Capitalism—The Sick Society (1959)

From the June 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Social Basis of Mental Ill-Health 

"I want to be left alone; I want to dream my dreams, to believe as I once believed, that life is good and beautiful and that men can live with one another in peace and plenty. No son of a bitch on earth can tell me that to make life better you have to first kill a million or ten million men in cold blood." The cry from the heart of millions of ordinary people today; people whose only wish is to live happy, full, life free from hardship, fear and anxiety.

This cri de coeur comes from a “fictitious” American, a soldier disabled in World War I, “The alcoholic veteran with the washboard cranium.” His creator—Henry Miller, whose savage, bitter attacks on Capitalist society are brilliantly embodied in his story of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company from The Tropic of Capricorn.

The greatest tragedy of Capitalism is the suffering of its living victims. The dead are dead and can feel nothing, but the living must endure the frustrations, the fears, the uncertainties, the insecurity, which are inextricably bound to mid-twentieth-century Capitalism. Nearly half the hospital beds in the United Kingdom are reserved for patients with mental illness; in the United States it is as common for people to have their own “head shrinker” (psychiatrist) as it is for them to have their own butcher or beautician. Here is a tape-recording of a private talk between an American T.V. producer (Dan Enright) and a professional “quiz contestant” (Herbert Stempel), reported in Time magazine of 15th September, 1958:

Enright: I want to get a psychiatrist for you.
Stempel: I already have one.
Enright: No, sir. I want you to go to a psychiatrist five days a week, not twice, Herb, to expedite yourself . . .  We will foot the cost . . .
Stempel: Well, my doctor seems to feel that my problem isn’t serious enough for five days a week.

Age of the Phoney

A society must be grievously sick when so many of its members have to undergo mental treatment. Psychiatry is a peculiar product of modern Capitalist society. Mental conflicts (including the “neuroses,” which account for so much mental illness nowadays) are largely the result of peoples’ inability to come to terms with their environment, and psychiatry is an attempt to resolve these conflicts; but they are inevitable under Capitalism, where society is divided by warring groups and classes.

Capitalism has created a world of potential plenty, but millions of its workers either live in poverty or else they live in a state of apprehension lest some “crisis” (an oft recurring feature of Capitalism) throw them into poverty. Capitalism is world-wide, but lethally armed nations make a mockery of cooperation with the shrill cries of their gutter-patriotic leaders and their insatiable demands for markets, trade routes, and for their Cypruses, their Formosas, their Algerias. Capitalism, especially the mid-twentieth-century brand, will go down in human history as the great age of the phoney. Honesty and integrity are subjects for derision; the present-day gods are the gimmick, the ballyhoo, and the slick-tongued salesman, all wallowing in a bog of false social values.

The U.S.A.

No country in this Capitalist world is more socially sick than the United States of America. The United States is a fantastic amalgum: it possesses the source of scientific knowledge and industrial techniques challenged only by Soviet Russia, and yet, according to Paul Blanshard in his book The Right to Read (The Beacon Press, Boston, 1955), there are roughly 8,000,000 “functional illiterates” in the U.S.A. That is, there are 8,000,000 adults who have not got the reading knowledge that a child should acquire in the first four years at school. And according to Louis R. Wilson’s study The Geography of Reading (quoted in the above book), only about one-half of the adult population of the United States in 1938 had sufficient reading skill to understand the ordinary books published for adults. And yet these “functional illiterates” are subjected to the same strains and stresses of Capitalism as their more “enlightened” fellows: is it any wonder, then, that many are intellectually and emotionally incapable of coming to grips with a bitterly competitive and hostile environment—modern capitalist society?

When faced with a problem, some people fight it, some run away from it, and some remain undecided, a battleground of conflicting emotions which tend to destroy the peace of mind and cause mental illness. When faced with the problems of Capitalism, therefore, some people fight them (Socialists are in this category), some run away (Capitalism must answer for many suicides), and others become mentally ill: they either fill the mental hospitals, appear in police courts, or, more tragic still, they may live for years with terrible mental conflicts which blight their own and their families lives.

But suddenly these pent-up frustrations, conflicts, and inward suffering may erupt with dreadful results: people “flip their lids” as Americans so graphically describe the onset of acute mental illness, and the outward peace of the humdrum “respectable” home is shattered brutally and irrevocably. Consider the case of 16-year-old Diana Daye Humphries, who ambushed and shot to death her 14-year-old brother in their home in Houston, Texas.

According to an Associated Press despatch dated 24th September, 1958, Diana was an honour student at High School, where her teachers and schoolmates described her as a “brilliant student and well-liked girl, not the type to do a thing like this.” But she did do it, and her reasons for doing it are a terrible indictment of the existence she and her family (along with millions like them) endure under modern Capitalism. Diana (who had also planned to kill her father, her mother and herself) told the police:

“I did it because everything was so routine. My mother goes to work every day and comes home tired. So does my father, and he is sick with ulcers. Everyone was always tired. Robert was tired of school. It seemed we were always getting up, going to work or school, coming home, cooking meals, eating, washing dishes, going to bed and getting up again. I couldn’t stand it! I wanted to kill everyone so we wouldn’t have to suffer any more.”

This penetrating picture of working-class life by a teenage girl makes a macabre mockery of all the sickening eulogies of Capitalist society with which Capitalists and their politicians and spokesmen incessantly bombard our senses. What dark powers Capitalism must have to turn a “brilliant student and well-liked girl” of such tender years into a pessimistic, disillusioned killer.

Another Associated Press Report dated 24th September, 1958, this time from Sparta, Michigan, tells of the tragedy of an unemployed man who killed four of his five children with a shot-gun; his fifth child and estranged wife escaped with minor injuries. The father told the police: “I can only take so much. I got shot up in the war and my nerves act up.” By no means the least horrifying aspect of this tragedy was the hard-boiled, matter-of-fact, attitude of the eight-year-old surviving child, who is reported to have been found sitting on a blood-spattered bed saying: “Hey, cops! Daddy did this. I played dead. He thought he killed me, too.”

These two cases represent the small number of human tragedies in which the stresses and strains of life under Capitalism cause violent reactions, and hence get into newspapers. They are the one-tenth of the iceberg visible above the surface of the water: the extent of submerged human misery can only be inferred from the great increase in recent years of mental illness, suicides, divorces, alcoholism (especially in young people), the so-called “psychosomatic” illnesses, such as duodenal ulceration, and the colossal trade in “tranquillisers ” and sedatives.

The follies, miseries, frustrations, and personal tragedies of modern Capitalist society have been, and are being, forcefully recorded by a growing number of novelists, mostly American. Henry Miller’s savage polemics in The Tropic of Capricorn are not generally available, but there are many other works freely obtainable from public libraries or as cheap “paper backs."

“1984”

Orwell’s prophecy of the control of man’s thoughts under the Capitalist corporate state a few decades hence is a phantasy (which may perhaps become partly true) featuring violence to mind and body and sophisticated torture. But Merle Miller (The Sure Thing) and David Karp (Leave Me Alone) suggest that “thought police” work, albeit “unofficial” is present today: these authors' subject is the intolerance, persecution; and in some cases social ruin, of people with ideas (real and imagined) slightly out of line with the “hundred-per-cent. All-American” outlook of conformist, unquestioning, suburban communities. These last two books are, in a way. more horrifying than 1984. both because they describe what might actually be happening today, and also because the persecution and intolerance are not exercised by “ thought police,” but by groups of ordinary, well-meaning, law-abiding, citizens only too well indoctrinated with the ideas of intense nationalism, racial prejudices, and selfishness engendered by the Capitalist society in which they live.

