Back to the Future for Working Conditions (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conditions for workers today in Britain are moving back towards those in Victorian Britain. The struggles of the working class in Britain in the nineteenth century to ensure better working conditions and humane working hours are documented by Marx in Chapter ten The Working Day in Capital Volume 1. With zero hours contracts we have gone 'back to the future'.

The capitalist class in the UK have about 1 million workers on zero-hours contracts. These contracts mean there is no guarantee of work and pay each week, no holiday or sick pay. The balance of power favours the employer and makes it hard for workers to complain. Workers are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are worked out, but are expected to be on call for extra work at short notice, like the day before. If you don't comply you don’t get any work. Cinema chain Cineworld, Buckingham Palace's 350 summer workers, retailer Sports Direct (20,000 of its 23,000 staff), Pub group JD Wetherspoon (24,000 of its staff  - 80 percent of its workforce), 1/3 of the voluntary sector, 1/4 of the public sector , McDonalds, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Tate Galleries all use workers on zero hours contracts.

There are now fees for lodging claims at industrial tribunals. A worker has to pay a fee when a claim is lodged at the tribunal and another one at the hearing. Level 1 claims include those for unpaid wages, payment in lieu of notice and redundancy payments which cost £160 and a hearing fee of £230. Level 2 claims include unfair dismissal, discrimination, equal pay and whistle blowing which cost £250 and a hearing fee of £950. There will be higher fees for those cases where there are multiple claimants.

Currently an employer could discuss offers of settlement with a worker to terminate his or her employment on a 'without prejudice' basis, which means they could not be divulged in future tribunal proceedings as evidence against that employer. There would need to be a prior 'dispute' for an employer to take advantage of this protection. Under new rules, employers will now be able to engage in pre-termination negotiations/ early exit discussions with a worker even where no formal dispute has yet arisen. The new law allows employers a free reign at any time to enter termination discussions with their staff without fear of it being used against them.

The maximum compensation that could be awarded for routine unfair dismissal claims at an employment tribunal was £74,200. Now it will be the equivalent of 52 weeks' pay or £74,200, whichever is the lower. Average salary today is £26,500 for full time workers.

These changes prompted Elizabeth George, a barrister in the employment team at law firm Leigh Day to say:

'This sends a very dangerous message to employers who will be less inclined to abide by their legal obligations as the risk of being challenged will be much reduced, these fees will disproportionately hit those suffering discrimination because of their age, race, disability and gender, the disproportionate fees will mean many people having to put up with discrimination and unable to challenge unfair dismissals, however badly they had been treated. We have already seen guidance from lawyers advising employers to wait to fire people as it will be cheaper and the chances of being taken to tribunal will be less following the introduction of fees. Instead of standing up for people suffering unlawful discrimination in the workplace, the government is doing the exact opposite'. (Guardian, 29 July)

Online retailer Amazon opened a huge processing centre in Rugeley, Staffordshire in 2011. Arthur Valdez, vice-president operations Amazon said at the time: 'We look forward to assembling a team of talented people who will play their part in ensuring that customers receive the millions of items that will be ordered' (Daily Telegraph, 10 July 2011). Mike Dell, president of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce concurred: 'It's excellent news. It brings jobs to an area that desperately needs it'. Aidan Burley, local Tory MP put his tuppence in: 'It's absolutely fantastic news for Rugeley. People are crying out to get back into work'. (BBC News Stoke and Staffordshire online, 10  July 2011)

A recent Channel 4 investigation discovered at the Amazon factory in Rugeley timed toilet breaks, workers' movements were monitored by GPS trackers, workers given 30 minutes for lunch in a ten-hour shift, 20 minutes of which were spent walking to and from the canteen, workers were issued penalty points for talking to colleagues, taking sick leave, or even spending too long in the bathroom. This all on a 'three strikes and you're out' basis. Workers were searched for stolen goods at airport-style security checkpoints before going into the canteen, and temporary staff laid off to avoid giving them the same benefits and rights as permanent workers. Zero hours contracts were used extensively which meant those staff having no job security and were forced to make themselves available for work with no guarantee they will be offered a shift on a particular day. Also Amazon tried to avoid paying out hundreds of pounds in accrued holiday pay to agency staff by instructing agency representatives not to inform employees that it was owed to them.

We should always remember that the capitalist class demand the free exploitation of working class labour-power. Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Marx's Capital came out in 1867. There are differences between life today and life then but fundamentally there is no change as the capitalist mode of production grinds relentlessly on, a person has to 'sell their labour or starve'. Capitalism can never operate in the interests of the working class.

Steve Clayton

Waging the Class Struggle (1968)

From the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thousands of workers know from personal experience that members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain are involved in supporting and encouraging industrial organisation and action to improve wages and working conditions. Socialists are active at all levels of the trade union movement - branch officers, shop stewards, works convenors, organisers, committee men, conference delegates, regular branch attenders - and in many unions and industries. Socialists are active unionists because they are class conscious workers; they know that there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between workers and capitalists and  that all governments have to act as agents of the capitalists.

Briefly, the policy Socialists advocate is democratic action to improve or maintain wages and working conditions and they emphasise that this policy should be pursued whatever party forms the government. We do not soft-peddle the class struggle because there is a Labour government or because capitalism has started a war. Socialists are opposed to unions being linked to the Labour Party and refuse to pay the political levy. Beyond this, we say it is up to the workers involved to work out the details of their demands and how to get them. As it is the workers in an industry or factory or office who have to take part in the struggle, and suffer the consequences of any defeat, it is clear that they alone should decide what to do and how to do it. We do not tell workers what to do, except of course for general advice on the importance of democracy and the class struggle. We do not fancy ourselves as leaders.

The Socialist Party, as a party, does not intervene in the affairs of trade unions. It is merely that we, as class conscious workers share a broad conception of what sound industrial action is. As far as details are concerned we can, and do, find ourselves reaching different conclusions; some favour the closed shop, others say it's undemocratic. We have members in rival unions. Some support ginger groups; some have joined breakaway unions while others have stayed in, and so on.

Socialist Party members have always been active unionists. In the early days many were members of craft unions, particularly in the building industry. One of these was perhaps our most "illustrious" ex-member George Hicks, CBE, one-time TUC President, Labour MP and Junior Minister who died in 1954. One member who knew him says:

George Hicks, after leaving the SPGB became an official of a building workers union and was President of the TUC in 1927. He also joined the Labour Party and remained in it for the rest of his life. In spite of this he continued to take an interest in the SPGB and on occasions declared that he still agreed with the SPGB case. Early in the 1920's he debated with Palme Dutt and not only put the SPGB case against the Communist Party but frankly stated that it was the SPGB case he was putting.

Today the composition is rather different though. M. Harrison in his Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945 remarks that in the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers  several branches "are influenced by minority Socialist groups like the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain". Not that the ILP is socialist, mind you, or that we are out to influence the ASW. It is true, however, that there are socialists active in this union. Between the wars, with the bulk of the members in London, socialists were active in unions like the Union of Postal Workers and the busmen's section of the TGWU. During the war members formed branches of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. At first this might seem odd but the explanation lies in the fact that many Socialists were working on the land after refusing to do military service. There are Socialists active in the printing unions, in the seamen's union, AEU and ETU, and in white collar unions covering civil servants, teachers and technical workers. As Socialists are recruited from all sections of the working class, so there are Socialists active throughout the trade union movement.

To illustrate how Socialist Party members are active in trade unions it will be useful to take the cases of two who have been particularly so - one in the TGWU and the other in DATA.

