TV controllers — we shall make sure that we address the best arguments for capitalism, that we deal with the profit system as it is and not as we might wish to make it appear. Socialism does not exist, but as a theory it stands as a mighty threat to the dogmatic ideology of capitalism, a threat reflected in the fact that our opponents, when given a mass audience before which to discredit socialism, are forced onto the ground of distortion and linguistic trickery.

Steve Coleman

Fighting a Losing Battle (1995)

TV Review from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been a long, hot summer and the TV companies have been fighting a losing battle with the weather as ratings tumble in inverse proportion to soaring temperatures. Repeats of Fawlty Towers and the Likely Lads had been about the best on offer—twenty-and thirty-year-old evergreen repeats. However, the odd interesting snippet emerges from the programming still, and this was certainly the case with World In Action on 7 August.

World In Action asked whether Britain's love affair with the motor car is now over. Anti-car protesters have taken to the streets, motorway protesters have held up new road-building schemes and the government itself has asked car users to use other forms of transport during the stifling heat in order to minimise pollution. As World In Action pointed out. it is this latter phenomenon which is in many ways the most interesting. It was, after all, Mrs Thatcher who said in 1979 “nothing should be allowed to come in the way of the great car economy”. The problem for the government—and any future government for that matter—is that a number of contingencies have appeared to get in the way of the “great car economy".

World In Action interviewed doctors who testified that asthma among children increases in incidence near main roads, as do cases of chronic bronchitis and emphysema. In some streets, over a third of children need to use inhalers, objects which were rarely seen in schools thirty years ago but which are now standard equipment for tens of thousands of children all over Britain, especially those in the cities.

Slow coaches
As well as pollution there is the rising problem of traffic congestion and its associated difficulties. Forget the adverts for the top-performance speedsters—in London the average car speed is now down to 12 miles per hour and still falling. In comparison to some cities though this is quite good—congestion in Cairo and Mexico City to name but two is much worse, as is the pollution.

Apart from appeals to people’s good natures, the government appears to be powerless. Cars could be banned from some city centres altogether, as has been mooted, but experiments in other countries shows that this only shifts the problem to the suburbs and inner city areas. Some cities have taken the draconian step of banning car drivers from using their cars on certain days, letting drivers A-K out on Tuesdays, Thursdays. Saturdays and alternate Sundays only. Not quite the victory for the great car economy that Thatcher had in mind.

But if the government are stuck for a viable solution, the protesters from Reclaim the Streets and other single-issue groups have no better answer. Their recent attempts at blocking streets and holding up traffic in Camden Town and Islington have certainly highlighted the problem (if it really needs highlighting anyway) but they have not improved matters. In fact, their direct-action street protests only served to make the congestion worse, transferring the problem to adjacent streets.

In many ways, it has to be said that the anti-car protesters rather miss the point. The problem is not simply with cars themselves (though trust capitalism to have invented and promoted what is a somewhat anti-social form of transport) it is the way transport as a whole is influenced by the market economy. The twin problems are the internal combustion engine—a one-time technological leap but now fast becoming outdated, protected primarily by the oil and motor cartels—and the crazy “taking-coals-to-Newcastle" arrangement which capitalism has always promoted, with its duplication of resources, waste and burdensome on-costs. The market economy is loathe to tackle the first of these issues and incapable of tackling the second as it is integral to the system itself.

Of course, the government has tried hard to make capitalist transport work, mainly through building more and more new roads. But, as even the Department of Transport now realises, there is a limit to new road-building and it rarely if ever seems to eradicate the problem, with cars simply arriving to fill up the new tarmac laid down—viz. the M25 London orbital motorway. Whatever the government does the problem keeps on getting worse.

Let us be under no illusions— capitalism has created a gigantic transportation mess and a sane society is going to have to clear it up. It will not be an easy task, but it will only be through the abolition of the market economy that transport congestion and pollution can be really tackled in a system which puts people and not profits first. There are no lasting solutions within capitalism itself precisely because capitalism is a very large part of the problem—uncontrollable, wasteful and anti-social to its core in transport as in most other things.

