Contradictory (2016)

Book Review from the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition'.  By Neil Davidson, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016.

This book, a collection of previously published articles, does not live up to the blurb on the back that ‘Davidson draws out how nationalist ideology and consciousness are used to bind the subordinate classes to “the nation”, while “the state” is simultaneously wielded by capital as a means of conducting geopolitical competition.’

That Davidson is going to criticise and oppose all nationalism as an anti-working class ideology is shattered in the preface where he reveals himself as a supporter of both Scottish independence and Brexit. As a Trotskyist, who was in the SWP till 2013 (when most of the chapters were written), he is able to come up with some convoluted non-nationalist argument for doing so – that either or both would ‘provoke a crisis for the British nation-state, of a type that has been relatively rare in its history.’

More generally, he agrees with Lenin (introduced on page iii of the preface) that the left should support oppressed nationalisms against oppressing ones (though he thinks Scottish nationalism is neither) and the ‘right of nations to self-determination’, i.e. to a separate state. He explicitly rejects Rosa Luxemburg’s view that, in the era where capitalism dominates the world, this doesn’t make sense.

Luxemburg also argued that this wasn’t possible and so was clearly wrong about that as at the last count the world is divided into some 194 states and statelets. Davidson discusses why in the chapter entitled ‘The Necessity for Multiple Nation-States for Capital’. The emphasis here is on ‘necessity’ as he is arguing against both the possibility of a single world capitalist state and that the world just happens to be divided into capitalist states but doesn’t have to be, positions defended by some of those he is arguing with (including SWP leader Callinicos who defends the second).

His argument is that capitalism is necessarily a competitive system for profits and that states are, and have to be, just as much involved in this as capitalist enterprises:

‘Capitalism is a system of competitive accumulation based on wage labor, and these two defining aspects also point to the reason for the persistence of the states system: on the one hand, the need for capitals to be territorially aggregated for competitive purposes; on the other, the need for that territory to have an ideological basis – nationalism – that can be used to bind the working class to the state and hence to capital.’

So, for him, and rightly, nationalism is a product of capitalism, a position he defends in polemics about when a Scottish ‘national consciousness’ arose. He argues that it was only after the 1707 Union as it was only after then that capitalism developed in Scotland. His opponents – a Stalinist hack and the more respected Tom Nairn – put the date, in accordance with Scots Nat mythology – much earlier, to 1296 even.

Another chapter criticises the term ‘ethnicity’, which has become a politically correct substitute for the unscientific and discredited term ‘race’, and calls for it to be dropped. We agree and is why we refuse to answer the question about this on the census and other official forms except by ‘human being’ or ‘member of the human species’.

In view of the rise of Trump in the US and the victory of the UKIP position in the UK EU referendum, the chapter that has the most immediate relevance is the one on ‘Far-Right Social Movements as a Problem for Capital’. In it Davidson discusses why so many workers have been turning to such non-fascist, far-right movements as the Tea Party and UKIP. He attributes this to disillusion with and contempt for the current political elites for imposing ‘neo-liberalism’ (in practice, redundancies, job insecurity, cuts in social services and payments). This is a plausible explanation of the Brexit vote in Britain, which certainly has caused a problem for British capitalism.

Davidson writes

‘… even if I am right that certain aspects of far-right politics are detrimental to the needs of capital, it does not follow that the increased chaos resulting from the implementation of these policies would necessarily benefit the left, even indirectly.’

Which rather contrasts with the reason he gives in the preface for voting Brexit.

Adam Buick

Watching the detectives (2002)

TV Review from the December 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The three-part documentary True Spies which finished its run on BBC2 last month was an illuminating insight into one of the oldest–and most disreputable–professions. Looking at how the British intelligence services have since the 1960s systematically infiltrated those organisations considered to be "subversive" of the state, it united the spies and the spied-upon in a visual history of their secret combat.

The range of the organisations targeted for infiltration by the British "secret state" was a long one, encompassing some still surviving and many others that are long gone. On the left, it transpired that the Communist Party, the SWP (formerly IS), the WRP, Militant and the IMG were among those with paid agents of the British state in their ranks from the late 1960s onwards, many of whom were part of the so-called special branch "hairies" who specialised in entering the entryists so deeply that they assumed positions of power, influence and knowledge within the target organisation, as well as their habits and dress code. While most of their number will continue remain secret for obvious reasons, several spoke to camera of what they did and of how they did it. So too, did their handlers: bluff Northern policemen with anti-union agendas and cockney commie-bashers from Special Branch with a love of Queen and Country.

A small number of the "hairies" went native as their attempt to dialectically interpenetrate their opposites led to an unexpected outcome. But by the mid-1970s internecine rivalry between Special Branch (viewed as the grammar school boys) and MI5 (the public school-educated "sophisticates") led to a scaling-down of the operation and the use of occasional or periodic paid informants rather than long-term "sleepers".

Interestingly, their informants included over twenty top officials from trade unions who leaked information on potential industrial unrest and political militancy. These apparently included not just the usual right-wing hatchet-men but the former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Joe Gormley, and others of a similar ilk. When asked to comment on this, Arthur Scargill–the man who succeeded Gormley as NUM President–expressed his surprise that there weren't even more, and for once it is tempting to agree with him.

Many of the other political (or former political) activists interviewed went to great lengths to express their astonishment that they had a spy in their ranks and that they may have been betrayed by someone close to them. In this category came current Cabinet Minister Peter Hain, formerly a leading light of the Anti-Apartheid movement and the 1970 "Stop the Tour" campaign (about the visit of the South African cricket team). Also in this category was the actor and former member of the "Shrewsbury Two" Ricky Tomlinson, who had been jailed for his secondary picketing activity during the 1972 building workers strike. Whether his surprise was real is difficult to gauge, though if it was, the level of naiveté involved is breathtaking.

Did the likes of Hain and Tomlinson really think that the forces of the state machine wouldn't take an interest in their activities? It does seem unlikely, especially in the case of Tomlinson–someone who used to delight in calling himself a "Marxist".

I am not a number?
The security services didn't just–and don't just–target the far left or trade unions of course. Fascist and nazi organisations, Irish nationalists, animal rights protesters, anti-nuclear campaigners and anti-globalisation activists have all fallen under the MI5 spotlight, as the programme demonstrated quite ably. Current and former members of the intelligence services estimated during interviews that at the end of the Cold War there were files on about one and a half million people in Britain held by Special Branch and MI5. That was roughly one in every thirty adults.

Though many of these files have now allegedly been destroyed the surveillance continues, of course. Stella Rimmington, former head of MI5, took visible delight in putting the "end of history" argument in her piece to camera about surveillance of the far left, saying that they had been vanquished. But it was clear from some of the interviews conducted with current security service operatives that there are still paid agents attached to all manner of political organisations in the UK. While much of the resources at the disposal of MI5 in particular have been directed towards the 400 or so members of the IRA in the last decade, surveillance of other political "subversives" continues apace–even if not quite at the heady levels attained in the 1970s.

It is quite possible–indeed likely–that the Socialist Party itself has been a target for the repressive agencies of the state over the years. While not allying ourselves with any foreign power (which is what made the Communist Party such a threat) we nevertheless places ourself firmly within the revolutionary tradition in this country–unlike, we would argue, the fake revolutionaries of the far left who have always sought a change of bosses rather than a real change of social system.

But as the Socialist Party has no leaders and no led, and has no secret meetings or cabals, we would have presented a different proposition to the security services altogether. No Socialist Party meetings are ever closed to non-members and as the fullest possible democracy replaces the diktat of a leadership, any "hairy" infiltrating our organisation would have been on a cushy number indeed. If such a person (or persons) has existed, their interview on a programme such as this might have made fascinating viewing–and we would certainly have been interested in hearing of their experiences.

