Letter: Marxist ethic? (1983)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ethics is taken to be, on the one hand, the negation of bourgeois ideology and morality and, on the other, as the intellectual and practical anticipation of the humanist values which are to govern relations among individuals in a world community freed from today’s dominant alienating institutions (economic, political, ideological, etc.), then the work of Karl Marx may consequently be understood as an ethical act. As such, this work is one of the most important contributions to a radical transformation of mankind’s destiny: to humanity’s passage from the pre-human to the human stage, from human prehistory to history made by man.

As an ethical act, Marx’s work is based on scientific proof of the opportunity offered to mankind to choose between collective suicide, made possible by technical achievements which escape man’s rational control, and human self-realisation thanks to the reasonable use of the world’s resources and the technical advances of modern science.

As an ethical act, Marx’s teaching and practice was inspired by his view of the rapid cyclical development and expansion of the capitalist mode of production on a world scale, and thus of an increasing proletarianisation of the labouring masses, despite the immense progress in science and technics, and, finally, of mankind’s opportunity for material and intellectual emancipation. It is through a growing consciousness of this opportunity that the proletariat of the industrially developed countries was to constitute itself into political parties and “win the battle of democracy,” either legally, by universal suffrage, or by a revolutionary struggle, i.e. a general strike and the workers’ takeover of the means of production in view of self-management.

As an ethical act, Marx’s theory was offered to the most numerous and poorest class not as a definitive revelation of proletarian slavery and human emancipation but as an instrument for revolutionary self-education in the tradition of the teaching and practice of those great social reformers whose disciple Marx acknowledged to be. Marx, an insatiable reader and scholar, himself provided a definition of his intellectual and literary vocation, while admitting the limits of his theoretical originality, in this following confession to his daughter Laura: “You'll certainly fancy, my dear child, that I am very fond of books, because I trouble you with them at so unseasonable a time. But you would be quite mistaken. I am a machine condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history” (Laura had just married Paul Lafargue and the two were spending their honeymoon in Paris; letter dated 11 April 1868, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Capital).

Marx, who was a disciple of Epicurus, Spinoza and Leibniz as well as of the French and English materialists, succeeded in constructing a world-view which he in no way considered as a new system of thought, nor as a new philosophy or a new science. He never asked that workers study Hegel’s Logic before attacking Capital. Although his master-work remained unfinished, it is perfectly understandable as a set of scientific and critical theses whose aim is to disclose “the economic law of motion of modern society” (Preface to Capital), and as a series of ethical norms and postulates derived from empirical observation of the self-emancipatory efforts and struggles of the modern slaves, the victims not of capitalists but of capital. The object of scientific analysis is the “reign of necessity”; the object of ethical vision is the “reign of liberty” (Capital. Book III, chapter 48 of the edition established by Engels).

In adhering not to any socialist or communist ideology, but to the cause of the working class and of human emancipation, Marx immediately formulated his ethical creed by affirming a “categorical imperative” that was fundamentally different from the one proposed by Kant : “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being ...” (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844). After he had become a member of the Communist League and was entrusted with drawing up its charter and articles of association, Marx thought best to express the meaning of this imperative in the form of an appeal for union, similar to that which, before him, the leaders of the Chartist movement had addressed to the British workers. Marx added to it a world-wide dimension : “Workers of all land, unite!” 

This appeal of 1848 was, nearly twenty years later, to constitute the implicit conclusion to Capital as formulated in the three pages of the chapter entitled: “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.” This chapter ends with two passages taken from the Communist Manifesto in which Marx draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the growth of poverty, oppression, slavery and degradation and, on the other, the revolt of the ever-growing working class, educated, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. Here we find a typical example of the double-sided reasoning, the empirical judgment of the lucid observer paired with the ethical conception of the revolutionary behaviour and emancipatory will of slaves who consciously realise their enslavement.

Marx refused to “prescribe recipes (in the style of Auguste Comte?) for the cook-shops of the future” (Afterward to the second edition of Capital, 1873), just as he never claimed to have invented any new morality intended for the slaves of capital. While we may justly affirm, in Engels’s words, that Marx’s “real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat,” it is wrong to claim that “he was the first to make [this proletariat] conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.” Through this dubious eulogy delivered at Marx’s graveside, Engels became the first bearer of Marxist ideology and thus of a new political superstition, whose principal representatives were to be Lenin and Kautsky. The British proletariat was the first to have gained consciousness of its enslavement and of the conditions for its emancipation. Marx had chosen to cooperate in the movement for the emancipation of the modern proletariat, not as a teacher, but as a disciple of the British proletariat, putting at its service not only the fruits of his studies, but also his energy as a militant. As an ethical act, this choice reduced Marx’s life to that of an intellectual pariah, with a career on the margin of official society, to that of a perpetual beggar, who depended above all on the hand-outs from his friend Engels. It was not as a teacher and founder but as a disciple and pariah that, in 1856, Marx addressed an audience of English workers, referring to the “symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire” in order to remind them that “they will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world which is as universal as capital-rule and wages-slavery.”

Over 125 years after this appeal, in fact a veritable declaration of faith, the “symptoms of decay” have changed into the certainty of a world in decline without there appearing on the horizon the gravediggers of capital and the State. 

Can this phenomenon of decline, which seems to contradict the theses formulated by Marx in the conclusion of Capital (“The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”), be explained with the help of his materialist conception of history, in other words using the scientific method which Marx claimed to have adopted in the course of a radical critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right? If this is the case, can we consider that “the economic law of motion of modern society” which Marx claimed to have revealed the Preface to Capital) to be precisely one of the “truths” resulting from the application of the materialist method? If the answer to both these questions is yes, are we not then obliged to admit that Marx’ s thought is opposed to any kind of ethics and that the famous “categorical imperative” was only a sally, a parody of Kantian morality? 

Does the “economic law” not demonstrate the frightening thesis according to which 

“even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural law of its movement ... it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development” (Preface, Capital).

Here is a thesis which seems to justify certain critics of Marx who take him to task for his “historicism,” for his mania for identifying social science (or the so-called human sciences) and natural science, for his ambition to observe and study human societies with the mind of a natural scientist (physicist, astronomer), for his quasi-Spinozian way of exculpating the individual and blaming the “social conditions” of which the individual remains a product, “however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” (Preface, Capital). 

It follows that neither the capitalist nor the worker is individually responsible for their destiny, since they are only “the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests.” So, in the end, what remains of the “categorical imperative” to overthrow the social conditions which make the workers slaves and reduce them to beasts of burden?

Marx envisages this overthrow as a long historical stage in a process of evolution which undoubtedly changes the conditions but which also changes men. Hence the “reformism” in Marx’s political theory, a consequence of his determinism which rules out the possibility of a society “skipping” over the phases of its development or “removing” their obstacles by legal enactments. This “reformism” is clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto and in the canon of the IWMA; echoes of it can be found in Capital and in other texts where Marx envisages trade union struggles, demands concerning the shortening of the working day and factory legislation to protect the workers’ health and to promote the coercive education of “factory children,” while imposing on the capitalist mode of production, “by a coercive law in virtue of the State” (Capital, XV, 9) “the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health.” 

As a revolutionary thinker, Marx had to struggle throughout his whole career for “bourgeois” reforms since liberal democracy means the triumph of the freedom of conscience, association and organisation which alone can allow the proletariat to educate itself and to prepare itself for revolution and so for the abolition of capitalism. It is only then that they will be in a position to act in the spirit of the “categorical imperative,” in other words of the ethic which following other reformers Marx placed at the centre of his work. Until the “historic” moment of the revolution, the slaves are only able to “short and lessen the birth-pangs” .

