George Moore on Charity-Mongering. (1929)

From the May 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

“ .  .  .  A case of intense suffering is brought under the notice of a bourgeois; it awakens in him a certain hysterical pity, or, should I say, remorse, for he feels that a system that permits such things to be cannot be wholly right. He relieves this suffering, and then he thinks he is a virtuous man; he thinks he has done a good action ; but a moment’s reflection shows us that this good action is only selfishness in disguise —that it is nothing more than a personal gratification, a balm to his wound, which, by a sort of reflective action, he has received from outraged humanity. Charity is of no use; it is individual, and nothing individual is of any value; the movement must be general.”

George Moore.

Answers to correspondents. (1929)

Answers to correspondents from the May 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

C. McLean (Burnley).

Neither Marx nor Engels dealt in detail with the mental process. Dietzgen deals with the thinking process in his works, but not specifically with the "slowness" of the worker’s mind to grasp the necessity of Social Revolution.

This is a matter dealt with often in the Socialist Standard.

J. Blundell (Burton).

Soddy’s Cartesian Economics may be cartesian, but it is not economics. The professor may know physics, but he is certainly unacquainted with Economic Science. We will try and review his pamphlet shortly.

S.P.G.B. Propaganda Meetings (1929)

Party News and notices from the May 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism and Climate Change: Cause and effect (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent interview with Channel Four veteran Jon Snow, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney made the audacious claim that capitalism is part of the solution to climate change (LINK.). Carney calmly delivered this claim in an ongoing capitalist context of political malaise, escalating trade tensions, continued financial mismanagement, and imminent sovereign debt crises.

The argument he made was that in order to mitigate risks (not doing anything about climate change rendered a risk to profitability, rather than dealing with the problem being a genuine social priority), capitalist businesses will have to move their focus from where we are today, to where we need to be tomorrow. Perhaps this wooliness doesn’t placate your concerns? Well, Carney went further in arguing that the financial sector had a prominent role to play in this switchover, whereby funds will be withheld from businesses that are unable to move with the times and prioritise climate change.

When probed by Snow, Carney reiterated that capitalist businesses which ignored climate change would go bankrupt ‘100 percent’. While you could argue that an incumbent business which completely disregarded climate change could plant the seeds of their own long-term demise, the ‘100 percent’ route to bankruptcy is by a capitalist ignoring profitability.  Carney would most probably respond that, as climate change poses a ‘risk’ to long-term profitability, capitalist businesses will be forced to prioritise the mitigation of climate change. However, surely the Governor cannot believe that other ‘risks’ of not making a profit are simply going to make way for the prioritisation of the environment?

Leaving aside Brexit and the US-China dispute, let us consider a few contemporary ‘risks’ prioritised by financial institutions. Argentina, for example, faces yet another sovereign debt collapse. Once perceived as an emerging market with relatively wide investment margins, its borrowings from western financial institutions soon proved to be unsustainable. Rather than allowing for an accountability of failure on behalf of banks and investors, the Argentinian government has been provided with multiple large IMF bailouts. Only months since a $7.1 billion IMF loan, Argentina’s dollar-denominated sovereign debts appear on the precipice of default as the strongly IMF backed incumbent government came second in primary elections, resulting in a 25 percent devaluation of the peso and a stock market collapse. 

In Malaysia, Goldman Sachs has promised to ‘vigorously defend’ itself against state prosecutors who claim that senior bankers and domestic politicians alike had embezzled state investment funds, defrauding investors in the process. Does any of this inspire confidence that the financial sector can lead a gilt-edged defence of the environment? Not when such unprofitable investments in loans are bailed out and fraud and embezzlement are vigorously defended. Capital that risks disappearing because a sovereign state borrower is unable to repay the loan cannot be protected by central banks and monetary funds indefinitely, but they will be defended as long as possible at whatever social cost. The idea that investments in loans that are not ‘profitable’ will lead to an immediate risk to bankruptcy or to a redirecting of capital into sustainable and socially acceptable ends is an age-old laissez-faire myth.

As per usual with liberal economics, climate change has been reduced to an economic abstraction in an effort to plead for the capitalist system. Can we afford to wait for climate change to pose the biggest risk to capitalist profits? Are central banks and the IMF going to allow financial institutions to go ‘bankrupt’ if they continue to make loans that turn out to be unprofitable investments, as Carney insists?  Is it likely that in the immediate future climate change will overtake the quarterly demands of investors? How long will it take to simply wait for the profitability of environmentally-damaging goods to slowly deplete?

Can we afford to wait? The answer of course, is no. Environmental groups must no longer prioritise the achievement of empty emissions promises from politicians on behalf of financiers and capitalists. The socialist response is to advocate a system based on common ownership and economic democracy which can prioritise social need, rather than the ability to make profits and if not, to defend unprofitable investments at any social cost. 

James Clark

Cooking the Books: The Next War (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘In the next war, we’ll need the Royal Marines’ was the heading of an article by Roger Boyes in the Times (17 July), subtitled ‘Other nations are scaling up for an amphibious conflict over trade but Britain is ill-prepared.’ He quoted Hannah Arendt about the age of imperialism being when ‘businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen,’ adding: ‘These times are back.’

Socialists have always contended that the underlying cause of war is the competitive struggle for profits that is built-in to capitalism and which leads to conflicts between capitalist states over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets, investment outlets, and strategic points and areas to protect these. Normally, this competition is peaceful and differences are settled by diplomatic means in arrangements which reflect the relative strengths of the states involved. Here might is right, and not just economic might but also the military force at a state’s disposal. This is why all states try to equip themselves with the most up-to-date and deadly weapons that they can afford.

War is only resorted to as a last resort, when those in charge of a state judge that its vital interests are at stake. After all, war is costly and risky for a capitalist state. On the other hand, sabre-rattling, as a threat to go to war, is a normal part of diplomacy. Economic sanctions, in which states try to impose a mediaeval-type siege on the population of a whole country, have more recently become an alternative to actual war.

All that happened after the end of the stage of capitalism Arendt commented on was that ‘statesmen’ found it politic to speak of war as being fought for ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and other such lofty ideals, in order to disguise the real reason from populations less likely to support a war over such a sordid thing as trade. Now, it seems, they don’t feel the need to do this so much.

