Festival of thieves (1982)

From the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Approaching from a distance it seemed as if it could have been a meeting of the Youth section of the Bulgarian Communist Party: flags attached to poles were held high by blank-faced patriots who clapped occasionally with all the passion of a fly drowning in a glass of water; on the makeshift platform stood grey-suited, makeshift leaders whose faces seemed to blend in to the empty slogans which were written on the solitary blue banner; the hum of conformity was in the air and, approaching, it became clear that the three hundred or so people assembled in Hyde Park stood beneath a banner which announced that this was a “RALLY FOR FREEDOM”.

Freedom, eh? Certainly not the Bulgarian CP, then. On closer inspection they might have been a regiment of newly-recruited Boy Scouts — or perhaps a crowd of extras waiting around for a re-make of Mary Poppins. But then came that all too familiar clapping sound — that sound which tells you that “Britain" or "Our Boys” or “Long Live Maggie" have been mentioned — the sound of non-verbal consent and complacency which is Nature’s little way of telling us that Conservatives are around. There is no mistaking the Tory clap; your reporter had stumbled upon a Young Conservatives’ rally — a rally for freedom, no less — freedom under capitalism. The Houdinis of British politics were about to perform live — well, almost.

The flags were upside-down Union Jacks and their holders were young Tories who had come to cheer their leaders who had come to tell them that there could be no sweeter freedom than that which capitalism offers. An exiled Hungarian general was brought on to frighten the crowd with horror stories about “Hungarian Communism”. “We must keep the flame of democracy burning” he said (by which he did not mean that we should burn down the House of Lords) and “the Communists must be opposed with all our might". The crowd applauded heartily, not realising that by “Communism” the general meant a society based on authoritarian government, impotent trade unions, intense militarism and national chauvinism (all of which are features of state capitalist Russia and all of which also happen to be Tory objectives) and that by “freedom” he meant the right of the rich and powerful 10 per cent to exploit the propertyless 90 per cent. The deception of rhetoric is well disguised by a long, hard Tory clap.

Next comedian to mount the podium was Rhodes Boyson, government minister for indoctrinating the wage slaves. Ex-headmaster Boyson spoke with all the arrogance of a village idiot who has become drunk on a pint of shandy, thus acquiring the confidence to open his mouth as if he knew what he was talking about. He referred to the Berlin Wall and the need for respect and said that meetings like this could certainly not take place in Red Square. He was right about the last point — in Moscow they are able to assemble even more deluded patriots in their cynical attempts to manipulate wage slaves in the name of “freedom". The crowd clapped Rhodes Boyson until they were exhausted (for some of them this was the most energy they’d expended in months) and fifteen seconds after his speech ended the next contestant to be Tory Twit of the Year ascended the platform.

The third man was concerned about “defence”, by which he meant attack, and felt that fifth columnists were at work in our schools, by which he meant that it was terrible that not all teachers are in favour of telling children that when they grow up they must go out and kill people. He said that “we need to get back to teaching the basic values of civilisation; we need to explain . . .” “Yes, the basic values of sending workers to kill each other in your commercial wars" interjected a bearded heckler in the front row. He was soon surrounded by three or four Tory stewards w ho wore Union Jack shirts and looked as if they had failed the intelligence test allowing them to join the National Front. No questions allowed at Young Conservatives meetings: so that’s what they mean by “freedom”..

The star speaker was John Biggs-Davison who announced that the theme of the rally could be summed up in one word which was . . . um . . . er (reaching for his prompt cards) “Ah yes, self-determination — that's what we stand for. The right of people to live as they choose to live." He failed to mention that this “right" would be denied to the vast majority of the population who produce the wealth of society. Capitalism offers workers no more than the right to live as we can afford lo live. The freedom to be impoverished — to be alienated from ownership and control over the world we live in — is no freedom at all.

In the subway leading to Hyde Park there used to be a couple of old con-men who obtained fivers from gullible Americans by performing the three-card trick. One day they were arrested and now they are conning tourists in a different area of London. But what of the Tory con-men for whom freedom means exploitation, liberty means inequality and peace means oppression? Trading on the political ignorance of the exploited class, these people have police protection while they perform the political three-card trick. But nothing will defend the advocates of capitalism against the genuine case for social freedom. Be they Tory. SDP or Labour, the misleaders of the working class will not succeed forever.

Steve Coleman

Germany Stages a Come-Back (1938)

From the October 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The crash in Wall Street put an end to the flow of money and credits across the Atlantic. German capitalism sang “Don’t let the river run dry.” Short-term loans in Germany were now called in, and there was a rush on the banks. The number of small businesses which went under is legion, and monopoly capitalism (giant trusts) alone could survive the deluge. Unemployment and bankruptcies went up by leaps and bounds. This condition, whilst tragic, served a useful purpose. It enabled the mighty German industries (built by American money) to shake off the foreign fetters, America being in a mess. In this way the gigantic plant and production, with new rails, roads, etc., passed into “Aryan” hands.

The era of monopoly capitalism needs a corresponding moulding of the workers. It needs a human conveyor belt, a producing class as automatic as a machine. How can this be done? Two ways! Eliminate those who think otherwise (always a comparative few) and bluff the unthinking (the vast majority). In Hitler and his gangsters they saw the very instrument, so, placing their money at Hitler’s disposal, they built up their (industrial capitalist) machine. The millions of workers, not understanding Socialism, fell for demagogy of the Nazis, who cunningly used the term “National Socialist.” This cannot happen if the workers know the meaning of Socialism.

Capitalism in Germany having consolidated itself inside, now has to move outside. Fascist or Kaiser, the same problem remains, the problem which no capitalism can evade, the problem inherent in the very marrow of its bones—how to find new markets and new sources of profitable exploitation. Confronting Germany is the same circle as in 1914. French and British capitalism are holding on to their spoils.

The simple rule, the golden plan.

Let him take who may, let him keep who can. 

Playing on the chord of race, Germany spent huge sums of money in subsidising subversive movements in neighbouring territories. This, however, is a two-edged sword. It was quite an easy task to murder and pillage an unarmed, defenceless half-a-million Jews inside Germany, but outside—that is another story. Hitler expresses German capitalism aptly in “Mein Kampf" (page 699), when he says: "The inexorable enemy of the German nation is and always will be France.” French capitalism bars the way to western expansion, and that means British capitalism must stand by France. It also, of necessity, links Holland, Belgium, etc. Baldwin settled that by “our frontiers are on the Rhine.”

Barred from the west by the might of Britain and France, Germany has either to break this circumstantial unity or go east. Italy’s Near Eastern adventure in Abyssinia roused British and French capitalism; both saw an unexpected menace to their dominance in that part of the world. Their anti-Italian attitude gave Germany its chance. Up to this period Italian Fascism ('knowing the breed) did not relish a brother Fascist as a neighbour, and was looked upon as a factor against the eastward trend of Germany. The new situation, however, created a new orientation. It brought Italy and Germany together as “victims” of French-British capitalism and wound up with the Berlin-Rome axis. In this fashion was split the unity of forces against Germany westward and the move eastward facilitated.

We must again quote Hitler in his “Mein Kampf”: “ We stop the eternal march to the south and west of Europe and turn our eyes towards the land in the east.” In addition to the east being the easiest way, it was the safest way. The States en route were small and could in no sense put up much of a fight on their own, with the exception of Russia, who, from a military standpoint, would be a tough customer to tackle, but this was the route and economic necessity a remorseless master. Germany took a chance, invaded and seized Austria—it came off. The first stage had been overcome, and appetites grow by what they feed upon; Austria will do to start off with, but it is the industrial part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire which matters, and that is now called—Czechoslovakia!

There, in twenty years, with French financial aid, has grown and developed a healthy, young and virile capitalism with a prosperous home-grown capitalist class, who mean to hang on to their right to exploit their workers. This they will do with the usual cries used by capitalism: national independence, or some such catchword. Once again German capitalism is challenging the capitalists of France and Britain. Can she do it? 

Lew.

Butchery in the Balkans (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, many in the West breathed a sigh of relief. Western democracy and the free market were seen to have triumphed and the Red Spectre that hunted Europe had been finally exorcised. Politicians and bureaucrats began speaking of a “New World Order" and of a “peace dividend" whereby money saved on military expenditure could be put to social use and channelled into health and education programmes.

Few anticipated that the end of the Cold War would open a new can of worms. From Prague to Vladivostok, republics and tiny enclaves became caught up in a tidal-wave of nationalist fervour. Overnight, even the most recently published atlases became out of date as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated.

