Identity (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

When discussing socialism with someone who has had little interest in politics we invariably find ourselves confronting their “identity”. This is because we all identify, sometimes unintentionally, with certain ideas and values. We may not be aware that we do until we attempt to articulate them in response to another idea asserted by someone else. At a basic emotional level we might take an ideological position because we feel that our status is being threatened by the other personality that confronts us.

The concept we have of our social status is one of the most emotionally-charged elements that constitutes our identity. It also aligns us politically with the values of a class or a subdivision of a class or cultural group. Other components such as gender, age, sexuality and “race” also play a part in defining identity but only through the lens of group ideology (ideas of masculinity and homosexuality are very different in “blue-collar” and “white-collar” communities).

Indeed the very concept of class itself is received differently as can be seen readily by its relative acceptance by those on a lower income (sometimes erroneously called working class) and its complete denial by those on a higher income (incorrectly called middle class). A friend of mine who resolutely denies that class has any effect on their tastes refuses to attend a “multi-plex” cinema to watch a film but is quite happy in the local art-house theatre. When pressed for the reasons why this is so he points to their respective atmospheres; he clearly prefers intellectual pretension to Hollywood popularism and the audiences they generate.

This choice can be interpreted in a class context because of the identification with certain tastes and values and a rejection of others; or to put it more bluntly, a liking for some “types” of people and a dislike for others. This kind of division exists in almost all areas of life and certainly inhibits the political cohesion of the working class being properly understood (since both communities have to sell their labour power to the capitalist class to make a living).

So it can be said that identity, in some important respect, is based on an association of the self with others in a social group and their value system. We may even go as far as to say that the nature of those values is dependent on their association with a group with whom we wish to identify and not essentially on the internal logical structure of the ideology in itself. The motivation for this social/ideological identification derives from our need for social status and the self-respect it supplies.

Paradoxically an example of our need for status to confirm our identity is when we appear to give it away to someone else in the form of exclusive love. During such an event between two people the individual identity seems to depend on the other and this would seem to contradict the cult of the self that so characterises our society.

There is a very revealing and desperate need to escape the prison of our identity in this search for such a liberating synthesis with another. Invariably such a relationship fails because it reveals itself to be yet another example of the attempt to confirm identity through conforming to a social convention to achieve status. The projection of our needs onto another can become so comprehensive because of the socially restrictive context imposed by a competitive culture that it leaves little space for the other to express their needs. The relationship crumbles under the pressure caused by the crowded desires needed for the mutual confirmation of identity between just two people. Sometimes we look to parental love as an example of an escape from status inspired identity but many times this too succumbs when children grow up to deny parental aspirations for the same reasons.

If we are to accept that to an important degree identity is generated by our need for social status must this always be a destructive element within human society? To answer this let’s return to our starting point, the political discussion. If we are honest about our desire for status and the respect it gives us from others we have to understand what it is and how we achieve it within contemporary society.

For most of us status is acquired through competition in a capitalist system except for those who inherit it. Those who are regarded as successful manifest their status in the accumulation of material wealth which in turn enhances their social influence. We may come to dislike these people through envy but who has not daydreamed of having wealth and power? There are those amongst us who have turned their backs on the rat-race and devote their lives to helping others such as nurses, carers, charity workers and even social revolutionaries. As a psychologist once said: “political ideology is a kind of love affair”, and there’s no denying that the identification with a political group is in part motivated by the desire for social status, albeit of alternative nature.

The difference is, of course, that this time it confronts the values of society because by acquiring membership status socialists undertake the formal denial of competition. This can be seen as a positive manifestation of the need for social status because this time it motivates the need for social liberation. It also serves to undermine our culture’s insistence that it is only through competition that the human spirit is creative and productive. There is also the possibility that competition is a perversion of human social instincts because, as the psychologist observed, identifying with an ideology shares the emotional liberation felt during the first stages of a relationship—but this time with a community and not just an individual. Once the needs of the individual are identified with the community and not in competition with its members then socialism becomes not only possible but necessary.

The litmus test for this perspective concerning identity can only be our emotional well-being. Even within the group of high wage earners it is difficult to deny that unhappiness has become something of a plague. For all the inherent frustration of working for socialism it does afford some emotional protection against the pain caused by the loss of a job or the breakdown of a relationship.

Those who believe in a socialist future do not make the same emotional investment in the capitalist present and so have another place to go to when the anxiety endemic in the sick culture in which we live threatens to overwhelm us. The capitalist class and its supporters of left and right hate socialists for their identification with hope and liberation but they can never destroy it because to do so they would have to kill part of their own humanity forever.

Wez.

Prisons (2001)

Book Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind Bars: The hidden architecture of England’s prisons. Allan Brodie, Jane Croom, James O Davies.

To socialists this book is an abomination, as repugnant as “Floral Displays at Auschwitz” or “Idi Amin’s recipes for vegetarians”. But hey, you say, don’t get wound up, it’s only architecture, it’s only art. If this were so the book would be merely in bad taste. But it isn’t so. In fact it’s a thoroughly distasteful example of the reformist’s art.

To explain: the first part of the book is indeed a history of prison architecture and surprise, surprise, not all prisons look the grim Victorian monstrosities of popular imagination (although window bars and locks are recurring architectural themes). In the second section of the book, however, great pains are taken to contrast the prisons of today from those of yesteryear. The pointless labour of the treadwheel, the brutality of corporal punishment, chains and tin buckets to piss in, are all recalled. And today’s prisons? Images of children and animals, as if jail is a kind of friendly club for malefactors (Tony and his frigging budgie in HMP Grendon took the biscuit for me). But a prison is a prison for all that. A cell is nothing but a cell.

For all the 200 years of reform, prisons, like the poor, are still with us. Prison is an indictment of the capitalist system. Prison means punishment, generally punishment for the infraction of property laws. In the more exceptional cases of punishment for personal crimes, it results in the further alienation of already psychologically damaged individuals, who need treatment not punishment. Socialism means the abolition, not just of nasty jails, but of all places of punishment.