Dave Perrin

Between the Lines: Currie and chips (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Currie and chips

Perhaps, on the basis that if the government will not last forever it might as well go by suicide, Margaret Thatcher gave a ministerial post to the unacceptable face of medievalism, Edwina Currie. No sooner was Currie installed behind her new desk than she was throwing out insults to the impoverished of the North about how their bad health conditions were all down to too much booze, too many fags and excessive amounts of fast-food. (Evidently nobody has told Currie that capitalists investing in those products are among the biggest donators of funds to the Tory party). World In Action (ITV Monday. 6 October. 8.30pm) set out to go for the Edwinian jugular, which in her case meant sticking a microphone in front of her and letting her show her extensive capacity for insensitive stupidity. Currie's final comment that (paraphrased) if workers spend their money on unhealthy food and drink it will be their own fault if they die early is just the sort of talk which puts the lie to the myth of "caring capitalism". But the programme's method of trying to demonstrate that workers in the North are more poor than the luckier ones in the South was misleading and can only create further confusion about how to rid society of poverty.

The evidence used was a comparison between some of the poorest areas of Newcastle and a poor district in South East London. It was shown that workers tend to die earlier in the first area and that this is due to an inescapable cycle of poverty which is especially prevalent in the North. Even if this is so (and there are numerous parts of the so-called prosperous South East which are ghettoes of extreme deprivation), what conclusion would it lead to? Put more money into health care in the North? Reformists may argue for this, but within capitalism this may simply create new, worse problems for areas from which the NHS funding will be taken.

Ironically, one of the reasons for particular problems in the NHS in London is precisely a result of a central government policy to divert London NHS funding to other areas. Like the documentaries which seek to demonstrate that the real poverty is in the Third World, this programme serves only to fragment the analysis of poverty and to miss the point that deprived workers in Africa or Newcastle or Surrey are impoverished because it is profitable to let them be. That point was never made to Edwina Currie, thus allowing her to skate around the real issues, albeit on ice so thin that one hoped she was wearing her thermal underwear.

Paradise postponed

This is not a literary column but it so happens that 1 have always regarded John Mortimer as a much over-rated playwright. His current epic series (BBC2. Saturdays. 9.30pm) called Paradise Postponed is one of those tedious scripts full of apparently witty comments which leave the viewer thinking, How come I don't go around all day making witty comments and receiving them from other people? The thesis of the drama (beware of dramas bearing theses) is that after 1945 everyone expected the new government and the welfare state to create something approaching paradise, but it all failed because there are not enough idealists around.

I do not know whether John Mortimer, who spent most of the period concerned operating in the lie-courts as a barrister, sees himself as one of the few idealists but it is evident that he is a Labourite who like so many others is now playing out his disappointment that it all ended up just as The Socialist Party always said it would end up. No, the welfare state and the other crumbs lobbed towards the proletarian voting fodder have not created paradise or anything like it. In this drama Mortimer calls on us to mourn with him over the passing of this dream: maybe he will get some agreement from the reformists who see nothing but defeatism and the postponement of any real social change as inevitable but socialists did not share in the illusion in the first place and will not share in any theatrical shedding of tears over the televised burial of Labour's sterile ideals

A puzzler for Mr Dimbleby

Your reviewer dutifully watched most of the conferences on TV and contemplated the joke which asks, how can you tell when politicians are telling lies? Answer: when their lips are moving. But I have a problem for David Dimbleby and his buddies at the BBC. Let us imagine for a moment that they began to take democracy seriously and decided to cover the conferences of all political parties, even the little parties who do not spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on such events.