Boyes, who is the paper’s diplomatic editor but who sounds more like its war correspondent, was mainly concerned in the article about conflicts over trade routes, mentioning in particular three strategic sea lanes:

• The Strait of Hormuz which controls the entrance to the Persian Gulf ‘through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes.’
• The Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, through which all shipping using the Suez Canal has to pass.
• The Malaccan Straits ‘through which 80 per cent of China’s imported oil passes from the Indian Ocean into the South China Sea.’

There is already a war going on in the Red Sea area, on one side of which is Yemen where America’s allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are fighting against local militias serving as Iran’s proxies, with, as always in wars, devastating effects on the local population. The main flashpoint at the moment, however, is the straits of Hormuz which Iran is threatening to close in retaliation for the crippling economic sanctions imposed on it and the US is mobilising a war fleet to keep them open if needed.

Boyes views this as normal: ‘Proximity to the sea lanes that define global trade has become something worth fighting for.’ Actually, from a capitalist point of view, it always has been, but in expressing this Boyes is at least being honest, while at the same time confirming the socialist case on why wars happen – and why we say that defending trade routes is not worth a single drop of working class blood.

Brief Reports (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a pity

‘Large numbers of children in Britain could grow up struggling with “financial illiteracy” if the UK becomes a cashless society and does not educate children on the concept of paying for things, a maths professor has warned. Many children are failing to grasp the concept of exchanging money for goods because they have never seen their parents or carers handing over coins or notes to a cashier, warned Dr Jennie Golding, at the UCL Institute of Education.’ (i paper, 15 June)

Why would this be a problem if Adam Smith was right about humans having a ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’? But wait till we have socialism when we will all be ‘financially illiterate’ and adults, let alone children, won’t know what a cash machine was or what paying for something online means. 

They still don’t get it

‘Working-class values like hard work should be rewarded with decent pay and security. The Government should concentrate on rebuilding working-class jobs with decent pay’ (Frances O’Grady, TUC General Secretary, i paper, 10 August).

It must be nearly two hundred years since the slogan ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ was first raised and it’s over 150 years since Marx urged English trade unions to abandon that ‘conservative motto’ for the ‘the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wages system.’ Maybe the C in TUC stands for ‘conservative’.

Ten less years

‘For most people, health has little to do with healthcare. It is genetically and socially determined, and in a country like the U.K. with high levels of child poverty and income inequality, the consequence is a 10-year gap in life expectancy between rich and poor, and a 20-year difference in healthy years lived.’ (M.D., Private Eye, 9 August).

Anti-Trumpism (2019)

Pamphlet Review from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Resisting Trumpist Reaction (and Left Accommodation). Marxist Humanist Initiative. New York, 80 pages. 2018.

This is an odd pamphlet from a group entitling itself ‘Marxist’ in that it argues that workers should vote for a ‘centrist neo-liberal’ to stop Trump being re-elected in 2020 just as it says that they should have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Their argument is based on the premise that ‘Trumpism’ is some sort of modern form of fascism and that Trump wants to replace political democracy in the US by an openly authoritarian regime. Political democracy in the US (such as it is) is not under threat, but even if it were the answer would not be to line up behind pro-capitalist politicians.

The pamphlet claims that the position Marx took up of supporting the North in the US Civil War and the separation of Ireland from Britain vindicates their position. Marx supported the one to hasten capitalist development in America and the other to undermine the power of the landed aristocracy in Britain, both issues long since settled by history and of no relevance today.

Their argument is that Marx also had in mind that both would free workers from ‘supremacist’ ideas – racism and anti-Irish prejudice. Maybe (not that it did) but this would not imply voting for the Democratic Party today. That’s not going to change anything. Rather would it suggest some other way of overcoming the prejudices of Trump voters. Such as a straightforward campaign to explain that their problems are caused by capitalism and that it is their interest to unite with other workers to establish the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. A message that should be equally directed at Democratic Party voters.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Cunning stunts and climate tokens (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

What was Greta Thunberg thinking by travelling to the UN climate summit in New York on a small ‘carbon-neutral’ yacht across the Atlantic instead of flying like any normal person or even – since she admitted there was no hope of changing Donald Trump’s mind about climate change – staying home?

She surely wasn’t suggesting that a two week yachting cruise instead of a 7-hour flight was somehow the more practical or the safer option, or even realistically available to anyone apart from the rich and leisurely. She wasn’t claiming that air travel, at around 2 percent of global carbon emissions, was the world’s biggest problem. She wasn’t seriously asking the world to revert to the nineteenth-century age of sail, was she?

Of course not, it was a media stunt, a token activity with no other purpose than to grab headlines. Seasoned media watchers won’t be surprised by this. In just a few short months Greta has gone from schoolgirl-on-a-mission to a global ‘brand’ to be steered and navigated through the world’s front pages by an expert PR team. It’s a bit sad really. What the world loved about Greta Thunberg was her plain-speaking naivety, her quasi-autistic inability to dissemble. Now she’s started pulling media-targeted eco-stunts like any selfie-obsessed YouTuber, it’s hard not to see the tacky side. Her on-message team will have meant well, of course. Turning her into a global influencer means the potential to influence global climate policy, or so they hope. But in doing so they’ve played capitalism’s game and commercialised her into a product. No doubt businesses are already bombarding her with eco-sponsorship deals. No doubt her engagement diary is fully booked and hefty appearance fees negotiated, all for the cause. But it’s not quite the same now she can no longer stand apart from the system she is criticising.

Greenwash, or eco-tokenism, is equally evident in the much-vaunted ‘global general strike’ on 20 September, in which adults are asked to join schoolchildren in widening the protest against climate change. In one sense this was always going to happen, since children are not wage-workers and thus their withdrawal of ‘labour’ can have no realistic effect on capitalism’s economy. But for a start it’s not really a ‘global general strike’ – at the time of writing no or virtually no strikes are scheduled anywhere in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Gulf states, North Africa, South and Central America, Canada or (weirdly – considering who started all this) Scandinavia. Nearly all the activity is confined to western Europe (except Spain), India, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the US (https://globalclimatestrike.net/).