Keith Scholey

Obituary: Bob Simpson (2001)

Obituary from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members will be saddened to hear of the death of comrade Bob Simpson, who has died after a short illness aged 81. Bob first joined the Party in 1942 and was—like his twin brother Tom who passed away in 1994—a conscientious objector during the Second World War. He originally became a member of the Party`s Lewisham branch but later transferred to South-West London branch when it began meeting in Clapham, just a few miles from his home in Bermondsey.

Bob lived all his life in London and epitomised what is sometimes referred to as the cheerful “Cockney disposition” of Londoners, being born (just) within the sound of Bow Bells. It seems quite remarkable that during his long life Bob only left the confines of the capital on literally a handful of occasions—and all the more so because his range of interests and pursuits was so extensive: from the benefits of Chinese herbal medicine, to old-time dancing and through to the study of UFOs.

The principal forum for Bob’s activities though was the Party, where he held a number of positions at branch and national level over the years and where he threw himself enthusiastically—and with typical good humour—into everything he did. For example, Bob was one of the stalwarts helping with the distribution of the Socialist Standard for a considerable time and for a period also served on the Party’s reformed Economic Crises Committee where he was an assiduous collector of statistics, newspaper cuttings and anything else he thought could further the collective knowledge of Party members and therefore the strength of the Party’s case.

With Bob’s passing the Party has lost another one of its “characters” and it is sad to think that he is no longer with us. His cheeky wink and infectious laugh will be sorely missed at the Party’s gatherings, as will his unstinting hard work for the cause to which he dedicated the best part of his life.

50 Years ago: The Road to Destruction (2001)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militarism, the worship of arms and armaments, the glorification of battles and destruction, has not a separate existence of its own, it is merely the instrument of those who wield power in the countries of the world. Capitalist trade rivalries create antagonism and the government responsible for administering capitalism in each country responds to it by organising the military forces and preparing for war. But the people of the world do not readily accept this doctrine of the necessity of war, and they have to be tricked and goaded and frightened into a more receptive state of mind. So after being told for many years that the enemy of peace was the alleged warlike nature of the German people, the Western Governments, along with their own fantastic increases of armaments, are setting about re-arming Germany. But the Germans, like the rest of humanity, are lukewarm about it and, as Mr. Kenneth Ames writing from Germany tells us in the Daily Mail (24/11/50) they “must be roused.” “Western Allied officials here stress that the German nation must be aroused to some sense of imminent danger and talked over to the idea of re-armament before it will be possible to provide Western Europe with anything more than a small force of mercenaries.”

. . . The human race looks forward apprehensively to a new world war in which “protective” armaments of a size and power never before known may be set in motion. Well may we all wish to be protected from our protectors; but it will not be done by “Communist” Peace Conferences, or by United Nations debates and interventions. Only by destroying capitalism which engenders war, and replacing it by Socialism in which the human race will have no need to engage in fratricidal conflict will the world be rid of capitalism’s handmaiden militarism.

(From editorial, Socialist Standard, January 1951)

Letter: Post-modern pessimism (2001)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Post-modern pessimism

Dear Editors,

Probably the basic problem with the political perspective propagated by the SPGB is that you do not appear to have any sense of a dialectical perspective at all, which, in my opinion, accounts for your absolutist Utopian position, which is surely contrary to a marxist standpoint of scientific socialism. A dialectical perspective teaches that all aspects of life are relative and contradictory, so that the SPGB absolutist position of total communism on the basis of mass theoretical understanding is just totally absurd, and, if I did not know any better, I would have to say that the SPGB were some kind of agents provocateurs—indeed, the Maoists would say that you were objectively counter-revolutionaries. Surely the fact that the SPGB has been standing parliamentary candidates for the last hundred years and still does worse than the fascists should make you think that perhaps you are doing something wrong. I don’t think that you could show me one article in the Socialist Standard where the subject of dialectical materialism has ever been dealt with, which is quite serious, as only an uneducated fool would say that the philosophical basis of marxism was not imperative.

If I would have to label myself, then I would have to say that I am a post-modernist marxist, in the sense that, although I theoretically adhere to the marxist philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism, I would have to say that the ultimate communist goal is quite Utopian, and so unachievable, except perhaps in terms of science fiction, if a small number of people leave the dying civilisation on earth to form a communist space colony. I would say that the greatest obstacle to a fully-fledged communist society is what I call the ecological imperative, in the sense that, within the social context of a realistic expectation of world population levels, it would be ecologically infeasible to expect everyone in the world to have at least the the material status of, say, a working class English person. Just as the SPGB at least had the good sense to agree with the Trotskyists that socialism in any sense was impossible in one country, since, of course, it would only be an equality of poverty, the same thing applies in relation to the ecological imperative within the social context of any serious attempt to impose generalised world equality. Thus if the notion of communism has a future, then it is only in terms of a primitive communist society that would remain after the final collapse of bourgeois materialist civilisation. Moreover, contrary to what some idolatrous admirers of Marx seem to think, he was no more aware than anyone else was prior to recent times of the exigencies of the ecological imperative when he enunciated the Utopian goals of a wholesale communist society.

Thus, in my opinion, the zenith of human civilisation is liberal-democratic (or, perhaps, social-democratic) capitalism, and since the bourgeois materialism of capitalism is essentially ecologically infeasible, it is only a matter of time before bourgeois democracy will degenerate into bourgeois fascism of either the convential type or the Left-fascism of Stalinism—in this regard I would regard all the marxist-leninist groups as essentially Stalinist, since they, like the SPGB, are trying to achieve Utopian ends, although, unlike the SPGB, the Stalinists at least have a realistic perspective of power politics.

It should not be necessary to have to explain to someone who claims to be a socialist that the capitalist imperative of economic growth contradicts the ecological imperative, and that any notion of a green capitalism is nonsense, since, within the social context of realistic levels of world population, in terms of the dialectical principle of quantity changing into quality, even if so-called ecologically sustailable technology was adopted on a wholesale scale it would make no ultimate difference in terms of pollution and resource exhaustion; moreover, the notion of a green capitalism would presumably entail a fascist political context as the capitalist class generally would not willingly agree to abstain from what they would regard as profitable activities, although the ruling capitalist circles would regard it as necessary. And, as is the case in our present-day society, whenever a particular commodity is banned, there develops a criminal industry around it, and the same would be true if it was profitable to market illicit anti-ecological commodities, if, in accordance with the capitalist law of value, the illicit alternative to what was supposed to be ecologically sustainable was more economical.

