Thirty-Five Billion (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

I've been toying with the figure $35 billion which I heard the other day - toying with it because I, like most folk I've spoken to about it since, couldn't grasp the sheer enormity of it. What did it actually represent?

So I decided to do my own in-home research using the New Internationalist World Guide latest edition's figures (UN statistics).

This is what I came up with: $35,000,000,000 is the equivalent of (GNI is gross national income):

1) 1 year's GNI of $35,000 for 1,000,000 people in USA

2) 1 year's GNI of $1,000 for 35,000,000 people in the Philippines

3) 1 year's GNI of $480 for 70,000,000 people in India

4a) 1 year's GNI of $240 for 140,000,000 people in Mali or

4b) 10 year's GNI for total population of 14 million in Mali

5a) 1 year's GNI of $100 for 350,000,000 people in Ethiopia or

5b) 5 year's GNI for total population of 74 million in Ethiopia.

Now, if just one person owned all that wealth they'd have to put it somewhere safe, in some kind of bank or shares or whatever where it would be safe and accumulate, e.g. a 1 percent return over 1 year would produce $350,000,000 in interest; a 5 percent return $1,750,000,000; 10 percent $3,500,000,000 and so on assume compound interest kicking in and you'll have to do your own figures or find an expert; however, you get the picture.

Of course when you've managed to accrue enough after a few years to be able to give away the lion's share without noticing any difference at all in your own life style people will applaud you and say what a wonderful, altruistic person you are.

What would you choose to do with your fortune? Beat malaria? Wipe out the debt of several Highly Impoverished Nations? Bring clean water to some of the millions without? Fund schools or hospitals in perpetuity from your foundation's coffers? The possibilities are endless.

But, surely, one person wouldn't actually have so much money! How would one person acquire enough in the first place to be able to put money to work to accrue more money? Simple, just use other people, lots and lots of people, to do the work for less than it's worth to produce the goods on your behalf and pocket the difference.

The less you manage to pay your workers and the more you're able to sell your goods for to other workers, the better the profit you'll make, enabling you to be the one to choose how to improve life on the planet for the unfortunate masses.

How can it be, however intelligent, hardworking, honest and/or altruistic, that one person's 'gift' can be equal to the income of all the people of Ethiopia, men, women and children, for 5 years?

How can it be that one person should be able to choose how to affect (or not to affect) such a multitude of people, albeit in a positive way? 

How can it be that so many people have so little choice in their own lives? 

It's the system, my friends, the system that puts profit above all else - how else could it work?

The system that uses and abuses people all around the world, the system that can't work with full employment, universal healthcare and satisfied bellies, but must rely on chasing profit around the globe whatever the consequences for the planet and its inhabitants.

Imagine 1,000,000 US citizens giving up their whole year's income. Imagine the entire population of Mali having no income at all for 10 years. Imagine one man having that much spare cash. I don't doubt that you know which particular man I'm writing about - the second richest man in the world, Warren Buffet, who's decided to donate not $35 billion but $37 billion to the charitable foundation of the richest man (Bill Gates).

But what's $2,000,000,000? Well, 3 years GNI for the Maldives . . . 

Am I knocking Bill Gates, Warren Buffet et al? No, I'm knocking the system which allows, nay encourages, a small minority to exploit the vast majority in an unequal relationship. The capitalist system cannot work with equal relationships. There have to be (a few) winners and (many) losers. 

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right to clean water, enough food, access to health care, a comfortable home, to raise one's children in a cooperative rather than a competitive society in a well-husbanded world environment in the knowledge that there is a sufficiency of all our basic needs and no good reason for anyone to go without.

This is the only fair system. If you're content with the status quo then carry on as before. However, if you've taken the time to read this far the chances are you're not content. If you're sick and tired of hearing the same old political fixes on offer and are looking for real answers then take a few more minutes to look at the only alternative. It could be the best thing you'll do this year.

Janet Surman

Foreign Takeovers: a non-issue (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent poll shows public opinion in Britain is becoming increasingly perturbed by the changing ownership of the companies that make up the British economy, but does it matter to workers who owns the company that exploits them?

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive at the beginning of June, found that the acquisition of British companies by those based in other countries is causing major concern, with "more than two thirds of people saying it is now 'too easy' for overseas predators to acquire businesses here," (Financial Times, 19 June 2006) and urging government intervention.

The poll comes after 18 months of intense acquisition and take-over activity on the London Stock Exchange that reaped acash bonanza for the shareholders of a number of well-known companies and shows no sign of abating. The feverish activity has been fuelled, in large part, by foreign-based companies buying UK companies in deals that in the first 10 months of 2005 were worth 70 billion pounds - twice the value of such deals for the whole of 2004. In one week alone in November 2005, four potential deals involving P & O, Pilkington, O2 and Mowlem were reputedly worth £24 billion.

More recent events have aggravated the unease. The announcement that Peugeot was to close its Ryton car factory, destroying 2,300 jobs, was accompanied by persistent rumours that Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas company, is about to take over Centrica in a period of rising gas and electricity prices. The timing of the Harris poll also coincided with the finalisation of the Spanish company Ferrovial's bid for the British Airports Authority, which owns Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead airports, among others.

The reason behind all this is not difficult to discover. As noted in the [London] Observer on 6 November last year, "The reason for the activity is simple: five years of belt tightening following the technology boom has left UK plc in robust health. Returns on equity are higher than they have been for years and cash generation has been strong, leaving balance sheets healthy." Since profits in these companies have remained 'healthy' it is evident that it is the working class who have experienced the 'belt tightening' - foregoing improvements in living standards, motivated, one suspects, by the fear of losing their jobs. Growth in company profits in the last few years is not the outcome of a general increase in sales but a consequence of cost savings. All too often these savings are secured by holding down wages, intensifying working conditions and, where necessary, terminating jobs - the destruction of the livelihood of men and women with all the misery and dislocation this entails.

Behind the concern expressed in the survey is the misguided belief among working people that they have a stake in making sure that companies retain their British ownership. Many appear to hold the view that foreign companies cannot be trusted to maintain existing employment levels and have the unsubstantiated conviction that workers will enjoy greater job security when the ownership of their workplace resides with people born in the same country.

It is taken it for granted that those who own the factories, raw materials and land, and those who sell their labour power forwages and salaries within the same country, automatically share a 'common interest,' when the opposite is actually the case. Capitalism has divided the world into two irreconcilable but interdependent groups - the working class and the capitalist class. Despite the fact that the interests of these two classes are antagonistic, the relationship is also strangely symbiotic. The working class own no means of producing wealth and are dependent, through wages and salaries, on those who do, while the owners of the means of production are dependent on a subordinate working class to sustain their position of power and privilege.

The working class exchange labour power for money which allows them to gain limited access to the necessities of life. In this exchange the worker produces value greater than that of their own labour power. This value belongs to the capitalist. Calls for the 'right' to work, sometimes heard in times of economic depression, are therefore no more than a demand for the'right' to be exploited by anyone willing to offer employment. Arguments about 'fair wages' are simply abstractions that acknowledge the power of the capitalist class to dictate the condition of life over the subordinate working class. Society as presently organised cannot be operated in any other way and workers who never look beyond this truism fail to comprehend thatan alternative society that does not work against their interests can be established - but that society is not capitalism.