Secondly, what about the call to ‘unleash mass resistance’? Resistance to what, exactly? Workers are asking their bosses for permission to go on this so-called strike, and getting it! One architect firm is keen to get behind the climate message by effectively giving its workers the day off: ‘A number of our staff [have] asked whether they could join the protests (the answer: of course!)’, (LINK.). They’re not alone, as firms right across the sector scramble to get in on the act and proclaim their green credentials (see ‘Architects sign on for the Global Climate Strike’ – LINK.). Other industry sectors able to spare a one-off Friday holiday will surely join the stampede.

There are signs that some state authorities are adopting a similar strategy (‘Edinburgh youth climate strikers allowed one school day off a year’, LINK.). One day off in a year to fight climate change? They must be kidding themselves because the kids won’t fall for it.

It’s not a strike if your bosses are giving you permission. All you’re doing is making tokenistic statements and giving your bosses the opportunity to indulge in some useful ‘virtue signalling’. Everybody wins, but nobody accomplishes anything.

The problem with the environmental movement is that it doesn’t know who the enemy is. It thinks we’re all in the same boat and that cooperation is all that’s required. But we’re not, and it isn’t. The enemy isn’t air travel, or industry, or agriculture, or plastics, or your personal heating consumption – these may be factors but they are not the main problem. The real enemy is the stranglehold on decision-making possessed by the global billionaire elites – the One Percent – together with their puppet state administrations. It’s their drive for profits – not some generalised human greed – which is ruining the planet. Universal democratic cooperation is out of the question while they remain in charge. They may pretend to be looking for a solution but they will try to prevent any activity which threatens to dethrone them.

And how do they do that? Brute force, in the last resort, however in capitalist economies where bosses wear suits and not battle fatigues they generally like to be more subtle. The trick is not to confront opposition directly, which might create sympathy for it. Instead you direct and channel it into the mainstream where its narrative is gradually diluted out of existence. If there’s a figurehead you can’t ignore, mock, bribe, discredit or kill, you can try to drown them in celebrity-wash until they become as transparent and irrelevant as any other reality star. That’s another reason not to follow leaders.

So, if it’s all tokenism, what’s the point of this global climate strike? Well, at some level it’s a valid consciousness-raising exercise and if you’re in a position to take a free day off then there’s no harm in it. But it won’t trouble the corporations and the government mandarins, and it won’t move the world a single step closer to what it really needs, the global abolition of the capitalist system with its class ownership and market economy. Instead of tokenism and virtue signalling, workers need to take the world into a new era of common ownership and democratic guardianship of all the world’s resources. But don’t bother asking your boss’s permission for that, because you certainly won’t get it.

Paddy Shannon

“World Revolution”: another confused group (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent years have seen the emergence of groups who recognise that by socialism Marx meant a society in which goods would no longer be produced for sale and in which people would no longer work for wages. They have not, however, acknowledged that the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been pointing this out for over seventy years. In fact they have some harsh things to say about us. The journal World Revolution, for instance, which styles itself “the British group of the International Communist Current” is on record as describing us as “a completely degenerate bourgeois organisation which can only play a counter-revolutionary role within the working class” and as “a parliamentarian leftist sect renowned for their Menshevism” (WR3). Recently, however, they seemed to have had second thoughts and have upgraded us from “a completely degenerate bourgeois” organisation to a “confused proletarian” one:

  The SPGB has survived since 1904 as a proletarian organisation. While its rigid sectarianism from the beginning tended to inhibit any real contribution to the clarification of the tasks of the working class, it nonetheless stood against both world wars, attacking them as capitalist wars in which the working class had no interest, and denouncing anti-fascism for the anti-working class movement it was. The SPGB also recognises Russia and China as state capitalist, and sees parties of the left and extreme left as parties of state capitalism. But against these class positions it also holds to the view that the working class can only come to power through Parliament and that it can defend itself through trade unions. It is even confused about who the working class is – for example, it sees the repressive arms of the state, the police, as members of the working class simply because they are paid wages (WR11).

The so-called “International Communist Current” is an organisation with supporters in North America and a number of European countries, centred on the French journal Révolution Internationale which has tried to combine the Italian and German “leftwing communist” traditions, both dogmatically anti-parliamentary, attacked by Lenin in 1921 in his pamphlet Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

WR holds that capitalism is, and has been since the first world war, in a state of economic collapse due to its inability to find new markets on which to sell its products at a profit. This view is based on an uncritical acceptance of the analysis made by Rosa Luxemburg in her book The Accumulation of Capital first published in 1913. We are told: “As Rosa Luxemburg showed, surplus value cannot be realised within the context of a purely capitalist economy” (WR1).

Rosa Luxemburg did indeed try to demonstrate this, but her argument was based on a simple fallacy. According to her, under “pure” capitalism (an economy where there are only capitalists and wage workers) market demand was determined by consumption (what the workers spend on consumer goods plus what the capitalists spend on consumer goods). If the capitalists were to consume all their surplus value, so her argument ran, there would be no problem, but as soon as they re-invest a part of it – which, the accumulation of capital, is after all the purpose of production under capitalism – market demand is no longer equal to what has been produced. For, the consumption of the capitalists having been reduced, so, according to Luxemburg, has market demand. The result, she concluded, was that there was nobody to buy the products in which the re-invested profits were embodied (new machinery, raw materials and consumer goods for the extra workers taken on).

This argument makes accumulation impossible under “pure” capitalism and Luxemburg did not shrink from this conclusion. In fact it led her to the basic theme of her book: that for capital accumulation to take place there must be non-capitalist areas to buy the part of the surplus product not consumed by the capitalists. It followed for her that capitalism would collapse at the point when there were no more non-capitalist areas left in the world. It is WR’s contention that precisely this collapse began to occur at about the time of the first world war.