If I say that I am a post-modernist marxist, and, as well as rejecting the SPGB perspective, I reject the so-called Marxist-Leninist position as objectively Left-fascist (i.e., Stalinist), then, in terms of concrete political practice, what indeed is left for an avowed marxist? I would say that in order to forestall or postpone what is the inexorable fascist political degeneration of capitalism my role is to do what I can to dispel Utopian illusions by emphasizing the necessities of supporting reformist political parties such as the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats, as being the best of what is practicably possible. It is indeed the case that I would be inclined to agree with the perspective of an organisation called Living Marxism, which has a website at LM, and which could be said to have a post-modernist perspective, and I would be interested to know if you are familiar with them—I will not discuss the notion of post-modernism now, since that is rather complicated, although it could be generally said it is a theoretical recognition that modern-day capitalism civilisation has not got a progressive future, and that there is no realistic alternative. What is perhaps the best thing for avowed marxists is to form think-tanks in the tradition of the Fabian Society, since for an avowed marxist it would be somewhat of a dialectical contradiction for them to be actively involved in social-democratic politics (which is quite all right in itself), while cogently expounding the exigencies of capitalist social evolution, which is essentially that there is no progressive future, and that we only have the choice of what is the lesser evil in a capitalist social context.

Leonard Amos, 

Australia (by email)

Reply: 

Yes, we do know of Living Marxism or “Dead Leninism” as we used to call it. It was originally the journal of the Trotskyist “Revolutionary Communist Party” but later evolved into the voice of a group of trendy cynics, changing its name to LM (a good thing, since it minimised the discredit Marx’s views got from being associated with theirs).

Your own comments illustrate this cynicism quite well: “the ultimate communist goal is quite Utopian, and so unachievable”; “the zenith of human civilisation is liberal-democratic (or, perhaps, social-democratic) capitalism”; “the necessities of supporting reformist political parties such as the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats, as being the best of what is practicably possible”; “there is no progressive future and we only have the choice of what is the lesser evil in a capitalist social context”.

You challenge us to produce one article in the Socialist Standard which discusses dialectical materialism. Since we’ve been published every month since September 1904 we could give you a whole list. But we’ll confine ourselves to referring you to our pamphlet Historical Materialism which has a chapter on the subject and which can be found on the internet [here]. Briefly, we, too, start from the basis that everything in the universe is interconnected and in a state of constant change but we don’t see any contradiction between this and our perspective of the more or less immediate establishment of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs” once a majority have come to want and understand it. Capitalism has had its period of being historically progressive and its insoluble contradictions now show that it is ripe to be replaced by the new social system it has prepared the way for—world socialism or communism (the same thing).

But you think that socialism/communism is in any event impossible because the resources don’t exist to sustain the present world population at the level of “a working class English person”. Really? Why not? A worker in England consumes a finite amount of food, clothing, accommodation, travel and entertainment but we can see no reason why, given the mobilisation of the world’s resources to that end, the same amounts could not be provided for everyone anywhere in the world.

The mistake you have made is to take the total amount of resources consumed in England (Britain) and divide it by the population and then multiply the result by total world population. This gives an enormous figure for resource consumption that may well not be sustainable. However, this figure is meaningless as it is invalid to assume that all the resources used in Britain are consumed in producing the finite amount of goods consumed by the working class here. Resources consumed in Britain at the moment include the waste of capitalism, which is enormous.

The waste, for a start, of arms and the armed forces. Then there’s the waste of the whole system of buying and selling (the armies of accountants, salespeople, ticket collectors, bank clerks, etc, etc, etc) and of administering the capitalist system (the armies of civil servants devising, collecting, recording taxes and paying out subsidies and benefits). Finally, there’s the waste of planned obsolescence, of producing shoddy goods designed not to last too long, and of not recycling.

How extensive is this waste? The most conservative estimate is that it amounts to 50 percent, i.e. that only half of the present-day resource consumption in Britain (and equivalent countries) is devoted to directly satisfying people’s needs, the other 50 percent being on-costs that are incurred solely because this is taking place in a capitalist context. Others have put the waste figure as high as 90 percent. Whatever the figure, socialism/communism being a society of direct production to satisfy people’s needs without money could economise on the resources used up on these oncosts of capitalism.

You also ignore the other side of the equation: resources. You seem to think that these are fixed and that we are near their limits but this is by no means the case. Figures produced by the FAO and other researchers show that, for instance, food production could be increased so as to adequately feed twice the world’s present population of 6,000 million (quoted by Swiss MP Jean Ziegler in his 1999 book La faim dans le monde expliquée à mon fils (Famine in the World Explained to My Son), p. 19; see also the FAO site at FAO under “Dimensions of Need”). Existing resources could also be made to go further by making things to last longer, by standardised spare parts, better storage facilities, recycling and by the adoption on a wholesale scale of the ecologically-sustainable technology you seem to doubt.

You don’t need to convince us that a “green capitalism” is nonsense. That’s been our case against the Green Party and campaigning environmentalist groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace from when they first made their appearance on the political scene in the 1970s and 1980s. You’re probably right that under capitalism the measures they advocate could only be fully implemented by authoritarian methods. And we can go along with you that things are going to get worse from an ecological point of view as long as capitalism is allowed to continue. Capitalism does indeed risk a descent into barbarism, the beginnings of which can already be seen. Indeed, the emergence of pessimistic and cynical doctrines such as so-called “post-modernism” is an ideological reflection of this.

You preach pessimism and say that the most we might be able to do is to slow down a little this descent into barbarism. We, on the other hand, retain the “modernist” view inherited from the 18th century Enlightenment that humanity can build a better future—but only as long as it takes steps to replace capitalism by a world socialist society.