Nowhere has nationalist upheaval been as intense as in the former "Socialist Federal Republic” of Yugoslavia. So enmeshed have become the politics here that a brief look at Yugoslavia’s history is in order.

Artificial creation

After the capitalist-instigated madness known as the first world war the Austro-Hungarian territories of Croatia. Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were joined with Serbia and Montenegro under the Serbian king Alexander, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded. Although a new constitution was proclaimed. rivalry between Serbs and Croats for political supremacy led Alexander to impose his own dictatorship in 1929, the year the republics were re-named Yugoslavia. This accentuated Croatian enmity to centralization and Serbian predominance.

Under the new Regent, Paul, Yugoslavia came increasingly under threat from the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, after 1933, and the hostility of the Soviet Union, which urged the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (formed in 1937) to work towards the fragmentation of the country. Germany took advantage of a popular uprising and invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, creating a puppet fascist state out of Croatia and territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the rest being parcelled between Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Resistance groups soon emerged to confront the Nazis—the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovic and Tito’s Communist Partisans. However, not only did many Croats support the Nazis, but many Chetniks collaborated against Tito’s partisans. By 1943, Tito had emerged as victor against Mihailovic and formed the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, which assumed power when the Nazis were finally driven out.

In November 1945, the provisional government abolished the monarchy and set up the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Six months later the country adopted a constitution based upon that of the Soviet Union in 1936, and later nationalized transport, industry and banking, and brought agriculture under collectivization.

In 1971, after stating his intention of liberalizing the government. Tito established a 22-man collective presidency which he hoped would manage affairs after his death. This "liberalization" had the effect of sparking Croatian nationalism, culminating in mass demonstrations and widespread rioting. In 1981, Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo protested against ill-treatment by the Serbian administration. This was followed by further unrest in 1988 when Serbia moved to end provincial autonomy there.

Yugoslavia thrived during the Cold War, chiefly because both blocs paid handsomely to maintain Yugoslav non-alignment. The Serbian political leadership advocated a centralized state and tough authoritarian rule. This brought it into direct conflict with Slovenia and Croatia, both of whom favoured greater autonomy, more so in the wake of the break-up of the Yugoslav League of Communists in spring 1990.

The Yugoslav federal machinery wasn’t made to take the strain of political pluralism. The federal government, led by free-marketeer Ante Markovic, was paralysed by wrangling among the republics. No procedure could be agreed for federal elections.

In April 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia held free elections in which the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Community Party and the Croatian Democratic Union swept to power on nationalistic, pro-independence cards. When these two republics declared independence they were invaded by the Yugoslav Army. The same thing happened when on 1 March this year Bosnia-Herzegovina too declared its independence. All three republics have since been granted recognition by the EEC and the USA.

The history and politics of Yugoslavia are indeed complicated, and while it is true that the end of the Cold War hastened the break-up of the republics, this alone does not explain the conflict that has raged there for over a year. Indeed, few commentators can agree on the cause of the crisis, or why some republics want autonomy while others wish to stay within the federation.

The Croatian president Franjo Tudjman echoed Thatcher's views when he asserted that Serbs and Croats “were not just different people but different civilisations’’, and that the conflict was one of "democracy against communism” (European, 18 August 1991). Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, claimed that the trouble was caused by the secessionist demands of other republics, adding that "all processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration” (Time International, 8 June).

Richard West, writing in the Guardian, sees the “difference between the Yugoslav people” as “one of religion” (17 September 1991), while Branka Magas (Marxism Today, November 1991) declared that “the war being waged against Croatia is . . . in reality little more than a war of territorial conquest”.

Few, if any, are putting forward a socialist analysis of the causes of the conflict and blaming the capitalist system for the crisis. It is true that nationalism is a factor, but it is only a banner used as a means to an end—profit.

Uneven development

The influence of the world market in recent years has accentuated economic disparity in the Yugoslav republics. Both Tudjman and Milan Kukan (respective leaders of Croatia and Slovenia) saw the economic advantages in independence, manipulating nationalist sentiments for financial ends.

The conflict was sparked by greed for profit. The north-west republics of Croatia and Slovenia, tired of subsidizing their southern neighbours chanelled economic indignation into a raw form of nationalism—the Croatian leadership digging up wartime fascist insignia—fearing that a more centralized Yugoslav federation would mean a greater redistribution of their wealth.

Croatia and Slovenia are by far the wealthiest of the republics. Heavy industry is concentrated in Croatia and production centred on iron ore is thriving in Slovenia. Croatia is Yugoslavia’s biggest producer of oil and in 1987 attracted 7.2 million tourists, boosting the economy by USS3 billion. Although Slovenia has only 7.8 percent of the population, it accounts for an estimated 25 percent of Yugoslavia’s GNP and 30 percent of exports.

Slovenia has for some time been the most wealthy and economically efficient of the Yugoslav republics. Average earnings are more than double those in Croatia and reputedly six times those of the southern province of Kosovo, where unemployment stands at 40 percent.

It is little wonder, then, that a centralized Yugoslav federation which pumped 55 percent of the federal budget into maintaining the armed forces, looked so unattractive to capitalists in the northern republics. And little wonder that Croatian and Slovenian capitalists object to shouldering the burden of subsidies—development aid, federal projects, natural disaster relief, etc—to the poorer south.

So the basic, economic cause of the conflict boils down to a clash of interests between those capitalists who wanted and those who opposed a redistribution of profits.

Just as Franjo Tudjman and Milan Kukan have sought to secure their republic’s economic futures, appealing to nationalistic sentiments, so too has Milosevic reawakened Serbian nationalism by rallying his people against the richer north-west with rash promises of raised standards of living and long-term economic security.

War in Bosnia

War is now raging in Bosnia-Herzegovina where 44 percent of the population are Muslims. The UN has imposed sanctions and a naval blockade on Serbia and there is talk of military intervention. Serbia, however, is nearly self-sufficient in food production and has stockpiled goods and fuel—although the latter could run short as Serbia produces only 20 percent of what she uses. So it is likely that Serbia will not be too badly affected by sanctions.

The recalcitrant Milosevic sees sanctions as “the price Serbians have to pay for supporting Serbs outside Serbia” (Independent, 1 June), but neglects to tell the workers who do his fighting that war is the price they must pay for the right to be exploited by Serbian capitalists. And Tudjman never tells Croats fighting for Croatian enclaves that they are really fighting to make bigger profits for their masters under German economic rule.

It is a great sadness that so many have died in what was Yugoslavia from the virus of nationalism, injected into them by leaders suffering from the disease of capitalism.

Enlightened workers will be aware that the only remedy for the present world malaise is socialism. Workers in reality have no nation, but hoodwinked by their leaders they seek sanctuary inside artificially-constructed borders. Workers bind themselves with the chains of regional and national identity, giving their masters the keys. They forget that there is only one country—planet Earth—on which all wealth and the means of living in comfort and security is produced by themselves. Workers must unite and break these chains. The world is theirs for the taking.

John Bissett

What’s the deal with Greenland? (2025)

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Six months ago nobody would have imagined Greenland making headlines. Almost the only things most people know about the place is that it’s not as big as it looks on maps, and it is covered in ice that’s melting due to global warming.

Then came US Vice-President Vance’s unwelcome and controversial visit to the island in late March. The ensuing furore fortuitously diverted media attention from ‘Signalgate’, the disastrous security blunder which made Trump’s senior appointees look like fools. Democrats furiously demanded the resignation of Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, who inadvertently included a journalist in top-secret discussions about bombing the Houthis in Yemen, and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, who blithely joined in the chat from his – possibly monitored – hotel room in Moscow. Russia, be it noted, is friends with Iran, who are friends with the Houthis. Republicans too must have been quietly alarmed at such blithering incompetence on the part of people put in charge of US national security. Trump’s self-estimation as a genius clearly depends on him surrounding himself with loud-mouthed buffoons. His protégés duly followed Trump protocol – lie, deny, and go on the offensive – but he probably realised that he ought to sack them and hand the Democrats a big win, because covering for them would undermine his own credibility. But as we later saw with his astounding tariffs and subsequent craven roll-back, he believes his credibility is indestructible.

