“Socialism in Paddington” (1912)

From the October 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the above heading a somewhat demoralising discussion has been carried on in the columns of the local Press, during which the S.P.G.B. in general and the Paddington Branch in particular have been favoured with the biased opinions of certain "well-educated, reasonable people," such being duly appreciated and assessed at their true value.

Undoubtedly much of this anonymous animosity was created by the wilful misrepresentation and historical lies that the cunning Anti Socialist and his co-partner, the Christian Socialist (!) are endeavouring to spread in this locality of extremes. In particular, a "Socialist" curate has been making himself conspicuous in that devilish direction by attempting to discredit our party by stating that "the S.P.G.B. is an obscure little sect, numbering (at the most) some 200 members in the whole of Great Britain."

As several supporters of our propaganda enquired whether such was true, a letter from the present writer was published in the local Press, in which it was pointed out that if the membership of the S.P.G.B. did not exceed 100 that of itself would not prove that the Party's principles were wrong.

It is clear that this genial cleric pinned his faith to numbers and not principles, and that his conception of a Socialist body is one that commences its career with a million members and dwindles down to a few choice spirits to perpetuate the species.

The sycophantic attitude of these "Socialistic" sky-pilots becomes apparent upon reflection. They are Anti-Socialist spies seeking to permeate the Socialist movement with the chloroform of a dead religion. It is all humbug to say that Socialism is based upon Christianity or "the Sermon on the Mount," because neither Theism nor Atheism can be the basis of a social system.

Another correspondent put forward the suggestion that the time had arrived when their united energies should be concentrated against "the only party worth talking about; the party of revolutionary Socialists ; the S.P.G.B." He proposed immediate action being taken to smash the branch up, because he felt convinced that when the S.P.G.B. citadel has been demolished and the rubbish cleared away, the Socialist movement in Paddington will cease to be a fighting force, and will gradually fade.

This hostile announcement acted like a tonic on the branch, who replied by advertising a series of lectures on Socialism at the "Prince of Wales," Harrow Road. It was proclaimed that our object in holding these lectures was to give citizens an opportunity to discuss the question of Socialism and all its implications, and we invited opponents to attend and submit questions, or state their case against us from the platform. With what result ? The week's mission was a great success. Large and attentive audiences listened to the exposition of Socialism, and the collections and sales of literature were very good. And from the enquiries that were made concerning the party the branch confidently expects an increased membership.

Our Secretary is at all times ready to enlighten any wage-worker who is desirous of joining the Socialist Party. If there is any doubt or difficulty that wants explaining, now is the time to have such matters cleared up. Our branch meeting is held for that purpose among others, and we cordially invite our fellow workers in Paddington to bestir themselves, throw off the shackles of superstition and ignorance, and join with us in securing our emancipation from the thraldom of capitalism by the institution of Socialism.

Ben Carthurs

Erich Fromm and Free Access (1972)

From the June 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those confronted with the Socialist proposition that goods and services should be freely available for people to take according to their needs often react by claiming that this wouldn't work because, first, nobody would want to work and, second, people would grab more than they needed so that shortages would again develop.

There are simple answers to these objections. First, the threat of starvation is not, and certainly should not be, the incentive to work. If some work is so unpleasant that nobody would freely choose to do it then it ought to be done by machines or not at all. Second, people only tend to be greedy and to grab in conditions of scarcity. If food and clothing were freely available in abundant quantities people would soon adjust to taking only what they needed just as they do now with tap water.

We are not alone in putting these arguments. For instance in 1966 Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst and writer, wrote a short essay in a book called The Guaranteed Income. Next Step in Socioeconomic Evolution? edited by Robert Theobald. This is the idea that, in order to maintain consumer demand in the face of the mounting unemployment some expect automation to bring, every American citizen should be guaranteed a minimum income. This is in fact a futile proposal to try to reform capitalism so that it can cope with abundance. Fromm wasn't too keen on the idea, but did answer the possible criticism that a guaranteed income might reduce the incentive to work. He wrote:

“I believe, however, that it can be demonstrated that material incentive is by no means the only incentive for work and effort. First of all there are other incentives : pride, social recognition, pleasure in work itself, etc. Examples of this fact are not lacking. The most obvious one to quote is the work of scientists, artists, etc., whose outstanding achievements were not motivated by the incentive of monetary profit, but by a mixture of various factors : most of all, interest in the work they were doing; also pride in their achievements, or the wish for fame. But obvious as this example may seem, it is not entirely convincing, because it can be said that these outstanding people could make extraordinary efforts precisely because they were extraordinarily gifted, and hence they are no example for the reactions of the average person. This objection does not seem to be valid, however, if we consider the incentives for the activities of people who do not share the outstanding qualities of the great creative  persons. What efforts are made in the field of all sports, of many kinds of hobbies, where there are no material of any kind !”

 and

“It is a fact that man, by nature, is not lazy, but on the contrary suffers from the results of inactivity. People might prefer not to work for one or two months, but the vast majority would beg to work, even if they were not paid for it.”

Precisely. The guaranteed income would, however, reduce the incentive to be exploited by an employer — which of course is why it will never be introduced.

Fromm went on to propose what he considered a better idea: "the concept of free consumption of certain commodities".

“One example would be that of bread, then milk, and vegetables. Let us assume, for a moment, that everyone could go into any bakery and take as much bread as he liked (the state would pay the bakery for all bread produced). As already mentioned, the greedy would at first take more than they could use, but after a short time this 'greed-consumption' would even itself out and people would take only what they really needed.”

Despite his good refutation of the objection that free goods and services would lead to widespread grabbing, Fromm is still thinking in capitalist terms as can be seen by his reference to the State paying the bakery money.

Fromm regards himself as a socialist, but is really only a member of the reformist Socialist Party of America. But what we can't understand is why, having taken the argument this far, he doesn't go all the way and advocate Socialism where, on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all the people, wealth would be produced in abundance and voluntary, enjoyable work and where money would be abolished with everyone having free access to what they needed to live and enjoy life. After all, he has no argument to put against this.

Action Replay: Games, Shops and Springboards (2014)

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

They’re called The Friendly Games but they have plenty of rivalry, flag-waving and drug-taking, just like any big international sports gathering. The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, which finished early last month, have been hailed as a major success for the city, for Scotland, and for the Commonwealth.

And of course it’s not just, or not even mainly, about sport. The buzz word is ‘legacy’ (see legacy2014.co.uk). VisitScotland, the national tourist organisation, emphasised that the Games would be a boost to tourism in both the host city and the whole country. Tourism is apparently worth £11bn a year to the Scottish economy, but there is hope that that can be increased, with the Games acting as a springboard (in a sporting metaphor, of course) for yet more visitors. £560m has been spent on the Games, with this seen as investment for the future.