We have never been believers in the need for a tightly-knit gang of conspirators, who are ever mindful of agents and infiltrators. Instead we rely on the strength of our case against capitalism and in the power of a democratically organised working class movement–the movement of the majority expressing the interests of the majority. Whilst we do not underestimate the power and intent of those who seek to uphold the vested interests of the owners and controllers of UK PLC–or the disruption that they can sometimes cause–neither do we think that they could stop a democratically organised socialist mass movement. History demonstrates that the activities of tiny minorities can never hold back the tide of the overwhelming majority for long, so–"hairies" or no "hairies"–we don't think they have any more right to claim that history is on their side than their adversaries in vanguards like the SWP.

Dave Perrin

Thatcher's monetarism (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outlook dry but stormy

Towards the end of April 1945, as the Russian armies closed in on Berlin, Hitler returned to the city and with a band of unrepentant Nazis took refuge in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, in a sort of collective madness. At his daily briefing sessions, he deployed armies that had ceased to exist. He married Eva Braun shortly after having had her brother-in-law put to death. Under the ruins of Berlin there was endless reminiscing about the Nazis' rise to power, nobody dare suggest that there might have been mistakes, that the Nazis were less than historically perfect or that their hands bore any unjustified blood. Whenever he confronted the failure of the Third Reich to last a thousand years Hitler fumed against treachery among his generals, armed forces, the German people.

Well it has not yet come to quite that with the Thatcher government, although there are whispers that Keith Joseph is not entirely in touch with reality, that he is cracking up under the strain of trying to convince everyone that he is absolutely right in everything he does. And as their problems multiply the government is beginning to be seized by something akin to the bunker mentality. Thatcher’s rigid obstinacy shows no sign of weakening and the Tory line seems to be that they can fail in their historic mission to revive British capitalism only if their policies are enfeebled by treachery in their own ranks. They have coined a ready name for the traitors within, who are called the Wets, which adequately expresses the hardliners’ impatience and contempt for them.

Thatcher took over at Number Ten on the policy of monetarism (although not all monetarists would agree that the Tory policy justifies the name). It was, they said, all quite simple. The market mechanism has an inbuilt logic, a sort of economic Darwinism by which the best — the most useful, the most adaptable — must always survive because only the best is profitable. Anything other ,than the best, in a free market economy, must go to the wall. It follows from this that a government must allow the market to run its course. In ho circumstances should a government underwrite wage settlements or try to revitalise bankrupt firms with an injection of state money. In disputes between unions and employers both sides should be left to argue it out with the market deciding, to everyone’s benefit, who wins. As government operations were to be reduced state expenditure would be cut back, which would mean lower taxes, which would give everyone a lot more money to spend as they wanted, without the government forcing them to pay for state health services, education and so on.

But it has not turned out to be as simple as that. To begin with, there must be some confusion in the Conservative Party about the path they are supposed to be travelling with such grim purpose and which the Wets are trying to divert them from. Are they following the policies laid down in their election manifesto:

"To restore the health of our economic and social life, by controlling inflation . . . ”
“. . . the creation of conditions in which new, more modern, more secure, better paid jobs come into existence."
"Mortgage rates have risen steeply because of the (Labour) Government’s financial mismanagement. Our plans for cutting government spending and borrowing will lower them.”

Or are they following the policy of actual events: inflation continuing at a high level, unemployment rising above 1½ million, mortgage rates at an all-time high? None of these aspects of capitalism pleases the working class and all too soon they are showing their restlessness in their votes.

To make matters worse, ministers seem unable to agree about when we can expect to be enveloped by Tory prosperity. Thatcher guesses that we must wait about eighteen months; Geoffrey Howe recently mentioned ten years. John Biffen. who is said to be one of the sterner-monetarists in the government, has thrown doubt on the whole thing by wondering aloud whether there is any demonstrable link between government expenditure and inflation. But they are all agreed on one thing: for the working class, who voted them into power, worse is to come.

Unmanageable

There might be an argument that, for anyone who supports capitalism and who accepts the system’s anti-human features of private ownership of the means of production and profit motivation, monetarism is a more likely policy than what might be called interventionism. Given a society of commodity production, is it not more logical to allow free rein to the market instead of launching doomed efforts to control—or rather distort—it through government action? This argument ignores two facts. Firstly, the theories of people like Keynes, on which much government policy—Tory as well as Labour—has been based since the war, did not come out of thin air. They were a response to the failure of free market monetarism to control capitalism and to have the very effects that are now being claimed for them. This is not surprising (and this is our second point) since no theory for controlling or even regulating capitalism so that it works to the benefit of the majority of its people can succeed. One after another, they have all failed and will continue to fail.

Let us look at just one of these problems. Last October, the Low Pay Unit estimated that 87,000 families are caught in the "poverty trap’’—that is to say, although they exist on desperately low incomes they gain nothing from the average wage rise. These are the sort of people who suffer acutely another problem; Shelter is now forecasting that the 1980s will see a new (!) housing crisis. At the other end of the scale there are people who will not be described as being caught in the "opulence trap”; about ten per cent of the population, they own nearly 61 per cent of the total personal wealth in this country. This social class is not affected by a housing crisis or by the price of essential goods in the shops. It is the owning, privileged class in capitalism and it is in its interests that governments administer the system. The problem of poverty on one hand and riches on the other is an enduring feature of capitalism, it is not susceptible to any remedy other than a social revolution.

It follows from this that Thatcher's monetarism will fail. Those who are waiting for her government to change course have some confidence from history being on their side. In 1970 Heath's government set out with some of the same policies: reduced government expenditure, a refusal to bail out bankrupt firms or to intervene in industrial disputes. As the realities of capitalism came home to them, Heath was forced into what were called U-turns, reversing many of the policies on which he had been elected. Most post-war governments, on coming to power, have declared against imposing wage controls but, with the exception up to now of Thatcher’s, they have all imposed those very controls. How long, then, will Thatcher last? Will the Wets finally succeed in reducing the Tory strong-men to a soggy, feeble pulp?

Common ground

If they do, many Tories may protest that their party is being corrupted into a pale version of the Labour Party. In fact, the opposite process has been taking place, so that on the issue of monetarism there is little to choose between the two. Well before Thatcher's victory at the polls, Keynesian theories had been discredited and monetarism was returning to favour. The last Labour government was no enemy to it: “Mr. Healey”, wrote Maurice Green in the Dally Telegraph (19/9/79) “was a good practical monetarist, even if mounting public expenditure was making restraint difficult towards the end of his tenure”. And both Labour and Tory ministers applied the same, monetarist analysis to the supposed effects of trade union action:

“We must go on down this painfully difficult road of getting people to understand that their responsibility towards pay bargaining means their prosperity, their jobs . . . failure will mean higher interest rates and taxes and lower public expenditure." Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, ITV, 25/11/79.)
“Trade union leaders . . . accused me often enough of using cash limits as a means of making cuts to which they strongly objected... That charge should he levelled at those responsible for breaching the cash limits by high pay settlements." (Joel Barnett, Labour’s former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the Guardian 19/6/79.)

It is no coincidence that there should he this common purpose, since both parties aim to run capitalism. As each of them fails, as each policy is exposed os an impotent sham they turn out another, to dupe the working class into voting for yet another spell of capitalist servitude. The Tory Wets are arguing for their party to adopt a more flexible style of duping the workers and for policies that can be less embarrassingly adapted in reaction to capitalism's crises and to the frustrated responses of the voters. They see Thatcher as trying to mug the working class, when they argue that a gentler picking of the pocket will lose less votes. Perhaps this will turn out to be the more attractive idea to workers who support their own wage slavery, since flexible policies may be politically more profitable in a society that is out of control. Both sides of the Commons agree on this anarchy of capitalism:

“ . . . no government of human beings can ever be completely master of its situation; world trade, foreign relationships. international loan constraints. industrial disputes, productive efficiency, and much else that is transient and unpredictable always influence and sometimes govern its actions." (Labour MP Arthur Palmer, in a letter to the Guardian 13/3/80.)
“Wc would all do a great deal better to pay less attention to the economic fortune tellers . . . Economics is not primarily about forecasting, it is above all about markets which by their nature can neither be reliably predicted nor fine tuned". (Nigel Lawson, Financial Secretary to the Treasury', the Guardian 30/4/80.)