So they are given the job of commentating on the conference of The Socialist Party. What would they do? Firstly, there are no socialist leaders. So there is no big speech from some pompous windbag designed to rally the faithful, no polls which can be taken to find out whether our leader is more or less, or as popular with over-85-year-old widowers than David Owen or Neil Kinnock. And with no leaders there can be no leadership splits. So all the Dimblebyesque interviews, so common with capitalist parties' conferences, about what wets think of dries and rights of lefts and cuddlies of hards (this is quite aside from Playschool, you understand?) would be redundant.

Secondly, our conferences are very democratic. So the TV merchants would not be able to hang around outside smoke-filled hotel rooms at midnight to find out whether the Milton Keynes delegation is going to give its block vote to the Dundee amendment about how big the print should be in The Socialist Standard. Thirdly, in The Socialist Party we have no secrets. Now, it is well known that journalists love snooping around looking for secrets to uncover. They poke around looking for copies of private letters between supposedly important correspondents.

In this party the only subject we would wish to discuss with the media are the principles and policy of The Socialist Party. The discussion of ideas — that will be a novelty act for Robin Day. We are not expecting the TV cameras at our next annual conference (the 83rd) and nor do we expect the capitalist media to conduct our propaganda for us. But when enough workers — the people who do not control the media — see the urgency of the socialist proposition we have no doubt that the experts in distortion will be losing no time in working out ways to spread disinformation about this party.

Steve Coleman

Clueless and Classless (1997)

TV Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

In examining the concept of class and whether John Major has succeeded in creating a classless Britain, ITV’s World In Action last month maintained its usual high standard of visual entertainment while simultaneously slipping badly in its standards of reporting. Like an insipid pint of beer there was plenty of froth but little body.

A number of celebs were paraded in front of the cameras to air their views on what they perceived the word "class” to mean. Style guru Peter York, footballer and PR merchant Max Clifford were among those who joined Tony Benn and Tory MP Steve Norris to declare an interest in the subject. This was the froth, but it was far more nourishing and tasty than anything that was to follow. While gung-ho. patriotic Tory-loving Vinnie Jones set out to convince anyone yet to make their mind up about him that he is indeed a total muttonhead. many of the others expressed views that bordered on the sensible—even Tony Benn.

Benn declared that the only meaningful conception of class is that which defines it in terms of how people get what they need to live, and that no political or economic problems will be solved unless the fundamental division in modern society between the owning class and the workers is addressed rather than avoided. This sound analysis was only spoilt by the fact that Benn is a man who has been a willing participant in anti-working class Labour governments which have attacked the living standards of the majority in the interests of capital, and who will be standing under Blair's banner at the next election—Blair himself being a politician who reiterates almost every time he speaks the importance of putting the "old class divisions” behind us to build a "united Britain”.

Quite amazingly. Peter York, a well-heeled ex-public schoolboy who has made a small fortune out of rather superficial social commentary about Sloane Rangers. Essex Man and the like, came out as a putative Marxist on the issue. While many could be forgiven for thinking that York would be one of the last-ditch defenders of the idea that class is all about etiquette, clothes, style, dialect and other fripperies, he instead rejected this view, stating that Marx's conception of what constitutes a social class is right after all! Only slightly less straightforward was the viewpoint of Max Clifford, who demonstrated that he, too, was not taken in by the camouflage draped over the issue by politicians and the newspapers.

Downhill all the way
But once this appetising froth was out of the way. the dregs were not far behind. The World In Action reporting team continually peppered their commentary with the assertion—never substantiated once—that the changing social structure of Britain was exemplified by the statistic that there are now as many "middle class" people as there are "working class". Though no evidence was given for it and no argumentation deployed to justify it either. this was presented time and again.

What constitutes "middle class"? They didn’t say. Why was the analysis of Tony Benn and Peter York dismissed in such a way? We weren't told. What seems likely is that this was either a deliberate attempt to confuse people or simply make the subject more “complicated" than it actually is, or alternatively simply slopping reporting.

