Cooking the Books: Against ‘Redistributionism’ (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 5 December there was an interesting meeting in New York organised by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) and Internationalist Perspective (IP). It’s on YouTube at http://tinyurl.ms/yvwx Like us, the four speakers all argued that the populist policy advocated by trade unions and leftwing demagogues of redistributing income from the rich to the working class was not a way out of the crisis.

Anne Jaclard (MHI) pointed out that this was a typical example of trying to reform capitalism to make it work in the interest of the working class, but this could not be done. Pursuing it was not just futile but a diversion from acting to get rid of capitalism. Redistributive politics, or ‘redistributionism’, was a view that needed to be combatted. This was not to say that workers should not try to get more under capitalism; that was part of the class struggle.

Sander (IP) said that the mistake of the ‘redistributionists’ was the common one of assuming that the aim of production today was consumption whereas it was the production of goods not as such but as value with the aim of accumulating more and more of it. Diverting value which otherwise would be invested by capitalist firms in production would lead to inflation as the goods on which to spend it would not get produced.

Andrew Kliman (MHI) presented the classic case against ‘underconsumptionist’ theories of capitalism, pointing out that what the workers could not buy could be bought by capitalists whether to consume or to invest in production. That workers could not buy back all they produced could not be the explanation of capitalist crises as this was the case also in boom times; in fact, if this was the case capitalism ought to be in a permanent slump and should have collapsed long ago. The mistake was to see ‘consumption’ as just what the workers and capitalists bought to consume, whereas ‘effective demand’ also included what the capitalists invested in production. It was changes in this, as the rate of profit went up or down, that determined capitalism’s boom/slump cycle. He denied that there had been a shift of income from workers to capitalists in the period leading up to the outbreak of the slump in 2008 and that this was its cause. He claimed that working class living standards had not fallen during this period. The only way out of a slump, he said, was a devaluation of existing capital that would restore the rate of profit.

McIntosh (IP) disagreed that working class living standards hadn’t fallen in the decades up to 2008 but agreed that the only way out of a slump was a devaluation of capital. It was not the redistributive policies of the New Deal that had ended the slump of the 1930s. According to him, it was the Second World War and the massive devaluation of capital through its destruction that did this. The way-out for the working class was not an attempted redistribution of income in their favour (as now being proposed by the new Mayor of New York De Blasio as well as unions and the Left), but an end to production as value. He was in favour of workers struggling for higher wages but whether wages were high or low, they still involved exploitation. What was needed was production directly to meet human needs and so the end of value, money and wage-labour altogether.

Wilfred Owen — war poet, icon . . . visionary? (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As one of the most popular and widely-read poets of World War One, Wilfred Owen’s legacy is a body of work deeply critical of war and its effects. But what was his attitude to the ultimate causes of war?

That turbulent decade, the 1960s, with its "Peace Movement" - CND, Aldermaston Marches, anti-Vietnam protests and all that – witnessed also the rediscovery of the works of World War I poet Wilfred Owen and his popular elevation to something of a "moral exemplar" and "voice for his generation"; a process further enhanced by composer Benjamin Britten's inclusion of several of his poems in the opera War Requiem.

A whole eclectic range of groupings have, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, claimed him as their own; from pacifists, feminists, Christians to so-called socialists, and whilst politically he did "tend to take the liberal side of the question", he was no pacifist and certainly no socialist, "so called" or otherwise.

Owen was one of a cluster of poets -Sassoon, Graves, Brooke and others - who endeavoured to view war from the perspective of the common soldier, portraying it in all its stark inglorious horror; a genre miles (well, easily half a league) away from the triumphal propagandist outpourings of late - Victorians Arnold, Newbolt and Tennyson. Whilst they, from distant drawing-room safety, could narrate glowing sagas of heroic charges, famous victories and sabres clashing, Owen’s poetic tapestry was an altogether more realistic one, interwoven and spattered with images of carnage and suffering.

Infantrymen "shiver and cringe in holes", "curse through sludge", "bleed and spew", lose limbs, eyesight, sanity. The air resounds to "the monstrous anger of guns", the wailings of "shell on frantic shell", "stuttering rifle fire" and "stinks sour" of mud, of men - of corpses.

It is perhaps not widely known that Owen spent little actual time on the Front Line - a mere 30 days between January and April 1917, from which period most of his poems emanate, followed by a further month through October into November 1918. Moreover, although he did suffer all the tribulations of combat and did indeed pay the ultimate price, he was spared the month on month, year on year wet, freezing, verminous conditions and the prolonged tedium, intimidation and gnawing uncertainty endured by so many. Whilst he could with every justification write, "Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life" and, "Those last 4 days I've suffered Seventh Hell", his overall war experience was by no means typical.

The son of a minor railway official, Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire in 1893 and if money was sufficiently tight to preclude university education, his upbringing was not a deprived one. Displaying some small academic talent, Owen pursued careers initially as pupil-teacher then parish assistant.

Already, inspired by Keats, he was dabbling in verse. The outbreak of World War 1 found him eking out an existence as an English tutor in Bordeaux, France whence he displayed not the slightest inclination to "answer his Country's call". Eventually however, feeling "traitorously idle" and galvanised by the views of his French literary mentor, Laurent Tailhade, he crossed the Channel in October 1915 and enlisted as a private in the Artists' Rifles, "to defend his language and culture".