Production in capitalist society is geared strictly to the generation of profit - extracted from the working class when goods are produced and released when they are sold on the market to those who have the money to buy. Individual companies are dependent on generating and attracting capital to reinvest in order to continue operating.

Capital always chases profit, moving from less successful companies to those where profit expectation is higher, without regard to the effect on employment or human welfare. Capital does not discriminate between the relative merits of the products and makes no distinction between the production of bombs and the production of bandages as long as the risk is as low and the activity as profitable as possible.

Wage labour and capital are in constant conflict. The capitalist class is continuously seeking to reduce the workers' share of the social product to expand the accumulation of capital and has become an uncontrollable independent power without regard for human need, seeking out opportunities to grow anywhere and everywhere across the world. Globalisation is merely the newest name for a process that has been ongoing since capitalism was first established.

Capitalism is an intensely predatory economic system. In the competitive struggle for survival many companies may be driven from business by competitors, while others, attracted by rising profits or a desire to suppress competition will be taken over or merged with rivals. Employment is dependent upon generating profit, which means that the real function of the world's working class is not to make products or provide services but to generate and thenincrease these profits. Working people in every country are trapped in an economic system where they must sell - and there by relinquish control over - their physical or mental energies simply to earn money to buy the things that enable them to resume the same routine, week on week to the end of their working lives. This vicious circle will continue until capital is abolished and capitalism brought to an end.

The conclusion reached in the Harris poll is indicative of worker confusion - a misguided belief that it is somehow less painful to be exploited by the portion of the owning class based within these boundaries than by that based elsewhere. The cause of poverty and insecurity is not the threat of 'foreign' companies but the economic system that sustains the international class monopoly over wealth creation and draws strength by exploiting working people in every country. As long as capitalism is allowed to continue it makes little actual difference to the working class who owns their place of employment - they will remain expendable wage or salary earners.

For as long as workers are deceived into viewing the world from a 'national' perspective, they will fail to understand their condition in capitalism. The working class is deluded by nationalism. Such beliefs actively encourage people to co-operate with their 'national' exploiters operating within boundaries determined purely by historical accident. Nationalism conceals the real nature of capitalism, turns worker against worker and serves to impede working class solidarity. The world's working class have no reason to be antagonistic to other workers but must unite against their common class enemy: the world's capitalist class.

Steve Trott

Cooking the Books: Commodity Markets (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

"1p and 2p pieces are now worth more on the commodities market than in the high street", reported the [London] Times on 12 May. Pre-1992 copper coins are 97 percent copper and, as the price of copper had reached a record high of $8,312 a tonne, they had, theoretically, come to be worth more than their face value. "Commodity prices yesterday", the report went on, "continued their bull run as traders bet that demand from fast-growing economies such as China would continue. Platinum, nickel, zinc and copper prices hit a new high".

Socialists, too, talk about "commodities". We say that capitalism is "the highest form of commodity production"; that workers' ability to work is today a mere "commodity", bought and sold on a market; that people's needs, and life generally, have become "commodified".

The meaning that the financial pages of the papers attach to the word is much more restricted. For them, it refers only to primary products, not just metals such as platinum, nickel, zinc and copper but also to oil and to agricultural produce such as coffee, sugar and wheat. These are indeed commodities in the Marxian sense in that they are items of wealth produced with a view to being bought and sold, but they are not the only things that are commodities.

In the Marxian sense, anything produced with a view to being sold is a commodity. Capitalism is the "highest form ofcommodity production" in that under it most items of wealth are produced as commodities. In addition, the human capacity to work, our mental and physical energies, take the form, as something bought and sold, of a commodity. In fact, this is what distinguishes capitalism from "simple commodity production", where this is not the case. Under capitalism anything, even if not originally produced to be sold, can, and increasingly does, take the form of a commodity, from honour, sex and influence to body parts and past works of art. There is a market for all these things. The tendency of capitalism is for everything to become "commodified".

But to return to the commodities of the financial pages, the [London] Times report was unusually frank in admitting that gambling is involved in "commodity markets". The primary products on sale on these markets have two types of price: a "spot" price, which is the price on the day, and a "futures" price, which is a price at which someone agrees to buy or sell the product at some set future date.

The economics textbooks say this is to allow the users of the product to plan ahead. This is true but you don't have to besomeone who actually wants copper or oil or wheat or whatever to intervene on a commodity market. When you buy something there is no physical transfer of the product but merely a change of ownership.

Gamblers can offer to buy a product in the future at a given price even though they don't want it, in effect betting that the spot price at that time will be higher. In which case they sell - transfer ownership - and walk away laughing with a bigger bank balance, while the product goes to someone who will use it to produce something.

It's nice to know that while millions are suffering from malnutrition there are others gambling on the future price of wheat.What a way to organise the production and distribution of the things humans needs to live and enjoy life.

For Whom The Bell Tolled (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

July saw commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil war which lasted until 1939. Usually little heard of outside historian and left circles it remains a conflict shrouded in myth, heroism and controversy.

For most of the early 20th Century Spain had been in turmoil, the monarchy fell, in 1931 - and liberals and conservatives were still struggling over the future shape of society. Trade unions - heavily influenced by anarchism (especially in Catalonia and Barcelona) were more like paramilitary forces, fighting a pistolismo war with employers and the state who were brutally trying to suppress them into brutal poverty. The worker's movement was split, however, and there was a large Socialist Party (PSE, chiefly a Labour party of the traditional type) with its trade union federation the UGT, with the anarchists in the syndicalist CNT.

Some (these days, those with long memories) use the example of Spain as an incident in which the capitalists would turn to arms and civil war to stop a rising socialist movement, but this ignores several features of the events that lead up to the civil war.

Although often portrayed as a war to defend democracy from insurgent fascists, it is fair to say that political democracy did not command strong support from all sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, in 1934, Largo Caballero, the "Spanish Lenin", lead an abortive revolt with a general strike that was crushed in Madrid, and the miners in Asturias managed to take control of their whole region before being put down - a genuine uprising. This attempt at violent revolution terrified the professional and ruling class of Spain, and set the stage for later tensions. By February 1936 Caballero and the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Party were out of prison and instead part of the newly elected popular front government which won by the slimmest of majorities.

This front consisted of liberals, Basque and Catalan separatists, the PSE and the Communist Party. Although the working class parties were the larger, the liberals actually headed the government - something which was not conducive to stable rule. The PSE itself was not united, ranging from Fabian-like reformists through to die hard revolutionaries. So it is clear that there was not a solid considered demand for revolutionary change. The Asturias rising, had, frightened the horses, and the right began to plot their own uprising.

In the background to all of this, political assassinations and murders continued apace - with partisans of the right and the left at each others' throats. Churches were burned down, political offices wrecked, chaos was spreading throughout society. The sort of everyday politically motivated chaos we have seen so many times since - currently in Iraq, for example.

At the head of the rightwing were the Falangists, a genuinely radical fascist grouping determined to smash the socialists. They were joined by conservative Catholics (representing a large landowning interest), monarchists and the military. It would be the military, under General Francesco Franco, who would provide the main vehicle for the National Front's resistance.