The problems of Capitalist Society have been described by socialists, novelists, historians, sociologists, and even by professional politicians. But only Socialists recognise that most of these problems cannot be solved until Capitalism is replaced by a social system in which people throughout the world will work harmoniously together to produce and distribute wealth to satisfy society’s needs. In this system of society. Socialism, there will be no terrible forces causing daughters and fathers to kill members of their families, there will be no need for armies of psychiatrists and overpopulated mental hospitals, no need for the senseless slaughter and maiming of men. women and children in war, and there will be no need for people to fear for their safety and security because of what they think.

To work for the abolition of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism is the life-work of the Socialist. What better work could there be?

Michael La Touche

Cooking the Books: The EU and the Price of Food (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the argument over whether to Leave or Remain in the EU is in the better overall interest of British capitalism, which the media and politicians are urging us to get embroiled in, the Remain side would arguably seem to have the stronger case – from a capitalist point of view that is, of course.

British capitalism benefits from unrestricted access to the single European market and also from having a say in drawing up its rules and regulations. It also benefits from being part of a large trading bloc in negotiations with other states and blocs, on the same principle behind trade unionism that ‘unity is strength’: you can get a better deal when negotiating as a group rather than individually.

But these are not the only arguments that the Remain camp are using. In April the Treasury published a study on what things would be like in 2030 if British capitalism leaves. Apparently, we’ll all be £4300 a year worse off. This is mere fantasy economics, as the Leave camp were quick to point out, including ex-Cabinet minister, Ian Duncan-Smith, who said that governments can’t predict what’s going to happen even a year ahead, citing Chancellor Osborne’s revision in March of the growth predictions in his previous year’s budget. We have always made the same point but can’t recall any politician making it when in government.

Then there is the claim in one of the ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’ leaflets that British capitalism being in the EU is ‘great for families with lower prices in our shops thanks to free trade.’ This is not true as there is ‘free trade’ only within the EU. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the EU is a customs union which imposes tariffs on goods from outside it, in particular agricultural products. This means higher food prices; which was one reason why some were opposed to British capitalism joining in the first place in 1973.

This is still the case, as Gerard Lyons, of Economists for Brexit, pointed out:

‘There is a tariff wall around the EU that protects agriculture, largely for the benefit of France, and parts of manufacturing, because of Germany. In these protected areas, people pay higher prices than in world markets’ (Times, 6 May).

So, if British capitalism left (and if it is decided not to protect UK farmers – a big If) there would be lower food prices. But this would not benefit workers. We’ve been here before, in the 1840s when there was a campaign to repeal the Corn Laws which imposed tariffs on the import of corn which benefited landowners who creamed off as higher rents the increase in the price of what their farmer tenants sold.

The capitalist opponents of the Corn Laws sought working class support by saying it would bring lower food prices, but, as the more astute trade unionists of the time realised, this would not benefit workers since, by lowering the cost of living, it would lead to lower wages, leaving workers no better off.

Engels, who used to hobnob with Manchester capitalists in the 1840s, wrote in 1881 that ‘there was no secret made, in those times, of what was aimed at by the repeal of the Corn Laws. To reduce the price of bread, and thereby the monetary rate of wages’, so as to increase the competitiveness of British capitalism on world markets or, as Engels said the British manufacturers put it, to enable them ‘to defy all and every competition with which wicked or ignorant foreigners threatened them’ (Labour Standard, 18 June). Which is how the Leave camp is still putting it today.

Tories back to nature (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Devotees of political stereotypes will be comforted that the Conservative Party seems to be back to its old self again, after all those years when it clumsily posed as the working class's friend, as the party which cares, as the party of freedom and prosperity. All that is over now; one Tory at this year's conference symbolised it when he asked about one of the wetter junior ministers: “What’s a man who rides bicycles, drinks beer and sends his children to comprehensive school doing in the Conservative Party?

During the years between the wars (the two World Wars that is; for our present purposes we are ignoring the others which have cost so much in suffering and destruction) Stanley Baldwin, although he did not ride a bike, managed to deceive a lot of people that there was something called the National Interest, in which everyone's fortunes were involved and which they should trust him to protect. Baldwin was a rich man whose money came from the family ironworks. He spent some of it on a comfortable home in the lush acres of Worcestershire where he acted the part of the country squire, caring for his pigs in whom he perhaps recognised the same characteristics of productive docility as were displayed by his employees.

Baldwin's was an astute ideological base from which to attack the workers. The calm — sometimes indolence — of his exterior concealed a steely resolve which was pitted against the working class in their resistance to the lowering of their wages during the slump. Baldwin has an assured place in the history of class conflict through his handling of the General Strike, when he contemptuously outgeneralled the TUC and then sat back to contemplate the miners being starved into submission. There was cruel suffering for those people, for their children, their families and for the communities where they lived. Baldwin was unmoved; in his ideal scheme of social things there was a place for the workers — but they should know this and keep to it.

A more compassionate — if at times equally indolent — public face was worn by one of Baldwin’s successors, Harold Macmillan, who seemed to regard strikes as a personal affront to his ideal of a united, co-operative, unruffled country in which profits for the ruling class came out in a constant, tranquil flow. Macmillan was always ready to speak on the theme of there being One Nation, which was only to be expected because he owned rather more of the Nation than any of the people he was recommending it to. Now in his declining years, the ex-Prime minister occasionally grumbles that the policies of this government are another affront to his ideal, that they do nothing to promote the prime deceit of One Nation. His words should carry some weight, especially with Tories sitting on a slim majority, for Macmillan knew a thing or two about persuading the working class to vote his way.

If Macmillan were placed in parliament now he might well be among the wets, who are usually pleased to be known as Tories. There is a special irony in this because the Labour Party once used the word Tory as a term of abuse which implied a hard-faced Dickensian indifference to the plight of the poor. The Wets have reacted to this by trying to give the word a more charitable meaning. In the debate last July on the government's refusal to restore the 5 per cent cut in unemployment pay which they imposed in 1980 one outraged Wet, Richard Needham, said "... it is the basis of Tory philosophy that we help those who cannot help themselves" and he was supported by another Wet. Patrick Cormack: "... restore some traditional Toryism to the lobbies, and ensure that those people least able to look after themselves are looked after by us".

A Tory cast in just that mould is Ian Gilmour, who has carried his opposition to the Thatcher government to the extent of speaking at a Child Poverty Action Group fringe meeting at this year's conference. Now this was very bold of Gilmour, since those few Conservatives who have heard of the CPAG probably regard it as highly seditious in its work of highlighting the more extreme poverty among the working class. Well fed pigs are much more attractive and reassuring to look at than half starved children. Gilmour did not attend the meeting to congratulate or to defend the government; he demanded the restoration of the cut in unemployment benefit and larger payments for the unemployed. He is, of course, another very rich Tory — like the man with the bike and the beer he went to Eton - so it was strangely generous of him to worry about the unemployed being deprived of a pittance more each week. It is even more generous of the workers, whether they are unemployed or in an active exploitative state, to take such nonsense seriously.

In any case this government, as they never tire of telling us, are made of sterner stuff. They are unlikely to restore that cut; their resistance to wage claims will probably stay as firm as ever; their resolve to ease the path of British capitalism by forcing down workers’ living standards will not easily waver. And if the election results are any guide there is small prospect of the workers reacting against this. The same patience and optimism which was so effectively exploited by politicians like Baldwin and Macmillan — as well as by Labour leaders — is still there, still pulling in the votes, still keeping capitalism in being.