A handy diversion

In the event, Vance’s impromptu and perhaps calculated excursion to the Pituffik airbase in Greenland provided a useful distraction from the Signalgate fiasco. Vance publicly hectored Denmark for its supposedly poor stewardship of the island, reinforcing Trump’s claim that a US takeover was not just desirable but inevitable. Not surprisingly the Danes were politely enraged, saying ‘this is not how you talk to your allies’ and calling the move Trump’s ‘Crimea script’. Even Pituffik’s own commander tried to distance herself from Vance’s remarks, promptly earning herself the sack. The Greenlanders were also not best pleased. In polls, 80 percent of them want independence from Denmark, but 85 percent of them do not want to be annexed by the USA. What they do want, one can only imagine, is some sort of unworldly solution in which they no longer have to scrape by on Danish subsidies yet somehow manage to prosper as a lone island state the size of western Europe, with no industry or infrastructure, or even roads, and a population only one third the size of the Isle of Wight’s.

There is zero chance of that happening, because Greenland is just too important to major powers. Trump has been wanting Greenland since his first Presidency in 2016, and the US, for various reasons, has been wanting it since 1867. That was the year the US bought Alaska off the Russians for $7m. The US Secretary of State William H Seward, who oversaw the Alaska purchase, was also keen on buying Greenland and Iceland at the same time, in order to wedge Canada in on three sides and force it eventually to become part of the US. Trump may well be aware of this Seward plan, which would add context to his comments about annexing Canada. In 1868 Seward began negotiations with Denmark to buy Greenland. But Congress failed to ratify his similar plan to purchase the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), and the Greenland plan was dropped.

Following a wartime occupation from 1941 to 1945 to stop a German invasion of Greenland, in 1946 the US secretly offered to buy it. Denmark refused, but did allow the US to build air bases there, as both countries were in the process of founding NATO. US interest in Greenland was now mainly military, as the island sits in the middle of the shortest missile flight path to Russia. It’s also part of a crucial choke point in the North Atlantic called the GIUK Gap, between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. Were Russia inclined to attack the US east coast using its Northern Fleet, based at Murmansk on the Barents Sea, its forces would have to pass through the gap. At the same time, a good reason not to press the Danes too heavily on the issue would have been that Denmark sits across the mouth of the Baltic Sea, meaning it could potentially bottle up the Russian Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad.

Cold war refreezes

US interest cooled somewhat after the Berlin Wall fell and relations with Russia temporarily became less frosty. But now Russia has remilitarised all its old Soviet naval bases in the Arctic, heavily outnumbering equivalent NATO bases, with increasing Russian submarine patrols around the GIUK Gap. The global internet has also intensified concerns over this gap, as critically important undersea data cables pass right through it, or just south of it, making them vulnerable to submarine sabotage. This could potentially blind the USA and cripple its ability to respond in the event of any future Russian incursion into, say, the Baltic States or Finland.

In addition, the US needs ground stations for its military satellites, including in the Arctic Circle. Two of these are in Alaska and Svalbard, but the main base is Pituffik, scene of Vance’s recent outburst against Denmark. And the US very likely wants many more such bases on the island. As things stand, Greenland is terra incognita, a ‘security black hole‘ that’s impossible for Denmark’s meagre forces – mostly one aeroplane and some dogsled teams – to effectively monitor.

Not just wargames

There are also pressing non-military considerations. As the Arctic melts and the sea lanes open up permanently, Greenland could come to dominate global shipping, due to the fact that the two trans-Arctic routes, the Canada-hugging Northwest Passage (NWP) and Russia-adjacent Northern Sea Route (NSR) have the potential to cut 4,000 km off the Panama route and make the Suez Canal largely redundant. Just as the US wants back control of the Panama Canal, it will also be keen to control this polar traffic. Annoyingly for the US, in 1985 Canada claimed sovereignty over the NWP, while the US insists it is an international waterway. That might be another reason why Trump wants to annex Canada.

Then there are the untapped resources. Greenland could be the key to breaking China’s near global monopoly on producing rare earth elements (REEs) and critical minerals, as the biggest deposits of these outside China are in, you guessed it, Greenland. It is thought to have the 6th largest deposit of uranium in the world, and to be very rich in lithium, REEs, graphite, iron, nickel and copper. There is also gold, along with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and a host of other quartzes and gemstones. It has 43 out of the 50 critical minerals needed for the US economy, in particular green tech and electric vehicles. Elon Musk and the other tech bros have declared an interest for this and other reasons, including the fact that the vast territory and freezing temperatures are ideal for server farms, of which an order of magnitude more may be required to enable the AI revolution. And then there are the estimated reserves of oil and gas, which put Greenland on a par with Nigeria and Kazakhstan, and superior to Qatar.

What’s in it for the Inuit?

Almost certainly nothing. The local population doesn’t have the people, money, skills or infrastructure to exploit any of this stuff themselves, so Greenland is a sitting duck for whichever major power acquires it, either through a business deal or by military action. What could very well happen if these resources are exploited in an unregulated way by a ruthless foreign power is that Greenlanders could suffer the notorious ‘resource curse’ of places like the Congo, with the country becoming a corrupt rentier state whose ruling elite siphon off the wealth and defend their position by becoming more repressive and authoritarian (youtu.be/x8j2uWw3WfU). Faced with this awful prospect, the idealistic islanders may realise that their best chance is to do some kind of mutual back-scratching deal with the US, while retaining a fig-leaf of independence.

Deals under the table

After the Vance visit, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told journalists that relations between the US and Greenland were nothing to do with Russia, and that he had no interest in the place. This blithe response strains credulity, given Russia and China’s keen interest in the NSR, and given that a US takeover of Greenland would be as much of a strategic threat to Russia as Ukraine being in NATO, if not more so. Missiles based in Greenland, especially hypersonics, could take out Moscow, St Petersburg and Murmansk before the Russians could even react. And that’s beside the fact that Russia is – since the Ukraine invasion – now hemmed in with the addition of two new NATO members, Finland and Sweden, as well as NATO Norway.

One possible explanation for Putin’s professed indifference is that Transactional Trump has offered a private deal in which Trump takes Greenland and Russia gets to keep its captured territory (and the largest European gas reserves outside Norway) in Ukraine.

Is a similar Trumpian quid-pro-quo over Taiwan possible, making for a three-way neo-colonial carve-up? On the face of it, no. Hegseth continues to sabre-rattle at China by reiterating US backing of Taiwan, and Vance is also waving his stick at China for wanting to expand operations in Greenland. But China has operations almost everywhere, and anyway rejects any comparison with Taiwan, arguing that Greenland is a sovereign foreign state whereas Taiwan is China’s intrinsic territory. Why would they do a deal over what they see as already theirs?

Even so, TSMC and other Taipei chipmakers are racing to set up shop in Texas, California and Arizona in an energetic US bid to make Taiwan less of an Achilles heel for western tech industries. Should this attempt succeed – and there are wage-rate, skill-set and supply-chain reasons why it might not – US support for Taiwan could evaporate.

Take the money and run?

It seems hard to believe that the US would actually invade Greenland by force. But given its tiny population of around 56,000, one intriguing possibility is that the US could wait until the expected declaration of independence from Denmark, and then offer to pay the entire Greenland population $1m each to buy the place. $56bn might sound like a lot but it’s approximately what the place is valued at in potential revenues, and it’s only 1/15th of the planned 2025 US military budget, or about 1/8th of the US annual debt-servicing bill. That way, Greenlanders could all be millionaires and retire to beach houses in Bali. But would they take the payout and emigrate, or opt to stay poor for the sake of patriotism? It’s hard to say. Nationalism is powerfully embedded in capitalism’s ideology, and objective logic often plays very little part.

Paddy Shannon

On the brink (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world has probably never held its breath so painfully hard as it did during the Cuba crisis. In some ways life went on as usual. Buses and trains ran, people went to work, played games, looked at television. A West End tobacco store announced that it had already imported its Havana cigars and that supplies would be undisturbed for Christmas. But it all happened under a cloud of unreality. Everyone knew that we stood on the edge of an overwhelming nightmare, perhaps the ultimate in capitalism’s upheavals. One newspaper published a cartoon in which a typist confided to her companion that she would scream if her boss, grinning, greeted them again in the morning with the observation that we were still here. Very funny. But a lot of people didn’t expect to be still here a few days after Kennedy’s broadcast and the point is that if the crisis had developed much further they might have be en proved right.

At the time, it seemed rather pointless to speculate upon the background of the affair. Now that the heat is somewhat off, we can take time to look around us.

Was it all a put-up job? Some of the missiles were carried quite openly on the decks of Soviet ships and their launching pads were put down in clearings with no attempt at camouflage. This seems to contradict Kennedy’s assertion that the missiles were sent clandestinely to Cuba. Because of this, and for other reasons, there was some speculation that the Russians were openly moving their rockets to Cuba so that they could use them to bargain with an alarmed American government.