Either way, it served as a springboard for a hopelessly irrelevant segment centred around the chairman of the MORI polling organisation. Bob Worcester, who took it as his cue to bombard anyone still watching with meaningless statistics about Essex Man and Worcester Woman, and how important the lie machines at Tory Central Office and Walworth Road consider them to be. While the commentary made the valid point that those at the bottom of the pile are being left out in the bigger political game, why give this type of analysis house space in the first instance? Its only real validity would be if the political ideologies of the main political parties were determined by what Worcester Woman thinks. But this is sheer fantasy, and is at least in part what the parties themselves would like their target voters to think about them, i.e. listening to the voters and shaping their policies accordingly. The reality is that the politics of the Labour and Tory parties is determined by their support for capitalism, and by the needs of requirements of the owning class at any given point in history. Essex Man and Worcester Woman can go and whistle if anything they do or think comes into conflict with that, and this journal for one is full of relevant examples.

This is why John Major’s hope of creating a classless society was just so much hot air. To create a really classless society would require the abolition of the political and economic power of the capitalist class. Neither Major nor Blair want this, only a removal of the perceived social barriers which make it more difficult to move from what is really the working class to the class of capital owners (they are presumably well aware that this is difficult enough without any additional impediments). Style, etiquette, dialect and background should not matter they say—only profits, markets and stocks and shares. Capitalists and workers would then truly be of one social class, only distinguishable by a few million pounds, as if such a triviality as that should matter among friends! And all this in the finer defence of a parasites' world of inaction where to be truly classless—Vinnie Jones— is to be totally clueless with it

Dave Perrin

Whose castle? (1985)

TV Review from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

World in Action, ITV, 11 February.

Mrs Thatcher's proud boast that she is turning the country into a "property owning democracy" is well known, but the question this programme asked was "owned by whom?" It looked at three families who have been forced to give up their homes by Court Order because they can no longer afford the mortgage payments. Fourthly, there was the man who had possession of his house only because he exists on £9 a week. His staple diet is dumplings, teabags are used twice and sometimes three times, and one gallon of paraffin is used in one heater which is carried from room to room. When his arrears are paid off he will be left with the princely sum of £16 a week for everyday needs, but he is determined to hold on so as not to lose the benefit of years of mortgage payments.

At the other end of the scale was the man used to a salary of £24,000 to £30,000 a year as a construction engineer. Made redundant in middle life, he set up his own small business but failed. The bailiffs evicted him and his family and he now lives with his mother, his wife and children staying with her parents. They are faced with a legal separation they do not want so that the wife might qualify for council accommodation. The young couple with two children who moved back into council property and lost two-and-a-half years' mortgage repayments when the building society repossessed their house were "lucky' compared with others in the programme. At least they are still together and have a roof over their heads. Not so in the last of the four case histories — the widow of a young man who committed suicide when they lost their house was still too upset to be interviewed. The common thread running through all cases was that, when the mortgage commitment was made, the people concerned were in full-time employment and the repayments were well within their capabilities. Since then they have either become unemployed or put on short hours due to the demands of the profit system.

We learnt that in some of the major cities one-third of council tenants — seduced by the rosy picture of home ownership — decided to buy their houses and are now seriously in arrears with payments. In the whole country during 1984, 30,000 were months in arrears, owing the building societies some £18 million, and 11,000 houses were repossessed. Building societies who, two-and-a-half years ago, were offering 100 per cent mortgages with few questions asked, now tell us that defaulting has not been so bad since the Depression of the 1930s.

Housing Minister Ian Gow was unperturbed because only about one per cent of those with mortgages were in trouble. (There are, of course, no figures for the many thousands in similar straits to the man existing on £9 a week.) "Everyone knows that when they decide to buy a house they're taking on responsibility", he said. What he omitted to mention was that security is an illusion under a system which puts profit before basic human needs, as those workers who formerly "owned" their homes now know.