If the promises of those political leaders had any worth, we would now be living in secure prosperity; the problems which are so troublous now would simply not exist. Workers would be able to vote for parties who had fulfilled their pledges to organise capitalism into a benign, abundant society. But what has actually happened? In March the numbers of people living on Supplementary Benefit rose for the first time above 4 million. Supplementary Benefit was originally designed as a final safety net which would cradle those few people whose usual circumstances had pushed them through the other provisions of the Welfare State. It is now the everyday income which millions of desperate workers rely on to survive.

In April the Department of Health and Social Security (who are supposed to stop it happening) found that over 2 million people are living below the "poverty line" — below the level of existence on Supplementary Benefit which is itself barely enough to live on. That same month the Low Pay Unit and the Civil and Public Services Association reported that the outpacing of wages by price rises was hitting the lower paid particularly hard — that the poorer were getting poorer. There is little hope from the government that this will change. In August, Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe was warning that it will "take a long time” for unemployment to start to fall. There will be no less pressure on those workers who are in employment: in July the President of the Confederation of British Industry described as “bonkers” the idea that wage claims should attempt to compensate for price rises, so that “. . . we should get a bit more each year”.

As those with memories stretching beyond last week will recall, that was exactly the attitude of the last Labour government, who tried to get the workers to accept rises below the rate at which prices were going up. Now it is the policy carried out — or perhaps taken over would be a better term — by a Conservative government. In their efforts to protect the interests of the ruling class, every government is compelled to dispute with the workers over wages. From their point of view, the big problem of the post-war years was the high demand for labour power, which undermined every pay restraint policy, whatever name it went under. This situation was rapidly changing under the Callaghan government and as Labour went out of office unemployment had risen, and was still rising, and seemed likely to continue to do so. Coincident with the election of the Thatcher government the slump deepened and as unemployment has risen still further so the attack on workers' livelihoods has become particularly savage. At the Tory conference, it was the hard-liners, the people who openly express the intention of forcing the workers to suffer most acutely in this crisis, who got the standing ovations: the others won only a ripple of applause scattered among a stony, disapproving silence.

The political danger in this is that the workers are encouraged to blame the Conservatives — or perhaps the Dry Conservatives — for these problems and so to assume that a different party, or a different section of the Conservative Party, would be able to run things differently. Anger and despair at unemployment and extremes of poverty will become focused on the public figures of politicians like Thatcher and Tebbit who, although they do little enough to soften their Gradgrind image, are not responsible for the basic nature of capitalist society. A desire for revenge at the ballot box will obscure the memory that the problems existed under a Labour government and that all parties show themselves equally helpless in face of capitalism's waywardness and anarchy.

Ivan

Contrast (1982)

Book Review from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Madeley, Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands (Minority Rights Group, 1982.)

Now that Falkland Islands jingoism has died down, the Minority Rights Group's Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands is a timely refutation of the hypocritical British claim to be defending the “sovereign rights" of British citizens.

In 1965 Britain offered Mauritius independence on condition that the islands of the Chagos Archipelago were excluded. The United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 2066 XX in December 1965 inviting Britain not to “dismember the Territory of the Mauritius and to violate its territorial integrity". Britain declined that invitation. Mauritius was granted independence in 1968 and Britain retained the Chagos Islands the largest of which. Diego Garcia, had a population of 1,800 — roughly equivalent to that of the Falkland Islands. The Chagos Islands, and those of Desroches, Farquhar and Aldabra became the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). In 1966 BIOT was leased to the United States for military purposes.

Diega Garcia was seen by the Pentagon as an ideal position to monitor the movements of the Russian navy in the Indian Ocean. Originally, the island was to be a communications centre but the base has gradually become a military one. The presence of an indigenous population, the llois, was inconsistent with the presence of a military base and. as John Madeley points out:

between 1965 and 1973 the British Government went about the systematic removal of its own subjects from Diego Garcia: it deposited them in exile in Mauritius without any workable settlement scheme: left them in abject poverty, gave them a tiny amount of compensation and later offered more on condition that the islanders renounce their right to ever to return home (p. 4).

The British Government, which later gave much credibility to the words of the United Nations over the Falkands' dispute, were in this instance acting in contravention of articles 9 and 13 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which state that “no one should be subjected to arbitrary . . . exile" and that “everybody has the right to return to his country".

The removal of the Ilois took a number of forms. Ilois families who had gone to Mauritius, some 1,200 miles away, were told that they would not be allowed to return. Madeley points out that many Ilois testified that they had been “tricked into leaving Diego Garcia by being offered a free trip" (p. 5) and boats were not available for the return journey. In 1967 the BIOT took over Chagos Agalega and closed down activities on Chagos during 1968-73. This effectively meant that Diego Garcia’s largest employer had ceased to operate. Finally, in 1968 food ships did not sail to the Chagos Islands. March 1971 saw the arrival of the first American servicemen and in the following December the remaining inhabitants of Diego Garcia were ordered to leave. In 1973 the evacuation of Ilois from the smaller islands of Chagos was carried out using the BIOT's ship Norvaer.

Mauritius was offered £650.000 for relief and resettlement of the islanders in 1973. The Sunday Times of 21 September 1975 published an article stating that the United States had given Britain an $11.5 million discount on Polaris submarines to help establish BIOT and thereby pave the way for the Diego Garcia base. The £650,000 compensation was paid to the islanders in 1978 and the Mauritius government put pressure on Britain to increase the amount of compensation. By 1979 Britain agreed to pay increased compensation if the Ilois abandoned all claims to be able to return to the island: an additional £1.25 million was offered.

In June 1981 the £1.25 million offer was renewed with an additional £300,000 of technical aid. The United States meanwhile were preparing their $1,000 million expansion of Diego Garcia into a base capable of accommodating aircraft and ships. In March 1982 the British offers of compensation were increased to £3 million and then £4 million. The Mauritian government offered the islanders land to the value of £1 million, which they accepted: the British compensation was still offered, on the condition that the islanders accept “their transfer to and their resettlement in Mauritius and their preclusion from returning to the Chagos".

It is ironic that five days after the settlement with the Ilois the Falklands were invaded by Argentina. The quibbling as to how much should be spent on "defending" the Falkland islanders was drowned in a sea of patriotic fervour. The £1,000 million and the loss of both British and Argentinian workers' lives makes a striking contrast to the treatment of the Ilois. and is another example of the cynicism of capitalist politics.

Philip Bentley

The Struggle for Power in Russia (1953)

From the February 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the arrest of nine doctors, most of them Jewish, on charges of murder and attempted murder of Russian military and civil leaders at the instigation of foreign governments and the Zionist movement, political commentators in the Western countries have been busy trying to guess what are the hidden forces and personal ambitions that will explain why the Russian Government chose to expose itself to publicity that must gravely damage its prestige and embarrass its Communist supporters in other countries. While the explanations vary and are often contradictory they almost all agree in refusing to accept the validity of the charges and die prisoners’ “confessions.” Most of them start off with the crippling defect of assuming that Communism exists in Russia and that the Russian Government’s actions are dictated by interest in furthering Communist ideas. President Truman carried this kind of examination to its logical extreme by interpreting the trial as a sign of Russian weakness, due, he said, to “ a fatal flaw in their society. Theirs is a Godless system.”

A much more objective approach was made in Manchester Guardian editorials (14,16 and 17 January, 1953). Here there was a serious attempt to compare political methods and motives in Russia with those in the Western Powers. It was frankly recognised that “communism has nothing to do with the struggle” and that the concern of the Russian State “is not with communism but with power; it uses communist jargon to serve its purpose, but that purpose is the maintenance and extension of power.”