On the negative side, Atos, notorious for implementing in a particularly harsh way some of the government’s austerity measures, was chosen as one of the Games partners, which many Glaswegians saw as adding insult to injury. Parking restrictions were suddenly introduced in places, as a further instance of the Games having priority over local residents. Parts of the city have been prettified (street cleaning, planting flowers, etc) but this has been confined to certain spots, such as those on the marathon course.

One of the most deprived areas of Glasgow is the East End, where many of the Games events were held. New houses and hotels were constructed in place of existing buildings, but one resident complained that the result was that there were ‘nae fucking shops’ (Guardian, 2 August). A day centre for adults with learning difficulties was demolished to be replaced by a car park; the council said this was to provide ‘a more efficient service’ (the standard justification for practically every cut or restructuring).

The real test, no doubt, will be to see if the Games, and the Scottish team’s performance, has any effect on voting in the ‘independence’ referendum. Nicola Sturgeon, head of the Yes campaign, pointed out that Scotland had won a record number of medals, as if this would somehow influence people’s voting intentions. Still, it’s probably as relevant to workers as arcane arguments about the retention of the pound.

Paul Bennett

The Great(er) Emancipator — Frederick Douglass (2013)

From the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Hollywood is ever ready to demystify the Civil War, it should give Frederick Douglass the star treatment.

How can you make a film about Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery and leave out Frederick Douglass? Steven Spielberg found a way, apparently, in his recent film Lincoln.

The film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, reportedly said that he had to leave out ‘dramatic scenes with Frederick Douglass’ as a ‘trade-off’ for focusing the plot on Lincoln’s 1865 effort to round up enough lame-duck Democrats in the House of Representatives to pass the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery). Kushner recalled that when Spielberg suggested limiting the film to this topic, both laughed at what seemed ‘an insane idea’ because the ‘whole movie was just going to be a bunch of guys talking.’

The insane part, though, is not the bunch of guys talking—a refreshing change from the bloody bore of the war itself—but the relative insignificance of an abolition debate at the very moment Sherman and Grant’s armies were uprooting slavery in fact. Spielberg chooses the denouement, after Gettysburg and Lincoln’s landslide re-election, and just a few months before General Lee’s surrender.

Spielberg and Kushner, by most accounts, have made the best of their material, but their ‘trade-off’ sounds like a bum deal. Why not keep Frederick Douglass and choose a more dramatic episode? Any number of points during the Lincoln administration could shed a sharper light on his politics and the debate over slavery, and the presence of Douglass in each case would heighten understanding. 

Setting the film even a few months earlier, to look at Lincoln’s re-election campaign, would have raised the dramatic tension: the stakes then were still high. Douglass feared that an election victory for the ‘revived’ Democratic Party, led by Gen. George B McClellan, would prevent a ‘final settlement’ to the conflict, leaving it ‘to tear and rend the country again at no distant future’—and he campaigned vigorously for Lincoln.

Even more interesting is the 1860 Presidential campaign, whose outcome sparked the war. Douglass campaigned for Lincoln in that election, too, but with many reservations. ‘With the single exception of the question of slavery extension’, he wrote at the time, ‘Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh,’ and offered the prediction that, ‘The Union will, therefore, be saved simply because there is no cause in the election of Mr. Lincoln for its dissolution.’ This illustrates the wide gap between Lincoln and the abolitionists at the time. Douglass’s prediction was wrong, of course, but only because, ‘the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions.’

And then there are the eventful months leading up to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. A film set then could examine how the war’s necessities, more than high-blown principles, led the Lincoln administration to (finally!) take the first cautious steps toward abolition. Douglass welcomed the Proclamation, but found it ‘extremely defective’ and ‘not a true proclamation of liberty but one marked by discriminations and reservations.’ Including his views would help brush a few cobwebs off Lincoln’s much-praised but half-hearted executive order.

Any one of these settings seems more promising than Spielberg’s odd choice, but there is probably method to his madness. Narrowing his film down to the Republicans’ debate with the demoralized Democrats at war’s end, rather than with principled abolitionists at its outset, would seem to spare the director the ordeal of grappling with Lincoln’s evolving policy. Instead, he can present viewers with the more familiar sight of political arm-twisting and horse-trading over an issue that is, by that point, a near formality. That level of politics may be more ‘relevant’ to our own, but really that is an argument against choosing it, dramatically speaking.

Better Fred than Abe

An even better idea (Steven, if you’re listening): Why not cut out Abe Lincoln altogether and make Frederick Douglass the star?

His life, stretching from 1817 to 1895, is full of gripping, conflict-ridden tales, intertwined with the drama of slavery’s demise and the rise of industrial capitalism. For dramatic plot lines and entertaining dialogue, the screenwriter need look no further than Douglass’s brilliant, overlapping accounts of his own life: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

The story of his life begins in eastern Maryland, where he was born in a ‘dull, flat, and unthrifty district . . . surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves, who seemed to ask, Oh! What’s the use? every time they lifted a hoe.’ His grandparents raised him several miles from the plantation where his mother and other slaves toiled, and where he was sent around age seven or eight to begin working himself. Douglass had the good fortunate to be removed from the plantation—‘before the rigors of slavery had fastened upon me’—and sent to the home of his master’s relative in Baltimore, where a somewhat freer atmosphere prevailed. Except for a harrowing period back on the plantation, where he worked in the fields and plotted a (failed) attempt to escape to the North, he remained in Baltimore. And in 1838, disguised as a sailor, Douglass escaped by train from the city to New York.

He settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, working on the shipbuilding docks as he had done in Baltimore. Within a few months of gaining his freedom he was a subscriber to The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper of William Lloyd Garrison, whom Douglass met in 1841 at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket. The impromptu speech Douglass delivered there created a sensation and launched his career as an abolitionist agitator, beginning with his work as an ‘agent’ and lecturer for Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass, to the consternation of some, soon outgrew his role as ‘escaped slave,’ which his ever-growing eloquence as a writer and speaker made ‘unconvincing’ to many audiences. He also outgrew, or grew apart from, his mentor, Garrison, rejecting his general aloofness to politics and his insistence that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. After returning from a tour of England, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, away from the sphere of the ‘Garrisonians,’ and in 1847 began issuing his own newspaper, The North Star. He would continue to publish a weekly or monthly newspaper over the next fifteen or so years, under a number of different titles.

There is something thrilling, especially to socialists, about the abolitionist movement around the time Douglass entered it. Unlike typical reformists, with their laundry list of incremental improvements, the abolitionists aimed to uproot an entire (semi) mode of production, and would settle for nothing less! And they set about the task with passion and patience, using the written and spoken word as their weapons.