Thereafter, through sheer graft, "Little Owen", a frail diminutive figure and "perceptively provincial", secured a commission as Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment and in January 1917 arrived in the trenches "to fight Fritz whom," he insisted, "he did not hate". Then ensued intermittent periods of ferocious action until in April, already traumatised by a recent gassing incident later featured in verse, Owen was blown up, rendered temporarily unconscious and subsequently diagnosed as suffering from "shellshock".

By 1917, a more scientific attitude had been adopted towards this phenomenon. The Somme offensive the previous year had yielded 30,000 such cases and as they clearly couldn't all be "degenerates" or "cowards", a new term, "Neurasthenia", had come into vogue. The importance of immediate therapy being recognised, this was provided in nearby field hospitals; not it should be noted, from any humanitarian considerations, but solely to enable the less serious cases, around two thirds overall, to be speedily "cured" and returned to the trenches for another dose of the same.

Owen, as a more severe case, was invalided home, hospitalised in Edinburgh and set about creating the poems that would eventually secure his reputation. In Dulce et Decorum Est, an ironic comment on the famous line by the Latin poet Horace, that it is "pleasant and honourable to die for one's country", Owen recounted the plight of an unmasked Tommy caught in a mustard gas attack, concluding:

"In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dream you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend you would not tell with such zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."

The "old Lie"? During his prolonged convalescence, Owen encountered various viewpoints, dissenting and otherwise, on the conduct of the War but there is no evidence that he ever developed any understanding of the underlying reasons for its having been waged in the first place. Nevertheless, however inadvertently, Owen has, as it were, "landed a direct hit". It does require a lie; a veritable pack of them in fact, to persuade the artisans, the farmhands, the clerks in one country that their own best interests are suddenly and mysteriously at variance with those of their direct counterparts in another and to spontaneously quit their respective workplaces, dole-queues, semis and slums to participate in the act of mutual slaughter that is war. Always "freedom", "democracy", "ways of life", "national pride" are at stake and, remarkably, "God" is ever on their side.

Specific to the 1914 affair, German "militarism" had to be rebuffed and "plucky little Belgium" supported. The truth is decidedly less exotic. Wars are always and only waged for entirely commercial reasons - access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. In short, to consolidate existing profits and aspire to the accumulation of others. The present globally-dominant economic system, capitalism, features within each country, the ownership of the means of wealth - the land, factories etc. - by a tiny parasite minority, from which it follows therefore that any profits will accrue only to that minority. The overwhelming non-owning majority; those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a peashooter to their lips? Hence the need for the "old lie".

Germany did not become unified until the 1870s, by which time the bulk of the world's exploitable resources had been colonised by longer-established nation states like Britain and France. To develop and expand, therefore, required attempting to "muscle in on the action", precisely in the way that criminal organisations have long engaged in feuds over bootlegging, gambling and drug-trafficking rights. World War I was only ever a sordid largescale turf war between rival "families" within capitalism's mafia - although by the time the politicians, the media, the clergy and the educationalists had spun their lies, old and new, very few people saw it as such.

Ignorant of the real causes of the War, Owen could only see its solution in terms both abstract and impracticable, if not downright silly. In this he was not alone. Some held that the war was a "natural tragedy" to which the only responses could be of sorrow and compassion; others that it represented merely the periodic erupting of some innate human predisposition towards aggression. Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells believed the war would "exhaust itself", enabling wise and devoted people (like themselves, presumably), to step in and "rebuild Society". Owen himself considered that when the war machinery had "choked itself to a halt", then "art" and "beauty" could be deployed to "help refresh the human spirit".

Accordingly, he hoped to avoid being returned to the Front, but his hopes were not to be realised. In due course, he was deemed "cured" and returned to France nicely in time to participate in the final decisive attack on and through the Hindenberg Line. For bravery under fire he was awarded the Military Cross but as this particular incident involved him also single-handedly exterminating numerous "Fritzes", the actual text of his citation tends not to be quoted by those who would portray him as the "Poet of Pity". He himself perished at St. Souplet just one week prior to that supreme exercise in pretentious cant -"The eleventh hour of the eleventh day, etc., etc." - that was the signing of the Armistice.

The September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard, observing the entirely "business" nature of the war embarked upon, both extended the hand of friendship to the workers of all countries and declared that there was nothing at stake "to justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood". This uniquely principled stance, maintained throughout, s one of which socialists can feel immensely proud. More importantly, a solution, concrete, practicable and eminently sensible, was offered. Since wars arise solely from conflicts of interest between rival groupings of capitalists, and are merely an extension, a more turbulent or intense phase of this ongoing struggle, then it follows that their eradication lies with the universal replacement of private ownership with common ownership. If the world's natural resources and means of producing wealth were the property of Humanity at large, what possible reason for conflict would, or could, remain?

Wilfred Owen's poetic voice was an exceptional and developing one, prematurely stilled. Who knows to what heights it might have soared? His poems depict their subject matter in ways that are once beautiful and repulsive and are, albeit unintentionally, a damning indictment of class-divided society. Furthermore, they serve as a dire warning to any testosterone-fuelled youth "ardent for some desperate glory", that the net result of "taking the shilling" might just be the sudden and catastrophic loss of his testosterone-producing faculties. As much, however, as his poems deserve to be read, to be appreciated, to be cherished, they do merely observe; they neither investigate nor solve. This requires the altogether more prosaic process of examining and understanding the underlying reasons for war.