Admitting that in this respect “ Russia does not differ appreciably from the ordinary Western State,” the writer singled out as the important difference the fact that in Russia, since there are no political parties able to fight out the struggle for office in election contests, the form it must take is that of plotting, intrigue, and the violent removal of rival claimants. Victory means power, defeat means extinction. The '‘Guardian” writer’s conclusion is that whatever the present grouping of the contestants the likely outcome when Stalin dies is that the generals will move to the front of the political stage:—

“The fears and the hopes, as the life of Stalin moves to its end, may split that political structure as they have split so many before in the history of States. There will not be the authority of a Lenin or a Stalin to hold the ambitious down, nor the prestige of a Generalissimo to check the generals. The lions now under the throne will struggle for the seat on the throne. And in that struggle can the throne survive? May it not be that already the first faint shadow of anarchy and civil war is beginning to fall on Russia?”

It is an interesting speculation, but what is of more concern is to consider what sort of country Russia is that such events can take place there. As a great capitalist power in a capitalist world Russia is subject to the same kind of internal strains and external pressures as other powers; the need to keep an impoverished working class more or less content with wage-slavery; the need to accumulate capital and increase productivity in order to build up modem industry capable of serving the military and civil needs of capitalism; the need to force an unwilling peasantry into collective farms so that by increased production and government requisitions on produce the towns can be fed and manufacture supported; and of course the need to defend and expand its world position in face of the other powers. These are problems much like those of. all governments, but once those in power in Russia had committed themselves to dictatorship by suppressing the Constituent Assembly because it had not a Communist majority and then suppressing all political parties except their own, there was no other way of maintaining power against internal discontents, whether in the inner circle or among the population as a whole, than that of violence and terror.

For a guide the commentators, instead of looking for explanations in current ideological disputes in Communist circles, could more profitably have looked at Russian “palace revolutions” under 17th and 18th century Czarism or at any European country a few centuries ago. In such conditions current Russian events cease to appear fantastic; everything is possible, including plots to murder generals (almost alone the Manchester Guardian considers that “it would not be surprising if an attempt at medical assassination had in fact been made, from whatever motive”). Whether there ever was such a plot or whether it was the vile invention of the rulers of Russia, either way the event throws a revealing light on the savage political conditions of that country, for these accusations were made by men who know that they can count on wide masses of the population believing that such things are possible and that American-backed Zionism is responsible. So strong are the passions of rival contenders that either one group under cover of medical attention will murder its enemies or another group, those in power, will fabricate a plot and thus bring about the legal murder of innocent men as part of a political manoeuvre to discredit its rivals. This is the political system that Russia’s admirers tell us is so superior to the politics of Western countries!

It should also be noted that the men who are charged have spent 35 years under Communist rule. They are men holding responsible and well-paid positions in the Soviet “Paradise ” and now we must believe either that desperation drove them to political murder or that they are the innocent victims of other men's desperate ambitions. This tells us more about Russia than all the soothing accounts of unruffled progress and happiness brought back by the stream of credulous visitors, not one of whom in the past year or so has given so much as a hint of the bloody struggles for power going on behind the facade.

Party News (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party stood 3 candidates in the Greater London Assembly and 1 candidate in the Welsh Assembly elections on 5 May. Here are the results:

Lambeth and Southwark: Lab 96,946 (51.63%), Con 34,703 (18.48), Green  25,793 (13.74), LibDem 21,489 (11.4), UKIP 6,591 (3.51), Kevin Parkin (Soc) 1,333 (0.71), All Peoples Party 906 (0.48).

London North East: Lab 134,307 (58.7%), Con 32,565 (14.23),  Green 29,401 (12.85), LibDem 14,312 (6.26), UKIP 11,315 (4.95), Respect 5,068 (2.22), Bill Martin (Soc) 1,293 (0.57), Communist League 536 (0.23).

London South West:  Con 84,381 (39.47%),  Lab 62,937 (29.4), LibDem 30,654 (14.34), Green 19,745 (9.24), UKIP 14,983 (7.01), Adam Buick (Soc) 1,065 (0.50).

Swansea West: Lab 9,014 (40.6%) Con  3,934 (17.7%), Plaid Cymru 3,325 (14.5), UKIP 3,058 (13.8), LibDem 2,012 (9.1), Green 883 (4.0), Brian Johnson (Soc) 76 (0.3)

To a New Reader (1938)

From the January 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The journal which you are now reading is published each month. For many years it has appeared as surely as night has followed day. Just as surely, each month a copy drifts into the hands of many who have not read it before. This copy has drifted into your hands for the first time, maybe at a street-corner propaganda meeting, from one of the all-too-few newsagents who stock it, or from one of the enthusiastic workers who sell it in the streets and at railway stations. It would be fair to assume that you are an anti-Socialist or non-Socialist; that you bought the “S.S.” because a particular article caught your eye, or because some question dealt with by a speaker interested you. Probably you did not buy it because you wanted to learn about Socialism. You “know” all there is to be known about that, don’t you? And yet, fellow-worker, you are reading a journal you have never seen before, describing itself as the official organ of THE Socialist Party, which claims to be the only party in Great Britain organised for Socialism. Moreover, you will find in these columns the opinion implicitly and openly expressed that the reason for workers not supporting the Socialist Party is because they do not understand Socialism. Your reactions we can imagine. It is the first time you have read the "S.S.,” and, after all, you did think you knew about Socialism. You think us arrogant? And our claim to be the only party organised for Socialism just advertising ballyhoo, as it were. To call attention to our wares. Fellow-worker, our claims are not arrogant; we are not engaged in ballyhoo. Workers organised in this party are THE Socialist Party of Great Britain and the only workers organised for Socialism.

You, fellow-worker, “know” all about Socialism, don’t you?

You “know” that Socialism means “share and share alike,” that is to say, that you should share your belongings with your neighbour. And knowing your neighbour, you decide against Socialism. You “know” that Socialism means some vague mush about “loving your neighbour,” and again looking at your neighbour you feel uninspired. You “know” that Socialism means the destruction of initiative and inventiveness, and being young (or not so old) and ambitious you feel that the present order of things should not be upset. You “know” that Socialism means that woman would occupy a degraded position in the social arrangement. For hasn’t the Morning Rail often turned your stomach in its description of the free love of the Socialists and the nationalisation of women. You ”know” that Socialism has been tried in different parts of the earth. After all, the self-styled “Socialists'' have said so.

Quite bluntly, fellow-worker, you know little or nothing about Socialism. In truth, if Socialism did mean the things which these mangled ideas try to express then the working men and women who are organised in the Socialist Party would turn to some other more intelligent pursuit.

Socialism does not mean sharing out either goods or income. Such a conception implies a fixed amount of social wealth, out of which each took an equal share. Socialism means something fundamentally different from that. It means the social ownership of the means for producing wealth. Consider for a moment the factory in which you work. Each worker, out of perhaps many thousands, has his particular job to do. Yet no one worker produces the finished article, which the factory, as a whole, produces. Each worker plays his part, but the product is the result of the indispensable work of all. Production is a co-operative process. As in the factory, so in society generally. The work and life of the community is carried on by the workers as a whole. No one worker or group of workers is independent of the rest. One worker can play his part in steering a ship, but the labour of many thousands is required to build it. The worker who steers the ship could not do so without the builders. Production is social.

