Telling it like it wasn't (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike Back by Ernie Roberts (Published by the author 1994)

The only thing of interest in this autobiography of a long-standing supporter of state-capitalist Russia who was an Assistant General Secretary of the AEU for twenty years and Labour MP for Hackney North from 1979 to 1987 is the following lying attack on the Socialist Party. It refers to an incident that allegedly took place in a Coventry factory about 1940:

"Armstrong-Whitworth had always been a well-organised factory, and as a result, wages and conditions there were among the best in the city. A small group of men - about ten in all - steadfastly refused to join the union. Not because they were anti-Socialist, but because they were members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was firmly anti-union. They claimed that trade union leaders were the lieutenants of capitalism - saddling the workers so that the boss could ride them better. Finally, the other workers decided to take some action against the SPGB members for breaking the closed shop, and they approached their shop stewards with the problem. The solution was a fairly amicable one: the non-union men agreed that they would pay a contribution equivalent to their union subscription to a charity of their choice, so that there could be no question of their opting out of membership for financial reasons, and the rest of the shop then let them hold on to their anti-union principles in peace" (pp. 32-33).

Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB knows this can't be true. The SPGB was founded by workers who were active members of their unions, particularly in the building trade. When the issue of the Party's attitude to the existing pure-and-simple, "reformist" trade unions came up soon after the Party was founded in 1904, the policy of opposing them by trying to set up rival "revolutionary" unions were rejected in favour of working within them to defend the workers' day-to-day interests at work within capitalism. Ever since Socialist Party members have been active in various trade unions, including the AEU.

It is possible that Roberts is referring to an incident, involving members of the old SLP, but the fact that he associates it with the SPGB reflects the influence of the now defunct Communist Party (of which he was first a member and then a fellow traveller) which always used to spread the lie that we were "anti-union".

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Value and Surplus Value (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

People write the strangest things. Here, for instance, is John Lanchester in an essay ‘Marx at 193’ in the London Review of Books (5 April):

“In Marx’s judgement surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing.”

While Marx did say that the extraction of surplus value is the basis of capitalism and that all value is created by labour, he did not say that all value is “surplus value”. Only some value is.

In the process of capitalist production, according to Marx, the workers, through the exercise of their mental and physical energies (their ‘labour-power’), transfer to the product the previously existing value embodied in the raw materials, energy, wear and tear of machines and the like. At the same time they create new value. A part of this, corresponding to the value of their labour-power, returns to them as wages; the rest, over and above this, is appropriated by their employer as “surplus value”.

That Lanchester’s statement, “all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour” is not just bad wording becomes clear when he goes on to write of Marx’s “surplus theory of value” rather than of his “theory of surplus value”. This leads him to bandy about the term “surplus value” in bizarre ways. According to him, you can create surplus value for yourself, and, as a customer or client of a company, you create surplus value for that company when it makes you book online or deal with a phone menu. This has nothing to do with Marx’s use of the term.

While Marx thought that all value was created by labour, he did not think that all work created value. Products only acquire value when they are produced for sale on a market (as ‘commodities’). This was expressed, when they were bought and sold, as their ‘exchange value’ (in money terms, price). In fact, for Marx, it was only through exchange value that a commodity’s value can be expressed.

Products not produced for sale do not have a value even though they are products of work. They are simply products, useful things that people have made to use. Before capitalism, most products were produced to be used directly and not for sale. Even today under capitalism, there is work that does not produce value. Housework doesn’t, nor does DIY or gardening. To say that such work does not produce value is not to say that it is worthless. On the contrary, most of it is very worthwhile. It is just that it does not produce ‘value’. Work in socialism won’t either as it won‘t be producing things for sale.

Even when there is production for sale not all work produces value. According to Marx, only labour that is ‘socially necessary’ does that, by which he meant the time which it takes a worker of average skill to produce a particular product. Otherwise, the slower workers worked the more value they would create.

For Marx, the value of a commodity was determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour embodied in it from start to finish, i.e., not just the labour at the final stage, but also all the labour at previous stages right back to extracting the raw materials from nature.

Marx did not think that under capitalism commodities actually exchanged at their value. He explained in Volume III of Capital that, due to the averaging of the rate of profit, goods sold at what he called their ‘price of production’ (cost + the average rate of profit). So Marx’s theory of value is not a theory of price, but rather an explanatory tool to understand the working of the capitalist system as a whole.

Part of the union (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1980s by Ken Fuller (Lawrence & Wishart.)

One of the myths about the Socialist Party, perpetuated mainly by historians sympathetic to the Labour Party or the now-defunct Communist Party, is that we are opposed to trade union activity (see review of Ernie Roberts's book p21). But the fact is that there are few unions, in the London area at least, whose history would not have to include, if only in a footnote, a reference to the role played by Socialist Party members. 

The London busworkers are a case in point. SPGB members played so prominent a role here that in this fascinating and readable book even a sympathiser of the defunct Communist Party such as Ken Fuller has had to face what for him must have been an unpalatable fact.

In 1913 previously existing unions for busmen and cabdrivers (who were in a similar position through having to hold a licence to do their jobs) amalgamated to found the London and Provincial Union of Licensed Vehicle Workers (LPU). This was a militant union whose constitution allowed the members a large degree of control over policy (officials and organisers were subject to regular election and re-election, and all members had a right to attend the meetings of the union's Executive Committee). A number of SPGB members were active in this union, including the E. Fairbrother mentioned by Fuller of pages 39 and 40 (he had been a founder member of the SPGB) and George Bellingham, who served on the LPU  executive for a while and was also one of its organisers till it amalgamated with the other unions in 1921 to form the Transport and General Workers Union (Socialist Standard, June 1938).

The London busworkers, as the title of Fuller's book indicates, were a relatively privileged group within the working class, enjoying more job security and higher wages than most other workers. The TGWU's policy was to bring its other members, tramworkers for instance, up to their level, even if tis meant not using the busworkers' full strength to get the best deal possible for busworkers.

Under these circumstances tensions developed between the busworkers and the TGWU leadership. A Busmen's Rank and File Movement (RFM) was formed in 1932, mainly on the initiative of Communist Party members (whose anti-"reformist"-union line had been changed by Moscow earlier that year); mainly but not exclusively since the man who was elected chairman was Frank Snelling, described by Fuller as "a member of the anti-Communist Socialist Party of Great Britain"  (p. 111).

Within the TGWU the London busmen had an elected Central Bus Committee. In the 1933 elections the RFM assumed control of this body. Snelling became the chairman, a post he occupied until after the 1937 Coronation bus strike, which was defeated largely due to the strikers being stabbed in the back by the TGWU leader Ernest Bevin.