Maximilien Rubel

Paris

(Author of "Marx Without Myth" with M. Manale)

Reply:

If all Rubel means by the words ethics and ethical is that the establishment of socialism ("a classless, stateless and moneyless society" as Rubel puts it in the Introduction to his Marx Without Myth) is not something that will come about automatically as a result of some economic or historical forces operating independently of human will, but rather can only be a deliberate choice, or act of will, on the part of the "most numerous and poorest class" in capitalist society, then we would not quarrel with him. We, too, do not regard socialism as being mechanically inevitable but as something that can only  come about as a result of a conscious dcision by the wage and salary earning majority.

But we would not use the word ethical to make this point. In fact we would have a strong objection to doing so as this word, at least in English, is so closely associated with parsons and other moral preachers that it inevitably gives rise to the impression that those who use it are appealing to some abstract, eternal morality. But socialism is not a moral issue in this sense; it s a class issue. It is first and foremost the solution to the very material problems of the majority class in society, not the realisation of some abstract moral or ethical principles. In this connection it is interesting to note that Marx himself never described his "teaching and practice" as an "ethical act" and even less as an "ethical creed".

We agree that Engels went too far in the passage from his speech at Marx's graveside in which he said that Marx was the first to make the working class conscious of the conditions for their emancipation. Of course he wasn't. No one was, as this is something that workers learn as a result of their experiences as an exploited class under capitalism and, as Rubel correctly points out, it was from the working class movement (Chartists, trade unionists) that Marx himself first learned about the class struggle and socialism. But then speeches made at funerals are not meant to be taken too literally. To blow this statement up so as to make Engels "the first bearer of Marxist ideology and thus of a new political superstition" is to be extremely unfair to Engels. No more than Marx did he use the word "Marxism". In fact it was Engels who recorded for posterity Marx's famous statement, "One thing is certain, that I am no Marxist" (Engels letter to Bernstein, 2-3 November 1882).

It is true that we ourselves do use the word Marxism but this is not in the sense of a "new systems of thought", a "new philosophy" or a "new science" invented by a genius called Karl Marx, but simply to indicate that we acknowledge that Marx was a socialist in the same sense that we are and that we accept in general his method of analysing society, history and economics. We of course fully agree that the "Marxism" of Russia, China and the like (and also that of the various Leninist groups and grouplets) is a political superstition, an ideology designed to disguise the fact that these countries, far from being socialist, are also capitalist and class-divided.

We take it that the last paragraph is intended as a direct criticism of our opposition to a socialist party advocating reforms. Marx advocated reforms, says Rubel, implying (we suppose) that we ought to as well. This is a rather curious position for someone who has spent a lifetime denouncing the making of Marx's views into a dogma to take up! Logically he might have been expected to hold that socialists should base their policy today on an examination of today's circumstances and not on what one particular nineteenth century socialist may or may not have said or done. In any event this is the position we take up.

It is true that, as Rubel states, Marx did support trade union action over wages and hours of work, factory laws to protect the health and safety of workers, and political democracy. Let us take these subjects one by one and see exactly what our position on them is.

Trade Unionism: Our members are, as individuals, members of existing trade unions and work within them alongside their fellow workers to resist downward pressures on wages and working conditions and, when circumstances permit, to improve them. Like Marx we urge workers not to exaggerate these defensive actions but to strive for the abolition of the wages system.

Factory legislation: This is the one type of reform which a minority of socialist MPs could consider voting for. For we are not opposed to social reforms under capitalism as such: if they really do protect the safety and health of workers or promote their education they ought to be accepted, What we are opposed to is a socialist party seeking support on the basis of promises to achieve such reforms. This is why we do not advocate reforms, desirable as some of them might be. We freely recognise that our position here differs from that of Marx, but then Marx did not experience what happens when a party tries to combine advocating socialism and advocating reforms: it attracts support mainly for its reform programme and eventually ends up being a mere party of capitalist reform. The evolution of the German Social Democratic Party before the first world war is a case in point.

Political democracy: Here we fully agree with Rubel (and Marx) that this "means the triumph of the freedom of conscience, association and organisation which alone can allow the proletariat to educate itself and to prepare itself for the revolution, and so for the abolition of capitalism". The working class in the nineteenth century were right to fight for this in Britain and elsewhere and Marx was right to encourage and join in the workers' struggle for an effective universal suffrage. Similarly today the workers in state-capitalist dictatorships like Poland and Russia are justified in making the same demands. The existence of political democracy is very important for socialists and for the working class generally, as it provides a means for propagating socialist ideas and for establishing socialism peaceably.

We know that Rubel only speaks of Marx's "reformism" in inverted commas but there is still an ambiguity in his position. For he talks of the overthrow of capitalism being "a long historical stage" and seems to imply that social reforms are necessary and desirable as a way of "shortening and lessening the birth-pangs" of this stage. It is true that there is "a long historical stage" involved in the overthrow of capitalism but this is going on now: it is more or less gradual evolution of the majority socialist understanding necessary before socialism can be established.

Reforms don't come into this, or rather don't any more since for Marx the reforms he supported were merely necessary to create the preconditions (a reasonably healthy and educated working class, freedom of speech and association, universal suffrage) for this evolution, preconditions which have long existed in most of the developed capitalist countries. Today in fact reforms are necessary for the smooth running of capitalism and so are advocated by all political parties, even those which openly support capitalism.

If all Rubel means is that as long as there is no majority in favour of socialism all workers can do is to seek the best they can out of capitalism then we would agree. We however would see this as essentially involving only trade union and trade union type activity. We suspect that Rubel might see this as also involving voting for reformist parties and candidates, to which we would be very much opposed.

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Co-ops Again (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the capture of the Co-operative Bank by hedge funds and the exposure as hypocrisy of its claim to be more ‘ethical’ than other banks, there are still those who stubbornly argue think that co-operative enterprises could be a viable alternative to capitalism. Supporters of capitalism, however, have a more realistic view of co-operatives and what they can and cannot do within capitalism.

One of the arguments put forward in favour of co-operatives is their democratic management structure. They certainly are more democratic than any normal capitalist enterprise which are anything but this. The moment an employee enters the doors of the office or the gates of the factory where they work they cease to be ‘free citizens’ with a right to vote and become subjects who have to carry out the orders of the unelected managers who are running the business on behalf of its owners.

Under capitalism, however, not being undemocratic is a handicap for an enterprise. Even a nominally democratic structure hinders the emergence of the type of ruthless top executive needed to engage in the struggle with rivals with any chance of success.

This was spelled out clearly in an editorial in the business section of the  Daily Telegraph (20 November) commenting on the Co-operative Bank and the Co-operative Group generally:

‘Its democratic structure, with a Byzantine relationship between area committees, regional boards and the group board, was held up as a paragon of virtue. It was, as has been proved, a recipe for disaster … It is difficult to imagine any corporation of this magnitude being governed by archaic governance standards more suited to a village charity than an organisation with its sites on major expansion.’

Like it or not, it’s true. The sort of decisions that the top executives of an enterprise engaged in the competitive struggle for profits have to take are impeded if they are subject to any degree of democratic control. A democratically-run enterprise just wouldn’t survive in the capitalist jungle. If you want to compete with the other beasts in the jungle you’ve got to behave like one of them.

This has been candidly recognised by the president of the much-touted Mondragón co-operative group (one of whose flagship enterprises has since gone under), Txemia Gisasola, when he told Miles Johnson the Financial Times (21 March):

‘We receive visitors from many companies and many countries, and some come here with a magical idea of what Mondragón is. This is not magic. We are in this market, competing in the capitalist world, and the only difference is how we do things and why we do things. We have to be competitive, we have to be efficient, we have to have quality in our products and give satisfaction to our clients, and we have to be profitable. In that sense we are no different from anyone else.’