As the 1850s progressed, the abolitionists found that the tide of history was finally beginning to flow in a direction more favourable to their cause. The great national crisis was coming to a head. These are cinematic years of constant political and social upheaval: the disintegration of the Whig Party, the rapid rise and fall of the Free Soil and Know Nothing movements, and the birth of the Republican Party, while the nation staggered from one patched-together compromise and crisis to the next until the election of Lincoln. The Civil War itself is far less gripping than the decade that preceded it, and no one trained a keener eye on the political currents than Frederick Douglass.

Of course, the story of Douglass during the Civil War is also immensely instructive. His writings at the time and his later reflections reveal how reluctant Lincoln was to do more than merely preserve the Union. From the outset, Douglass urged the President to wage an ‘abolition war’ and was deeply frustrated by how long it was taking the ‘slow coach in Washington’ to get moving in that direction. He berated the Republicans because they ‘fought with the soft white hand, while they kept the black iron hand chained and helpless behind them; that they fought the effect, while they protected the cause.’ But Douglass believed the necessities of the war would turn Republicans into abolitionists, wisely appealing to their pragmatic interests rather than their sense of morality. His analysis proved correct in the end but the war also turned Douglass the abolitionist into a stalwart Republican, which he would remain until his death.

After the war, as Garrison was disbanding his Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass felt that there was still work to be done; that the aim had been ‘not merely to emancipate, but to elevate the enslaved class,’ and that the former slave was now ‘free from the old plantation’ but with ‘nothing but the dusty road under his feet’ and a ‘slave to society.’ But his efforts to aid black workers were hampered by his loyalty to the Republican Party. This blind support for the party of industrial capital painted black workers into a corner, and allowed the Republicans to take their votes for granted. The contradictory position Douglass found himself in, as black leader and diehard Republican, sets the tone for his last three decades—a period of history that revealed how the Civil War freed capital from its chains, too. 

An inspiration to wage slaves

Knowing Hollywood, and its hankering for hagiography and historical melodrama, it’s just as well, perhaps, that Douglass hasn’t been given the star treatment; I would hate to see him reduced to a saint or superhero. The curious are better off going straight to the source by reading his autobiographies.

All three books bring the history of nineteenth-century America alive. But what makes them even more powerful is that while slavery may officially be dead and buried, exploitation and class rule are very much alive. You may pick up one of his autobiographies with the intention of learning about the past, only to encounter passages that remind you of your own lack of freedom as a worker—a wage slave.

It would be ridiculous, of course, to ignore the differences between a wage worker and chattel slave—starting with the auction-block tragedies that broke up slave families—but Douglass himself noted the similarities: ‘The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers.’ We need to think of ourselves as wage slaves, not to belittle the past horrors of slavery, but to keep in mind our real position under capitalism today.

The great ‘advantage’ the slave has over the wage worker, although rooted in a bleaker situation, is in having no illusions about being free. Ever since Douglass, as a little boy, learned about a ‘mysterious personage’ named ‘Old Master’ who owned his grandmother and ‘all the little children around her’ (including himself), his state of bondage was a transparent fact, and gaining his freedom an obsession. This early revelation left young Frederick with ‘something to brood over after the play and in moments of repose.’

His restless, probing mind went straight to the heart of the matter, asking himself: ‘Why am I a slave. Why are some people slaves and others masters?’ The stock answer he was given—much like today’s ‘That’s just the way it is’—was that ‘God, up in the sky’ made everybody and ‘made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves.’ This struck Frederick as an odd thing for a benevolent God to do, and the source of the knowledge was unclear (‘Did they go up in the skies and learn it?’). Also, he knew of many whites who were not masters, and blacks who were not slaves.

But he wasn’t long in making his first great discovery that there were slaves brought directly from Guinea and those whose fathers or mothers were stolen from Africa. ‘It was a kind of knowledge,’ he recalled, ‘that filled me with a burning hatred of slavery, increased my suffering, and left me without the means of breaking away from my bondage. Yet it was knowledge quite worth possessing.’ From this he knew, ‘what man can make, man can unmake.’

How many workers today are asking themselves: Why am I a wage slave? How many would even accept that self-description? We can learn from the attitude of the young Douglass who already was scrutinizing his social world and taking the first steps toward emancipation.

Another great lesson Douglass learned at a tender age—dispelling the ‘painful mystery’ of the ‘white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man’—was that slavery had to enforce ignorance. The lesson was driven home by his master in Baltimore who forbade his wife to continue teaching Frederick how to read, saying in front of him: ‘Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world.’ Douglass drew the appropriate conclusion from his master’s ‘exposition of the true philosophy of slavery,’ knowing from that moment knowledge is ‘the true pathway from slavery to freedom.’

Along with his hard-fought struggle to develop his mind as a tool for confronting slavery, Douglass throughout his life had to fight to protect his dignity—even as a ‘freeman’ in the North, where he confronted segregation on trains and in restaurants and hotels. Douglass ignored such ‘rules’ and if necessary physically resisted attempts to enforce them, believing that the ‘way to break down an unreasonable custom, is to contradict it in practice.’

His ‘take-no-crap’ attitude dates back to his earliest experiences as a slave, from which he learned, ‘He is whipped oftenest, who is whipped easiest.’ The great turning point in his own life, wonderfully narrated in his autobiographies, came the day he physically resisted the ‘Negro-breaker’ Edward Covey’s attempt to beat him into submission. Douglass fought back, giving his attacker (who never laid a hand on him again) the worst of it. ‘I was a changed being after that fight,’ he recalled. ‘I was nothing before; I was A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN.’

That fight (and the example of Douglass’s entire life) recalls lines from Byron that Douglass loved to quote, and which speaks to the working class today:

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not

Who would be free, must strike the first blow?

Michael Schauerte

Slavery and the US Civil War (2013)

From the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

150 years ago President Lincoln proclaimed the end of chattel slavery in the United States.

The Proclamation of Emancipation freed slaves in the southern Confederate states that were fighting to secede from the Union. Up until this point the declared war aim of the northern states was to preserve the Union against the attempt of the southern states to secede. The war had always really been about slavery but it was only with the Proclamation of Emancipation of 1 January 1863 that it become openly so. Slavery had always been controversial in the US and had come close to being abolished in all states in 1787. By the early nineteenth-century it was outlawed in all states north of the Mason-Dixon line (which separates Maryland from Pennsylvania) but the growth of the cotton industry in the southern states gave slave-holding a new impetus. By the 1850s these states were seeking not just to defend but to expand slave-holding.