The result was the demise of the RFM and, in 1938, the formation of a breakaway union, the National Passenger Workers Union, by some of the non-CP members of the old RFM and Central Bus Commitee (CP members were under instructions to stay in the TGWU). Snelling became one of the officials of this union which survived until after the war when it was squeezed out by a closed-shop agreement between the TGWU and the London Passenger Transport Board.

The NPWU revived the old LPU practice of electing officials and organisers - in contrast to the TGWU where they were, and still are, appointed from above - and adopted a non-political stance (i.e. didn't support the Labour Party). In 1943 it was to be denounced by the Communist Party as "a hotbed of every kind of anti-working class politics - SPGB members (who believe the fight for Socialism is hopeless till every worker is a 'Marxist'), ILP-ers, Trotskyists" (Socialist Standard, August 1943).

The existence of this breakaway union posed a bit of a dilemma for the Socialist Party and in June 1938 a meeting was organised by our Lewisham branch in which two busworker members, Snelling and Bill Waters (who had chosen to stay in the TGWU) debated the issue. The debate was attended by many local busworkers and was reported in the local press (Fuller, pages 166-7). The position eventually adopted was that SPGB members were left to decide for themselves which particular union they joined.

Both Snelling and Waters reappear after the war. Snelling as the national organiser of another breakway from the TGWU, the National Union of Port Workers (Socialist Standard, October 1946) and Waters as a founding member of an unofficial busworkers' journal The Platform that appeared between 1950 and 1967 (see Fuller, page 199). Waters was also a regular writer in the Socialist Standard on busworkers' problems (his February 1949 article is quoted by Fuller).

The Platform was edited, under the name George Moore, by George Renshaw who before the war had been the London Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party but who by this time had left the CP; Waters, in fact, went on record as stating that Renshaw was a sympathiser of the Socialist Party (Socialist Standard, June 1968).

Adam Buick

Confusion About Class (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gorän Therborn, Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, is known for his writings on 'post-Marxism,' notably his 1980 book, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, where he reflects on the writings of Louis Althusser, and then describes the 'ideological constitution of classes' and the relationships between ideology, political power and social change.

In his 25-page essay, Class in the 21^st Century (New Left Review 78, Nov/Dec 2012), Therborn describes the twentieth century as ‘clearly the age of the working class,’ stating that ‘working people who lacked property became a major and sustained political force’ but ‘the working-class century no doubt ended in defeat, disillusion and disenchantment, it also left behind enduring achievements’.

From a Marxist perspective, this survey of the twentieth century is open to criticism. Primarily, the fact remains that the capitalist class in the West were never removed from political power. In Russia, China, and Cuba, a Leninist 'vanguard' party bureaucratic class operated a state capitalist system of production and the working class continued to have their surplus value stolen from them. Reforms in the West to capitalism in the 20^th century that could be said to have benefited the working class like the introduction of the Welfare State in Britain are also open to question. So-called 'achievements' like full employment, economic policies in the Keynesian mould adopted after 1945, state capitalist 'nationalisations' of major industries, legislation to protect collective bargaining and industrial action have all been reversed after world capitalist production went into crisis in the 1970s and the global capitalist class adopted a more unfettered form of capitalism in order to shore up profits.

Therborn discusses the working class and political power in the context of capitalist society but never acknowledges the need for the ‘overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, and conquest of political power by the proletariat’. There is no talk of abolishing capitalism, ending the wages system and transforming world capitalist society into global socialism.

He writes of the ‘Social Democratic labour movement’, ‘the reformist wing of 20th century labour’, ‘modern, centre-left social democracy’ and ‘Communist parties or their descendants’ as the sources of the 'achievements' of the past and claims that they have left ‘progressive legacies’ for the 21^st century. Therborn feels ‘whatever may be said about the ruthless authoritarianism of its leaders, the Communist movement produced an extraordinary number of self-sacrificing, dedicated militants in every corner of the world. Their adulation of Stalin or Mao was wrong-headed, but very often they were the best - sometimes the only – friends of the poor and the downtrodden. This everyday commitment demands the respect of all progressives’.

That's as may be, but Therborn admires leftist leaders and organisations such as Castro, Chavez, and ‘Morales and his coca growers with a spine of disciplined cadres’. He appears committed to a belief in leftist political organisation and leadership as formulated by Lenin. Therborn writes that ‘the October Revolution provided a model of political organisation’. Lenin wrote ‘that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness’, and argued that class-consciousness had to be brought to the working class ‘from without’ by professional revolutionaries organised as a vanguard leading the working class to ‘socialism’. Therborn does not speak of socialism; it is always about reforms in the interests of the working class in capitalism. One is again reminded of Lenin who argued that 'socialism' is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism in which ‘there still remains the need for a state’ and a money economy. Lenin emphasised the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which would become the 'dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat'. According to Lenin: ‘It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!’ The theory of ‘socialism’ as a transitional society is an apology for state capitalism.

Therborn writes that ‘the persistence of Communist-led states after 1989-91 means that a socialist option remains open to some degree’ which clearly establishes that Therborn believes China under Mao was a 'socialist' society.

Leftist and Leninist political parties and governments have not abolished capitalism, do not promote socialism and do not agree that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’. Therborn believes that in Latin America ‘socialism is on the agenda’ with ‘left-of-centre governments’ but Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela are 'state capitalist' economies.

Therborn sees the 21st century as heralding ‘the return of class as an ever-more powerful determinant of inequality,’ but Marxists argue that class never went away. He points correctly to the development of capitalism in China, India and Brazil as being of importance and that ‘the emergence of a powerful movement based on this proletariat would have a tremendous impact,’ although he concludes that a ‘political transformation spearheaded by working-class parties seems even more improbable – whether they are reformist or revolutionary in character’. But Therborn does say that ‘For a new left to have true global significance, deeper roots will have to be dug in Asia.’

Therborn says ‘the liberal media looks to an ascendant middle class as the vanguard of democratic reform’. He believes that the 21^st century will be ‘the age of the global middle class. The workers of the last century are banished from memory; a project of universal emancipation led by the proletariat is replaced by universal aspiration to middle-class status’.  Progress, he thinks ‘is likely to be driven by the hopes and resentments of the middle class’ and ‘workers and the popular classes in all their diversity – the plebeians, rather than the proletariat’. Here, Therborn appears to be using definitions of social class from Ancient Rome: the plebeians were a class below the patrician landowners but above the 'capite censi' of the proletariat, and so they are akin to a modern 'middle class' or petty bourgeoisie. But later Therborn confusingly distinguishes between ‘the new middle class, or the plebeian masses’. He sees that in ‘a confrontation between the rich and the rest, with the middle class playing an important role among the latter’.