On 18 July 1936 Franco issued a pronunciamento the traditional announcement that preceded Spain's many previous military coups. Unlike them, however, this was a call for a massive social struggle, and one that both sides had been waiting for. Carnage began immediately - radio officers shot their ship's captain rather than hand them over the order. The barracks in Barcelona was surrounded and eventually vanquished after bloody struggle - a national general strike was called.

There followed a savage war - with estimates of the number who died varying from three hundred thousand to a million. It was a thoroughly modern war of the people in arms - aided with zeal heroism and determination against the organised efficiency of a professional army. Although the advantage nominally lay with the loyalist Popular Front government forces (they had the money) they were deeply divided and Franco took the bulk of the army especially the experienced troops.

The "international community" reacted by imposing an arms embargo on both sides - the same sort of trick the Major government used to back the Serbs in their war in the former Yugoslavia. Despite this embargo, some of the great European powers saw this as a chance to flex their muscles. Mussolini's fascist government sent troops and armaments. The German Nazis sent the Condor Legion - and Spain quickly became a training yard for the new form of aerial warfare practised by the Luftwaffe. On the loyalist side aid was given by the Soviet Union through the auspices of its International Brigades - recruited by Communist Parties in various countries. Others, such as George Orwell, volunteered independently.

The international brigades to this day hold a place of honour for many in Britain, especially among the Labour Party some of whose members revere them as defenders of democracy and anti-fascists leading the way in a war that could have stopped fascism before the great slaughter of world war two. Many died, bravely; and their defence of Madrid reads like something from an epic poem. Their enthusiasm made them have a great impact on the war, but not enough to actually save political democracy in Spain.

What started as a local struggle quickly developed into an imperialist battleground, a proxy battle for the tussle between Germany and Russia. This aspect quickly overrode the local concerns - the communists were able to punch above their weight of support thanks to their gift of arms, and they quickly joined with government forces in suppressing the elements of social revolution and independence thrown up by anarchist groups throughout the country. Communist Party torture chambers were discovered after some of their strong holds fell.

This is the source of much of the political recriminations springing from that war. Trotskyists accuse the anarchists of failing to organise a vanguard party and seize power (which was, apparently offered them, much as Baldwin offered the reigns of government to a shocked TUC in 1926). Anarchists point to the role of the Stalinists in liquidating their advances, and point, with some justice, to their achievements. The Trotskyists accuse the Stalinists of selling out Spain in order to demonstrate to the capitalist powers that the USSR had no designs on spreading a world revolution.

In some areas revolutionary committees controlled all the major infrastructure and industry - money was replaced by varying types of voucher system (although in some places they simply instituted controlled prices and wages). Democracy ran throughout the anarchist columns, with democratically elected officers accountable to their troops. The ad hoc nature of these efforts - heroic and imaginative though they were - coupled with the fragmentation of Spain, the ongoing warfare and the continued existence of the market throughout the supply chain eventually meant that they were doomed to failure.

Eventually Franco triumphed, and went on to rule Spain until his death in 1975 - to that rare reward for dictators, death in office. His period of authoritarian rule, built on the back of smashing an independent workers' movement and suppressing the regionalist tendencies of the Basques and Catalans meant that a reasonable orderly transition to capitalist business as usual was possible.

The Spanish civil war has an immense ability for people to read their own interests and perspectives into it. It was a melange of heroism, imagination and daring do mixed with calculated cruelty, brutality, murder mayhem and brute stupidity. It is difficult to blame anarchists who took up arms to defend themselves and their unions from murderous bosses; but we can perhaps look to the rejection of political democracy that preceded the civil war and gave the armed authoritarians the support they needed to break cover and launch their assault.

It is vitally important today to remember that socialists must be the standard bearers of civilisation - the defenders of the political democracy and the peace that we will need to successfully manage the transition to production for use. Rubble doesnt make a good basis for building socialism.

Pik Smeet

Further reading:
The Civil War in Spain (September 1936)
The SPGB and Spain (May 1937)
George Orwell, Spain and anti-fascism (May 1997)

Anarchism and Marxism (2000)

Book Review from the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. 1999.

Murray Bookchin is on the same wavelength as us in that he, too, stands for a classless, stateless society of common ownership in which money becomes redundant and the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" applies.

But the agreement does not stop there. He recommends Marx's analysis of how the capitalist economic system works ("As a study of the capitalist economy as a whole, it [Capital] has no equal today. Marx's economic studies are central to any socialist analysis",). In this book, largely a collection of interviews, he also argues that, although capitalism can offer the occasional palliative, it can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority. And he defends rationalism, science and technology against the current wave of New Age mysticism and self-indulgent life-stylism (including fighting the police on demonstrations) that has infected the Green and anarchist movements. He opposes so-called "identity politics", seeing this as essentially seeking a better deal for women, gays and blacks within capitalism as well as being divisive.
So where do we disagree? As a boy Bookchin had been a member of the US Communist Party's youth section, then he became a Trotskyist. By the 1960s he had come to call himself an anarchist and wrote a series of influential articles that were later published as Post-Scarcity Anarchism. His main argument was that current scientific knowledge and technology had made it possible to establish more or less immediately a decentralised society which would not only eliminate material want but also allow the state and hierarchies to be dissolved and money to be abolished.

In one of the essays called "Listen Marxist!" he gave the vanguardists with their advocacy of "proletarian dictatorships" and "transitional states" a real trouncing in the same sort of way we do. Only he mistakenly attributed the source of their views to Marx, whereas the essay should have more accurately been called 'Listen Leninist!'. Interestingly enough, while still disagreeing with Marx (as over questions of history and the need to win control of the central state) he backtracks considerably in this book on his earlier criticisms.

The major disagreement between him and us is precisely over this last point of the need for the majority to win control of the central state in the course of establishing socialism. In classic anarchist fashion he opposes this on the grounds that, supposedly, it would lead to the perpetuation of the state under new management. He accepts that to win control of the state the majority would need a party but argues that any party must inevitably reflect the state.

He is on very weak ground here as, contrary to classical anarchism (indeed, some other anarchists regard him as not being an anarchist for this), he is in favour of those who want a decentralised, classless, stateless society participating in local elections. But this too involves organising as a party. But if such a party, operating at local level, can organise itself on democratic, non-hierarchical lines why can't a party contesting national elections do so?

Bookchin does in fact advocate co-operation between local "libertarian municipalist" parties, so why couldn't they constitute a federation based on the principles of delegated democracy to win control of central state power without becoming a statist party? And if they could, why not do it? Surely this would be a better strategy than working to win control of local councils in the hope that when a majority of them had been won "the nation-state's power would be sufficiently diminished that people would withdraw their support from it, and it would collapse like a house of cards"? Far better, if only to minimise the risk of violence, to organise also to win a majority in parliament too, not to form a government of course but to end capitalism and dismantle the state.

Adam Buick

Socialism and Ecology (1990)

Book Review from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

In America, and to a certain extent in Britain, the movement of those concerned about the environment has become infested by people who want to turn ecology from a naturalistic science into a religion with a "spiritual" message. Where they are not supporters of conventional religion, they want us to believe that nature is peopled by wood sprites and other spirits headed by a goddess - Mother Earth, or Gaia - who we should worship under the auspices of witches and priestesses, or some such manifest nonsense. On a more philosophical level this takes the form of a doctrine called "deep ecology" according to which human beings and flies are of equal significance and which sees the human species in itself as a disturbing feature to the biosphere which, until we mend our ways, nature is quite justified in taking steps to eliminate (through famines and ecological disasters).