Lincoln was against slavery but was a moderate and pragmatic politician and he hoped first to restrict slavery to those states in which it already existed but ultimately to enact a policy of abolition with compensation for slave-owners. With the victory of Lincoln and the new Republican party in the 1860 elections the long-term survival of slavery was threatened. Unable to expand production into avenues that did not depend on simple labour, slave-holders required new land to expand production and avoid land exhaustion. Without the ability to expand into new territories, southern slave-owners were doomed to a slow decline. The future of slavery in the US depended on the secession of the southern slave-holding states and so began the U.S. Civil War, a war in which around 750,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians died over the rights of a narrow oligarchy to own slaves (300,000 were slave-owners, 1.5 percent of the total US population).

A short new book by James Heartfield,  British Workers and the US Civil War (ISBN 978-0956806123, £4), looks at the attempts of the British government to intervene in the US Civil War on the side of the Confederates. Though not overtly pro-slavery this intervention was aimed at denting the power of the USA in North America and drew on anti-democratic sentiment prevailing in the British establishment at that time. The British press and politicians were overwhelmingly in favour of intervention on the side of the slave-owners. They were unsuccessful, however, in creating a casus belli to assist the Confederate states despite efforts to do so. The case being made was one of supporting a fledgling state in its attempts at independence. In this context an attempt was made to mobilise the cotton mill workers of the north-west of England in support of intervention on the side of the Confederate states on the grounds of the state of their trade due to the shortage of cotton imports from the southern states. This shortage was due both to a blockade of southern exports by the Union navy but also deliberate withholding by Confederates to provoke such intervention. Unemployment and short-time working impacted heavily on British cotton mill workers, but they refused to support the cynical attempts to engage their political support in favour of slave-owners.

With the working-class radicalism of the Chartist movement still within memory for many, a counter movement emerged to support the Union cause. This was focused on the radical Union Emancipation Society which contained a core of working class supporters. By contrast the far more establishment British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society refused to take sides in the civil war. The popular support for the Union anti-slavery cause was assisted by Lincoln’s astute political move of issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation which made the war openly about the future of slavery. Thereafter it became politically impossible for the British government to intervene in favour of slavery. Having played an important part in preventing the possibility of war in support of the Confederates, the pro-Union anti-slavery agitation fed into a renewal of British working-class radicalism which helped to secure the 1867 Reform Act. Heartfield’s book is a timely reminder of how, decades after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the British ruling class had few qualms about intervening in a war that would have secured it elsewhere for their own ends and how working class radicalism played an important part in preventing it.

Marx and Engels considered the US Civil War to be the second revolutionary phase in the history of that country, involving the end of slave labour and the expropriation of slaver-owners. The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the US constitution abolished slavery with no compensation to the slave-owners, granted citizenship to all those born or naturalised in the US and granted the right to vote and hold public office to all citizens. From its struggles with the expansionist southern slave-owners the northern industrial capitalists had emerged truly dominant in the US. With ‘free labour’ now the unchallenged form of exploitation, independent labour politics could develop in the US. As Marx put it: ‘Labour in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin.’ By the late nineteenth-century labour and socialist movements appeared to be flourishing in the US. However, we know what happened next. The history of the twentieth-century was one of the failure of labour politics and state capitalism and the marginalisation of revolutionary socialism. The US was the scene of a long battle against the rampant racism that still prevailed in the wake of slavery. It remains for the cause of the emancipation of labour to renew itself in earnest.

Colin Skelly

The ghost of Jaurès laid. (1916)

From the October 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

M. Jaurès, the Blatchford of France was assassinated just previous to the outbreak of the European war. At a recent Socialist (!) congress held in Paris, a minority, composed presumably of anti-militarists, claimed that had Jaurès lived he would have been on their side and against the war. Lt. Paul Hyacinthe Loyson, advertised in the ''Daily Chronicle" as "a prominent French Socialist," tells them and us, that "it is a cheap and easy game to lay claim thus to a corpse that cannot speak."

The genuine Socialist will not take sides in this body-snatching quarrel. Jaurès' influence with large sections of the French workers is claimed by the advocates of two philosophies with little to choose between them. England possesses faithful facsimiles of both. We have the anti-militarists of the I.L.P., who are anti-militarists among other things, and may be Socialists when Socialism is too strong for them to resist it. We have, too, the "Socialist" Patriots like Lieut. Loyson and—according to the evidence he furnishes—Jaurès and the majority of French Socialists.

Lieut. Loyson's evidence is most convincing. The anti-war party of the I.L.P. might just as well lay claim to Robert Blatchford as the "Zimmerwaldians" try to appropriate the ghost of Jaurès. The latter, only a year before his death, "consecrated a book of 560 pages to the study of the best means for a democracy of waging war. A strange anti-militarist, forsooth, this theoretician of the art of fighting." We agree with Loyson, he is entitled to the corpse., and all that goes with it. As a Socialist Party we do not even seek a share in the possession of it. We not only deny the truth of Loyson’s claim that Jaurès was "the leader of international Socialism all the world over and its 'living; torch;'" we deny emphatically that he was a Socialist even. You ask for proof—permit Lieut. Loyson, who so readily supplied the evidence that discomfited the Zimmerwaldians, to provide the material that will lay the ghost he himself has raised.

"Jaurès," he says, "was, in fact, a great-realist who threw the purple mantle of his oratory only over ideas that were healthy and well-muscled. Hence he always held that a whole could only be made up of its parts and that without nations there could be no International."

There is plenty of evidence in Loyson's adulatory article, and in the writings of M. Jaurès, to convict him (Jaurès) of having been anti-Socialist. But I select the above because it is novel and supremely childish, coming from one represented as a "living torch" with none but "well-muscled ideas."

The scientists and philosophers, ancient ant modern, who have been really great, have in the setting out of their systems, been often compelled to begin with simple definitions of terms and things for the sake of clearness. That Marx commenced his analysis of the capitalist system of society by defining and analysing commodity. Euclid laid down at the outset postulates and axioms, and one of the latter was that "the whole is greater than the part." Unfortunately, few people get much further than the axioms or definitions of any science; that doe not prevent them having the greatest respect for those who have gone farther. Those who like Jaurès and Loyson, have made it their business to mislead the workers, know that an assumption of scientific knowledge gleaned from the very first pages of really great works, make a first-'class impression on the minds of the ignorant. A neat phrase conveying an questionable truth, purloined from Euclid, Darwin, or Marx, is not only impressive, not only does it give safe foothold for the mind for a space, but it imparts weight to the trash that follows, and the recipient will doubt his judgment rather than hesitate to swallow  what is claimed as an obvious deduction. It may be "cheap and easy to lay claim to a corpse," but it is not less "cheap and easy" to intersperse scientific commonplaces, cheek by jowl with false economics and capitalist shibboleths, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the workers.

