Preface to Daniel De Leon by Stephen Coleman (1990)

The following is the preface by the author to his biography of Daniel De Leon, which was part of Manchester University Press' Lives of the Left series. 

Thanks go to La Bataille socialiste  blog for originally putting this on the net.

This biography is a study of uncompromised revolutionary hope and dismal political failure. The story of Daniel De Leon is not that of a populist leader or a radical legislator, but of a militant and unswerving Marxist and irrepressible socialist activist who could see what was wrong and what must be changed in the mean and sordid atmosphere of turn-of-the-century American capitalism. The wrongs which he exposed and the change which he sought concerned not only the nature of the capitalism itself, but also the ways in which that system tends to dominate and misdirect efforts to resist it. The wrongs were to outlive De Leon; the change has yet to come. Still people of reason argue with passion, and sometimes despair, about why socialist ideas have never taken root in the USA; why the American working class has been so successfully accommodated within the capitalist system; why the message of De Leon has been utterly unheeded. It is to be hoped that this biographical study of the pioneer of American Marxism will contribute to an explanation of the hopes and failures which characterised the early socialist tradition in the USA.

Writers of history have not been kind to Daniel De Leon. Apart from the generally uncritical hagiographical accounts of his life written by De Leonists in defence of their tradition, most historians have mentioned De Leon only in passing, usually disparagingly and often inaccurately. When I first came to study the history of socialist thought in the USA, I was surprised (and irritated) to discover that no serious scholarly work dealing exclusively with De Leon’s ideas has been published. It reminded me of the absence of serious scholarly works on the great English Marxist, William Morris, which had at one time been a feature of British socialist historiography. It was clear to me from the outset that De Leon was a figure of major intellectual importance in the history of American socialist thought, and it was just no good for his life and ideas to be left to the realm of superficial caricature. As I embarked upon a study of De Leon’s writings and speeches it became obvious that I was considering a substantial political theorist, an evaluation of whom should not be clouded by tedious psychological investigations or other long-obsolete sectarian squabbles. In the time that I have written this book I have come to conclude that most of the original attacks upon De Leon were motivated by the fact that he would not abandon his principles in order to court the kind of popularity socialist often attract when they stop being socialists. The secondary critics of De Leon have too often been inclined simply to regurgitate the prejudices of those who wrote before them without comprehending the political context of such prejudices. I must plead guilty to an absence of biographical interest in the deeper qualities or defects of De Leon’s personality, nor would I  expect others to evaluate the political ideas of a Marx, a Mill or a Morris on the basis of criteria which are best left to computer dating agencies. In so far as De Leon’s character influenced his effect as a political thinker and activist such matters are considered in the following pages. It is my hope that readers will be motivated by this account of De Leon’s life to turn next to his many very readable and easily available writings, in which are to be found some of the soundest and most straightforward Marxist thinking between the years 1890 and 1914. The account which follows is intended to clarify the context and meaning of such writings as well as to raise a number of criticisms which the openminded reader will want to consider.

I acknowledge with gratitude the contributions to the production of this book of several people. Melvin Harris, whose profound intellectual generosity has been an inspiration to me, allowed me free access to his unique collection of material by and on De Leon; furthermore, the discussions I had with him and the suggestions I received helped me immensely to understand some of the important themes examined in this book. Frank Girard entertained me while I was researching in the USA, offered me the benefit of his years of scholarly and committed reflection upon De Leon’s contribution to the socialist movement, and (together with Ben Perry, with whom he is writing what promises to be an excellent history of the Socialist Labor Party) gave me insights into the De Leonist tradition which I could not have obtained otherwise. Adam Buick has encouraged and, sometimes, directed my research, especially into De Leon’s conception of socialism. Clifford Slapper’s very useful comments on the text and consistently intelligent suggestions of ways to improve both the stylistic and political quality of this book are much appreciated. I have received useful information from Edmund Grant, Ronald A. Sims, John O’Neil, Louis Lazarus and a number of others in the USA who did not know me personally but who heard that I was writing about De Leon and were kind enough to send me literature by, or about, him. In expressing my sincere thanks to these people, I must make clear that I take responsibility for any errors of fact or fault of interpretation which may have found their way into the text. I would also like to thanks Sally McCann for her diligent and very helpful work in copy-editing this book. Above all, I dedicate this book to my father, who first taught me about the importance of history and the vision of socialism, which, when combined, can change the world; without his support over many years this book could never have been written.

Stephen Coleman

An American Marxist (1990)

Book Review from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Daniel De Leon. By Stephen Coleman. Manchester University Press. £25.

The contribution to socialist thought of Daniel De Leon has been neglected over the years. Most labour historians have mentioned him only in passing, usually in scorn and often inaccurately. Stephen Coleman’s book, in Manchester University Press’s “Lives of the Left” series, rectifies the situation. But who was De Leon?

By 1886 Venezuelan-born Daniel De Leon was 34 and living in the Hispanic quarter of New York. An ordinary family man, his main concern was to achieve secure employment as a university law lecturer. However, he was soon to come into conflict with the status quo and leave university life for good. He immersed himself in the radical movements of his day, finally emerging as a Marxian socialist in 1890. He joined the American Socialist Labour Party (SLP) which he was to dominate, transform and remain in for the rest of his life. He stood for socialism and nothing but, and his distinct brand of Marxism and party organisation is still extant today.

De Leon’s major concern, states Coleman, was “to apply the orthodox position of Marx to the industrial conditions of his own time, and to simplify its reasoning and conclusions”. He goes so far as to include him in the tradition of popularising socialist ideas of William Morris and Robert Tressell and to write that it would be hard to name any other source of Marxian education in the USA. De Leonist bodies also emerged in Canada and Australia.

In Britain De Leon’s works were a major influence on the revolutionary minority which left the Social Democratic Federation in 1903-4. This minority formed the British Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Coleman quotes Jack Fitzgerald, a founder member of the SPGB, who thought the American SLP’s journal The People “the best socialist journal published in English”.

De Leon’s standards were rigorous, and Coleman makes it clear that he imposed them on the SLP. For a start, membership of the party was not automatic. Applicants had to demonstrate an understanding of SLP principles before joining. Neither were waverers tolerated for long. That unity was not to be had at any price is demonstrated by the party split of 1899, when a halving of the membership was regarded by the remaining members as a gain in the party’s strength. James Connolly was one of the more notable waverers to be ousted. Now more famed for his Irish nationalism than his socialism, he left the SLP fold with De Leon accusing him of introducing racial (national) and religious questions into party tactics and organisation.

De Leon’s influence was such that principles would not be exchanged for a “broad-church” numbers-game. It was this principled stand for socialism and nothing but that influenced those who found the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But this is as far as it goes. There is another aspect of De Leonism that Coleman could have more clearly distinguished from this political influence: socialist industrial unionism.