Murray Bookchin is one of those in the ecological movement who are fighting against this resurgence of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism which he calls the "counter-Enlightenment" (it extends beyond the Green movement, of course, as in the growth of astrology, belief in UFOs and the like). He points out in his latest book Remaking Society (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1989) that human beings are both a part and a product of nature; that, despite what the "deep ecologists" say about flies, humans do have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force, since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. It is quite true that at the present time the form human intervention in (the rest of) nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour.

If humans have a "place" in nature, says Bookchin, it can only be to consciously intervene not just to meet their needs but also to ensure nature's balanced functioning; in this sense the human species is the brain and voice of nature, nature become self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system which mediates their intervention in nature. Bookchin is explicit enough on what this change must be: a change from capitalism, in both its corporate enterprise form in the West and its bureaucratic form in the East, to a "community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs":

"The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less than material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory."

This, of course, is instantly recognisable to us as the world society of common ownership, democratic control and production geared to meeting needs that we call "world socialism". Bookchin himself does not use this term, preferring to speak of this as being the application of what he calls "social ecology". He is in fact an anarchist in the anarcho-communist tradition of Kropotkin, and in other of his works has accepted the term "communism" to describe the alternative to capitalism. But what is important is the content, not the label, and it is heartening to know that, whatever our disagreements about how to get from here to there, there is a group of people in the Green movement in America putting forward the same solution as us.

Indeed, some of the things Bookchin says mirror the criticism we have made of the Green Party in this country:

"To substitute words like industrial society for capitalism can thus be misleading . . . To speak of an 'industrial society' without clear reference to the new social relations introduced by capitalism, namely wage labour and a dispossessed proletariat, often wilfully endows technology with mystical powers and a degree of autonomy that it does not really have. It also creates the highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is 'green', 'ecological', or 'moral', even under conditions of wage labour, exchange, competition and the like. This misuse of language imputes to technology - much of which may be very useful socially and ecologically - what should really be directed against a very distinct body of social relationships, namely, capitalistic ones."

Disagreement with Marx
Such disagreements as exist between Bookchin and us arise from the fact that we are in the Marxist whereas he is in the anarchist tradition. In this book Bookchin takes up an explicitly anti-Marx stand, arguing against the materialist conception of history on the grounds that Marx was wrong to say that a free society only became possible with the development of the productive forces under capitalism; on the contrary, says Bookchin, a democratic society of common ownership could have been established at a number of key turning points in history. Since we are now where we are, and both sides are agreed that the solution to world problems lies in the immediate establishment of a society of common ownership, democratic participation and production for needs, this can be seen as a rather academic dispute. After all, whether or not a communistic society could have been established at the end of the feudal era (but wasn't) had sufficient humans opted for this does not affect what we should do now.

This brings us to Bookchin's other disagreement with Marx, in fact not just with Marx but also with those in the anarchist tradition such as the anarcho-syndicalists who continue to look to the class struggle of the workers as the driving force for the establishment of a society of common ownership. "The working class", writes Bookchin, "has become a largely devitalized force for basic social change, not to mention revolution". Here, Bookchin is using the term working class in the limited sense of factory workers and it is true that there is nothing special about factory workers compared with other workers (office workers, service workers) that means that it is the pursuit of their particular interests as factory workers that will be the driving force for the establishment of common ownership. If common ownership is a working class issue, it is an issue for the working class as a whole: all those who are dependent for a living on selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary, irrespective of whether they work in a factory or an office or a school or a shop or whatever.

This is the sense in which we use the term and we still think it makes sense to see the struggle for common ownership as a class struggle. To say that productive resources should not be subject to private property rights is to say that they should be taken away from those who currently hold them as their exclusive property. The struggle to establish common ownership is thus a struggle by the rest of society (in effect, the working class in its proper, broad sense) against the monopolising minority (the capitalist class). This is not to say that, in this struggle, those we in the Socialist Party call the working class are merely pursuing their own narrowly economic interests; at the same time they are pursuing the general interest of the whole of humanity.

Limits to Capitalism
At one time it was widely believed amongst social revolutionaries that the change-over to common ownership would be sparked off by some economic crisis that would push workers to overthrow capitalism just in order to get their basic material needs satisfied. Some in the Marxist tradition (though not us) even believed that capitalism would eventually break down economically, leaving workers no choice but to establish common ownership.

Experience has shown these beliefs to have been misplaced. So what will spark off the change-over? Bookchin suggests that the limits to capitalism are "external" rather than "internal":

"For generations, radical theorists opined about the 'inner limits' of the capitalist system, the 'internal' mechanisms within its operation as an economy that would yield its self-destruction . . . In the face of vast biogeochemical dislocations that have opened vast holes in the earth's ozone layer and increased the temperature of the planet by the 'greenhouse effect', these limits are now clearly ecological. Whatever may be the destiny of capitalism as a system that has 'internal limits' economically, we can emphatically say that it has external limits ecologically."

This (rather than stale arguments about the materialist conception of history) is the sort of thing that those who want a world of common ownership and democratic participation should be discussing. We ourselves have long reached the conclusion that capitalism has no "internal" limits (our classic pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse appeared in 1932): unfortunately, from a purely economic view, capitalism could continue indefinitely. Such limits as it might have as an economic and social system have therefore to be "external".

Bookchin's hypothesis that these limits are ecological is attractive (we have in fact discussed it amongst ourselves), but there are other candidates, in particular the nature of human beings as rational and socially co-operative animals. (Can capitalism reduce us indefinitely to isolated competing atoms when it is our nature as a species to co-operate to survive? Can capitalism indefinitely prevent us as life-forms capable of reflective thought from seeing that, as a matter of objective fact, common ownership and democratic control is the only framework within which contemporary problems can be solved?).

Whether we disagree with Bookchin's hypothesis here or not, it is clear that he is on the same wavelength as us. This is not a discussion between supporters and opponents of socialism but a discussion amongst people who are agreed that the way forward for humanity lies in the establishment of a world of common ownership, democratic participation and production to meet needs.

Adam Buick

To Have or To Be . . . (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The title of this article is taken from the book of the same name by the psychologist, Erich Fromm. It is probably true to state that many Socialist Party members view psychology with some suspicion because of its tendency to see “abnormal” human behaviour in isolation; but Fromm is in no doubt that it is our sick society that leads to such behaviour, and not the reverse. Thus, his ideas are worthy of study by socialists.

Fromm commences To Have Or To Be by stating that the failure of capitalism, aside from its economic contradictions lies in its two main premises:

  “The first is ‘that the aim of life is happiness, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (radical hedonism) “;
   The second is ‘that egotism, selfishness, and greed, as the system needs to generate them in order to function, leads to harmony and peace.'”

With regard to the first premise, Fromm distinguishes between subjectively felt needs (desires) whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure, and objectively valid needs that are rooted in human nature, and whose realisation is conducive to human growth which produces “well-being”.