"A whole can only be made up of its parts" is merely a variation of Euclid's axiom that "'The whole is greater than the part," and "without nations there could be no international" is one of the "healthy and well-muscled ideas" over which "the great realist threw the purple mantle of his oratory." Such unsophisticated and shallow reasoning—excuse the compliment—would scarcely seem worthy of notice were it not for the implication it carries. Without nations there can be no international, therefore nations are necessary—they must be preserved, that the international may not die— that false and contemptible international that writes the parasitic labour decoys in common discussion for their mutual interests; that rotten international where they exchange their experiences, their successes and vicissitudes in the despicable game of bluffing the workers.

"Without nations there could be no inter-national." In other words, without capitalism there could be no Socialism, or Socialist movement ; without classes there could be no class war; unless a small class own the means of wealth production and enslave the larger class, there can be no struggle of the slaves for emancipation, and so we might go on. Is it the struggle we want? Do we pray for the class war? Is the international—even the real international—our goal? No, Socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of all the means of life, is the objective of the Socialist. The international, when we get it, is only a means to the end. It is forced upon us because the workers will see the need for it. The ruling class will use all manner of excuses to keep the working class divided; the International Socialist movement will brush the ruling class aside like chaff. For the Socialist movement tramples down national boundaries, recognises the common link between the workers of every land— their poverty and slavery indicts the ruling-class as a robber class, establishes the fact, that poverty need not exist, that slavery can be abolished by the workers themselves, and that the quarrels of the ruling class are of no concern to the working class. 

The working class of the world have a common bond that transcends every tie of race or nationality—their urgent need for emancipation. What matters the name of the country of your birth, if you are a slave in that country? What tie is it that links you to the lordly capitalist ? You are chained to his machines, in his factories and workshops, and driven by the whip of hunger to produce wealth for him while you sink deeper into poverty. You are the robbed, he is the robber; you are the slave, he is the master. A bond of shame, a tie that is a degradation to every wage-slave, is the only nexus between classes, and patriotism is the acceptance and approval of the bond.

Capitalism in its ruthless and brutal progress breeds workers of less consequence than machines, and treats them with far less consideration. The greater the progress of capitalism is, the deeper is the poverty of the workers, the more widespread their suffering, and the more intense their anarchic struggles for existence. Their ever-increasing efficiency intensifies the struggle. Yet all that the ruling class can suggest, nay command, is more efficiency, greater efforts, and sterner self-sacrifice in the interests of trade, and loyalty to them in their scramble for the lion's share in the markets of the world.

In every land the dominant class holds sway over the lives of the workers, moving them like pawns over the chess-board of civilization. From the slum to the factory, from the factory to the battlefield with the workhouse for the huffed. The dominant class wages scientific war against the workers. It maintains the necessary physical force to break down their strikes for higher wages, and with callous irony calls it "preserving order." It provides for an army of priests to lie about the "divine purpose of the Almighty God" in creating rich and poor—the first to be charitable and the second to be patient -while, their only god is gold. The dominant class enlists from the ranks of the workers themselves all the gifted traitors who can fashion themselves into the semblance of respectable labour leaders, entrusting them with the task of educating the workers in the way they should go for Christ's sake and capitalism.

Yet, in the midst of this hellish turmoil of capitalist oppression and anarchy, when starving millions only fail to strive for Socialism because of their ignorance, "Socialism's living torch," with academic calm and dignity, assures the workers that "without nations there can be no international!" Nations first, internationalism second—and impotent: that was Jaurès' conception. As the power of nationalism to grip the minds of the worker rises, so Socialism fades. But when the warm rays of Socialist enlightenment and knowledge illumine their minds with the promise of freedom and social well-being, their hands will clasp across national boundaries, and their feet will tread them into the past. In that day the capitalist will "beat the bounds" in vain, the workers will know that boundaries and nations have no meaning or significance for them. These two, nationalism and international Socialism (and there can be no Socialism that is not international) are opposite as the poles, as antagonistic as fire and water. When patriotism and Socialism enter the worker's mind, patriotism will be quenched or Socialism will evaporate. The Socialist patriot is as impossible as the Christian Socialist. If he is loyal to the class that exploits him, he is a traitor to his own class. If he recognises and is true to his class interest, the class war will engage all his free time and energy; and he will laugh to scorn the hypocritical vaporings about the rights of small or big nations, seeing only in every nation a large or small group of capitalists—his own class being spread over the world, like an upper strata of the earth's crust, for each group to claim and exploit.

The real international will be built up on the facts of Socialism The universal recognition of these facts will mean the linking up of the world's workers in opposition to the capitalist class. That class will practice nationalism and preach patriotism just so long as it serves to obscure the class struggle and keep the workers divided. When they have to face an enlightened and united working class, they themselves will stamp out every boundary in their urgent need for cohesion and strength to meet the workers' onward march. Imagine in that day, if you can, the members of the International Socialist Movement seriously discussing the proposition that "without nations there can be no international." Such a proposition has no place in the Socialist philosophy. It is mere kindergarten babble to the Socialist. But to the anti-Socialist it serves as a premise on which to build his case for the loyalty of the workers to their exploiters. Jaurès and Loyson have both used it in that way, thereby proclaiming themselves anti-Socialist. The Socialist does not care a rap whether the capitalist class divide the earth among themselves by rivers and seas, or by the lines of latitude and longitude. What concerns him, is the class ownership, which he works and organises to abolish.

F. Foan

Paying for air – why not? (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Introductory note. As a researcher, I am swamped by a constant stream of Working Papers, Discussion Papers, Position Papers, Occasional Papers and Miscellaneous Papers that all sorts of schools, networks, institutes, foundations, and centres are kind enough to send my way. Most of them go straight on a pile for later transfer to the green recycle bin, but now and then one catches my eye. I was so impressed by the sheer brilliance of this “Thought Paper” by a junior economist at the Centre for Research, Analysis and Policy (CRAP) that I decided to share it with readers of the Socialist Standard. The author wishes to remain anonymous. — Stefan

Optimal efficiency in the use of any resource requires the functioning of an effective market in that resource. Everyone (that is, everyone who matters) accepts this thesis in principle, but proposals to put the principle into practice still run up against irrational fears and prejudices, hidebound attitudes, and vague moral reservations. This applies especially to the still controversial issue of establishing and regulating a market in air.

That no doubt explains why the published literature on air marketisation and privatisation is so scanty, although these topics have been the object of lively discussion among economic policy specialists, and not only at our centre.  And yet, as people are beginning to realise, the air in the Earth’s atmosphere is a limited resource like any other.

If its use is to be rationalised, the consumption of air must be subject to the discipline of the market. As in the case of wood, water or any other resource, free access to air is a flagrant invitation to profligacy and waste. Studies by physiologists in several countries have revealed that surprisingly large proportions of individuals breathe more deeply and/or at more frequent intervals than strictly necessary for adequate body maintenance.