Marxists argue that the 'middle class' is part of the proletariat, the working class, ‘who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live’. The 'middle class' are excluded from ownership of the means of production, sell their mental power, and so form part of the working class too.

The world in the 21^st century needs global socialism which is ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.

Steve Clayton

Material World: Dying to Migrate (2014)

The Material World Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Migrants, hoping to find a better life, face death during various stages of their journey, and with destination in sight, face the possibility of being picked up by border guards, detained indefinitely and in most cases deported back to their homeland. Those lucky enough to avoid death or capture then enter into a world of uncertainty, where they are likely to work in low-wage labour, forming an under-class of Europe and North America. People who have risked everything to escape the dire life that they were born into will not be dissuaded by the threat of death or detention and deportation.

It is only going to get worse as the effects of climate change are already impacting upon the growing migration trends. 2.8 million people are struggling to feed themselves in a drought-prone area shared by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, according to the UN World Food Programme. The Red Cross said some 571,710 people were affected by the drought in Honduras and that '...families are selling their belongings and livestock to secure food for survival, while others are migrating to escape the effects of the drought.' Researchers believe drought, amplified by deforestation, was a key factor in the collapse of the Mayan empire around 950 C.E.

When the UK Government announced they will not support any future search and rescue operations to prevent migrants and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, responded:

‘Governments that do not support the search and rescue efforts have reduced themselves to the same level as the smugglers. They are preying on the precariousness of the migrants and asylum seekers, robbing them of their dignity and playing with their lives.'

He went on to say: 'Migrants are human beings and just like the rest of us they too have rights. They too have the right to live and thrive. To bank on the rise in the number of dead migrants to act as deterrence for future migrants and asylum seekers is appalling. It’s like saying, let them die because this is a good deterrence.'

He cast doubt upon its deterrence 'Sealing international borders is impossible, and migrants will continue arriving despite all efforts to stop them, at a terrible cost in lives and suffering.' (www.scoop.co.nz/stories, 31 October).

This view has been supported by Italy’s Admiral Filippo Foffi who dismissed the idea that having a rescue system ‘Mare Nostrum’ for migrants in place has created a pull factor: 'If someone is talking about pull factors, he simply doesn’t know what he is speaking about,' he said, adding that that many refugees’ journeys start more than three months before they make it to the shores of Libya and northern Africa with the majority enduring hardships that meant an estimated half die before reaching the coast (Guardian, 29 October).

America’s war on illegal immigration with its higher, longer fences and intensified border patrol surveillance merely provides business for the people smugglers. Peter Andreas in his 2001 study, 'Border Games', pointed out that reliance on human traffickers emerged only in response to the US government’s border build-up in the 1990s, and not a product of porous borders where people would just walk across on their own and not bother with procuring the services of a smuggler. In 2005, Phil Marshall and Susu Thatunon on the basis of their extensive study of anti-trafficking experience in the six-nation SE-Asia region explained 'tighter border controls exacerbate trafficking...' (Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered).

No matter their reason for leaving the country of their birth, as an asylum seeker or as an economic refugee, record numbers are dying in this process. Yet their deaths and desperation receive muted responses from the politicians who prefer to whinge about how migrants are scrounging from the welfare state, despite the fact that the vast majority of people move home to work and not claim benefits.

For millennia there were no borders, nor countries or nationalities - people wandered freely over the planet. Who are we, each one of us, if not a mongrel species of mixed ethnicities? It's long past time to recognise our common heritage globally and work for a world shared in common. The rich, including African oligarchs, can as always live anywhere they choose (Guardian, 26 October).

ALJO

Horrors of Vietnam (1979)

Film Review from the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Deer Hunter

This is a haunting film, of great emotional intensity, with little relief. The story begins in a Pennsylvanian steel town—a hell-hole of heat and noise and smoke. There, in impossible conditions, the three young men who are conscripted to fight in Vietnam work—and when they leave work it is to live under the very shadows of the mills.

Their recreation is juvenile; stalking and killing deer, getting riotously drunk, playing worship to a shocked soldier home from the war. Before they get to Vietnam it seems an exciting adventure, a glorious change from the grinding routine of the furnaces. Once in combat it becomes a nightmare in which all three are destroyed physically or emotionally.

One loses his legs and withdraws into the shell of the Veterans' Hospital where volunteers from the American Legion lay on macabre games of bingo for the limbless. Another is hooked on heroin and dies playing Russian roulette for money in a Saigon casino. The third, the caricature of a hero, comes home in one piece but can no longer relate to his former life. Once the expert deer hunter, when he goes out to hunt again he is so sated with death and pain that he cannot pull the trigger on the animal he has in his sights.

The film has come under heavy criticism, notably from reviewers like John Pilger and other war correspondents who witnessed the fighting. They argue that The Deer Hunter is biased against the Vietcong and shows nothing of the opposition to war in America. (None of which prevented it from winning a number of Oscars!)

There is some force in these criticisms, yet there is no hint in the film that war is anything other than obscene. No better world is promised, to rise from the ashes in Vietnam. The legionnaires in the hospital are shown up as ridiculous, prepared to absorb endless punishment from capitalism. Saigon is depicted as a city where human standards have been crushed by the violence, the cynicism and the rush to make money while the going was good.

Patriotism is made to look futile, out of touch with reality. The final scene, after the funeral of the man who died playing Russian roulette, shows his friends in the shack where he lived, in the middle of the wasteland among the steel mills. It is a ghastly place and they are wretchedly unhappy. Yet their tears are dried as they sing, together, "God Bless America". No patriot could find comfort in that scene—nor, for that matter, could any socialist. We do not look easily at capitalism's vile face.

Proper Gander: Fiscal Exercise (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Considering how important our income is in shaping our life, talking about it can feel more embarrassing than a conversation about genital herpes. Channel 4’s How Rich Are You? aims to encourage some fiscal debate with its mix of interviews, pundits, comments from the studio audience and lots of statistics. Even when jazzed up with flashy graphics, the show’s stats give a depressing picture of our divided society. For example, poorer people die up to 12 years earlier than the rich on average, and just five families have as much wealth as 12 million other people. The widening gap between rich and poor is explained by a tendency for an increasing proportion of wealth to end up as capital rather than being paid as wages. This is illustrated with a replica of a machine built during the 1960s at the London School of Economics, which pushes cold tea through pipes into containers marked ‘taxes’, ‘capital’, ‘labour’ etc to represent how money flows round the economy. While much of this data would benefit from clarification, and terms like ‘rich’ and ‘wealth’ are often left fuzzily defined, the clear message is that the capitalists are still winning the class war. As one member of the audience says, while a minority are laughing their way to the bank, he’s on his way to the food bank.