Yet outside the productive process is the class who own the means of production. It takes no part in social production and is unnecessary to it. Socialism means the social ownership of the social means of production. This will eliminate the owning class. Quite a simple proposition to conceive, but profound and revolutionary in its implications. Far from Socialism meaning the sharing-out of some imaginary fixed quantity of wealth, social ownership will release the powers of production from the fetters of private ownership. It will bring into productive activity an enormous number of workers now engaged in unproductive labour. Production will expand to correspond to the people's needs. The people will take from the social store as they have need. Initiative and inventiveness will have the chance to thrive, instead, as now, of being dependent on the ability of the worker to sell his abilities to a capitalist. Cut-throat competition for jobs will no longer exist and the mushy sentiment of brotherly love will have an opportunity to acquire real meaning.

So we could go on, stating and answering the common objections to Socialism. But we want to do more than that. We want your interest. Whilst we tell you that you know nothing about Socialism your interest is perhaps not easy to obtain. But be patient. Ask yourself what time you have devoted to a study of the question. Is your conception of Socialism the result of independent thinking, or has it acquired shape from the influence of biased or coloured sources more interested in misrepresenting it? Think that out and be wary. Perhaps you have not had the time to study Socialism. However, you are reading the “S.S.," and we assume that you want knowledge, and want to assist in removing the social evils of capitalism if you knew how. We know that only Socialism will solve these problems. We know that Socialism will come. Make up your mind about that. More, the time will come when there can be no ordered intelligent living, no progress, no harmony in social relations; national or international, without Socialism. The lessons of the Socialist message will be learned through the experience of bitter struggle. That struggle can be eased and shortened by the spread of Socialist understanding. That is our responsibility. Yours is surely to examine our case. And that is what we ask you to do.

In the course of years we have answered all known objections to Socialism in the “S.S." We can let you have back numbers if you wish. Read the “S.S." for the next twelve months and you will be much nearer an understanding of our position than you are to-day. One issue may modify some popular misconception in your mind, but it would be insufficient to convince you of the soundness of our case. One prejudice we are certain will disappear—that working men and women cannot understand the meaning of the apparently complicated events around. They can. You can. We have. And we lay no claim to more than average brains. But we have devoted many years to the study of Socialism. We know something about it. You know little. Quite naturally; we should be in a similar position regarding a subject to which you had devoted long study. We are not of superior intelligence. We do claim, however, that we have found ourselves on the road to Socialism (perhaps, in the first place by accident) and that you would be with us with a little guidance. We are workers drawn from representative occupations, miners, mechanics, carpenters, busmen, clerical workers, artists, house-wives, and so forth. We have a case—the case for the social ownership of the means and instruments of production. Study our case and we are certain that you will soon be in the fight for Socialism.

Harry Waite

Socialist Economics: 5. Capital (1974)

From the May 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Economics Series

“The lazy men squandered their substance whilst the diligent saved theirs—thus Capital was born from thrift.” This fairy tale has about as much real application to the origins of Capital as Adam’s Rib has to the origins of women. The important point is: how are private fortunes created and how do they grow?

We know that prior to the capitalist system of production the producers owned their means of production, and the primitive accumulation of capital is nothing less than the process of divorcing the producers from their means of production and turning them into capital. When this process is completed historically we arrive at the situation which exists today, where the producers are totally alienated from the social means of production. They are propertyless wage-workers selling their life-activity to their employers, with enough to live on and sometimes not even that.

Capital has not existed from all time. It commenced in Europe out of the ruins of the old Feudal society around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is a social relation of production, and came into existence with the production of commodities and their circulation. The circulation of commodities means the development of an exchange system which finds its ultimate expression in the introduction of a monetary system. Any stated sum of money is representative of any stated quantity of commodities or Value. Money is the final product of the circulation of commodities, and capital appears in the first instance in that form. But capital can also appear in the form of a sum of commodities (Values); raw materials, instruments of labour, in fact, any sum of Exchange Values. What distinguishes the commodities comprising capital from any other group of commodities is the way in which they are used. The object behind their use must always be to produce a greater Value than that existing. Capital functions solely to produce a Surplus-Value greater than the sum originally advanced, either in the monetary form or in the commodity form, or both.

It is important to differentiate between capital trading transactions and share or stock dealings carried out mainly on the world’s stock exchanges between rival stockholders and investors, each trying to improve his financial position individually, or in a group. These represent transfers of capital between various people and institutions. They do not add to the total wealth, but change the ownership of existing wealth (Value), much in the same way as you can move furniture from one room to the other within the same house. You finish up with the same furniture but in different rooms. One man’s loss is another man’s gain.

The function of capital production is to increase existing wealth. The production of wealth cannot, therefore, depend on trading transactions, neither can it depend on nature or heaven, despite “the Lord’s bounty.” When the parson gives thanks every harvest festival “when all is safely gathered in”, it should never be forgotten that every day is harvest day for the capitalist, sowing capital and reaping Surplus Value.

Raw materials, and even the most sophisticated machinery, or gold bars, do not possess magical powers, and cannot increase their own Value merely by being placed together in any sphere of production. Being inanimate objects they are dependent on men, either to produce them in the first instance, or to maintain or supervise their operation. Living Labour is vital to the whole function of capital. If the machine or the materials cannot change their Value, and if there is an additional or Surplus Value created, then it could only have come from living labour, there being no other possible source. The legendary brilliance of the capitalist, his organizing ability, and other associated fables, have little to do with the social production of wealth and its accumulation. Some are clever, some are industrious, most are ignorant of the source of their wealth, inefficient and self-indulgent. Were they all in the first category it would make no difference, because the fact remains that capital is a social relation of production working independently from personalities clever, stupid, or mediocre.

The social capital mainly consists of the means of production and distribution; factories, industrial complexes, oil wells, mineral workings, means of transport, ships, aeroplanes, railways and road transport systems, agricultural land, plantations, etc. Most of these have been created gradually by workers long since dead. This is the accumulated labour (Value) of the past which provides the basis for the living labourers’ productive activity in the present. The employer (capitalist) allows the worker access to this existing social capital, created by the worker’s predecessors, for the sole and specific purpose of adding a greater Value than that previously existing. This marriage between living labour and capital (past Labour) is a necessary condition for the social extraction of Surplus-Value. But, as has been stated, the element of Surplus-Value, or Profit, cannot come from a fixed quantity of accumulated wealth. If anything, without the fertilization of living labour the accumulated wealth of the past which exists in the objects of social labour—factories, machinery, road systems, industrial centres, shipyards, cultivated land, etc.— would deteriorate and eventually become wasted assets. Living labour serving capital therefore performs two functions: first it produces a Surplus-Value working together with the accumulated labour of the past; and second, and by virtue of its productive activity, it preserves the means of production from decay. Every act of production is, in effect, also an act of reproduction, and it is through this act of reproduction that the means of production remain intact, and are preserved for the capitalist.

The employers, as a class, who own the social capital, buy social labour-power, giving wages in return. The amount of the capital is described by Socialists as Variable capital, because we claim that it alone changes in quantity at the end of the productive process. This is because the workers produce more Value than they receive back in the amount of wages paid to them. The difference is described by us as the rate of Surplus-Value, or exploitation. If a company pays annually the sum of £1 million in wages, and £9 million in raw materials, machinery, etc. (£10 million total), and shows a profit of £1 million, the rate of exploitation is 100 per cent irrespective of the claim of the capitalist that he only earns 10 per cent. The variation upwards in total Value has been entirely due to living labour.

On the other hand, if a capitalist spends £10 million in wages and £1 million on raw materials, fuel, machinery, etc. and shows a profit of £1 million, the rate of exploitation would be 10 per cent.

The rate of exploitation is measured against the amount paid out in the form of wages, and not the total capital. The constant capital vested in machinery, raw materials, fuel, buildings, etc., is constantly replaced, or constantly reproduced by the capitalist adding the Value of these elements to the commodities which he produces. Constant capital cannot add any additional Value to the products, other than that contained within itself. In fact, it is only through the agency of human labour power during the productive process that dead capital (accumulated labour) gives birth to new additional Value.