The TGWU, with over a million members, is the largest genuine trade union in the world. Perhaps this is its drawback as it seems to make for bureaucratic rule. And the TGWU must hold the record for giving birth to breakaway unions. Socialists, as we said, were active on the buses just before and during the last war. The busmen, then, were a highly regarded section of the working class. It was a secure job that carried with it some prestige and this encouraged militancy. The union was at that time dominated by Ernest Bevin with Arthur Deakin as his deputy. After the failure of the negotiations for a shorter working day for London busmen an official strike began on May Day 1937. The Central Bus Committee was given full powers to conduct the strike. This six-man committee included one Socialist and four members of the so-called Communist Party. The CP also ran the London Busmen's Rank and File Movement. Although the TGWU executive had given the busmen full powers to conduct the strike, on 28 May Bevin issued over the radio an order to return to work. To preserve their industrial strength the busmen returned to work in an orderly fashion. The executive, however, then moved against the militants. As one of our members involved described it:

The Union instituted an enquiry into the strike. The Central Bus Committeemen and many local branch members were summoned to Transport House to answer for their actions. I was included. Despite my protest and the production of my SPGB membership card and badge, I was accused of being a Communist by Arthur Deakin who acted as a prosecutor. 

As a result of the inquiry all but one of the Central Bus Committee, together with a few others, were dismissed from union office. In 1938 some busmen, including a few Socialists, set up the National Passenger Workers' Union as a rival to the TGWU. Other Socialists, and this well shows how we can come to different conclusions on trade union tactics, opposed this move "on the ground that a new union could do no more than the existing one till members were class conscious and that the effect would be to divide the busmen and thus weaken them". The NPWU did not really stand a chance. It did carry on till after the war when the TGWU, by signing a closed shop agreement with London Transport, was able to squeeze it out. In 1943 the CP declared that as the NPWU was "a hotbed of every kind of anti-working class politics - SPGB members, ILPers and Trotskyists" no member of it could join the CP. The Socialist Standard of 1943 commented: 

With the issues involved in the dispute between the rival unions we need not here concern ourselves except to say that members of the SPGB are to be found in both unions.

The union's national organiser was in fact a Socialist. The same man was later to national organiser of another breakaway from the TGWU, this time in the docks, the National Union of Port Workers. The Socialist Standard had to make the same point again in October 1946 when a pro-Labour paper tried to discredit a strike in which this Socialist was active on the grounds that he was an opponent of the Labour government.

After the war the TGWU brought in a rule that barred members of Fascist and Communist parties from holding office (this rule still applies, but may be relaxed soon for the Communists). All candidates for union office had to sign a document saying that they were not members of these parties. Socialist in the union were quite opposed to this because they

objected to political discrimination in a trade union, claiming that members had the right to nominate any other member they wished irrespective of politics, race, religion, etc.

When later one Socialist did sign the document "the better to fight against political discrimination and other objectionable union policies", he found himself with the unwelcome support of the Communists (our members in the ETU have experienced the same thing since that union too barred Communists from holding office). Our member, who had been elected to committees at all levels of the union, was very active in the 1958 London bus strike. Socialists contributed regularly to The Platform, the unofficial busmen's journal, which ceased publication in 1967 after some seventeen years on the retirement of its editor (a sympathiser of the Socialist Party). "When Frank Cousins came on the scene", one says, "the CP heralded him as a Trade Union Messiah and carefully abstained from saying a word against him". Other socialists have had similar experience of CP tactics in other unions. At present the CP are trying to channel industrial discontent behind men like Cousins and Scanlon and the leftwing of the anti-working class Labour Party.

The first white collar strike in Bristol Siddeley Engines factory took place in February 1961. It was staged by sixty members of the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen (now DATA) in support of their "collecting member" (or shop steward) who was the only one in the office not to get a pay rise. The one week strike became official and was successful. The victimised man, a member of the Socialist Party, got his rise. A couple of years later this Socialist was elected chairman of the local DATA branch and as such played an important organising role in a strike over pay that began in the same factory in June 1963. The Bristol Evening Post described our member as "leader of the 1,000 Bristol Siddeley workers who are on strike". This of course was not so as Socialists are opposed to all leadership, on the industrial as well as on the political front. Our member's protest was published in the paper on 16 July:

May I, as chairman of Bristol No. 2 branch of DATA, thank you for the way in which you have to date, covered our dispute with BSE Ltd. But as an individual member I wish to deny that in any way am I the Leader of the 1,000 members who are now on strike. I am their elected Representative and as such, with the rest of the annually elected branch, try to carry out, to the best of one's ability, their wishes which are decided in a democratic way, either by secret ballot, or by show of hands at a general meeting. I regard this as a very important distinction.

The same member (who as branch chairman again had an important role to play in 1965 in the struggle against redundancy following the cancellation of the TSR 2,) described the six week's strike, which was controlled by the strikers and successful, as "the best organised and successful ever. It was a show down between DATA and the employers nationally and cost DATA £180,000. The members levied themselves towards local costs and paid 5% of their salaries back to DATA". DATA in fact is one of the most successful unions in Britain, consistently pursuing an aggressive wages policy.

These, then, are two examples of how Socialists are involved, in a democratic way, in waging the class struggle  on the industrial front. We could have quoted more examples but we think these suffice to nail the lie spread by those would-be leaders, the CP and the trotskyists that the Socialist Party is anti-union.

Adam Buick

Diminishing our view of the world (1995)

Theatre Review from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beautiful Thing by Jonathan Harvey 

Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing is a success. Starting life at the Bush Theatre it has subsequently played in Leeds (at the West Yorkshire playhouse), and in London (at the Donmar Warehouse), before finally making it into the West End.

Critics have been enthusiastic, using words like "honest" and "vivid" to describe plot and dialogue. When I attended recently an uncharacteristically young (for the West End) audience showed similar enthusiasm and delight. Yet as laughter rumbled round the elegant theatre I felt initial surprise, then disappointment and, finally, anger.

Beautiful Thing is packed with characters straight out of Eastenders. The action may take place in a scruffy block of high-rise flats in south London, but those familiar with the antics of the residents of Albert Square will quickly be reminded of the ugliness, the meanness of character and aspiration, the sordid pointlessness of it all. "This is how life is", the author seems to be saying; "this is what life must be like", he seems to be suggesting by implication. If people are selfish and unknowing, out of touch both with themselves and the larger world of which they are a part, this is to be expected; it is "natural". The possibility that people might have learned to be selfish, acquisitive and repressed -  that they might even have learnt how to remain ignorant - is not considered.

True, in the maelstrom of indifference, stupidity and no little malevolence which Harvey describes, there grows a loving relationship between two young men - presumably the Beautiful Thing referred to in the title. But this is no metaphor pointing to the possibility of larger transformations. The world continues as before: the other characters make no significant discoveries; and even for the loving couple the rest of life remains insufferably the same.

Although the play is described as a modern fairy story Harvey sells us short. The little love affair he describes could have offered a pointer to the redemption and liberation of others; of changes and transformations at many levels. By eschewing such possibilities the play, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the perception that such things are impossible. Our vision of the world is thus diminished rather than expanded, and we are imprisoned rather than set free. Not so much a fairy story as a nightmare.

Michael Gill

Pies in the sky (1986)

Book Review from the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marie Louise Berneri, Journey through Utopia (Freedom Press)

Journey through Utopia is Marie Louise Berneri's classic study of the most important utopian writings from Plato to Huxley. The book was first published in 1950, a year after the author's untimely death at the age of thirty-one, and recently re-issued. It is a scholarly work (Berneri used her fluent knowledge of four languages to make her own translations in the absence of English versions) but the author's journalistic experience ensures that the text remains very readable.

An examination of the utopias of antiquity shows Aristophanes satirical utopias to be more pleasant than Plutarch's "most perfect example of a totalitarian state" or the slavery, despotism and elitism in Plato's Republic. As Berneri points out: "It is rather puzzling that Plato's Republic should have aroused such admiration and, paradoxically, it has been chiefly admired by men whose principles were completely opposed to those of Plato".

The chapter dealing with the utopias of the Renaissance is the most interesting. Sir Thomas More's Utopia calls for the abolition of the death penalty for theft, and puts forward one of the earliest arguments for free access to wealth, pointing out that it is economic insecurity which makes people greedy. However, far from being a perfect society, crimes and adultery are punished by slavery and imperialist wars are waged against weaker states. Berneri points out: "In a society which admits of slavery even the 'free citizen' is not free; his chain is no longer than that of the slave".

Campanella's City of the Sun is the first utopia to abolish slavery: property is abolished for the whole community and a leading role is given to natural sciences. Campanella was tortured and imprisoned by the Inquisition and because of the risk of confiscation, several versions of his works exist. Torture and prisons are banned from Campanella's utopia - probably influenced by his own ordeal - but there is little individual freedom: women can be condemned to death for using make-up or wearing high heels.

Francis Bacon anticipated modern trends by placing faith in technological changes, departing from the idealistic utopias of his predecessors, while Andreae, although deploring the death penalty and the "wickedness of men who punish rather than reform", displays the intolerance of the religious reformer. By contrast, Rabelais did not propose a remedy for the evils of the time. His utopia is more of an individual rebellion with only one rule: "Do What Thou Wilt", and probably all the more readable because of it.

The first utopian to believe that society could only be changed by the people as a whole was Winstanley, who wrote The Law of Freedom in 1652. However, paradoxically, slavery is the punishment for lesser crimes while for more serious ones Winstanley's ideas are barbaric: "He who strikes his neighbour shall be struck himself by the executioner blow for blow, and shall lose eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb, life for life".

The nineteenth century utopias are considered boring, reflecting the conceit of the authors. A notable exception to the authoritarian, centralised control of Cabet or Bellamy and the curious attempt by Lord Lytton to reconcile certain socialist ideas with laissez-faire capitalism is News from Nowhere by William Morris, which appeared in serial form in Commonweal in 1890. Morris "realised that the manner of life of a community cannot be artificially arranged in the mind of an individual, but must be spontaneously created by all the members of the community". Berneri praises this charming vision of an ideal society and it is one of the few utopias with which socialists could sympathise.

The final chapter deals with modern utopias. Bureaucracy, coercion and moral compulsions are used by H. G. Wells in A Modern Utopia in 1905, although he altered his views in Men Like Gods in 1923. Berneri considers Wells to be the last utopian writer in the classical tradition; modern writers such as Zamyatin and Huxley have written dystopias in which the central characters rebel against the authoritarianism, regimentation and enforced happiness of their societies.

Journey through Utopia is a comprehensive guide to the utopias of the past and a warning of the dangers of permitting others, however well intentioned, to plan our future for us. The emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the workers themselves.

Carl Pinel

Letter From Europe: Bordiga and the Idea of Socialism (1982)

Amadeo Bordiga

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the socialist form production remains social and thus there is no ownership by anyone of the instruments of production, including the land and fixed installations. In this society there will be no individual appropriation even for consumption; distribution will be social and for social purposes. Social consumption differs from individual consumption in that the physical attribution of consumer goods does not take place by means of commodity purchase and with a currency. When society satisfies all the needs of its members which don't conflict with the best interests of its development independently of the greater or lesser contribution they have made to social labour, all personal property ceases and with it its measure, i.e., value and its symbol money (translated from Bordiga et la passion du communisme pp.79-80).

So stated Amadeo Bordiga in a lecture given in Italy in 1958, thus showing that the original idea of socialism as a moneyless, wageless society which we and our companion parties have kept alive in Britain and the English-speaking world has also survived on the Continent.

The rest of Bordiga's views however are quite unacceptable. After playing a prominent part before the First World War in the youth section of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and in the campaign (together with, of all people, Mussolini, then also a member of the PSI!) against the openly reformist elements in that party, he opposed the war, and Italy's entry into it, as an imperialist slaughter in which no working-class interests were at stake. He later emerged as the leader of the pro-Bolshevik elements within the PSI. By 1919 he had come round to a position which was to bring him into conflict with Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders: his experience of the failure of the PSI to control its MPs had made him an "abstentionist", or opponent of contesting elections and participating in parliament. Neverthless, he still became the leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) when it was founded at Leghorn in January 1921 as a breakaway from the PSI.

His "abstentionism" was in fact an attempt to resolve the problem of reform and revolution which those in the pre-war Social Democratic parties of Europe who genuinely wanted socialism had had to face. Bordiga believed that, because of their corruption and oppression by capitalism, a majority of workers could never come to want and understand socialism while capitalism lasted  (in this of course he agreed with Lenin). This led him to conclude that a policy of trying to obtain mass electoral support for socialism was not only pointless but dangerous in that it would lead a socialist party into reformism by lowering itself to the non-socialist consciousness of the mass of the workers.

He favoured instead an elite socialisy party, composed exclusively of those who understood socialism, whose policy should be not to advocate reforms or seek mass electoral support but to use working-class discontent to seize power and establish its dictatorship. On this point, Bordiga was quite open and frank: he advocated a dictatorship by the Party. He was in fact virtually a classical Blanquist. For Blanqui too, following in the tradition of Babeuf and Buonarotti, had held that the workers were too corrupted by capitalist rule to be able to liberate themselves and so would have to be liberated by the action of a determined minority seizing power, establishing a dictatorship and then educating the people in socialist ideas. Marx, although sympathising with Blanqui as a man of action, of course rejected such views, countering them with the declaration that the emancipation of the working class could only be the work of the working class itself.

As a solution to the problem of reform and revolution Bordiga's view was quite inadequate though he was correct to see the danger, indeed the inevitably, of a descent into reformism if a socialist party sought electoral support on a programme of reforms. The founders of the Socialist Party of Great Britain also saw this danger but, because they did not accept that the working class was incapable of coming to want and understand socialism under capitalism, this led them to a different conclusion. The "education" of the working class to want socialism (the result of their own experiences and reflections as well as of the propaganda activities of a socialist party, thus "education" in the broadest sense) had to take place before capitalism could be abolished and indeed was a precondition for this. The danger of reformism could be avoided, not by renouncing the attempt to win an electoral majority, but by renouncing trying to win this on a programme of reforms. A socialist party, they said, should campaign among the working class only for socialism. This has remained our policy to this day and, as the solution to the problem of reform and revolution, represents our specific contribution to socialist theory.

Despite being a throwback to the 19th century, Bordiga's views were supported by a majority of the members of the PCI during the first two or three years of its existence. This inevitably brought Bordiga into conflict with the Bolshevik leaders, particularly Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, and Lenin himself who devoted an appendix to his pamphlet Leftwing Comminsm, An Infantile Disorder to attacking Bordiga's abstentionism.

In 1921 the Comintern decided on one of its many changes of tactic, this time to adopt the so-called "united front" which involved the new Communist Parties co-operating with the Social Democrats and even forming "Workers Governments" in coalition with them. This new line was  not popular with the non-Russian CPs since they were now being asked to co-operate with the very people they had just broken away from and in many cases had opposed as reformists since even before the war. This was the case of Bordiga himself and he went to Moscow to oppose the new line, though he left accepting out of a sense of discipline the majority decision. The PCI, even under Bordiga's leadership, thus did participate in elections even though he personally was opposed to this.

The Bolshevik leaders soon decided that Bordiga was quite unsuitable to be leader of one of their parties and attempted to remove him; but they had to proceed carefully in view of his reputation and support in the Italian party. He was eventually removed and replaced by Gramsci (now the rage in leftwing circles despite the fact that he was little more than a Stalinist hack) in 1924. From then on Bordiga was on the way out as Stalin's orders to suppress all opposition in the non-Russian parties were implemented. Bordiga, who was then in a fascist prison, was expelled in 1930, officially for having sided with Trotsky.

Bordiga, however, was no Trotskyist. He eventually came round to the view that Russia was state capitalist, or rather that the state capitalism under the control of the "proletarian state" which he held had existed under Lenin had given way, with the dictatorship of Stalin, to a simple state capitalism. Bordigist groups, with one of which he himself was associated from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1970, have existed in Italy, France and Belgium as rivals to the Trotskyists, propagating Bordiga's Blanquist idea of the incapacity of the workers to become socialists under capitalism and of the need for them to be liberated by the dictatorship of a vanguard party.

Although Bordiga knew what socialism was (in the sense of using the word only in the way we do) he did not stand for the immediate establishment of socialism. This followed from his basic position that the workers were incapable of coming to want to socialism after capitalism and would have to be educated to it after capitalist rule had been overthrown. Thus he had to posit a transitional period between the overthrow of capitalist rule and the final establishment of socialism, during which tis process of education would go on. When this had been completed then socialism, a moneyless, wageless, Stateless society, could be established. It was because he believed that this was what Lenin had been trying to do that he had supported the Bolshevik regime even though he was well aware that Bolshevik Russia wasn't socialist.

Not only did Bordiga insist that socialism would be a society without money, wages or the state but he also emphasised that it was the common ownership of the means of production by society as a whole and was a vigorous critic of syndicalists and others (like Gramsci, for instance, at one period) who advanced slogans like "the factories to the workers" and "the land to the peasants". He correctly pointed out that, if these slogans were implemented, the result would not be socialism since they envisaged the continuation of private (non-social) property in the form of the ownership of the various means of production by sections only of society (those working in a particular factory, mine or farm). A point we have often made ourselves.

Bordiga and the Bordigist movement have influenced people and given rise to splits which have retained his correct description of socialism while abandoning some of his other views. The so-called "International Communist Current", for instance, through its parent group in France revolution internationale has a Bordigist ancestry. Jean Barrot, author of a number of books including Le mouvement communiste, reviewed in the Socialist Standard in October 1973 and which contains a correct definition of socialism, has also been influenced by Bordiga. And in France a whole series of Marx's writings on subjects like trade unions, Malthus, education and utopianism has been collected together and introduced by a more or less orthodox Bordigist, Roger Dangeville who (while often distorting Marx's views on other subjects such as violence and democracy) correctly points out that Marx's conception of socialism involved the disappearance of money and wages.

Others have advanced further, coming to criticise the labour-time voucher system and to favour free access, as in the publication La Guerre Sociale. This group distributes the pamphlet entitled Le communisme: Un monde sans argent (Communism: A World without Money), extracts of which were published in the July Socialist Standard and which gives a description of future society which is identical to ours.

All these groups and individuals, however, are still mistaken on how to get socialism either because they still accept the idea of a vanguard party (the orthodox Bordigists of "Programme Communiste", Roger Dangeville, the ICC) or because they deny that the establishment of socialism is a question of majority consciousness (Barrot, "La Guerre Sociale"). All of them favour violent insurrection rather than democratic political action (elections and Parliament) to try to establish socialism.

Adam Buick

Further Reading:

Bordigism by Adam Buick

Spare us the confusion (1996)

Book Review from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels by Albert Meltzer (AK Press 1996)

This is a confusing book full of confusing and ill-conceived statements. Ostensibly the autobiography of one of Britain's most well-known anarchists, its anecdotal nature overrides any pretensions to serious political thought. Lip-service is paid to the goal of a classless, stateless society very occasionally but it is no more than just that.

Meltzer is a self-styled 'man of action' of the anarchist movement whose protege, Stuart Christie, was famously convicted of terrorist offences; in this book action for its own sake is lauded to the skies, without apparent consideration of its effectiveness in achieving Meltzer's ultimate goal. In truth though, Meltzer has always been horribly confused on the issue of how to bring about a classless society - despite his many other undoubted qualities - so this is unsurprising enough.

His political confusion can be illustrated by his description of the old Independent Labour Party as an organisation with a "revolutionary socialist programme far beyond the grasp of most of its membership". Quite what he can have had in mind in writing this is difficult to say as anyone with any revolutionary and anti-statist credentials whatsoever during the ILP's hey-day must have realised that it was a reformist organisation through and through.

Meltzer also writes of the Russian dictatorship that "What reigned in Russia was not capitalism nor communism but the state in control of everything. Some dissident Communists introduced as an alibi a fiction that State Capitalism existed in Russia but all that oppresses is not capitalism". It is not indeed, but where class division, commodity production, wage labour and capital accumulation out of surplus value exist, then it's a pretty safe bet by anyone's book. And, of course, the theory of state capitalism was not introduced as an "alibi" by dissident communists, but as an original analysis based on the facts by the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

For some peculiar reason, when Meltzer talks about the Socialist Party on a couple of occasions, it is in the past tense and he writes that we were "a small sect of dogmatic socialists" founded "around 1910". For this he can get no other than nought out of ten for both originality and research, though ten out of ten for cheek, as Meltzer has spent all his political life in British anarchist groups like Black Flag and the Direct Action Movement which have made the SPGB look like a veritable mass party.

Frankly, when Meltzer writes of his admiration for Socialist Party orator Tony Turner when stopping to listen to him speak in Hyde Park at the outbreak of the Second World War one is left wishing that he had stayed a little longer and listened more intently, if only to spare us some of the confusion now.

DAP

• Meltzer's autobiography can be read online at the following link.
• There is an audio recording of a 1987 debate between Albert Meltzer - representing Black Flag - and Richard Donnelly of the SPGB at the following link.

Editorial: Class struggle - back on the agenda (1996)

Editorial from the January 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over recent years commentators, left and right, have argued that the phenomenon of "class struggle" has become an anachronism - something that died with the bad old days of the 70s. Those on the right have actively supported the subsequent attacks on the working class (mass unemployment, poorer conditions at work, etc.) as being a price worth paying for the "national interest". Those apologists for capitalism the left have floundered around condemning the "evils of Thatcherism", forgetting previous experiences of Labour governments and losing in the battle of ideas to the "realists" on the right.

Real socialists have remained resolute in our analysis of society. Capitalism is based upon the class antagonism between Capital and Labour. Although class struggle has operated at a relatively low level for so long, we have always maintained that this central feature of capitalist society will not go away while capitalism remains.

The explosion of popular unrest in France is testimony to this. As the economic crisis in capitalism forces France to cut its social spending - exacerbated by its move towards a single currency. The commentators who have previously written off "class struggle" have been forced to sit up and take note.

Workers everywhere can take heart from these developments. The working class in France has demonstrated not only working people acting as a class - but the power that class has in society.

This doesn't mean that socialism is around the corner or indeed that this is even the beginning of the end of capitalism.

This struggle is dominated by defensive reformist ideas and defensive institutions such as the trade unions. The positive point is that within such an atmosphere the potential for revolutionary ideas to spread is increased. This will mean workers breaking with reformist ideology (as indeed some have shown) and realising the only alternative is the political solution of world socialism.

There is no shortcut to this goal. It can only occur when the majority of the working class organise for it and achieve political power democratically.

Without this, struggles like the one in France will just become dates in the turbulent history of capitalism.

Cooking the Books: The Death of the Middle Class (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in the Daily Mail (23 August) lamenting ‘the death of the middle classes’ Dominic Sandbrook wrote:

‘One day, predicted Karl Marx, ‘the lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants’, would begin to sink down the social ladder, crushed by the cruel economic logic of modern life. Society, he thought, would inexorably be divided into haves and have-nots, and tension would turn inevitably to violent revolution. Marx gloried in his own prediction. As the founding father of Communism, he looked forward to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, when the middle classes would be extinguished and capitalism would be torn down.’

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels did write something like this, but not exactly. Discussing the origin of the ‘proletariat’, or working class, defined by Engels in a footnote to the English edition of 1888 as ‘the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live’, Marx and Engels wrote:

‘The lower strata of the middle class the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.’

Earlier in the Manifesto Marx and Engels had pointed out:

‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.’

Which has gone on ever since, despite the rise of the so-called ‘new middle class’ of salaried employees; these have not even been ‘reduced’ to ‘selling their labour power in order to live’ as they never were independent owners of their own business.

Sandbrook in fact takes it for granted that his ‘middle classes’ have to work for an employer when he writes ‘middle-class men and women once expected to have a job for life.’

Society is already divided into two classes: those who, not owning means of production, are forced to sell their labour power, whether for a wage or a salary, to live and those Engels in his footnote called ‘the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of production and employers of wage labour.’

It is true that the ‘tension’ between the two classes did not turn into ‘violent revolution’ as Marx and Engels had expected in 1848. Later they envisaged the possible conversion of universal suffrage into ‘an agent of emancipation’, not that this has happened either.

It is true, too, that Marx occasionally used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but what he meant was the exercise of political power by the majority class of wage and salary workers, which he considered should be done democratically.

To tear capitalism down? Yes, by converting the means of production from the property of a tiny minority into the common ownership of the whole of society, so allowing production to be geared to meeting people’s needs instead of for sale on a market with a view to profit.

To extinguish the middle class? Yes, in fact of all classes. Together with the rest of the wider working class, today’s so-called middle class will commit suicide by abolishing itself.

Material World: Who Are ‘The Poor’? (2013)

The Material World column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are reluctant to talk about ‘the poor’ as a distinct social group. In a certain real sense, all of those excluded from ownership and control of the means of life – the large majority who make up the working class – are poor.

All the same, there are degrees of poverty. Being homeless or trapped in a rat-infested tenement is very different from living in a comfortable house (however heavily mortgaged) in a clean suburb. The focus here is on the people conventionally regarded as poor in the United States. Socialists might prefer to call them ‘the extremely poor’.

The US government defines a ‘federal poverty line’ (FPL) – currently an annual income of $19,530 for a family of three or $23,550 for a family of four – and equates being poor with falling below this line. By this definition, 16.3 percent of Americans (up from 12 percent in 1975) are poor, although for children the figure rises to 22 percent.

Poor = black? Wrong!

In the US ‘the poor’ tend to be identified with black people and especially with residents of the city ghettoes, who occasionally draw attention to their grievances by rioting. It is true that the poverty rate is higher for blacks than for whites, but in absolute terms poor whites – sometimes called ‘the invisible poor’ – are far more numerous than poor blacks.

Millions of poor people live in small towns and rural areas. In large parts of the South the majority of them are black, but in some other depressed areas, such as the Appalachian Mountains in the East, they are mostly white.

Poor = unemployed? Wrong again!

There is also a tendency to identify ‘the poor’ with welfare recipients and the unemployed. In recent years, however, there has been growing recognition of the ‘working poor’ – the quarter of the American workforce whose pay is so low that despite long hours of hard work their income still falls below the poverty line.

According to a 2011 study by the Congressional Budget Office, 10 percent of US wage earners are paid under $8.90 per hour. This is also the current median wage of workers in fast food outlets. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, which if a bill now before Congress is passed will rise to $10.10 by 2015. But many workers – especially but not only illegal immigrants – get less than the minimum wage. The workers at a carwash near our home receive only $5.75.

How can people possibly survive on such low wages? They work long hours or even in many cases two jobs. They also draw government benefits and get help from charity (so-called ‘income supports’). One increasingly important income support is the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as ‘food stamps’. The number of participants in SNAP has risen steadily from 17 million in 2000 to about 47 million at present. In fact, government and charities subsidize the employers of low-paid labour, who in the absence of such programs would have to pay higher wages to enable their workers to survive. 

The near poor

The Federal Poverty Line is an unsatisfactory yardstick in several ways. It ignores taxes and ‘income supports’, it allows only for bare subsistence, and it takes no account of the huge regional variations in the cost of living.

Some researchers have tried to compensate for these defects by adding a category they call ‘the near poor’ – people with incomes from 100 up to 150 percent of the FPL. When this category is included, the poverty rate doubles to about a third of the population. A clear majority of children (57 percent) are ‘poor or near poor’.

These must still be underestimates because a family needs an income of anywhere from 150 up to 300 percent of the FPL – depending on the cost of living in the area where they live – just to cover ‘basic expenses’ (National Center for Children in Poverty, nccp.org). 

Lifespan poverty experience

While those who are ‘poor’ at a particular moment may be only a minority, though a very substantial one, studies of ‘lifespan poverty experience’ show that a majority of Americans have the experience of being ‘poor’ at some time in their lives. Thus, a study published in 2001 found that 51 percent of 75-year-olds had passed at least one year in ‘poverty’ since the age of 25 (‘Signs of Declining Economic Security’, 28 July 2013, bigstory.ap.org). 

It is this continuous large-scale movement of workers into and out of ‘poverty’ that gives the lie to the conventional idea of ‘the poor’ as a separate social group or even as a sort of special ‘underclass’. A large majority of Americans are always at significant risk of falling into ‘poverty’; the fear of ‘poverty’ occupies a crucial place in their psyche.

The typical suburbanite can become destitute and homeless very easily. All it takes is a single ‘negative life event’ such as the loss of a well-paying job, a serious illness or accident, imprisonment or divorce. Especially during a slump, masses of ‘middle class’ workers are rudely awakened from the ‘American dream’ to find themselves stranded among ‘the poor’.

‘Poverty’ and relative prosperity are alternate phases in the life of a single social class, the working class – a life marked by abject insecurity and dependence. Most members of the working class are not ‘poor’ most of the time, but it is ‘the poor’ who most starkly embody the essence of working class status.

Stefan

Editorial: What About Nuclear Weapons? (2013)

Editorial from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

When someone enlists in a military or paramilitary organisation they swear or affirm their willingness to obey all orders issued to them by their superior officers. In turn, such officers, in ascending order, are subject to the orders and instructions of their superiors who, ultimately, must respond to a national executive of politicians or an individual with executive power.

Effectively, then, this means that armed forces throughout the world are composed of people who have abnegated their sense of right and wrong when such a sense is in conflict with the orders they are given.

Like so many things in capitalism, it sounds absurd – and very frightening – but, in a world where there is at least one war going on every single day, it is consistent with the lunatic logic that underpins a wasteful and outmoded system of social organisation.

At the moment the problem preoccupying the most powerful nations of the world and their politicians is the conflicting politico-economic interests confronting the Syrian dictator and General Secretary of the Ba’ath Party, Bashar al’Assad, who took over power from his deceased father in 2000.

Like Saddam Hussein, his predecessor and holy war suppressant in Iraq, Assad’s power lay in his ability to suppress the toxic feuding and internecine killing that reside in the different strains of Islamism – just as they do in Christianity. It is possible that the present Syrian conflict may be the prelude to a more diverse sectarian conflict in which the US, Russia, Britain et al, will have more direct sponsorship as the awful potential of Cold War politics returns.

In the old cowboy films the Sheriff could deal with impending strife by collecting the gun belts and guns of the gunmen. In capitalism this would not be possible nor would the capitalists and their political agencies desire it. The arms trade, bordering on some two trillion dollars per annum, is a major source of profit - and, of course, employment - for the major nations of world capitalism. But weaponry, necessarily visible weaponry, is essential in dictating the terms of the system’s uneasy ‘peace’ agreements. Capitalism’s temporary periods of peace, like its industrialised phases of killing, requires a heavy investment in armaments.

The Syrian crisis has again brought the shadow of the Cold War with the same players who terrorised the world for decades following the Second World War. Then – in what was openly referred to as ‘a balance of terror’ - they threatened the planet with nuclear destruction. The US, Russia, China, France and Britain produce  the bulk of the world’s armaments; all have stockpiles of nuclear weapons and, if they were not all-powerful and beyond the control of the United Nations Organisation, it is likely that all five would be adjudged ‘war criminals’.

Obama and Putin lecturing the world about ‘morality’ and civilised human standards from behind their massive stores of the most awesome weapons demonstrates the veniality of what they defend as democracy. Yet in all the scores of interviews we see on our TV screens never is the issue of their nuclear weapons raised. Unquestioned virtue would appear to be the reward for power.

Alternative History (2013)

Book Review from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Human Front, by Ken Macleod. PM Press, 2013.

Alternative history is a strange genre. Its central premise, that small changes in history can lead to radically different worlds is somewhat tenuous: Hitler dying as a small child is unlikely to have prevented a Second World War (merely changing the cast and their precise lines, instead). It is, though, fiction, and it provides a useful means of exploring ‘what ifs’, where the route to the alternative history is usually just an excuse to look at a world that might have been or is simply just different from our own. Being able to imagine different societies is a useful skill, in and of itself.

A few are wish fulfilments, and there’s a few too many ‘If the South won the Civil War’ or ‘If the Germans won the Second World War’ and even ‘If the British Empire never fell’. And of course, the less said about Zeppelins, the better.

Ken Macleod’s work has featured in our review columns before, often for their interesting examination of the ideas and cultures of the revolutionary left, as well as for his commitment to libertarian (proper sense) causes. The Human Front was his first published novella, and it has recently been reissued, along with an essay and an interview that further flesh out some of its themes.

It begins with the news that the Communist partisan Joseph Stalin has been killed in early 1963. The Soviet Union had fallen in 1949, under assault from Allied super hi-tech secret weapons. As Macleod explains in the essay, this dramatically changes the shape of the post-war world, leading to the unrestrained use of military superiority to maintain the colonial powers’ positions. The absence of the Soviet Union and the ongoing Chinese revolution means Maoism rather than Trotskyism comes to predominate on the British left. This leads to several scenes of ‘People’s War’ in the Scottish Highlands, with all the horror and brutality that entails.

Originally published in 2001, the image of a fugitive Stalin gunned down escaping is now resonant with the fates of Hussein and Bin Laden, and indeed, of our present unipolar world with the unrestrained use of drone strikes. Tens of years on, it seems more like prescience than alternative history. Although the novella soars off into high science fiction for its end twist, its grounding in the Scotland and the Lewis of Macleod’s childhood gives it a sense of solidity, grounding it in real history and left wing arguments remembered.

This reissue is an opportunity to not only consider the themes of the original story, but also alternative history itself and the way in which we shape our pasts to try and make our own future.

Pik Smeet

Cooking the Books: An Easy Match for Mammon (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 25 July the Archbishop of Canterbury, who fancies himself as a bit of a financial expert, said that it was his Church’s intention to drive the payday loan company Wonga out of business. He revealed that he had told Wonga’s boss that ‘we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence’ (London Times, 26 July).  The next day he was left red-faced when it came out that his Church had money invested in a venture capitalist, Accel Partners, that was one of Wonga’s financial backers.

His plan is to encourage credit unions by offering them premises in churches and expert advice from Christian businessmen. But the idea that credit unions could out-compete capitalist money-lending enterprises like Wonga is pure fantasy.

A credit union is basically a savings and loan club. People pay in small amounts of money (on which they receive some interest) which gives them the right to borrow small sums of money (on which they pay interest) when they need it. To remain viable by covering its administrative costs, the union has to charge a higher rate of interest to borrowers than it pays to savers. Basically, they are a form of bank, mainly for poor people. Ideally, they are run democratically by their members.

A payday loan company, on the other hand, is a profit-seeking capitalist enterprise specialising in short term (from payday to payday) loans at a very high rate of interest. They don’t particularly target poor people, but rather anyone in short-term financial difficulty. In fact they prefer people who have another payday coming. The money they lend is theirs (or put up by backers such as Accel Partners) – and they have to have it in the first place.

It’s all about money and getting an income from lending it, but the Archbishop didn’t offer to put up any of his Church’s money, merely to let the credit unions use his churches as their offices. Even if he had, it is unlikely that the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church’s millions, would have approved as the rate of return, though eminently ‘ethical’, would have been too low. They have to choose investments with a higher rate of return to generate the income to pay the salaries and pensions of the clergy and for the maintenance of the bishop’s palaces. They are forced to behave capitalistically too.

If the Archbishop really thinks that local credit unions, operating from churches, can out-compete capitalist enterprises like Wonga (who have the resources to advertise every day on TV) by stealing their customers, he can’t be the financial expert he thinks he is. But at least he doesn’t think banks can create money out of nothing which if true (but it isn’t) would surely solve the problem. A Church bank creating money out of nothing would easily out-compete a payday loan company which has to already have the money to lend.

The only way the Church would have a chance of driving payday loan companies out of business would be to set up its own payday loan company, charging ‘ethical’ rates of usury and sending polite, ‘ethical’ solicitor’s letters to defaulters.

You can’t stand a chance of beating capitalist businesses unless you join them but there’s no guarantee that if you do join them you will beat them, as the ‘ethical’ Cooperative Bank has found to its cost.

The Iron Lady (2012)

Film Review from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The film The Iron Lady is a paean to a personality rather than a political documentary, and must be judged as such. The personal is political, however, and therefore anyone who lived through what happened in Britain in the 1980s will have some reaction to the politics of this film. Meryl Streep's acting, as ever, is extraordinary and this is by far the most remarkable thing about this film. Most of the action effectively takes place inside Thatcher's head, as her senile dementia filters a mish-mash of memories, regrets, resentments and pride over the course of her career. This allows the film some poetic license in its random and one-sided presentation of historical events. This device enables, as it were, a multitude of sins, as we are allowed only the most cursory of glances into the dogmatic arrogance of her rule or the huge suffering and destruction of life which her governments both oversaw and caused.

We are invited to share in her principled stand that, "we must never give in to terrorists" without even so much as a clue that she was simultaneously financing and sponsoring terror on a vast scale through her support of foreign dictatorships and the sales of arms (which, on a smaller scale, her beloved son Mark was to become thoroughly embroiled in). We are shown in some detail how she had to brave the entrenched male chauvinism of the Conservative Party to be selected as a candidate (and that of the Labour front bench once she arrived in parliament) but are given no clue of the utter contempt she held for the miners' wives who bravely struggled against the violent attack she unleashed on them, their husbands and children and the whole communities that were destroyed by her calculating policies in defence of the profits of the already powerful and privileged. (Regarding the otherwise very realistically filmed scenes in parliament, was there really not a single other woman MP in the country throughout the 70s and 80s?)

There is a nice motif running through the film of her struggling to pack away the extensive wardrobe of her recently deceased husband, which apart from being used to explore and amplify her love for him, also perhaps serves to accentuate how she had to brush away the extraordinary male dominance which had marked the Palace of Westminster until then. Not that any great change was sustained even in those regards, however, as today's few hundred political representatives are still overwhelmingly male as well as overwhelmingly white, public school, Oxford and Cambridge and wealthy (not that this makes any significant difference to the operation of capitalism anyhow).

There is an interesting turning-point half-way through the film, when the rising score and deftly stylised camera work accentuate her supposed moment of epiphany, that she has been "chosen" to lead the movement to end the consensus politics which had prevailed since the Second World War, and embark on her supposedly inspired battle against conciliation. This, and other moments such as the laughably over-played scene where she finally leaves Downing Street for the last time (This gets the fully absurd Hollywood treatment, with hundreds of red roses along the marble floor she treads, and her entire household staff of several dozen servants all in floods of tears!) are the film's greatest indulgences, which perhaps take inspiration from the fiasco of Evita with its focus on the supposedly moving love of "the masses" for their vicious dictators.

The artful and manipulative direction here tries to uphold The Iron Lady as a hugely sympathetic portrait of a woman whom any intelligent political analysis can easily demonstrate to have benefited the super-rich and supervised widespread and often intense suffering for millions of people who were already deprived and became more so. As for the increasing groundswell of anger and resentment, fury and resistance amongst those millions - that was conflated into a few seconds here and there in which an amorphous and animalistic crowd screamed and punched at her as she sat looking dignified and patient like Joan of Arc inside her Bentley.

She is shown as simply reacting to the nuisance of trade union solidarity and the atrocities of the IRA (both the killing of her friend Airey Neave and the bombing of the Brighton Grand are given prominent and fairly graphic attention), rather than having initiated conflict by, for example, waging war on organised labour or benefits claimants. We see her order the attack on the Belgrano, which killed 300 Argentinean conscripts, but those deaths are quickly skated over as we are encouraged to dwell, like her, only on the English volunteers who died in the revenge attack. In short, The Iron Lady portrays Margaret Thatcher on the whole as compassionate, principled and patriotic rather than as a pious, arrogant and dogmatic warrior for the wealthy, who not only scoffed at ideas of social conscience or solidarity but even denied the existence of "society" itself.

Clifford Slapper

Greasy Pole: All That Stuff – And Nonsense (2013)

The Greasy Pole Column from the September 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1945 election the Labour Party offered a manifesto with the title blazoned across the front cover – Let Us Face The Future – which provoked the more retentive voter to comment that this was because they dare not face their past – Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas, the 1931 'National' government... Now Ed Miliband is trying the same desperate technique – concentrating on the promised future and ignoring the indefensible past –Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Alistair Campbell, Iraq, Afghanistan...And if anyone anywhere is still doubtful there is Labour's paddock of developing talent, presented so as to include A Future Leader Of The Party.

Epiphany

One of the brightest and most pyrotechnic of these is Stella Creasy, whose present prospects are for a steady whizz up the Greasy Pole –unless she turns out to have gone too far too fast. It all began when she was asked, at school, to join a noisy protest about the export of sheep from the docks at Brightlingsea. She underwent a political 'epiphany' leaving her dissatisfied with the idea of shouting and waving posters: 'you had to get stuff done'. Any excitement for her in this flash of conversion should have been calmed when in 1989 she joined the Labour Party – at a time when it was sliding towards New Labour with its immovable resolve to win votes by keeping stuff as it was and always had been. If she had any reservations on this whole issue she controlled them, taking jobs as a speech-writer for, among others, Douglas Alexander and Charles Clarke. Elected as a councillor in Walthamstow, she wrote herself a speech which unwisely argued that the nascent recession was passing so that 'We're already starting to see movement out of it...' Such loyalty to that fading government justified her nomination for the parliamentary seat at Walthamstow, which she won in the 2010 election with a majority well over nine thousand.

Praise

Perhaps she was unaware of the enormity of it but she began her time in the Commons by trying to use a lift. Another MP (Conservative and male), apparently unable to accept that a blonde younger women could also be an Honourable Member, informed her that the lift was reserved for MPs. Outrageous as this was it should have been useful to Creasy as an introduction to the prejudice and arrogance rife among those who have such power to regulate our behaviour in the interests of a ruling class. How she responded to that fool is not recorded but a guess can be made from the opinions of others. The Spectator named her Campaigner of the year 2011: 'an example of how to do opposition politics'. The Conservative Home website rated her as 'one of the few genuine Labour stars of the 2010 intake'. Even more impressive (and unnerving) Iain Duncan Smith thought that 'She has certainly got a bright future. Stella will go all the way'. After some delay, Ed Miliband gave her a minor job – Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention.

Threats

Any doubts on whether her promotion would devitalise Creasy's ambitions were answered when she joined Caroline Criado-Perez in her agitation for a female image to appear on the new￡10 bank note –which provoked a storm of Twitter abuse and threats of violence, including rape, toward both of them. The consequent panic obscured the fact that the monetary system is a necessary appendage to capitalism's commodity economy with all that means in terms of poverty and disaster, compared to which the style of bank notes is drastically irrelevant. Creasy has also spoken out about the problem of domestic violence, which on average results in the deaths of two women each week. This is one of the ugliest problems in this society, persisting whatever efforts are made to ease it. But it is not so straightforward; it is often in the confines of a home that the despair, the fear and the frustrations of an impoverished existence overrun all restraints, leading to behaviour which is internal and illegal as distinct from other, more damaging, violence for which people are clothed in uniforms and decorated with medals.

Incorrect

These are just samples of the 'stuff' which Creasy has involved herself in, on the assumption that there was something to be achieved in this way. She regarded Alexander as 'incredibly intelligent and kind' but the fact is that during his time in Parliament under Blair he rose through a series of ministries and is now Shadow Foreign Secretary, apparently complacent to have been part of that wretched experience. There is nothing better to say about Charles Clarke, who was Home Secretary under Blair. He made himself notorious for his readiness to undermine some of the most important legal safeguards of people up against criminal charges. He closed down the Stephen Lawrence Steering Group, set up by Jack Straw to oversee the implementation of the recommendations of the MacPherson report on that racist murder, on the grounds that the majority of the Report had been implemented – which Stephen's mother, did not accept: ' I cannot believe we have achieved anything near what we should have done in the Steering Group'. Creasy's overall view of that government's record was crudely inadequate; on the murderous war in Iraq, and the lies, she '...didn't agree with the decision to go to war. I think, however, that we have moved on and we have a duty now... to both learn from that experience and address where Iraq is...'

To understand the working of this social system, enabling its passage into a sorrowful history, it is not necessary to experience anything like an 'epiphany'; the case for the abolition of capitalism now is constructive of past systems and human abilities within them. For example animals are exported, often with cruel suffering, for breeding or to be sold for profit. That is part of the nature of capitalism's wealth, always and everywhere as commodities. This is a fact which does not respond to shouting on the dockyard or elsewhere and it needs more than 'stuff' to change it.

Ivan

Policing the Proles (2012)

From the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

All coppers might be workers but their role is helping maintain capitalist law and order.