Eva Goodman

Between the Lines: Next Fraud (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Next Fraud

Next Left (C4, 8 pm, Fridays) offered four programmes packed to the edge of the screen with undiluted nonsense. Purporting to be about the failure of socialism in years past and the need for socialists to adapt to the new age, the series offered the most facile account of current world politics and not even an attempt at explaining what socialism actually means. It seems to be the case that when documentary-makers produce films about socialism they feel quite free to accept the fallacy that anyone who calls himself a socialist is one. Neil Kinnock, Bryan Gould, François Mitterrand, Brandt, Rocard  . . . all of them advocates of state-run capitalism, and all of them called upon to discuss why the failure of their state-capitalist policies means that socialism has been tried and failed. The working class, we are told, is disappearing; the market is becoming more accountable to people's needs; planning has failed and "freedom" is the new buzz word. "Socialists" must adapt to these new conditions or become irrelevant. Instead of talking about social transformation socialists should be attending to more modest changes, we are informed, such as establishing workers' co-operatives and providing welfare services through the trade unions. The new "socialist" model is Sweden; "socialism" works there — even though Sweden is a capitalist country. No contradiction. No need to explain anything. The frauds who make these programmes are like the character in Alice in Wonderland who insists that words shall mean what they want them to mean. Channel Four's attempt to advise socialists to throw away our revolutionary principles and attend to making capitalism work was intellectually shallow, dishonest drivel.

Laughing all the way to the bank

Another bloody charity telethon. It is hard to switch on the telly these days without seeing either Kylie Minogue or a begging bowl. This time it was Comic Relief (BBC1, all evening, Friday, 10 March). No doubt there was plenty of sincerity there. So what? Since when has plenty of sincerity made the profit system run in our interest? This time we were treated to comedians making jokes to encourage workers to send in a few quid. In one night's nationwide collecting Comic Relief brought in about £10 million. About enough to buy a cheapish military fighter plane. The same night's Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30 pm) had a very brief report on the annual profit made by the clothing company, Viyella: £135 million — down on last year's figure. That's a year's profit for one medium-sized capitalist company. So, who is giving more to charity — the workers who collected ten million quid after a day of wearing silly plastic noses and bathing in custard for sponsorship, or the wage slaves at Viyella who donated all that profit to the capitalists in the biggest charity of all: The Wages System? The capitalist class are kept in the luxury to which they are accustomed because a majority of workers acquiesce to a system which puts the profits of the rich before the unmet needs of those crying out for help.

Free to beg

World In Action (ITV, 8 pm, Monday, 6 March) was a documentary depicting the miserable lives of kids who, having left home and come to London in search of work, find themselves in cardboard boxes on the Embankment by the River Thames. These youngsters — many of them under eighteen — are compelled to beg in order to live. Young girls are under great financial pressure to find a pimp and work for him. The programmes showed that the young beggars of London are a fast-growing population, products of a system geared not to encouraging the creativity of people, but to making them exploitable workers. If they are too young to be put to work and too poor to find shelter, then they are ignored as if they did not exist. This is the living reality of the great revival of Victorian values: the sight of homeless kids forced to beg for the price of some food — and probably for drugs once the culture of street frustration has finished with them. And these well-paid TV tricksters on Channel Four tells us that the socialist revolution from production for profit to production for human need is no longer relevant.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Jewish Anarchists and the Wobblies (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

We lost; they won

It has been a miserable few weeks for "us". First "we" got torn apart by the Indians in the Test Match. Of course, "they" were using unfair tactics -  and "we" taught "them" how to play the game. Then "the Argies" get their own back in the World Cup. Maradona, using the Belgrano tactic (when "they" do it's called cheating to win) knocked the Falklands spirit out of Jimmy Hill. Then some unknown American (worse still, a negro) demolished "our" boy, McGuigan. And to finish it off "we" didn't stand a chance at Wimbledon. TV sports commentators — a unique tribe of know-nothing nationalists — are buried in the vocabulary of "us" and "them". World sport becomes a spectator version of world war, and viewers are treated to such phrases of nationalist nonsense as "Well Jimmy, it looks like the Brazilians are up to their old Latin tricks" and "Look at those Moroccans — they must be proud to be playing against a team like England". (Morocco beat England.) And as the World Cup final was played between England's two old enemies, "the Jerries" and "the Argies", wasn't it a pleasure to watch Jimmy Hill sitting there trying to find a way to hate each more than the other?