Capitalism is basically a system of accumulation, and that portion of Surplus-Value which is not consumed by the capitalists on luxury living, is remitted to the fund of accumulated labour, where it can serve as fresh capital to exploit workers again and again, increasing with every phase of circulation. It is indeed the dead hand of the past weighing heavily like an Alp on the living. The greater the fund of accumulated capital the greater the pressure on the workers to serve that capital, to augment it ad infinitum.

It is often stated by supporters of capitalism that capital has opened up new horizons, and that men have access to things and technological discoveries previously undreamed of. But it should be remembered that men, together with their fellow men, live in society and create their own environment. That environment is anti-social, because men’s creative ability is stifled as they do not own or control the means of production. It is hardly an argument to suggest that man is adequately compensated for this social loss by the ownership of TVs, motor cars and central heating. As Marx stated: “Whether his wages be high or low, or whether the chains that bind him be made of gold, the worker is as firmly riveted to capital as was Prometheus to the rock.”

Capital appears to have a separate existence outside the control of man. As a social relation, it Frankenstein-like, dominates all forms of human behaviour, where everything is related to the money principle. The measure of a man is his wealth not his intellect or culture. The ability of a man is determined by his financial power. The big spender has inherited the earth—that is why he is a big spender. Capitalism has created a phoney culture, and has debased man’s intellect to the level of a commodity. Happily we have not all succumbed to its pernicious influence, and we know, and are optimistic enough to believe, that society can be turned the right way up—which means that civilisation can survive and prosper without capital.

Jim D'Arcy

Greasy Pole: Goldsmith versus Khan (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a thought for Zac Goldsmith. For Frank Zacharias Robin ‘Zac’ Goldsmith.  For the son of a proliferous billionaire who left him to struggle through life on an inheritance of between two hundred and three hundred million pounds, which represented a monthly income of about £5 million. For the pupil at Eton –-  until they found forbidden drugs in his room. For one so convincing  as a self-promoted defender of the natural world that his uncle gave him the magazine The Ecologist to do with what he liked, even to appoint himself as its editor. For the triumphantly victorious MP for Richmond Park against the industrious Lib Dem Susan Kramer. But one whose smooth rise up the Greasy Pole was obstructed when he devoted his talents and his riches to a campaign for election as Mayor of London – in which he was thwarted by the distinctly non-legatee Labour candidate Sadiq Khan. Thus Goldsmith’s case for election was not as elegantly appealing as those Richmond Tories must have assumed it would be and his copious ambitions were reduced to a state of baffled suspension. So spare a thought for him.

Argumentative

And for Sadiq Khan who stood as the underdog against the handsome, elegant Goldsmith.  He could hardly have been more different for he is the youngest of five children whose grandparents came from Pakistan to take root in council housing in one of the rougher parts of London. His father was a bus driver and his mother a seamstress. Working his way through university Khan qualified as a solicitor, specialising in cases concerning human rights – which often brought him into conflict with the police (a teacher at his comprehensive school had advised him that his ‘argumentative personality’ made him a natural to study law instead of dentistry as he intended). In 2005, after a spell as a councillor in Wandsworth, he became the MP for Tooting and in 2009, when he was made Minister of State for Transport under Gordon Brown, he was the first Muslim to attend the Cabinet. He then held a succession of shadow ministerial posts under Ed Miliband. In this process he was establishing a number of records, often related to being a Muslim but including such as regularly being placed by the Evening Standard among the Top 100 London politicians and, in 2005, awarded the ‘Newcomer Of The Year’ by the Spectator for ‘…the tough-mindedness and clarity with which he has spoken out about the very difficult issues of Islamic terror’. But none of these counted as crucial in the battle against Zac Goldsmith for the London Mayoralty. No matter that Kahn could offer the usual promises: against this was the slickness of Goldsmith’s office and his experienced media advisers with their well-honed voting strategies.

Terrorists

But this was a case when those experts in the dog-whistle style of voter-manipulation placed themselves in a position which was evidently ill-advised. For they seemed to have decided that as Sadiq Khan is a Muslim there were votes to be won by associating him with the terrorist operations which are among  the current problems across the world. One example of this appeared when theGuardian of 30 April publicised a letter written by David Cameron to Anita Vasisht who is a lawyer specialising in immigration problems. Cameron warned that any policy resulting from the united efforts of Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan would bring about a situation in which ‘Londoners will become lab rats in a giant political experiment’. The implication of this was more obvious in a letter from David Cameron to another lawyer which stated that only Goldsmith could be relied on to ‘…keep our streets safe from terrorist attacks’. At the same time, and on the same theme, there was Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph accusing Sadiq Khan of ‘…pandering to the extremists. I don’t want him running our capital’. And Teresa May, whose earliest claim to fame was when she denounced the Tories as ‘the nasty party’, warning their spring conference that Khan would be ‘unsafe’ to run London when it faced ‘…a significant threat of terrorism’. These attacks on Khan as a Muslim terrorist were not entirely welcome in the Tory party. Their ex-chair Baroness Warsi later referred to the election loss as a result as an ‘appalling dog-whistle campaign’ which ‘lost us the election, our reputation and credibility on issues of race and religion’. Steve Hilton, previously infamous as the party’s election master mind, regretted that it had brought back that ‘nasty party label to the Conservatives’.

Milkman

The overall effect of this, with the ominous survey ratings which gave Khan a solid lead, may have persuaded those Tory strategists to try another style of deceit, by sending Goldsmith out in the early morning disguised as a milkman on his rounds. However Goldsmith was not travelling in one of those snuffling battery floats but in a posh black limousine. We were supposed to believe that he was delivering that milk to what looked like some posh mews in a place like Kensington. But of course one effect of this was to arouse those well-used, long-ago slogans about Thatcher The Milk Snatcher.

 Sadiq Khan became the new Mayor of London by defeating Zac Goldsmith by 14 percentage points.  From the piracy that is now the Labour Party he may emerge as their new leader. Meanwhile he must make his mark through some particular policies which he claims will adjust, or even eliminate, the merciless realities which distort the lives and the wellbeing of what are called ordinary hard-working citizens.  At present there are few surprises in these; for example an intention to build genuinely affordable homes; to ensure that the streets of London are cleaner, safer. There is one novelty in the introduction of a new public transport ticket known as the Hopper which at first threatens to require harassed commuters to become mathematically agile as they are about to board the bus or the train. London is a great example of capitalism in sordid operation with its proliferation of social dislocation and hopeless responses.  The election struggle between Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith was no more than another rejected opportunity for the people in this part of the world to begin the historical change for the better.

Ivan

The Problem is Not the EU . . . It’s Capitalism (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 23 June you will asked to make a decision on behalf of the minority who own and control the means of production in Britain: should they stay or should they leave the EU?  Perhaps you ought to feel flattered that, for once, they have entrusted you with making a decision of vital importance to them. But our answer, as socialists, is ‘we are not interested. Settle the matter yourselves’.

This is because the problems we and you face as wage and salary workers or their dependents are caused by the capitalist system of ownership by the few and production for profit. This system, which requires that making profits comes before meeting needs, will continue whether Britain is in or out of the EU. Whichever it is to be, the problems will continue. They will continue for as long as capitalism does. The only way out is if you, together with wage and salary workers in the rest of the world, organise democratically to replace global capitalism by a worldwide classless socialist society of common ownership and democratic control, with production to satisfy people’s needs not for profit, and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” not by the amount of money you have – or don’t have.