Fromm notes the contradiction between the concept of unlimited pleasure and the ideal of disciplined work, and between an obsessional work ethic and the ideal of complete laziness. “Both contradictory attitudes”, we are told, “correspond to an economic necessity; twentieth-century capitalism is based on maximal consumption of the goods and services produced as well as on routinised teamwork”.

Fromm sums up the first section by stating that “… (the) pursuit of happiness does not produce well-being”. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save!

The second psychological premise of capitalism, that the pursuit of individual egoism leads to harmony and peace, is equally rejected by Fromm. To be an egoist means:

  “I want everything for myself that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have. “
   "I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes: I must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. “

Fromm is in no doubt that the passion for having must lead to never-ending class war and, in global terms, international war. He states that “Greed and peace preclude each other”. He is also in no doubt that the development of an economic system as an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will, is a recent development. The question, therefore, is no longer “What is good for Man?” but “What is good for the system?” – and the assumption is that the latter is good for the former.

And this assumption is bolstered by the further assumption:

  “That the very qualities that the system required of human nature – egotism, selfishness and greed – were innate in human nature; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them.”

Societies in which egotism, selfishness and greed did not exist, were supposed to be “primitive” and their inhabitants “childlike”. People refused to recognise that their traits were not natural drives that caused industrial society to exist, but that they were the products of social circumstances.

Fromm reinforces his assertion with the little-known, but surprising, fact that the majority of the world’s languages have no word for “to have”. Such languages express possession in the form “it is to me”, whilst others have only developed the construction “I have” at a much later date. “This fact”, argues Fromm, “suggests that the word for ‘to have’ develops in connection with the development of private property, while it is absent in societies with predominantly functional property; that is, possession for use”. And “While private property is supposed to be natural and a universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history.”

Thus, for Fromm, the difference between “being” and “having” is between a society centred around persons and one centred around things such as property, profit and power. The distinction is between “I have knowledge” and “I know” – where “knowing” means to “see reality in all its nakedness”.

Fromm therefore concludes that the character traits engendered by our socio-economic system are pathogenic, and produce sick people and a sick society. Given that fact, we are headed for an economic catastrophe unless we change our social system. The physical survival of the human race depends on it.

Richard Layton

Blogger's Note:

From the same issue of the Socialist Standard, see also 'And Fromm Where . . . '

China At Last Joins The Scramble For Africa

From the January-March 2006 issue of Socialist Banner, the quarterly journal of WSM members in Africa.

The recent announcement by the Senegalese to re-establish diplomatic ties with Mainland China did not come as a surprise to many. This move understandably signified an end to diplomatic ties with Taiwan. This comes in the wake of intensified efforts on the part of the Chinese authorities to get involved in "Africa's development". In this regard, their Foreign Minister, Li Zhaoxing officially unveiled an African Policy Paper (APP) on 12th February 2006 which outlined the future relationship between Africa and China. This was immediately followed by his tour of several African countries from 11th to 19th January.

Why, one would ask, have the Chinese authorities only just realised that they must redouble their efforts to assist in Africa's development? The policy document on Africa answers the question. As is always the case in carrot-and-stick diplomacy, it starts by promising that China, will "co-ordinate positions on major international and regional issues and stand for mutual support on major issues concerning state sovereignty, territorial integrity, national dignity and human rights." Of course, this kind of hackneyed phrase-mongering is what the bankrupt African leaders want to hear so as to justify to their suffering people the need to bring in the Chinese business interests.

The rest of the content of the APP was devoted to the real intentions of China. First, it made it clear that "the Chinese government will adopt more effective measures to facilitate African commodities access to the Chinese market." This makes it clear that the focal point of China-Africa relationship is resource-based. China's economy, measured in terms of the capitalist yardstick, is growing at an alarming rate and, therefore, it is in dire need of raw materials. As a result, the document states further that "the Chinese government encourages and supports Chinese enterprises' investment and business in Africa, and will continue to provide preferential loans and buyer credits to this end". This, it said, would be done without any political strings attached.

The policy paper also promises to promote high level military-related technological exchanges with African countries, to continue to train African military personnel and support defence and army building of African countries for their own security.

However, one does not need to read between the lines to understand this desperate more by China to increase its role in "Africa's development". The African people must take cue from the age-old adage that once bitten twice shy. The western business interests (represented by their governments in London, Paris, Washington etc) entered Africa under the guise of bringing civilisation to barbaric Africa. The rest of the story is known to all. Therefore African people, not African rulers and their masters in big business, must realise that the Chinese are only coming as competitors to the traditional exploiters.

The pledge by China to co-operate with Africans on military matters means not only that China will sell Africa its obsolete military wares but in doing so it will also equip and strengthen state security forces in Africa, enabling them to better hold down the people so that the looting Africas resources can go on smoothly.

Another equally important aspect to the Chinese design is to use African countries as a pawn in their decade-old conflict with Taiwan. African countries that do not recognise Taiwan are sure to get Chinese foreign direct investment, aid and military assistance.

How then can African people react to this attempt by Chinese business to join in the scramble for the continents resources? Do we manifest our objection to the whole issue through mass demonstrations? This will not lead anyone anywhere, as rulers and their partners in business control the forces of coercion and will not hesitate to unleash them on defenceless civilians, as has happened all too often. Do we attempt to overthrow the governments? No - this will not only lead to violence and bloodshed in which only the innocent die and experience testifies that the new group of leaders will only turn out to be the same as, if not worse than, their predecessors.

The only way forward, therefore, is to endeavour to let as many people as possible understand the nature of system that is in operation in today's world - the capitalist system. It is a system that is global in nature. It is a system in which only a minority of people control the wealth and resources of the world and in which the majority live lives of poverty, denied access to the necessaries of life. Through their control of these resources they also effectively control governments. In fact, business and government are on the same side against the majority working class. Therefore, to put an effective and a definitive end to such looting and plundering, as the Western business interests are already deeply involved in and which now Chinese big business is contemplating, the capitalist system must go.

PG

Other articles in the latest issue of Socialist Banner include:
- NGOs: Friends or Foes?
- Kenya's Referendum Farce
- Hunger in the Sahel
- Zimbabwe
- African Leaders and the United Nations

For more details on the Socialist Banner and other literature produced by the World Socialist Movement, email spgb@worldsocialism.org

Chomsky (2006)

Book Review from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wolfgang Sperlich: Noam Chomsky. Reaktion Books.

This is a volume in the Critical Lives series, so it opens with a brief biographical sketch of Chomsky, noting that he was influenced by writers such as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. It's good to learn that by his early teens Chomsky was not just opposed to Stalinism but was also "a pretty committed anti-Leninist". Then comes a chapter on his contributions to linguistics and philosophy, though to be honest you'd need to have some prior idea of his views here to make much sense of Sperlich's presentation.

The main chapter is entitled 'Political Activist', and it presents Chomsky's writings on various political issues, concentrating on his exposures of US foreign policy. This is a decent guide to Chomsky's attacks on the US government, military and establishment, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, the Middle East to the aftermath of 9/11. Unfortunately there's little attempt at elaborating Chomsky's own views on how society should be organised, other than labelling him variously as an anarcho-syndicalist and a libertarian socialist. He's quoted at on point as saying, "capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of 'possessive individualism' - all must be regarded as fundamentally anti-human." Also that a consistent anarchist must oppose wage slavery and private ownership of the means of production.