Luxemburg had the intellectual honesty to admit that this theory conflicted with the rough notes Marx had made at the end of Volume II of Capital which implied that long-term growth (accumulation) was possible under “pure” capitalism. She therefore tried to show where Marx had gone wrong, but only succeeded in exposing her own utter confusion about economics. She made the silly mistake of assuming that the level of market demand was determined exclusively by consumption (the spending of workers and capitalists on consumer goods) whereas in fact it is determined by consumption plus investment (capitalist spending on new means of production). Thus, when a part of the surplus value is re-invested rather than consumed, market demand is not reduced; it is merely re-arranged: what the capitalists formerly spent on consumer goods they now spend on means of production. Marx had made no mistake.

Of course, to say that capitalism could in theory exist without external non-capitalist markets is not to say that it always has done. External markets did play a key role in the birth and early growth of capitalism. Similarly, to say that there is no permanent underconsumption built-in to the capitalist system is not to say that there is therefore always a smooth crisis-free accumulation of capital. Far from it. Accumulation under capitalism proceeds by fits and starts, but these crises are caused by other reasons than underconsumption: by disproportions between the different branches of production leading to a fall in the rate of profit or, at times, to a temporary retraction of the market demand for consumer goods. Finally, to deny that capitalism is in a state of collapse through inability to find new external markets is not at all to deny that, since about the turn of the century, it has been a reactionary, “decadent” system with no further positive role to play in the history of mankind. By that time, it had already built up the material basis for a world socialist society and so had fulfilled its historic role.

According to WR theory, the period after the first world war was one of imminent “proletarian revolution” sparked off by the collapse of capitalism. In fact, however, capitalism was not collapsing nor were the workers revolutionary in any meaningful sense of the term, that is, imbued with socialist understanding. They were merely discontented with the terrible conditions they had to endure. A minority were indeed prepared to take violent action to try to rectify the situation, but this did not mean they were revolutionary in the sense of wanting and understanding socialism. The great majority of workers, however, as the results of elections held in Britain, France and Germany at the time showed, remained loyal to the political parties which openly upheld capitalism, including by now the Labour and Social Democratic parties.

Lenin too made the mistake of assuming that a socialist revolution in the West was imminent. His justification for the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 was that it was the first step in the world proletarian revolution, a breakthrough by the working class where the link in the imperialist chain was weakest, to be followed fairly rapidly by revolutions in the other countries of Europe and in particular in Germany. In reality the Bolsheviks’ coming to power was nothing of the sort, but was rather the seizure of power by a determined group in the conditions of chaos following the collapse of the Tsarist State under the impact of the war. Certainly, the Bolsheviks claimed to be socialists, but their support amongst the workers had been built up not for socialism but on the slogans “Peace, Bread and Land”. Once in power they never had any choice but to develop capitalism in Russia which they proceeded to do in the form of state capitalism as Lenin was to frankly admit. Thus their coup d’état was essentially only a point in the process of the development of capitalism in Russia, Russia’s equivalent of the French bourgeois revolution of 1798 or rather of the coming to power of Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1793.

WR, however, and the “International Communist Current”, reject this view and proclaim that the Bolshevik seizure of power was a “proletarian revolution” which later “degenerated” into the state capitalism we see in Russia today:

  Its [the Bolshevik Party’s] coming to power in October was one of the highest moments of the proletarian revolution” (WR1). 

  With the recognition of the proletarian character of the October Revolution must come the realisation that the Bolshevik party . . . was a proletarian party of the revolutionary wave” (International Review No.3, p. 1).

The fact that WR regards the Bolshevik seizure of power as a “proletarian revolution” and the Bolshevik vanguard party as (at that time) a “proletarian party” reveals a lot about their own conception of majority, conscious revolution (as WR claims), yet points to the Bolshevik coup (where an unconscious majority was manipulated by a conscious minority as in all previous bourgeois revolutions) as an example of the sort of revolution they have in mind, then their claim, or their understanding of its implications, must be open to serious question. That, despite what they say, they don’t really stand for a majority conscious revolution will be confirmed when we examine their attitude to Parliament and elections.

WR is vehemently opposed to Parliament describing it as a “circus” and us as “parliamentary cretins” for saying that the working class can make some use of it. They favour instead “workers councils” in which their organisation would play a “vanguard” role. Once again this results from the fascination the Bolsheviks have for them.

Tsarist Russia was a political autocracy which did not permit the organisation of normal political parties or trade unions. Thus when it collapsed in March 1917 there were no mass parties or trade unions, or even local government bodies, through which the workers and soldiers could express their views. To fill this gap they formed make-shift representative bodies called “soviets” (which is merely the Russian word for “council”) as they had done before in 1905. The fact that these bodies were make-shift without any formal democratic structure (though there is no reason to believe that they were not more or less representative till the Bolshevik coup) made it easier for them to be manipulated by a determined minority such as the Bolsheviks were.

Lenin cynically proclaimed these councils as a superior form of democracy to Parliament just because their unstructured nature had made it easier for a minority calling itself revolutionary to come to power by manipulating them. WR has inherited this tradition and has not entirely freed itself from the Bolshevik tactic of organising as a “vanguard” to manipulate the “workers councils” they want set up.

On the other hand, socialists reject all forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the immense majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, act of a socialist-minded working class.

In these circumstances the easiest and surest way for such a socialist majority to gain control of political power in order to establish socialism is to use the existing electoral machinery to send a majority of mandated socialist delegates to the various parliaments of the world. This is why we advocate using Parliament; not to try to reform capitalism (the only way Parliaments have been used up till now, which has inevitably failed to do anything for the working class since capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work for their benefit), but for the single revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism by converting the means of production and distribution into the common property of the whole of society.

No doubt, at the same time, the working class will also have organised itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going, but nothing can be done here until the machinery of coercion which is the state has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist class by political action.

In the passage from WR11 quoted at the beginning of this article we are criticised for saying that the working class “can defend itself through trade unions”. We do indeed say this. The existing trade unions are certainly not perfect – they are bureaucratic, they often collaborate with employers and governments, they engage in reformist politics – but at the moment, given the existing low level of consciousness among the working class, they are all workers have to defend themselves. Actually, we do not support the existing trade unions as such; what we say is that we are in favour of workers organising democratically and taking industrial action to defend their wages and conditions, and where possible improve them, against the encroachment of capital, an activity that has in the past sometimes brought them into conflict with the existing trade unions.