“Socialists tend to die frustrated or deluded: frustrated that human emancipation has not been achieved, or deluded that it has”. Such is the socialist’s lot according to Coleman. But perhaps De Leon’s life shows that frustration and delusion need not be mutually exclusive. There is no doubt that De Leon’s political life was a model of socialist commitment and principle. The frustrating fact was that workers continued to be, in Coleman’s words, “a recalcitrant force”, persistently denying ballot success to the SLP. And though Coleman emphasises that De Leon was never deluded into thinking that socialism had been achieved, it could be argued that he held illusions about how it could be achieved – illusions born of frustration.

By 1905 De Leon was rejecting the notion of a solely political transformation of society. He asserted the need for an economic wing to the socialist movement and put forward a three-stage theory of revolution: socialists winning the battle of ideas, victory at the ballot-box, and socialist industrial unions supplying the economic might to enforce electoral victory and workers’ power. He also ventured a view of future socialist society that would be an industrial unionist administration. To this end he was a major influence on the formation of two industrial unions: the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance and then the Industrial Workers of the World – both ultimately to fail.

Socialist unions were never to be the short-cut to a mass class-conscious movement that De Leon might have hoped for. How could they be when, unlike the political wing, an understanding of basic socialist principles was not a condition of membership? Coleman argues that De Leon was not wrong to condemn “pure and simple” trade unions. “His mistake was to attach too much importance to leadership, assuming that dishonest leaders imposed themselves on unwilling union memberships”. The fact is that these leaders had the support of the workers “and this would not be changed by retreat into socialist-run unions, but by hard and sustained persuasion of those who accepted the union status-quo”. In Britain industrial unionism was taken up with enthusiasm by the SLP and even by a short-lived minority in the early SPGB.

Coleman is quick to point out that De Leon’s post-revolutionary plan, to replace a political state that would “wither away” with a work-based industrial administration, had its unsolved problems. What about those who do not work? For example, the retired, disabled and those in full-time education. Neither, Coleman states, were De Leon’s views on socialism in one country nor his plans for a post-revolution labour-voucher system what one might expect from a consistent socialist. What about free access?

These were certainly lapses. But De Leon was a product of his times. Coleman claims that his industrial administration theory was borrowed from Edward Bellamy’s utopian work Looking Backward and of course even Marx came up with a labour-voucher scheme in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. In final mitigation, Coleman points out that De Leon was unable to spend time working out an entirely coherent conception of socialism because he was too busy recruiting socialists.

Although Coleman can hardly suppress a glowing respect for this giant amongst pioneer socialists, his is not an uncritical account of De Leon’s life and ideas. De Leon’s failings as a revolutionary socialist are openly and clearly brought out and, in many respects, account for the greater part of Coleman’s work.

Indeed this book, apart from its biographical content, should achieve the status of a handbook to the do’s and don’ts of socialist strategy. As well as being a well-researched scholarly work, it is accessible and eminently readable. It only remains to add that a cheaper, paper-back version will be published later.

John Dunn

Early days (1986)

Book Review from the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx in Manchester, Ruth and Edmund Frow (The Working Class Movement Library, Manchester £1.80p)

Today, no public library is complete without a number of books dealing with Marxism on its shelves. What is true of municipal libraries equally applies to the retail book trade and extends to university libraries.

It was against this background, and the centenary of Marx's death, that the Manchester Public Library Committee decided to organise an educational exhibition on the close relationship of Marx and Engels to the city of Manchester. Held at its Central Library, (which incidentally stands on the site of Peterloo) the exhibition was so sell attended that it was given an extended run. Arising directly from the event, the Working Class Movement Library decided to print R. & E. Frow's Marx in Manchester.

The booklet is more than a detailed account of Marx's many visits to Manchester. It deals fully with the important reasons for them, among which was the necessary and essential research for Capital and his need to pool knowledge and share experience with his many close friends and comrades in the town. These included his friend and collaborator Engels, who lived in Manchester for 20 years, Wilhelm Wolff ('Lupus"), the Manchester teacher to whom Volume One of Capital was dedicated, and Samuel Moore, who translated Capital. Given Marx's constant ill-health, his visits also provided an opportunity for medical treatment by Dr. Edward Gurnbert (the Physician in General) who was Marx and Engels' doctor and a close friend. Often Marx and his wife Jenny would stay ay the Gurnbert house.

On Engels' arrival in Manchester in December 1842—just after the conclusion of the Lancashire General Strike (referred to by the bourgeois historians as the "Plug Riots.")—the town had already undergone a huge industrial transformation. It had become the centre of a new factory system in which the mode of production had been completely changed by the use of steam and machinery. Its cotton products were famous throughout the world. Here was the first great factory town the world had ever known; the birthplace of large-scale capitalist production and the modern proletariat. The workers there had experience of the class struggle (the town was an important centre for the Chartist movement) and Robert Owen's teachings were well known (he had been employed in a Manchester mill). 16 August 1819 (Peterloo) was still well remembered by the workers.

The main source of information in Manchester for Marx was Chethams Library. He told his publishers later that the journey had been taken exclusively for research for this book on political economy. Engels wrote: "at that time Marx had never yet been in the reading room of the British Museum. Beside the libraries of Paris and Brussels, besides my books and extracts seen during a six weeks' journey in England we made in the summer of 1845, he only examined such books as were procurable in Manchester." Some of the material collected was put to good use by Marx in his Poverty of Philosophy. Also a large amount of the historical material contained in Capital was obtained from Chethams Library.

Marx was elected as an honorary delegate to the Chartist Labour Parliament held in Manchester in 1854. This conference was attended by delegates from all over the country, and Marx's message to them was a clear and concise summary of what was happening in the political arena. He urged that the proceedings should be aimed at organising the working class for the conquest of political power and the immediate taking over of the means of production.

In 1864, the First International was founded. It constituted one of the most memorable episodes in the history of socialism. The International had branches in Manchester and Salford, both of which has the support of the local Trade Council. Marx's key role in the IWMA meant that yet again he had direct links with the Manchester working-class movement. Incidentally, Engels regularly posted the Manchester Guardian to Marx, who closely followed the movements of the Cotton market, as a reading of Capital will show. 

The authors list the monies paid annually to Marx by Engels, during the latter's stay in Manchester. They also provide an exact and detailed account of Engels' income from the firm of Erman & Engels, in which his father was a junior partner, thus clearing away the considerable confusion on this issue.

This low-priced booklet is published by an organisation of workers, the profit motive plays no role in their decision to write and publish material on working class history. As a source of information on an aspect of Marx's life not usually dealt with, it deserves a place on every bookshelf.

Wally Preston

Voice From The Back: Zillionaires And Nonsense (2014)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zillionaires And Nonsense

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson has told people to stop bashing the super-rich. 'Mr Johnson accused ‘everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Nick Clegg’ of bullying the group he defined as ‘zillionaires’ and said the most rich of all should receive ‘automatic knighthoods’. ........ Mr Johnson said the rich deserve our ‘humble and hearty thanks’ for their contributions to charity and the exchequer - quoting figures that say the top 1 per cent pay 29.8 per cent of all UK income tax’ (Independent, 18 November). Since Mr Johnson's zillionaires tend to get knighthoods anyway we wonder at his concern for them, especially when all their wealth has come from the exploitation of the impoverished majority.