Chomsky has often expressed his support for 'left wing' governments in the developing world. With regard to the president of Brazil, Sperlich writes, "I ask Chomsky if Lula da Silva shouldn't have abolished the state of Brazil by now and introduced council communism or anarcho-syndicalist freedom. Chomsky answers that it's easy for us to say such things because we do not have to live with the consequences - Lula da Silva has to." Perhaps Chomsky should have said that it was a bloody stupid question, based on the assumption that a political leader can introduce a new social system.

The last chapter summarises Chomsky's work on the mass media as a tool for suppressing the truth and presenting a pro-capitalist view of the world, for (in the title of one of Chomsky's books) 'Manufacturing Consent'.

So this is a useful if unexciting guide to Chomsky's ideas. And until I read Sperlich I didn't know there is a radio station called Radio Chomsky, even if it is in New Zealand.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: More Slaughter in the Middle East (2006)

Editorial from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again in the Middle East innocent workers are being killed and useful structures destroyed. The immediate cause was the capture in a raid from Lebanon of two Israeli soldiers but the ultimate isssue was, once again, who controls this oil-rich region: the US and its allies or various local elites?

All states are artificial and illegitimate but Israel is particularly so. Set up by colonists from Europe on the basis of fables recounted in a book supposedly emanating from a god, it has been armed and financed by the United States as its only reliable ally in the region. Over the years it has acted as Americas gendarme there to deal with sections of the local Arab ruling classes who have sought to challenge US domination. These sections, in their turn, have identified Israel for what it is and have sought to destroy it and have been able to win considerable popular support.

This is not to say that Israel is under direct US control. The rulers of Israel have their own agenda and can, and do, act independently of their protector. But thats a price the US has to pay to avoid sending its own troops to fight and die there. The US would like some compromise solution between Israel and local Arab elites but in the meantime gives Israel a virtual free hand, only issuing ritual appeals to it to exercise restraint.

Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon, is armed and financed by two states whose regime the US has vowed to change: Iran and Syria. It is entirely possible that the present crisis was deliberately provoked by Iran, which has ambitions to be the dominant regional power, as a means of bringing counter-pressure on the US in the diplomatic trial of strength going on over its nuclear programme, a means of showing that it too is not without bargaining counters. Israel, incidentally, is without doubt already a nuclear power, which shows up the US hypocrisy over the spread of nuclear weapons.

So, as a conflict over which states and ruling classes should dominate the region, no working class interest is involved except in so far as it is they who are its innocent victims and need the killing, maiming and destruction to stop. Socialists are always spontaneously on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors and the massive use of overwhelming force by the state of Israel clearly exposes it as the oppressor. But just because we sympathise with the victims of Israeli oppression does not mean that we favour the solutions popular amongst them.

A Palestinian state would be a capitalist state. "Anti-imperialism" is the slogan of local elites who wish to dominate the region in place of the US, a situation which would still leave the mass of the population there exploited and oppressed with the eternal problem of finding enough money to buy the things they need to live.

Capitalism is a war-prone society with a built-in clash of interests between states over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes and strategic points to protect these. In the Middle East the conflict is over oil, and strategic points to protect its supply and transport, which has already led to many wars there.

The only lasting way out is to get rid of capitalism and replace it by a world society of common ownership and democratic control. On that basis, the resources of the world, including oil, could be extracted and used for the benefit of all the people of the world. Poverty and misery in the Middle East, as elsewhere, could be ended once and for all. The waste of arms and the horrors of war would disappear.

Socialism is, quite literally and without exaggeration, the hope of humanity. 

Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834 (2002)

The Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival is an event held every year on the third weekend of the July in the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, England to mark and celebrate the memory of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm labourers who, in 1834, were arrested, convicted and transported to Australia for forming a trade union as a means of resisting the lowering of their wages.

The event is organised and attended by trade unionists, and in amongst the beers, the bands and the bouncy castles, occasionally a bit of politics breaks out in the form of stalls being staffed by political parties, and leaflets distributed to the attendees. The following is the text of a leaflet that was distributed by members of the Socialist Party at the event in 2002.

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community".

The above will be familiar to members of the Socialist Party as the party's object. It was, however, found on a web site celebrating the commemoration of the Tolpuddle martyrs. It demonstrates the extraordinary range of appeal that the memory of the "Dorset martyrs" still holds, from all sections of the left of capitalism.

The remembrance of the persecution of early unionism and the celebration of the ultimate triumph, both of reprieve of the martyrs and the ultimate widespread growth of trade unionism, seems to provoke outbursts of seeming socialist ambition. The tradition still continues, this year on 20 and 21 July with the annual TUC rally in Tolpuddle. Like all such occasions marking the history of working class struggle, the left makes it an opportunity to bluster about its "values" and, largely invented, history. These displays, of course, are in stark contrast to the reality of the achievements of the left and the tattered remnants of its ambitions.

The use of a socialist object in relation to the annual Tolpuddle rally is appropriate in recording the contribution made by working men and women in a period of rapid social change and industrial advance, accompanied by political persecution. Such resistance as was heroically given by those convicted of forming a union at Tolpuddle deserves to be remembered, along with other early political movements (such as Owenism, Chartism, republicanism) that allowed the eventual formulation of a socialist political party to be possible. But the use of socialist slogans by trade unionists and political parties whose aims are a long way short of anything approaching socialism is mere canting hypocrisy.

It may seem rather too obvious, to those fetishising "struggle", but what the cause of socialism needs is socialists. The struggles of the working class of the last two hundred years should tell us one thing - that it is futile to seek to fight a rearguard action against capitalism. The most successful movements of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries had programmes that sought to maximise gains within emergent and rapidly expanding industrial capitalism. In politics, the Chartists challenged for political democracy, the success of which may have had revolutionary implications. In social thought, Owenism provided a critique of competition, combining the need for co-operation and the potential of harnessing of machines to humankind rather than the harnessing of workers to machines. In the economic sphere, trade unionism sought to increase the standard of living of the working class, including moves towards general unionism and, in the first decades of the twentieth century, syndicalism.

Socialists of course recognise the limitations of these movements. Chartism and trade unionism sought to increase the power of the working class, while Owenism tried to transcend it despite being at base a paternal, regulated capitalism. The threads and influence of all three, however, can be seen in the emergence of Marxian thought and the development of a programme emphasising the need to replace capitalism according to the design of the workers rather than reform the worst aspects of existing society.

The struggle of the working class to build a new society, replacing capitalist private ownership and competition with common ownership and production for use rather than profit resulted in the emergence, by the late nineteenth century of a growing movement pressing for something approaching socialism. The challenge recognised the nature of the source of working class exploitation in the productive process and saw poverty, material and mental, next to vast accumulations of private capital amidst the productive potential for material abundance for all.

It is unfortunate that as it grew, working class opposition to capitalism reacted to its partial concessions from capital by withdrawing its ambition from social revolution to social reformation. Here emerged, not the replacement of capitalism by socialism, but the incorporation of "labour" into existing productive relations. Paradoxically, the ideological justification for this (the "gradual" advance of working class interests rather than "inexpedient" socialism now) has not produced, by the twenty-first century, an emergent socialist society, but an almost complete withdrawal of most inheritors of this kind of position from any kind of programme which comes close to criticism of modern capitalist society.