And it is not socialists who are “confused about who the working class is”. We say that the working class is composed of all those who are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and who are consequently forced, in order to live, to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary, irrespective of the job they do. The working class thus includes office workers and civil servants as well as factory workers and miners and, yes, policemen and members of the armed forces. Indeed, it is partly because we know that the state machine is manned largely by members of the working class that we are confident that the socialist working class majority will be able to establish socialism peacefully. For, when socialist ideas begin to spread among the working class it is most unlikely that those in uniform will remain unaffected. When a majority of workers generally are socialists, so will most of their fellow workers in the armed forces be.

Adam Buick

Sport mimics warfare (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win . . . At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests and seriously believe—at any rate for short periods—that running, jumping and kicking a bill are tests of national virtue.

George Orwell

Blogger's Note: 

This short quote from Orwell really should have been tagged onto the end of Paul Bennett's article, 'The Olympics: sport as warfare', but I missed it at the time. I'm now making amends.

The quote itself is from Orwell's 1945 essay, 'The Sporting Spirit'.

In the minefield (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

To each side in the coal dispute, this is more than just another strike. For the NUM it is a struggle to keep miners in employment, whether this is profitable or not; it is also, for some strikers, a stroke at the heart of the Thatcher government which may end in Arthur Scargill becoming the champion of the Labour movement. For the government and Ian McGregor it is a matter of asserting that management must be allowed to "manage", by which they mean allowed to implement the principle that coal mines are like any other productive unit and must be closed if they run consistently at a loss. Both sides are aware of the events of 1973 and 1974, by now a part of left-wing folklore, when the Heath government blundered into a fight with the miners, the Three Day Week crisis and then to electoral defeat. In case anyone is hoping the miners will repeat that particular piece of history, it should be remembered that that alleged triumph for the organised working class resulted in the 1974-79 Labour governments, which were notable for their continual assaults on workers’ living standards, their strike breaking, their encouragement to cross picket lines and at the end the infamous Winter of Discontent. And what came out of that? When Callaghan called the election in 1979, class society was as strongly entrenched as ever. The means of life, including those parts of it which had been nationalised, were still owned by a minority of exploiting parasites while the useful, productive majority were still bound to submit themselves for exploitation in order to live. The miserable impotence and disarray of those governments persuaded millions of workers to vote for the Thatcher government who made no secret of their intention to curb the trade unions, if need be in the kind of fight to a finish which the miners may now be engaged in.

Back beyond 1973, there is an ominous resemblance—by no means accidental or insignificant—between what happened in the 1920s and what is happening today. At the end of the First World War many of the staple industries, on which the British capitalist class relied so much, were in decline; coal was affected by competition from continental rivals such as the Ruhr and Poland and the productivity of British mines lagged behind that of their most serious competitors. In 1925 a slump in coal exports contributed to the industry showing losses of about £1 million a month and the mine owners gave notice of their intention to negotiate a new agreement with the union based on a longer working day and a reduction in wages. The miners resisted and. as the TUC declared their support, a general strike seemed unavoidable. What deflected the strike was the government's agreement to provide a subsidy, which eventually amounted to £23 million, to keep the mines working.

The day the subsidy was announced 31 July 1925 — has also gone into folklore as Red Friday, an enduring triumph for the working class. The secretary of the miners’ union. A.J. Cook, trumpeted: "We have already beaten, not only the employers, but the strongest government in modern times".

There were two serious mistakes in this claim. The miners had not beaten anyone; the subsidy could only postpone or modify the operation of that law of capitalism — no profit, no production (which Ian MacGregor is trying to apply now). Baldwin's government had not been defeated; they had merely bought time to organise for a more conclusive confrontation with the workers. They used the time by setting up, in September 1925, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to recruit and train volunteers (or rather blacklegs) who would keep services running during a general strike. Administratively the country was divided into regions of government, each under a Civil Commissioner, and then into smaller areas under committees responsible for transport, police and other services. A grateful mine owner, probably not susceptible to left wing hysteria, praised ". . . the respite purchased by Mr. Baldwin" and the Prime Minister himself assured the critics of the subsidy on his own side:

  . . . if the time should come when the community had to protect itself, with the full strength of the government behind it. [its] response will astonish the forces of anarchy throughout the world. (House of Commons. 6 August 1925)

When the time Baldwin was referring to came, the state machine was ready as it had not been on Red Friday. The general strike lasted but nine days and it did not bring capitalism down, nor the government to their knees, nor even the coal owners to a more conciliatory mood. In fact the owners grew more obstinate with the passage of time, which tended to upset even the people who were supposed to represent their interests. J.L. Garvin described them in the Observer (25 April 1926) as ’tactless and irritating to the last degree” and Lord Birkenhead said he would have thought the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England had he not met the coal owners.

When the other unions backed out of the general strike the miners struggled on. Cook, who was by then the best loved or the worst hated man in the country, had declared in March 1926:

  We are going to be slaves no longer and our men will starve before they accept any reductions in wages.

And starve they did, as the months passed by and with each tightening of the screw by the owners and the government. Cook's rhetoric could fill no stomachs and some miners began to doubt the usefulness of struggling on. The trail back began — Warwickshire in July. Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in August — until in December Durham went back and the surrender was complete. The miners had to concede the longer working day and the cut in wages, which were cut yet again a couple of years later. Such was the suffering in the mining communities that the Lord Mayor of London, in the best traditions of capitalist charity, was moved to set up a Relief Fund. In the aftermath of bitterness, the breakaway Miners' Industrial Union was formed in the Midlands.

The 1984 battle is over pit closures but it too springs from the plight of the British coal industry in a time of world slump. The dispute goes back some way before the start of the strike, to the time when the government applied something of the Baldwin 1925 strategy, conceding the miners' case in order to prepare for a more final solution. It was in February 1981 that the government, in face of a threatened national coal strike, withdrew their plans to close ten pits during the next year. They did not then stand on the argument that it is impossible to keep "uneconomic” pits in operation; they accepted NUM policy on restricting coal imports and announced a subsidy of £300 million to finance these measures. Tory backbenchers were restless about the deal, as were the Institute of Directors. They need not have worried; a year or so later the government were ready to do serious battle and announced plans to shut down about 60 pits by 1991, some through exhaustion and others as loss makers. This opened the battle which is raging today, on the picket lines, in the courts and in the media.