Editors.

Editorial: A Crime Against Humanity (2001)

Editorial from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent murder of 10 year old Damilola Taylor on a south London housing estate has shocked and outraged the public, the politicians and the press alike. The manner of his death–slashed with knives and bottles and then left to bleed to death in the stinking stairwell of a condemned council housing scheme–serves as a metaphor for the current state of modern capitalism. Not that the press and politicians realise this of course, but it is worth us pointing it out all the same.

Capitalism is a sick society and we do not hesitate to say so. Nor do we hesitate to say that Tony Blair and Jack Straw (or alternatively William Hague and Ann Widdecombe) could double the number of police on the streets and quadruple the number of people “stopped and searched” under current legislation without it having any noticeable effect on the violent crime and disorder eating away at the fabric of society. New Labour came to power famously promising to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” but if you are seemingly unaware of what the causes of crime really are how can you be “tough” on them?

It does not take a leader-writer for the Daily Mail to know that serious crime is at the highest levels it has been in living memory, and pretty much right across the “developed world” too. Neither do you have to be a seasoned criminologist to be aware that where the lawless American inner cities and ghettos have led, so have London, Manchester and a whole host of other cities followed.

Catching criminals in modern capitalism is like the labours of Sisyphus, a never-ending task. This is because crime is overwhelmingly committed by the poor, the disenfranchised, and the cynical, in short the people without a stake in society. And it is capitalism–the system which commands the unwavering support of Blair and Hague alike–which creates such people by the bucketload.

All social systems adopt a code of morals, laws and regulations commensurate with the economic structure of that system and capitalism was no different. The codes that developed alongside the market economy were those entwined with notions of the sanctity of private property, the value of “enterprise”, and the importance of a stable hierarchy in society. Unfortunately for the system, it is the spread of the competitive buying and selling relationship into every aspect of human existence together with the “every-man-for-himself” culture that this promotes that has undermined the basis of the social stability that capitalism has previous been able to claim for itself. Nowhere is this expressed more obviously than in the nihilism and lack of respect for “authority” and “convention” in all its forms that has been a developing feature of youth culture, in particular, over recent years.

When community relationships break down, when individuals treat one another as stepping stones to social advancement rather than as equals, and when drugs to numb the pain of the daily rat race become the norm, then society is in serious trouble. Indeed, as it eats away at the fabric of its own existence, capitalism is in especially deep trouble because it knows no other way out of this problem other than more of the same. This means more competition, more rampant individualism, more big sticks and gang warfare (of both the legal and illegal varieties) and more social dislocation as a result.

The dispossessed youth of the inner cities and sink council housing estates are right to think there is no hope within the present system, but wrong to sit back and wallow in its excesses. Socialists say that society can be better than it is. The Damilola Taylors of this world needn’t be its unwilling and repeated victims. But to change things people have got to organise and organise with a purpose–to overturn the relationships and values that capitalism so ruthlessly and cynically promotes.

In other words we need to create a society where a real community exists once again that is truly fit for humans to live in. That can only mean a society of equality, built upon participation and mutual respect. And we contend that in turn that can only mean socialism, where a real community of interests based upon common ownership and democratic control can be established to eradicate most crime and anti-social activity at root, to be established with agreed rules and regulations necessary for resolving any hangovers from the destabilising and dehumanising days of capitalism.

We argue that today we stand at a juncture in history where only socialism can provide the framework for the eradication of the current malaise society finds itself in. For without socialism, tackling the “causes of crime” will mean nothing other than more empty words and broken promises, fuelling another, destructive, cycle of cynicism.

Cooking the Books: The Labour Party Marxist? Pull the other one! (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun (5 December) denounced the prospect of ‘a Marxist-run coalition with Corbyn in No 10.’ This strange view that the Labour Party under Corbyn is Marxist had been repeated for months by Tory politicians. A headline in the Daily Express (30 March) proclaimed ‘Iain Duncan Smith issues warning over “Marxist threat” from Jeremy Corbyn premiership,’ while in July, in his bid to become Tory leader, Boris Johnson spoke of Corbyn as ‘the leader of a cabal of superannuated Marxists.’

This claim goes even further back, to Prime Minister’s Question Time in 2013, when according to a Daily Mail headline (9 October 2013) ‘Miliband wants to live in a ‘Marxist universe’, Cameron claims as leaders clash over Labour ‘gimmick’ to freeze energy bills’, while ‘Chancellor George Osborne claimed that the Labour leader had put forward the same argument that “Karl Marx made in Das Kapital”’. Cameron’s case was that Marxists want to control prices while world market prices are beyond the control of governments; which, ironically, is the Marxist view.

But what is a ‘Marxist’? Marx himself didn’t like the term and would have preferred his theories to have been called ‘communist theory.’ Nevertheless, after his death, ‘Marxism’ came to be the term used even by those who agreed with his views to describe the body of his theory: the materialist conception of history, with technology and class struggles as the driving forces; his analysis of the economic workings of capitalism as a system of uncontrollable capital accumulation in fits and starts; and his insistence on the need for the working class to win control of political power in order to establish a communist (or, the same thing, a socialist) society based on the common ownership of productive resources and production to directly meet people’s needs rather than for sale with a view to profit.

The Labour Party falls at the first hurdle. It does not stand for socialism as Marx did, even though at times it has claimed to be socialist. The first time it did this was in 1918. Before that, it saw itself as merely a trade union pressure group in parliament. But what it called socialism was nationalisation, or production for profit organised by state enterprises, the correct term for which is ‘state capitalism’.

The present Labour Party has abandoned even this, accepting that the commanding heights of the economy should be in the hands of profit-seeking private enterprises. It talks now of an ‘entrepreneurial state,’ which is just another form of state capitalism.

The Labour Party has never understood how the capitalist economy works. It has never accepted Marxian economics, preferring Keynes who taught that capitalism can be controlled by state intervention and made to work in everybody’s interest.

A previous Labour Party general secretary, Morgan Phillips, famously said that ‘the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’, which is true. Its philosophy, insofar as it has one, is do-goodism rather than Marx’s view ‘the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the working class itself.’