Yet governments win power precisely on their competing claims to be able to forecast and control capitalism’s economy. How many votes would they get if they produced a manifesto that did no more than confess to their impotence? Both Thatcher and the Tory’ Wets are playing the same, familiar game of insisting that, when a few temporary’ problems have been got out of the way, capitalism can be fashioned into a benign, abundant society. They do this in open contempt of the workers, in the assumption that the working class has a limitless appetite for being duped and despised. And so far, they have been given plenty of reason to he complacent. Will this Tory government, will capitalism itself, last another thousand years? How long before the working class wake up to the madness of it all?

Ivan

Tito and Balkan Capitalism (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The truth behind the crocodile tears

Josif Tito, President of Yugoslavia, died on May 4, 1980. The media commentators dug out the cringing cliches that they use to describe the despots of foreign states that are (actually or potentially) the allies of British capitalism. The editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, said in a leading article (5/5/80) that Tito was “a man of extraordinary stature”, and that he "belonged among the great men of his time"; the whole-page obituary in the same paper said he was "perhaps one of the few remaining idealists", and so on. Reporting his funeral, Keith Graves on the BBC news (8/5/80) said "this was the day when the world mourned" (did you mourn, dear reader?) and Sue Lawley, on Nationwide (8/5/80) said Tito had "brought brotherhood and freedom to a divided nation”. The pundits could not have been more servile if he had owned an oil-field. But these comments belong in the fantasy world of highly-paid journalists and broadcasters: they have no connection with the facts.

In reality Tito was a remorseless ruffian, an implacable hatchet-man, who rose to power by jailing and killing potential rivals, and who then lived in ostentatious luxury as front man for the Yugoslav ruling class while the workers toiled m poverty to produce the good things that the Yugoslav upper class enjoyed. A tyrannical dictator of Tito’s stamp would be attacked without mercy by the British media if he was an enemy of the British ruling class; as a thorn in the side of Russia, he was, and is, glorified.

A glance at the historical background is necessary to understand Yugoslavia, its relations with other countries, and the internal and external strains that threw up such bully-boys as Tito. As capitalism established itself in south-eastern Europe during the nineteenth century the existing political divisions (that is the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, all dating from an era when the landed aristocracy had held the power) became increasingly out-of-date. Capitalism needed new political structures, and the "nation-state” was in much of south-eastern Europe the chosen vehicle. The idea behind these so-called nation-states- that homogeneous “nations" of convenient size, with one language, one culture and united economic and social interests, occupy neatly-divided sections of the earth’s surface has always been an illusion. The Albanians, for example: they speak two dialects so divergent that they should be regarded as two languages rather than one; they do not by any means all dwell in what is called Albania—many are scattered across the Balkans, others live (and have lived 600 years and more) in southern Italy; and among those speaking Albanian languages live others speaking other languages. However, capitalism has forced us to swallow greater illusions than that. So an entity called "Albania” was created in part of the old Turkish empire, with an Albanian national anthem, Albanian armed forces and history-books full of Albanian patriotism: all based on the class-division of capitalism—the many, poor, labouring, and ready to die for the (newly designed) flag and the few, prosperous, leisured, and ready to let them. It would have been a farce if it were not so tragic, and it was paralleled throughout the Balkans.

Motley people

The earlier empires creaked and groaned under the stresses of the First World War, and two of them (the Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish) collapsed entirely while the third, the Russian, survived only under entirely new management. But the reorganisation of the Russian empire, as capitalism established its political power there, meant that for twenty years after 1917 Russia had to concentrate on internal affairs and postpone its previous steady advance across Eastern Europe.

East of the Adriatic, between Italy and Albania, was a heterogeneous collection of people, languages and religions (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Moslem) — the Slovenes in the north, the Croats around Zagreb to their south, the Dalmatians on the coast, the people of Slavonia further east, the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and so on. Most of them spoke Slav languages, and most were too few to populate a state suitable for independent capitalism on their own. so they were all lumped together, willy-nilly. Some were less willing than others: the Montenegrins, who had already had a brief existence in a separate state before the war; the Macedonians, who wanted to join up with other Macedonians in Greece and Bulgaria, and the Croats, who feared the Serbs would swamp them. Serbs and Croats spoke dialects of the same language, but had been divided by their separate and antagonistic histories—the Serbs had the Cyrillic alphabet and the Eastern Orthodox church, the Croats had the Latin alphabet and the Roman Catholic church. In among this already motley collection of mainly Slav peoples were many Hungarians and Albanians, with sizable populations of Turks, Rumanians, Gypsies, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Germans, Ruthenians, Czechs and Italians, as well as smaller groups of Poles, Austrians, Greeks and Jews. Capitalism forced all these people together in one discordant mass, and called the concoction the Kingdom of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia. The King of Serbia, Peter Karageorgevitch, became King of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia and the other Balkan states created or confirmed in 1918 were always shaky, lacking the morale-boosting propaganda advantages of a long history and furthermore Russia, though still pre-occupied with establishing state capitalism, never ceased to cast its eyes covetously at eastern Europe. The Balkan countries became increasingly autocratic. King Alexander, Peter’s son, overthrew the democratic constitution and became a dictator in 1929. The rumbling discontent (and sometimes more than rumbling — Alexander was assassinated by a Croat dissident on a visit to Marseilles in 1934) was all to Russia’s advantage. The Russians organised underground parties of the discontented in all the eastern European states (as well as elsewhere) in the 1920s and 1930s, using, as many other capitalist states before had done, revolutionary language to cloak expansionist aims. The Yugoslav "Communist Party” was formed in 1919, although of course it had nothing whatever to do with Communism. One of its members was Josif Broz, later known as Tito.

Russia’s puppet

Broz was born in 1892 near Zagreb, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a young man he worked in a car factory near Vienna, then joined the Austrian army and was captured in Russia during the First World War. When the 1917 revolution broke out Broz became a Bolshevik and served for three years in the Russian army. Returning to Yugoslavia, he worked for the Russian-inspired underground (the "Communist Party” was banned in 1921). In this puppet party of the Russian Bolsheviks Broz worked hard (or his Russian masters. As Zagreb branch secretary he denounced the Yugoslav leadership to the Comintern (the Russian-led international organisation of Bolshevik-style parties) and the old central committee was sacked wholesale by the Russians, and a new one appointed which would be more loyal to Russia. After this success, Broz was arrested and jailed for five years by the then Yugoslav dictatorship. Emerging in 1934, he became a member of the Yugoslav party’s central committee, and began installing in influential party positions members devoted to himself (much as Stalin had done in Russia in the early 1920s). Then he left for Moscow as Yugoslav link-man with the Comintern.

In 1936 disloyalty to Stalin and Russia was again rearing its head in the Yugoslav party. The whole of the Yugoslav politburo was called to Moscow and dismissed from office. The loyal Stalinist Broz became organisational secretary. In 1937 the Yugoslav party secretary, Milan Gorkic, was arrested; he and most of the other Yugoslav party leaders were jailed and executed by Stalin. Broz was Stalin’s close collaborator in this sweeping slaughter, and ascended over the bodies of his dead colleagues to the leadership of the Yugoslav Stalinist party. In 1938 he returned to Yugoslavia as Stalin’s trusted emissary. He advanced men he could rely on to positions of power, and purged those not slavishly obsequious to Stalin and himself.