Because (and who isn't relieved at this?) the two great powers of contemporary capitalism are still at the bargaining stage. The Russians might have wanted to use their Cuban bases to get the Americans out of Turkey and Iran. Or at least they might have been able to use them to force Washington to talk about the American bases and to discuss whether they should have them so near to Russia. This would have been a unique situation. Whoever heard of one capitalist power negotiating with its enemy over bases which are designed to attack them?

Another possibility which was bandied about was that the Russians were trying to persuade the Americans to accept the existence of an unfriendly Cuba. This would give the Soviet Union more than a toehold in the Caribbean. Kennedy has, of course, agreed that if the missiles and the nuclear bombers leave Cuba he will guarantee not to invade the island. This presumably means that he will leave it in the “imprisoned” condition which he ascribed to it in his broadcast. Or is that too risky a presumption? Capitalist politicians have broken promises before and there is no reason to think that they will not break them in the future.

Or was Cuba a blind? Was Kruschev trying to create a disturbance at one end of the world while the real dirty work was done at the other? Many eyes were turned to Berlin during the Cuban crisis and there was some fear that the Russians would at least make a definite hostile move there. If that had happened the propaganda machine of Western capitalism was ready. Kennedy mentioned in his broadcast that the Russians were not to interfere with the “brave people” of West Berlin.” How short a time ago was it that we were being encouraged to hope that the Russians would do just that, and with a vengeance ? Or does the world forget so easily the lies of yesterday, only remembering those of today?

All these speculations—and some of the others which were in the air at the time—must have a chance of being near the truth. It has been a feature of Russian tactics in the Cold War that they suddenly create a tremendous racket which convinces half the world that war has all but started. Each year, for example, Moscow seems determined to sign a treaty with East Germany and so provoke a really serious crisis over Berlin. Then just as suddenly they take the heat off and get everyone sighing with relief. But when the dust has cleared it can be perceived that the Russians have advanced their cause somewhat. Last year the Berlin Wall seemed a temporary irritant. Now it is permanent, well guarded. This could have been the tactic which Moscow were playing in Cuba.

Rocket bases

There might of course be a simpler explanation, one which does not rest on the assumption that capitalism's international dealings depend upon the suave, tricky diplomat who does his job as if he were a top-notch poker player. Perhaps the Cuban bases were a purely offensive move by the Russians, intended as a pistol pointing at America's heart. This would have put the Russians on something like an equal footing with the United States, whose overseas rocket bases are about as far from Moscow as Cuba is from Washington. The rockets in Cuba outflanked the elaborate and expensive early warning system which the Americans have built up. They reduced the time which a missile attack would give the American people to wind up their affairs, patch up their quarrels and kiss each other goodbye to the more hurried three or four minutes which we would have in England.

In at least two ways this was an ironical situation. Capitalist nations, whose experts assure us that they know what they are doing, have always spent a lot of effort in building a static defence system for use in wartime. In the days of more leisurely, more personal wars they built systems like the Hindenburg and Maginot Lines and the heavy fortifications at Singapore. Very often, these defences have been useless because the enemy has simply come in the other way—which is what the Russian missiles would have been able to do from Cuba. Which shows, once again, how fallible are the people whose reputation rests upon their being infallible.

There is irony, too, in the American refusal to accept parity with the Russians in missile and nuclear resources. Both sides in the Cold War argue that such things are necessary as a deterrent. But the most effective deterrent is surely one which is equally available to both sides, so that they can frighten each other equally. We need not point out—but we will—that neither America nor Russia ever takes the deterrent theory to these lengths. They are both too busy fighting out the race for bigger and more terrifying weapons. The fact is that the deterrent theory, just like the rest of capitalism's war propaganda, is a lie. Capitalist powers like the USA and the Soviet Union do not develop weapons to keep the peace. They make them so that they can wage war more effectively—more destructively—than their rivals.

If Kruschev was in fact trying to outflank the American defensive system, he has obviously failed. For him, personally, this could be a serious matter. There is ample evidence that the Russian government are deeply divided over the method of sparring out the Cold War and that Kruschev has had some narrow squeaks in these internal disputes. A diplomatic defeat in Cuba might mean the end of him—literally the end, because nobody can be sure that in Russia political defeat does not still mean execution.

These speculations are interesting, but that is as far as they can go. Only a very few people in the world know what was behind the Cuban affair. The international disputes which capitalism is always putting us on edge with do not lend themselves to open and honest dealing. Secrets must be kept and each side must try to hide its intentions from the other. Only now are we learning something of the truth about events which died fifty years ago. Only now are we beginning to learn some of the detail of what was behind the First World War. The 1939 war is still shrouded in official secrecy, although sometimes drops of horrible truth trickle out. Not for a long time will the facts on Cuba come out into the open. Not for a long time will the world know fully of the lies and double dealing, the threats and the power and the fearful, insane risks that were taken.

Secrets

Because in these disputes ordinary people do not seem to count. They are only the people who run capitalism, who keep the system working and who design, make, transport and finally fire off the missiles which all the fuss was about. They are only the people who are essential to the war effort which rounds off the fuss. For who was it who Kennedy and Kruschev called upon at the height of the crisis? Who did they mobilise into their armed forces? Who did they try to persuade, with their propaganda? The ordinary people. The working class.

The working class do not share in the secrets which pass between their leaders. Kennedy refused to publish the vital part of the correspondence between himself and Kruschev—the part which possibly explains the whole thing—for the reason that it was a letter which was addressed to him personally. But that is too transparently fatuous to need further comment. The working class are not asked for their opinion in these matters. Krushchev did not ask the Russian working class whether he should risk all their lives by sending missiles to Cuba and Kennedy did not consult the American workers about starting a war over those missiles. Neither, for that matter, did Macmillan ask English workers whether they agreed that they were behind America—to the death, if need be.

Conditioning

The working class are not asked—and do not expect to be asked—about these matters. They only expect to work, to fight and if necessary to die for capitalism. And, of course, to vote for it as well. Apart from that, they do not seem to count.

Or do they ? What if Kennedy’s call to mobilise bad been met with a blank refusal? What if American workers had refused to man the ships in the blockade? if Russian workers had said no to shipping the missiles? The leaders of capitalism would have been powerless. They could have exchanged insults or compliments for as long as they liked. In the end it would have been the workers, and not the leaders, who counted.

Capitalism's wars are fought because of the economic clashes of its opposing powers. But these wars can only be organised, supplied and fought by the very people who have nothing to gain—and everything to lose—by fighting them. That is why there is such a careful propaganda campaign, all the time, to condition the working class to accept the latest line-up in international capitalism. That is why the workers in this country are now taught to hate the Russians and to love the Germans, when a few years ago we were taught the exact opposite. Yes, workers do count.

Because they could stop capitalism's wars. They could do more than that. They could stop capitalism itself. Not, this time, by refusing to take part in it; but by understanding it. By taking the trouble, to start with, to remember and to put Cuba—and Korea, Formosa, Berlin and the rest—into perspective.

Capitalism marches to chaos upon the ignorance of the people who keep it in its miserable existence. Cuba was only one step along this unhappy road. But who dare say where it will end, if the march and the ignorance continue?

Ivan

Capitalism, war and atrocity (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various enquiries into the events leading up to the Iraq war keep showing up more of the dubious ways the government tried to get voters’ support for a war which was launched in defiance of their own international law and the United Nations. But however much Blair’s back is to the wall, he can (and does) always make the excuse that even if the actions of Britain and America are not justified in any other way, the regime of Saddam Hussein was so terrible that no one can be sorry that Bush and Blair sent their armies in and threw him out. Almost all wars can be justified by pointing out how bad the other side is. All capitalist governments do unpleasant things: that is the inescapable nature of capitalism. So whenever two capitalist powers go to war, each can make a strong case against the other, by alleging how shocked they are about all the repulsive things the enemy has done.

When hostility ripens into open warfare, each side’s ruling class does even more terrible things to the other side, destroying its towns and slaughtering its people. This gives both belligerent countries even more propaganda points to make. Before long, each side is claiming that it only started fighting in the first place because (in some miraculous way) it could see what barbarous actions its enemies were going to be guilty of in the war. In other words, the propaganda of each hostile country claims that it only went to war because of the atrocities committed during the war on the other side.