This was not sudden or unexpected, except perhaps to those people who think that capitalism can be made to operate against its essential nature. After the Second World War it did not take long for the coal mines to feel the pressure of competition, from electricity — with nuclear power stations — oil and the re-emergent gas industry. During the 1960s the NCB tried to catch up, investing in powered supports and mechanised systems which increased productivity and helped cut the workforce by half but behind that production fell from 184 million tonnes a year to 134 million tonnes. In 1973, just before the Plan for Coal was agreed, it stood at 130 million tonnes.

The Plan for Coal was in fact a sign of a burgeoning optimism in the industry, partly due to the price advantage which coal regained as a result of the oil crisis of 1973- 74. which put its price per therm at about half that for oil. It was generally expected that the market for coal would expand and the unions, the NCB and the government planned for production to rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s to reach about 170 million tonnes in the year 2000. For the NUM these plans represented not just security of employment for the miners but also a strengthening of their bargaining power. However the whole exercise rested on the kind of assumptions which the economists and the politicians are continually making and which are continually found to be false. There was the politicians' presumption that the economic problems of 1974 were no more than a little temporary difficulty which could be cleared up with some adjustments in budgeting and taxation. There was the presumption that when that happened the coal industry would compete ever more successfully in the energy market. And the conclusion from both these presumptions was that it would make economic sense to keep open pits which, in more stringent circumstances, the NCB would want to close as loss makers. It was not just the 1974 Labour government which deceived itself in this way; in June 1980 Thatcher's Energy Secretary assured the Commons that "Coal is our greatest single natural resource . . . coal's prospects have never been better ".

As the crisis of 1974 deepened into a world recession, the hopes and plans were exposed as the work of people who had little real understanding of how capitalism operates. The market for coal did not expand, it contracted. Ian MacGregor recently referred to the "over supply world-wide" on short term markets and predicted that intensifying competition from American exports will bring about "a coal glut for Western Europe" (Guardian, 2 October 1984). Following their retreat in 1981, the NCB's return to the matter of closures in 1982 was in some ways the Thatcher government's 1926. except that now there is no Triple Alliance to support the miners in their resistance. In place of the hard-faced, complacent private owners there is Ian MacGregor, the nationalised boss and not one whit more sympathetic for that, the despair of those like the clergy who think the whole unfortunate matter could be settled in a cosy, family chat. And of course the successor to A.J. Cook is the combustible Arthur Scargill. as much loved and hated as Cook was in the 1920s.

These resemblances are not coincidental, for MacGregor. Scargill and the rest are filling roles in a script which is structured on the needs of this social system. Capitalism has not basically changed since 1926; it is still a society of class ownership, of conflict, of commodity production and of the boom/slump cycle. The administrators of the system cannot control these things, they can only respond to them. The miners are weakening now, as they did in 1926, because they belong to the class who depend for their lives on selling their working abilities. When a miner goes back to work it is not a victory for "the national interest", or "common sense", or democracy; it is a bitter acknowledgement of the essential poverty and degradation of all workers. of whatever industry, everywhere.

A defeat for the miners could lead to them being treated much as they were in 1926. forced to accept terms which are some way worse than were on offer earlier in the strike. That will be an acknowledgement of the other side of the class war, of the fact that the owning class are also the ruling class and that they dominate through their control over the coercive state machine. At the points where 1984 resembles 1926 there is more than a repeat of history. There is a signal for the strikers and for the working class as a whole. There is little to show for these sixty years of struggle except cracked heads and bruised bodies; capitalism, a repressive society of privilege against poverty, remains to be dealt with.

Ivan

Running Commentary: Book-keeping (1985)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Book-keeping

Although they are not actually on the picket lines, the accountants are in a titanic clash over the coal strike, on the issue of whether the mines are really losing money or not. On one side, arguing that the National Coal Board has got it wrong because it doesn't keep its books properly, are two professors of accounting and financial management (yes, there are such people). The development of the professors' argument is that if the NCB kept its books differently the coal mines would be seen to be making a profit. Then the NCB could stop closing pits, it might even re-open some which it has already closed and the strikers could all go back down the mines.

The argument apparently revolves around something called fixed or central overheads, which have nothing to do with pit props but which are of vital concern to accountants. The Coal Board calculates that these overheads are saved if a pit is shut down but the professors assert that they are merely reallocated among surviving pits. Applying this argument to Cortonwood colliery, where the present dispute began and which the strikers have called their Alamo, would mean that the pit showed a profit of £5.5 a tonne instead of a loss of £6.2 a tonne.

The accountants are in battle over an issue of great significance to capitalism because coal, like all other wealth, is at present turned out with the motive of making a profit. But to anyone whose concern is with human welfare, there is another significance. Whatever the book-keeping system, whether the coal mines are in the accounts as making a profit or a loss, the production of coal has continued, by the human process of applying the miners' working skills to natural materials. This illustrates the true nature of capitalism's need to produce profit and to accumulate capital — an encumbrance on society's productivity which a sane world will not tolerate.

Apathy

Lurking somewhere among the pin-striped ranks of MPs. merchant bankers and stockbrokers there are quite a few people who were once in open revolt against institutions like Parliament and the City. Mostly, they expressed their anger in the student riots of the 1960s, which were written up as the beginning of the end of the acquisitive society — the short, sharp shock to get socialism without the tiresome wait for the working class to understand and want it.

At the time this sounded pretty seductive, especially to youngsters who enjoyed shocking others or being shocked themselves. However, over the years the revolutionary ardour of the rioters has cooled as they have submerged themselves in the daily grind of getting a living or the less arduous business of raking in the dividends.

What about the rioters' heirs, the young people who now populate the universities? Among the ancient stones and the dozing spires there is a similar tranquil acceptance of the priorities of capitalism. The universities, to put it another way, are no longer hot-beds of dissent. All is quiet at Essex; in deepest Sussex they are not stirring. "We are concerned." says one report about the undergraduates of Cambridge, "about current political apathy on the part of students in the presence of numerous national and international problems". In Oxford the students are compliant enough to give the "bulldogs" — who are appointed by the university to police the undergraduates — an unusually easy life.