The war

The war came, and Yugoslavia was occupied by the Germans. When Russia entered the war, Broz (or Tito) loyally called for an insurrection against the German occupation forces, with the immediate aim of helping the Russians, and to pave the way for a Stalinist takeover of Yugoslavia after the war. The Yugoslav royalist government, in exile in London, had also organised clandestine warfare against the Germans under General Mihailovitch, so that they should have armed forces in the country ready to seize power again after the war. The two sets of terrorists, or freedom-fighters (the nomenclature depends on one’s political convictions) fought against each other as much as against the Germans. The same was happening in other east European states, which suited neither Russia nor the Anglo-American allies. The British and Americans wrote off most of the Balkans as being Stalin’s reward for fighting the war, but insisted on Greece remaining as an Anglo-American client state.

So Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt came to an agreement at the Tehran Conference of 1943. The British and Americans would abandon Mihailovitch and the other “right-wing” guerillas of eastern Europe, while Stalin promised to abandon the Stalinist partisans of Greece. Henceforward in Greece only the anti-Stalinists, and in Yugoslavia only the Stalinists, got military aid from the Allies. So when Germany collapsed in 1945, Tito was able to smash all opposition—Mihailovitch was captured and executed, and Archbishop Stepinac, leader of the Yugoslav Catholic Church, sent to jail—and establish a Stalinist dictatorship. In the same way the government of "liberated" Greece, backed by the Anglo-Americans, was able to smash the Stalinist organisations EAM and ELAS, while Russia, keeping its promise, stood by with folded arms.

Many of those who fought under Mihailovitch against the Nazis had to flee the country to escape Tito’s revenge. The writer, working in South Wales just after the Second World War, lived in a hutted encampment that also housed many of those (Yugoslavs and others) who had chosen the wrong anti- Nazi army to fight in, and as a result had lost their families and homelands, and were doomed to permanent exile, labouring in a foreign land.

Stalin was triumphant. The warm water ports on the Mediterranean that Russia had craved for 150 years seemed now firmly in his control. But the plans even of capitalist superpowers not infrequently go awry. The new Yugoslav ruling class were restive as clients of the Russian empire, and Tito aspired to be Yugoslav dictator in his own right, not merely as Stalin’s vice-regent. Relations between Stalin and Tito deteriorated, and then the Comintern, on Russian orders, expelled the Yugoslav party from the fold. When other countries became uneasy under the yoke later—on Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—the preponderance of opinion within the native ruling class was in favour of Russia, against the home-grown boss. In Yugoslavia it was not so. Tito had done too good a job in gaining control of the party machinery and its propaganda weapons. Though border incidents were almost a daily occurrence for some years, Stalin was never able to re-assert his control.

Having carried out many purges in the cause of Stalinism, Tito now carried out others in the cause of anti-Stalinism. Opponents were executed or jailed. Twelve thousand Yugoslav Stalinists found themselves in prison on the Adriatic island of Goli Otok. At the same time the other Balkan states, under Russian instructions, rooted out and put on trial any members who the Russians felt might follow Tito’s example, and declare their independence of Stalin. Executions of so-called Titoists became common throughout the remaining Stalinist countries of eastern Europe.

But Tito himself survived, and after Stalin’s death his successor Khruschev visited Yugoslavia to explain that it had all been a mistake. Thereafter Tito played a cunning game, allowing both superpowers, Russia and America, to woo Yugoslavia with economic and military aid. He also tried to create a “third world" bloc under his own leadership, independent of both Russia and America. In all things, he defended and promoted Yugoslav capitalism. 

He claimed that capitalism in Yugoslavia was socialism; a good propaganda line to persuade the oppressed and exploited that they are really free. Tito himself saw the facts clearly enough, when his own interests were not involved, and he himself described the Russian system as state-capitalism. But honesty in capitalist societies is often available for export only.

Tito's dictatorship remained as tyrannical os he felt necessary for the prolongation of his own power and his state-capitalist system, and he continued until the end to put opponents in jail, such as his former comrade Djilas, or to have them killed. In 1971 he purged the Croatian party leadership for "nationalism", and followed it with a purge of the Serbian party leadership for "liberalism". Dissidents who fled abroad were pursued by the Yugoslav secret police. The Times (29.4.80) reluctantly referred to the accusations of Yugoslavia "arranging the murder of Croat emigres”, and thus drew an indignant letter from a reader with a Serbian surname (Pavlowitch) reminding the editor (6.5.80) that "the list of murdered Serbs is also most impressive: at least one in Paris, three in Brussels, two in Canada, two in the United States, one in Stockholm and one in West Germany, the last one Dusan Sedlar, on April 16 in Munich. Not to mention the known cases of kidnapping, one in Switzerland and one in Rumania".

As political boss of an autocratic country Tito was not dissimilar to others of the same kind. (And over eighty per cent of the world’s population is in the grip of dictators: capitalism breeds them, as a dead rat breeds maggots.) While his opponents were fitted with prison garb, or their winding sheets, Tito sported flashy uniforms and diamond rings, and his hat always had more gold braid than anyone else's. While those who differed from him were incarcerated in their cells, or their graves, Tito was driving expensive fast cars, or was out shooting game. While those who had not been spry enough to change sides at exactly the right moment stared through the barred windows, if they were that lucky, Tito amused himself in luxurious speed boats, cruising round his island of Brioni. While those who held incorrect opinions forced down prison food, or themselves fed the worms, this large-bellied bon vivant savoured the succulent delicacies of state banquets.

And the great majority of the Yugoslav people, drudging in workshops and factories, and on the farms and railways, accepted it all os being part of the natural order of things. Since they supported capitalism, they were brainwashed by Tito’s propaganda machine into hero-worship of "the leader". Turning out in their thousands to Tito’s funeral ceremonies, they demonstrated their own political ignorance, just as so recently the loyal crowds in Iran turned out to support the Shah, or in Uganda to support Amin. In a socialist—a sane—society people will find it difficult to understand how such a blood-stained monster as Tito was ever allowed house-room by human beings—much less permitted to lord it over an entire country as a dictator.

Alwyn Edgar

Marx on Britain (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

See also Britain as Marx's political model

The Three articles—or rather the two articles and an extract from a third—which we publish here for the first time in English translation, were written by Marx in 1855 for the Neue Oder-Zeitung. After he came to live in Britain in 1849 Marx earned his living as the European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune to which he regularly contributed articles during the ten years 1851 to 1861. In 1855 Lassalle found him an additional job as the London correspondent of the Neue Oder-Zeitung which provided Marx with a supplementary income until the paper ceased publication at the end of the year.

Most of the articles Marx wrote at this time, both for the NYDT and for the NOZ, were about the Crimean War. As Marx mistakenly gave support to the British-French-Turkish side in this war, these articles make very embarrassing reading today. The three articles we have selected for publication, however, are more acceptable since they concern the situation of the working class and the struggle for universal suffrage and a shorter working week. As will be seen, Marx was particularly hostile to the industrial capitalists and to the Manchester School, the Parliamentary and Financial Reformers, the Peace Society and the Radical politicians like Joseph Hume, Richard Cobden and John Bright who expressed their interests.

We have added some footnotes to explain a number of historical references.

THE COMMERCIAL CRISIS

The Economist of London writes of the present commercial and industrial crisis: 

  Whatever may be falling off in the export of other articles, there is none in machinery. The value of 1854 exceeds the value in 1853. Other countries, therefore are now taking into use our machinery. We have no longer any advantage of this kind over them. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and the United States are all now great manufacturing countries; and some of them have advantages over us. We have a race to run and we cannot succeed if we tie our legs. Formerly they were tied for the advantage of the landlords, or the advantage of some classes of manufacturers, and very [illegible] work we made of it, as increasing poor rates and perennial disturbances testified.
  Nations, as well as individuals, look very foolish jumping in sacks, and get many a fall. Having got rid of the restrictions for landlords and the restriction for the master manufacturer, we must now walk in the workman’s manacles. Experience has satisfied every person that the restrictions imposed for the benefit of the master manufacturers injured them; and by and by the factory workers will find out that the restrictions imposed for their benefit will injure them. It is to be hoped, however, that they will find out before the countries before mentioned have made such progress as to supercede England in their own and third markets and have reduced the factory hands to destitution. (Economist, No. 594, 13 January 1855.)