No Recovery For Some

It is often difficult to get up to date figures about poverty in Britain but a recent survey backed by public money has come up with some current statistics. 'Nearly nine million people across the UK are living with serious debt problems, according to a new report. The Money Advice Service (MAS) also said very few people were making any attempt to get professional help. The problem is particularly acute in five English cities, where more than 40% of the population is struggling to repay debt. According to the survey, 18% of Britons, 8.8 million people, consider they have ‘serious’ financial issues’ (BBC News, 27 November). These figures give the lie to political nonsense about a so-called economic recovery.

Not So Glamorous

The following scene is a common one throughout capitalism. 'The line for the soup kitchen starts to form at dusk, and by the time it is fully dark more than 200 people are waiting to be fed. There are toddlers in prams, and military veterans in wheelchairs’ (Times, 29 November). The scene is not all that unusual but this is not happening in Asia or Africa but in modern sophisticated Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood. Every night for 27 years the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition has given a hot meal to some of the 53,800 homeless estimated to live in Los Angeles. Behind the chauffeur driven limousines and expensive cocktails of the Hollywood cinema dream factory lurks the sordid reality of modern capitalism.

Harsh Reality

British MPs like to pat themselves on the back and boast about improving living standards, but recent information from official sources paints a completely different picture. 'Food poverty in the UK has now become such a big problem that it should be seen as a ‘public health emergency’, a group of health experts says. In a letter to the British Medical Journal, six leading public health figures warned poor nutrition could lead to a host of problems. It comes amid reports that people are struggling to feed themselves. The UK Red Cross has started asking for food donations for the first time since World War Two. And in October the Trussell Trust, which runs 400 food banks, said the numbers of people it was helping had tripled to 350,000 in the past year’ (BBC News, 4 December). Poor nutrition for thousands of workers in one of the most developed capitalist countries in the world despite politicians boasts is the harsh reality of the profit motive society.

Poverty Stricken Millions

'More working households were living in poverty in the UK last year than non-working ones - for the first time, a charity has reported. Just over half of the 13 million people in poverty - surviving on less than 60% of the national median (middle) income - were from working families, it said. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said low pay and part-time work had prompted an unprecedented fall in living standards’ (BBC News, 8 December). These figures underestimate the extent of the problem as the JRF's annual Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report was written by the New Policy Institute and tracks a range of indicators, including government data and surveys covering income, education and social security, and has a very frugal concept of what poverty is. In the 2011-12 period, the amount of earnings before a household was said to be in poverty was £128 a week for a single adult; £172 for a single parent with one child; £220 for a couple with no children, and £357 for a couple with two children. How many of the ‘we are all in this together’ MPs could survive on £128 a week?

The Vienna Butchery (1927)

From the September 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader who lives in Vienna sends us the following letter on the so-called "Revolt" in Vienna, which ended so tragically. The letter arrived too late for insertion in August issue.—Ed., Comm.

Vienna,

July, 22nd, 1927.

Last year a Russian film called "Potemkin" made the round in Germany and Austria; its main feature were a successful revolt of Czarist Russian marines in the battle cruiser "Potemkin," and its sequel in Odessa—the crushing by Czarist soldiers of a people's manifestation of sympathy.

Little did the people of Vienna dream that they would so soon have a real life experience of the terrifying scenes they saw last year from a comfortable chair in a picture palace. And if the numerous English, American and other foreign visitors who stop in this city at this time of the year on their continental pleasure trips, and whom a considerate censor had prevented from seeing the Potemkin film in their own countries, they have now been able to learn and to appreciate Czarist Russian manners and methods in grim reality in the fair city of Vienna, "the city of songs and music on the blue Danube, the centre of art and of culture."

Anyone who, like the writer, happened to be on the Friday (July 15th) afternoon on the beautiful Ringstrasse, could not but become the terrified witness of scenes not one whit less revolting and gruesome than those he had seen in the said film. Police. mounted and on foot, and gendarmes firing into a mass of unarmed and fleeing civilians, screams of falling men, women and children, under a sky laden with the smoke-clouds from a burning building. And a hundred men, women and children are now lying in their graves,  a mass grave, as befits members of the working class to which they all belonged; a thousand others left to continue the battle for life with broken limbs and shattered nerves, many of them still in the hospitals at the time of writing, fighting between life and death; two hundred in prisons awaiting trial fro lawlessness and incendiarism; such is an episode in Capitaism's career—the sequel to "Bloody Friday in Vienna."

What had happened? What was it all about? What had aroused this special anger and fury of the powers that be?

Had the poverty-stricken mass of the city's workers suddenly lost their patience and their temper, and broken into the comfortable quarters of the rich and wealthy? Had they tried to ease their and their families' wretched lot by forcibly seizing some of the goods with which the countless stores are filled to the roof tops? Had they made a determined attempt at gaining access to the good things of life they produce and store up for a favoured few? Had the workers suddenly come out of their dens and hovels with the set purpose of establishing themselves in the elegant and spacious garden villas and mansions of the "Cottage" or the "Ambassador's quarters"?

Had the sumptuous palaces of the Rothschilds', the Fürst Liechtenstein, and the innumerable other palaces of the city been seized by the "common" people? Had the warehouses been attacked and plundered? Was property in danger? Could it be that the workers marched up to overthrow the Capitalist order and to proclaim the Socialist Commonwealth?

But though the fear of these things, which was stimulated by a general shutting of shops, betrays the existence of great social inequalities—"injustices," if you like—that will sooner or later force a correction, not one baker's or tailor's shop, and not one villa in the "Cottageviertel!" was in danger. And even the fact that the scene of that terrible collision between working men and the powers that be was the "Palace of Justice" (the Law Courts of Vienna) does not do more than provide an accidental omen.

This attack, however, of July 15th, silly and stupid as it would be in any circumstances had nothing to do with Socialism. though the party that pretends to stand for the interests of the working class in this country, namely, the Social Democratic Party, cannot be acquitted of a large measure of the guilt for the massacre of so many working class lives. This guilt lies in the awful confusion which that party creates among working men and women by identifying them with, and wasting their energies on, all kinds of minor issues and reforms. The workers are dragged into every kind of political fracas, the petty squabbles of the innumerable organisations, and thus become easy preys of Bourgeois intrigues.

Only class-unconscious workers could have been so staggered by the acquittal of the two nationalists who shot dead a social democratic working man and a boy at Schattendorf last January as to begin a "wild strike" and a march to Parliament with the disastrous consequences that followed.