The devil you know

Apart from a few idealists who want to see a Federal European State, the main group in favour of  staying is Big Business. With good reason, from their point if view. The EU gives them tariff- free access to a vast single market with common standards. And the EU, negotiating as a single body with non-member States over trade and other economic matters and so with more bargaining power, gets them a better deal than if Britain had to do this on its own.

Other supporters are the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists who want to protect the EU subsidies their parts of Britain get. More principled is the position of the Green Party which wants to defend the free movement of workers throughout the EU – out of as well as into Britain.

Cameron claims to have negotiated some fundamental reform of the EU. Actually, he has done no more than freeze the position of Britain as a non-member of the Eurozone. He hasn’t undone anything. He hasn’t even stopped immigration which some mistakenly see as a problem, only held out a hope that it will be less attractive in a few years. No wonder the Eurosceptics are sceptical.

Basically, the Stay campaign are campaigning for the status quo. As is the Labour Party.  In other words, capitalism as we know it, with all the problems it causes, and so not worth supporting even if it is the devil we know.

The devil you don’t

But what about the devil we don’t know?  Its supporters are an unsavoury lot. UKippers, Tory backwoodsmen and other xenophobes plus a few ambitious politicians calculating that leaving will provide them with a better chance to climb further up the greasy pole. They have some limited business support, mainly small businesses producing for the home market rather than for export and some hedge funds that don’t want to be regulated.

The leave camp are the ones proposing a change, which they claim will be for the better. But their case is a mixture of wishful thinking and the usual empty promises of politicians. It doesn’t even make sense from a capitalist point of view. Certainly, as they claim, outside the EU British capitalism could still have access to the single EU market, but would no longer have a say in fixing its rules and regulations. A non-EU Britain could still, as they also claim, negotiate trade deals with other countries and trading blocs, but on its own would be in a weaker bargaining position. No wonder Big Business and its supporters regard them as flat-earthers.

The sovereign has no clothes

One more respectable argument for leaving  than ‘Keep Immigrants Out’ or ‘Send Them Back’ is that leaving would give back to parliament the ‘sovereign power’ to decide what laws should apply in Britain.  Capitalism, however, is a single world economic system, which makes ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ purely formal when it comes to economic matters. Governments, whatever formal powers they may have, cannot control the way the profit system works. In fact it’s the other way round. Capitalism is sovereign and governments have to apply its basic economic law that priority must be given to profit-making as this is what drives the system.

A State can choose that its government and parliament take the decisions required to comply with capitalism’s basic economic law (as the leavers want) or it can delegate some of these decisions to some inter-governmental body (as at present and as the stayers support), but in the end it doesn’t matter who makes the decision. Nor where, whether London or Brussels. the decision is made.

How to vote, then?

You don’t need to accept the sham choice on offer in this referendum between the devil you know and the devil you don’t. Leave that choice to those who support capitalism in one form or another.  As we consider the right to vote as a gain and a possible tool to end capitalism we will be going to the polling station, to cast a write-in vote for socialism by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across our ballot paper. If you agree with us, we urge you to do the same.

Executive Committee

The Socialist Party of Great Britain

April 2016

Editorial: The Shadow of Anti-Semitism (1960)

Editorial from the February 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

This “Brave New Year” of 1960 has opened sinisterly. Outbreaks of slogan daubing and swastika painting have occurred in many parts of Germany and there have been similar incidents in a number of other countries, including Britain. People have been reminded, rudely and violently, of something they had almost forgotten—those terrible days of the thirties when the shadow of Nazism first fell upon the world. The photograph on our front page is a vivid reminder of those times and of the way in which the German working-class took its first steps along the road that was to end in conflagration and ruin.

For some strange reason these outbreaks appear to have come as a surprise to many people. They have been shocked to see again something they thought was finished for ever. It is hard to understand why, unless it was from a deeply hidden fear of having their thoughts again disturbed by the horrors of the past.

Did they really think that the people of Germany could change their thinking overnight? That after twelve years of being conditioned to hating Jews, to being the only true “Aryan Supermen,” to belonging to the “Master Race,” they could each and every one turn into an apostle of brotherly love and racial tolerance? Or did they really believe the notion trotted out to them in wartime that the ideology of Nazism would disappear with the defeat of Germany? If so, they must be incredibly naive.

And if they really thought this, how explain the similar outbreaks that have occurred in something like twenty other countries, at almost the same time? What about the incidents in this country itself? The real facts are that the virus of anti-Semitism is to be found wherever there are Jews. Given the right conditions, this virus will come into life, grow, and flourish—unless the working-class decide otherwise.

As to the incidents themselves, what importance are we to attach to them? Are they the work of some lunatic tinge, or of a few die-hard Nazis and fascists still lingering on from the past, or are they evidence of more serious forces at work in Germany and elsewhere? Can they perhaps be dismissed as a petty example of imitative hysteria brought on by the widespread coverage they have received from the newspapers, radio, and T.V.? Concentrated publicity, especially on a subject that lends itself to sensationalism, can often set up a chain-reaction, the effects of which can be particularly strong upon the young and the mentally ill. The Guardian of 14th January, for example, mentioned the case of the individual who went round Woolwich at night inviting people to “join the English Reich party.” Even more absurd was the further instance they quoted of the schoolboy in Western Germany who confessed he had painted his swastikas because “my village hasn’t been in the news at all.”

On the other hand, serious and apparently reliable sources have spoken of new Nazi organisations with memberships running into tens of thousands, and of periodicals and pamphlets with circulations of the same order.

Which of these is the truer reflection of the actual state of affairs? Should we, in short, be heartened or should we be alarmed?

We suggest that there is no reason for the moment to be one or the other. First, because we have not yet enough sound evidence to form a judgment. It is still difficult to establish, through the haze of newspaper and other publicity. just what the real facts are. Second, because not enough time has gone by as yet for the incidents to be seen in their proper perspective. The whole thing may die down as quickly as it arose. On the other hand, it may only be a prelude to more serious events.

For the moment, therefore, we prefer to reserve judgment on the incidents themselves and their significance. What we do want to state, or rather re-state, because it is not something that we suddenly think up for occasions such as these, is the fundamental Socialist position on anti-Semitism and on all other forms of “race" prejudice.

This position is that “race” prejudice today is bound up with the capitalist system. That like a virus it dies away or flourishes according to the state of health of that system. That if capitalism is passing through one of its more “prosperous” periods the virus will tend to lie dormant. But that if capitalism is in crisis, as it was in Germany in the early thirties with its terrible unemployment and all the misery and other evils that stemmed from it, then the virus is capable of coming into swift and virulent life.

The only means whereby the working-class can be sure of immunity from racial intolerance is through an understanding of the forces at work in capitalism. This means Socialist understanding. It means the realisation that the conflicts, the crises, the frustrations, the miseries, the threats of war, and all the other evils of capitalism, are fertile ground for the workers to find a convenient scapegoat in the Jews, West Indians, Irish, or any other minority that happens to be at hand. It means the realisation that such race prejudice can be part and parcel of nationalism, dictatorship, and the drift to war. It means, finally, the realisation that race prejudice is useful in taking their minds off the real cause of their troubles—the capitalist system itself.

It cannot be said too often. The working-class fall for the myth of “race” at their peril. 

Action Replay: Cinderella Men Win Premier League (2016)

Jamie Vardy against Liverpool.

The Action Replay column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against all the odds and prognostications of sports journalists and pundits, Leicester City, the team that narrowly missed relegation last season, silenced the doomsayers and doubters by winning the English Premier League.