Mr. Wilson, editor of the Economist and office boy at the Treasury of the anointed and oily man called Gladstone, apostle of freedom and careerist in one and the same person, who denies in one column of his journal the need for a State in general and demonstrates in the next the absolute necessity of the Coalition Ministry [1] in particular, this Mr. Wilson begins his homily with a deliberate falsification. The export statistics for 1854 contain in fact two headings for the export of machines. The first refers to railway engines and show in 1853 exports were £443,259 against £525,707 in 1854, which does indeed give an increase of £82,448. But the second, which refers to all other machines used in factories, records £1,368,027 for 1853 as against £1,271,503 in 1854, a reduction of £96,524. For the two headings taken together there is thus a deficit of £14,076. This detail is typical of the Manchester School. They believe that the present time is favourable for the abolition of the restriction existing in favour of factory workers, i.e., the legal restriction on the working time of young people below 18, of women and of children under 12. To achieve so elevated an aim, a few figures can well be falsified.

But, if we believe the Manchester Examiner, the special organ of the Quaker Bright, as well as the reports coming from the industrial regions, foreign markets, those traditional outlets for the surplus of our factories, are creaking under the weight of our overproduction and overspeculation. If we have reached such a congestion of the world market in spite of the opening up of two fabulous new markets, in Australia and California, in spite of the electric telegraph which has transformed the whole of Europe into an immense trading exchange, in spite of the railways and steamships which have infinitely extended communications, and so trade, how much time would the crisis have waited before coming if the employers had been authorised to operate 18 hours a day instead of 11?

The question is too simple for us to need to give the answer. But relatively quicker breaking out of the crisis would not have been the only difference. A whole generation of workers would have lost 50 per cent of their physical strength, intellectual development and ability to live. This same Manchester School, which replies to our scruples “Should this torment torment us, since it increases our pleasure?”[2], weeps and wails, with sentimental lamentations, about the sacrifice of human lives which the war against Russia, every war, costs! In a few days we will hear Mr. Cobden protest in Leeds against this mutual slaughter of Christians. And, in a few weeks, we will hear him in Parliament protest against the restrictions which prevent human lives being consumed too quickly in the factories. But, of all heroic gestures, only one seems justified to him: Herod's massacre of the innocents.

We agree with the Manchester School that the need for a legal limit on the daily working day in no way indicates a high degree of social development. But, in our view, the fault lies not in the laws, but in the state of affairs which makes them necessary.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 20 January 1855.)

[1] Britain was then governed by a Coalition between the Whigs and the “Peelites”, or pro-Free Trade lories, one of whom, Gladstone, was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[2] A line from a poem by Goethe.

DEATH OF HUME

The death of Hume has deprived the House of Commons of its father. His long parliamentary career was the exact barometer of the bourgeois Radical party which was at its height in 1831. A kind of Warwick or maker of MPs in the first years of the reformed House, he was, eight  [1] years later, along with Daniel O’Connell and Feargus O’Connor, one of the authors of the People’s Charter which still today constitutes the political programme of the Chartists and which basically amounts to a demand for universal suffrage and the conditions for putting it into practice in Britain. The split which soon occurred between the workers and the bourgeois agitators found Hume on the side of the latter. At the time of the Russell Ministry, he drew up a “little Charter”, which was adopted as a programme by those called the “parliamentary and financial reformers”.

In place of the six points of the People’s Charter, it only contained three points, replacing the demand for universal suffrage with a demand merely for a wider franchise. Finally, in 1852, Hume announced a new programme, in which he gave up his little Charter and only demanded one point: election by ballot. In short, Hume was the classic representative of the opposition called “independent” which Cobbett characterised excellently and definitively as the “safety valve” of the old system. In his old age he had a veritable mania for putting down motions and then withdrawing them, on a sign from Ministers, just before the doors closed. He employed his talents, as everyone knows, “to save public money”. All the Ministers allowed him to fight against the small expenses so that the big expenses passed all the more completely.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 28 February 1855.)

[1] The Charter was in fact drawn up in 1838, which is six. not eight years after the election of the first Parliament on the basis of the 1832 Reform Act.

CONFLICT BETWEEN WORKERS AND CAPITALISTS

In a previous correspondence we stated “the conflict between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie will begin again at the same time as the conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy reaches its climax”. [1] Tangible proof of this statement was provided at a big meeting held last Friday in the London Tavern. Before giving a report of this meeting, [2] we will say a few words on the skirmishes which have taken place recently, outside and inside Parliament, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Just recently the Manchester factory owners have organised meetings at which they decided to launch a campaign for the abolition of the official Factory Inspectors, on the grounds that these inspectors have not confined themselves to seeing that the legal working day is observed but have had the effrontery to insist that the safety measures laid down by Parliament for avoiding accidents and death to workers from machinery are effectively enforced in the factories. The Factory Inspector for South Lancashire, the famous Leonard Horner, has attracted their particular hostility because in his latest report he strongly called for a safety measure to be legally enforced whose absence, according to the naive admission of one factory owner, naturally a member of the Peace Society, “only cost last year the lives of five workers”.

That is what happened outside Parliament. The House of Commons rejected, on Second Reading, Sir John Halford’s Bill to make illegal “stoppage of wages”. It is thus that are called the deductions made from nominal wages, either because the worker has infringed some regulation laid down by the employer or because, in industries where the modern system has not yet been introduced, he has to pay a rent for the hire of the looms, etc.

This latter is especially the case in Nottingham in the hosiery industry. Sir John Halford showed that in many cases the worker instead of being paid by the contractor is forced to pay him money. So many deductions are made on various pretexts from the nominal wage that in the end the worker has to pay more than is due to him from the capitalist. The worker thus becomes the debtor of his employer who then obliges him to renew his contract on more and more unfavourable terms, to such an extent that he has become, in the full meaning of the word, a real serf, without however, like other serfs, having his material existence guaranteed.

While it rejected on Second Reading Sir John Halford’s Bill to end this abuse, the House of Commons did not even consider the Bill proposed by Cobbett, the son of the great English pamphleteer. This Bill aimed 1. to replace the 1850 10 ½-hours Act by the 1847 10 hours Act; 2. to make really effective the legal limitation of the working day in the factories by the compulsory stopping of the machines at the end of each legal working day.

(Final part of an article first published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 22 March 1855. The title is ours.)

[1] In an article "The British Constitution" that appeared in the NOZ on 6 March 1855. English translation in Pelican Marx Surveys from Exile, pp. 281-4.

[2] This report was published in the NOZ on 24 March 1855. English translation in Marx-Engels Articles on Britain, pp. 227-30.

Greasy Pole: How Do You Like Your Leaders? (2016)

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

As we were asked again and again, while one Westminster aspirant after another withered from their unnourished ambitions until Labour had only Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith left in contention for their party members’ votes – while the Tories were compelled to accept Theresa May and her deliberate technique of fostering or stifling the careers of her party underlings.

For Labour the conflict was particularly distressful; when Ed Miliband gave up the leadership there was a brood of competing successors – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Tristram Hunt … remember them? And those others, hoping that some rival’s spectacular failure would give them an opening. And the rest? One by one they were ground away until they were conclusively despatched by the simple, predictable process of the overwhelming votes of their party supporters for the hitherto obscure Jeremy Corbyn. Remember him? The locally  popular MP who persistently voted against party instructions while stolidly grappling with the problems his constituency voters passed on to him? Who thereby amassed a formidable, unforeseen growth of simple popularity among the local people which infected the Party membership at large.