How to succeed in nastiness

It is not often that this column has reason to mention Terry Wogan. Perhaps that is because we endeavour to deal with the TV output which our readers are likely to bother with. But much as one tries to avoid him, it is difficult to watch BBC TV for very long without being caught. Wogan (BBC1, 2 July, 7.00pm) had as his guest a fifteen year old boy who had started his own business, employed other people and was raking in a five-figure income. He boasted about being driven to school in a chauffeur-driven car and eating in the best of restaurants. How did he achieve this? By employing others to work hard to make him profit. We were not told where he got his initial capital from and no doubt viewers were supposed to conclude that here was a model of how they too could get rich. In fact, the kid was a rather nasty bit of work, boasting about how he ensured that his employees did not "misbehave" and explaining how examination knowledge was of no interest to him. Quite true: you don't need to have many ideas to get rich, just plenty of wage slaves willing to carry you on their backs. Capitalism loves the successful entrepreneur (remember Freddie Laker?) and the mass media offers every impoverished wage slave the promise of reaching such frank prosperity. We look forward to seeing Wogan interviewing a few of the countless victims of the dole queue to see if they have as much to laugh about.

The Jewish anarchists

It makes a refreshing change to find a TV programme dealing with radical ideas in a serious and sympathetic manner. The Free Voice of Labour: The Jewish Anarchists (Channel 4, June 26), was the fourth programme in an excellent series on American labour. The film, using interviews, snippets of rare films, newsreels, stills and song, told the story of the Yiddish anarchist paper, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, established on 4 July 1896. Although the aim of the paper was to spread ideas about a society without government, coercion and wars, it also provided a medium for Yiddish culture, theatre, poetry and literature.

The historian Paul Avrich, author of several books on anarchism, explained how Jewish immigrants escaping from Eastern Europe were disappointed with life in capitalist America. The so-called land of liberty, promise and opportunity, was brutal and oppressive. The conditions of labour in the sweatshops and factories of Boston and New York were miserable, the wages low. Some of these experiences are reflected in the folksong, Mayn Rue Plats, (My Place of Rest).

Don't look for me where the myrtles grow
You won't find me there, my love.
Where lives wither at machines, that is my resting place
Don't look for me where birds sing.
You won't find me there, my love.
I am a slave, and where my chains ring,
That is my resting place.

The Jewish immigrants worked mainly in the needle trades and it was here that anarchists and radicals became involved in the struggle, often violent, to establish trade unions and the eight hour day. This story is captured in the Yiddish feature film, Uncle Moses (1932) and in the folksong, Makhnes Geyen (Masses Marching):

How long, oh how long
Will you remain enslaved
Bearing the shameful shackles?
How long can you create magnificent riches
For him who robs you of your bread?
How long will you stand stopped back,
Down trodden, homeless, in pain?
It's dawn, already! Wake up!
Open your eyes!
Recognise your strength of steel!

The Jewish anarchist movement was at its height between 1880 and 1920, and during this short period of time it helped to influence the development of the American labour movement. In the 1920s and 1930s anarchist ideas were kept alive by Italian and Spanish immigrants. Several reasons were given for the decline of the Jewish anarchists. Firstly, the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia by the Bolsheviks, who used slogans such as "All Power to the Soviets", attracted many young and active anarchists, who formed the backbone of the American Communist Party. Secondly, America's entry into the First World War led to an increase in patriotic fervour and a crackdown on all "subversive organisations". Anarchists and Wobblies were attacked for making anti-war speeches. The Palmer raids led to persecution and imprisonment for radicals. Under the Espionage Act, anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported. Finally, Jewish anarchism can be seen as partly a response to the experience of being an immigrant in a strange and hostile country. Future generations were rapidly assimilated into mainstream American life. With the decline of Yiddish language and culture went the decline of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. It ceased publication on the 25 November 1977, with a circulation of 1,700.