One of the show’s richer contributors suggests that to get assets, you should ‘get off your fucking arse’, as if that’s how he acquired his inherited booty. As economist Dr Faiza Shaheen points out, effort and talent are less important in determining our income than the circumstances we’re born into. Social mobility has reduced as wealth inequality has increased. So, it’s now harder to break free of the constraining opportunities and life expectancy we grow up with. Dr Shaheen gives plenty of examples of how wealth inequality damages our wellbeing, but her disappointing conclusion is only that too much of a divide hinders capitalist growth. And presenter Richard Bacon’s two-penn’orth is to say that we need some rich people for society to function. Unfortunately, capitalism itself isn’t questioned by those participating in How Rich Are You?, only how it’s administered. Despite this, the programme still reminds us why the system doesn’t work in the interests of the majority.

Mike Foster

Obituary: Vic Heaven (1980)

Obituary from the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over forty years the socialist cause has been kept alive in Bristol by a trio of members with a happy collection of names—Force, Flowers and Heaven. Our small era came to an end when Vic Heaven died on 22 April, aged 81.

Vic joined the army as a boy trumpeter in 1914; political maturity came a decade later. In 1925 he became a socialist and gave his war medals to his children, saying "Here, you can have these begging irons as toys, they're only fit for standing on the pavement with and selling matches". A nice sense of proportion made him keep and cherish the eleven medals he won as an amateur footballer.

Soon after joining the Party he teamed up with a Comrade Howell. Heaven and Howell used to delight in walking around Bristol and calling out to the navvies digging trenches "when are you blokes going to realise that you're being exploited?" The night before Howell died of cancer he threw a party and Vic was pleased to play the piano as Howell sang the Red Flag for the last time.

I first met Vic in 1935, when I was studying for holy orders and was walking through Bristol with my vicar. Heaven was there, selling the Socialist Standard, and he put the case to us. After hearing it, the vicar intoned pompously, "young man, you are 200 years before your time". With his lightning tongue Vic flashed "old man, you are 2,000 years behind the times!" My religious belief evaporated.

Later Vic became a civil servant with the Ministry of Labour, and this cramped his public propaganda work. Nevertheless, he was pleased to have advised every conscript who passed through his department during the second world war of the alternative to fighting for capitalism.

On retirement Vic kept a beautiful cottage garden and, amid the pear trees, he would talk socialism with all his visitors. "The world's first socialist candidate, Clifford Groves" holidayed there; and "Fellow Worker White", so-called because anywhere, and without warning, he would shout "fellow workers!" and gather an audience to hear the socialist case.

Our sympathy and gratitude go to Vic's four daughters, who looked after him in his latter years.

J. Force

Brotherly Love in the U.S.A. (1930)

From the April 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, the author of "Babbitt," "Main Street," and other widely read novels, dealing with life in the U.S.A., was on the spot during the recent embittered struggle between mill-owners and cotton workers at Marion, North Carolina, one of the new industrial areas in the Southern States. He was inspired to write a pamphlet, "Cheap and Contented Labor," in which he tells of some of the incidents of industrial conflict as it is waged in America. It is written in simple, direct language, and is a powerful indictment of the unrestrained brutality of the employing class when they believe their interests to be endangered.

The operatives were on strike for an increase in their wages of 13 dollars a week—a starvation wage at American prices.

No sooner had the workers struck than all the forces of capitalist suppression were turned against them. Armed militia fired upon them on the least provocation. Hospitals refused to tend their sick and wounded. The law courts discounted their evidence, and charges were fabricated in the favour of the employers. Parsons ranted and demanded public whipping posts as a punishment for the "agitators."

General housing and social conditions in Marion are appalling, and call to mind the conditions of the mining and cotton districts of England in the early days of English factory development. Mr. Lewis, who has visited the Lancashire cotton districts, says that the condition of the workers there "is the abomination of desolation," but, he adds, these are "some three or four hundred per cent. superior to those of the workers in Marion." To any who are acquainted with the cotton districts of England such a comparison is enough.

We are also told that the conditions of the mill-workers of Marion are representative of scores of mill towns in America.

However, America still is a land of "prosperity and golden opportunities"—for the Capitalist. For the workers—slavery.

Mr. Lewis wants to abolish this slavery, although in this pamphlet he does not tell us what are his own views on the method of doing it.

H. W.

Dreaming spires and screaming tyres (1991)

From the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A resident of the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford describes the background to the recent riots there.

For a week during the summer Blackbird Leys, a housing estate in Oxford, was catapulted (and I choose that word carefully) to the the forefront of public attention after a sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of violence. Rioting occurred and petrol bombs were thrown when police tried to break up crowds of young people who had come to watch a display of the driving of stolen cars, something of a local pastime. Why did this happen? What is the origin of this conflict with authority in the shape of the police which is such a feature of Blackbird Leys? And why did it erupt on this occasion, as it never had done before, into such open violence?

The violence and conflict was not the product of simple material deprivation; unemployment at 9 percent, but this is not the highest in Oxford. It was more subtle; to do with things which are more intangible; boredom, police insensitivity and the alienation of a whole category of people from mainstream values, opportunities and ideals, and the establishment of a youth culture with its own values which are irreconcilable with the bourgeois values of the wider society.

Blackbird Leys is a large featureless 1960s council estate with a population of around 9,000 which, although it is technically part of the city of Oxford, is attached to the south of Oxford, outside the main Ring Road, in a way which gives it the definite appearance of being an afterthought, something which is artificial and created, not something natural or organic but an excrescence, manufactured to cope with a category of people somehow left out of mainstream society. This feeling of exclusion both physical and social is real and tangible. The actual situation of the estate—you have to go there specially; it is not on the way to anywhere—is mirrored by social exclusion, the feeling of being somehow outside the rest of Oxford and not integrated into the community at large.

The estate itself is oval-shaped and lacks any proper social centre or focus. The nearest thing to this is "the oval"—roads around a rectangular space with trees which functions as a traffic island. It is around this space that most of the driving stolen cars for excitement and danger takes place. The whole estate with its long straight roads is laid out in a way that encourages this joy-riding and speeding. Recently humps that were put in by the City Council to slow traffic down on these long roads have made joy-riding even more exciting and have only served to inconvenience legitimate traffic.