For let us make it clear that these thousands had come for no other purpose but to protest against the acquittal of the two murderers; they soon found the police, mounted and on foot, confronting them and moving them on in the usual police style, until the sight of the "Palace of Justice," with more police and showers of bullets, provided the signal to a maddened crowd to set fire to the building. In vain did the well-tried "leaders of labour" endeavour to appease the infuriated masses from resurrected barricades, in vain did the Social-Democratic mayor himself mount a fire-engine to save the burning building, but—is it necessary to say—after an all-day and night struggle the police and military eventually "cleaned" (as they put it here) the streets.

With a more or less obscure object the Social Democratic Party declared a partial "general" strike. On Wednesday, the 20th, the victims were laid to rest, and now things are "normal" again. The "labour market" is relieved to the extent of the murdered and mutilated workmen, and by an increase of the police force supplied by members of the S. D. Party, ready, as that party always is, to assist the Capitalist class in maintaining and perpetuating Capitalist order.

The Communists saw in the march once more the advent of the social revolution, though it is not all certain whether they will survive its defeat.

Frank. 

"The Recruiting Sergeant." (1927)

From the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Canadian Election Statement (1986)

Classic reprint from the Winter 1986-7 issue of the World Socialist

The following classic statement of the socialist case at election times was issued as a leaflet by the Victoria Local No. 2 of the old Socialist Party of Canada at around the time of the First World War.

Although not nominating candidates in the pending election, the Victoria Local of the Socialist Party of Canada desire to place some of the leading ideas held by the Party before the electors who are giving consideration to the problems confronting us at the present time—problems which we are convinced can only be solved by the abolition of the present capitalist system, based on the class ownership of the means of production, and the substitution therefor of a system of social ownership and production for use.

There are two classes in society—the Working Class and the Capitalist Class. All other party divisions tend to obscure the real clash of contending interests.

All wealth is created by the application of labor to natural resources. This being so, how is it that the Working class—the producers of all wealth—frequently lack even the barest necessaries of life?

The reason is that the natural resources, i.e., the land, mines, factories and transportation facilities are owned by the Capitalist class, and the worker can only gain access to them when an employer can make a profit out of him.

To any student of modern social and industrial conditions, who carefully considers the evidence, it is apparent that our present system is rapidly reaching the point when a breakdown is inevitable. The Capitalist class who control industry, and, in order to maintain themselves in power, must also control the legislative, judicial and administrative functions of the State, have proved themselves incapable of organizing affairs so as to provide all the people with the necessaries essential to maintain life.

Even in this "Last West," in periods of frantic "development," at no time were all employed under conditions fit for human beings and at wages sufficient to maintain a moderate standard of comfort for the worker, and the family dependent on him.

But even were all employed at a "living" wage, the reason for the existence of a Socialist Party would still continue. With the ever-increasing perfection of the machinery of production and the more efficient organization of the producers of wealth, the worker of to-day is able to produce in a few hours a far larger output than formerly could be in treble the time; but this increased product, instead of reducing his hours of labor, thus giving him greater opportunities for culture and the pleasure of life, is retained by the owners of the machinery of production and is used to force him to accept an even lower standard of life than hitherto. Instead of the larger output made possible by the increased productivity of the machine being used to raise the workers' standard of life, it is used to dispense with a portion of the labor army, and the growing problem of the unemployed, with all its attendant misery, suffering and degradation, is a ghastly witness of the failure and mismanagement of industry by the Capitalist class. This is the rock on which Capitalism will meet its doom.

It has been conclusively proved that a standard of life better than that enjoyed by the best paid artizans is possible with the expenditure of less than three hours per day in labor of all able-bodied men, if society were but organized on a sane basis, and realizing also that the social evils of to-day, which are the despair of "statesmen," and towards the solution of which the "reformers" can at best only be compared to the efforts of Mrs. Partington to drive back the waves of the Atlantic with her mop, the Socialist points to the absolute necessity of the means of production being taken over by, and managed in the interests of the whole people, instead of in the interests of an ever-decreasing minority.

The Socialist Party has nothing in common with the person whose whole efforts are expended in social reform. Social evils are almost invariably the result of bad economic conditions; the study of Socialism will make this clear.

The Capitalist class, who appropriate all the wealth created by the Working class over and above the amount necessary to permit of the continued existence of the latter, maintains itself in power only by its control of the machinery of the State, thus entrenching itself in possession of the wealth secured in the exploiting process of modern production.

When the Working class fully realize the utter hopelessness of any real improvement in their condition as long as Capitalism lasts, they will unite under the banner of Socialism to capture the machinery of the State, take over the means of production, and manage industry in a manner certain to ensure to all a healthy, happy life, with the fear of poverty absolutely abolished.

We urge you to study the literature of the movement, educate yourself in every phase, and take your place among those who are to-day trying to rouse the Working Class from the apathy and ignorance which alone stands in the way of their emancipation from the thralldom of wage slavery.

If you are interested, send your name and address to the Secretary, Victoria Local, S.P. of C., Room 6, 1406 Broad Street, and we will arrange to supply you with some of our literature.

Against War When It Mattered (1984)

Classic reprint from the April 1984 issue of the World Socialist

July 1917, and the bloody butchery of world capitalism had been unleashed for nearly three years. Workers in their masses were being sacrificed as human offerings to the insatiable god of profit. The recruiting sergeants, in different countries and different languages, poured forth the propaganda of nationalistic hatred. 

And with them, supporting the recruitment for the trenches, were the bogus socialists. Yes, indeed, these so-called socialists, who wave the red flag in peace time and their national flags when the signal for war was given, had spoken loudly of "internationalism" before the war began. Easy to favour peace when there is no war, isn't it? But, because they were tied up in the ideology of capitalism and did not recognise it as a world system based upon a clear class division between capitalists and workers, the phoney socialists abandoned the interest of the working class in favour of the interest of capitalist nations. 

We publish below the Manifesto which was issued in 1917 to be considered by the proposed anti-war conference which was due to be held in Stockholm. It shows that, at the time when it mattered, we socialists held tight to our principles and upheld the case for world peace. 

Since 1917 socialists have been urged to support other wars. Indeed, some of those who were part of the minority of anti-war internationalists in July 1917 were subsequently to create the Russian state capitalist dictatorship which, in 1939, justified the Stalin-Hitler pact in the name of socialism. We have been asked to support "wars for democracy" and "wars of liberation" and even "civil wars for socialism". In every case the World Socialist Movement has refused to support the view that the workers' interest can be advanced in any way by means of capitalist war. It is not only in peace that we have spoken of peace, but in war too, even though the consequences for our members have not been easy or comfortable. 

So, in printing this, the first of our regular "classic reprints", we stand by what we stated in 1917. The parties referred to may now have different names; in different countries the militarist histories have taken different forms; but war in this century is of global proportions and has a single cause: the system of capitalism. And, as war has only one cause, so it has only one possible solution: world socialism.

_________________________

From Socialist Standard, July 1917

The Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain

To the proposed International Congress

COMRADES,- 

Residing as we do under the control of the "democratic" British Government, we are not permitted to send Delegates to the Congress to state our views, present our case, and defend our policy, as we so strongly wished. All the more is this to be regretted as our organisation is the only one in the British Isles that takes its stand upon a definite and avowed Marxian basis and follows a policy logically deduced from that basis. 