The truth, however, is exactly the opposite. It is not the atrocities which lead to war; it is the war which leads to the atrocities. What happens, over and over again, is that a government, reacting to the pressures inseparable from capitalist (and other private-property) societies, treats some of its citizens very badly. Then the government gets into a war against other states; only to realize that its previous ill-treatment of this or that minority has simply provided a ready-made fifth column for the enemy. In other words, if the enemy should make a successful attack on the home territory, there are many citizens of the home country who would almost certainly prefer the enemy to win, and therefore might well engage in sabotage or guerrilla attacks on the home forces. If the war begins to go badly, the government and its supporters become terrified that they will lose and will therefore be killed (either by the enemy or by knives in the back) or at least driven into poverty and exile: terrified of such an impending fate, they turn on those whom they have previously ill-treated, and murder them.

Armenian massacres

The massacre of the Armenians, in Turkey in 1915, came about in this way. The Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia, close to the Turkish centre of the Ottoman Empire, and often showed rebellious tendencies. There were demands for independence. In addition the Turks were Muslims, and the Armenians Christians, which gave an excuse for more villainy: nothing is so bad that religion will not make it worse. The Turks treated the “disloyal” Armenians very badly, to the extent of killing many thousands of them in the 1890s. Then in 1914 the first World War broke out, and Turkey joined in on the side of Germany.

The Russians advanced into eastern Anatolia, and were helped by many Armenians, wanting revenge against the Turks; and on top of that, numbers of British and Australian troops invaded Gallipoli, in north-western Turkey, in April 1915 (after a naval attack in February). With the country being invaded, the Armenians were obviously a danger to the Turkish authorities, and action was taken to nullify that danger. Many of the Armenian men were massacred, and the women and children were sent on forced marches to the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq, robbed, raped, harassed and injured continuously, and most of them died. Estimates of the number who perished vary; the Armenians say 1,500,000 or more, the Turks say “only” 600,000. Many accounts of the massacre treat it in isolation, as if it was merely the result of Turkish (and Muslim) wickedness; in fact it started almost on the exact day in April 1915 that the Allies landed at Gallipoli. Presumably this separation of the two events is to maintain the fiction that the war was because of the atrocity, rather than that the atrocity was because of the war.

Second World War

Another horror of the same kind was what is now called the Holocaust. The Germans were treated very badly after the first World War. For many years they were execrated as pariahs who were solely responsible for the war; a continuing blockade caused much suffering, and the demand for “reparations” caused runaway inflation, so people who had worked hard for years to make small savings saw them reduced to nothing. The Nazi party gained popularity by offering someone else to blame: the Jews, who were in a minority in many countries, not having their own state, and who therefore were ideal scapegoats. Hitler was in power from 1933, and began the regular and open ill-treatment of the Jews; in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made the German Jews second-class citizens, e.g. closing the professions to them.

Anti-semitism was not particularly frowned on in Britain at the time, and two years after the infamous Nuremberg Laws, in 1937, Churchill said that “he hoped Great Britain would have a man like Hitler in times of peril” (quoted in the Times obituary of Leni Riefenstahl, 11 September) . Besides that, Poland at the same time, under the anti-semitic regime of the dictator Pilsudski and his successor Smigly-Rydz, treated the Jews even worse (and even joined in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938); yet Britain actually declared war in 1939 in order (it claimed) to defend this totalitarian anti-semitic state. For some time Germany seemed to be winning the war, conquering much of Poland in 1939, then Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941; but in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, and after early successes, his armies became bogged down, at the same time as America entered the war in December 1941. It became clear that Germany was in for a long and potentially disastrous struggle against many powerful enemies, in which large numbers of Jews, not only in Germany but also in the conquered countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, would not surprisingly be hoping for a German defeat.

The next step could have been forecast: the Wannsee Conference (in Berlin) of leading Nazis, in January 1942, decided on the “Final Solution” – the murder of the entire Jewish people. Probably six million Jews perished, as well as the same number of other people whom the Nazis claimed to think were inferior. This monstrous crime, carried out in the years 1942-5, is now often given as the reason for Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939. In fact it was the other way round; the conflicting interests, arising inevitably out of capitalism, of a number of European and world powers, led to the war: and the war led to the atrocity.

The third case of this kind is of course Iraq. The various conflicts in which Iraq has been involved recently, arising from the inexorable conditions of capitalism, such as the desire of each particular country’s ruling class to make the most profits from oil, and its efforts to extend the territory over which it rules, have lasted for no less than twenty of the last twenty-three years. The war against Iran raged from 1980 to 1988. Then Saddam Hussein’s attempt to conquer Kuwait in 1991 led to the first Gulf War, which ended with the first President Bush leaving Saddam in power, for fear that his overthrow would lead to a much greater role in the Middle East for Iran, which the US regarded as a greater threat than Iraq. But the war and the deaths resumed in a slightly different form, by means of continuous air patrols over Iraq territory and by economic sanctions, which UNICEF thought had brought about the deaths of nearly half a million Iraqi children under five.

All these hostilities, including this second Gulf War of 1991 to 2003, however much they might be blamed on the then Iraqi leadership, resulted in those leaders having the same mindset which has been discussed above: the fear of disaster for their regime, and death for themselves. This frame of mind leads automatically to atrocious behaviour from rulers, and Saddam Hussein has been no exception: jailing opponents, a ubiquitous secret police, the torture and murder of suspects.

Saddam Hussein has been just as bad as many other rulers across the world (including many with whom Britain and America are allied). But for Blair now to claim that he went to war because of this behaviour is putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. The horrendous regime of Saddam Hussein was a by-product of the two Gulf Wars of 1991-2003, not the other way round. If you want to have done with barbarous dictators like Saddam Hussein, it’s a waste of time to go to war: others will spring up everywhere. Get rid of capitalism, the fertile soil which produces endless numbers of dictators and atrocities.

Alwyn Edgar

Germany reunites (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The East German state circus, traditionally one of the most revered in the world, has been closed down. What animals can be sold will be; the rest are to be killed. The market has come to town and the unprofitable circus must go. Into the fertile area of East German magazine sales has come the West German and American porn industry. There are profits there, you see. Ah, the sickly smell of free-market "liberation’’.

If you read the British press it all seems so simple. East German Communism has been swept away. The free marketeers have come from the West to make life good. Germany is to be unified. The Germans are to be the most prosperous of Europeans. Hurrah for capitalism! The reality is different. There never was communism in East Germany, but state capitalism, ruled over by a class of party bosses who ran East German exploitation for their own ends.

State capitalism, not socialism of any description. has failed utterly and now East Germany is to be integrated into the rest of the private-capitalist world. Germany is being unified, but it is still divided between those who own its resources—the capitalists—and those who produce its wealth—the workers. These two classes, whose interests are diametrically opposed to one another, can never be united, except in terms of a national illusion. As for prosperity coming to Germany, there are plenty of workers who will tell a different tale—particularly the more that they are exposed to the harshness of the unregulated market.

Massive unemployment

East German workers face massive unemployment. In the past their jobs, which were often state-subsidised in order to maintain the appearance of full employment, produced goods for the East German national market. Now that market is being saturated by West German capitalist outfits which can sell higher quality commodities than East Germany is able to make. Of the 8000 East German firms, which are due to be privatised in October, the vast majority cannot compete on the open market with their West German rivals. In particular, food, textiles and mechanical engineering firms are going bust.

According to Creditreform, a West German credit-rating company which is now active in the East, there will be two million workers unemployed in East Germany after the October privatisation. The "good news" is that new jobs—just under a million—will emerge by the end of 1991 in new services, notably financial institutions and hotels (Rheinischer Merkur, 15 June). Even if this promised light at the end of the dark tunnel of unemployment proves to be a correct prediction, who wants to move from producing useful wealth to taking jobs counting money in banks or insurance houses, or waiting on tourists? Is that what liberation means? And it should be noted that even if the most optimistic forecasts come true, there will still be over a million unemployed East Germans by the end of next year.

East German workers with jobs are discovering something else: that they are expected to pay West German prices for goods and services, but the capitalists investing in East Germany are only willing to pay old East German wages. So. we see the disgusting contradiction of East German stores with shelves full of hitherto unobtainable commodities, but all that the East German wage slaves can afford to do is look at them longingly.