Many of these irresponsible “free riders” encourage their children to follow their own bad example. Indeed, there are even misguided physicians who in deference to the latest health fad promote “deep breathing” practices among their patients. In the past, the purely technical difficulties of controlling air consumption confined discussion of air markets to the realm of futurological speculation.

Thus, the writer Herbert George Wells, in a story that has for some reason been considered “dystopian,” imagined a future in which the majority of the population live and work underground and, in addition to rent, pay private companies to ventilate their quarters. If they fall into arrears with their air payments the air supply is turned off until the next tenant resumes payment.

Recent developments in pharmacology give reason to hope that in the not too distant future it will be feasible to control air consumption above ground. In the most plausible scenario, a legally mandated annual dose of a paralytic agent makes respiration impossible without subsequent weekly injection of an antidote, the market in which serves as a proxy air market. Of course, the first dose of the paralytic agent has to be combined with the first dose of the antidote; it is only from the second dose that the consumer starts to pay for the antidote – that is, for air access.

The right to sell the antidote to different sections of the population could be sold at auction to the highest bidders.  Those who feel that such an arrangement is morally repugnant usually justify their stance in terms of the naive idea that a person’s access to a vital necessity like air should not depend on how much money he or she has. Presumably it is acceptable to regulate access to luxuries by means of money, but not access to the necessities of life. But this idea makes no sense in the real world. Consider what absurd conclusions would follow if we applied it consistently.

It would mean that there should be free access to food just because we have moral qualms about people starving to death. It would mean that there should be free access to housing, heating, and warm clothing just because we shrink from the sight of people freezing to death in the winter cold. It would mean that there should be free access to medical care just because we feel people should not die for lack of the money to get treated. After all, besides breathing, people need to eat and drink, keep warm, and so on. To be sure, asphyxiation is a quicker way to die than most. But that makes it more humane, not less.

What has this sort of fuzzy thinking got to do with economic rationality?

Stefan

Lenin as Philosopher (2003)

Book Review from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin as Philosopher. By Anton Pannekoek. Edited by L. B. Richey. Marquette University, Milwaukee.

This is a republication of Pannekoek's classic 1938 analysis of Leninism as a non-Marxist theory, the ideology of the development of capitalism in Russia in the form of state-capitalism. This edition is for professional philosophers and students of philosophy and has notes and a lengthy introduction (half as long as the work itself).

In his introduction, Richey takes up a pro-Lenin and anti-Pannekoek stance, criticising Pannekoek for adhering to a philosophy of science not that much different from conventional science (that knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is the ordering and description, a symbolic representation, of empirical evidence obtained through the senses). It is true that Pannekoek was a practising scientist--an astronomer in fact who ended his career as professor of astronomy at the University of Leyden in Holland--who did not reject the empirical approach and did not regard science as a "bourgeois ideology".

It is also true that, in the controversy within the Marxist tradition, as to whether dialectics exists in nature or is just a mental construct, Pannekoek, following Dietzgen, took up the latter view. While he regarded the external world of phenomena as an interconnected and ever-changing whole (two "dialectical" features), he did not see contradiction (a third such feature) as a characteristic, let alone the motor of change, of this world. For him, contradiction was a mental phenomenon resulting from the paradox that the human mind, to make sense of this world in order to better survive in it, has to mentally isolate parts of it and treat them as if they were separate entities whereas in fact they remain inseparable parts of the whole.

As this controversy does not have any bearing on everyday arguments for socialism (it doesn't come up much in pub conversations, except amongst socialists) it is not one that the Socialist Party has felt the need to take a position on. But, if we were forced to choose, we would incline to the Pannekoek/Dietzgen view, on the grounds that while it is clear that social development takes place through internal contradiction (the class struggle within class societies) – this is a verified description on the basis of the facts – it has not been confirmed that change in the physical world is driven by internal contradiction. On the contrary, the most adequate theory of biological evolution is that it took place in response to changing external factors.

In any event, whatever criticisms may be made of Pannekoek's approach, to treat Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a serious contribution to the philosophy of science, as Richey does, is ridiculous. As anyone who has tried to read it knows, it is just a rant against some of Lenin's opponents within the Bolshevik Party in 1908 who he accuses, quite unjustly (but quite typically), of harbouring or condoning religious views just because they rejected his crude and untenable view that the mind merely reflects and photographs (as opposed to mentally reconstructs) the external world. Pannekoek, while of course himself a materialist and a non-believer, interprets the priority Lenin gave to the anti-religious struggle in Russia as evidence that the coming revolution there was to be a bourgeois revolution as in France in 1789 and that Leninism was the ideology of this revolution. Lenin as the Voltaire of Russia's revolution to capitalism.

“Class-Consciousness” (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

No point in the Socialist philosophy arouses such controversy as that of the “class-struggle” and “class-consciousness.”

The confusion prevailing is only intensified by the use of these phrases by those who, while claiming to be Socialists, have altogether failed to grasp the meaning of the term. For example, the Rev. Conrad Noel recently filled the better part of a column in the Daily Chronicle with a criticism of that “over-insistence ” upon the “Marxian Dogma” which has “done the cause of Socialism so much harm.”

This criticism formed part of an article on the S.D.F., and the one thing the Rev. Conrad most objected to was the use of this term “class-consciousness.”

“In the mouths of S.D.F. speakers it always means ‘artizan-consciousness,’” he argued. This may well be—but it only proves, what readers of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD know quite well, that the S.D.F. speakers do not understand the Socialism they profess. The S.D.F. uses Marxian phrases and fails to comprehend them; it employs the words of Revolution and the tactics of Reaction—the language of the proletariat and the deeds of the bourgeoisie.

[And it is as well to note that the Rev. Conrad Noel has since announced his intention of applying to become a member of the S.D.F.—“though not a ‘class-conscious’ one.”]

His objection to the word “class-conscious” is twofold.

Firstly, it is, he thinks, impossible to reconcile the conflicting interests of the various sections of the working-class (clerks, artizans, labourers, &c.) and secondly, that “converts to Socialism from the ranks of the upper and middle-classes are a trifle puzzled—of what class are they to become conscious?”

The point here raised is crucial. Those who hold to the conception of the class-struggle logically deduce therefrom their revolutionary policy; those who deny or (what in practice comes to exactly the same thing) fail to comprehend it must adopt the attitude and policy of Reform and Compromise. What then is the meaning of this term “class-consciousness?”

At a certain stage in the life of every individual he acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity. He becomes aware of his distinctiveness, physically and mentally, from the external conditions which progressively stimulate his susceptibility to impressions, and possessed of a power to recall, combine, and analyse by successive stages of mental presentation these said impressions and emotions.

This sense of individuality, this power of ordered thought (briefly “consciousness”), is the result of the development of the requisite brain-organ; and, as each individual from conception to maturity successively reproduces the stages through which the species as a whole has passed, by comparison we can ascertain the relative degree of development reached by any individual.