This does mean that there is no place at all for co-operatives within capitalism. There are some niches for a few of them, but they can never spread to take over the whole economy as their more romantic supporters envisage. As the Times put it (18 June), ‘co-operatives are a model for a few companies, but not for an entire economy.’ Co-operatives are in fact not at all an alternative to capitalism, just one form of capitalist enterprise and a not very efficient one at that.

Rocard versus Rocard (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who once wrote:

How can we imagine a possible socialist revolution in France? What do we know? We know that a mere electoral victory, limited to the exercise of universal suffrage, is useless to bring it about. We know that we are not in a situation, where it is possible to imagine, even in the long term, an armed insurrection, and this is true of England too. The whole idea is stupid. Therefore, we know that the main battleground is the strike, the social struggle, the class struggle.

Answer: Michel Rocard, the current Prime Minister of France. The passage is from an interview he gave in 1971 when leader of a small leftwing breakaway party that aimed "to free the workers from capitalist exploitation" and denounced the Communist Party for being too moderate.

The interview in question, incidentally, was given to The Spokesman, organ of the Institute for Workers Control in Britain, who republished it in 1974 as a pamphlet under the title Michel Rocard Speaks, thus illustrating that he was once the darling of the left in Britain as well as in France. Nor can Rocard dismiss the views he then expressed as an error of youth since, being born in 1930, he was in his forties at the time. 

Rocard had been a founder member of the Parti Socialist Unifié (PSU) in 1960 and from 1967 to 1974 was its National Secretary. In the 1969 presidential elections he stood as a self-styled "revolutionary" candidate obtaining 3.6 per cent of the vote, but he did win a famous by-election the same year to become the PSU's lone MP. In fact, to many, the PSU—the rough equivalent in British terms of the ILP in the 1930s—was Rocard and Rocard was the PSU.

Needless to say his views have changed somewhat since he left the PSU to join Mitterand's PS in 1975, where he soon emerged as the leader of its openly pro-capitalist wing. In 1971 he had proclaimed that the class struggle was the way forward. In 1985 he was complaining:

The final project of socialism still remains for too many socialists a vision limited to the class struggle. It is a question of destroying the bourgeoisie, i.e. the class that holds capital. The idea of a compromise made with the holders of capital remains considered a class betrayal (Libération, 22 May, 1985).

He had changed his views too about the limitations of universal suffrage under capitalism. Whereas in 1971 he had declared:

In the electoral field, the bourgeoisie always has the cards stacked in its favour.  

and

Democracy . . . will only become possible when we have got rid of the power of capital

in 1985 he was declaring:

You don't seek to destroy the bourgeoisie in a pluralist society with universal suffrage. Since, fortunately, the machine gun is not the instrument for settling conflicts in civil society and for this reason there is no longer the physical destruction of the other side, the perspective should no longer be economic destruction either. 

Rocard - 1971 proclaimed:

We must aim at self-management, that is, the management of factories by the workers themselves . . . Workers' control can only be imposed in strikes where the balance of forces is overwhelming, that is to say, where the unity of the workers is strongest.

 For Rocard - 1985, however, 

An economy only functions well if it is competitive. The enterprise must be recognised as a productive unit and not simply a battlefield.

Having repudiated his past in this way, Rocard became a suitable candidate for top political office and there us even talk of him becoming Mitterand's successor as President. Now that he is Prime Minister—under the last Mitterand PS government he was only given the post of Minister of Agriculture—he will be able to exercise to the full his desire "to make compromises with the holders of capital" since this is precisely what governing within the framework of capitalism means, and has to mean. The last thing the workers in France can expect him to do is to free them from capitalist exploitation, as he promised them when he was in the PSU, and the only class struggle he'll be waging will be for the bourgeoisie against the workers.

Although the PSU employed language of revolution—talking about ending capitalist exploitation, overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie, waging the class struggle—Rocard never showed any understanding of what socialism is. His vision of "socialism" was always limited to an idealised version of the sort of workers-managed market economy that Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia under Dubček were supposed to be moving towards.

In fact, in a book written in 1972, Questions à l'Etat socialists, he went out of his way to repudiate the idea that money should or even could be abolished, writing of "two tenacious myths" circulating on the subject. The first, he wrote, was that money should be replaced by labour-time vouchers (a silly idea we agree) while "the other tenacious myth concerning money aims at its total disappearance in the framework of a fully distributive economy".

His attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of replacing buying and selling as a means of distributing consumer goods—a reference to some experiment in Cuba when Che Guevera was still around—was pathetic, but it is interesting to note that a Prime Minister of a leading capitalist country has had to confront this idea. A lot more are going to have to in the future.

Adam Buick

The Criminal Justice Act: The Icing on the Cake (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few issues in recent years have caused as much confusion as the Criminal Justice Bill (now the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). The deranged hangers and floggers of the Tory right believe it will curb crime. The reformers of the left claim that it destroys "democratic rights" to picket, to assemble and to demonstrate. This is fantasy, no such legal rights existed in the first place.

Just look at some of the powers the police already had.

Police powers

In 1978 the Labour government's Criminal Law Act introduced the statuary offence of conspiracy, defined as an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. No crime need actually be committed for a conspiracy to have taken place, only an agreement to commit a crime. The Act does not define what constitutes an "agreement" and in practice evidence that the accused had a common aim is sufficient to imply that an agreement has been made. There need only be one accused, incidentally, as a single person can be charged with "conspiracy with persons unknown". Effectively, then, anyone can be arrested at any time if they are suspected of having agreed to commit a crime, even if the person(s) with whom the agreement is alleged to have been made are unidentified and the crime itself has not even been committed.

In addition to this, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 gives police officers power to stop and search persons or vehicles if they have reasonable grounds for suspecting that they will find stolen or prohibited articles. The same Act bestows upon JPs the authority to grant a warrant to enter and search premises if they are satisfied that the officer who made the application has reasonable grounds for believing that a serious arrestable offence  has been committed and that there are materials relevant to the investigation and prosecution inside. What exactly constitute "reasonable grounds" is left unclear. "Serious arrestable offence", a central concept in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, is defined as one which has led, its intended to lead or is likely to lead to any of the following consequences: serious harm to the security of the State, public disorder, serious interference with the administration of justice, death, serious injury, or substantial financial loss/gain. Just as under the Criminal Law Act it is the police who can decide what constitutes an agreement to commit a crime, so under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act it is the police who decide the intention and likely consequences. These "discretionary powers" made police powers of arrest and entry virtually unlimited even where no crime has been committed, and this was before the Criminal Justice Act became law.

The Public Order Act of 1986 requires that written notice be given to the police of any proposed marches and demonstrations. If the senior police officer reasonably believes that a march or demonstration may result in serious public disorder, damage to property, disruption to the community, or that it has been organised for the purpose of intimidation, he may "give directions imposing on the persons organising or taking part in the procession such conditions as appear to him necessary to prevent such disorder, damage, disruption or intimidation" (S. 12. 1b); the wording of the Act suggests that conditions may be imposed even after the march as begun.

If the senior police officer reasonably believes that powers under section 12 are insufficient for the prevention of any of the above he apply to the district council, for an order banning the march which may be granted with the consent of the Secretary of State.