There are indeed plenty of reasons for the students to protest. They stay quiet, the only noise from them being the industrious scratch of pens, the devoted turning of pages, the gentle hum of labouring brains, because they are disciplined to be like that from the fear of not being able to get a job when they graduate. Unemployment, says the president of the Cambridge students' union, and the fierce competition it brings, concentrates the students' minds on their work.

So were those famous riots no more than futile ephemera? They did not bring capitalism down; they did not change the system's priorities; they did not "raise consciousness". What they did was to divert workers' attentions and energies away from the real work of understanding this iniquitous social system and using that understanding to abolish it.

Shabby

Quite a few Labour Party members would like to see the back of one of their most illustrious recruits, but the person concerned won't go of his own accord. This is not surprising because the Most Illustrious Recruit in question is that famous millionaire and benefactor of the starving Ethiopians, Robert Maxwell, who is not well known for bending to the wishes or the opinions of those around him.

Maxwell, it may be remembered, is the man who was not deterred by his Czechoslovak origins from originating the I'm Backing Britain campaign. He was also the Labour MP for Buckingham and is now owner of the Pergamon Press and the Daily Mirror and, if not the owner at any rate the chairman of, Oxford United Football Club.

None of these interests, however, seem to have bothered the members of Oxford East Labour Party where, we must assume, they pride themselves on their socialist principles or at least on what passes for them. What makes them want to get rid of Maxwell is the fact that he resorted to the courts to evict redundant print workers who were occupying his London plant.

The members are outraged that someone they should be greeting as a fellow socialist should use the provisions of the Tory Employment Act against his workers. The fellow socialist is sure that he didn't need Tory laws; he used some of the legislation which was on the Statute Book under the last Labour government, kept there to protect the property rights of the British ruling class.

The passions of the Oxford East members seem spent to no avail because, according to the Guardian (19 November 1984) Maxwell's place in the Labour Party is safeguarded by his ownership of the Daily Mirror, the one mass-circulation paper to support the party. Who would want to upset so valuable a vote-winner?

Whatever the outcome of this shabby dispute, the members of the Oxford East Labour Party might ask themselves a few questions about the nature of their party, about its capacity to include someone with the political opinions of Robert Maxwell and about why it is reluctant to expel him. Can such a party lay claim to be socialist? As Maxwell's Mirror might put it. the answer is NO!!!

Robber Democrats (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

What hypocrisy! The capitalists are chastising the wage-slave "citizens" of United Kingdom (Ltd.) because the wretched proles are losing respect for Democracy. One word and a thousand deceptions: democracy — the catch-phrase of the economic dictators who monopolise the means of life.

Democracy, to make sense, means that the majority are able to make and put into effect decisions. Yes. they must act with respect for the minority who might disagree with a decision, but when all is said and done, democracy means that the majority is in a position to suit itself. (Of course, there may be different majorities on different issues, so that nobody need ever be always in the minority or always in the majority within a democratic set-up.) Democratic decisions will not always be the best ones, but they are the only alternative to various forms of dictatorship — unless, of course, we were to achieve the rather boring state of affairs where everyone agreed about everything.

Most people say they are in favour of democracy. We were brought up to be in favour of it. Ask the average worker in the office, factory or pub and he or she will tell you that we are living in a democracy. They were taught to believe that. We learnt at school about how "our" armies fought for democracy and we read in the press about how Britain's "democratic way of life" is best, just as Russian workers are indoctrinated to believe that their "People's Democracy" is best. When the nuclear bomb destroys millions of human lives (as it will if the human targets don't move) it is likely that there will be some political pervert left to climb from the rubble and proclaim that it was all in the cause of democracy.

What do the politicians and the editors and the millionaires and the titled layabouts and the bishops and the constitutional geniuses mean by democracy? Look around at their much cherished "democratic nation" and it is plain to see. For them, democracy means that a mere one per cent of the population owns more of the marketable wealth than the poorer 80 per cent added together. Three quarters of the daily newspapers are owned by just three millionaire-owned companies. And the carefully picked people who edit the press are soon given their marching orders if they fail to print what the media-owners want. Nobody elects the judges or the generals or the top dvil servants with their immense governmental power. You never see a Lord or a Duke or a Baroness standing for election on a parasites' manifesto and nor is the unelected Head of State (the Queen) appointed by a majority. The boards of the multinational companies, made up of the smallest minority of the population, exercise terrific power over workers’ lives, but they are not elected. And neither are the boards of the state-run nationalised industries. In short, the power of the few over the many is their idea of democracy. But, as we have seen, if democracy is to make sense it must mean that the majority is able to make and put into effect decisions. The majority cannot at present make or put into effect decisions about the productive and distributive machinery such as factories, farms, offices, mines and other places where wealth is created because the majority does not own or control them. Can the majority decide what the media shall do? No, the majority does not own, control or have much access to the mass media. Can the majority determine our own lives? Again, no, because the lives of the majority are at the disposal of those who buy our mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to make a profit out of them, and our lives must be tailored to their need for profit.

In fact the present social system (capitalism) is not and never can be properly democratic. The majority is in no position to exercise power within the system because the majority is deprived of the ownership and control of the means of life. What can be achieved, however, is the illusion of democracy. The intense concentration of wealth in the hands of the few can be called "a property-owning democracy" and the right of the richest to communicate furthest can be called "free speech". Such descriptions are as fraudulent as the Russian Empire's claim to be socialist.

The capitalist minority, whose power to legally rob the propertyless majority is dependent on the subservience of the latter, first used democratic rhetoric when it was fighting the feudal aristocracy for power. In the days before the capitalists were the ruling class they needed to make democratic noises. Many workers were taken in by the democratic posing of the would-be rulers and campaigned to allow the capitalists a say in the running of the government. Little did they realise that when the capitalists attacked aristocratic privilege because it was unrepresentative of the people they meant by "the people" only themselves. After 1832, when a large number of British capitalists obtained the vote, they were as committed as their aristocratic predecessors to keeping the wage slaves away from state power.