That was when David Cameron, deluded by expected success in the EU Referendum, revelled in stirring up his Back Benchers’ hysterical rapture with his corny jibes from the Despatch Box. Take your pick from a library of his feeble sallies. But somewhere among your choice will be the jibe about Ma Corbyn giving advice to Her Majesty’s Loyal Leader of the Opposition to pay more attention to adjusting the hang of his trousers, to smoothing his shirt front and to keeping his hair placidly combed. The Tories hungrily adored it. But it was actually ineffective.

Fife

Consider, to begin with, the matter of the Honourable Jacob William Rees-Mogg, son of a now-deceased life peer and editor of the Times. An offspring of a family who grew rich from the labour of Somerset people in their coalmines and who at school wallowed in the absorptions of Eton College before enriching himself in his City of London company by the name of Somerset Capital Management - the function of which needs little imagination. At the age of 38 Rees-Mogg failed to persuade the voters of the (at that time) obdurately Labour constituency of Central Fife to welcome him as their representative in Westminster by touring the poorer districts in what was said to be a Bentley car, accompanied by a woman who had been his ‘nanny’ during the luxury of his childhood in the family stately home. But there were other, less demanding constituencies and in the 2010 election he won the new North East Somerset constituency with a majority of almost 5000.

The point is that Jacob Rees –Mogg is also noted for being the very opposite of Jeremy Corbyn for his appearance, with his double breasted suit immaculately smooth and controlled, an appropriate tie and shirt and hair. How significant is this in relation to his performance? One of his campaigns as an MP was to legislate so that the county of Somerset should have its own time zone, 15 minutes behind London. He supports zero hours contracts for their ‘flexibility’, disregarding those desperate unemployed workers who have no choice but to conform to this additionally exploitative device. He is against same-sex marriage and in favour of state-financed repatriation of immigrants to return them to their ‘natural homelands’. And, in case it is not by now obvious, he describes himself as ‘a monarchist’. All of which emphasises that it is most urgently obvious that all leaders must be judged on matters other than their appearance.

Riots

And on that basis where does Jeremy Corbyn stand? There is no shortage of promises from him on every relevant problem. But then both of the big parties, as well as the smaller, equally squirreling, groups compete for votes with programmes which at first sight may offer straightforward strategies and foresight to adjust capitalist society into being problem free. This grim fact exists and flourishes despite the evidence conclusively against it. For example on the currently dominating matter of public disorder in reaction to the stress of urban life, Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology at the London School of Economics, who has a dominant reputation in the subject, spoke recently on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 riots: ‘The underlying conditions for those riots still persist… There’s no real sign that things have improved for the lives of the kinds of people who were involved and caught up in the riots. Certainly it’s not implausible that there could be more riots’. (Guardian 6 August). And amid this morbid chaos all those previous, short-lived hopefuls for the Labour Party leadership have been replaced by Owen Smith, the MP for Pontypridd.

Smith was first elected in 2010 and was allocated to a succession of Shadow Ministerships including as Secretary of State for Wales. Previously he had a career which included a spell as Head of Policy and Government Relations for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer – who, he ominously said, were ‘extremely supportive’ of his ambitions for political advancement. With this encouragement, during his first effort to get into Parliament at a by-election in 2006, he came out in support of the Private Financial Initiative in the NHS, with its promise of rich profits for private companies such as Pfizer. He was once a member of the CND, with typical reservations about the Trident programme but he later reversed this into support for that devastating weapon. During his campaign for the Party leadership he called for the constitution to refer specifically to tackling inequality ‘… right at the heart of everything that we do’ and he later announced this as ‘… a British New Deal for every part of Britain’.  In terms of promises to reform the agonies of capitalism there is nothing novel or stimulating about Owen Smith. He is simply the latest in a history of futile, hopeless imposters

So how do we like our leaders? And how do they like us? We endure this social system – pervading, dominant and repressive – where one group possesses all that is essential to human lives. In this our function is to keep relationships operating in that way and, when we are allowed to express our response, to confirm that we support it all at whatever cost to human interests. In this the politicians’ role is to operate a machinery to persuade us that it would be impossible to have it any other way. But in truth we can change it so that the likes of Rees-Mogg, Corbyn, and Owen Smith are part of a bitter history.

Ivan

Remember Belgium! (1930)

Editorial from the May 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1914, hundreds of thousands of workers were duped into enlisting by the appeal to their sympathy on behalf of “poor little Belgium!" It is interesting to learn that confirmation has now been given to the statement that the Allied Governments had themselves prepared for violating Belgian “neutrality.”

Mr. Harold Nicolson has just written a life of his father, Lord Carnock, who as Sir Arthur Nicholson was Permanent Under-secretary at the Foreign Office in the years leading up to the war (“Lord Carnock,” published by Constable, 21/-).

From a review of the book which appeared in the Daily Herald on April 3rd, 1930, we learn that in September, 1911,

“preparations for landing four or six divisions on the Continent have been worked out to the minutest detail"; and in 1913 French military authorities are reported by Sir Arthur Nicolson to be of the view that “it would be far better for France if a conflict were not too long postponed.”

In 1913 Sir Arthur Nicolson wrote to the Minister in Brussels :—

We and France might have to move troops across the Belgian frontier in order to meet the approach of German troops from the other side.

The Herald reviewer says that ‘‘The Minister's reply makes it clear that this action was contemplated before the Germans actually entered Belgium.”

These statements based on Mr. Harold Nicolson's book were promptly confirmed by the Countess of Warwick in an interview which she gave the Daily Herald on April 4th.

She reports a conversation between Lord French and M. Clemenceau which took place in 1910, she being the only other person present, and acting as interpreter. Clemenceau said:—

. . . .  The British landing would be at Dunkirk, and your troops would go through Belgium into Germany.

French was dubious, and raised the question of Belgian neutrality, to which Clemenceau replied:—

Treaties do not matter when it comes to war. 

The Countess of Warwick relates the following further facts :—

 In later conversation Clemenceau stated that while the British pushed through Belgium the French would attack through Lorraine.
 The conversation was private, but I wrote to King Edward, who was my friend, about it. 

The Countess of Warwick then explained why she had kept this secret for so many years. She had intended to publish it in her reminiscences published six months ago, but her publishers refused to include these passages because “it put our country in a bad light.”

She admits that she made no attempt to publish it earlier than 1929.

For years I bottled it up within myself, even at the time when the “poor little Belgium” talk was being used to lure thousands of poor boys to their deaths.

Then, last year, when she was publishing her own book, she “asked one or two friends what they thought, and they said that they thought it would do no harm so long after the war.”

In short, the noble Lady, one of the shining lights of the I.L.P., the Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation, kept her mouth shut when “poor little Belgium talk was being used to lure thousands of poor boys to their deaths,” and only disclosed the secret when she thought “it would do no harm.”

The number of British subjects who lost their lives in the Great War was nearly 1,100,000. In addition, thousands have been blinded, crippled or otherwise mutilated. This the Countess could stand. But she could not bear the thought of putting the "country" in a bad light, and therefore did not let the victims share her knowledge until "it would do no harm,” that is, 15 years too late for it to be of use to them.

We wonder what the Countess of Warwick regards as "harm.”

Editorial: Labour Government's Solution. (1930)

Editorial from the September 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unemployed to emigrate.

 

When the MacDonald Cabinet came into office the Countess of Warwick, who presumably knows what level of intelligence meets the needs of the members of her class, proudly claimed for her political friends, the Labour Ministers, that they are the “party of brains." Far be it from us to dispute her claim. Still less would we deny that they are industrious seekers after knowledge. Have they not during one short year appointed nearly 40 Royal Commissions and Committees of inquiry? Are there not hundreds of members of these committees closely cross-questioning other hundreds of expert witnesses and reading millions and millions of words of evidence? And has not the Premier appointed a very special Economic Advisory Council, composed to a large extent of prominent Liberal and Tory economists and captains of industry? With this great machinery pouring out facts and opinions is it possible that our rulers will miss even a single small grain of useful knowledge? The answer, we regret to say, is that they are not likely to learn anything whatsoever which will prove beneficial to the working class.