Section 14 grants similar powers to the senior police officer in relation to public assemblies (e.g. picket lines, rallies and outdoor meetings, etc), though not to the extent of outright bans. The "senior police officer", incidentally, is defined as "the most senior in rank present at the scene" (S. 14. 2a), the implication being that even a single police constable present at a public assembly (defined as 20 or more people in a public place), and who reasonably believes it to be causing a disruption, may impose on those taking part in it such conditions as appear to him or her necessary to prevent further disruption. In other words the police already had the power to break up a public meeting. It should be clear that even before the advent of the Criminal Justice Act the "democratic rights" the reformists speak of existed no more in law than they did in reality. Strikers at Orgreave and Wapping, travellers at the Beanfield and protesters at the anti-poll tax march in London, all found their "democratic rights" to picket, assemble and demonstrate instantly terminated on the arbitrary whim of police and bureaucracy without the Criminal Justice Act.

While it might be pointed out that the Act extends the power to impose banning orders on processions to cover public assemblies and introduces a new power to impose a five-mile exclusion zone on any place subject to a banning order, it is no less true that police and local authorities have already used bans and exclusion zones to prevent public gatherings on numerous occasions, even without the explicit statutory power to do so—at Summer Solstice gatherings at Stonehenge, for example—and exclusion zones have been used to prevent travellers reaching the Glastonbury festival.

Law and Order

It is with regard to travellers and their (alleged) freedoms that much of the concern about the Criminal Justice Act has arisen, but again existing legislation already makes these freedoms illusory. Under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968 designated local authorities have the power to order trespassers to leave land, while under section 39 of the 1986 Public Order Act the police may order those who trespass or damage property with vehicles to move on and arrest them if they fail to comply. The Criminal Justice Act extends the Public Order Act's reference to "damage" to include "damage to land", defined as widely as to include walking across a field, and extends the powers of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act to all local authorities but no longer requires that those concerned actually be trespassers in that there need not be any request from the landowner to leave; absence of consent is enough. Should the "trespassers" be there with the landowner's permission then the landowner can be charged with offences relating to unlicensed caravan sites under an earlier (1960) Caravan Sites Act.

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is an attempt by a weak and unpopular government to mobilise its supporters against what appears to be a resurgent Labour Party. We need hardly point out that much of the Tories' support comes from bigots whose tolerance level is akin to that of the Tonton Macoutes and who would more than welcome the restoration of public floggings and executions for the most trivial offences. They are, as ever, complaining that "crime"—basically anything they don't approve of—is on the increase, and so are demanding a good dose of "law and order" (i.e. state-managed persecution), which the Labour Party have promised to give them.

The Criminal Justice Act is intended to counter this by reasserting the Tories' traditional role as the "Party of Law and Order". It consists of a lot of tough talk but introduces little if anything that is new, merely tightening up existing legislation and legalising policing actions that were previously of a somewhat dubious legality. Nevertheless, the bait has been swallowed by all concerned; the right have rallied to the Act as the new symbol of law and order while the left have mobilised to oppose it, providing the right with an instant enemy to unite. Thus the Labour Party are outmanoeuvred; unable to oppose the Act for fear of being portrayed as "soft on crime", they are unable to support it either for fear of alienating their left camp-followers.

What democracy?

Just as the reactionaries of the right claim to be guardians of "law and order", so the reformists of the left pose as the defenders of "liberty and democracy". Despite all the left's radical rhetoric and militant posturing the campaign to prevent the Criminal Justice Bill becoming law was a pathetic failure and, in the extremely unlikely event that the second round of this crusade succeeds in getting the Criminal Justice Act repealed, then the same powers conferred by it can quite easily be brought back onto the statute book by a series of quiet backdoor amendments to the various Acts referred to above. And even if this doesn't happen it won't prevent such powers being used because, as noted, they were already being used anyway.

The reformists seem oblivious to the fact that for democracy to be defended it must exist in the first place. Democracy means literally "the people rule" (demoskratos). Unless qualified (and democracy qualified is no democracy at all) "the people" must be taken to mean every single living human being without distinction of age, sex, "race", etc; and what they rule is everything—every single aspect of their community existence. That no such state of affairs prevails within capitalism need hardly be emphasised. The political reality of capitalism is class conflict between those who work but do not own and those who own but do not work. For the most part it is the owning class who have the upper hand in this conflict by virtue of their control of the state apparatus, via their representatives in Parliament, by which they can physically force the working class to submit to their rule.

Actual physical force, however, is generally unnecessary; the owning class's representatives issue directives in the appropriate form and make known the punishments that await those who fail to comply (this is what is meant by "law and order"). As part of this process they present these directives as being in the interests of the whole of society, an illusion reinforced by the fact that the representatives if the owning class are elected to Parliament by universal suffrage. This is the extent of capitalism's claim to be democratic: that we may give our endorsement to one party of capitalism's hirelings over another and in so doing give our consent to whatever these people do while in office.

This is not real democracy. This can only exist where is no ruling class and no repressive state apparatus, where the whole community, rather than a parasitic clique, have control over society's productive and distributive resources enabling each individual to have free access to the goods and services they need to live. It will never be achieved by engaging in futile campaigns to repeal pieces of legislation that are nothing more than the legal expression of the state's already existing arbitrary powers, powers derived from the support given to corrupt capitalist politicians in elections, which, ironically, the reformists persistently urge us to do.

Ian Simpson

News and views about Russia. (1919)

Book Review from the July 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Six Weeks in Russia in 1919" by Arthur Ransome. (Paper, 2s. 6d. I.L.P., S.L.P., and George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.)

This interesting work by an observer who has recently returned from Russia consists of a series of short sketches descriptive of the situation there during February and part of March this year.

The position of our Party in relation to the Russian insurrection receives in this book a good of justification. Much of the work consists of interesting though brief accounts of the personalities of prominent characters in the revolt, and their opinions upon various phases of the situation confronting them.

The industrial difficulties which face the Bolsheviks are dealt with, but so also are the valiant efforts being made to overcome them. Railways and roads are under construction; the Baltic-Volga canal system has been improved to admit the movement of large ships; power-stations on a peat fuel basis are in process of building, and improvements in textile production have been made enabling the utilisation of the abundant supply of flax which is available. There is a great shortage of transport, fuel, and food, but the last two items have become more plentiful since the acquisition of the Ukrainian supplies.

In the control of industrial establishments technical and managing experts are appointed by a central authority instead of being, as formerly, elected by workers in the concern—an important modification.

The most important problem in Russia, is, however, that of agriculture, and this is, unfortunately, all too briefly dealt with. One thing is made clear—the utter impossibility of land socialisation for a long period to come is now recognised by the Soviet Government. Let us quote Ransome:

In the afternoon I met Sereda, the Commissar of Agriculture. He insisted that their agrarian policy had been much misrepresented by their enemies for the purpose of agitation. They had no intention of any such idiocy as the attempt to force the peasants to give up private ownership. The establishment of communes was not to be compulsory in any way; it was to be an illustrative means of propaganda of the idea of communal work, not more. The main task before them was to raise the standard of Russian agriculture, which under the old system was extremely low. By working many of the old estates on a communal system with the best possible methods they hoped to do two things at once: to teach the peasant to realise the advantage of communal labour, and to show him that he could himself get a very great deal more out of his land than he does. "In other ways also we are doing everything we can to give direct help to the small agriculturists. We have mobilised all the agricultural experts of the country. We are issuing a mass of simply written pamphlets explaining better methods of farming." (Page 99-100. Italics mine.)

According to some of our critics the Russian moujik needs neither force nor persuasion to acquiesce in the socialisation of the land, but those in Russia know different. Philips Price, in his pamphlet "Capitalist Europe and Socialist Russia," tells us that: "the decree on land, issued by the Bolshevik Council of the People's Commissaries, instantly quieted the peasants. They knew that the land would indeed be theirs if the land committees, which they controlled, had the handling of it." But, we may add, "theirs" in a different sense from that the Bolsheviks intended, for on January 23rd, 1918, they passed the new land law which declared, according to Price, "All private property in land, minerals, water, forests, and the forces of Nature within the limits of the Republic are abolished for ever, and "the land without any compensation to the owners (open or hidden) becomes the property of the whole people to be used for objects of common utility." (Italics mine.)