One more intelligent Tory, Robert Halfon, newly re-elected MP for Harlow, warned them to ‘stop calling Corbyn a Marxist’ as ‘such terminology means very little to most ordinary folk’. It doesn’t, but there might be an upside to this – more people seeking to find out what it does mean.

Football TV rights: Amazon joins the game (2020)

'You don't know about The Casa?'

From the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time you read this, ten English football clubs will have played seven competitive games stretching from 3 December to 27 December. The TV rights for showing these fixtures were purchased by Amazon Prime in a three-year deal struck in June 2018. According to CityAM (3 December), if Amazon, the biggest company ever to have bought English Premier League TV rights, is to make its mark it will have to sign up plenty of new customers to its Prime membership.

At present, this intervention does not threaten the current status quo, under which Sky Sports and BT Sports dominate the current televising of Premier League fixtures, with a few smaller competitors including DNZA who are interested in the procurement of streaming rights, etc. Having dipped their toes in the water, Amazon Prime will surely consider increasing their investment by procuring more broadcasting rights in the near future. However, there is so much money sloshing around in the EPL at the moment that there will definitely be a future feeding frenzy in which all of the competitors will attempt to grab what they can.

If we liken the current EPL to a large cake – we can say that there will be plenty of cake to go round but not sufficient for everyone’s wants or needs. So there will be losers as well as winners. Capitalism will separate the rich from the not so rich, rewarding as ever those that pay the most, by allocating them a place at the table. The unfortunates who were unable to bid enough for inclusion will just have to sit out on the bench. Like the working class have to all the time under capitalism.

Kevin.

The Election: Analysis (2020)

From the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

April 2013, and on bonfires in mining villages in South Yorkshire Margaret Thatcher was burnt in effigy to celebrate her death. ‘The wicked witch was dead!’ Around six and a half years later, in many of those villages, a significant number of the residents vote for her party, the party that actively pursued their economic destruction.

How do those who just four years ago were holding events to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the miner’s strike, where bitterness against the scabs and the authorities is still evident, come to favour Conservative candidates in the general election?

It is not for socialists to bemoan the sorry state of the Labour Party, but there are aspects that are of concern. On the next day’s local lunchtime news a resident of Maltby forcefully stated that Labour under Corbyn had become a far-left Marxist party and wouldn’t get his vote until it represented the working man again.

For a Marxist watching this there was initial incredulity, followed by a grim realisation that if the moderate welfare reforms Labour had advocated could be portrayed as Marxist, then Marxists have a problem. All the more so when the word Marxist has become just shorthand for high-handed, intolerant, extremist politics. It does not make actual Marxist advocacy any easier.

What became apparent from a whole series of vox pops in the broadcast was that the underlying issue remains Brexit. ‘Get Brexit done’ is a slogan that has resonated in the consciousness of so many who live in economically blighted areas. There the Leave vote was highest and the Labour Party made itself vulnerable by promising to honour that vote, then seeming to renege on it.

A general trend emerging from the election is the advance of nationalism. Whatever else it may be, Brexit is fundamentally an expression of English nationalism. In some vague way it’s felt that if only the country was free of interference by Europe in particular, perhaps foreigners in general, then the country would be better off.

It is because there is a lack of Marxism in the public political consciousness that the actual cause of economic blight, capitalism, is not widely recognised. The promise of freedom, of lucrative trade deals boosting local as well as the national economy, has proved seductive.

What is not recognised in all this is that any such trade deals would be with foreign powers who would demand binding agreements similar to those of the EU. People could well be voting for the loss of the few benefits capitalism presently allows: whatever the denials, the US would want the NHS for example.

Corbyn has proved to be useful in that he has become Worzel Gummidge, the straw man the media can knock down again and again, constantly drip-feeding fallacious notions into the popular consciousness. Once the Soviet Union was the exemplar of nasty ‘Marxism’, now it’s a benign social reformer who fills the role. Even better, from the media’s point of view, is that he does occasionally claim to be a socialist.

The damnation of Corbyn was furthered by the frequent assertion, often by members of his own party as well as the media, that his opposition to Zionism was really anti-semitism. Whether that was directly an issue for many Brexit supporters in the Labour heartlands is open to question. However, it did feed into the extremist narrative. And again, that could serve a purpose in so branding socialism, by inference at least. Left wingers are just not to be trusted.

The left-right political contest was born in the assembly of the French Revolution that brought the emerging capitalist class to power. It continues in being the two poles of the present capitalist state, while actual socialism, as yet not realised anywhere, is not left wing as often portrayed, but transcends capitalism and its political arrangements.

Workers need to become aware of the actual causes of their difficulties as lying inevitably within capitalism. In the end whichever of the main Westminster parties, or even the fringe ones like the Green party or the Brexit Party, are voted into power, the election winner is capitalism.

The Marxist analysis remains the best way for workers to understand their predicament and how to resolve it in their own best interests. A society of the common ownership of the means of wealth production, democratically organised to produce goods to supply needs not profits is possible. It is certainly not extreme. How, though, to persuade the voter in Maltby. There’s the rub.

Dave Alton

Disability: Models of Meaning (2020)

From the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much has been made in the media in recent years about the growing costs associated with meeting the needs of elderly and disabled people under the current social system known as capitalism.

Politicians are never shy when it comes to declaring that ‘we need to do something about the growing problem of an ageing and disabled population’

Disabled people, up until around the mid 1990s and the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) tended to be the poor relation of various other minority groups when it came to legal protection and making it unlawful to discriminate against someone on the grounds of their perceived ‘identity’.

Up until the 1970s it was all too common for children born with disabilities to be either ‘given-up’ by their parents voluntarily, or worse still, have them forcibly removed by the authorities and placed into asylums for the ‘insane’ and given the title ‘mental defectives.’

Lennox Castle ‘Hospital’ in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, was one such place where many of those went on to spend a lifetime ‘employed’ in the workhouse doing menial jobs, or alternatively spending their days doing nothing.