We hold that the Working Class must march to its emancipation from wage-slavery and the domination of the Capitalist Class, by the conquest of political power. In the British Isles the means wherewith to accomplish this are already in the hands of the workers, as, despite certain anomalies in our franchise, the workers have the overwhelming majority of the votes at their disposal when an election takes place. Hence the great, immediate, and pressing work requiring to be done is the education of the Working Class to an understanding of Socialism -to a realisation of their slavery and the method of their emancipation. 

The Working Class are slaves to the Capitalist Class. While the Workers produce all existing wealth by applying their labour-power to the materials provided by Nature, this wealth, and the instruments necessary for its production, along with the great storehouse of Nature's materials -the earth- are owned and controlled by the Master Class under a system of private ownership that necessitates the selling of the bulk of the products upon the markets. But while powers of production increase by leaps and bounds, the markets grow but slowly. Hence the struggles between the various groups of Capitalists for the control of these markets and the routes thereto so that they may dispose of the commodities the wage-slaves have produced. Practically all the wars of the last three centuries, from the struggle against the Dutch and Portuguese in India to the present colossal carnage which is devastating the whole world, have had their essential causes rooted in the demands of the various groups of Capitalists to control these markets and routes. 

The Workers' share of these conflicts has been to slaughter each other in their Masters' interests, to find a grave if killed, or be offered the degrading and comfortless shelter of the workhouse if disabled or maimed. The hardship, misery, want, and suffering following these wars fall always upon the Working Class. Thousands of cripples and tens of thousands of men with constitutions ruined by military service will feel the horrors of the struggle for existence with tenfold bitterness after the war. In the midst of the conflict the Pensions Minister, Mr. G.N. Barnes - a member of the ILP and of the "Labour Party", and "Labour" Member of Parliament for Blackfriars Division of Glasgow - has admitted that over 100,000 men have been discharged from the British Army as medically unfit for Service without allowance or pension of any kind. To soothe the ruffled feelings of these unfortunate victims of capitalist brutality this so-called representative of the Workers said: 

"It has been claimed that these men should be put on pension . . . . inasmuch as the doctors have passed them in . . . . I want to say that they will not get it while I am in the office."-Official Report, col. 254, March 6th, 1917. 

No matter which group of the Masters win the struggle, the Workers remain enslaved. The division of interests is not between the peoples of the world, but between the classes - the Master Class and the Working Class. Not, therefore, in their fellow Workers abroad, but in the Master Class at home and abroad, are the working-class enemies found. 

What interest have the Workers, then, in either starting or carrying on war for their masters? Absolutely none. 

Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist. 

Moreover, where the Working Class have the necessary means - the franchise - for their emancipation within their grasp it is clearly an anti-Socialist and treacherous act to urge them to use those means for the purpose of placing political power in the hands of the masters. The flimsy excuses so often used to cover up such acts of treachery to the Working Class merely add evidence to support the truth of this statement. 

Applying these tests of real understanding of Socialist principle and correct action to the organisations in this country claiming to be Socialist, we find all of them except the Socialist Party of Great Britain failing to stand that test. The Fabian Society, with Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb at its head, merely wishes for an extension of the Civil Service system under the control of a bureaucracy, and is opposed to the Workers being emancipated from their slavery .In addition to supporting the carrying on of the war, both the society and its individual members readily support the return of Liberal Capitalists to Parliament. 

The so-called Independent Labour Party is ready at all times to make political bargains with the Capitalists and to urge the Workers to place power in the hands of the masters. Thus Mr. Ramsay Macdonald at Leicester, Mr. Philip Snowden at Blackburn, Mr. F. Jowett at Bradford, Mr. James Parker at Halifax, Mr. G.H. Roberts at Norwich, Mr. G.N. Barnes at Glasgow, and Mr. Clynes at N.E. Manchester all owe their seats in Parliament to bargains made with the Liberals, in return for which they gave their support to Liberals in these and other constituencies. While protesting - in some forms - against the war, and now urging "Peace by negotiation", the ILP allowed its members like Mr. Parker and Mr. Clynes to assist in the recruiting campaign. 

In a letter sent to his constituency on 11th September, 1914, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said: 

"I want the serious men of the trade unions, the brotherhoods and similar movements, to face their duty .To such it is enough to say ‘England has need of you' and to say it in the right way. 

"They will gather to her aid; they will protect her." Daily Chronicle, September 9th, 1914. 

In the Merthyr Pioneer for 27th November, 1914, the late Mr. Keir Hardie, another ILP Member of Parliament, said: 

"I have never said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting. I know too well all there is at stake." 

How is all this different from assisting in carrying on the war? How clearly it shows the treachery of the ILP leaders and Members of Parliament! 

Moreover, the ILP has allowed its members to accept office in a Capitalist government without making any protest or repudiation. It is true that their 1917 Conference passed a resolution dissociating the organisation from Mr. Parker's action in taking a Government office, but not only is Mr. Parker allowed to remain a member of the ILP, but no protest at all is made when other members, as Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. Roberts, accept office under similar conditions. While protesting against German Social-Democrats voting war credits in the Reichstag, ILP members have steadily voted for war credits here. 

The claim of the ILP to be a Socialist organisation is fully repudiated by the actions of its members, of which the above are but examples. 

The British Socialist Party has been just as ready - if with less success - to try and enter into arrangements with the Capitalist parties for seats and offices. At General Elections they have shown their impartiality by advising the Workers to vote for Capitalist candidates of the Tory brand in some constituencies - as South Hackney, Norfolk, etc. - and for Capitalist candidates of the Liberal type in other constituencies. The one MP who until recently was a member of the BSP -  Mr. W. Thorne owes his seat to the Liberals and Tories in West Ham combining to make him a present of that constituency. In the early days of the war he, with Mr. Hyndman, Mr. Hunter Watts, and others, took a prominent part in the recruiting campaign, calling upon the Workers of Great Britain to take up arms for the slaughter of their fellow Workers on the Continent, although Mr. Hyndman admitted that whichever side won the Workers would not benefit a single jot. Just lately Mr. W. Thorne has returned from a trip to Russia, taken, along with Mr. O'Grady and Mr. W. Saunders, on behalf of the British Capitalists, to persuade the Russian Workers to continue the war on the Eastern side. 

In the ranks of the BSP a division of opinion has developed, resulting, after a struggle between the two sections, in the secession of the defenders of the war - Hyndman, Hunter Watts, Lee, Irving, and the rest - and the formation by the secessionists, of the National Socialist Party .The absurdity of the title is balanced by the merit it has of showing how completely pro-Capitalist and anti-Socialist these individuals are. 

The BSP has now joined hands with the ILP in a so-called peace propaganda, but the confusion and double-dealing lying behind this movement is shown most glaringly by the fact that both these organisations remain affiliated to the Labour Party that has whole-heartedly supported the war from its inception.