Andrew Armitage

Cooking the Books: Profits before petitions (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Profit before planet. Who is making deals with your government?” read the front page of the leaflet from Friends of the Earth that dropped through people’s letterboxes recently. Their answer:

“Oil companies. Supermarkets. Petro-chemical firms. Airlines. Globally they spend millions of pounds undermining environmental policy. Big businesses spend serious money on advertising and PR telling us that they are doing their bit for the environment. But away from the public eye they’re spending many millions holding back environmental progress. Airlines are spending millions to persuade governments to expand airports. Petro-chemical companies are blocking environmentally friendly measures because of the cost to them. Oil companies are funding ‘independent thinktanks’, designed to undermine serious climate change research. And they are all doing it for one thing. Profit.”   

True, all too true. But the big businesses concerned are only doing what they were set up to do – preserve and increase the wealth of their shareholders. This is an economic imperative as well as a legal obligation. The directors and executives of a business who did not seek to maximise profits and grow bigger could face legal action from its shareholders. More importantly, it would also risk going under in the battle of competition as, if it didn’t seek to maximise profits, it would not accumulate enough funds to invest in the new productive equipment and methods that it must if it is produce cheaper or, at least, as cheaply as its competitors.

This competitive striving for profits is built-in to capitalism. The accumulation of more and more capital out of profits is in fact what capitalism is all about. The legal obligation on businesses to do this is a reflection of this basic economic mechanism of capitalism.

So what do Friends of the Earth propose to do about it? Campaign against the whole profit system and for a society in which there would be no profit-seeking businesses controlling production because productive resources would have become the common heritage of all and be used to directly provide for people’s needs?

No, not at all. They accept the profit system and merely offer to restrain profit-seeking activities of big businesses by lobbying against their excesses. “We have nearly 40 year’s campaigning and political lobbying experience. So we know how to take on, and beat, the corporate bullies.” They claim an “ability to influence change” and that “left to their own devices, big businesses will simply not put the planet before profits. But there are two things you can do today to make them act.”

First, make a monthly donation to them of £3 a month. Second, sign a “campaign action card” to be delivered to David Cameron at Number 10, saying: “I am therefore calling on you and your Government to put the interests of people and our planet first – and not allow yourselves to be bullied by big business.” This is asking for the impossible. No government has, nor ever will, put people before profits. Their role is, precisely, to establish or maintain the best conditions for profit-making. The cards will just end up in the rubbish bin all government departments will have for such petitions.

Having said this, governments sometimes do intervene, in the overall capitalist interest, to restrain the activities of some business or industry where these activities are endangering the interests of all other businesses and industries. But they can work this out for themselves without the lobbying of no doubt well-meaning charities.

The Salient (1985)

From the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the bus from Roulers draws near to Ypres it runs along a wide street of rather expensive houses. Strung along the top of a low ridge, it is a village, but like so many others in this motorcar age it has become a detached suburb of Ypres. A quiet ordinary scene; children cycle home to lunch, people stand at bus stops or potter in front gardens while the usual mid-day traffic passes through. Away to the right the land drops downhill, revealing green fields and woods, with the spire of Ypres in the distance. A scene that would look just right on the cover of a glossy magazine. Hazy autumn sunshine completes the picture. So it is with a shock that one reads the road sign—Passchendaele. This was the village pounded by heavy shells to the point that it could no longer be called rubble but dust. This was the prize for which tens of thousands of men died. This was the place that was to give its name to one of the most squalid bouts of butchery in the history of warfare. In those pleasant fields for four months men were shot, gassed, blown to pieces or drowned in water-filled shell holes. This is the edge of the Ypres salient. It is ringed by huge cemeteries, but that whole area is one great graveyard. Under those fields lie the remains of at least 40,000 people. The full casualties are not known but even today the ploughs and ditching machines still bring up bones and skulls.

As it proceeds the bus comes to the main road, where once to stand up straight meant instant death. Then through the terrible Menin Gate, a huge building that runs the width of the ramparts. Juggernaut lorries pass through it with ease. It is faced with white stone, and every inch has a name, 55,000 in all. These are men whose bodies disappeared in the Ypres salient in the period up to June 1917; near Passchendaele there is another memorial with 34,000 names of men who disappeared from June 1917 onwards. These are only British Empire troops and do not include French, Belgian or German. Then on to the end of the ride in the main square of Ypres.

Ypres (today usually called by its Flemish name of Ieper) is a bustling town dominated by its great Cloth Hall and Cathedral. The impression is of an ancient town, somewhat heavily restored; but this is all a reconstruction for the town was painstakingly rebuilt in the early 1920s. Again, a pleasant scene. Buses and coaches stand in the main square disgorging their tourists while the shops and bars are full. People fish in the moat or go off to play some game or other. It is only when you visit the Salient Exhibition under the Cloth Hall that you realise what a shambles Ypres was.

Ypres was the greatest of the medieval Cloth Towns and dominated the Flemish Plain. Once more important even than Bruges or Ghent, it slowly lost its prominence and sank into obscurity. Pre-1914 photographs show it as somewhat run down. The war was to give it a grim immortality.

The war on the Western Front opened with the German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg as well as France. Militarily and economically the invasion of Belgium was beneficial to Germany because it gave its army greater room to manoeuvre and placed the coal mines and factories of Belgium at their disposal. But politically it had the disadvantage of bringing Britain into the war. It was touch and go as to whether Britain should enter the war on the side of the Allies or stay in a state of armed neutrality. The British ruling class had for a century largely kept out of European conflicts, preferring to use diplomacy to maintain the Balance of Power—in other words to keep their rivals divided. Thus they had supported Prussian aggression, being in favour of a united Germany. They had sympathised with Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war and applauded the formation of the German Empire.

It was not until the end of the last century that British capitalists began to wake up to the fact that Germany was developing into their major rival—flooding world markets with cheap, mass produced goods and beginning to muscle in on the colonial scene in Africa and elsewhere. The German programme of naval expansion was also seen as a threat to British naval supremacy. France had always been the traditional enemy; the Entente Cordiale had been signed only in 1904. Throughout the Edwardian period large sections of British public opinion remained anti-French, anti-Russian and pro-German. The invasion of Belgium tipped the balance. Much was made of Britain's obligations under the Treaty of Neutrality and Germany's violation of it, but the real cause for concern was control of the Channel ports. It had long been a cornerstone of British foreign policy that the Channel ports facing London should not be controlled by a great power. This was seen as a major threat to the Port of London, and, of course, "gallant little Belgium" made an excellent propaganda ploy.

So Britain was in the war and soon British troops, alongside French and Belgians, found themselves in headlong retreat. Germany opened the war on the Western Front with a massive attack aimed at encircling Paris and knocking France out of the war. The Germans had massed 12 armies—about a million and a half men—on their frontiers. When they attacked the sheer weight of numbers, aided by French miscalculations, brought them to the outskirts of Paris, where they were held in the battle of the Marne. Unable to break through in France, the German army began a push through Flanders with the intention of outflanking their opponents and seizing the Channel Ports of Dunkirk and Calais. In this they were nearly successful but were held in the vicinity of Ypres; the Belgians had managed to flood low-lying land between the city and the sea. This stopped the German advance to the North of Ypres, and there ensued a period of heavy confused fighting that lasted from 12 October until 11 November. This had been called the first battle of Ypres, although battle is hardly an appropriate description of what was in fact a campaign lasting a month. It was the last time that any kid of movement or manoeuvring was possible on the Western Front. In November the Germans dug in on the ridges that surrounded Ypres. The line of trenches extended from Switzerland to the sea but there was a bulge at Ypres, with the city in its midst, only a few miles deep and a few miles wide. This was the Ypres salient, the most exposed and dangerous patch of land in the world. For four years the fighting never stopped. It was the worst killing ground of all.

The second battle of Ypres opened on 22 April 1915. It began with the bombardment of the city which sent the civilian population streaming out along the roads. In the late afternoon a new horror was added to the scene—chlorine gas. "A strange green vapour" was seen drifting down onto the Algerian troops who were holding this part of the line. This was the first time that this foul weapon had been used, but the next four years were to see even nastier forms unleashed. Everybody is familiar with photographs of blinded men queuing up for treatment; 60,000 men died in the second Ypres. At the end the Allies withdrew to a mere two miles from the ramparts of Ypres. The salient was now small, and for the next two years was pounded by shells almost without interruption. The sane thing for the British to have done would have been to withdraw behind Ypres and straighten the line, but this was no longer just a military matter. The workers at home had been fed a never-ending stream of propaganda about the importance of the Ypres salient and its "glory", so that to have abandoned it would have hit morale. In the popular press this was Britain's own battlefield, ignoring the fact that thousands of Belgians and Frenchmen had also died there. It was to break out of this death-trap that the Third Battle of Ypres was launched. This was its official title, but the world knows it as Passchendaele.

This century has been called "a century of horror", and there has been no shortage of it: Hiroshima, Dresden, Viet Nam, and now Ethiopia to name just a few of the worst, but even among these Passchendaele can still shock. Even by the cruel standards of warfare, in which the loss of human life is acceptable and human beings are measured against territorial gain, it was inexcusable. The declared aim of the offensive, which the British Commander in Chief Haig and the High Command used to convince the government that the plan was reasonable, was to punch a hole in the German defences, pour through into the land beyond and capture Ostend and Zeebrugge to stop the U boat attacks in Allied shipping, and to capture Roulers, the great railway junction through which men and materials passed to the line. This was a complete pipedream because, even if they had succeeded in making a complete breakthrough—something that nobody had managed to do in more than two years—Ostend and Roulers were 40 miles apart. A more realistic aim was to capture the ridges that surrounded Ypres and extend the salient.

The prelude to the attack was the capture of the Messines ridge on the southern rim of the salient. It began by the explosion of 19 mines under the German positions, followed by a barrage of 2266 guns and howitzers and an attack by 80,000 troops. This was a "success" as "only" 1,700 men were killed and the attack achieved its aim. This was one of the factors that bolstered up the illusions of the High Command in the months to come.

In the continuous saga of mindless slaughter that ran from 1914 to 1918, three highlights stand out: the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele. But of these the one that arouses the revulsion—because of the massive loss of life and the unbelievable conditions under which it was fought—was Passchendaele. The area had been reclaimed from marshlands over many generations. Most of it was too wet for cultivation and was used as pasture. Farmers were required by law to keep their ditches clear. This delicate balance was shattered by the unprecedented bombardment in which nearly 4,000 guns pounded the German lines for ten days. Four and a quarter million shells, or 4¾ tons to every yard of the front, were fired. This resulted in the complete destruction of the drainage system. The attack began on the 31 July in torrential rain, and it poured with rain during most of the following three months. On 4 November Canadian troops captured the mass of shell holes that had been the village of Passchendaele. The line had been extended by five miles. The cost? Nobody really knows but the most often quoted figure is 300,000 Allied casualties and 200,000 German.

However, it is the conditions that the armies endured which made this campaign so horrific. A vast area of foul-smelling mud that sucked everything down into it, and water-filled shell holes in which not only men and horses but guns and even tanks sank. Every new shell threw up rotting corpses that had sunk, only to sink again. Overall drifted a new weapon being tried for the first time—mustard gas. Six months later, in April 1918, the big German spring offensive recaptured all the ground which had been gained. In Britain war weariness was spreading. Gone was the wild enthusiasm of 1914; the never ending casualty lists, the ever receding hopes of victory were taking their toll. The old regular army was destroyed in the first few months of the war. Kitchener's Army, the volunteers who had flocked to the recruiting offices in the early days of the war. had been destroyed on the Somme. The British army was scraping the bottom of the barrel, the very, the old and the unfit were dragged in.

The final collapse of Germany in 1918 rolled back the battle lines from the salient. It left behind a scene of utter destruction, a land in which everything was unrecognisable; a place where every landmark had been wiped out. Shattered tree stumps began to throw out leaves again, and the ground was covered with the poppies that became the trade mark of the new "Remembrance" industry. The poppy is a plant that flourishes wherever soil is disturbed, so it would naturally take root in such a place. Incredible as it may seem, within a few months of the Armistice, Ypres became a tourist centre. While the town was still in ruins and teams were still searching for bodies in the area, trains were bringing visitors to the battlefields and tours were being organised in Britain.

Nearly seventy years have passed since the end of that war, and there are few people remaining who took part in it. The landscape has been restored, the trees and hedges have grown again and the fields have been out back. Apart from the cemeteries, one could walk through this place and not know what had happened. But in those seventy years other landscapes have been shattered and millions more have died. Only twenty years after peace came to this area, another, even bloodier, war broke out and in forty years of "peace", so-called local wars like Viet Nam and Cambodia have claimed yet more lives.

Les Dale

It could be you (1995)

Editorial from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

As this year's conference season grinds on the attribution of blame continues in earnest. Aspiring politicians hoping to hit the jackpot know that their party's conference is the big one. For them this is the major event of the year, a televised showpiece designed to maximise the possibilities afforded by what is no more than institutionalised peddling of hopes. So forget the National Lottery, for in this game of chance we are all participants and therefore all as equally likely to have the finger pointed at us.

In the same random fashion that coloured balls are spewed out of the National Lottery number selector so scapegoats for society's ills are picked out. As a member of the working class there is every likelihood that some facet of your existence will be selected and held up as the cause of a one of the current ills that befall us.

It is foolish of us to expect anything else from these smooth-tongued professional mouthpieces. No politician became rich or successful by concerning themselves with honesty, truth or principle. And as they inch their way up the greasy pole of career politics we can only watch as their promises of a better world are continuously held over into life's eternal rollover week.

In this world of rigged opportunities where life's ticket is handed to you at birth the dreams invested in lottery jackpots and the power bestowed upon political dream merchants exist only with your agreement. It is you the finger points at. For if you accept that chance is dependent upon matters outside of your control then you are ignoring the opportunity that is available to us. To take control of our lives and rid ourselves of the organised fraud that is capitalism.

Why do we need socialism? (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The reaction of many workers to this question will be to dismiss it as being no concern of theirs. They are concerned, they say, with the company that employs them, with their chance of keeping their jobs and with getting more pay. They are mistaken. What happens to a particular company depends on its ability to sell its products at a profit, which in turn depends on what happens in the economy as a whole - that is in capitalism. Workers give partial recognition to this by organising with other workers in trade unions. Socialists urge them, in their own class interest, to take the further step of replacing capitalism with socialism.

Capitalism, the social system under which we live now, is briefly described in our Declaration of Principles:

Society, as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living, (i.e. land, factories, railways etc) by the capitalist or Master class, and the consecutive enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

And our Object deals with socialism:

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. 

Unfortunately, and through no fault of our ours, the terms capitalism and socialism have both come to be widely used to mean something quite different from what they mean to socialists.

The Labour Party and the Tory Party have, for many years, restricted the term capitalism to cover only part of the whole capitalist system, excluding from the definition the nationalised, or state capitalist industries. In keeping with this unjustified limitation both parties have chosen to call the state capitalist industries "socialism".

This was not always so, for some of the leaders of the Labour Party once took a different view. Sidney Webb, later to become a minister in Labour governments, signed  the Manifesto of English Socialists which contained this declaration:

On this point all socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage-system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish National and International Communism on a sound basis.

In 1907 Keir Hardie the "father of the Labour Party" - and its first champion, justified nationalisation, not as an end in itself, but on the ground that "it will prepare the way for free communism . . . in which the rule of life will be  . . . 'from each according to his ability. To each according to his needs'". In saying this he was, as he said, claiming the Labour Party to be Marxist.

The Tory Party has been equally inconsistent. Now they say that nationalisation is socialism. They did not say that in 1844, when they passed the first act giving the government power to nationalise the railways, or when Tory governments nationalised the postal, telegraph and telephone services of when they set up the Central Electricity Board and the BBC. Their version then was that these were measures undertaken in the interests of capitalism.

They have a special problem with their idolised leader, Winston Churchill, for during the greater part of his political life he was a supporter of nationalisation and, in their misuse of language, must therefore have been a "socialist". Churchill was minister in several governments which nationalised various services and in 1943, when he was Prime Minister, he declared: "There is a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise, especially in relation to monopolies">

Karl Marx spent a large part of his life studying the historical developments which produced capitalism. He identified what distinguishes it from earlier social systems, describing how capitalism came into being with the forcible removal of the peasants from the land, turning them into a propertyless class - wage earners producing profits for the owners of land and capital. In his analysis Marx set out the conditions necessary for the rise of the capitalist system of society -  a peasantry forced off the land and compelled therefore to seek employment; an owning class possessing land and money; the prevailing arrangement being the production of "commodities" (the products of industry should be, not for the direct use of the owning class but for sale in the market) and the dispossessed class being wage workers as opposed to slaves.

He showed that the essential, distinctive characteristic of capitalism is not the exploitation of one class by another, or riches and poverty (both existed when there was slavery and where there was serfdom) but commodity production as the prevailing system, wealth being produced by a class of wage-earners. So the opening paragraph of Marx's Capital (Vol. 1) begins with the words:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities". 

 In line with this, Marx's aim of replacing capitalism with socialism involved, not only the dispossession of the owning class, but the ending of production for sale. It was put by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto as "the abolition of buying and selling". Engels said: "With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with". Marx also showed that historically, in all forms of society, the way in which the products of industry are divided among the different class is determined by the existing mode of production itself.

In socialist society therefore, with production directly and solely for use and the consequent disappearance of the money system, the wages system and incomes from the ownership of property, all will have free access to what has been produced. This brings us to another misuse of the word socialism, based on the fallacy that state capitalism (nationalisation) is socialism. We are told the world is divided into "capitalist countries" and "socialist countries", the latter comprising Russia with her allies and associates, China, and such modern countries as happen to have governments which call themselves "socialist" (France and Spain at present and Britain when the Labour Party is in power).

This theory is totally without foundation. In all the 160 countries in the world there is a wage-earning class divorced from the means of production, getting a living by being the employees of the companies and governments which own and control society's means of production and distribution. In all there are inequalities of wealth and income; the more money you have the more you can enjoy of the products of industry. In all, the prevalent form is commodity production' production for sale at a profit. (In Russia for example a large part of the revenue of the central government is described as "a share in the profits of state industry'). The very existence of the 160 separate countries with their conflicting interests and armed forces is an indication of world-wide capitalism for, as Marx said, the formation of the separate nation states was a necessary part of the establishment of capitalist class supremacy.

In seeking to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism the appeal of socialists is to the working class of the world, in whose common interest it is to bring about that revolutionary change.

Edgar Hardcastle 

Keynes’s World (A Capitalist Utopia) (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maynard Keynes imagined a society that would be centred on the pursuit of enjoyment rather than accumulation, but like other reformists he couldn’t fathom a future without money and commodities.

Markets, profit, money, and private property seem as natural as the air we breathe to most people. Like Adam Smith, they believe that the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” is an aspect of our human nature. So it is naturally assumed that commodity exchange will continue to exist in the future, and that the only realistic way to overcome the problems we face is through a reform of capitalism. This is the “common sense” of today. And from this perspective, socialists appear to be unrealistic dreamers.

Certainly, socialists do dream of a new form of society, but our conclusion that fundamental social change is necessary is based on an understanding of today’s reality. We know from experience and study that the serious problems which humanity faces, such as poverty and war, arise naturally from the capitalist system itself. History also teaches us that other forms of society have preceded capitalism, so this system is neither eternal nor rooted in “human nature.” And we also have an idea of how to achieve socialism by means of a revolutionary political movement.

The aim of this article, however, is not so much to refute the claim that socialists are unrealistic, as to throw this same criticism back at those who believe capitalism will somehow work out its problems in the future. This reformist view, quite frankly, is a daydream. To concoct their capitalist utopia, reformists have to overlook the nature of capitalism as a class-divided system of production for profit, not to mention the fact that profit stems from surplus value obtained from workers.

The unreality of the reformists’ standpoint becomes clear if we look at any of their depictions of a better future under capitalism. The view of the economist J.M. Keynes seems as good as any to consider, particularly since his stature has been high (at times) among both capitalists and self-styled leftists.

Keynes’s prediction

In a 1930 article entitled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,” Keynes predicts a far better world in a hundred years. He does not attach any label to his future society circa 2030, but it is said to be a world where the “economic problem” has been solved. This is defined as the problem of scarcity, which he describes as the central economic problem that has confronted humanity throughout history. Overcoming scarcity will mean that people’s “absolute needs” (as opposed to subjective needs) are fully met.

The solution to the problem of scarcity, Keynes says, is a continuation of the capital accumulation and technical innovation that have been raising the standard of living since the dawn of the “modern age” (capitalism) following centuries of stagnation. He views capital accumulation in material terms, noting that if capital increases at two percent a year, “the capital equipment of the world will have increased by a half in twenty years, and seven and a half times in a hundred years.” He encourages the reader to “think of this in terms of material things — houses, transport, and the like.”

This steady capitalist growth is the basis for Keynes’s bold prediction that the standard of life in “progressive countries” in a hundred years’ time “will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day,” even adding that it “would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.” Expressed in qualitative terms, he says that once economic scarcity has been overcome, we will be able to “devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.”

What scarcity?

Before further examining Keynes’s solution to “economic scarcity,” it is worth considering whether scarcity, at least as he understands it, is indeed our main problem.

Keynes is hardly alone in raising the problem of scarcity. In a popular university textbook by Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, students are informed on the very first page that, “Scarcity means that society has limited resources and therefore cannot produce all the goods and services people wish to have+a society cannot give every individual the highest standard of living to which he or she might aspire” (Principles of Economics).

Here this problem of scarcity is both an explanation and a justification for why some people have a less than ideal life. But if society’s resources are so limited, how can the rich (like Mankiw himself), and the ultra-rich, justify their own disproportionate consumption? The fact that a single individual, Warren Buffett, has 35 billion dollars on hand to donate to a charity run by another multi-billionaire, suggests that the “scarcity” some of us face does not stem from the limited resources of society.

The fact that the economic scarcity of certain individuals is an artificial condition, related to class divisions, should have been perfectly clear to Keynes. Already a century earlier, the Swiss economist Sismondi had been shocked to see first-hand how miserable workers in England were despite the tremendous advances in the output of production. The artificial nature of “scarcity” under capitalism becomes even clearer during a crisis, when factories remain idle because production is not profitable and commodities rot on shelves for a lack of customers.

Keynes wrote his article at the outset of the Great Depression, so he could not completely ignore the mass unemployment of the time. Yet, in his article, unemployment is dismissed as “growing-pains from over-rapid changes” or a “temporary phase of maladjustment.” He was confident that in the long run things would work out, which is a bit rich coming from a man who reminded us that “in the long run we are all dead.” Today, more than 75 years later, these growing pains continue. The “scarcity” resulting from unemployment seems unlikely to end any time soon.

Keynes’s way of framing the problem in terms of scarcity, and finding the solution in increased production, only makes sense if it is assumed that we are already dealing with a socialist society. That is, in socialism, where there is social ownership of the means of production and the aim of production is to directly meet human needs, any expansion of material production or increase in labour productivity would potentially raise the standard of living for every member of society.

Things are a bit different under capitalism. We know from experience, for example, that the introduction of new technologies or increased productivity will not necessarily result in a shorter working day or improved standard of living. This seemingly illogical state of affairs is not surprising when we consider that technical improvements are only made to gain a competitive advantage that will result in higher profits.

Keynes chooses to ignore the obvious fact that the pursuit of profit underlies technical innovation, making it seem instead as if every increase in production under capitalism will directly raise the standard of living for the population as a whole, bringing us that much closer to the end of scarcity.

Neighbourly thinking

How will we know when economic scarcity has become a thing of the past? Keynes writes: “The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when this state of affairs becomes so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed.”

He argues that the number of affluent members of society will increase to the point that people’s way of thinking changes. Instead of being “economically purposive” (selfish), people will be generous towards each other. It is not at all clear, however, how “general” this state of affairs will have to be for a magical transformation in consciousness to take place.

The absurdity of Keynes’s dream speaks for itself. Why would a person suddenly begin acting in a neighbourly fashion one day, if the competitive system that had fostered his avarice were still very much in place? Moreover, it takes considerable wealth today for a person to be able devote his or her “energies to non-economic purposes.” And even those able to retire from the business world, to engage in philanthropy and the like, appoint other “economically purposive” characters to manage their affairs. At any rate, few people are satisfied even after their “absolute needs” have been met, and most seek to accumulate a bit more just to be on the safe side. It should be obvious that the general way people think and behave will only fundamentally change once we are free of the insecurity that the competitive capitalist system breeds.

To his credit, Keynes does seem a bit disgusted by the selfish way people act under capitalism in its present form. But in a strange twist of logic, he argues that selfish behaviour will some day set us free from selfishness. In fact, he warns us not to start acting too generous, too soon: “But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” Apparently, the road to paradise is paved with bad intentions.

“Economic bliss”

Keynes’s depiction of what he jokingly refers to as “economic bliss” is very brief, but he does manage to effectively contrast the stunted nature of present-day life with a far more civilised existence in the future. He notes, for example, that people will begin living for the sake of enjoying the present, rather than endlessly accumulating for tomorrow. Instead of the fawning over the rich, people would value those “who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking the direct enjoyment in things.”

Keynes also points out that even after we are free of economic scarcity, many people will have a strong desire to work. He suggests, for instance, “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week” would probably be “quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” It is not clear whether this work is actually necessary, or just a way for people to occupy their time, but Keynes is right to suggest that work can be a source of human satisfaction (if taken in the proper dosage), which refutes the idea that no one would bother to work in socialism.

Compared to the joie de vivre that characterizes life in his future world, Keynes says that today’s love of money “as a possession” would seem a “somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” And he looks forward to the day when “all kinds of social customs and economic practices” that are “distasteful and unjust” can at last be discarded. Although, true to form, he feels obliged to remind us that such habits are “tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital,” which is his motive force of history.

Many of Keynes’s observations, ironically enough, are applicable to life in socialism, but his clear assumption is that the system of production from the days of economic scarcity remains more or less intact. Even though money will no longer be loved as a possession, it will still be cherished “as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life.” In other words, people will still have to pay for whatever they consume. This naturally means that products are produced as “commodities” for exchange, and therefore the means of production are in the hands of private individuals or groups of individuals. Keynes even admits that there will be people in the future with “intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth,” although he assures us that we “will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.”

In short, Keynes looks to a future where people are generous and enjoy life to the fullest even though production is carried out with profit in mind and money still makes the world go round. To which socialists can only respond: Dream on!