When an individual has become “conscious”—has, that is, arrived at that stage of growth at which he perceives both the distinction and relation between himself and the rest of creation—he has acquired a power of reacting upon his environment; a power (limited but real) of “self-determination,” within, of course, the possibilities set by his physical powers and the said environment.

Society is an organism progressing through stages of development.

The present stage is that in which classes have been differentiated within the Social organism: the propertied bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat.

Whether they are aware of it or not their interests are conflicting. The workers fulfil the function of production, i.e., their associated labour adapts all natural resources to human use; the Bourgeois or Propertied Class retain ownership of the tool of production, appropriate the products and control the function of distribution.

Hence the social function of production the prime necessity for social existence and development is fettered and hampered by the survival of the obsolete Bourgeois system of exchange—Bourgeois control of the social function of distribution.

Just as the chicken developing within the shell is compelled as a condition of further existence and development to burst the shell which had till then served as a necessary condition of further growth, so the working-class will sooner or later become conscious of this hindrance to their development—become conscious that they are the only useful class and progressive force in Society—conscious that they are potentially, the Society of the Future, and bursting the shell of Bourgeois political control and consequent economic domination, act themselves (and Society) free to commence a new and higher stage of evolution.

In a word: when conditions are ripe the working class will acquire, with the recognition of their place in Society, and of their constraint and that which constrains them, and a perception of the vital organic force impelling them to struggle, their consciousness as a class—their power of “self-determination.”

To make the working class thus “conscious,” it is necessary to make it understand the relation between it and the rest of (i.e., the other classes in) Society.

To achieve this result in the class, an effective of the individuals composing it must acquired the capacity of seeing, behind apparent diversity of interests (as clerks, spinners, hammerers, and diggers) their real community of interest as a class—must have recognised their common subjection to the necessity of selling their abilities in a common labour market; their consequent common exploitation, and their common interest to emancipation as a class.

Such distinction as still survives between “skilled” and “unskilled” labour is being rapidly abolished by the extension of education on the one hand and the introduction of machinery on the other. And few know this better than the “skilled” workmen themselves.

Hence Conrad Noel’s objection concerning the diversity of interests among the working class has no foundation. With regard to the vague use of Marxian terminology by Reformers posing as Revolutionists it must be noted that the stage at which a worker is brought to recognise that he is exploited by his particular employer, or he and his fellow-workers in their particular industry by their particular group of employers, is not the stage of class-consciousness—it is but the stage of class instincts; the rudimentary possibility of subsequent consciousness.

Class-consciousness on the part of any one worker thus entails the recognition by him of his place as a unit in a class, at present politically ruled and economically enslaved, whose historic mission it is to carry Society forward into a higher stage of development: the recognition that the interests and therefore impulses of the individuals composing either ruling or ruled classes respectively are mutual and those of the two classes antagonistic, and consequently that the development of Society more and more produces a class-struggle for the possession of political power as a necessary pre-condition on the one hand for rule and on the other for emancipation.

The working-class-consciousness will express itself in a political organisation for the purpose of accomplishing this emancipation. That worker is class-conscious who has seen the duty of enlisting under the banner of Revolution—in the Political Party of the workers —the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

With regard to the Rev. Conrad Noel’s second objection little need be said. The Capitalist-class will only be converted to Socialism by the Social Revolution; the middle class by the Official Receiver—any isolated individuals from these classes who may enlist under the banner of Social Revolution by so doing desert their own class-standpoint for that of the working-class. They must accomplish the feat of lifting themselves intellectually above their own class-environment to the height from which, comprehending the process of social-development as a whole, they can foresee the inevitable triumph of the despised proletariat—a feat that few have the intellectual power to accomplish.

The middle-class man “converted” to Socialism is generally a source of grave danger to the working-class movement. Fastening upon the cruder manifestations of working-class instinct—he gives this instinct a Bourgeois Reformist turn and so hampers its growth. As “breadth of thought” and “toleration” he conceals the shallowness and superficiality common to his class: under the name of Socialism he preaches State-Capitalism. In place of Revolution he urges Reform. Upon the half-hearted and partially conscious efforts of the workers to organise the political party of their class he fastens as a “leader”—and all development is arrested.

Hence we are not concerned about “middle-class converts” to Socialism.

Socialism is possible when the workers, organised in the Socialist Party, proceed to establish it. When they do that, the whole of the “upper and middle” classes will be powerless to prevent them. Without the workers so consciously organised nothing can be done.

The first thing then is to make the working-men “class-conscious.”

T. A. Jackson

Benn: the heir apparent (1981)

Editorial from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Left has taken a new hero to its heart. Though born into the English peerage with an inheritance that he did not throw aside with his title, this man is said to represent the true and radical voice of the working class. Though a Minister in a government under which the number of unemployed doubled and Britain's stockpile of nuclear weapons increased enormously, we are told that this man will ban bombs and create jobs if only he gets the chance. Although a professional Christian, our hero is considered to be a Marxist. Having supported the last government's five per cent incomes policy, we are informed that the unions have no truer friend than this man. It is true that the People's Friend served in a government which presided over an increase in the concentration of wealth owned by the richest one per cent, but then, he does stand for a fundamental redistribution of wealth, doesn't he?

At bus stops up and down the country old ladies are quivering at the thought of the impending Bennish Revolution. Writing in The Sun (4/6/81), Paul Johnson makes it clear that 'unlike any of his rivals, Benn knows exactly what he wants and how he is going to get it. His is not interested in office . . . (Why, of course not. If he were he would have accepted a Ministerial post, wouldn't he?) . . . He wants power—the power to change the nation fundamentally.' So Sun readers be warned. Vote for TB and your nation will be changed fundamentally. Don't bother to ask what that means. Just shake with fear. After all, most of us are so deliriously happy in this best of all possible worlds—with its poverty and bombs and dole queues—that fundamental change is simply not playing cricket. The media loves to have a bogey man to feel threatened by, especially when the threat of real change is a fiction and personified in such a gentlemanly soul as a lapsed Viscount.

Just as some workers are led to fear this imaginary threat, so others are led to regard it as their greatest hope of salvation. Tony has come to redeem the children of Labour from the tyranny of the Right-Footed monster (who used to be a Left-footed monster until he met the pastry chef at Number Ten). The Socialist Workers' Party has announced that a victory for Benn will be progressive. The International Marxist Group has taken the next logical step and urged its members to join the Labour Party and do what must be done for the heir apparent. Followers follow with all of the passion of next week's roast mutton. It is radicalism gone flat, with ears to the keyhole of the NEC taking the place of any thought of self-emancipation.