Many of the ideas discussed in this fascinating programme have been consistently advocated by the Socialist Party - the abolition of the state, opposition to all capitalist wars, and rejection of the state-capitalist system found in Russia and other so-called socialist societies.

Having watched this programme and sung along with Hey, Hey, Daloy Polltsey (Down with the Police), I somehow couldn't face the next programme, Their Lordship House.


The Wobblies

On July 3, C4 continued their series about American labour history with a programme on the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. It described their attempts before and during the First World War to organise unskilled and immigrant workers into the one big union. These workers were in a weak position, working long hours for low pay and often their periods of exploitation were irregular. The Wobblies had some success in recruiting them, much to the consternation of the bosses and their newspapers, who described the union men as thugs, vagabonds, workshy and other such names popular among defenders of the parasite class.

The programme had some old Wobblies recalling several successful strikes, where the solidarity of the workers paid off despite the violence and intimidation of the bosses, their police and courts. The determination and intelligence of these people was a conclusive answer to those who doubt workers' ability to organise for themselves.

The Industrial Workers of the World were beaten when America joined the war and the bosses made sure there would be no interruption to the military defence of their markets and strategic interests. This came about at a time when the Wobblies were split over the Russian revolution, which many wrongly saw as the workers taking over the factories for themselves. One weakness of having leaders and followers was shown when the leaders of the Wobblies were jailed on trumped-up charges or fled the country to Russia. If there are no ringleaders then it is difficult to pick them out.

The actions of the state in breaking up the Wobblies show the inadequacy of organising in one big union. You ignore the state at your peril. A separate political organisation aiming at democratically seizing state power is needed; union organisation is necessary, but is never enough.

Many of the Wobblies as migrant workers were deported for their "anti-American" activities, and a poignant scene showed them being shipped out past the Statue of Liberty. Coincidentally, the next day most news programmes had an item on the restoration of the statue, and its lighting up on Independence Day. This is a time when Americans are supposed to celebrate the anniversary of a change in their exploiters, from foreign to homegrown ones.

Ronald Reagan was at the ceremony, of course, where he made his usual speech about freedom, liberty and the US being a shining city on a hill, showing the way for all freedom-loving people. Reagan uses the words freedom and liberty a lot. The previous night's programme showed that in America, as elsewhere, it is the freedom for the bosses to exploit the workers, and the liberty of the workers to be wage-slaves, to starve or to get beaten up for resisting.


The Wirecutters

World in Action (ITV, 7 July, 8.30) showed a documentary entitled The Wirecutters. It was about the 2,000 odd reformists whose contribution to preventing a Third World War is to cut the wire fencing around US military bases — a pathetically futile waste of time, although one could not doubt their sincerity. No doubt either about the sincerity of Lady Olga Maitland when she says that we need bombs to preserve peace, but sincerity is insufficient. The reaction of most workers to reformists like the Wirecutters is to say that they will get nowhere. Then when they encounter socialists talking about how the means are at hand to really end all war they dismiss us with the same cynicism. The message of this documentary is that reformists not only fail to eradicate the problems they claim to be solving — they make it harder for those of us who are advocating the real solution.


Peacock

First came the leak and then the publication and then the interpretation of the Peacock Report on whether the BBC should be nationalised, privatised, commercialised or simply left to carry on telling lies in the same old way. The Socialist Party's verdict on the report? Yawn! Snore! Throw Terry Wogan to the lions!

Steve Coleman