Lennox Castle was typical of large institutions built by local authorities in the 1930s and was the largest in the UK. Built to accommodate around 1300 people, it frequently exceeded those numbers by many more hundreds. Lennox Castle has become well known as an example of a particular type of provision characterised by its isolation and by a certain notoriety among members of the public and nursing professionals.

Lennox Castle represented a ‘large investment’ by the Corporation of Glasgow at the time, which bought the land and built the hospital. However 60 years after it opened, it was closed down.

It has been documented that some of the patients (perhaps more accurately described as inmates) went on to form relationships from which babies were produced, only for these to spend the rest of their lives within the walls of Lennox Castle too. Thankfully the social stigma and misunderstandings that surrounded people with disabilities at that moment in time is now pretty much a thing of that distant past.

Legislation

Prior to the DDA (1995), there was in place legislation that outlawed – for example – employers discriminating against someone on the grounds of their sex (Sex Discrimination Act 1975) and also the Race Relations Act of 1976,which made it unlawful to discriminate against someone on grounds of the colour of their skin, nationality or ethnic origin. Of course, that’s not to say it stopped it from happening altogether.

In more recent times, any kind of discrimination against these minority groups have been outlawed together under the umbrella of The Equality Act (2010) and to facilitate same sex marriage, The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013.

All well and good you might think.

But are we really any closer to achieving anything like true equality under this grossly and inherently unequal social system known as capitalism?

As someone who is Registered Blind and depends on a Guide Dog to help me get around, this subject is of particular interest to me.

Medical Model v Social Model of Disability

Many people – mainly those who might find themselves in otherwise ‘good health’ – might be inclined to err towards the medical model of disability thesis. In broad terms this effectively says that people are disabled because of their impairments (legally defined as the limitation of a person’s physical, mental or sensory function on a long-term basis) or differences.

Under the medical model, these impairments or differences should be somehow changed by medical interventions and other treatments, even when the impairment or difference does not cause pain or illness. The medical model looks at what is ‘wrong’ with the person and not what the person needs. It creates low expectations and leads to people losing independence, choice and control in their own lives.

The social model of disability, on the other hand, says that disability is caused by the way society is organised. In particular the built environment, rather than by a person’s impairment or ‘difference’. It looks at ways of removing barriers that restrict life choices for disabled people. When barriers are removed, disabled people can be independent and relatively equal in society, with some choice and control over their own lives.

Disabled people developed the social model of disability because the traditional medical model did not explain their personal experience of disability or help to develop more inclusive ways of living. Some examples might include a wheelchair user wants to get into a building with a step at the entrance. Within a social model solution, a ramp would be added to the entrance so that the wheelchair user is free to go into the building immediately. Under the medical model, there are very few solutions to help wheelchair users to climb stairs, which all too often excludes them from many essential and leisure activities.

A teenager with a learning difficulty wants to work towards living independently in their own home but needs help with cooking, cleaning and quite probably money matters. Within the social model, the person would be supported by a carer (formal or informal) so that they are enabled to pay bills and live in their own home in the community. Under the medical model, the young person would be expected to live in a hospital or institution – most probably because it would have been the cheapest option.

A child with a visual impairment wants to read the latest best-selling book to chat about with their sighted friends. Under the medical model there are very few solutions, but a social model solution ensures full text audio-recordings are available when the book is first published. This means children with visual impairments can join in with such activities on an equal basis with everyone else.

Conflicting legislation

Of course, barriers are not just physical. Attitudes found in present day society, based on prejudice or stereotype, also disable people from having equal opportunities to be part of society.

I personally and frequently encounter access refusals when accompanied by my guide dog to private hire taxis, as well as in both Indian and Chinese restaurants, where culturally dogs are deemed to be ‘unclean’ and their saliva ‘toxic’, particularly within the Muslim faith. It is believed that should a Muslim person come into contact with dog saliva, it will ‘void them of their state of purity.’

This can be a particularly challenging situation when two competing pieces of legislation collide and compromise is hard to reach.

There was a difficult case that ended up in the courts several years ago, whereby a young Muslim man lost his sight and had to depend on a guide dog to help him get around. Not only did it take much persuasion for his parents to agree and allow their son to have the guide dog in the first instance; that it seemed was only the beginning of his problems. Unfortunately, the Iman of his local mosque refused him access on religious grounds. There was a stand-off and eventually the case had to be heard and decided by a judge, who eventually ruled that Disability Laws should trump Religious Beliefs and Laws, and so it was found that the boy had been discriminated against and must be allowed entry to the mosque along with his guide dog, as well as receiving substantial compensation.

Employment problems

It would be wrong to suggest that the rights and quality of life of the disabled have not improved considerably compared to the dark days of an institutional existence, with some now living relatively independent lives in supported accommodation.

But is there scope for all of our lives to be improved further? As a socialist and proud member of the disabled working class, the plain and simple answer is yes.

It is common knowledge that there exists a high proportion of disabled people both in the UK and elsewhere in the world who are denied fulfilling work opportunities because they are deemed to be a high liability by potential employers and likely to cost more in terms of days off and lost production and consequently lost profits, should their situation worsen.

For those who develop conditions while in employment, days off for treatment are frowned upon, and any production time lost invariably has to be ‘made-up’ by the employee in their ‘own time’. There are very few employers out there who take a sympathetic view of a worker’s health condition if it has a detrimental impact upon their profit margins. And more often than not, a ruthless capitalist will think nothing of ditching an unproductive worker.

Within a socialist society, on the other hand, where people will be the priority as there is no pursuit of profits, there will be no need to fear losing one’s job and subsequent income, because wage earning and the selling of one’s labour in order to survive will be destined to the annals of history, along with the irrational and insane relationship between the buying and selling of goods and services to one another.

Instead, we the working class will take control over our own destiny, with each and every one of us living a full and dignified life in accordance with our own unselfish needs, contributing to the welfare and common good of the whole of our communities in accordance with our own unique and individual abilities and skills.

Those who are fit, able and desire to work, will avail themselves of the tools necessary and free in order to enable them to do so. Those who cannot, can be assured of a decent quality of life without the insecurity of having to depend on government handouts that barely cover what is needed in order to sustain basic human needs and life itself.