They were fed the lie that once the Berlin Wall came down they would enjoy access to all the goodies which they had spent years seeing advertised on West German television. Well, the Wall is down, but poverty persists. Is it any wonder that the German press has reported a major increase in petty crime in East Germany? The capitalist explanation is that the East German workers have yet to understand the ethos of private property relations and are recovering from years of state-capitalist frustration. The fact is that they are angry, particularly the young East Germans who were promised a market which would liberate them; they have been offered unemployment or low wages, and commodities which they are too poor to buy. Such is capitalist "freedom".

Struggle against new bosses

Workers who were out in the streets last year to bring down the Honecker dictatorship are now having to struggle against their new bosses. Workers in the East German shoe and leather industry have called nationwide token strikes to draw attention to their plight. More than half a million jobs are at stake in that industry and all that "liberation" offers them is a future job in a hotel or a bank.

The striking workers will be defeated. The hypocritical German capitalists, who showed such theatrical concern for their struggle when it was fought against the old state-capitalist elite, could not care less what becomes of the workers now that they have their grubby hands on the united German shoe industry. At the end of last year the German press was celebrating the struggle for freedom being waged by the newly-formed Free Federation of German Trades Unions, an umbrella organisation of East German non-state unions. The same union called for an increase in net pay of 50 percent as from 1 July this year. The same newspapers who were cheering them on less than a year ago are now denouncing their "impertinent" demands.

The East German workers were right to overthrow the anti-democratic state- capitalist dictatorship of the Communist Party. They were more than right: they were heroic in taking on a force which we now know was planning to put down the rebel workers in the same way as the Chinese dictators did at Tiananmen Square. But the victory of last winter was a battle won. not a war ended. The East German workers had better realise that the owners of the Earth, be they private or state capitalists, Eastern or Western, will oppress and exploit them until they are dispossessed of their ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. The class war goes on. Experience will teach this to the East German workers—as it did to the many Polish workers who recently organised a massive rail strike against their new oppressors in the Solidarity government—but a period of temporary enchantment with the wonders of the illusory free market is bound to occur.

Housing crisis

East German wage slaves who have voted to be led by Kohl and his team of market-lovers. and the other workers conned by the reformist promise of welfare capitalism offered by the SPD, need only peep over the border to Hamburg where their fellow workers, long-standing members of a "free" capitalist nation, face a major housing crisis.

The Hamburg Abendblat (27 April) reports that rents in Hamburg have increased from early 1989 to early 1990 by an average of 33 percent. This figure is second only to Stuttgart where the rent per square metre has gone up 39 percent in the past year. The German housing problem has led to widespread opposition to the granting of housing to East German workers wanting to settle in the more prosperous Western sector. So. after years of waiting for the Wall to come down. East German workers are now being told not to compete with their Western counterparts for cheap or subsidised housing. The new Wall is made of poverty and fear.

The Guardian (27 July) referred to the West German housing crisis as “a political battlefield . . . a social scandal in a land of conspicuous prosperity: the squeezing out of the housing market of tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of citizens". The West German Housing Minister. Gerda Hasselfedt, estimates that one in four East German homes are “uninhabitable" and three in four “need to be totally renovated". If new homes are not to be built, and old ones improved, by the state, then who will take on the task?

Private property developers and landlords certainly have no interest to gain in building houses and doing up old ones for the benefit of poor people. On the contrary, with an excess of supply over demand their economic interest is to push up the rents and interest rates on mortgages. As ever, the housing problem is not about an inability to produce houses—last year there was a 14.7 percent increase in German house-building, mainly at the more expensive end of the market. It is about the inability of workers who need homes to pay for them at prices that will bring profits to capitalists.

The housing crisis has also given rise to a wave of anti-immigrant feeling amongst the least enlightened workers. Where Turkish “guest workers" were once tolerated, German racists are saying that that it is bad enough having to compete with other Germans without having to put up with "foreigners". In the riotous celebrations following the German football victory in the World Cup:

East Berlin and Hamburg . . . witnessed bloody battles between police and young right-wing extremists, as well as attacks on Vietnamese, Turks and other foreigners . . . In Cologne a group set on a young Turkish taxi driver trapped in the delirious crowd, trying to overturn his car and lynch him. Police again used tear gas and batons to help him escape . . . (Guardian, 10 July).

The government has responded to this rise in racist insecurity by passing an Aliens Law which is designed to frighten away non-German workers wanting to settle there.

Germany is set to be the new European superpower. If you have millions of Deutschmarks invested in the Bundesbank you may be in for some sharp rises in profits. But most readers of this journal do not. Neither do the West German workers struggling to pay high rents. The hundreds of thousands of East Germans who are being thrown on the scrap heap of the unemployed do not. Nor do those who will have to face cuts in German welfare services which will have to be made so that taxes can be kept down so that German capitalists have money to invest in the East. In East Germany the circus is closing down and the lions are being given a fatal jab; for the wage slaves of Germany the future offers little in the way of either bread or circuses.

Steve Coleman

Fifty Years Ago (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago, in 1937, I had managed to survive three years of life on the dole and, more importantly, had discovered the Socialist Party of Great Britain, offering the only practical alternative to such a life.

The 1929 Wall Street Crash had signalled that capitalism was in for one of its periodic slumps, but despite that in 1931 I landed a so-called permanent job as an LM&S Railway staff joiner. However as Marx said "the only permanence is change" and in 1934 the LM&S reduced its staff, pitching our gang of joiners, plumbers, painters and labourers on to the scrap heap of the unemployed. I found myself signing on at the Albion Street labour exchange in Salford (where Walter Greenwood. author of Love On The Dole had also signed on). My weekly allowance for myself, wife and two children was thirty four shillings out of which I had to pay ten shillings rent. (£1.70 and 50p respectively). The rent was for a bug infested attic flat in Higher Broughton. Many houses in the Broughton area were infested with bugs. Indeed on one occasion I had obtained the keys of another flat from a Mr Lever who then lived in Northumberland Street, Higher Broughton. I had decided to take the flat and had deposited two suitcases there when I noticed something moving on one of the cupboard shelves and to my horror found colonies of bed bugs all over the flat and behind the wallpaper. I quickly removed my suitcases and returned the keys to Mr Lever, declining his offer to have his property fumigated for me.

In an attempt to escape those bed bugs. I fled from Higher Broughton into a house in Lower Broughton as no bugs were to be seen there. I had only been there one night when larger colonies of bugs than ever attacked us. They had been hiding behind the skirting boards. An old man with the longest beard I ever saw sat next door on his doorstep and politely enquired of me . . . "Vell, how you like your house, eh?" . . . I told him how much I disliked it and he waved a hand airily, remarking complacently "Vell, a few bugs".

The gambling "solution"?

Trying to beat the depression with various money making schemes. I finally got hooked on horse racing, although 1 had never gambled in my life before. In those days, the only legal way to gamble off course was to send one's bets by post to Scottish bookmakers and I chose to deal with McLauchlan's of Glasgow and Edinburgh who accepted bets so long as they were time postmarked prior to time of races concerned. To my delight my very first two commissions won me £40 and I decided to study the game from all angles, even sending over to Dublin for a copy of The Irish Horse (an excellent book on breeding) and burned the midnight oil studying systems by the dozen, many of them my own invention. Some of those were successful for a season, but the next season something would inevitably go haywire.

Incidentally, the racing programmes in the daily press in public libraries in the mid-thirties were erased by black ink so that the unemployed, who could ill afford the price of the Sporting Life were denied something so readily available to those frequenting Ascot's Lawns. Also the Black Maria police vans used to prowl around Britain's back street betting dens before 1962 when betting became, for working class punters, a respectable activity. After a period of successful bets with McLauchlans. they placed a restriction on my bets by writing to tell me. that. . . "In future your bets must be in our office before racing" . . . I was torpedoed because that meant posting my bets the day before actual racing which was really restricting me to ante post betting, which was useless to me. So I joined the back street "tapes on the wall" dens from then on, moving from one area to another to evade the Black Marias.

Non-union exploitation

The official union rate for joiners when I joined the ASW (Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers) in 1929 was 1/7½d an hour (about 8p) but the railway rate, when I joined the NUR was l/4d. But there were other benefits such as a guaranteed week with no loss of time for being rained off or foggy weather plus quarter fare travelling facilities anywhere on the railway. After a year of the dole queues I decided to try a non-union firm of cabinet makers situated in the old Ford Auto works in First Avenue, Trafford Park. I was offered 10d an hour which of course I refused and after haggling with them I agreed to start at one shilling an hour. In that factory, many men were doing the same job for different rates. My mate on the other side of the bench was getting 10d; I was getting a shilling - considered a top rate there. We worked from 8am until 8pm with two half hour breaks for tea snacks and they charged us ½d for hot water to brew up. On my first day there a foreman came over to me and shouted in my ear above the din of the machinery: "Any more talking and you're outside". So we became silent automatons, trying to meet the target rate of twenty minutes to fit five drawers in a cabinet by planing off a quarter inch of American oak from each drawer, an impossible task set by management and none of us did better than a half hour minimum. It was of course planing by hand with one's own tools, not machine planing. I got home at 9pm and sank into a chair too tired to wash until later. After six months of that the firm laid us off for a temporary period which I decided to make permanent, so I said goodbye to Trafford Park and its hateful environment of wage slavery which I've no desire to re-visit.