How does this decree square with the statement of Sereda as to the non-interference with private peasant property? This is one instance of what Ransome in more than one place refers to, namely, that many of the fine sounding Soviet decrees exist largely or wholly on paper owing to the difficulty of enforcing them: "the spirit is willing" but the materials are damned rotten.

Does not the idea of model communes and propaganda pamphlets remind us of the work of Owen, Cabet, and the other Utopians who hoped to banish capitalism by "good examples"; by demonstrating the "superiority" of communism with "model factories" and co-operative colonies. Of course the conditions are vastly different, for the experiments in Russia are undertaken with the assistance of the State authority, but even so, to convince tens of millions of semi-barbarian, grossly superstitious, illiterate and intensely conservative peasants by such means is a colossal, an insuperable, task.

Ransome reports the continuation of his conversation:

I told Sereda I had heard that the peasants were refusing to sow more than they wanted for their own needs. He said that on the contrary the latest reports gave them the right to hope for a greater sown area this year than ever before, and that even more would have been sown if Denmark had not been prevented from letting them have the seed for which they had actually paid. I put the same question to him that I put to Nogin as to what they most needed; he replied "Tractors." (Page 100.) 

The first part of Sereda's statement looks like an exaggeration. It probably means more has been sown than during the past four years, which should be pretty obvious seeing that the millions of peasants drawn from production for the Imperial army completely disorganised agriculture and almost brought it to a standstill. But if Sereda means literally what he says: "more than ever before," this would not be surprising, for after centuries of impoverishment both in land and products, the poorer peasants would indeed be fools if they did not use to the full their present opportunity to raise their level of subsistence.

But really Sereda's evasive reply does not settle Ransome's pertinent query at all. The point is, can the Soviet Government assure a constant and automatic supply of agricultural products as food and raw material whilst retaining the system of peasant farming and, at the same time, socialising the industries of the towns?

Sereda's last point is significant—"Tractors." Without machinery, and the consequent abolition of the primitive, individually used tools of production true socialisation is impossible. The manufacture or importation of agricultural machinery in sufficient quantities and its practical use embodying the destruction of the traditional mode of production and social relations in Russian rural life is the only solution—and this will take years to accomplish.

In an account of a conversation with Lenin Ransome says:
We talked then of the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory Communism, and how that idea had also considerably whittled away. I asked him what were going to the the relations between the Communists of the towns and the property-loving peasants, and whether there was not great danger of antipathy between them, and said I regretted leaving too soon to see the elasticity of the Communist theories tested by the inevitable pressure of the peasantry.

Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty sharp distinction between the rich peasants and the poor. "The only opposition we have here in Russia is directly or indirectly due to the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as they are liberated from the political domination of the rich, are on our side and are in an enormous majority." I said that would not be so in the Ukraine, where property among the peasants is much more evenly distributed. (Lenin) "No. And there, in the Ukraine, you will certainly see our policy modified. Civil War, whatever happens, is likely to be more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere, because there the instinct of property has been further developed in the peasantry, and the minority and majority will be more equal. (Pp. 150-151.)

Now, without pretending to any detailed knowledge of the situation, is not the support of the poor and the opposition of the rich peasantry due to the fact that the Bolsheviks support the aspirations of the poor peasants for larger allotments even at the expense of the richer peasants, and that the latter are prevented from employing wage labourers and thus cultivating and making a profit upon whatever surplus land was them, in addition to having to bear a heavy taxation? The support of the poor peasants does not mean they are in favour of land socialisation, but that they have received land from the Soviet regime which was hitherto denied them, as well as backing against their would-be exploiters.

It has been repeatedly stated in this journal that the Bolsheviks do not draw their power from a class-conscious working class. The above bears evidence of that, but Mr. Ransome's book contains even more definite information on the point. He states that the discontent engendered by hunger and cold was so great and widespread, though unorganised, that the non-Bolshevik parties could, were they not afraid of reactionary invasion, use it with such effect as to overthrow the Communist Party. Now were the workers conscious supporters of Communism it is obvious that they would easily recognise their impoverishment to be due to causes outside the control of any political party, and that neither the Social Democratic reformers nor the Socialist Revolutionary Anarchists can materially alleviate their hardship. The evidence, on the contrary, shows that the Bolsheviks have proved far better organisers politically and economically than any of their predecessors in power, and that whatever improvement has occured is, in a measure, due to them.

Most of the Bolshevik leaders seem to think that England is on the verge of a Socialist revolution, and Lenin in an amusing sentence quoted by Ransome declared that "Ramsay Macdonald will try to (stop it) at the last minute." We here, however, know only too painfully how mistaken the Russian revolutionaries are. Let those who think it possible for a minority of workers here to seize political power in the way the Bolsheviks successfully adopted in Russia, ponder over the words of Meshtcheriskov, quoted by Mr. Ransome on page 58 of his book. This old Siberian exile, who has recently visited England, says:

In the West, if there is revolution, they will use artillery at once, and wipe out whole districts. The governing classes in the West are determined and organised in a way our home-grown capitalists never were. The autocracy never allowed them to organise, so, when the autocracy itself fell, our task was comparatively easy. There was nothing in the way. It will not be like that in Germany. 

The suppression and massacre of the Spartacists in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere in Germany proved this judgement correct.

Let the revolutionary workers of this country continue their urgent task of agitation, education, and organisation for the day when, having full control of the armed forces of society through the only source of that power—the State machinery—they will be enabled to handle in no uncertain fashion the pro-slavery revolt of the present ruling parasites and their allies, and proceed with the only method of proletarian emancipation, the ownership and control by the community of the means of life.

R. W. Housley. 

Cooking the Books: Neither Keynes nor Hayek (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 26 July Paul Mason, economics editor of the Tonight programme, chaired a debate at the London School of Economics between supporters of the doctrine of J. M. Keynes (1883-1946) and those of F. A. von Hayek (1899-1992). The Keynesians were represented by Keynes’s biographer, Lord Skidelsky, and an economist working for an international trade union federation; the Hayekians by George Selgin, professor at an American business school, and Jamie White, an eccentric philosopher. The debate was later broadcast on BBC Radio4 and is available as a podcast.

Lord Skidelsky explained Keynes’s basic argument that once capitalism had got itself into a slump there was no automatic mechanism to bring about a recovery; on the contrary, without government intervention to sustain and increase spending, the economy would tend towards an equilibrium position well below full employment. At the start of the 1930’s slump Hayek had advocated “liquidate everything” – let failing businesses and banks go under – but, Skidelsky said, you can’t cut your way out of a slump.

Jamie White, who is rather more than a Hayekian (more an anarcho-capitalist), said that Hayek was right to have advocated liquidation as the way out of a slump; the businesses that survived would be more efficient and their investments would lead the recovery. To the applause of the claque of Hayekians in the audience, he said that Roosevelt’s spending policies had only prolonged the depression of the 1930s. You can’t spend your way out of a slump, he said, as had been shown in the 1970s and was being demonstrated again now.

The American business professor said that Keynes had had no theory as to why capitalism got into a slump in the first place. Hayek had; it was that government monetary policy promoting cheap credit encouraged an artificial boom which led businesses to invest in activities that were not sustainable and which would sooner or later collapse. This had happened in the 1920s and was the cause of the present slump when “over-investment” in housing and finance collapsed. Once this situation had been reached the only way out was to let liquidation take its course. There was no painless exit from a slump caused by an unsustainable boom bursting. The only way to avoid a slump was to avoid the preceding boom by not allowing the government to pursue a lax monetary policy. And the way to do this was to abolish central banking and let the market determine interest rates and bank loans.