Leicester could be described as a team of journeymen who have been rejected by former clubs or have joined from lower leagues. But led by manager Claudio Ranieri they have been transmuted from base metal into gold. The total cost of the team is £55 million, only 2 million more than the £53 million Manchester United spent on one player, Ander Herrera.

Now after the joyful celebrations that took place in Leicester and echoed in other parts of the country by neutral football fans impressed with Leicester’s endeavour, Ranieri will look forward to next season knowing that without significant investment to strengthen the squad it will be difficult to compete for the top prizes.

Since wage bill data was first released by the Premier League 16 years ago, the ledger shows that the clubs with the biggest wage bills claim the top four places 80 percent of the time. Only twice, Manchester United in 2013 and Chelsea in 2001, have the team with the biggest payroll finished outside of the top four.

Leicester are by no means paupers. Actually they are one of 17 teams on the Deloitte list of the world’s 30 richest clubs, coming in at no 24 with revenues of £137m. Owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabba features in the Forbes rich list at 714 in the world.

They are, however, competing against clubs that have far deeper pockets. Even with the £90 million winner’s prize, £19m up on the club’s take last season and the increased handout from the new Premier League broadcast rights deal, which sees an increase in value of 71 percent from last season, Leicester do not have the same financial underpinning as the elite clubs they triumphed over this time.

It’s been an invigorating season watching the big teams flounder against them and getting a timely comeuppance.

Kevin.

Editorial: End Not Mend Capitalism (2016)

Editorial from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The basic nature of the society we live in, where we make human relationships, where we contribute with our ideas and our work, also fashions the problems we face. For good reason that society is known as capitalism, historically a developed human arrangement in which a minority class dominates in the exploitation of the rest of us to its own advantage and to enduring frustration and damage to us as humans.

For example a recent survey revealed that a serious health risk is needlessly imposed by the enormous amounts of sugar which are included in what are described as ‘fashionable’ hot flavoured drinks. This contributes to Britain suffering Europe’s highest rate of obesity – a condition which can fertilise a host of menacing illnesses such as diabetes, strokes, osteoarthritis. This highly dangerous addition is actively promoted by the street coffee shops, particularly the likes of Starbucks and Costa Coffee – a situation recently blasted by a Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine as ‘scandalous’. Starbucks and Costa, balancing it out with their profits, must have another word for it.

In another field, also relevant to our health, is a recent report by the Ministry of Justice which revealed that in 2015 in England and Wales a total of 42,728 ‘households’ were forcibly evicted from their homes by bailiffs because they had failed to pay their rent – the highest recorded since records were opened in 2000. This whole matter is a symptom of the most desperately dehumanising effects of poverty – at a time when George Osborne and David Cameron habitually insist that we are luxuriating in the shelter of a ‘strong economy’.

The conventional political parties – Conservative, Labour, LibDem, the Greens, UKIP, the Nationalists – strive to persuade us that they have the ability and the intention to wipe out the current problems in society. To this end they produce policies relating to problems such as health, housing, crime, poverty, education, transport, along with less prominent issues such as planning, art and culture.

This is often effective in persuading enough people that they should take serious notice of their pronouncements, however transparently populist. But for people to do this entails them ignoring the fact that these parties have promised many times before to solve these problems, so that at times the remedies being put forward clash with those in the past. It also entails ignoring the vital – indeed crucial – fact that, as these problems are engendered by the capitalist system itself, they cannot be solved within its framework of minority ownership and production for profit, a system which all these parties uphold in one form or another.

In contrast, the Socialist Party is an organisation which is distinctive through its principle of refusing to promise to ease the problems of capitalism as they are inevitable results of that social system’s basic nature. Our objective is the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with socialism – a classless, moneyless society based on common ownership – a universal system which cannot exist separately in Britain or any other part of the world.

The War - Capitalism does it again (2003)

Editorial from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The organised slaughter has begun. It is now clear that this was always the intention of Bush, the nominal head of US capitalism, and his British counterpart, Blair. They cynically allowed the diplomatic wrangling to go on at the UN so as to buy them time to get their forces massing on the borders of Iraq up to full fighting strength. This done, diplomacy was discarded and the military given the go-ahead.

This war is not being fought simply to overthrow a brutal dictator – though this will surely happen. Nor even to stop the spread of chemical and biological weapons – even though countries like the US and Britain are anxious to maintain their monopoly of such weapons. It is being fought over a key energy source – oil, of which Iraq has the second biggest reserves after Saudi Arabia. The chief aim is to secure future supplies of such energy resources, essential to their political and economic demands.In other words, this war is no different from any of the wars that have taken place in modern times. It's a business war. Capitalism is driven by the competitive struggle for profits between corporations and states. Conflict, economic, political and, as a last resort, military is built-in to capitalism over sources of raw materials, investment outlets, markets, trade routes, and strategic points to control and protect these. When a state judges that its “vital interest” is threatened – e.g. needing to secure access to a key raw material, trade route or military outpost – it goes to war. Iraq did this when it invaded Kuwait in 1990 and America is doing this now in invading Iraq.

Capitalism breeds war, though most people would prefer to live in peace. Consequently massive propaganda exercises are employed by the state to stoke people's fears and anxieties that stem from their material poverty and insecurity. Invariably these also endeavour to present it as being in some way humanitarian. This is because people have a healthy horror of war. They know war means death and destruction. Death not only of the soldiers on both sides, but also of women, children and old people as “collateral damage” – who make up four-fifths of casualties of modern war – and destruction not only of military installations and hardware, but also of bridges, roads, power stations, ports, hospitals and other socially-useful constructions.

This particular war may be over quickly. The Iraqi armed forces are no match for the US army and its awesome weapons of mass destruction. It is, however, going to be followed by chaos and massacres throughout the region, as Bush and Blair well know but have dismissed as “a price worth paying” to secure control of oil supplies.

Many people's gut reaction is simply that war is crazy. Socialists share this anti-war sentiment. It is one of the reasons why we are Socialists – real Socialists that is, not supporters of the sort of state capitalist dictatorships that failed in Russia and Eastern Europe, but advocates of a united world community without frontiers based on all the Earth's resources, natural and industrial, becoming the common heritage of all humanity and being used to satisfy people's needs instead of for profit. We have concluded that capitalism means war and that therefore to get rid of wars and the threat of wars – and the constant preparation for war represented by maintaining armed forces – you have got to get rid of capitalism.

That voices are raised against the war, millions of voices, shows that there is hope. That workers – whose experience of life stems from using their energies and talents to co-operatively solve problems and achieve goals; who realise the potential for mutual dependence and support; who enjoy some security of life won through the class struggle – are determined to oppose the war shows that opposition to war has its basis in material reality rather than mere moral condemnation.

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. Even in times of peace – as the armed truce between wars is called – capitalism's pursuit of profit pollutes and plunders the planet and upsets the balance of nature with potentially devastating consequences. The economic law “no profit, no production” applies implacably, resulting in millions dying of hunger and related diseases every year simply because it is not profitable to produce the food to feed them and, in fact, often while the food that could feed them is destroyed so as to maintain prices and profits.

As World Socialists, who are opposed to war and to capitalism which breeds it: 

• We place on record our horror that capitalism has once again provoked the orgy of death and destruction known as war.

• We extend the hand of friendship to our fellow workers in Iraq who our political masters have designated as targets for destruction.

• We pledge to do all within our means to bring the slaughter to an immediate end.

• We pledge ourselves to continue to work for the establishment of a world socialist society of peace and cooperation.

• We call upon fellow workers everywhere to join in the struggle for World Socialism.

One World, One People! Unite for World Socialism!

The Executive Committee,

The Socialist Party of Great Britain,

Companion party of the World Socialist Movement.