Paul Edwards

Liverpool Marxist Book Fair (2020)

Party News from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 23 November the first ever Marxist Book Fair was held in Liverpool, with various denizens of what the press likes to call the ‘ultra-left’ in attendance, by invite only. The venue was a largish back room in a fairly up-scale pub close to the University, and members of our Lancaster and Manchester branches turned up in the morning to crew a stall for the day. We were rather lucky to be given a large table in a good position in front of the band stage, which meant we were able to mount an SPGB banner on two speaker stands on the stage behind us. This formed an impressive backdrop to our display of literature, t-shirts, badges, and a laptop running the Party whiteboard video on permanent loop. Pretty groovy, we thought, except that the banner rather dominated the room while other stall displays were somewhat more modest, contrary to our expectations. What we also didn’t realise was that when the scheduled talks began, people would be using the stage area, so every speaker had to deliver their talk in front of our SPGB banner. Oops, our bad. It looked uncomfortably like something the SWP would do. They are notorious for trying to hijack events, which may have been why they hadn’t been invited.

There was a curiously eclectic mix of groups there, including the Merseyside Socialist Theory Study Group, Socialist Appeal, the CPGB, Liverpool’s ‘News from Nowhere’ radical bookshop, the CWO, and ex-Militant (nowadays calling themselves Socialist Party of England and Wales – SPEW – with a kind of self-hating disregard for the power of acronyms). We had a nice long chat with the people on the IWW stall next to us. We couldn’t really figure out the logic by which some groups were invited or not invited, but anyway it was a pleasant day and everyone was very civil and polite, which makes a nice change considering how left groups have been known to treat each other in the past.

The talks said much about the politics of the groups involved. Instead of giving a lecture we chose a bit of audience participation, and we were grilled on our parliamentary politics (left communists, like anarchists, tend to be very against using parliament as part of the revolutionary process, while the IWW – aka Wobblies – are syndicalists who are also sceptical). Quite why this is such a big issue for left groups is a bit of a mystery to us. Our Material World column this month (page 9), writing on Hong Kong, makes a very good point about whether or not people in revolutionary situations would use the ballot box – just you try and stop them!

Some of the other speakers talked in impassioned tones about the urgent need to ‘get the Tories out’. We’ve been hearing this same rallying cry for decades and it’s amazing that such groups have got the energy to keep banging that drum. Leaving aside the politics of favouring one capitalist party over another, there’s something hugely dispiriting about such calls. It’s bad enough when you can’t get workers to consider the idea of taking the whole world into common ownership, without governments, frontiers, the rich, money, banks or bosses. But at least that’s an ambitious goal. How much worse must it be when you can’t get recruits for your group when the only thing you are asking them to agree with is ‘get the Tories out?’

One or two other speakers talked about the need for socialist ‘leadership’, which made us feel slightly uncomfortable and reminded us we were in the presence of a lot of Leninists. The thing about people on the left who believe in this is that they’re not necessarily in love with the idea of having bosses and having to take orders, it’s just that they can’t imagine a group getting anywhere without leadership. The fact that we have no leaders and are also the second oldest political party in Britain may prove that it is possible to have a sustainable and long-lived leaderless group, but that’s not the point as far as they’re concerned. What is the point is that we haven’t achieved our aim of world socialist revolution, so in their minds this proves that leaderless groups don’t get anywhere. But in a classic case of confirmation bias, they tend to overlook the fact that they haven’t got anywhere either! As we pointed out in our contribution to the gathering, we’re all in the same back room of an obscure Liverpool boozer, not hosting rallies in football stadiums.

The only group which chose not to give a talk was SPEW. In fact they didn’t look like they enjoyed being there at all. They didn’t seem to talk to anyone at other stalls, pointedly carried on conversations between themselves when other people were giving talks, and then packed up abruptly and noisily in the middle of one of the talks. We wondered if they’d been getting bad hex vibes from the other stallholders. We tend to forget that, while we’re not keen on Leninist ideas in general and we do have an enshrined commitment in our Declaration of Principles to be ‘hostile to all other parties’, in practice we’re fairly easy-going and tolerant compared to Leninist groups themselves, who frequently hate each other with a vengeance.

There were a fair number of visitors, and quite a good crowd for the talks, considering that advertising for the event had probably been modest (there was no poster on the railings outside the pub, which seemed like an unfortunate oversight, or it may have been a pub prohibition). We sold a bit of stuff and made a few contacts. The general idea is to hold this Book Fair every November, and we’ll be happy to go along again if asked. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years, and whether groups who are historically so divided over their revolutionary approaches will remain enthusiastic about the idea of sharing an annual space, especially if the SWP get involved. Dislike of the SWP is probably the only thing all left groups have in common.

How to keep the event sustainable in the long term is a particularly relevant question given what’s happened lately to the long-established London Anarchist Book Fair, which seems to have (perhaps temporarily) died a death. This event managed quite successfully for the most part and over many years to accommodate a variety of perspectives within the general anarchist movement. But then a catastrophic Trans-Terf confrontation in 2017 caused it to go into melt-down. The organisers, facing a barrage of unjust criticism and abuse (being called ‘fascists’, etc), understandably lost the will to organise a further event so there hasn’t been one since, although some regional bookfairs have gone ahead. Let’s hope the organisers of the Marxist event don’t end up in a similar situation. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished . . .

Paddy Shannon

50 Years Ago: The Socialist Party and the Common Market (2020)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is neither for nor against Britain’s entry into Europe. We stand for world Socialism and regard the Common Market issue as irrelevant from a working class point of view.

Britain’s joining the Common Market would amount to little more than a re-arrangement of tariff barriers. Which is a matter of no concern to workers, but of great concern to capitalists since it could affect their profits.

Most of Britain’s biggest firms have long been convinced that joining the Common Market would allow them to make more profits. This is why the parties that most directly serve their interests, the Labour Party and the Tory Party are also in favour of entry. It is the task of these parties to work out policies that benefit capitalist industry in Britain and then to trick workers into backing these policies. Thus we are about to be subjected yet again to intense pro-Market propaganda in the press and on the radio and television.