One of the rewards given for this support was the appointment of Mr. J. Hodge, "Labour" Member for Gorton, as Labour Minister. Within a week of his appointment he tried to show his utility to the masters by threatening to use the powers of the Defence of the Realm Act against the Boilermakers of Birkenhead, who were protesting against the rotten conditions imposed upon them by the employers. 

The organisation calling itself the Socialist Labour Party has never understood how the Workers are enslaved, and for years has propagated what it calls Industrial Unionism as the method of emancipation. Its attempts to reconcile this position with its claim to be a political party has led to such confusion in its ranks that when the war broke out it was divided as to whether it should support or oppose it. 

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN alone takes up the Socialist position here. At the beginning of the war we pointed out the essential factors forming its cause which we have given above, and we have steadily and consistently pressed this view by all the means in our power, and maintained it upon all occasions without change or deviation. Thus we said in the first issue of our official organ to be published after Britain's entry into the war (Sept. 1914): 

"THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN . . . whilst placing on record its abhorrence of this latest manifestation of the callous, sordid and mercenary nature of the international capitalist class, and declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood, enters its emphatic protest against the brutal and bloody butchery of our brothers of this and other lands, who are being used as food for cannon abroad while suffering and starvation are the lot of their fellows at home. 

"Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity . . ." 

While in the February 1915 issue we said: 

"We . . . declare again that there was nothing in the conditions of any country which justified Socialists voluntarily supporting either side in the war, and record our condemnation of such action as a betrayal of Socialist principles arising from lack of political knowledge and unsound political organisation." 

So, with our own hands clean and our every action in accord with the CLASS struggle and the solidarity of the interest of the Working Class the world over, we bring before the international proletariat our DEMAND FOR PEACE without any change of attitude or re-adjustment of policy. We stand for PEACE without reference to terms, since the fruits of Capitalist war are the Masters', and only the pains and penalties thereof the Workers'. 

The grim humour of the claim that Britain is fighting to "crush Prussian Militarism" is clearly shown by the fact that a Bill is being passed through the liberty-loving, democratic British Parliament establishing "Militarism" in a far worse form than either the present Prussian or the late Russian rulers ever attempted. Men who have crossed the seas because they refuse to accept military service are to be forced into the army of the "allied" country they may be in or brought back to serve in the army here! 

To the Socialists of other countries we extend our fraternal greetings. As soon as conditions will permit us to do so we shall endeavour to join forces with our Comrades for the purpose of establishing a Socialist International Congress where Socialist policies shall be decided, where misleaders and tricksters who use the name and fame of Socialism will be exposed and denounced, where the message of Socialism will be sent forth to the toilers of all countries in clear and unmistakable terms, where the gage of battle against the Capitalist Class will be thrown down to the clarion call: 

"WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS; YOU HAVE A WORLD TO WIN."

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN

20^th June 1917                                                                    193 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1.

Action Replay: Counted Out (2014)

The Action Replay Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

No other sport would tolerate the fatality rate of boxing. We begin with two notorious examples. In 1963 Davey Moore died after a fight, and Bob Dylan wrote a song ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’, in which everyone involved, from opponent to manager to gambler to the crowd, denies their culpability. In 1982, Kim Deuk-koo went into a coma after the referee stopped his fight in the fourteenth round, and died four days later. Various changes were made to boxing afterwards: the maximum number of rounds was reduced to twelve, and far more extensive pre-fight medicals were introduced.

In October last year Franky Leal died in Mexico after being knocked out. Boxing writer Mike Gallego noted that Leal had been knocked out more than once before and should probably have stopped (or been made to stop) boxing: ‘But Leal soldiered on because that’s what fighters do. Especially poor fighters who spend their life as what can generously be described as a B-side fighter, or what sometimes more accurately can be called cannon fodder’ (uppercutting.kinja.com/boxing-is-a-goddamned-tragedy-1450455925).

Fights with less tragic endings can also result in controversy. In Manchester on 23 November, super-middleweight champion Carl Froch beat George Groves after the referee stopped the contest. Many of those watching claimed that Groves was well enough to continue, and that Froch himself could well have been stopped earlier in the bout when he was taking a lot of punishment.

Gallego, quoted above, went on to say, ‘Franky Leal is dead because boxing fans and the boxing industry are hypocrites’ (he included himself in this). The audience, whether live or on TV, certainly like to see boxers raining blows on each other, and will criticise referees who stop fights ‘too early’, as in the Froch-Groves case. Further, they often dismiss a boxer who retires from a fight as a ‘quitter’.

But it is the promoters, the managers and the broadcasters who do very nicely out of boxing, its violence and its suffering. Any number of ex-professional fighters end up with little to show financially and having to carry on fighting long after they should have retired. But you rarely see an impoverished or punch-drunk promoter.  

Paul Bennett

On the Platform (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A man who could have made his fortune in the halls" - "Manchester Guardian" reporting a Party speaker at Trafalgar Square.

The Socialist Party has always been renowned for its quite remarkable speakers. As a political Party wedded to the democratic idea, and "persuasion" of the soundness of its case, it was bound to produce a number of outstanding orators.

Side-by-side with its insistence on propagandist educational methods, went the refusal to countenance any sort of personality cult. The Party was what mattered; "leaders" were OUT. So here was the paradoxical position of, on the one hand, a number of quite exceptionally outstanding characters, while on the other personal grandeur had no place in the Party.

From 1904 onwards, until the great technical revolution, the "mass media" was the outdoor platform—or to use the Americanism, the "soap-box". In this, the Socialist Party was no different from the others claiming to be Socialist. The most notorious Labour politicians, in their day, were all soap-boxers. For years, many of them, George Lansbury (who was an ex-SDF paid propagandist), Jack Jones, Herbert Morrison, Tom Mann, John MacLean, John Burns and scores of others, continued their regular street-corner meetings. It was the usual thing for any energetic young ILPer or member of the BSP to mount the street-corner platform. The main activity was the "meeting".

Despite its frequently much smaller membership the Socialist Party could and did, meet the pseudo-Socialists here on level terms. When all the public parks had three or four meetings running, the SPGB took its chance with the others, and the best man won—the biggest audience. In the school of fierce competition and deadly debate were trained some of the most brilliant exponents ever to hold audiences in sway.

The chief fascination of the public meeting was controversy. This it was which attracted thousands to all the local meeting spots. To hear Adolph Kohn, Alex Anderson, Moses Baritz, Charlie Lestor, Groves, Turner and others reduce Labourites, Leninists, Anarchists, Liberals, and religionists to stuttering impotence was sheer mirth-provoking delight.

Since the Party definitely encouraged "heckling" and offered its platform to all opponents, victims were always forthcoming. It was the very success of the Party in demolishing opponents which instigated the decision by the Communist Party to forbid debates with the SPGB. No Party in this country suffered a more devastating attack from the SP than the CPGB.

They were easy meat. One recalls the packed meeting in St. George's Town Hall, Stepney. The entire East London CP there in force, our speaker Adolph Kohn. The local CP organiser requests a (loaded) question.