So, what to do? No surprise here, I am afraid. No easy ways out. If you want socialism then you should be a socialist. If we, collectively as socialists, want socialism then we should make socialists. How is this to be done? Well, we can rule out "gradual" reform. A hundred years of that has brought us further back than we were in the beginning. What about a programme of ambitious reforms first with a genuine desire for revolution later - a "dialectical" strategic disappointment and a vanguard leadership for workers when they realise that capitalism cannot be reformed without new problems (inflation, for example)? Well, if you want someone else to direct you, if you want to work for a programme you know will fail, if you want to lie to lead, well, yes. But if not, if you regard democracy as important, then it is necessary to recognise that it is us, the working class, who must make socialism for ourselves and that we cannot be led to socialism.

As for programmes, if you want to work for union rights, benefits, full employment, against war, just name your cause, then join the Labour party to try and make them make promises or the Socialist Alliance or the ex-Militants who make promises they cannot keep. And, in ten or twenty years time, be prepared to be no further forward than you are now.

If people vote for an "ethical" foreign policy or an increase in public spending, in the name of socialism, and all they get is broken promises, because the global finance pulls the plug, or roaring inflation, then people will think that is what socialism is. Simple. However, if people vote for capitalism, in the name of capitalism, and get capitalism, then they might want something else. This has happened to some extent with the disillusion over New Labour and there is promise in the new (and growing?) "anti-capitalist" movement.

If it is solutions to world poverty you want, to insecurity, to global power politics, to war, then socialism, production for use not profit under democratic control (not just as a slogan but as actuality), that offers a positive solution, rather than valid but hopeless criticism. By all means let us defend and increase our share of the wealth we produce in capitalism. But if you want more than this, if we want something else, something better in the twenty-first century and beyond than we had in the decadent twentieth century, if you want something to work for rather than against, if you want socialism, then join the socialists.

Colin Skelly

The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)

It turns out that Channel 4 is currently repeating Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH on its More4 channel. Best known for his earlier TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, which by common consent is considered one of the most important and best loved dramas in the history of British television, Bleasdale was lauded and condemned in equal measure for GBH because so many people thought it was little more than a knockabout attack on the local politics of his hometown, Liverpool, and the then Militant Tendency's domination of its Labour council. Reproduced below is a review of the drama that appeared in the Socialist Standard at the time of its original showing, which delves deeper and goes beyond the notion that Bleasdale was doing little more than writing ten hours of television drama so that he could stick the metaphorical boot into Derek Hatton.

The Off the Telly website carries an interesting article on GBH, as part of a series of articles on Bleasdale and his work.

TV Review From The August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four hyped it relentlessly as a Great Drama of our times. Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader. The Right wing objected because the series portrayed MI5 as being a shower of devious criminals - heaven forbid the thought. The SWP, who rarely comprehend anything that was not written by a dead Russian, denounced Bleasdale as a brown-nose who sold out to the ruling class. GBH (C4, Wednesdays and Sundays) seems to have upset them all. So does all great drama.

What was GBH about? Taken literally, it was implausible nonsense. Whole cities are not thrown into chaos by half a dozen or so Equity ruffians; Good and Evil rarely take on such vivid personal realisations as Murray and Nelson; even corrupt Labour leaders have more political know-how than Murray was shown as having. As fictional political history the series was drivel. Sadly, it is as fictional political history (FPH) that most lefties watched it and switched off in disgust. GBH was about power. It was about why people lust for political leadership, what they do with it, and how, after all the panting after it and delusion of luxuriating in it, most politicians come to discover that they do not really have it. Politicians are tools of power. The French professor, Maximilien Rubel, once wrote a letter to the Socialist Standard saying that the people who are our rulers are paranoid megalamaniacs who cannot be trusted. Maybe so, maybe not - certainly, even the most balanced of leaders must act like a madman if they are to dance to the cacophony of the profit system. Michael Murray, abused and beaten by power, became a political abuser and beater. It was the only way he knew. The political was personal. The brilliance of Bleasdale's writing was that Murray, the hateful petty tyrant, was so much more than that. He was more even than a comical, power-hungry stooge; a modern Chaplinesque Great Dictator. Murray was a man with whom we empathised. His was a world of the used and the users; he had been used and now he tried to use others. His world was our world: the world of human exploitation on every level.

Jim Nelson, Michael Palin's romantic hero of the series, was a man afraid and therefore strong because he understood - or began to do so - his fear. He spoke more than once of how in our society the poison is seeping down. The poison in question is the poison of power-madness and obsessive exploitation. The simplification that evil emanates from Tory bastards may have satisfied simple-minded rebels a decade ago, but now it is clearer to see just how the human perversions of power-madness are coming from all directions, including those movements which pose as being for the people. In short, the fleas from the Tory dog have rubbed off on to the Labour poodles who can only fight the Tories by being like Tories. As for Militant, it is infiltrating amongst the fleas, only able to get power by being more loathsome than the rest. They are playing the same game.

The message of GBH is that if you try to beat the Devil by dressing up as Satan you end up not being able to tell who is who. Murray thought he was being manipulated by Trots when he was really being used by MI5. The only reason he couldn't tell the difference is because there wasn't any. MI5 broke Murray. Bleasdale overstated the real power of the state to intervene in electoral politics. But then this was not FPH. What he got right was the power of the decent many to resist the arrogant few. That is one of the most hopeful political lessons; it must be, for workers are the many and the force against us is the very, very few. The scene in the final episode when the "decent workers", as the caricature portrayed them, stopped the "ignorant little gobshites", as the script referred to the thuggish Trots, from dictating to the majority was an inspiring moment. At that meeting leadership collapsed and illusory power was no shield: Murray wept and the boys who had only ever read one book and knew how to shout slogans were shown that democracy is bigger than them.

But wait a minute. Where was that great scene taking place? In the Labour Party hall. What was a bloke of principle and courage doing in that old wreck of a political whore-house? Here we see Bleasdale the faithful Labourite overcoming the writer of insight. On one level GBH was a series about why Labour should expel Militant. We socialists could not care less if they expel them or sleep with them or form a coalition with the Monster Raving Loonies, but if that is the political message which was being offered to us, then when are we to see the series about hypocritical, compromising, well-bribed Labour "moderates" who do not need to be crushed by MI5 because they are safe? You do not need state conspiracies to neutralise Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair - they come ready-neutered.

GBH will be talked about for a long time to come. It should be. Both Robert Lindsay (Michael Murray) and Michael Palin (Jim Nelson) performed in ways that we will not see again soon. The wit of the writing was a model of classical characterisation and symbolic plotting. It made us think, even though we were not all thinking the same thing. GBH was about a horrible corrupt country - "a cold land" - where the opposition was dirty and the "intelligence" people filthy and all of us either in it or against it.

Steve Coleman

Further Reading:
From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool

Bar Room Rebels (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bar-room rebels are very tough - when they talk. And they know how to talk. They have fought a hundred bloody battles in their conversations in the boozer on a Saturday night. With Guinness as their fuel for their tanks they have defeated countless oppressors - at least, they have spoken of doing so.