The general result of these inquiries could be foretold in advance. The terms of reference of the Commissions and Committees and their composition preclude the barest possibility of a Socialist policy being recommended. Does the anti-Socialist professorial muddler of economic theory abandon his prejudices when he secures appointment to the Economic Advisory Council? Does the company director come there to devise ways and means of abolishing the capitalist system which gives him his power and privilege? Or, are the Liberal Party leaders, with whom the Government is holding private discussions about unemployment, likely to do so.

And if a miracle could take place, and if the capitalist thistle of a committee of inquiry did produce a fig in the shape of a recommendation in favour of Socialism, what would the Labour Government do with it?

What could they do? Elected by the votes of non-Socialists, a minority at that, they must do what their predecessors did—run the capitalist system as best they may and fob off the discontented electors with one excuse after another as long as they can. The expedient of setting up Commissions of Inquiry in order to postpone the awkward admission of failure to carry out Election promises is a time-honoured device of Governments. It is also the rankest dishonesty. When the Labour Government has supplemented its own knowledge with the false theories of all the economists, all the business experts, all the intellectuals, and all the politicians in all the capitalist parties, the truth will still remain that capitalism can only be run on capitalist lines, and will continue to produce poverty, unemployment and insecurity for the workers.

Unemployment is a problem which well illustrates the ignorance and trickery of the Labour Party. The Party in its literature and in the speeches and writings of its leaders has at different times adopted and proclaimed as their own unfailing remedy every nostrum of their Liberal and Tory opponents. For a time we were told that “high wages” in America had solved the unemployment problem, but Mr. William Green, the President of the American Federation of Labor, told the Senate Commerce Committee in April last that for 2¼ years the unemployment among the Federation’s members had never been less than 9 per cent. Last winter it rose to 22 per cent.—one in five out of work! Other Labour leaders told us that agricultural co-operation on Danish lines was the cure; but Denmark has unemployment as severe as our own. They pointed to Rationalisation as the painful operation necessary in order that work might be found for all; yet Germany, that much rationalised nation, has this year had 3 million men and women vainly seeking employment. The Labour leaders were also parties to that most colossal of post-war frauds, the greater production campaign, but now their spokesmen admit that the world is being stifled with over-production. They have preached shorter hours, but Mr. Snowden has just told the industrial employees of the Government that they must wait until times are “more favourable." These and many other useless or harmful schemes have been handed out by the Labour leaders to a credulous electorate. Then last year they tried a dose of J. H. Thomas at £5,000 a year, but the unemployment figures promptly leapt up to more than two millions. Now finally, they are reverting to the old and exploded scheme of migrating the unemployed to other Empire countries.

We recall how the Labour Party cried to heaven when Tories and Liberals told the unemployed to get out of the country and look for work elsewhere. Mr. Tom Shaw, at present Minister for War, was suitably ironical eighteen months ago concerning the "ecstasies" of the Imperialists “about the development of distant parts of the Empire."  . . . (Article in the Morning Post, 18th February, 1929.) The last Conservative Government set up a transfer board to move unemployed miners to imaginery areas where jobs were vacant. How the Labour Party scoffed at the idea of solving unemployment by moving the unemployed from one depressed area to another!

But now the Labour Government, according to the "Daily Herald" of 12th August, is considering a big Empire settlement plan by which the unemployed will be employed on development schemes in the Dominions. Mr. George Lansbury says that he feels “positive that there are tens of thousands of young men in this country who, if they were certain of a proper chance of a decent and self-respecting livelihood in the Dominions, would jump at it." Mr. Lansbury, who is himself in receipt of £2,000 a year for his post in the Government, explained a day or two earlier, that he thought it a most terrible tragedy that these young men “should be able for years of their growing lives to live on a sort of public allowance." (“Daily Herald," 11th August.) It is pertinent to remind Mr. Lansbury that his “sort of public allowance" was given to him because he was going to assist Mr. J. H. Thomas to solve the unemployment problem. His and Thomas’s expensive labours produced nothing, and there are nearly a million more unemployed. The young men are out-of-work because Mr. Lansbury and the Labour Government have utterly failed to find them the promised jobs. But Mr. Lansbury, the £2,000-a-year failure, deplores that they should be getting paltry unemployment pay. His alternative is that they should be found work in the Dominions. The “Daily Herald,” on the following day, unkindly sent this new-old fraudulent remedy into the rubbish heap with the others, by informing us that Australia has its own unemployment of “alarming proportions". “Thirteen per cent. of trade unionists are now out of work, in addition to thousands who do not belong to any unions. Those who know, estimate that there are at least 150,000 unemployed.” (“Daily Herald,” 13th August.) The correspondent of the “Daily Herald,” writing from Australia, added that “there is strong opinion that the stimulation of migration far exceeding the nation’s power of absorption is the principal cause of the present unemployment problem. With the stoppage of this flow of emigrants a return to normal conditions is confidently expected.”

And after Australia, Canada! Two days subsequent to Mr. Lansbury's optimistic views on emigration to the Dominions the “Daily Herald’s” correspondent in Canada announced that a bar had been put up against assisted immigrants owing to the heavy unemployment. Canada only wants immigrants with some capital. (“Daily Herald," 15th August.)

So Mr. Lansbury and the Labour Government have nothing else to offer to the unemployed than to ship them off to the Dominions, in spite of the fact that the Canadian Government and the Australian Labour Government are faced with alarming and continuous unemployment of their own, and firmly declare their determination not to receive Great Britain’s surplus workers.

The Labour Government has no policy except to try to administer capitalism in a way which they hoped would be better than administration of capitalism by Liberals and Tories. In many respects they have actually made the position worse. So little do they know of economic theories and the workings of the capitalist system, so bereft are they of any constructive ideas, that they can do nothing but desperately tread once more the pathways worn by their predecessors in office, pathways which lead to disillusionment for the workers.

This is what happens when a “party of brains” takes on the task of patching up the capitalist system. When the working class wake up to the realities of the situation they will apply their intelligence to a different task, the institution of Socialism. They will seek to understand their own problems instead of elevating the MacDonalds, Thomases and Lansburys into positions of power from which to broadcast pitiful nonsense copied from the programmes of the other parties of capitalism.

Mullahs and oil wells (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following China’s takeover by its so-called Communist Party in 1949, American politicians and commentators embarked on a spree of self-recrimination and examination. How could the enormous Nationalist army, with its American arms and advisers, have been defeated by ill-armed guerrillas? Who, in short, was responsible for “losing China”, and how could it have been “saved”?

A similar debate has been taking place over the last eighteen months concerning another country lost from America’s sphere of influence—Iran. A friendly dictator-emperor, reinforced by a massive army, was sent packing, and is now forced to scuttle from one country to another. Even worse, fifty American diplomats (of whom some no doubt were spies) were held hostage, and still are after an abortive marine attempt to rescue them. Could Iran too have been “saved”, given a little more competence and finesse on the part of President Carter?

One of the reasons for the intense interest that the rulers of other countries show in Iran is of course oil. But it is not the only factor involved. Vast though they are, Iran’s reserves are relatively small when compared with those of countries like Saudi Arabia, and (unless new reserves are discovered) Iran will not be a major exporter of oil much beyond 1990. Western capitalism wants Iranian oil but could certainly get along without it, as it will soon have to do.

The prospects of exports to Iran are also an important factor The massive revenues from oil sales go exclusively to the Iranian state, and a large part of this income is used to pay for imports. Iranian imports have risen spectacularly as a result of the country’s new-found wealth, from four hundred million US dollars in 1958-9 to $18.45 billion in 1975-6. A large part of this figure is made up of arms purchases—Iran under the Shah was for a time America’s best arms customer. Any capitalist class will want a piece of eighteen billion dollars' worth of action, and will inevitably have an interest in maintaining a friendly government in Tehran.