History is not made by great men. Indeed, there are no great men. Great men are the inventions of politically myopic journalists and indolent historians who cannot be bothered to look for real causes. There are great myths and often men and women are motivated to put great faith in them. One such myth is that leaders can create democracy while those who want it need do no more than cheer from the sidelines and drop mental blank cheques into the ballot box. As if liberation can be achieved while the minds of the liberated are still chained to the illusions of class society. As if the mighty are high for any reason but that the meek are holding them upon their shoulders. A leader cannot lead unless there are followers to follow.

Socialism—which is what Brother Benn claims to stand for—can have nothing to do with following. You cannot be a socialist and have a leader. You cannot be a socialist and be a leader. Socialism means self-emancipation of the working class by the working class. Only when a majority of workers understand and want it will socialism be a practical possibility. It is all a question of consciousness allied with democratic political action.

Good or bad intentions do not enter into it. Maybe Leader A is a nicer bloke—or less of a swine—than Leader B. It is irrelevant. It is possible that Benn will try hard to do what he thinks will be in the interest of 'the people'. Good motives do not stand a chance against the limits of historical possibilities. Capitalism cannot be reformed into Benn-evolent socialism, even if Tony does say his prayers before he goes to bed every night. Similarly, if the press is correct and our gallant hero is a Phony Tony, that is no concern of the working class. Leaders can be good, bad or indifferent, but they will still do the same thing. They were elected to run capitalism for the capitalist class. That is what they will always do for as long as they are allowed to.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never had time for leaders who aim to come into the working class political movement and get socialism on our behalf, especially when such leaders are jumped-up moralists from the bourgeoisie. In July 1906 The Socialist Standard had the following words to say on the subject:

The middle-class mean 'converted' to Socialism is generally a source of grave danger to the working class movement. Fastening upon the cruder manifestations of working class instinct—he gives this instinct a Bourgeois Reformist turn and so hampers its growth. As 'breadth of thought' and 'toleration'  he conceals the shallowness and superficiality common to his class: under the name of socialism he preaches State-Capitalism. In place of Revolution he urges Reform. Upon the half-hearted and partially conscious efforts of the workers to organise the political party of their class he fastens as a 'leader'—and all development is arrested. Hence we are not concerned about the 'middle-class converts' to Socialism.

Maybe Benn will displace Foot. If he does, it will not take him long to shock his fans and pacify his critics by acting in just the way that every useless Labour Prime Minister has done in the past. Then he too will be rejected as a traitor and another radical hero will emerge to stab him in the back. Opportunist leaders come and go, and while they plot and intrigue and pat themselves on the backs, the followers, on whose backs they have been riding, should be taking a tip from Prince Charles's horse.

Material World: The Bottom Line on Climate Change (2011)

The Material World Column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

As predicted in January’s Material World about international climate change meetings, more business opportunities have unfolded within the framework of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but when the facts are out there has been no advance in reducing those emissions.

December sees the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) taking place in Durban, South Africa, a city which has had massive coverage from CNN TV, for one, promoting a super-green city with a host of wonderful big green business opportunities in and around it. This view is totally at odds with that of Patrick Bond, South African activist and scholar, writing that the ASSAF report (Academy of Science of South Africa) totally plays down or omits to mention some of the worst of recent decisions and builds in the city. There is also no mention of the 'national context' of the world's third and fourth biggest coal-fired power plants under construction in South Africa but the report is full of “greenwash attempting to disguise high carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric.” Lead negotiators for South Africa at the Durban meeting are representatives of Eskon, electricity producers and the country's single largest polluter.

June 2012 will be the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of these meetings and a return to Rio de Janeiro where, in 1992, at the first “Earth Summit” UN members signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which is still the governing treaty. It states that members promise to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions in time “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change” (but without any specific targets). Who will be there next year to remind them of this broken promise? Perhaps ‘dangerous’ is not a word that can easily be agreed upon explicitly even if ‘anthropogenic’ (originating in human activity) is accepted.

Wasted Years

If you think that too much time has been wasted in those 20 years, consider this: in 1896 a Swedish chemist, later to win a Nobel prize, first calculated that continued burning of fossil fuels would lead to a hotter earth; in 1904 the USA's first solar-powered electrical plant was built in St Louis and the second soon after in the Mohave Desert – the company to be driven out of business a few years later by cheaper coal and gas plants.

COP17 runs from 28 November to 9 December but there are alternative meetings to look out for – African women farmers of La Via Campesina, 30 November to 2 December; a Global Day of Action on 3 December; and a Mobilisation Day for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in Durban and worldwide on 5 December. Associations such as these of small farmers clearly understand that they, their descendants and the great majority of the world's population are under serious threat from agreements reached (or not) at 20 years of international climate meetings by the very nations which profit most and which produce the largest volumes of harmful emissions on their own soil or outsourced for their own consumption as food, biofuels and products of industrial factories.

How bad is it after 20 years of non-binding, ineffectual, voluntary agreements? Most people will have heard the latest statements following a number of recent scientific studies which are pointing to similar conclusions: that new findings are more than 20 times more likely to show that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected” rather than 'not as bad as previously expected.' Recent reports confirm that from 2009 to 2010 worldwide emissions increased by 6 percent. At a London conference in October over 100 medical and military professionals, including the chairman of the BMA, were signatories to a statement saying that lower carbon use would save vast amounts of health care money and they submitted a list of demands to all governments.

Wars and climate pollution

The Pentagon, the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy, is not subject to any international agreements nor is its total use transparent. The US air force is the world's single largest consumer of jet fuel at 25 percent. The Stratocruiser uses as much fuel in 10 minutes as an average driver in a year. Studies done by Oil Change International looking at the climate pollution of war found that the full cost of the Iraq war would cover all the global investments in renewable power generation needed up to 2030 to reverse global warming trends, and that between 2003 and 2007 this war generated more CO2 equivalent each year than 139 countries release annually. With figures like these it's easy to see how hollow and ironic are the calls for individuals to make green lifestyle changes.

The worldwide industrial food system, change of land use entailing massive deforestation for monocrop production and biofuel plantations, production of crops as commodities rather than food, all cause huge but unnecessary additional emissions. With big investors around the world looking for profitable returns, capitalist politics takes no heed of public opinion on any topic, from Canada's tar sands, Australia's coal, USA/NATO's wars, to misappropriation of indigenous land and common wealth.

The Climate Vulnerability Monitor measures four main impacts of climate change: health, weather, habitation and the economy. The most intransigent states at the last meeting were those least under threat and most committed to strong economic growth. The bottom line to this business as usual with foreknowledge of the chaos, disruption and necessary flight of hordes of homeless and hungry as a result of inundation and drought – impacts caused by continuing stubbornly along this road to ruination – is surely premeditated murder of billions from sheer hypocritical self-interest.

Janet Surman