The bar-room rebels come to life on a Friday night when the pub doors open and the band is tuning up. After a pint or two they speak with passion about injustices which they know to exist. The troops in Ireland and the despicable prison camp at Long Kesh where men are sent without trial before a jury to be tortured and wasted. They are right to be angry - only the politically desensitised are not. The misery caused by racist tyranny in South Africa - the white dictatorship, the torture and murders committed in its name for the sake of "law and order", the willingness of governments to deal with such oppressors. Again, workers are right to be angry. The bosses who are robbing us - we work hard, they grow rich. The idle, parasitic millionaires. And the bar-room rebel downs another pint and concludes that "they're all a bunch of bastards". A common response to the class which exploits us; scientific socialists are not too pure of mind to share such indignant emotions - we would be peculiar revolutionaries if we did not.

The leisure hours of some of the bar-room rebels are one long expression of anger. Every symbol of capitalist oppression is muttered against in endless bitterness, usually preceded by the inappropriate adjective "fucking", and that for some of the bar-room rebels is the beginning and the end of the fight. At best, such behaviour can be described as harmless; it is also politically useless. But that is not the worst of bar-room politics.

Worse still are the theoretical terrorists who are to be found making aggressive verbal noises in the pub. They support the IRA. "Up the Provos", they shout, as if this is some kind of threat to the ruling class. Now let us be clear in understanding two points about the politics of the gun. Firstly, it has nothing to do with liberation. You do not liberate anyone by the tactics of the militarist oppressor. Cetainly, it is theoretically possible that violent struggle will remove British occupation of a part of Ireland, but it is just as sure that once the old oppressors are out the men with the guns will be the new oppressors - the new ruling class. That is the lesson of 1916. Workers who believe in the illusion of national liberation should look at the Irish Republic, where British capitalists have more capital invested in working class exploitation than in the North, and they will see that wars over nationalism lead only to new, but not very different, nations. Secondly, violence is not something to be theorised about. Armchair terrorists are not only mistaken for thinking that freedom will come from the barrel of a gun but they are hypocrites for doing nothing about their conviction.

Not so long ago the Islington branch of The Socialist Party had a debate against a bunch of bar-room rebels called Red Action. Their main speaker argued that winning the war against the British state in the north of Ireland is the key issue in the class struggle, exhibiting a degree of sincerity unusual on the Left. His comrades cheered him when he made his comment and spoke loudly about the important and brave struggle of the Republicans in Ireland. But killing workers is not a theoretical position, it is a practical one. Why don't those who are so eager to cheer when it comes to supporting military violence get in on the act? After all, if socialists genuinely believed that defeating the British army in Ireland was the decisive issue in the class struggle (a nationalistic belief which no socialist could share) we would have an obligation to join the armed struggle. But for the bar-room rebels it is much easier to sing a few nationalistic songs (it is a sight worth seeing: these so-called Red Internationalists sitting in a pub on a Saturday night singing A Nation Once Again) and paint a few slogans on the toilet walls than to go and do what they urge other to do.

The bar-room rebel fight wars with his mouth. The present writer has been told countless times that he is not qualified to speak about Ireland because he was not born there. Such crass reasoning would lead to the conclusion that the Loyalist majority of the North must be most qualified to speak about Ireland because they were born there. Socialists recognise that workers have no country. The bar-room rebels will agree with that view and then talk at length about the nation which is soon to be born out of the heroic military struggle which they are unwilling to join.

Those who offer support to terrorism in resolutions have an obligation to do so on the streets. Socialists refuse to make brave sounding noises which we cannot back up with action. Like the Christian pacifist who declares that "Thou shall not kill . . . unless under orders from Her Majesty's government", the bar-room rebels proclaim that the armed road is the only road - but they'll not be collecting their ammunition this weekend.

Within Trotskyist circles, where insurrection is always just coming up on the agenda (after the expulsion of this or that member) bar-room rebellion is a favourite pastime. They are to be found often, sitting over half pints of lager discussing whether the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers Revolutionary Party will run soviets after the BBC has been taken over in a midnight coup and the Royal Family has been sent to Epping Forest to receive the Nicholas II treatment. Big talk; if words were bullets the millionaires would be trembling. And the bar-room rebel is quite sure of the futility of trying to persuade fellow workers of the need for a new system. The essence of Leninist politics is that workers are too thick to know what socialism is all about. We must be led. So the bar-room rebels persist in their puerile fantasies about Petrograd in 1917, expelling each other as they fight over who will be Lenin and who will be Trotsky. Meanwhile the would-be Stalin never buys a round and takes the minutes.

The odd thing about these bar-room insurrectionists is that (to their credit) if they saw a gun they would faint. Guns and bombs and the sophisticated instruments of murder are sickening, obscene objects, not symbols of human freedom. Armies are necessarily brutal and authoritarian.

The case for political violence is the case against the possibility of working class consciousness. Once workers understand our oppression we can disposssess he ruling class of both the means of violent coercion and the means of wealth production and distribution. The bar-room rebels base their talk about violence on the defeatist belief that the ruling minority will always be bigger than us. Indeed, the capitalist elite might respond to majority socialist revolution with violence. But if they do they will be powerless in the face of the democratic majority. There is no glory in getting killed; as workers, our aim must be to avoid at all costs the possibility of suffering for our class, while ensuring victory for our class.

A recent topic of noise-making for the bar-room rebels is the struggle in South Africa. Socialists are just as sickened and angered by the racist dictatorship of apartheid as are our fellow workers who have come to hate it. It is easy to be sickened and angered, but then what? There is an implicit racist attitude, expressed by some leftists in Britain, both white and black, that violence is the only possible way out of oppression for the African blacks. It is a racist perception because it assumes that persuasion, organisation, democratic action, trade union struggle - these are not to be expected of the black South African. It is based on the racist caricature of the spear-carrying, unthinking "native" who can only win by the rules of the jungle. The bar-room rebels are quite happy to see a bloodbath in South Africa - "it is the only way". But it will not be their blood in the bath. There have been no reports of British leftists going to fight alongside the ANC.

Socialists would not be historically scientific if they did not understand why workers join the IRA, why they join the ANC. The present writer was once told by a comrade in Belfast how after the British troops started beating up and killing Republicans the IRA won more recruits than they had guns. State violence breeds counter-violence. The Socialist Party is not the Liberal Party; we do not sit around tutting at workers for becoming violent. But neither are we opportunist liars who will tell workers that violence will create anything but new rulers. Only the struggle to end capitalism will bring genuine human liberation. And the struggle is easier to win than those in which countless workers have had their lives wasted as they have swallowed nationalist myths and joined the dead heroes.

It is not for socialists to begrudge our fellow workers a few drinks and a bit of shouting on a Saturday night. The bar-room rebel is but a political reflection of the poverty of working class life. Out of the emotional anger of the heated pub debate socialists have been made - and many more will begin to think about politics in the place where workers try to escape and brewers get rich. But to the bar-room rebel we have a warning: you can't romanticise the struggle forever. The need to get rid of this rotten capitalist system is urgent. Sloganising and fighting wars with bar mats and looking for new nations is no solution. And the bar-room rebel knows that it is no solution. Perhaps that is why one or two of them are reading this article.

Steve Coleman