In the last century workers in Britain organised in order to win the vote, particularly in the great Chartist movement supported by Marx and Engels. The granting of votes to workers was resisted for years by the bosses, who hoped that they could rule forever without the wealth producers having to be involved. Modern Tories and Liberals who speak eloquently of the fine democratic traditions of Great Britain should read their history and find out that leaders of their own parties opposed votes for workers with the determination of dictators. Eventually votes were given to workers, partly out of fear of what the workers might do if they were excluded forever and partly because the shrewder of the bosses realised that bringing the exploited into the process of governing might lead workers into believing that we are in control.

Of course, it is better to have the right to vote than not (for reasons we shall explain), but workers should not regard the right to vote as proving that Britain is a democratic country. Many workers know that however they vote, whichever government is elected will end up doing essentially the same things. In short, capitalism cannot be voted into a controlled system — it is out of control and politicians, bosses and workers alike cannot do much to change its destructive course. The decisions made in the House of Commons are concerned with obeying the economic laws of capitalism, not making them. So voting and parliamentary activities are used by the robber class as a way of pretending that democratic control of society exists.

When combined with an understanding of socialist ideas the pretensions attached to the vote can be turned into a reality. When the vote is used not to elect tweedledum or tweedledee to sit in parliament and follow the dictates of the market, but to abolish the market system itself, then it can be of great value to workers. Unlike parties and sects of the Left which tell workers to ignore democracy as a capitalist con-trick, socialists say that workers can use the democratic machinery for our own ends, but that only majority class consciousness will transform voting from a process of trickery into one of liberation. It is on such a basis that the Socialist Party puts up candidates in local and national elections. And where workers have not yet achieved the right to vote it is in their interest to win it.

We are often told that the capitalists will not just sit back and allow a majority of workers to vote for socialism: to make and put into effect the revolutionary decision. No doubt there are many capitalists who share that view and think that when the time comes, as it surely will, they will be able to prevent the majority from having our way. But a conscious majority will not sit back and be dictated to by an arrogant and undemocratic minority — and if any of the dispossessed robbers are foolish enough to attempt to smash the new social order which the majority has consciously voted for it would not take very long to defeat them one way or another. So the bogus democracy of capitalism can be used by genuine democrats in order to establish a truly democratic state of affairs. Socialism and democracy are linked together, and there are no undemocratic socialists or anti-socialist advocates of social democracy.

Until workers are conscious of their real needs and their real power the bosses will continue to dictate. Periodically it is possible to see just how much contempt these democratic fakers have for majority decision-making. For example, at this year's conference of the National Union of Students, which is a fairly democratic event, the Federation of Conservative Students issued a booklet to its delegates showing them how to smash up the proceedings if the results are not going the Tory way. According to the Guardian.

  It describes how to cause chaos and confusion and how to exploit disruption by shouting, heckling, throwing things and rushing the microphone. It says ‘Always be provocative. Remember, you are not here to persuade the closed-minded leftists. You are here to wind them up so much they lose control . . . ‘ (10 December 1984).

Well, that's one way to act when the majority is not on your side. And these semi-fascists dare to give trade unions advice about how to conduct strikes democratically! The fact is that these privileged defenders of exploitation and oppression have total contempt for democracy and think that they can go on pushing workers about forever. Only a class-conscious majority of democratic revolutionaries can remove the grins from their smug faces.

Steve Coleman

The Futility of Reformism. A Case for Peaceful Democratic Social Revolution

Book Notice from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Futility of Reformism. A Case for Peaceful Democratic Social Revolution. By Samuel Leight WWW Publishers. PO Box 42224. Tucson. Arizona 85733. USA.

This 200-page series of essays by our comrade Samuel Leight, of the World Socialist Party of the United States, is meant as a companion volume to his previous book World Without Wages and deals with the inevitable failure of various reform movements in America as well as with the question of war and the state capitalist regime in China. Copies can be obtained from the publishers or from our Head Office (price £4. postage included).

Letter: Charity and Disability (1985)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

What is the view of socialists towards working for charity? I assume that charity and religion should be placed in the same category, that they both serve to relieve the plight of the underprivileged just sufficiently to avoid revolt against the capitalist system.

Unfortunately, because of my own physical disability, I am living on charity and also working for a charity. My tasks involve collecting money and sending rehabilitation equipment to disabled people in the "third world". Surrounded as I am by apathy and uninterest, my work is providing me with my only social life. Am I a hypocrite to describe myself as a socialist?

Peter H Reynolds 

Banbury

Reply

To answer your last question first; no. we would not condemn you as a hypocrite providing of course that you already accept the object and principles of socialism as well as recognising, as your assumption implies, the nature and function of charities. Socialists are not given to castigating the victims of capitalism, of nature's cruel quirks and of accidents when they are compelled to accept as dependants the aid and support which is, more often than not, only available from charities. And we understand the position you are in, which requires you and many in similar straits to endure what can be a demeaning reliance on handouts. You have little choice of course since you would otherwise be in an intolerable situation; a forgotten victim of capitalism's inhumane, selective priorities, dependent on central and local government both loath to accept responsibility, both trying to balance the books by avoiding such expenditure.

The first-aid, relief from suffering and longterm care provided by charities certainly helps to take the pressure off the system and off profits, some of which would otherwise have to be diverted into this area. Some idea of how much would be so diverted can be got from the present horrendous suffering world wide. A system geared to maximising profitability, even on "famine crisis relief", rather than ministering to and trying to eliminate pain, disfigurement, handicap. deprivation and hopeless despair, is not able i to change its spots or its ethics.

There is, however, an encouraging aspect to all this. Even though the vast majority in need around the world don't have even the limited charity-funded help which is available in most industrially advanced countries, the fact that the accumulation of individual care and concern does often result in organised, dedicated, unstinting service to relieve suffering, is a positive vindication of our contention regarding "human nature". The favourable social circumstances of socialism will be conducive to such care and concern, and prove false the deliberately peddled distortion that we are all totally selfish and cruel by nature. And of course in such a society of free access not only would there be access to all the most advanced technologies, equipment and skills, but the world would be free of capitalism's conditions, imperatives and dangerous attributes which directly cause most of the suffering, the deprivation and the handicaps and which call into existence the very need for charity.

Editors