The third reason for Iran’s importance is its strategic value. It borders on Russia and commands the route to the Middle East oilfields. A pro-Moscow government (or, for that matter, a Russian invasion) could blockade the Persian Gulf and drastically reduce the amount of oil reaching Western capitalist nations. On the other hand, a pro-Western regime functions as a regional balance to both Russia and the Arab oil-producing states. In fact, the Shah acted as a kind of policeman for Western interests, supporting the royalists in North Yemen in the nineteenth-sixties, the Sultan of Oman in 1971, and Pakistan against the Baluchi guerrillas in 1973. There was no need for, say. direct American intervention in these cases; an army trained and armed by them was on the spot to defend the status quo.

Thus American policy since the beginning of the Shah's dictatorial rule in 1953 has been to keep in power a friendly ruler. This involved, as we have seen, massive arms sales, the weaponry being used for both internal repression and external intervention. The notorious secret police. SAVAK, was set up in 1957 with a permanent secret US mission attached to it (in light of the American government’s occasional hypocritical ramblings about “human rights", it is salutary to recall its role in establishing this vile SS-like organisation). Even the land reform of the early sixties was a response to American pressure on the Shah to carry out just enough by way of reformist policies to avoid too much rural opposition.

The opposition was restricted by press censorship and the lack of independent trade unions as well as by the ubiquitous agents of SAVAK. Agrarian reform failed to benefit those who actually worked the land (not that it was ever intended to), and the fruits of the oil industry reached only a tiny minority of Iranians. As elsewhere, nationalisation has been of no benefit to the ordinary workers. Apart from the fantastically wealthy and corrupt royal family, and a small capitalist class, Iranians lived lives of poverty and squalor. Their position was made even more unacceptable by knowledge of the rich resources beneath their feet and the manifest affluence of their rulers:

 “As early as 1971 a cautious observer of Iran remarked that, on walking through the streets of the southern, poorer part of Tehran, he encountered 'more expressed hatred than I have ever heard before’ from ’people who watch the cars of the people who are doing well’. The wealth in Iran was being distributed in a manner that was ‘ostentatious’ and 'grotesque’. (Fred Halliday: Iran: Dictatorship and Development, quoting Richard Cottam.)

In the absence of genuine political parties, opposition centred around religious movements (rather as the Catholic Church in Poland is a kind of symbol of anti-government forces).

There are additional reasons why opposition should have come from, and been centred on, the Islamic religion. Sunni Muslims recognise the temporal ruler as the successor of the prophet Mohammed, but this is not the case with the Shi’a branch to which most Iranians belong, The various land reforms of the Shah and his father have deprived the religious leaders or mullahs (of whom there are some 180,000 in Iran) of their lands. They have thereby been forced to rely economically on the “religious tax" paid by their followers, especially the bazaar merchants—and the sums paid over in this way were probably greater than the secular taxes paid to the government. The mullahs constituted a large, influential and financially secure grouping outside the formal state apparatus, and one moreover with a sizable grass roots organisation. The Shah’s new-style oil-based capitalism inevitably led to undermining of the merchants’ position and hence of the mullahs. The result was a clash of interests between the merchants and the Shah as spokesman for the new oil-financed bourgeoisie. The priests are but the ideologists of the merchants, and the seemingly religious dispute masks an economic conflict.

Opposition to the Shah’s regime gradually increased throughout 1977, and by the middle of the following year the Shah was promising “liberalisation" with “free elections”. These carrots failed to quieten things down and martial law had to be declared in September 1978. Opposition still seethed, however, and in January 1979 the Shall left Iran. It was a striking demonstration that even an apparently all-powerful dictator cannot survive for long without the support, or at least the acquiescence, of those he rules over.

The replacement has been the so-called “Islamic republic”, which is effectively run by religious leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Tehran workers are provided with a diet of “bread and circuses", parading outside the US embassy as if American imperialism were the cause of all their problems. Their new rulers are no better than the Shah and, like him, go in for executions and secret trials. Like the Shah, they wage bloody war against nationalist movements in the non-Persian speaking areas of Kurdistan and Khuzestan. And above all, the division of society into two classes remains.

Meanwhile opposition too continues. At the end of April, bomb explosions in Tehran killed four people, those being blamed for this including the Americans, the Iraqis, the Kurds and left-wing guerrillas. The position of Iran’s new rulers is by no means secure. It is unlikely that the Shah will return (other than to face trial), but the Islamic republic will be as unable to solve the country’s economic problems as he was. The dispute between different sections of the Iranian capitalist class will continue, with the new industrial bourgeoisie likely to come out on top eventually. As has happened so often elsewhere, an inter-capitalist dispute has been dressed up in other clothes (religious, nationalist, or whatever), and workers have been deluded into supporting one side or the other.

Our message to workers in Iran is the same as our message to workers everywhere: do not waste your lives and energy by supporting one group of your masters against another—instead, unite as a class against the system that sets up some human beings as masters over others.

Paul Bennett

Cricket 2003 - Survival of the Richest (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ideally, sporting activities are organized to entertain the public and indeed, in which the public participate. But in a profit-driven society, sports becomes an industry in which sportsmen, sportswomen and spectators are tools used by wealthy individuals and groups to make profits. Whereas competitors are hired and even drugged to squeeze out every exploitable energy and talent from them (of course it is officially called “performance enhancing”) the public are allowed to watch games only if they can pay. Many people don't realize this business aspect of sports or they simply overlook it. But this year's Cricket World Cup held in Africa embarrassingly betrayed the high profit considerations in sports.

The fixtures for the tournament were scheduled as far back as October 2001. England was billed to play against Zimbabwe in Harare on 13th February 2003. Now everyone knows that the local, mainly black, capitalists in Zimbabwe are locked in battle with the predominantly white capitalist farmers over land. The Zimbabwean and British governments are deeply involved in this intra-capitalist struggle on the side of the mainly black and predominantly white respectively.

The 13 February match in Harare therefore provided a 'godsent' weapon that the white commercial farmers, through the British government, decided to use against their adversary. So rising up to their role as a paid agent of people in big business, the government of U.K., started the machinations. The culture secretary Tessa Jowell and other Ministers in London urged the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to boycott the match in protest against Mugabe's evil regime.

However the British government could not authoritatively order the ECB not to honour the match because the ECB is also a capitalist organization thirsty for profits. Thus the issue disgracefully degenerated into another battle between two of the British government's masters, the Zimbabwean commercial farmers and the capitalists in the cricket business.

The ECB was ferociously determined to go ahead with the match in view of the millions of pounds they would lose in fines and profits. They defended their intention to play with a capitalistically logical argument that there were no trade and sports sanctions against Zimbabwe and that if over 300 British companies were trading in Zimbabwe, the why couldn't the ECB also pursue its profit-oriented interests there?

It is not our concern which of the capitalists won the day. What concerns us as an exploited class of players and spectators is whether our miserable living conditions would change whether the match was played or not. Of course we would still remain a plundered class. Boycotts, sanctions, strikes, etc. present no solutions to the serious problems of war, famine and disease. Sometimes they are even counter-productive, as is is currently the case in Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his colleagues in the privileged class are not in any meaningful way affected by the sanctions. It is rather the poor who feel the pinch. Is it not a mockery that even though Mugabe is under a travel ban, French capitalists through the French government managed to get him to Paris in February for the Franco-African Summit where business and profits were discussed?

A genuine way to liberate the world from all its problems is to get it off this profit-oriented view of affairs. It is only then that cricket players and fans can cease to be used as a source of money for a tiny majority, and the sport returned to the domain of leisure activity in which ones enjoyment of sport, whether as a participant or spectator, is not dictated by the amount of money in their pockets.

Suhuyini