"Mr. Speaker, do you agree that all political parties are the expression of class interests?"

Kohn: "Yes!"

"Do you agree that separate political parties are the expression of the interests of sections of classes?"

Kohn: "Yes."

"In that case, Mr. Speaker, which section of the capitalist class does the Communist Party represent?"

Kohn: "The Undertakers."

Collapse of CP!

Or Kohn's classic reply to the Hyde Park heckler shouting:

"Tell us when this 'ere Revolution is going to happen then?"

Kohn: "Next Tuesday afternoon at 2.30. Leave your address and we'll send you a post-card." 

During the Second World War, events were relatively favourable to the Party. One platform alone stood in all its solitary glory in Hyde Park on September 3rd 1939—the Socialist Party. The scene, and the impression it made, were described in an article in the magazine Clubman in 1955. 

And from that day on, week in, week out, the Socialist Party doggedly held its ground, against all the threats of assault and violence; against charges of "being in the pay of Hitler". "stabbing our boys in the back", etc. etc. As the war dragged on, the audience grew.  "I'm fighting for the likes of a little yellow-bellied bastard like you," yells a fat uniformed Sergeant-Major on leave. "Then you have my permission to stop now," smiles Turner sweetly. Collapse of heckler.

Events dictated that eventually workers would leave other Parties and join the SP. Among them those who had been prominent in the CP. Week after week, fanatical Communists would shriek:

"YES! but have you been in Russia?!"

Speaker: "No! I haven't been in Australia either."

Heckler: "There you are then!"

Came the day when the same taunt was hurled at a new speaker who replied:

"YES! I lived in Moscow for many years as an official of the YCL."
Same Communist heckler: "What bloody difference does that make then?" 

Who can forget the Conway Hall in London? The occasion, a debate between the SPGB and Mrs. (now Lady) Barbara Wootton. Packed to the doors—the record of that debate on "Federal Union" in pamphlet form speaks for itself. Or Shoreditch Town Hall packed, hanging on the chandeliers; Cliff Groves playing with Sir Waldron Smithers, who told Groves he would pray for him. Groves objected to him preying on him.

The Hammersmith Town Hall packed; SPGB versus the Peace Pledge Union. George Plume, Secretary of the PPU:

"It's all very well the SPGB saying that Pacifists are impotent. I'm the only pacifist in this country who got a month's solitary for striking a sergeant over the head with a chamber-pot."

Or the post-war election campaigns where the opponents trembled at the thought of a Party speaker.

Traffic and television have changed all this. Politics has been plonked right inside the sitting room. A new generation has grown up in ignorance of the old heroic days, Phone-ins, quizzes, TV and radio have replaced the simple, direct, elemental, personal approach.

Who are we to deplore change—we are revolutionaries! Change is our business! Eventually we, too, will win our way to the media. One of the reasons for the high quality of our propaganda is the wise insistence that nobody shall publicly without satisfying the members that he knows—the speakers' test. A fault of our modern propaganda is the inability to answer questions concisely—like Kohn, with one word. The wit was devastating.

Despite traffic and television, public speaking will always be the Party's most valuable activity. Every member who masters it acquires a new dimension. The man (or woman) who knows, who speaks clearly and simply, will always attract and  convince.

On our 70th Anniversary we salute the orators of the past, resolving to carry on their work until its aim is achieved.

Horatio 

Radical critique (1996)

Book Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Is Situationism? A Reader edited by Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996, £9.95)

This is an occasionally interesting though somewhat repetitive collection of writings about the strand of revolutionary opinion which emerged out of Lettrist and other avant-garde artistic groups, principally in France in the 1950s. With their radical critique of bourgeois consumer society the situationists influenced to a greater or lesser degree both the May events in France of 198 and then, nearly a decade later, the punk rock movement.

Famously, in 1966, a group of situationist-inspired students at Strasbourg University were elected to positions of responsibility in the moribund Students' Union and immediately set up a Society For The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx. They also published various radical tracts including Khayati's On The Poverty of Student Life using unions funds, for which they attracted public outrage and eventually the attention of the police. At their trial the judge summed up situationist philosophy as well as anyone had hitherto ever done, stating "these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with 'unlicensed pleasure' as its only goal".

Though lacking a coherent revolutionary strategy, the situationists stood out clearly against the market economy, commodity production and wage labour, advocating the creation of a socialist society of common ownership where production would be undertaken solely to satisfy needs and desires. This book doesn't explore this concept as well as it might do, however, and nothing is as well-rounded as Mark Shipway's presentation of the subject in the book Non-Market Socialism edited by Rubel and Crump. Probably the best chapter in this collection of writings is "The End of Music" by Dave and Stuart Wise, dealing with Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistols, the rise and fall of punk rock and its relationship with situationist politics—the other writings range from the quirky (Jim Martin on Wilhelm Reich and situationism) to the near pretentious (Jean Barrot's text being the most obvious example). This said, there are far worse books around that you could add to a collection on radical politics.

DAP

Cooking the Books: It Wasn’t Socialism (2012)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commenting on multi-millionaire and Tory backwoodsman Adrian Beecroft’s description of LibDem Cabinet Minister Vince Cable as a “socialist” for criticising his proposal to make it easier for employers to sack workers, Owen Jones asked “How did ‘socialist’ turn into an insult?” (I newspaper, 25 May).

It’s a question we ourselves have often asked. Our answer has been that it’s because the word became associated with the Labour Party and the state capitalist dictatorship in the old USSR.

Although we consistently opposed both, we were unable to keep to the fore the original meaning of ‘socialism’ as a co-operative commonwealth based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use, not the market or profit, and the end of having to work for wages.  Both Labour and the Russian dictatorship failed and people were encouraged to see this as the failure of socialism.

The early Labour Party’s claim was that, by a series of nationalisations and social reforms, a Labour government would be able to gradually improve workers’ living standards and progress towards socialism (which some of them understood in the same, original sense as us). It didn’t work out that way. In office, Labour had to govern capitalism on capitalism’s terms, as a profit-making system. This inevitably brought them into conflict with workers and to introduce wage restraint and restrictions on union activity.

The post-war Labour government did nationalise coal, the railways, gas, water and electricity but mainly in order to ensure that the rest of private industry got these provided in a more efficient (and subsidised) way. It also introduced a nation-wide social insurance system and health service, once again mainly to benefit employers by providing them with a relatively healthy and more productive workforce.

Although working conditions in the industries that were nationalised did improve, the basic conflict of interest between workers and employers that is built-in to capitalism continued, and so, therefore, did strikes. An economic crisis (and the need to finance a war in Korea) forced the post-war Labour government itself to begin the whittling away of some of the social reforms it had introduced. The same happened with the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead of Labour gradually transforming capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually transformed Labour, from a party that talked of socialism even if only as a vague and long-term aspiration into an alternative management team for British Capitalism plc.