It is true that Keynes had no truly coherent theory as to why capitalism got into slumps from time to time. On the other hand, the purely monetary explanation offered by Hayek is inadequate. Slumps are indeed caused by “over-investment” leading to overproduction but this comes about through the anarchic pursuit of profits that is part of capitalism. When a boom is underway the market is expanding; competing businesses assume that they will benefit from this and plan to expand their production; in the end production expands more than the market, resulting in overproduction, a financial crisis and then a slump.

When it comes to how to get out of a slump, the Hayekians have a point. Inefficient businesses have to be eliminated. Marx made the same point but from a different position, seeing slumps as part of a boom/slump cycle that was built-in to capitalism, as periods during which, precisely, unprofitable businesses were eliminated as a condition for capital accumulation to resume.

Unlike both the Hayekians (who say slumps can be avoided by governments adopting a laissez-faire monetary policy) and the Keynesian (who say that appropriate state intervention can end the boom/slump cycle), Marx held that there was no formula for steady growth without booms and slumps. For him these were endemic to capitalism, being in fact its “law of motion”.  They will keep on recurring as long as capitalism does and there is nothing governments could do to stop this.

Nationalism and Destruction in the Balkans (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review a recent film about the break-up of Yugoslavia.

'The Weight of Chains', a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010)

‘Who in their right mind would actually want to be a colony? ‘So begins The Weight of Chains, a documentary written and directed by Boris Malagurski (2010) which argues that the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was orchestrated by Western powers in furtherance of imperial ambitions. Director Boris Malagurski, hailed by the Belgrade press as the ‘Serbian Michael Moore’, claims his film ‘takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once-peaceful and prosperous European state’.

The film is narrated by Malagurski himself and begins with a whirlwind history of Yugoslavia: the country was first established as a kingdom in 1918, and encompassed people of various religions and ethnicities, including Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians (all of Slavic extraction), as well as sizeable Hungarian and Albanian minorities. The country was reorganised as a federation of six national republics in 1943, the Titoist ruling party opting for an economic model which mixed state and private ownership of capital. By the 1970s Yugoslavia came to enjoy levels of social and economic prosperity which rivalled even many of its avowedly capitalist neighbours.

The historical background thus set, Malagurski pinpoints the beginning of Yugoslavia’s decline to the early 1980s, when it took out an IMF loan to shore up its waning economy. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan issued a secret memo, National Security Decision Directive 133, which committed the US to widen its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by aggressively promoting Western-style market capitalism in Yugoslavia. US-sponsored NGOs promptly began funding Yugoslavian opposition groups, journalists, free-market economists, and trade union activists. By the late 1980s, this ideological groundwork had paved the way for ‘privatisation through liquidation’: US-guided Yugoslavian bankers and legislators started implementing monetary and economic reforms which triggered the bankruptcy of thousands of state-run firms. This, explains Malagurski, deepened the state’s massive debt and led to runaway inflation and unemployment, cuts to welfare spending, and tension between the subnational governments. Foreign speculators snapped up failed companies at rock-bottom prices, and the federal government, cut off from further foreign credit, was forced to accede to American demands for ‘free’ multiparty elections in the constituent republics.

Lured by the promise of Western favour and financing for their individual republics, regional politicians sowed the seeds of ethnic discord; these in turn were eagerly cultivated by the impoverished workers who were searching desperately for someone to blame for their sudden misfortune. Malagurski aptly shows how the ensuing nationalist secessions brought their leaders into open and often very bloody military conflict over land and resources.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should – long-term readers of the Standard will recognise this part of Malagurski’s analysis of the Yugoslavian breakup and ensuing wars as much the same one we have always presented. Like Malagurski, socialists eschew the ‘ancient hatreds’ theory which holds that interethnic hostility is biologically innate and genocidal violence preordained. Instead, we observe how a faction of the ruling elite, when confronted with rivals to its privileged position as owners and controllers, is compelled to enlist masses of the working class to defend that position. One way of rallying this support is to seize upon some unimportant characteristic – say, religion, language, or ethnicity – which the workers share with the ruling faction, but not with the workers of the rival faction. By exaggerating such differences and ignoring or obscuring the more important commonalities, leaders convince the workers that they share a common interest with their masters, and to happily march off to war in support of it.

By this point in the film, therefore, Malagurski has set things up wonderfully for a scathing indictment of nationalism, irredentism, and capitalist warmongering. Unfortunately, this indictment never comes: as it turns out, Malagurski is just another nationalist, albeit one pining for the ‘good old days’ of pre-breakup Yugoslavia (which, rather tellingly, he himself is far too young to remember). While he correctly surmises that the new ‘Bosnian’, ‘Kosovar’ and other national identities are largely artificial distinctions, invented or overinflated by their respective governments in order to win the support of their electorate and of foreign powers, he ignores the fact that the same was true of the even more artificial ‘Yugoslav’ national identity they supplanted.

In support of its pan-Yugoslav agenda, the film devotes considerable screen time to documenting how the political and economic leaders of the newly independent states enriched themselves at the expense of the common people. Malagurski explains how they did this by cutting back social programmes, skimming foreign investment funds, and selling off entire domestic industries to foreign concerns. But what he fails to establish is how any of this could have been prevented had Yugoslavia remained united, nor why foreign private ownership of industry is any worse for the workers than local private ownership. Russia, for example, emerged from the USSR with a strong national identity and a much greater proportion of its industry in local hands, though its workers also experienced widespread poverty and massive social cutbacks. Of course, even Titoist Yugoslavia was never the paragon of social and economic equality Malagurski seems to think it was. The Yugoslavian nomenklatura may have avoided the conspicuous consumption typical of Western capitalists, but it remained a privileged ruling class which was just as keen to enrich itself through exploitation of its workers.

Many of the film’s flimsier claims and arguments can be explained as the work of a naïve but well-meaning patriot, but others cannot be so innocently excused. For example, Malagurski outright denies that the ethnic minorities in Serbia were oppressed, conveniently omitting any mention of the mass protests and general strikes that led to the revocation of their political autonomy in the late 1980s. In another segment, he paints Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović as a rabid jihadist, quoting from a thirty-year old Islamist manifesto which the man had long since repudiated. Most controversially, he presents the infamous Srebrenica massacre as a ‘stage-managed’ ploy by the Bosnians and Americans to justify NATO military intervention against Serbia. Whatever the plausibility of this theory, it’s particularly distasteful how Malagurski trivialises the village’s civilian death toll as ‘no larger than the number of Serbs killed’ in the surrounding area, without any pretence of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant deaths.

Given this it is not hard to see why Malagurski’s detractors accuse him of being a pro-Serb whitewasher and historical revisionist. Are they correct?  With so many of the post-breakup events still under active historical and criminal investigation, it’s hard to say for sure. But at least one thing about Malagurski is clear: for all the effort he spends exposing and decrying the dishonest propagandising which fuelled the Yugoslavian implosion, he certainly has no qualms employing many of the same tricks when it suits his own agenda. Whatever that agenda may be, the conclusion is that he has a very low estimation of the intelligence of his audience.

Two Pages of S.L.P. History. (1919)

From the July 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the June issue of the 'Socialist" appears an amusing little skit, the must amusing part of which, however, is the sequel which lack of space compelled our contemporary to leave out. Fortunately, however, we have an odd corner in which to complete the tale.