Some British capitalists, with investments mainly in farming and what used to be the British Empire, are opposed to entry as they reckon it would threaten their profits. Their direct political expression is through sections of the Tory Party but their anti-Market campaign is helped, no doubt inadvertently, by a section of the Labour Party, the National Front and the so-called Communist Party.

It is because we know that the Common Market debate involves only the interests of these two sections of the British capitalist class and that, as we say in our declaration of principles, “the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class”, that we refuse to take sides and warn workers not to be taken in by the political spokesmen of either section.

We repeat now what we said when this red herring first appeared in 1961:

  “Whether the British government goes in or not, British workers should be looking to promote their own Socialist working class unity with workers everywhere, not just in Western Europe” (Socialist Standard, January 1962).

[From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard.]

Editorial: Brexit done, back to capitalism as usual (2020)

Editorial from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forget climate change, forget the NHS, the general election turned out to be a proxy second Brexit referendum. Despite Labour’s (and indeed our) efforts to highlight the social problems generated by capitalism and how to solve them, the result reflected the 2016 referendum. Leave-voting areas in the North, the Midlands and North Wales returned a majority of pro-Brexit, Tories – giving the Tory party a comfortable majority in the House of Commons – while Remain-voting London, Scotland and Northern Ireland returned a majority of pro-Remain MPs.

We saw previously solid Labour seats, even in ex-mining areas, return Tory MPs. In fact, the first result – and the first Tory gain – was in Blyth where the Northumberland NUM used to have its offices. It is true that, in quite a few of these seats, the Tories won because the Brexit Party took votes from Labour. The reason for this change can’t be that those who switched really thought that Brexit would make any difference to their lives, but will more have been resentment that, having been asked a question and given an answer, that answer was being ignored.

What people vote for is of course routinely ignored, but this is due to the fact that the workings of the capitalist economy, which require that priority be given to profit-making, prevent the improvements in health care, housing, education, transport and the rest that people vote for from being implemented. Brexit is different. It might not make sense from a capitalist point of view but it is something that could be delivered. However, it was being thwarted, with a view to not implementing it, by opposition MPs. Insofar as the Labour Party was seen as part of this they were punished for, in effect, not respecting a democratically-made decision.

So, Brexit will now happen. The United Kingdom will formally leave the European Union on the 31st of this month. That will satisfy most Leave-voters. Of course that will not be the end of the story – negotiations over trade and tariffs will go on for years – but, a democratic vote having been satisfied, the resentment of those who voted for this can be expected to die down, as the particular trading arrangements British capitalism makes with the rest of the capitalist world is not their concern anyway.

Economic reality and capitalist interests might compel Johnson and his government to negotiate a ‘softer’ Brexit than their rhetoric has been suggesting but that’s unlikely to get people jumping up and down. Given the nationalist vote in Scotland and even in Northern Ireland (for the first time there have been more Nationalists than Unionists elected there), there could be big problems ahead for those in charge of the British state.

Those who voted for Brexit via the Tory party are going to be more interested in the Tory promises to end austerity and to improve health care and education. And that is no more likely to happen than it would have if the Labour Party had won. Capitalism is an economic system driven by the imperative to make and accumulate profits and it is this that has to come first, not improving the conditions of the wage-working majority.

Knowing this, we confidently predict that the Johnson government will fail to honour its promises here. Not because they necessarily don’t want to – though they are still the nasty party – but because they cannot. No government can.

Popular Posts in 2019

First post of 2020 on the blog should be a brief look back at 2019 on the blog.

The following are the ten most popular posts on the blog in the previous 12 months. Of course there's a couple of anomalies in the mix that I shouldn't have to point out to the reader but I do think it's interesting that, overall, the most popular posts in the past year are articles that deal with matters relating to history and/or socialist theory.

It could be argued that those are the type of articles that I am more inclined to push on various social media sites, etc, and there is some truth in that, but people still have to click on those links at the other end so maybe, just maybe, in these uncertain times it's the sort of material that people want to read. Writers and Editors for the Socialist Standard, please take note.

A special note on the IWW article. That particular piece's place on the blog dates from a time when I was a bit more eclectic in my choices of what I posted on the blog. (Go back to 2006/07 on the blog, and you'll see what I mean.) That an article on the meaning of the term 'Abolition of the Wages System' posted 13 years ago was still gets multiple hits in 2019 is heartening.

• The Destruction of Nature: by Anton Pannekoek (2019)
• A Commentary on the Communist Manifesto (1930)
• Who The Hell Was Karl Marx? (1998)
• What Does The IWW mean by "Abolition of the Wage System"?
• Lenin . . . Reviewed (1976)
• Djanogly – One Of The Family (2011)
• MMT: New Theory, Old Illusion (2017)
• Karl Marx and the abolition of money (1980)
• 50 Years Ago: Beeching’s Cuts (2012)
• Socialism and Calculation (1987)

Night All.

Hello Dear Reader ('Reader' singular, 'cos I know it's just the one.)

You are currently reading the last post on the blog for the year — actually, I'll go further than that — you are currently skim-reading the last post on the blog for the decade. I thought I'd end on a round number, and this is post number 2,500 for 2019. That many posts in 12 months is not to be sniffed at. I doubt I'll reach such heady numbers again in a calendar year but I'll give it a shot. (Just maybe not in 2020, if that's okay with you.)

I could have reserved the final post of the year with a scanned in article by John A. Dawson - one of my favourite Socialist Standard writers from the pre-1914 period - or finally got round to scanning in that long arse essay by Maximilien Rubel that's been 'resting' in drafts for about two years now but I'm feeling lazy: There are films to be watched, family to annoy, and Grandma pizza to be eaten.

So, instead, I will leave you with this pop classic from 2006. One of those songs that never ages. Should have been a smash (getting to number 48 doesn't cut it), pisses all over John Lennon's 'Imagine' and will be my song of choice if I ever audition for The Voice.

See you next year: