Mr Brown (2000)

A short story from the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

On a dark and rainy day, recently, a representative from the Department of Social Security called at our home. We had been warned by letter that a visit was imminent and though we knew what day it was to be we didn't know exactly what time the interview was to take place. Then at precisely 9.30am there came a ring on the front door bell. Enter Mr Brown.

Once ensconced in an armchair in the sitting room Mr Brown lost no time in telling us that due to a "discrepancy" on the computer our long-term claim for benefit had not only to be cancelled but we were also in debt to the department for a large, but as yet unspecified, sum of money. You can say what you like about the wonders of the computer. It didn't do us any favours. Big Brother had been watching us.

The seventy-five pence awarded to pensioners by Tony Blair's "listening" government had done little to boost our respective pensions. We live modestly and buy our clothes from charity shops yet it had not escaped our notice that though we scraped by each week never going hungry, owing money to nobody, we were never going to go on a world cruise and if the boiler went kaput tomorrow it would make more than just a dent in our bank balance. This estimation of the nature of our standard of living was not something that obsessed us; it was no more than mere fact. Now the shattering news that our claim for benefit was withdrawn and that, meanwhile, we had been building up another debt had us mentally reeling.

Whilst Mr Brown went on doing his stuff I wondered about him. I am reluctant to describe his appearance. Smartly dressed, well-scrubbed politicians long ago sent me the message that a wholesome, outward exterior has little to do with what is going on inside a person. Let me just say this: his tones were reasonable. He didn't gloat. He even apologised for being the bearer of bad tidings. His manner was mild, his visage pleasant. He was somebody's son, brother, partner, father, nephew, uncle, I tried to remember. None of it was personal. His salary was the justification for the meting out of this kind of treatment. Had it ever crossed Mr Brown's mind that we had toiled all our lives on a restricted income only now to find ourselves in our sixties and still relatively poor? Was the representative from the DSS aware that there were rich, idle people who, though celebrated, made little, if any, contribution to this society except to flaunt their wealth? And did he know that there were businessmen who had embezzled thousands and nothing very detrimental had befallen them as a result?

Across the planet there are millions of Mr and Mrs Browns carrying out orders without ever thinking to question them. It is a common enough problem. What it all comes down to is your wages and salaries, your cars, your mortgages and your holidays abroad and if doing your job means that a few people must go to the wall then that is only what capitalism has taught us from birth. What matters most is the survival of the fittest and that attitude goes hand-in-hand with never stopping to think, never attempting to question the ethics of the work you are doing, why you are doing it and for whom? And because so few questions are asked wars are waged and people who have no vested interest in fighting them are killed or maimed and still children are dying of malnutrition.

Mr Brown tidied his papers, put them back in his briefcase and made ready to leave. "Now I will leave you in peace," he said. Because I am without words I wrote on my slate "PEACE" and held it up for him to see. He took a squint at it and said, "Sorry, I don't understand." Exit Mr Brown.

Heather Ball

Pioneers of socialism (1998)

From the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist League, a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which was established in the 1880s by William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and other pioneering socialists, was remarkably close to the Socialist Party in its ideas and aims. However its confused position on parliament and the ballot box despite its correct opposition to campaigning for reforms led to it being overrun by anarchists and to the resignation of genuine socialists such as Morris.

The strategy of Morris and the others was the "making" of socialists who understood and wanted an end to capitalism and wanted the establishment of a socialist society. This ran counter to the object both of anarchists who simply wanted to destroy the state, and of those "socialists" who wanted to concentrate on building a large party with its roots in the trade unions which could somehow reform capitalism out of existence. Some fourteen years after the Socialist League was overrun by anarchists in 1890, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded. Like the League, it was a breakaway from the SDF but, while echoing the League's call for revolution and nothing less, addressed the issues which had led to the League's failure.

Revolution not reform
The Socialist League was founded in 1884 after the resignation of a number of socialists from the SDF which had taken the position of working gradually for socialism through the winning of reforms, so-called stepping stones to socialism. Disgruntled with the undemocratic nature of H.M. Hyndman's leadership and seeing the absurdity and inevitable failure of trying to change capitalism and its essential profit-making drive through legal changes, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Belfort Bax and others established a separate body committed to socialism and nothing less. Morris wrote:

"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt to bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side."

The Manifesto of the Socialist League, drafted by Morris and Bax and adopted in 1885, stated firmly the stance of the League against reformism and for social revolution and nothing else:

"As to mere politics, Absolutism, Constitutionalism, Republicanism. All have been tried in our day and under our present system, and all have failed in dealing with the real evils of life.
Nor, on the other hand, will certain incomplete schemes of social reform now before the public solve the question.
Co-operation so-called—that is, competitive co-operation for profit—would merely increase the number of small joint-stock capitalists, under the mask of creating an aristocracy of labour, while it would intensify the severity of labour by its temptations to overwork.
Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value inevitable under the Capitalist system.
No better solution would be that State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages in operation: no number of merely administrative changes; until the workers are in a possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.
The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation."

After a century and more of failed attempts at reforming capitalism, the position of Morris and the League has been proved correct, as has its position against what they called "state socialism" (more accurately described as state capitalism) which has only succeeded in dividing the working class and replacing the issue of class with the issue of supporting one capitalist "nation" against another.

The ballot box

The League, however, was opposed to the idea of achieving socialism via the ballot box and parliament. This was not on the grounds of wanting to lead the working class to revolution in the belief that a socialist majority could never exist, but on the grounds that campaigning for election to parliament inevitably meant advocating reforms of the present system. This mistaken conclusion was drawn due to the number of so-called socialists in this period who were turning away from social revolution and towards gradualism. Parliament, according to the League, was a capitalist institution which would only be strengthened by reformist policies and which would subvert a socialist party from a body which campaigned for social revolution to a corrupt body which would inevitably campaign for election on a reformist programme. Even so, Morris did envisage that, at some stage, socialists would enter parliament as rebels to dissolve capitalist power:

"I believe that the Socialists will certainly send members to Parliament when they are strong enough to do so; in itself I see no harm in that, so long as it is understood that they go there as rebels, and not as members of the governing body prepared to pass palliative measures to keep Society alive."

It was its opposition to the use of elections by connecting them to the policy of reformism which was the weak link in the League's armour. Opposition to parliament and elections led to the increasing membership of anarchists, who saw the problems of society not as connected to capitalism but to the institution of the state itself. They did not seek to remove capitalism (the disease) by making socialists but sought to destroy the state and authority (the symptom) by acts of violence. It was this section of the League which grew in strength and eventually displaced the genuine pioneer socialists who had established an organisation and produced literature which still remain an inspiration to socialists today. It has to be said, however, that many of these pioneer socialists were beginning to turn to gradualism themselves, as the working class seemingly turned to this course (but in reality only opting for small improvements now rather than any conscious socialist idea).

The Socialist League collapsed in the early 1890s with the departure of William Morris in 1890 (who formed the Hammersmith Socialist Society). After this its publication Commonweal, with the party in general, declined to an ignominious mess after control passed to the anarchists whose squabbles were an irrelevance to the working class.

Thus, the voice of socialism (despite the League's few inconsistencies) was lost until the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904 and its solving of the problems of earlier socialists. Formed after a group of socialists grew disillusioned with the reformist stance of the SDF (as the League pioneers had been twenty years earlier), the Socialist Party solved the problem of reform or revolution by a unique commitment to the use of the ballot box and the democratic sending of socialists to parliament with the sole aim of abolishing the profit system; a possible socialist minority in parliament being committed to opposition to all policies that would help prolong capitalism.

The Socialist Party has stood for socialism and nothing but ever since. A bastion of socialist consciousness in a political wilderness of capitalist party against capitalist party; free market or nationalisation, private ownership or state ownership, left or right, tweedledum or tweedledee. 

Capitalism is capitalism whichever mask it is attempting to wear and the Socialist Party is the only party to have stood for socialism throughout the twentieth century despite the diversions of Lenin, Keynesians and a host of others attempting to change capitalism without a socialist majority that understands and desires it. Capitalism's appearance may have changed in the last hundred years but no amount of tinkering can change the essential labour-fleecing and profit-seeking which makes it tick and which socialists understand must be removed before socialism can exist. Socialism remains as relevant for humanity today as it did then.

Colin Skelly

Crassness (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

An educational dialogue explaining the workings of modern capitalism and rebellion, based on genuine events.

Scene: An alternative bar in North London. Cool movie posters plaster the walls. Electronic music pumps out unusually quiet from speakers – it is a week day evening.

Enter Pik Smeet, wearing broad brimmed hat, trying to look like a Puritan. He approaches the bar, buys a bottle of cider, and sits at his chair of many years usage. After him, come two middle-aged male punks, spikey haired, leather-clad with tattoos and chains strewn around their bodies – back from smoking outside. They sit around the corner of the bar from Comrade Smeet.

Punk 1: …So, my boss says, when you’ve got all the money in, that's it, you can go home.
Punk 2: Gah! Like I need another reason to hate you – easy street.
Punk 1: Yeah, I hate me too. We own market places all over London. Go round, collect the cash, nice little job.
Punk 2: Bet you get a stack of griping from all the stallholders.
Punk 1: That’s why I don’t hang around after I’ve picked up the rent.
Punk 2: Too right. You have many places?
Punk 1: Yeah, Camden, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus. All over the joint. Going to be more now, we’ve just bought out a former Woolworths store, now they’ve collapsed.
Punk 2: Oh, really, what you going to do with that?
Punk 1: Well, unless a big firm comes along and makes us an offer, we’re gonna turn it into small units. You make more money breaking big stores up into units, see. Could get you a place if you fancy one.
Punk 2: Well, I’m only interested as a customer.
Punk 1: Ah, well, then, you’ll like our night clubs. They’re good money too – we have a chain of clubs, you know the ones, one near Farringdon.
Punk 2: Oh, them – the strip places?
Punk 1: Well, call them night clubs, but, basically, well, they’re brothels. Then, that’s where the money is.
Punk 2: Yeah – you should try working in making porn films, I make good money shooting them.
Punk 1: Well, I used to, but I got out because the money isn’t there any more. And, y’know, that’s why you do it, I mean, it’s fun, you get to travel the world, but the bottom line is the money. If you’re not making any, there’s no point doing it.
Punk 2: You reckon?
Punk 1: Yeah. You see, America – yer biggest market, y’know, they won’t allow you to import films any more. And you can’t get a visa to enter the states and shoot the films. That’s it, no point being in the game any more.
Punk 2: Well, I still make good money – hand over fist – I think you should have stuck with it, mate, it’s a good game – so long as it’s not the only thing you can do.
Punk 1: That reminds me – one girl, we were driving her round London, showing her some sites, got to Trafalgar square, I said “And that’s Nelson’s column” she said to me “Who?” I mean, totally dumb – nothing else she could do that be in the business.
Punk 2: Was she English?
Punk 1: Perfectly, girl next door. The quality product, not one of your Eastern European girls.
Punk 2: Ooh, the very thing. Mind you, when I was living above the brothel your English birds would last until lunchtime, and when there wasn’t plenty of food forthcoming, they be off out the door. Least the eastern birds have to hang around.
Punk 1: On our shoots we’d have about four hundred quid a week to just send out to Sainsbury’s for food. We were a big crew, so, you know, we’d all need feeding. Twelve hours a day we were doing – a laugh. I know, half hour bursts of work, but we were there for the whole long day. Great fun.
Punk 2: Have you tried flogging your stuff over the internet?
Punk 1: That’s just it – who wants to pay forty quid for hardcore pornography when you can download stacks of it for virtually nothing.
Punk 2: Well, you get to control your own business, from beginning to end – production and distribution – everything except the credit card payments – you need someone else to do that –
Punk 1: Usually from Russia.
Punk 2: You have to be careful with them, but, yes, the Russians can helps you with the financial side of things.
Punk 1: Y’ See, I mean, the technology is out there, anyone can make porn – and it’s the home-made look, with the girl next door, that really draws in the punters.
Punk 2: That’s what we’re good at doing – your punters want realistic-looking sex, and we do home-made look quite well. It’s a skill to achieve that look. That’s what we bring – technology is cheapening the production process, but we still add value through our skills.
Punk 1: Well, the value we add gets less all the time, I reckon I’m better off collecting the rent. Right, next fag.
Punk 1 stands up, on his shirt is sewn a badge with a picture of Karl Marx, over his heart. He pulls on his studded leather jacket, and goes out for a smoke.
Smeet (to himself): Well, that’s punk for you, rebellion within capitalism – non-conformity can be highly profitable. Reckon I’ll go home and write all this down – a little morality play full of symbolic resonances and the like.

Pik Smeet

A postscript to the article is the following discussion of its content at the recent Autumn Delegate Meeting of the SPGB, and the response by the writer on the Spintcom discussion list:

"Another example of an article was 'Crassness'. Report of dialogue between punks. Apart from anyone else it's boring. (May 2009 Socialist Standard). Makes a lot of assumptions. Moral is the punks are all stupid because they don't understand the Socialist case."

1) It was a genuine report of a real conversation, that I thought illustrated some of the failings of punk rebellion, viz.,

2) It in no way implies stupidity on their part - far from it, it implies that they know how to get on under capitalism, and make a quid or two. I can't see how the implication of stupidity can be read into it, because the text makes no mention of the socialist case, at most the irony of the faux-rebel, who's just spent ten minutes talking about collecting rent, living off prostitution and and pornography, wearing a Karl Marx badge, is mentioned.

3) The point was that the rebellion of punk is in no way anti-capitalist, but in fact ultra capitalist, in that being prepared to go into ways of earning money considered outside "normal" mores they are able to make a fine living.

4) It touched on how even the porn industry is subject to the cheapening of the means of production, and the cold hearted business case at the bottom of the industry.

5)The moral, if there was one, was that punk is rebellion within capitalism, and not a rejection of it.
I'm sorry that [the comrade] it boring, but it was only meant as a light piece, and was submitted with my expressions that I thought it only had an outside chance of seeing print. I should add, though, that boring was part of the point - here were two people in full punk regalier, and large swathes of their conversation - about collecting rent, retail opportunities, etc. could have been heard from any golf club bar room bore in slacks and loafers. That was my chief inspiration to write it down as soon as I ear wigged it.

That said, further incidents in the same pub, which I've blogged about elseplace, did lead me to thinking about submitting for a regular column of such stories entitled "As soon as this pub closes"...

Pik Smeet

This year's Nobel Prize for Economics

From the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

Every year the Bank of Sweden awards a prize to some economist, often called the Nobel Prize for Economics even though it wasn’t established by the old merchant of death himself. It has in fact only been going since 1968. Usually the prize goes to some obscure economist for work on some obscure aspect of the market economy. Sometimes it goes to a big name such as the Keynesian Paul Samuelson (1970) or the Monetarist Milton Friedman (1976). Even the mad marketeer Baron von Hayek got one, in 1974.

Very occasionally it goes to someone who has done some interesting work, as when in 1998 it went to Amartya Sen who had shown that famines were caused by a collapse in legal access to food (via money or direct production) and not by any actual shortage of food or overpopulation. This year, too, it has gone to someone whose work sounds interesting – Elinor Ostrom whose 1990 book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action refuted the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” parable that is often used to try to show that socialism wouldn’t work.

In 1968 an American biologist Garrett Hardin conceived of a parable to explain why, in his view, common ownership was no solution to the environmental crisis and why in fact it would only make matters worse. Called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, his parable went like this: assume a pasture to which all herdsmen have free access to graze their cattle; in these circumstances each herdsman would try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons and, in the end, its carrying capacity would be exceeded, resulting in environmental degradation.

Hardin’s parable was completely unhistorical. Wherever commons existed there also existed rules governing their use, sometimes in the form of traditions, sometimes in the form of arrangements for decision-making in common, which precluded such overgrazing and other threats to the long-term sustainability of the system.

One of the conclusions that governments drew from Hardin’s armchair theorising was that existing cases where producers had rights of access to a “common-pool resource” the solution was either to privatise the resource or to subject the producers to outside control via quotas, fines and other restrictions. Ostrom took the trouble to study various common property arrangements some of which had lasted for centuries, including grazing pastures in Switzerland, forests in Japan, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines.

According to The London Times (13 October),

“Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, she asserts that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest”.

In other words, common ownership did not necessarily have to lead to resource depletion as predicted by Hardin and trumpeted by opponents of socialism. The cases Ostrom examined were not socialism as the common owners were private producers. In socialism the producers, the immediate users of the common resources, would not be trying to make an independent living for themselves but would be carrying out a particular function on behalf of the community in a social context where the aim of production would be to satisfy needs on a sustainable basis. But the rules they would draw up for the use of the grazing land, forests, fishing grounds and the like would be similar to those in the cases she studied.

Adam Buick

New roots of conflict (2009)

From the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have had two world wars and countless local conflicts over the struggle for raw materials, trade routes and spheres of influence. Capitalism is a competitive society and the logical outcome of the resultant conflict is military violence.

The first world war was based on the struggle for colonies as well as access to the coal, iron and steel of Europe. It led to the collapse of governments, thrones and empires, and the redrawing of national borders. More importantly to the world's working class it led to mass destruction, death and injury. It was depicted in this country as a war against militarism and in defence of freedom. Shortly after the cessation of that war the British working class was to enjoy the freedom of the labour exchange and slum housing. The "war to end all wars" saved the British capitalist class from the encroachment on its markets and empire by its German rivals.

The second world war with its advanced armaments was to bring the horror of war home to the civilian population as never before, with cities wiped out and whole countries razed to the ground. Again this was depicted as a war against the evils of dictatorship and in defence of democracy and freedom. The fact that Britain was united with the dictatorship of Stalin's Russia against the dictatorship of Hitler's Germany was conveniently overlooked. This war like the previous one was fought for economic reasons not ideological ones.

Ever since 1945 the world has experienced local conflicts. Korea, Suez, Vietnam, India/Pakistan – the list is endless. There has not been a day since 1945 when the British army has not been engaged in some sort of conflict, and every one of them has been depicted as something to do with freedom, democracy or some such laudable purpose. The present tensions in the Middle East, however, with its struggles for access to oil so nakedly obvious it has become increasingly difficult for governments to disguise the economic basis of the disputes.

Capitalism is a dynamic system and yesterdays struggle for coal and steel may have been somewhat overshadowed by the conflicts over oil. This in its turn may give way to another source of military dispute – lanthanide metals. "Global supply of the rare-earth metals, which are vital to the mechanisms of hybrid cars, wind turbines, iPods, lasers, super-efficient light bulbs and radar systems is 95 per cent controlled by China. The country's dominance of the market is the result of a deliberate 20-year bid by Beijing to cast itself as the ‘Opec of rare earth metals’." (London Times, 28 August)

One of the countries that has a supply of lanthanide is Australia and they are at present considering an offer from China to buy a 51 per cent share of their source. This has caused real concern to the Japanese capitalist class who have threatened to take up the matter with the World Trade Organisation. "Chinese export quotas of rare earth metals fall below Japan's demands, forcing even the largest consumers there to rely on smuggled materials to meet about a quarter of their annual needs. A draft of the Chinese plan has been seen by senior executives at several of Japan's largest trading houses and has sparked fears that China is aiming to step up dramatically its programme of quota reductions. Beijing has cut exports by about 6 per cent annually over the past decade." (London Times, 28 August)

It is impossible to foretell how capitalist rivalries will develop but the growing monopoly of the rare metals market by China is a potential source of economic conflict that could lead to a future military struggle. Capitalism by its very nature breeds competition between nations over such sources of raw materials. This produces threats and counter-threats which leads to ultimatums, trade boycotts and eventually to military action. The awful truth is that it is members of the working class who own no part of these resources who take part in the resultant conflicts and suffer the resultant tragedies of war.

RD

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 116

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 116th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1523 friends!

Recent blogs:

The problem that never went away

A salaried economy, no thanks

Hunting in the morning

Quote for the week:

"Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever." Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1932.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

The rise and fall of the ILP (2009)

From the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

With proposals to set up a united leftwing party to challenge Labour, we look at a previous attempt at this.

The Independent Labour Party was born on 13 January 1893 in the Labour Institute, Peckover Street, Bradford. The birth was the culmination of a series of efforts dating back to the creation of the Scottish Labour Party some five years earlier. From the spring of 1891 local ‘Labour Unions’ were formed, with the similar Manchester and Salford Independent Labour Party following in May 1892. The party and its predecessors were primarily the offspring of James Keir Hardie, ILP chairman 1893 to 1900 and long time (1887-1904) editor of The Labour Leader. Hardie had launched his paper (it remained his personal property until 1904 when it was taken over directly by the party) in January 1887 and it would remain the focus of the ILP activity through several renamings (becoming The New Leader in 1922 and The Socialist Leader in 1946) until its termination in the late ‘70s. Essentially the party was a radical split from the Liberal Party and its ideology and outlook were determined by this.

The early ILP’s conception of socialism was a bit of a joke. In 1896 Hardie defined it as “…brotherhood, fraternity, love thy neighbour as thyself, peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and glory to God in the highest” (Justice, 6 June 1896). While, in a 1903 letter to Edward Carpenter (quoted in Stanley Pierson’s British Socialism) John Bruce Glasier, a near-forgotten ILP bigwig, more obscurely referred to socialism as “a power that began with the beginning of the world and permeates infinitude”. I fear he may have been confusing socialism with some form of quantum physics.

Despite its talk of peace and brotherhood, this is what Glasier, then Party Chairman, said at the 1903 Conference:

“Our foreign trade is flagging; our internal freedom and external defence are less secure; our military glory is dimmer; our national character, our literature, our science, our inventions are in less repute; our young and virile population is quitting the country as if it were a sinking ship, and we are getting in pauper aliens and rich predatory aliens instead.”

The ILP was oriented towards parliament from its inception. Hardie had been elected for West Ham South in 1892 but it was not until the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 that the real breakthrough occurred. The LRC, renamed the Labour Party in 1906, was essentially a tactical move of the formerly Liberal-orientated trade unions but until 1918 the political input was very much from the ILP. In 1906 the party scored seven MPs with a further eleven being trade union endorsed members.

The early strongholds of the ILP were as one might expect in the old industrial zones of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire with considerable support in Leicester, Norwich and Merthyr Tydfil. Scotland, later known as the heartland of the ILP, was to develop later during and after the First World War.

First World War
If the ILP ever got anything right it was by accident and this is seen most obviously in its attitude to the First World War. Opposition to the 1914-18 war was clearly the correct policy: it is now generally admitted that it was an imperialist war, fought not for ‘freedom’ but for economic reasons. During the early months of the war Ramsay MacDonald (as might be expected) but also Keir Hardie (as might not be) encouraged young men to enlist. Despite this wobbling the ILP should be acknowledged as the largest organisation in Britain in opposition to the war and both Hardie and MacDonald came out against the war. However its policy originated in a faulty concept of what the war was all about. In a contemporary leaflet the ILP argued that the war was “a diplomatist’s war, made by about half-a-dozen men…we sit down and ask ourselves… ‘Why has this war happened?’ the only answer we can give is, because Sir Edward Grey has guided our foreign policy during the past eight years.” (Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left, p. 45). That Sir Edward, what a bastard.

Such a conspiratorial theory blended well with the wet pacifism endemic in the lower ranks and the antagonism to Tsarist Russia. But the diplomatic cause theory was to cause problems for the ILP, as it attracted a host of golden daffodils in the shape of the Union of Democratic Control. The UDC essentially consisted of Liberals, some high ranking, who wished for a more democratic and open foreign policy. They also viewed the war as caused by secret diplomacy. The bourgeois intellectuals of the UDC, including HN Brailsford, migrated into the ILP diluting the Northern spit and sawdust of the early party and providing the germ of the London based ‘intellectual’ (wobbly) ILP of the 1930s and after.

The First World War saw the ILP gain a Red reputation with its somewhat half-hearted backing of the Russian Revolution and its incidental association with the ‘Red Clydeside’ strikers. The war also saw the death of Hardie in late 1915 and the rise of James Maxton.

Golden Age
Before the First World War the ILP and the Labour Party were pretty much identical. The ILP leaders, notably Ramsay MacDonald (ILP Chairman 1906-9), were also those of the Labour Party. The 1918 constitution, particularly through the introduction of local Labour Parties, redefined the Labour Party not just as a political wing of the trade unions but as a party in itself. As a result the ILP had to redefine itself and in the 1920s its role came to be that of the left wing of the Labour Party. At first such a role was of considerable use to the party. Boosted by the ‘successes’ of the Labour Party, the ILP reached unprecedented heights in 1926 with an all-time high of 60,000 members in 1075 branches and a New Leader circulation of 70-80,000. Three years later the ILP had 37 MPs plus another 123 who were members of the party standing under other endorsement.
In 1924, to mark the new left turn, the ILP issued the report of its Socialist Plan Committee. Also known as “Socialism in our time”, this became the basis of ILP policy. It defined socialism as the establishment of “a minimum living income” and the “nationalisation of the pivots of capitalism” (i.e. “the banking system, land, mining, electrical generation and distribution, and transport.” (Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left, p. 148) In other words a typical confection of Leftist pseudo-socialism. With the exception of nationalisation of land and the minimum wage this was essentially the programme adopted by the Labour Party in the late 30s and carried out by the 1945-51 government. Given this it might well be asked, “what was the point of the continued existence of the ILP?” The answer is not a lot as we shall see.

Disaffiliation
Something very bizarre happened to the ILP in the early 1930s. Ordinarily the left wing acts as the shock troops of the Labour Party, brought out at election time to do donkey work for a small pay off after. Despite grumbling this usually works well. However occasionally the left gets ideas above its station - the Militant case is typical - or revolts at the unpleasant doings of the Parliamentary party. In this case the particular left of the era receives the order of the boot. They never want to go despite the sniping and grumbling and the parting is acrimonious. After the McDonald debacle however the ILP left voluntarily. This turned out to be a ghastly mistake from their point of view.

Officially the issue at stake was over Standing Orders - whether ILP MPs should without fail follow the Labour Party line. The ILP MPs, led by Maxton, essentially wanted freedom of action - to justify their separate existence as much as anything else. The PLP wanted (as well it might) loyalty in exchange for endorsement (which essentially meant actually getting elected). Neither side was willing to give way, leading to an inevitable break. However behind this was the looming shadow of MacDonald. Disaffiliation occurred in the summer of 1932. MacDonald had formed his National Government with his power-hungry toadies and the Tories the previous year. The Labour Party was badly split and in severe disarray. A major realignment seemed certain. To the ILPers it seemed as if their time had come.

After disaffiliation the ILP clearly didn’t know what to do. Archibald Fenner Brockway, darling of the old left and big cheese of the ‘30s ILP, remarked: “Since 1932 the Party has been a crucible of the change from reformism to revolutionism” (Inside the Left, p. 237). ‘Revolutionism’ clearly meant desperately jobbing around for popular leftwing causes. In the course of the seven remaining years of the 30s the ILP:

“experimented in many directions, at one time approaching the Communist International, and at another moving towards the Trotskyist position, at one stage attaching its hope to united fronts and at another reverting to purism, at one period going all out to prepare for Soviets and at another recognising again the value of Parliament.” (Inside the Left, p. 237)

Reflecting this uncertainty of orientation and plagued by internal factions (pro- and anti-CPGB and Trotskyist) membership plummeted. Immediately before disaffiliation the ILP had 16,700 members in 653 branches. By 1935, just three years later this was down to 4,400 members in 284 branches. This was a particularly dramatic decline given the ongoing depression which had boosted almost all other left wing groups and the ILP’s relatively firm handling of Spain (sending a contingent including George Orwell) and fascism (giving important backing during the Battle of Cable Street).

Despite this the ILP retained local predominance in parts of Glasgow with numerous local councillors and a range of MPs. This was partly due to an electoral pact with Big Labour and lasted until around 1950. There were other residual centres of strength including Merthyr, Bradford, Norwich, Derby and rather bizarrely Great Yarmouth (where one LF Bunnewell was ILP councillor from 1937 to after 1975).

Second World War and after
The ILP recognised the Second World War as basically a conflict between rival capitalists. However confusion remained. The ILP’s ‘Peace Terms’ were: 1. Self determination of ‘peoples’, 2. Subordination of nations to ‘international unity’ and 3. “The establishment of an international economic organisation for the distribution of the world’s resources according to the needs of all peoples”. All of which displays the ILP failure to recognise that whilst the world’s resources are still owned and controlled by the capitalist class, conflicts between sections of that class are inevitable.

The 1945 election was rather successful for the ILP with three candidates, James Maxton, George McGovern and the Reverend Campbell Stephen, elected (one more than the Communist Party). Fresh with a new influx the ILP seemed set for revival. The success was not to last

Maxton died little less than a year later. The following year his replacement, James Carmichael joined up with Big Labour. As did McGovern and Campbell. Fenner Brockway also took the jump, in 1947. Maxton had clearly been holding the party together and without him the thing fell apart. Re-affiliation might have saved the day. In 1945 it had knocked on Labour’s door, asking very politely for re-affiliation, but Labour (sensibly) didn’t open it.

Left out in the cold the ILP fished around for other potential alliances including with us. At the 1947 Conference a motion proposed ‘loose links’ and joint campaigns (peace, colonial freedom and other ‘causes’) with the Anarchist Federation, the Commonwealth Party and the SPGB. We said no. Further proposals were made in 1954 (“Need for a United Socialist Party”) and late 1957. We debated representatives of the ILP, including in 1928 Maxton himself, on numerous occasions throughout its career, the last being in Bolton in 1972.

The ILP gradually faded from view. It soldiered on however until someone let it back in. In 1975 it re-entered the Labour Party as Independent Labour Publications. Actually this was a bit of a cheat as individual members joined up and on 31 March 1975 the party as such declared itself terminated (a similar thing happened to the trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party in 1949).

Despite the fact that the Independent Labour Party does not now exist, its ghost may be found haunting Left wing shindigs and the like. It remains well thought of by Leftists of a historical bent, but clearly not well remembered.

KAZ

Cooking the Books: Funny Money (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a letter from Paul Grignon, of Canada, (www.moneyasdebt.net) challenging the analysis in our article “The Myth of Magic Money” in this column last December. He enclosed for review a DVD of his "animated movie series ‘Money as Debt’ which”, he says, “has been viewed by millions worldwide and universally praised as the best explanation of our money system ever produced”.

Sorry, but we can't join in the chorus of praise as the DVD incorporates all the myths about money and banks that currency cranks have been propagating for years. It even has a top-hatted banker taking off his hat and using it to produce money out of it just as a magician produces a rabbit.

Apparently, all you need to start a bank is to deposit a sum of money with the central bank and, hey presto, you can start lending out nine times that amount and charge interest on it to boot. Obviously this is nonsense. It's the familiar mistake of assuming that a 10 percent cash-to-other-assets ratio means that, for a given amount of cash deposited with it, a bank can lend out nine times that amount whereas what it means is that it can only lend out nine-tenths of it as it has to keep 10 percent as cash.

Banks are no different from anyone else who lends money – individuals, pawnbrokers or loan sharks – they can only lend what they've got (either because it's theirs or because they've borrowed it themselves). Grignon’s confusion is partly the fault of academic economics which teaches that bank loans are a form of money in addition to the money the bank already has (Grignon is right about one thing: money deposited in a bank is a loan to that bank).

In his letter Grignon quotes from an explanatory booklet Modern Money Mechanics, first issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 1975, which says that from an initial deposit of cash the banking system can go on to eventually make total loans of nine times its amount. Quoting this booklet seems to be obligatory for modern currency cranks, but they could just as easily quote from any economics textbook (except that they see US Federal Reserve as their main enemy).

This theory, however, does not say or even imply that the extra loans have been created out of nothing by a mere stroke of the pen or, in Grignon’s contemporary version, by "the flash of a few keystrokes". If you follow the theory carefully you will see that each extra bank loan has to be preceded by an extra bank deposit of which only nine-tenth can be re-lent. Grignon accepts this for when the first loan supposedly "created out of nothing" finds its way back to the banking system. The bank receiving this, he says (correctly), can only lend out nine-tenths of it. Logically, he ought to accept this for the first deposit and the first loan too.

His ideal is a capitalism in which banks have become like savings-and-loan institutions in the US (building societies would be the nearest here) and where the state has a monopoly in the creation of interest-free money. What he doesn't realise is that this is the actual situation: banks are glorified savings-and-loan institutions and the only the state bank has the power to create money out of nothing. And cash is interest-free.

Voice From The Back: Capitalism's Priorities (2009)

From the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism's Priorities

As various pieces of legislation pass through the US governmental machine it is often observed that the process is torturously slow. An example of this tardy procedure has recently been revealed in the proposed Health Bill. No such delay is evidenced when it comes to military budgets. "With hardly any debate, a powerful Senate committee Thursday approved President Barack Obama's $128 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the budget year beginning in October. The move came as anxiety is increasing on Capitol Hill over the chances for success in Afghanistan and as Obama weighs whether to send more forces to the country. The war funding was approved as the Appropriations Committee voted unanimously for a $636 billion spending measure funding next year's Pentagon budget." (Huffington Post, 10 September) The health of the American working class is obviously of less importance than the military needs of the owning class.

Poisoned by capitalism

Capitalism is a poisonous society. Thousands of coal miners have suffered lung diseases, thousands more in shipyards and factories have been maimed by asbestos. In the mad scramble for more and more profits the owning class have endangered the health and even the life of the working class. From China comes this latest example of the profit system's murderous nature. "More than 2,000 children have been found to have lead poisoning because Chinese factories greedy for profit have spewed out pollutants without carrying out even the most minor environmental monitoring. Officials announced yesterday that 1,354 children under 14, who had been living and going to school for more than two years within a few hundred metres of a manganese smelter, had excess lead in their blood. Local officials said that the numbers could rise when further tests were carried out." (London Times, 21 August)

Champagne Socialists

In the past when Southern Californian fruit growers were faced with a glut and falling prices they let the fruit rot on the trees. When castigated for this apparent madness they pointed out the quite logical capitalist argument that they would have to pay pickers wages for fruit they couldn't sell. When again they were taken to task for this argument they were offered by some charitable organisations the prospect of them supplying free labour and they would distribute to the needy. Again the fruit growers had an answer to that. "Every year charitable organisations buy at cut-rate prices our unsold surplus. Giving it away would even spoil that source of income for us." The fruitgrowers may have appeared heartless but from an economic standpoint letting the fruit rot seemed the logical action. A similar solution is being followed today by French wine producers. “Hopes of a glut of cheap champagne are set to be dashed when vineyards meet next week to agree on a big cut in production to prop up prices. With sales falling, producers may be ordered to leave up to half their grapes to wither on the vine in an attempt to squeeze the market." (London Times, 29 August) Capitalism is a crazy system, obviously inside socialism we would deal with the problem by drinking more champagne.

A Ten Million Pound View 

The newspapers are full of stories of unemployed workers suffering the indignity of their homes being re-possessed. Every day we hear of the crashing property market and the resultant misery suffered by hard working families. The story is completely different for members of the capitalist class of course. "At £10m it must be the most expensive sea view in Britain. A Russian multi-millionaire liked a plot of land on the coast at Sandbanks in Dorset so much that he was happy to pay £5m for it. The plot was already occupied by a substantial house, but he did not much like it so is paying the same again to have it knocked down and replaced with something better. The purchase last September by Maxim Demin, 39, a petrochemicals trader, shows that at the top end of the property market lavish spending has survived the slowdown." (Sunday Times, 13 September) There is nothing unique about the property market. In every market – housing, education, medical treatment, holidays and entertainment – "lavish spending has survived the slowdown".

A Modest Sort 

Away back in the bad old days we had ruthless dictators with over-bearing ideas of their own importance but today's leaders are much more modest fellows. In the past we had people like the despot Stalin who regularly polled over 100 percent at "elections", nowadays in "democratic" Belorussia we have more self-effacing creatures at the helm of state. "The Belorussian strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, admitted that he rigged the 2006 election because, he said, his popularity was so vast that the true margin of victory was unbelievable and had to be cut from 93 to 80 per cent." (London Times, 28 August)

Cooking the Books: It isn’t over till it’s over (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the latest figures for business investment were published at the end of August, pro-capitalist commentators were shocked:

“From April to June businesses spent £29.9 billion on investments, from new computers to vehicles, down 18.4 per cent on last year – the biggest annual drop since records began in 1967. Against the first quarter of the year, investment tumbled 10.4 per cent from £33.3 billion – the steepest quarterly decline in 24 years” (London Times, 28 August).

Times journalist Ian King commented:

“Normally sober economists, such as Michael Saunders of Citi, reached for the history books as they pointed out that, in terms of total investment, the annual decline this year is likely to be about 18 per cent – the biggest fall, outside wartime, for more than a century. Judging from these numbers, businesses are simply not spending enough to haul the UK out of recession”.

Even though it only amounts to between 10 and 14 percent of GDP business investment – essentially what businesses spend, except on wages and land, on renewing production – is what drives the capitalist economy. It is an increase in this, resulting from the reinvestment of profits not just in maintaining but in expanding production, that results in an increase in GDP.

Business investment falls either because profits are down (so businesses don’t have the money to spend) or because they are not prepared to reinvest all of them as they don’t see themselves making a profit from doing so. Both these factors will have contributed to the current fall.

Marx analysed capitalism as a system of capital accumulation where the amount of capital invested increased over time through profits made out of past production being invested as new capital. However, this was not a smooth process but one that proceeded in fits and starts due to fluctuations in business investment.

GDP does not measure capital accumulation directly, but it is the source of income from which new capital is accumulated. In any country where there is no longer any subsistence farming, GDP can only go up if there has been some capital accumulation. If GDP falls this is a sign that capital accumulation has faltered.

The official definition of a recession is a fall in GDP for two consecutive quarters. The initial fall will be the result of a fall in business investment but, as business investment is only about 10 percent of GDP, a relatively big drop in this will be reflected only as a small fall in GDP. Thus a fall of 10 percent in business investment will reflect itself as a fall of only 1 percent of GDP. (In fact it will be larger as businesses will also be reducing their outlay on wages, another component of GDP).

When quarterly GDP increases again (as it will) politicians and the media will proclaim the end of the recession. But this will only mean that the bottom has been reached, not that it is over. It won’t really be over until business investment and GDP reach the levels they were at before the recession began. As GDP has fallen 5.7 percent since the recession began this will be many quarters later.

At the moment the big argument amongst economists and business analysts is what shape the whole episode will turn out to have. The optimists are hoping that it will be V-shaped (i.e. a fairly rapid return to pre-recession levels). Others see it as being more like a tick (i.e. a slower recovery). The pessimists see it like a W (i.e. a double dip, a initial small recovery followed by second fall).

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 115

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 115th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1524 friends!

Recent blogs:

A Post-Conflict World

Japan : the road to Pearl Harbor

Nazism – the ultimate evil?

Quote for the week:

" ..the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter... " Engels, Anti-Dühring(1877)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Made to Waste (2009)

Book Review from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Made to Break. Technology and Obsolescence in America. By Giles Slade. Harvard University Press. 2006.

In 1960 the American investigative journalist, Vance Packard, brought out a book The Waste Makers. Subtitled “A startling revelation of planned wastefulness and obsolescence in industry today”, it exposed how capitalist firms making consumer goods were deliberately designing them to break down after a calculated period of time so as to encourage repeat sales.

This new book covers the same ground and is a history of ‘obsolescence’ in America. Slade identifies three kinds: a product can become obsolete because something new, and genuinely better, has been invented (as happened, for instance, to cut throat razors and gas lighting); or because of advertising; or because it had been deliberately built-in to the product (also known as ‘death dating’).

The manufacturers and their advertisers were quite open about what they were doing. Thus a Justus George in 1928:

“We must induce people . . . to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely: buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or to discard after a short time . . . the progressive obsolescence principle . . . means buying for up-to-dateness, efficiency, buying for . . . the sense of modernness rather than simply for the last ounce of use” (quoted p. 58).

And a Brooks Stevens in 1958:

“Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money” (quoted p. 153).

This provoked a conflict with engineers, who knew they could make solid products that could last for years, but in the end their reluctance was overcome (they, too, are in the end only hired employees who have to do their employer’s bidding). It is also enormously wasteful as still useable products, and the material resources that went into making them, are simply thrown away.

Things have got worse since Packard’s day, with the use of soldered circuits in electronic devices that are now part of everyday life. These are easy and cheap to produce but their chipboards can’t be repaired. According to Slade, there is a growing problem of where to dispose of abandoned (but still useable) cell phones (as mobile phones are called in America) which, together with other ‘e-waste’, contain materials that are harmful to the environment.

Like Packard Slade blames consumers, if not so much as manufacturers. If, he argues, people take account of the effect on the environment of what they buy manufacturers will begin “to adopt design strategies that include not just planned obsolescence but planned disassembly and reuse as part of the product life cycle”. This assumes that the capitalist economy is driven by consumers. It isn’t. It’s driven by the drive of capitalist firms to make as much profit as they can.

Adam Buick

Socialist Meeting in London: Social Change and Class Interest

Socialist Party public meeting

Social Change and Class Interest

Speaker: Pat Deutz

Sunday, October 4th

6pm

The Socialist Party Head Office,

52 Clapham High Street,

London SW4 7UN.

(nearest tubes: Clapham North and Clapham Common.)

Website: SPGB

Email: spgb@worldsocialism.org

Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog

Pathfinders: Is technology making us stupid? (2009)

The Pathfinders column from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you ever wonder whether the smarter technology becomes, the dumber and lazier we become?