Blackbird Leys was originally built to house Oxford's population overspill and to serve the nearby Cowley car plant, an ambitious programme of public building which one could never imagine happening today. The reality was quite different: it was not built with people and their real needs in mind and was a planning failure. Blackbird Leys is now perceived as an area which is "bad" and which concentrates Oxford City's unwanted into one area, a sort of semi-unofficial social asylum, housing, for example, those with criminal records, and "problem" families. Not surprisingly it also has a high immigrant population. It is also large enough to have its own social differences. Away from the centre are streets of mostly privately-owned houses whereas nearer in and closer to the centre are the more regular and featureless council properties.

Blackbird Leys also borders on to the south Oxfordshire countryside with its picture-postcard villages. Garsington is one of these and is a particularly exclusive small village (exclusive in a real economic sense—it excludes others from participation in its way of life and in its attractiveness) with its beautiful small church, manor-house and thatched cottages. From the centre of Garsington can be seen a swathe of green country which suddenly turns grey and out of which rise tower blocks. The contrast is striking, both between the grey and green and between the life of some and the life of others. From the centre of Blackbird Leys one can see a pleasant green wooded hill which speaks of an otherness to the regularity and featurelessness of the area.

This real sense of difference both from the city and the country only serves to heighten the isolation of the residents. If you have money you can participate in the richness and variety of life, you can live in attractive surroundings, and if you don't you are demeaned and devalued and such things as pleasant surroundings are not seen to matter or to be important—or necessary. These social differences will surely be exacerbated even further by the new development of Greater Leys, a private development starting to enclose Blackbird Leys from the south. This is an estate which is very different, both qualitatively and quantitatively from its larger neighbour. A no-man's-land separates the two and walking across it there is a feeling of stepping from one section of society into another.

Police clampdown
The immediate trigger for the Oxford violence was a long-planned police clampdown on the persistent problem of joy-riding and the opportunity which this gave to frustrated, bored excluded young people in hot weather for a confrontation with authority. By coming in as they did, as a posse, the police made themselves a target for violence and aggression. They were perceived as representing mainstream culture and the interests of the privileged and powerful rather than those of (this particular section of) the working class. Thus they presented a symbol of authority against which the original trouble was a reaction.

This insensitivity made the situation much worse. At the height of the trouble the estate crawled with police spoiling for a row and television camera-crews (I saw some from Germany) and journalists from the national press falling over themselves to film any sign of violence. This turned a fairly small-scale confrontation into one played out for a national and international audience. This, of course, electrified the atmosphere and prolonged the trouble.

Various superficial attempts have been made to improve the situation on the estate. These concern the symptoms but not the underlying disease and, in fact, the situation cannot be resolved within capitalism at all. The wide oval in the centre of the estate where joy-riders do their handbrake turns has been narrowed in a way which has made the featureless, impoverished centre into even more of an eye-sore. The tarmac extensions to the pavements look ugly because no attempt has been made to harmonise them with the existing pavement. Pathetic attempts like this make it more difficult to express the symptoms of the underlying disease, which is capitalism, an economic system, which separates people from each other and makes them compete in a cut-throat way for the necessaries of life; it creates an underclass which never gets a look-in to the better things of life.

What is needed is a wholesale change, a revolution, and end to the misery of private property and the inevitable inequality which goes with it; a new system of society which integrates everyone and distributes its wealth according to the reasonable needs of its members. This new socialist society would abolish at a stroke the problems of deprivation and exclusion of Blackbird Leys and inner-city areas. It would enable the wasted talent of those who are presently excluded on economic grounds from a proper participation in the life of society to be properly developed. The energy squandered on destructive and anti-social pastimes like joy-riding could be put into activities which are more rewarding, fulfilling and socially useful. Young people have much energy, enthusiasm and intelligence and the loss of this is a tragic waste, for society and for those who never fulfil themselves. What is really needed in Oxford is not condemnation from the Home Secretary, nor more police or re-designed pavements but a fundamental change in society.

Iain Jamieson

The Myth of National Characteristics (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

There once was a very bad TV situation comedy called 'Mind Your Language'. The basis of this unfunny comedy was a well-meaning hero teaching an adult night class the English language to a cliché-ridden group of non-English speakers. Stereotypes abounded.

There was the sexually attractive French girl in a short skirt, the randy bottom-pinching Italian, the very proper but dull German and a wide variety of stupid Orientals and Asians. The whole thing was complete nonsense and it says much for the better informed prospective audience that the whole thing sunk without trace after a short run. Although this particular attempt at national characteristics failed the notion that whole groups of people from a particular geographical area are genetically programmed to behave in particularly predictable fashion is very widespread. It would be almost impossible to watch TV or read a newspaper without observing a reference to 'Latin temperament', 'Germanic thoroughness', or even 'American brashness'. In journalism so-called national traits are the norm. In tabloid journalism like theSun or the Daily Mail they are almost mandatory. What lies behind this crass affectation? After all journalists are not stupid and they must recognise the wide variety of human foibles and unique behaviour patterns that exist amongst people. The basis of this pernicious poison lies in the misguided nationalistic aims of the mass media. These means of communications exist not just to sell and make a profit they also have a very important function to perform for the owning class.

It is imperative for the smooth functioning of a class-divided society that the working class imagines that they share a common identity with their exploiters. Thus we have deluded wage slaves on the last night of The Proms puffing out their chests and chanting 'Land of Hope and Glory'. This is a world-wide illusion. BeProud That You Are British or exulting in the American Way of Life are all of a cliched pattern.

It is impossible to imagine how capitalism would function so smoothly without the poison of nationalism. In the event of an economic crisis we must learn to buckle to and beat Johnny Foreigner. In the event of a war we must fight and die for 'our country'. In reality of course the working class have no country. It is an accident which country you were born into - it is probably even an accident that you were born at all. There is nothing to be proud or ashamed of the country you happen to live in. `

So wake up to reality, Bertie Wooster! You are not British. Put your non-existent monocle away and stop sticking out your pinky when having a cup of char. Aunt Agatha isn't going to call shortly.

RD

Cooking the Books: Hard Work, Taxes and Profits (2014)

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

In an article in the Times (30 October) David Cameron pontificated about having a moral duty to reduce taxes:

‘Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward or the classroom.’

The first sentence is not true but the rest is.

As the government as such produces nothing it does have to get all its money from elsewhere. However, it cannot be said that ‘every pound’ comes from ‘private earning’ if by this latter is meant wage and salary earners.

The government’s money comes from two sources: taxes and borrowing. Governments borrow from financial institutions but what these lend it can hardly be described as ‘private earning’. It is money capital accumulated from past profits, i.e., from past ‘unearned income’ (as the Inland Revenue used to call it in the days before spin).

As to taxation, some comes directly from taxes on profits, once again not ‘private earning’ but unearned income. Even the taxes paid by workers fall in the end on employers (though ‘paid’ is probably not the right word here as, with PAYE, workers never see it and what they have to live on is the take-home pay that goes into their bank account). A tax on wages is an indirect tax on profits as it increases the cost of recreating a worker’s labour-power and so what the employer has to pay for it. Economists have long known this but politicians are reluctant to acknowledge this as it blows apart their myth that we are all taxpayers together.

On the other hand, that ‘every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work’ is true. The hard work described by Cameron is the source both of the taxes that ultimately fall on profits on and of the accumulated profits that governments borrow.

So, if there’s any moral duty involved because of the ‘hard work’, it would not be to reduce taxes but to reduce, in fact eliminate, the unpaid hard work of wage and salary workers which produces the profits that governments tax or borrow.

In any event, Cameron’s moral high ground begins to crumble when he sets out another reason for reducing taxes on profits:

‘We know the economic case for cutting taxes: in a competitive world we cannot afford to carry on as a bloated, high-taxing, welfare-heavy nation (…) We have to fight the notion that you can endlessly suck more taxes out of businesses and bite the hand that feeds.’

That’s a rather different argument – that taxes on profits have to be reduced so that businesses operating from Britain can remain competitive on world markets. It’s an admission, too, that capitalism is governed by the quest for profits and that governments have to go along with this, even at the expense of the welfare of those they rule over.

In fact, how come that ‘welfare’ has become a dirty word under capitalism? The dictionaries define it as ‘the state of faring or doing well’ and ‘good health, happiness and prosperity’. Capitalism, on Cameron and the other politicians’ admission, is not geared to pursuing these objectives but to pursuing profits. It’s profits before welfare, which is why capitalism must go if we are to have a true welfare society.

The War in Ukraine (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The second in our three-part series on wars currently going on due to capitalism

The Ukraine Defence Minister stated 'A great war has arrived at our doorstep, the likes of which Europe has not seen since World War Two' (Independent, 2 September). The war in Ukraine in 2014 rose out of the 'Euromaidan' protests in Kiev in November 2013 when Ukraine under pressure from Russia backed out of a trade deal: the Association Agreement and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. For the pro-European Ukrainians EU membership is seen as synonymous with democracy as opposed to membership of Russia's Customs Union: the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC) which also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. The divisions in Ukraine are basically a conflict between two groups of the capitalist class over the choice of the external orientation of the country; toward Europe or toward Russia. As a carrot Russia promised Ukraine $15 billion in loans and 30 per cent discount on natural gas prices.

Ukraine is the 'bread basket of Europe' with its extensive fertile farmlands of rich black soil (chornozem black earth) and the vast fields of wheat, barley, rye, oats, sunflower, beets and other grain and oil crops. In 2011, it was the world's third-largest grain exporter, and according to a 2013 forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ukraine is poised to become the world’s second biggest grain exporter in the world, shipping over 30 million tonnes of grain out of the country last year. Ukraine also has a well-developed manufacturing sector, particularly in aerospace and industrial equipment, nuclear power generation and hydroelectric generation, an advanced rocket systems industry plus the old industries from the Soviet period of coal mining, steel, and metals. It also has its own proven, significant, but yet totally undeveloped shale gas reserves.

East or West?

For the Russian capitalist class Ukraine is the 'near abroad' and therefore within the sphere of influence of Russia. On 28 February Crimea (given to Ukraine in 1954) was occupied by Russia. Since the 1700s it has been the base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet but since Ukrainian independence in 1991 the base in Crimea has been leased from Ukraine, and the leasing agreement was due to expire in 2017, and unlikely to be renewed. This would have meant Russia not having a warm water port giving access to the Mediterranean and via the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean. A great deal of Crimean real estate is Russian-owned, in late February Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development called on Russian capitalists to invest $5 billion in infrastructural projects in Crimea. Gazprom is interested in rich oil and gas deposits off the Crimean coast, as are such western companies as Exxon, Shell and ENI. In April Chevron signed a 50-year lease to develop Ukraine's shale gas reserves which probably stoked Russian fears about losing its influence in Ukraine and as a major gas market. International Business Times (8 November 2013) wrote that 'Chevron's agreement with Ukraine was supported by the US as part of its national security strategy to help reduce Russia's hold on Europe and Kiev.'

In April pro-Russian separatists in the Eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk declared themselves 'independent' of Kiev as the People's Republic of Donetsk. Russia in a throwback to Tsarist times refers to the disputed areas of south-eastern Ukraine as Novorossiya. In six months of fighting 3,000 people have been killed. This area includes the old heartland of Soviet industry with its concentration of coal and steel production; the Don coal basin known as the Donbass. Essentially Russia wants the Donbass as a 'protectorate' so that Ukraine can never join NATO or fully orient its foreign policy westward. The loss of the Donbass region which accounts for 16 per cent of GDP and 27 per cent of industrial production would be a disaster for Ukraine, whose economy will contract 7 per cent this year and may not expand at all in 2015 according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Russia Today 14 May). In August the war expanded when a new war front opened on the coast where pro-Russian separatists took Novoazovsk, a small town on the way to the strategic port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.

The economic war between Russia and Ukraine meant that Russian loans were frozen in January, the price of gas to Ukraine was raised by 80 per cent in April, and Russia insisted that Ukraine pay a $2.7 billion gas debt or it would halt natural gas supplies. Also Ukraine had a foreign debt of $135 billion in 2012 with $13 billion due to be paid in 2014 mostly to European banks, and another $10 billion due in 2015. Standard & Poor cut Ukraine's credit rating describing it as 'a distressed civil society with weakened political institutions' (Bloomberg.com 28 January). In March the IMF authorised an $18 billion loan to Ukraine over two years, and the World Bank coughed up $3.5 billion, both designed to stop Ukraine defaulting on interest payments on its foreign debt. The hryvnia (Ukraine’s currency) has lost 35 per cent of its value against the dollar since the beginning of 2014.