“Evening All”. That was the opening catchphrase of PC George Dixon the eponymous hero of the homely television series Dixon of Dock Green that ran from 1955-73. Crime was of the petty variety. The real crux of the show amounted to the perception of Dock Green “nick” as an extension of George’s cosy semi-detached. Each episode ended with a homily about being a good citizen, a dutiful salute and the final vigilant "Goodnight all". Entertainment? Maybe. But the by-product amounted to a masterful PR campaign for the police force, one that nowadays they would swap their tasers for at the drop of riot shield.

The police force is barely a couple of hundred years old, but the Special Constabulary dates back to “Anglo Saxon times, when people policed themselves”. In 1673, King Charles II brought in an Act which deemed that “any citizen might be sworn in as a temporary peace-officer for a specific occasion, in particular when there was a threat of great disturbances”. Essentially the neighbourhood bobby had become politicised.

The existence of private property is why the police exist. As property devolved more and more in to the hands of the few, property owners began to fear for their property. Jeremy Bentham suggested a Ministry of Police, but an 1818 Parliamentary Committee saw it as "a plan which would make every servant of every house a spy on the actions of his master, and all classes of society spies on each other"(E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class). One year later 400 Special Constables joined a military presence of hundreds of armed men to confront a crowd of protestors seeking the reform of parliamentary representation at St Peters Fields, Manchester. Fifteen people were killed and 400-700 people were injured as the Cavalry charged with drawn sabres to disperse the crowd.

In 1829 Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force with 1000 constables. By 1857 all of the UK’s cities had formed their own police forces. Peel is said to have developed the “Peelian Principles” an ethical philosophy that supposedly underpins policing. At the forefront of the code is the principle: “The police are the public and the public are the police”. This could be interpreted as another meaningless slogan like the millionaire David Cameron’s jingle “we’re all in it together”. But the police are workers; just as much a part of the 99 percent as bank workers, dustman, nurses, bricklayers, miners, etc.

Discussing the Police Strike of 1919, the Socialist Standard pointed out that “the policeman is so essentially a member of the exploited class that he cannot get his admitted grievances redressed until he threatens to cease to be a policeman”. And in addressing a point that is frequently made nowadays: "the statement that a policeman is only such to support the State” it commented, “The complement of this half truth is, of course, that the State is only an instrument for keeping the workers in subjection.” (Editorial, June 1919)

The state was busy subjugating workers in 1910 when: “Riotous scenes without parallel in a South Wales Coalfield were enacted last night in mid-Rhondda and at Aberaman. At both places, the police and the mob were in fierce conflict for many hours, charge after charge being made by the constabulary upon the crowd. In the mid-Rhondda alone over a hundred casualties were reported, injured strikers being conveyed to local surgeries for treatment." (South Wales Daily News, 9 November 1910)  The state was at it again in 1919 when the City of Glasgow Police repeatedly baton-charged workers who were campaigning for shorter working hours to alleviate unemployment. On “Bloody Friday” a mass meeting was to be held in George Square, but the state intervened, initially with the police. But by Friday night the police had been reinforced with the state’s military muscle when "10,000 troops armed with machine guns, tanks and a howitzer arrived”. Ruling class paranoia revealed itself when the decision was made that: “No Glaswegian troops were deployed, with the British government fearing that fellow Glaswegians, soldiers or otherwise, would go over to the workers' side if a revolutionary situation developed in Glasgow” (Wikipedia).

The 1926 General Strike demonstrated how all pervading state power can be when profits are threatened. A warship was sent to Newcastle and 226,000 special policemen were recruited. Police baton-charged strikers in Hull, Preston, Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. The government “seized all supplies of paper, which hindered publication of the TUC's paper, “The British Worker”. The Catholic Church declared the strike “a sin”. And the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, declared the strike an attack on Britain's democracy.

During the NUM strike of 1984-5 Margaret Thatcher speaking to Parliament said (as Stanley Baldwin before her did) that “giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob”; she referred to the striking miners as ‘the enemy within’. Demonising your opponents is a well-worn tactic of the ruling class, made considerably more effective when it is aided and abetted by a tame media. "By the time the strike was over the miners had experienced at first hand the way in which the coercive power of the state can be, and is, used in defence of ruling class interests. The police, the judiciary, criminal courts and civil courts, even the DHSS were all used against the striking miners” (SPGB, The Strike Weapon: Lessons of the Miners’ Strike. 1985).

The NUM strike of 1984 to 1985 was a watershed in the class war. The power of the unions was on the wane. And the “rolling back of the state” was underway. The ruling class was on the offensive in the defence of profits. The Selsdon Group of right-wing Tories was at the centre of the ideology dubbed Thatcherism. And Margaret Thatcher was its public image. Perhaps her speech in May 1988 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland reveals the callousness of the ruling class when she proffered a biblical validation for her view on how capitalism should work. Quoting St Paul she said, "If a man will not work he shall not eat". This ideology has driven state policy ever since and is peddled to workers as part of a divide-and-rule strategy.

The Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, revealed in her autobiography how “counter-subversion” tactics were employed against the striking miners. Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners reveals a great deal more, including phone tapping, forged documents, informers, phoney bank deposits and the use of agents provocateurs. The use of agent provocateurs to infiltrate working class organisations is not new. Marx described how the state spy, Joseph Crémer, was expelled from the German Workers’ Educational Society in 1852.

Baton charges, and the panic created by charging mounted police has been reinforced by the methodical use of surveillance techniques and the controversial policy of kettling. It is no longer just the striking worker that has been looked upon as a threat to ruling class power—any group that might threaten profits is now judged to be the “enemy within”. The use of agent provocateurs is perhaps the most despised of all ploys used by the state. And the police are loath to be exposed as employing such tactics because it undermines their self-image as impartial. The reality though is very different.

In June 2008, in a letter to the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, the then MP George Galloway accused the “Metropolitan Police of engaging in ‘a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder’ during President George W. Bush’s visit to the UK last week."

Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake who joined G20 protestors in London saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. “When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police’” (Observer 10 May 2009).

Mark Kennedy an undercover Metropolitan police officer was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary aired in October 2011. By his own admission he stated that he spent seven years infiltrating, befriending, and informing on peaceful environmental groups in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy and Iceland. He claimed that he “knew of fifteen other undercover police officers operating in protest groups during the last decade” (Ecologist 9 February 2011). A quote from the Channel 4 documentary by Michael Meacher, former Labour Environment Minister reveals the real motivation behind these police tactics “. . .behind it are corporate interests. . .who don’t want interference, and they don’t want public opinion aroused against a product that is extraordinarily profitable for them”. And who are these corporate interests? The Guardian reported on the 14 February 2011 that: “The energy giant E.ON, Britain's second-biggest coal producer Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power, one of the UK's largest electricity-generators, have been paying for the services of a private security firm that has been secretly monitoring activists”.

The Occupy Movement has the potential to become a real threat to capitalism. Theirs isn’t simply a strikers or eco-protestors threat to profits. They can expect the state to employ all its powers and guile to discredit and destroy their nascent movement. New York Police Departments recent raid on the “People’s Library” at Zuccotti Park reveals how frightened our masters are of ideas.  Police “confiscated approximately 4,000 books. . . 1,275 books of the 4,000 books seized had been recovered; of those, one-third was damaged to the point of being unusable. It’s estimated that 2,725 books had been destroyed "(Truth-out.org).

For too long now our class has been lied to, tricked, beaten, tortured and murdered by the ruling class through the agency of the state. It must end. It’s up to you to bring that about?

Andy Matthews