Three "boozy-looking demobilised scroungers" were leaning against the bar bragging of what they had done in the war, when Mr. Dan Dusty, a well-known member of our contemporary's editorial staff, got the pip, and opened his mouth and spake thusly.

  "You're all three heroes, right enough; that's what you want to show, ain't it? You've all been out in France, dressed up by the capitalists . . . to fight for their interests and spoil yer own. Ain't that clever! . . . Equal to the glory of Julius Cæsar, I calls it. Got about as much sense as a blooming coolie what claps his pretty black hands for joy because his master ain't quite flogged him to death . . . You're demobilised with a quid or two or buried in your khaki, just as you was so gloriously shot by the other working man, labeled German, as big a fool as you . . . "

And this is what, but for us would have been lost to the world:

Beeriest-looking Scrounger: "Yus, matey, we're dam fools, and no mistake about it. But its like your dam cheek to say so, seeing that we only joined up because YOUR paper told us we ought to do so—here, don't go."

A. E. Jacomb

What was he fighting for? (2011)

From the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Phil Ochs as the Sound of the “New Left”

A new documentary film on the life and music of Phil Ochs, “There But For Fortune”, is being shown in several US cities now. It hasn’t come too soon, certainly, because Ochs today is largely unknown outside the circle of lefty baby-boomers.

Often Ochs is dismissed as a “topical” songwriter whose music, for that reason, hasn’t stood the test of time. “He’s no Bob Dylan,” his critics sometimes say. Dylan himself famously told Ochs he was “just a journalist” (as he threw him out of his limousine).

This image of Ochs owes much to his own statements, for he frankly admitted that the pages of newspapers and magazines were a source of songs ideas, saying “every headline is a potential song.” He underscored this by naming his first album “All The News That’s Fit To Sing” – punning on the masthead of The New York Times.

The origin of a song hardly determines its value, though; and in his best political songs, Ochs cultivated poetry out of such pulpy fertilizer, just like Hank Williams finding song ideas from his sister’s True Romance comic books.

Whatever one thinks of his music, though, it was clearly linked to the 1960s New Left movement. Ochs’s musical career rose with the movement, his songs championed its causes, and by the time of his suicide in 1976 the movement was dead as a social force. Listening to Ochs’s albums today is a way of tracing the rise and fall of this radical (but reformist) political movement.

Folk re-revival

The combative optimism of the New Left movement in the days when it was still new comes across on Ochs’s first two albums (1964–65). In particular, his song “What’s That I Hear” gives listeners an idea of the excitement young leftists felt as fifties conservatism gave way to sixties radicalism, with Ochs describing the sound, off in the distance, of “freedom calling” and the “old ways falling”.

Ochs in those early albums is not only looking forward with confidence, but also looking back to see what can be salvaged from the radical past. He had first encountered the history of the radical left in the late fifties through his university roommate Jim Glover, a folk musician who unlike Ochs had been raised in a leftwing family.

The early song “Links On The Chain” shows Ochs contrasting radical past with conservative present, as he compares complacent trade unionist with the militants who formed the unions – and with the civil-rights activists of the time “All that they [activists] are doing is all that you have showed / That you gotta strike, you gotta fight to get what you are owed.”

What Ochs and the New Left did not learn from the history of leftwing radicalism, unfortunately, was its limits: how it never truly sought to replace this social system in which workers continually have to fight just to “get what they are owed”. The sixties radicals were thus doomed to travel down the same dusty reformist road the “old left” (Communist Party) had trodden before. Ultimately, the line separating old left and new left was a generational difference in style and temperament, not a true distinction between reformist and revolutionary politics.

The early sixties “folk revival” owed much to the old left and its earlier revival of folk music in the 1930s. The best way to understand the politics of the earlier folk musicians is to listen to the songs of Woody Guthrie as well as the Almanac Singers – a band that included Guthrie, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and others. These musicians stuck to the CP line through thick and thin – and they started sounding pretty thick after 1941, when they ditched their (good) antiwar songs for crass warmongering songs like Pete Seeger’s horrifyingly awful “Dear Mr. President”. But even at their political and artistic best, the old-left songs glorify the futile effort to fundamentally reform capitalism.

“Sis” Cunningham, one of the Almanac Singers, and her husband Gordon Friesen took Ochs under their wing when he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1962. That was the year the couple started their soon-to-be influential magazine Broadside, which brought Ochs to wider attention by publishing the lyrics and music to his songs.

Ochs was influenced by Woody Guthrie, as Bob Dylan and so many others were, but he never tried to imitate Guthrie’s folksy ways (as Dylan does at times on his debut album). Rather, Ochs was drawn to Guthrie’s approach of using contemporary struggles as songwriting material and expressing a clear political opinion. This approach comes through on Ochs’s tribute to Guthrie, “Bound for Glory”, which culminates with the lines: “Why sing the songs and forget about the aim / He wrote them for a reason why not sing them for the same.”

Radical reformist

Ochs was a reformist, as is clear from his songs, but of the radical persuasion. He bandied about the word “revolution” at times and had little patience for timid leftists. Ochs put down such types for all time in his brilliant song “Love Me I’m A Liberal”, where his stereotypical (but true to life!) liberal pleads with radicals like Ochs: “Don’t talk about revolution / That’s going a little bit too far.”

It was the revolutionary act of tearing down a rotten system – more than the question of what might replace it – that seemed to fascinate New Left radicals at times. In the song “Ringing of Revolution,” Ochs brilliantly depicts members of a once arrogant ruling class cowering before the irresistible power of a revolutionary uprising. What the revolution aims to accomplish, however, is anyone’s guess.

"The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing” (Bernstein) – this was the basic attitude of sixties activists. And “the movement” then mainly comprised the struggle for civil rights and the growing opposition to the Vietnam War. These two political issues inspired Ochs to write numerous songs.

On his early albums, Ochs often relied on satire to skewer racists and warmongers. “Whenever there is a deep tragedy, there is always something of the ridiculous,” is how Ochs once introduced to an audience his song “Talking Birmingham Jam”. For that song and other topical ones like it, Ochs borrowed the “talking blues” format that Guthrie had used. In some of his best satirical songs, Ochs has the target of the satire do the talking, like the pro-war hypocrite in “Draft Dodger Rag” who knows that “someone’s gotta go over there [Vietnam], and that someone isn’t me”.

The absurdity of war and racism also inspired some of Ochs’s most mournful songs (“Too Many Martyrs” and “Song of a Soldier”), as well as his angriest and most rousing songs (“Here’s to the State of Mississippi” and “One More Parade”). Listening to the variety of songs that the two burning political issues in the 1960s inspired him to write pokes holes in the assumption that topical or political music is a limited art form.

The sheer amount of energy that Phil Ochs derived from, and poured into, the two political movements, however, could only be sustained as long as the movements were still gathering strength.

New Left grows old

I don’t know / But it seems that every single dream’s / Painted pretty pictures in the air / Then it tumbles in despair / And it starts to bend /Until by the end it’s a nightmare (“Cross My Heart”).

Songs on his later albums, like this one from the 1967 album “Pleasures of the Harbor”, document how Ochs’s radical élan gave way to despair in the late sixties. At times, Ochs tries to buck himself up, as in the refrain to “Cross My Heart” where he pledges: “But I’m gonna give all that I’ve got to give / Cross my heart and I hope to live.” These half-hearted lines, among the clumsiest he ever wrote, could hardly have raised his morale. Now they seem poignant, though, knowing as we do the suicidal end of his story. 

The mental turmoil of Phil Ochs in the late sixties seems to have resulted from a number of different but interrelated crises. His musical career was foundering, he sensed that his youth had become a memory, and he had always been in tune with the melancholic side of life (as even his earliest songs attest).