Ukraine has not recovered economically from the world capitalist crisis of 2008-09 and further austerity is required, nay demanded by the IMF as a condition of its loans. The IMF want 'commitment from the country to undertake painful austerity measures, tough reforms and a near-certain recession as a result' (The Times, 25 February) while Reuters called it 'some harsh economic medicine' (5 March). This will mean cutting fuel subsidies, government spending, pensions, and wage freezes for workers. All this will lead to higher gas prices which are projected to rise by 50 per cent in 2014 and by 120 per cent at the end of four years, rising inflation, an increase in unemployment, and a decline in the standard of living for the Ukrainian working class.

The economic crisis hasn't affected the profits of Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine (assets of up to $28.4 billion), his company DTEK controls half of Ukraine's coal, steel, iron ore and thermoelectric industries, and is the largest employer in the Donbass. A Russian oligarch Abramov owns the mining company EVRAZ. The coal industry in Ukraine is affected by a crisis of over production which was identified in the trade magazine Coal Age in December 2013: 'A production surplus in 2013 has hurt the Ukrainian coal industry which needs to reduce the level of production, and in addition, has even decided to temporarily close about 17 percent of all mines in the country. Ukraine is the fourth largest coal producer in Europe after Russia, Germany and Poland. The Ukrainian coal industry is believed to have 4 per cent of world coal reserves, or 33.9 billion Mt of proven reserves. This is enough to maintain the level of coal mining for 2012 in the country for almost 400 years.'

As always in capitalist crises, the working class are made to pay for the failures of the capitalist system. Ukrainian miners in the Independent Trade Union of Miners at the EVRAZ-owned Krivyi Rih iron ore mine in the Kryvbas (iron ore basin) near Dnepropetrovsk in Eastern Ukraine are fighting to defend their interests as workers against attacks by the capitalist class who are seeking to make redundancies, and 30 to 50 per cent cut in their real wages. The miners oppose Ukrainian nationalism and Russian separatist ideology and concentrate on fighting against 'the never-ceasing encroachments of capital' (Marx Value, Price and Profit), but the miners have had to establish self-defence militias to defend themselves against intimidation, and attacks by lumpen elements called 'Tatushka' recruited by the Russian separatists. Essentially these are gangs of thugs organised by mine bosses to crush organised workers before the region can be absorbed into the petro-oligarchy and anarchic-capitalist state that is Russia.

Sanctions

Because of Russia's involvement in Ukraine, the western capitalist powers have imposed sanctions on Russia's capitalist economy with its large energy reserves (oil and natural gas represent 68 per cent of Russia's total exports). These commodities are under pressure as new and cheaper supplies come onto the market, and crude oil prices worldwide hit a nine month low in August. Russian capitalists targeted by western sanctions included the largest bank Sberbank, oil companies Rosneft and Transneft, and Gazprom. Their access to capital markets for any long-term funding was restricted, new exploration projects in Siberia and the Arctic were affected by barring foreign oil companies Exxon and Shell from providing any equipment, technology or assistance to deep-water, offshore, or shale projects with Gazprom Neft, LukOil, Surgutneftegas, and Rosneft. Russian gas is delivered to Europe by pipeline which probably explains why Gazprom's main business is reported not to be on the sanctions list.

Russia is the EU’s third-biggest trading partner with a cross-border trade of $460 billion, and the EU gets a third of its oil and gas from Russia with 40 per cent of that gas pumped across Ukraine. The dominant capitalist power in Europe, Germany, has an economy intertwined with Russian gas and oil exports worth more than $75 billion a year. Larry Elliott wrote that 'a key aim of Berlin's foreign policy for the past quarter of a century has been to re-integrate what used to be the Soviet Union and its satellites into the market economy. Expanding capitalism to the east was seen as both good for German business and for German security. Resistance from German industry makes it unlikely Merkel will agree immediately to Iran-style sanctions that would freeze Russia out of western markets' (Guardian 28 August). The objective of US and European capitalism is energy diversification which means to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas.

The US and EU capitalist blocs are using the military threat of a revived NATO against Russia as part of the western capitalist attempt at influencing the external orientation of Ukraine towards Europe. In September NATO announced the creation of a spearhead 4,000 strong 'rapid reaction' force, with a HQ in Poland and forward units in Poland, Romania and Estonia who have all indicated willingness to host the bases so that NATO would have a continuous presence in eastern Europe. Ukraine has decided to pursue membership of NATO, and clearly the western capitalist powers regard the Russian 'near abroad' as their own sphere of influence. The Lithuanian president said 'It is a fact that Russia is in a war state against Ukraine. That means it is in a state of war against a country which would like to be closely integrated with the EU. Practically Russia is in a state of war against Europe' (Financial Times, 31 August).

The war in Ukraine was no impediment to the NATO military exercise in Ukraine in September known as 'Rapid Trident' at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center at Yavoriv, 60 km from Lvov in Western Ukraine close to the Polish-Ukrainian border. 1,300 troops from fifteen countries including the US, Britain, Germany, Spain, Poland, Norway, and some former Warsaw Pact countries that are part of NATO's Partnership for Peace programme (non-NATO members such as Ukraine and other former Soviet Republics) took part.

Russia went to war with Georgia in August 2008 when Georgia sought to join NATO. Russia could not allow this and Russia halted NATO expansion into the Caucasus. A Ukraine integrated into the EU and NATO would encircle Russia, which was the same reason for war against Georgia in 2008. As always in capitalism the economic conflict over control of mineral resources and trade routes (such as pipelines) will be the cause of war.

Steve Clayton

(Next month: concluding article on the war in Gaza)

Editorial: The Choice is Always Ours (2014)

Editorial from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The media have not been short of political drama to occupy them in recent months: the rise and rise of UKIP, the defections of two sitting Tory MPs , the accusations of dirty tricks, or the ‘nail-biting’ drama of the Rochester by-election.   Anyone following all this might be forgiven for thinking that the political process is a media soap centred on the rivalries and intrigues of a cast of political celebrities.  They might think, too, that it is a game of little consequence for the lives of working people whose only role in all this is to be persuaded to vote this way or that.  With the declining turnout at the polls in recent years, it seems that working people, the majority of voters, think so too. 

But then in September a remarkable 84.5 percent of the electorate north of the border went to the polls to vote in the Scottish referendum on independence.  If working people in Scotland were disillusioned with the current political establishment, then they showed themselves still strong in their belief that their future depends on having the right national institutions and leaders to run the capitalist system. Whichever way they voted, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they demonstrated their ongoing willingness to give away their power to political leaders, representatives of the capitalist class.