At one level, of course, this can’t be true. Literacy rates in almost all countries are in the high nineties, and the information revolution can scarcely be said to have rendered people more ignorant than they were hundreds of years ago. Advanced capitalism needs workers skilled in the ‘knowledge economy’, and can scarcely afford for its school indoctrination centres to turn out workers who aren’t up to the job.

But still, when you try to have a conversation in a pub with a group of people who are simultaneously writing phone texts, checking their email, Facebook, Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, and looking over your shoulder at the cricket scores on the giant TV screen, while humming along to the rock tune on the in-house speakers, you might be forgiven for thinking that less is sometimes more. It seems as if people don’t discuss, think, concentrate, criticise, evaluate. All they’re doing is time-slicing in a perpetual multi-tasking environment. What you are dealing with is, arguably, a case of social attention deficit hyperactive disorder. An entire society in need of ritalin.

The world is drowning in an ocean of data, but data is not information and information is not knowledge. Data consists of bytes or small packets, which must be compiled into some kind of order so as to provide meaningful information. Thus the words ‘lion’, ‘fish’ and ‘eats’ are data, while ‘lion eats fish’ or ‘fish eats lion’ or ‘lionfish eats’ are alternative forms of information.

There is a similar difference between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. For knowledge to exist, small pieces of information must be collected and processed into some meaningful agglomeration, like molecules building into more complex organic systems. Knowledge is thus a construct which it takes time, patience, communication and experience to build.

In the Dark Ages, knowledge was a treasure locked up behind monastic walls. In the Middle Ages, it was still the preserve of princes. With the dissolution of the monasteries in Britain knowledge began to be secularised, and the invention of printing revolutionised its spread.

The information revolution which began with printing and has lately accelerated geometrically with the internet has certainly involved a knowledge revolution but the two are not the same and the one does not necessarily entail the other. From a world subdued in ignorance modern workers now face a perpetual storm of information from which it is perhaps becoming harder, not easier, to extract meaningful knowledge.

It is not only the speed and intensity of this ‘data rain’ which swamps the mind. It is the fact that it is being broken down into smaller and smaller packets, knowledge being deconstructed, digitised, quantised and miniaturised for faster transmission. And to cope with this onslaught, the mind becomes less reflective and more selective, picking and choosing what it will process according to its preset value judgments, making it less rather than more likely that new ideas will be adopted. Time too is at a premium, and technology is taking knowledge away from the library and the desktop towards the e-reader and the smartphone, from email to Twitter, from debate to mere chat.

Some futurists, like Ray Kursweil, have been predicting the advent of the Singularity, a technological point beyond which it is not possible to make any predictions at all. The nature of the Singularity is popularly supposed to be the development or evolution of true machine intelligence, but could it be that instead of machine intelligence rising to meet us, we simply sink until we pass it on the way down?

Some say it’s Google making us ga-ga, others that it’s screen-burn to the brain. But where most such concerns are merely the same old bourgeois snootiness against youth or the lower orders, socialists have got legitimate reason to worry, because this could all play into the hands of capitalism. The ruling class loves to infantilise us, making us think we’re too dumb and childlike to take responsibility for ourselves without their ‘guiding’ authority. It would be scary to think that this might come to be true.

Our best hope is for a political Singularity, something no techie is predicting. The Zeitgeist Movement appears to be making huge strides in popularising non-market production for use, and another group is calling for a World Strike against money in 2012. These might grow or they might fizzle out, like the anti-capitalist movement. But for such a post-capitalist society to succeed it cannot be imposed from above or gifted to the world by one or two visionaries. Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere are all useful means of communicating ideas, but they’re not oriented towards what is also necessary: focussed reflection and critical debate. It’s not that people are incapable of these abilities, but if they are not accustomed to them they may try to avoid them. The danger is the spread of soundbite socialism at the expense of depth.

Paddy Shannon

Editorial: Capitalism and health care (2009)

Editorial from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

On both sides of the Atlantic, the last few months have seen various supposedly alternative models for health care inside capitalism being explored. Barack Obama’s review of US health care provision within his first year in office has met a predictably heated response from the paid lobbyists and cheerleaders of the health insurance industry, as well as other sectors of the US capitalist class with something to lose from any change to the status quo.

The costs of individual medical insurance being prohibitive, the poor of this so-called first world nation (46 million of them) are left with Third World levels of care and medical support, and daily “life and debt” decisions.

Whilst there are some differences between the US and UK healthcare system, we shouldn’t over-exaggerate them. Heated though the US v NHS debate may be, it is essentially a phoney war. From a world socialist perspective, these are just alternative capitalist models for rationing healthcare for the working class

The US system places a cash register and swipe card console at the foot of your hospital bed. In terms of the immediacy and impact on the patient, the NHS and similar systems in Europe certainly seem a little more ‘civilised’. But there is of course still a reckoning somewhere down the line. The ‘socialised’ systems just remove that decision from the immediacy of the ward. Instead the decision is made at one remove: by an NHS Trust or the government that allocates its funds. The decision isn’t made for you as an individual patient, but for your class as a whole, the working class who constitute some 90 percent of the population.

The reason the US administration is looking again at how their system is – or isn’t – working, has little to do with how ethical or plain nice it wants its society to be. Instead it is driven by a need to make economies and find the most efficient way to maintain the health of the US workforce. After all, despite the egalitarian claims surrounding it, the introduction of the NHS to the UK had a solid capitalist ‘business case’ behind it and was supported by all main parties. (The cost to the US state per head of population is now approximately twice that in the UK).

The NHS – and the other examples quoted of ‘socialised’ medicine (e.g. Scandinavian countries) – are not socialism, which we would argue means a moneyless and wageless economy as a whole. However at an individual and emotional level (rather than at a political level), it would be churlish of world socialists to dismiss out of hand the strong empathy and support for the NHS that most workers in Britain have. It is after all support for free access, for the idea that healthcare be freely available to all regardless of wealth.

At one level, world socialists entirely empathise with this sentiment. But not to the extent of getting caught up in expressing political support for one type of capitalist healthcare system over another: only a social system based on production for use rather than profit for the few, can truly realise this powerful and fundamentally egalitarian desire.