Jones noted that the word ‘socialism’“hasn’t made an appearance in a Labour manifesto since 1987.”But he doesn’t want to return to the original meaning but only to what the Labour Party used to mean by it years ago. “If socialists really were running the show in Britain”, he wrote, the banks “would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole”; the rich would be forced to pay more tax; the railways and energy companies would be taken into “social ownership”and run by workers and consumers; more social housing would be built, and a “living wage”introduced.

This is Old Labour stuff –the dream of a democratically-run wages and profits system (which, ironically, Vince Cable shared when he was a Labour councillor in Glasgow in the 1970s before following the Gang of Four into the SDP and then the Liberals).

There was nothing wrong with the sentiment behind this of wanting to provide workers with a decent and improving standard of living. It’s just that, given capitalism, this is not possible. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work in the interest of workers.

Pathfinders: Please Don’t Feed the Drones (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The announcement in December that Amazon planned to start delivering goods by helicopter microdrones prompted a flurry of media excitement prematurely extinguished by the two-faced hagiographic orgy following Nelson Mandela’s demise shortly afterwards. But still the story buzzed round the pubs and offices like whirring rotor blades. What if someone nicks your delivery after the drone has dropped it off? What if someone shoots it down with an air rifle or radio pulse? What if there’s a mid-air collision? What happens to all the plastic delivery boxes afterwards? And what of civil aviation control systems? Will all these drones flock in droves to Trafalgar Square looking for someone to feed them?

Some po-faced commentators were quick to identify the story as a piece of misdirection from a company already under fire for its working practices, including poor pay, punishing targets and round the clock surveillance, but this was merely journalistic contrariness.  Amazon can scarcely be worried given that such bad publicity is old and dog-eared news (see for instance ‘UK workforce attacks Amazon’, Guardian, 14 April 2001). Besides, shock revelations about Foxconn workers jumping in desperation off factory rooftops in China have not raised an eyebrow among Apple’s loyal devotees in the west, and Nike and Primark shoppers don’t pause for guilty reflection either, so why should Amazon lose sleep?

The risk that these drones would be hacked went from likelihood to certainty after news that another drone had suffered a similar fate (‘Parrot drones 'vulnerable to flying hack attack'’, BBC Online, 4 December). We therefore await with baited breath a near future when Black Friday Christmas online shopping extravaganzas are followed by a mass exodus of all UK deliveries to a single offshore pirate tanker registered in Liberia, or else combined into a festive Stuka dive-bombing raid on Westminster.

And what will these little Santas in their micro-sleighs be carrying to your back door in years to come? The answer is ‘wearables’. Not socks or pants, you understand, or at least not in the form you know them, but electronic wearables that ‘do’ things. Several companies are engaged in a high-street battle to corner the smart watch market, but this must surely be a minor skirmish compared to the battle for the smart bra, the smart wig and the mood sweater. The bra will tell you what mood you’re in, the mood sweater will tell everyone else (by lighting up in different colours), and the wig will allegedly let you see in the dark with bat-vision and control computers telepathically. With your Google glasses to complete the look you will be at the electronic leading edge of every fancy dress competition going. Just don’t go out in the rain.

Sound ridiculous? Well, it is. But that’s the future for you. Or at least it’s the future as projected by company sales executives on fire with the possibilities of technology to give an already overstuffed population more of what it’s already got.

There are worrying developments in amongst all this that you have to watch out for. Computer viruses are getting cleverer, and now passing themselves off as free virus-checkers. Spammers are overcoming their bad English and sending phishing emails, supposedly from your bank, that are starting to look convincing. Now the game is ‘ransomware’, a stroke of genius whereby the spammers don’t have to be sly, they can just barge right in, lock up your whole computer and then charge you a fortune in untraceable bitcoins before vanishing into the night – without bothering to release your data. Cue a new term and possibly criminal charge of – ‘dataknapping’. Remember, you read it here first.

But despite the concerns, is the future in capitalism any scarier because of this technology than it would otherwise be? Futurologists like Alvin and Heidi Toffler have made careers since the 1960s out of claiming so. Their influential notion of ‘future-shock’ has just been revisited by Douglas Rushkoff of Cyberia (1994) fame in his latest book Present Shock (2013), the idea being that the future is no longer the future but is smacking us in the face like a wet herring in today’s present. Interesting though these ideas are, socialists tend to take such things with a spoon of salt. For one thing, futurologists like the Tofflers and Ray Kurszweil (long-time predictor of the history-shattering Singularity) tend to overlook class relations as a social dynamic and motor of change. Even Rushkoff, politically more clued-up than them, is in danger of being dazzled by his own hype, coining terms like ‘fractalnoia’ (the construction of arbitrary patterns out of masses of data, leading to conspiracy theories) and ‘digiphrenia’ (the ability to be in multiple places and cyber personalities at once) as if these were fundamentally new human behavioural phenomena. In fact, everyone operates multiple personalities, at home, at work, on the phone, at job interviews, in the pub, and humans are forever building baroque theories out of bare bone facts. The underlying tendencies have always been there, so there’s no reason to get too excited about new manifestations of them.

Socialists are futurologists too, because socialism is a theory of the future, but we live in the present and our feet are on the ground, where workers actually live. The offices may buzz today with the latest talk of drone deliveries as if it was science-fiction come to life, but tomorrow people will be ordering by drone without a second thought. Workers don’t trip over the future and suffer some existential crisis, they simply lengthen their stride. Indeed, the main proof against the futurologist notion of future-shock is the futurologists warning us about it. Forewarned, we forestall any sense of surprise.

Besides, if you look around you and then compare it to any cinema film from the 1960s and 70s, when futurologists were first writing about brave new worlds of the year 2000, what do you see? You see pretty much the same clothes and hair, the same houses, buses, cars and trains. You see the same food, the same language, the same social mannerisms. About the only difference is that the TV cops back then didn’t have computers on their desks and they had to call the station from call-boxes. Oh, and they all smoked like chimneys.

That’s not to say the world hasn’t changed, or that technology has not been instrumental in the changes, but the real differences lie underneath the gadgets, in social attitudes. Far from being paralysed by the blinding speed of change, we are learning to change ideas at blinding speed. Social relationships have been revolutionised, at least in some ways, offering an instant intimacy and membership of identity groups at the touch of a button, thus promoting a new sense of commonality and debate among the young just when old curmudgeons are throwing earth on the grave of supposedly deceased ‘community spirit’. From the once-a-day stuffy announcements of old BBC six o’clock headlines, news now travels at light speed via a million channels, challenging the ability of conventional ‘stop press’ media to keep up, or of governments to keep down, and political movements and trends form literally overnight, challenging regimes from Syria to Ukraine. The future isn’t a shock. What is a shock is the discovery that we can make our own future, and that it doesn’t have to be what our masters tell us it should be. That’s encouraging to anyone who wants progress, and especially to socialists, who can easily feel marginalised and ignored in all the hubbub. The world might not be listening to us today, but give it 24 hours and all bets are off.