Then, in November, alongside the reports of political recriminations and infighting, the media sought to bring a patriotic lump to our throats by reporting on an ‘art installation’ at the Tower of London.  The installation consisted of an assemblage of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each one representing a British military death in the ‘Great’ war.  (An insult, you might think, to those conscripts among the dead who objected to the slaughter). The unintended symbolism of the event went largely unremarked, but revealed the nationalist and militarist sentiments underpinning it – for the poppies, forming a blood-red sea of lost working-class lives, were set in the defensive moat of the Tower of London,  a building deliberately erected to represent the authority of the state in eleventh-century Britain and the power of the economic elites that controlled it. 

Millions of working people of many nationalities followed the orders of their political and military leaders and slaughtered  one another on the battlefields of WWI – the ‘business war’ as it was known. Yet it was also tens of thousands of working-class Germans in uniform that helped bring the slaughter to an end by their refusal to carry on the fight. We should also remember that had the fragile internationalism of working-class organisations before the war been more firmly cemented, their pledge not to fight one another might have withstood the onslaught of nationalism. War would then have been prevented and millions of lives spared. Our past failures as a class stand as lessons to us for the future.

We always have a choice: we can continue to place our power as a class into the hands of institutional leaders who use it to pursue the narrow interests of a capitalist elite, or, we can take responsibility for it collectively and democratically, use it to further our own majority interest and, in the process, act in the interests of all humanity.

Fascism in Britain (2005)

Book Reviews from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Martin Pugh: Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars. Jonathan Cape.£20.00.

Nigel Copsey and David Renton, eds: British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State. Palgrave Macmillan. £50.00.

These two books are not recommended for the various views expressed by the authors and contributors, but for the wealth of information, much of it new, on British Fascism.

The first fascisti, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, was founded in Italy in 1919; Britain’s first Fascist organisation emerged in May, 1925, six months after Mussolini’s coup. It, too called itself Fascisti, but the following year changed its name to the British Fascists. Most of its leaders were aristocrats or men from military or naval backgrounds. They were militantly anti-Jewish and, through endorsement by such newspapers as the Times, Morning Post and the Daily Mail, believed in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy as portrayed by the infamous forgery, The Proctocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The British fascists soon, however, split into even more extreme sects such as the National Fascisti and Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.

Martin Pugh demonstrates in considerable detail the close connections between the Fascist groups and parties and rightwing, and even “mainstream”, conservative politicians. The Fascists were often looked upon as more decisive Tories who. wanted a more powerful, corporate state which would, hopefully, keep the “lower orders” in control and stop “alien” immigration. Many members of the Conservative Party would also be members of one of the fascist groups at the same time. Both could be depended upon to defend the Nation and the Empire. Indeed, between the two world wars, not a few members of the Royal family, including the then Prince of Wales, were sympathetic to Mussolini’s Fascism  and later Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill expressed admiration for Mussolini, and the Prince of Wales had Nazi friends.

Of course the Fascists opposed the General Strike of 1926. In fact, as Pugh notes, they were particularly enthusiastic anti-strike volunteers, enrolling in the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, and as Special Constables. Chief constables welcomed the Fascists, but only as individuals and not as uniformed members of Fascist parties as these had hoped.

In 1920, the Conservative Member of Parliament, Oswald Mosley, crossed the floor to sit as an independent; in 1924, he joined the Labour Party. His views were already interventionist, corporatist, almost Fascist, but he was enthusiastically welcomed into the Labour Party. By 1929, Mosley was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but he soon resigned, and in February 1931 he launched his New Party.Then in 1932, after visiting Rome, he founded the British Union of Fascists. The BUF adopted the Corporate State, with the abolition of political parties, as its official policy. At this stage, Mosley and the BUF looked to Italy for their model, and it was not until 1936 that the BUF became pro-Nazi. Pugh notes that Mosley regularly visited Italy, and was rewarded with funding by Mussolini for several years. Mosley did not meet Hitler until 1935. During this period, the British Union of Fascists, which added the phrase “and National Socialists” to its title, became increasingly anti-Jewish. The BUF was organised militarily, complete with uniforms until these were banned in 1936. For a number of years, the Daily Mail, owned by Lord Northcliffe, supported the BUF and promoted Fascism.

Besides the BUF, there were still a number of small Fascist parties, as well as various “front” groups such as the January Club and Anglo-German Fellowship and, later, the Link. As in the 1920s, such groups had many Tories, rightwing and mainstream, as members. Indeed, most Conservatives, in Parliament and the country at large, were either pro-Fascist Italy, pro-Nazi Germany or, like Neville Chamberlain, appeasers, as Martin Pugh demonstrates in some detail. Many of them continued to hold similar ideas even after Britain had declared war on Germany, on 3 September, 1939. In 1940, Oswald Mosley, as well as about 800 Fascists and others considered to be pro-German, were arrested and imprisoned. But by 1942, most had been released. Mosley was conditionally released from prison in 1944. The BUF had been banned in June, 1940.

British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State is a collection of fairly short and diverse essays by various authors. Richard Maguire discusses the use of Fascists by the Conservative Government in defence of what Stanley Baldwin called the “community” in defeating the miners, and during the General Strike of 1926. And, as noted in Pugh’s book, the authorities were more than prepared to use Fascists as strike-breakers, their views being that the Fascists could be depended upon as Special Constables and the like.

Richard Thurlow outlines the formation of the Security Service (MI5), and its collaboration with Special Branch in surveillance of the Communist Party, and Comintern agents in Britain, particularly during the 1920s and  1930s. After about 1933, MI5 and Special Branch began to interest themselves in the British Union of Fascists, which hitherto they had not done. Interestingly, Thurlow points out that Maxwell Knight of MI5 had himself been the British Fascists’ Director of Intelligence in 1927. Graham Macklin discusses the attitude of the police and magistrates towards the Fascists in their confrontations with the Communists, and shows that in general they were more sympathetic towards the Fascists than the Communists. Not surprisingly, Oswald Mosley was particularly effusive in his support for the police, many of whom were anti-Jewish. Philip Coupland outlines what he calls “left-wing fascism”, in which the BUF use leftwing terminology to attract workers and disillusioned Labourites and Communists. In parts of the country this was quite successful.

David Renton discusses the so-called anti-Fascism, during the 1974-79 period, by such organisations as the Anti-Nazi League, the Trade Unions and the SWP, all of which from a socialist viewpoint achieved nothing in defeating fascist ideas and activities. Indeed, a party like the BNP today probably has as much support as did the BUF in 1935. Possibly more.

Peter E. Newell