But we've come a long way since those days haven't we? Today there is Social Security. acid rain, nuclear bombs and three million on the dole. Berlin Walls, Belfast ghettos and apartheid . . .

G R Russell

“ My country is the world” (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I vow to thee, my country —all earthly things above 

Entire and whole and perfect the service of my love.

(Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, 1859-1918)

Nobody who has been to school can have escaped the regular doses of patriotism which are administered there. The sentiments of Spring-Rice's hymn—which is sung at many a school assembly—are widely accepted, in some form or other.

For example, all capitalist political parties agree that there are some things on which the shadow boxing has to stop; one of these is patriotism. Whatever slant each of them may put on it, they are all agreed that everyone should be proud of his nationality and should work for what they call the interests of his country. In the last general election the Conservatives said in their manifesto that they aimed to ”. . . gain the vitality to keep our country great." The Liberals lamented the fact that “Britain has lagged behind since the war . . ." The Labour Party promised to “. . . rekindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future . . .”

This general agreement also means that anybody who questions the values and the reason of patriotism is often regarded as a little odd, mentally undernourished, somebody who has got the world out of perspective. Yet all facts and reasonable argument show up patriotism for an empty sham, a propaganda weapon which is used to persuade people to do things against their own interests and to obscure where their interests actually lie.

Patriotism is adaptable. It can be stretched to include a number of countries which have united—or which have been united by another power—and which previously had their own, separate patriotism. Thus when Germany became united in the 19th. century there had to be created a German patriotism, to include and dominate those of the states which had been unified. In the same way the leaders of the new states in Africa are trying to create patriotism out of a mixture —and often a clash—of tribal loyalties. They are trying to instil into the people of their countries a pride in being a “ Kenyan”, or a “ Ghanian ”, or a “ Zambian ” worker; a respect for the country's flag, its National Anthem and a love of country to work, fight and die for.

The speeches of these leaders throb with patriotism. Last January, President Kaunda of Zambia promised military measures to “. . . protect our country and preserve our national identity.” When Kenya became what was called a one-party democracy last November, Mr. Ngala, leader of the swallowed up Kenya African Democratic Union, said that he had disbanded his party because ”. . . we consider the cause of Kenya to be greater than any of our personal pride, gains or losses.”

There is a certain bitter irony in this. For it is in the new countries that people should have learnt of the dangers of patriotism. The native peoples of Africa should have learnt this, in the days when they were invaded, carved up and suppressed by the super-patriotic Empire Builders of North West Europe. The same lesson should have been absorbed by the people of India, Pakistan and the new Far Eastern States— and by the people of Israel, many of whom have had their own personal experience of the logical end of patriotism, in the concentration camps of pre-war Germany.

Just as patriotism can be extended to embrace a number of united nations, so it can be contracted when a country is divided. The East German government, for example, works to keep Germany permanently split and to foster an East German patriotism. The guards on the Berlin Wall are encouraged to forget what they were once told about German nationality, and to shoot any of their fellow Germans who try to slip over to the West. In the same way, the North Koreans are now encouraged to treat the people in the South as their enemies; the same thing applies in the war which is going on in Vietnam.

Patriotism needs to be adaptable, yet in essence it should be inflexible and dogmatic. It was Stephen Decatur, in a speech in Virginia in 1816, who gave the famous toast—”. . . our country, right or wrong,” which does not allow for any modification. The unquestioning acceptance of patriotism has made men endure exceptional horrors, it has persuaded them to accept the most degrading of indignities, and to impose the harshest of brutalities upon others. The men in the trenches in 1914/18 suffered the mud and shellfire and the slaughter in the cause of country. The Nazis cut their swath of death and fear across Europe under the inspiration of their patriotism. The men who set fire to Dresden, and who killed Hiroshima, were acting under the same impulses—and the same delusion.

Here again we have an example of the way in which the proponents of patriotism cynically vary their attitude as it suits their purpose. The Allied bomber crews who wiped out the refugees in Dresden were doing what is called their patriotic duty—they were obeying an order, without doubt or question. Yet this is exactly what most of the men who have stood trial in the war crimes courts did. These men have not, of course, been charged with offences against their country; they have been prosecuted for what have been called crimes against humanity. Thus, although the victor countries of the last war insist that their own soldiers should obey orders because it was patriotic to do so, they also insist that German soldiers should have refused to obey their orders in the interests of humanity. They ignore the fact that, to be consistent, patriotism should swamp humanity.

What sort of arguments are used to support patriotism? One that is popularly accepted, especially in wartime, is that it is something to do with a country's scenery. The official propaganda of 1939/45 encouraged us to join up, eat less, save more, by showing us pictures of placid villages, rolling downland, welcoming white cliffs. Anyone who lived through that war can remember the Ink Spots vocal group adding to this propaganda (and presumably to their bank balance) by crooning about an old cottage in a peaceful valley of corn, ending up with the song’s message, and its title—This Is Worth Fighting For.

There are three things to say about this. The first is that all countries have their beauty spots and that if it was right for an Englishman to go to war because of the Sussex Downs then it was equally right for a German to fight because of the Black Forest, or an Italian because of the architecture of Ancient Rome.

The second thing is that a lot of the scenic beauty of this country has been destroyed since 1945; not by conquering Germans but by the enemy which is always there, in peace and war. It is the profit motive of capitalism which tore up enormous areas of countryside for opencast coal mining. It is the same motive which has been responsible for, among other things, the outrages of the big airports, for the housing sprawl into places which not so long ago were green and pleasant, for the high voltage power grid which is now threatening to violate the South Downs. The National Trust estimates that at least five miles of outstandingly beautiful coastline is each year being spoilt by property developers, who see the chance to make big profits as untouched bays and headlands are opened up by new roads, and motorways.

The third thing is that, even though there is a lot of beautiful scenery in this country, the vast majority of people have little chance to enjoy it. Most of us have to work for our living, which means that we spend all day, almost every day, in the heat and noise of a factory or the monotony of an office. Or perhaps we are salesmen, frantically chasing orders, However we get our living, it absorbs the bulk of our time and leaves only the fag end of it for any other activities. And when work is done we go back to the cheap poky place we call home. Millions of us go back to slums, which after all are as typical of a country as its rural scenery. (One First World War writer thought that the trenches were better places to live in than the slums that thousands of soldiers had left to go to war.) But no patriotic posters ever showed the Gorbals or Salford, and somehow these places got left out of the Ink Spots' records.

This, in a way at least, is consistent. The basis of patriotism is pride. No matter what their economic conditions may be—even if they live in a slum or are chronically out of work—patriots are proud of their nationality. British patriots are proud of being British, and do not bother themselves with wondering whether the impoverished peasant in Vietnam is proud of being Vietnamese. In the last war, the same sort of person thought that any decent German should have been ashamed of his nationality. Patriotism is always supposed to work in only one direction.

But anyone who is proud of being British should ask himself whether he takes pride in everything for which this country has been responsible. Is he proud of the fortunes which were built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which erected many of the stately homes which we are supposed to include in our national heritage, from the proceeds of slave running and piracy? Does he take pride in the pitiless hardships of the enclosures and the evictions in Ireland, in the savage exploitations of the Industrial Revolution?

The list is a long one. The conquering of India. The penal settlements in Australia. The blatant attempts to crush the young Boer Republic, Suez. And the end has not been reached. The depredations committed by the British ruling class, and by those of other countries, crowd the pages of history and continue to make the story of capitalist conflict. There is nothing in any of them for anyone to be proud of.

In fact, pride is completely out of place in relation to nationality. We are entitled to feel proud about something which we have achieved, but things which are beyond our control should not be matters for pride. We are not proud about the weather, nor about the fact that we were born at a particular time. In the same way, nobody should be proud because he happens to have been born in such a way that he can call himself British, or German, or any other nationality.