On top of this, or perhaps at the bottom of things, was the fact that the radical political movement was no longer in its optimistic early stage. The Vietnam War was widening despite the growth of protests against it, and every year brought new assassinations of civil rights leaders. The frustrations of radicals crystallized with the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic national convention. Chicago police beating down the protesters came as a shock of disillusionment, leading the more impatient and imbecilic radicals to begin toying with terrorism.

Phil Ochs was in Chicago that summer for the convention and witnessed the “police riot” during the Yippie’s Festival of Youth in Lincoln Park. The 1968 event seemed to dissolve the remaining political optimism of Ochs, who was supporting the presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

The following year he released an album pessimistically titled “Rehearsals for Retirement,” featuring a cover photo of his own gravestone, with the inscription: Phil Ochs (American) Born: El Paso, Texas, 1940, Died: Chicago, Illinois, 1968. The events in Chicago marked his own “spiritual death,” Ochs felt.

It is rather simplistic to imagine that the police brutality in Chicago suddenly dissolved Ochs’s optimism. More likely, it occurred at point when he already felt that he was reaching a dead end as a musician and an activist, and was looking for a new way forward. (Sadly, the music industry and his own fans at the time did not embrace his later songs, which are among his best.)

Ochs did not abandon leftwing politics after 1968, but the thrill of activism was gone. And how could his radical enthusiasm have persisted without any real belief in the possibility of a post-capitalist society? The movement was everything for Ochs in the early sixties; and he had thought it could broadly reform American society. Even in those years, though, Ochs sensed the fragility of the reform movement and recognized the power of the “establishment”, as is reflected in the many early songs he wrote about martyrs. Perhaps Ochs imagined a glorious defeat for himself, which is the ultimate goal when the final aim is nothing.

He did not die in Chicago, though, and the New Left kept going too. A few years later they discovered that it was not glorious defeat but a pyrrhic victory that awaited them. The end of the Vietnam War may have been the victory of the antiwar movement, in a sense, but it was the end of the New Left. Opposing the war was everything to the movement, so its end left activists without a sense of purpose.

But capitalism continued. Later the US government would pluck up enough courage to wage new wars, and the problems of racism and poverty never went away. So a new “new left” could rise to fight the same struggles again. Some point to these familiar problems to demonstrate the “relevance” of Phil Ochs’s music today. “Just change a few names and places,” they say, “and the songs become contemporary.” Yes, quite true. But the same old capitalist problems popping up, again and again, despite the best efforts of activists like Ochs, really speaks to the utter irrelevance of reformism.

Ochs’s reformism is clear from his songs, but even those songs most clearly inspired by New Left ideas have lines that can sound revolutionary to socialist ears, straining to hear the sound of freedom calling and the old ways falling.

Michael Schauerte

The end of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! (1980)

From the May 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

As everyone knows, there has been a Shakespeare industry for centuries. Thousands of academics—some wise, some foolish, some honest, some crooked—have made a nice living out of it. But it took a long time for a similar industry to develop about Marx; for most of the century since he died, the groves of academe in the main held a conspiracy of silence. He wasn't worth mentioning to students—who in turn became professors who were able to pass on their own ignorance to succeeding generations. Suddenly, in the last decade or two, all that has changed. The reasons need not bother us, but it's enough to make an SPGB cat laugh to find that there is now a flourishing Marx industry among circles which not so long ago "professed": "Marx? Never heard of 'im!"

Every facet of the sage's life and works is explored and there is no end to the discoveries about the subsequent career of his third cousin twice removed; or about the bastard whom he fathered on the domestic servant and who was looked after by the undoubtedly kindly Engels. It is true that all these scribblers seem to know everything except the one thing that Marx really spent his life on: socialism. Ask ten professors of politics to tell you what socialism is and you will get ten different answers, each one as stupid as the rest. A few months ago, for example, there was an attack on Marxism in the Observer by no less a personage than the editor-in-chief. Predictably, this brought an article the following week by E. P. Thompson (who is too big for the paper to ignore) who had no difficulty in showing that Conor Cruise O'Brien is an ignoramus. Sadly he also showed that he too has his faults. The author of The Making of the English Working Class, which received the high praise that was its due when reviewed in this journal some years ago, can still think that a Marxist can possibly associate with the reformists in the Labour Party or the SWP.

As is the nature of an industry, those who engage in it are always looking for products that the competition has not dealt with. So we find that the literati take their magnifying glasses to pore over every odd phrase that Marx wrote from his youth (and like ordinary mortals, Marx too had to grow up—and learn). So we get learned tomes discussing what exactly the great man meant in Chapter XYZ, line 123 of the Critique of the Gotha Programme or some such.

The matter of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is even more ridiculous. The phrase was not intended for, and not used in, one of his books or major pamphlets, but was merely a remark used en passant in the course of correspondence. This however has not prevented the phrase being analysed and dissected ad nauseam. Can there be a dictatorship of the great majority? Whom would they dictate over in the classless society of socialism? Did Marx really mean "dictatorship" in the sense in which we understand the term or was he using it in the manner in which it was understood in ancient Rome? One can only assume that in his grave in Highgate, Marx is saddened to think that a careless phrase, one that indeed seems rather less than meaningful to us, should occasion so much bother to generations then unborn.

Unfortunately, it is not only foolish academics who seize on such phrases. People like Lenin (who had at any rate studied Marx) and Stalin (who had no time to read, being too busy butchering the Russian proletariat) needed these obscure phrases to lend authority to their tyrannical capitalist regimes. Lenin and his so-called Communist Party made it quite clear that they thought it perfectly correct to run a dictatorship and call it democracy. This, they said, was what Marx meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And this in turn meant that Lenin and his grislier successors could claim to be Marxists when by every reasonable understanding of what Marx spent his life writing about, and fighting for, they were anti-Marxists who were running a dictatorship over the proletariat—like Hitler. (In a sense, even worse, Hitler could at any rate say that millions of proletarians had voted him into power in an election in 1933; something that has never happened in the entire history of the Union of Capitalist Soviet Republics.)

However, the mask has now been taken off, very quietly. Russia, which always claimed to be the supreme example of whatever Marx is supposed to have meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, has now abandoned that claim. At last, the official news from Moscow, from no less authoritative a source than the Sovietskaya Vooruzhennye Sily (p. 409). Most readers will no doubt be fully familiar with this journal but, for those who are not, it is the official publication of the Institute of Military History of the Soviet Ministry of Defence—and you can't get more official than that. Here is the passage in question: "Great changes have occurred in the Soviet political system. Our socialist state, which emerged as a dictatorship of the proletariat, has become an all-embracing national state expressing the interests and the will of the entire nation. As a result of this, the Soviet Armed Forces have become the weapon of our all-embracing state, a reliable defender of all classes and strata of Soviet society. Their social and class base has been widened. The union of the armed forces and the nation has been cemented further".

There we have it, After 60 inglorious years, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is now pronounced dead. Out of the ashes we now have a socialist, classless society? On the contrary, our glorious armed forces are there to protect "all classes and strata of society". Russia even has strata as well as classes, unlike our own capitalist state. It will not be necessary to point out all the significance of the remarkable passage quoted but it is worth mentioning that the dateline of the issue is Moscow 1978. Did the glorious Soviet people have some sort of referendum in which they joyously voted out of existence the glorious Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they had joyously upheld in all those free elections ever since Lenin smashed up the Constituent Assembly in 1918? If so, this great event went unreported. The Morning Star still knows nothing about it, which is remarkable ignorance even by their standards. It is probable that about 250 million Russian members of the working class who are unlikely to read Sovietskaya Vooruzhennye Sily, haven't noticed the change either.

L. E. Weidberg