The short, simple fact is that patriotism and logic do not mix. Perhaps that is why patriotic fervour is so often so belligerently expressed, and why it can so easily lead to the extremes of racial intolerance, to the theories about a “ Master Race ” and to the “ Final Solution" which is not final, which has nothing to do with any problem, but which is modern barbarity run wild.

This is the grimmer side of patriotism. A more popular one is that of a Blimpish nostalgia for the halycon days of Omdurman and the North West Frontier. It is common, now, for so-called progressive thinkers to poke fun at this, forgetting that under the skin the modern satirist is as patriotic as any choleric Victorian colonel.

No satirist ever hit on the basic tragedy of the thing, which is that patriotism debases a perfectly laudable motive. There is nothing wrong with the notion that the interests of a group are greater than those of any individual in it. Patriotism prostitutes this by restricting the size of the group into small parts of the human race and by bolstering itself with false ideas of superiority which in the end work against the interests of the whole.

Social progress depends upon the denial of patriotism. The majority of people in the modern world are members of the working class whose problems and interests are not confined within national barriers. These people have no country, no national interests; patriotism is poison to them. What they do have is a brotherhood with workers in other countries, which unites them in the need to establish a world of freedom. Thomas Paine once wrote, “ My country is the world,” and that is not a bad way of putting it.

Ivan

World View: Son of Star Wars (2001)

From the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rarely have Americans elected to office a president as impetuous, callous and as indifferent to the well-being of others as George W Bush, who even as a presidential candidate, signing more death warrants than any Governor in history, made no secret of his hawkish ambitions, determined to forge ahead with the “Son of Star Wars” National Missile Defence (NMB) system and to propel the world into another arms race and all the old cold war hostilities that accompany it and, indeed, perhaps signing the future death warrants of hundreds of millions.

The recent Pentagon report Proliferation: Threat and Response came as a godsend for the Bush camp, anxious to rationalise a planned $60 billion increase in defence spending, inclusive of investment in the NMD programme which would deploy thousands of air defence missiles to intercept intercontinental ballistic weapons fired by the proverbial “rogue states”.

The report would have it that the threat to mainland America is as great now as during the Cold War era and that apocalypse is just over the horizon, discerning a credible threat from North Korea within 10 years, Iran within 15 years and Iraq within 20 years. The report is critical of China for its continuing use of arms sales to “advance its strategic and economic interests”, but is silent on the US domination of the global arms market and its related hegemonic aspirations. Likewise, the amnesiacs who compiled the report lambast Iraq for its “pursuit of regional hegemony”, Syria for its excessive $1 billion defence budget (the US defence budget is currently $300 billion) and North Korea for its stockpiling of chemical weapons (when the US has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons on the planet). At every turn, it seems, there’s a rogue state just itching to lob a nuclear or biological weapon at the defender of global peace and democracy, and it is this warped logic that informs the hawkish stance in Washington. No mention is made of the fact that even without NMD, any state stupid enough to throw anything bigger than a grenade at the US would be bombed back into the Stone Age.

Nevertheless, it is talk that is demanding a $60 billion increase in US defence spending (which is actually China’s total military budget), and rhetoric that the cold warriors Bush has given cabinet posts to are more than familiar with. Once a critic of NMD, Colin Powell, of Gulf War fame (a man who came to prominence covering up the My Lai massacre and later up to his neck in the arms for hostages scandal and the illegal supplying of arms to the Contras) is now Secretary of State and the Pentagon’s top NMD salesperson. Other cabinet posts have gone to other Reaganite hawks such as Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Candaleezza Rice. Bush’s choice for key cabinet posts alone should warn us there is some serious ass kicking is going to be done.

Whereas Bush sees NMD as a “constitutional and moral requisite” (he incidentally also believes humans and fish can coexist peacefully) US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld agrees that “it is in many respects a moral issue”, that NMD is essential to counter “the raw and random violence of the outlaw regime or the rogue state armed with missiles of mass destruction”, that NMD would make the US “less isolationist”, “less vulnerable and more prepared to help its allies”.

At a defence conference in Munich in early February, at which the implications of NMD were discussed, concern was raised that NMD would undoubtedly spark an arms race. Rumsfeld declared that NMD would not destroy arms control agreements including the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but later suggested the 1972 treaty was “ancient history”.

Arms race

Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian National Security Council told the conference that “the destruction of the 1972 ABM Treaty will result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race”. As much, and more, was hinted at back in late 1999 when Republican hawks celebrated a Senate vote not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and announced their intention to scupper the 1972 ABM Treaty which outlawed Star Wars’ missiles systems capable of intercepting incoming missiles. For it was then that Russian Defence Minister Nikolai Mikolov, acknowledging Russia could not match US technology, declared Russia would simply deploy more warheads capable of overwhelming the US nuclear umbrella system.

In November last year the Kremlin announced plans to cut its number of men under arms by 360,000 and to shift the emphasis from nuclear weapons to conventional arms. This decision has since been shelved and will be reconsidered in March at the earliest. Meanwhile, in direct response to Washington’s announcement that the US intends to go through with the Son of Star Wars anti-missile programme, whatever shape this may be (air-based, sea-based, space-based) and regardless of any objections, Russia has announced it will seek an anti-US diplomatic alliance with China, North Korea and Iran.

As well as Russia, both India and China have expressed concern about the NMD, fearing it will very much provoke an arms race and force them to expand their own nuclear weapons programmes. Whist France and Germany are wholly opposed to NMD, the British government is currently playing its cards close to its chest. Though the MoD and the Foreign Office claim they are “not convinced of the merits” of NMD, Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon, asked if the US would be allowed to upgrade their early warning system at Fylingdales in Yorkshire replied: “We share of course US concerns about emerging threats. The US is our closest ally”.

For Tony Blair’s part, whilst it is felt he is bending towards the idea, keen to placate his US cronies, his government is under no pressure to make a decision for several months, which suits New Labour down to the ground. It should also be remembered that Blair is facing a general election this year so has no intentions of losing votes as a result of arguments with anti-nuclear protestors. It is, however, a safe bet that Blair will indeed see an election victory as his mandate to commit Britain to Bush’s wider game plan for global US domination.

It is a fair guess that there is more behind NMD than Washington lets on. For instance, the moment you begin installing a sophisticated missile defence shield is the moment your adversaries begin seeking ways around it. Whilst NMD may well take out the incoming missile, what of the biological or nuclear bomb in the suitcase or the suicide bomber?

A more likely explanation lies in the fears of the Republican right that the only discernible threat to US hegemony in the 21st Century will come from China as it develops into the economic giant many think it capable of—a serious challenger for US profits. What better way to curtail China’s economic ambitions than to compel it to channel more money into defence and away from other social programmes, economically hamstringing it? A similar tactic had been employed against the former Soviet Union during the Reagan administration in the late eighties, forcing state capitalism into an early grave as it found itself unable to meet the costly demands of an escalating arms race weighted heavily in the favour of the US.

It is poignantly ironic that George W Bush is preparing to raise the global security stakes when just over ten years ago his father George Bush, as president, announced to the world the benefits of the coming “peace dividend” in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “collapse of communism”; a world in which there would no longer be the need for countries to invest heavily in military hardware now the bogeyman had been exorcised—that money was now to be used for health, education and other social programmes. But there again, George senior did announce at his inauguration that the 20th Century had been the “American Century” and that he’d be doing his damnedest to ensure the 21st was also an American century. So maybe George junior is simply following out his father’s promises. Ensuring the 21st century will also be ruled by force and woe betides any one silly enough to mess with US interests.

One thing is sure. The US is deadly serious about possible threats to its strategic and economic interests in the 21st century and has already toyed with a future confrontation with a possible rising superpower. In January, the US air force, along with 250 military and civilian “experts”, completed its first major war games in space at the Space Warfare Centre in Colorado, rehearsing a conflict set in 2017 between China and the US. It is no great leap of the imagination to envisage the projected winner.

As we have announced several times in the past year, if we are to prevent the 21st century becoming a more violent re-run of the 20th, that witnessed two world wars, the first use of nuclear weapons and many hundreds of smaller conflicts—all in the name of profit—it is essential we, the victims, the cannon fodder, the class that has the biggest price to pay to satisfy the whims of the mighty, begin to organise now; not tomorrow when NMD is in place, nor in years to come when the sirens are screaming. We as a class have suffered too much and have too much to lose to leave decisions regarding the future of our planet in the hands of group of arrogant, conceited and profit-crazed individuals. Let’s really organise to take their power away, before it is too late.

John Bissett