Michael Schauerte

Cooking the Books: Cash Mountains - Why? (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his City column in the London Evening Standard (21 February) Anthony Hilton commented on the fact that at the moment “firms are awash with cash”:

“It is certainly highly unusual for companies to be in such surplus. Over the past half-century in both Britain and America, companies have shown themselves far more likely to be borrowers than savers. It is different now because they are behaving differently. Companies are sitting on mountains of cash because they have decided no longer to invest it. The ratio of investment in GDP in the developed world is about the lowest it has been for 60 years. What we now see – in Britain and the Unites States in particular – are corporates running themselves for cash rather than growth.”

This is indeed how many capitalist corporations are behaving at the moment, but the way Hilton puts it makes it seem that this is a deliberate change of policy objective on the part of those in charge of them: in the past they aimed at growth by re-investing the profits they made; now they have decided to use them to build up their cash reserves instead.

But why? This doesn’t make sense in terms of capitalism as a system where capital is accumulated out of profit and then reinvested in production, (i.e. growth), and where those who Marx said “personified capital” (today the top executives of capitalist corporations more than the individual capitalists of his day) are “merely a cog” in a social mechanism which obliges them to “keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation” (Capital, Vol 1, ch. 24, section 3).

Hilton’s explanation is that a target for building up profits that are not necessarily re-invested is attained more easily and quickly than a target for growing the size of the business; so top executives prefer to set such targets as easier for them to achieve and so claim their bonuses. “The bonus culture,” he says, “is destroying the system. The focus on the short term has led to a calamitous fall in investment which has unbalanced the entire national economy.” In short, it has even caused the present crisis.

The present crisis has been caused by a lack of investment; in fact, that’s what it is, a fall in investment which has had knock-on effects, on consumer demand and government debt as well as on output and employment. So Hilton is not entirely wrong when he writes:

“Conventional wisdom holds that the mess we’re in is the result of governments spending too much. But it could also be thought of as the consequences of firms spending too little.”

This, in fact, is how it should be thought of. The present slump has been caused, and is continuing, because of the reluctance of companies to re-invest any profits they are still making to expand production. But not for the reason Hilton suggests. It’s not because companies have decided to deliberately build up their cash reserves. It’s because they have calculated that they won’t make any or enough profit if they do invest. So they don’t, and as a result their cash reserves build up. Hilton has got it the wrong way round.

Anger (1986)

From the June 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The TV licence man came today. I nearly fell down with fright. He looked grim. He could see the borrowed set on the floor behind me, no use denying it. With a two month old baby it's the only thing that has kept us sane. Now it will have to go. We can't afford the fee.

It rains a lot in the north country. Mum used to say it was the angels weeping. Eighteen miserable quid to keep your sanity. I could weep. Of course there's no work. All the mills have shut. Around here you're more or less expected to be on the dole. Around here we're all scroungers. It's a laugh really. I've told so many lies to the Supplementary Benefit office I practically have to keep records. You can't afford the truth. You'd starve. Of course I live with my wife and two kids. If they found out they'd flatten us. They don't even want us to have that. It's the system.

Some of my friends shoplift. I'm too scared myself. There'd be a terrible stink. Mostly they steal food, the interesting sorts that cost too much, or baby clothes for us and other people. Or books. Even criminals read books. Sometimes a book's the best thing.

Of course we're in debt. I wasn't taught to manage money when I was a kid. There wasn't any. When I get a bit I spend it. We got this house during a bright patch, but we're behind four months now. But at least it's ours, in a manner of speaking. We don't have any bloody landlord anyway.

We pool resources. My wife gets child benefit, Supplementary Benefit and four pounds single parent benefit. I get the minimum single allowance. Both of us have about five pounds a week spending money—we both smoke and that takes care of that. The rest has to cover everything. Clothes, bills, mortgage, food. We have fifteen pounds a week to buy food. Imagine that. Three people, not counting the baby. Every week it seems to buy less. It's nothing unusual. I've got a friend who's taught her kids to hide on the landing when the doorknocker goes in case it's the milkman. They think it's a great game.

It's a nice town though. Open country a short drive in any direction. And don't get the idea we're all skint in this town. That's quite wrong. There's lots of money about. There's a lot of fine cars and nice houses and rich types with BBC voices who stroll around and act like they own the bloody place. Which they do. The Tories always get elected. The developers are giving the town a face-lift, there's new investments going on, the department stores are moving in. Everyone's happy and everyone's content.

Except me. I still can't pay my bloody TV licence. The only meat we get is bacon scraps. I still have to explain to my three-year-old why she can't have ice-cream from the van that stops every day in our street. And in the end she won't understand about money and sometimes I want to hit her for making me angry only I don't because it's not her that makes me angry and it's not her that deserves the blame. But I'm angry just the same. Like a knot that tightens and tightens until I want to scream and break something. I'm angry when I have to walk past the good food and buy the bad, and when I have to switch off the heater even though it's cold because of the bills and most of all I'm angry because I know damn well it's not going to get any better whichever party gets in next time and all my kids have got to look forward to is the same bloody dreary existence I've got.

But it doesn't do any good. Being angry I mean. What if I burnt down a department store> I'd go to jail and nothing would change. They'd build it again. It's all taken into account. It's all catered for. Even strikes. And I wouldn't even mind if I thought this system was necessary. But it isn't. Only people think it is. They think it's here to stay. And all those people who think it's here to stay are the reason it's still bloody here. So it goes on.

Maybe one of these days I'll land a job that'll pay its way. Chances are I'll hate it, but we might have enough then to save for a two week holiday away from it all. That's a laugh isn't it. Fifty weeks on, two weeks off. But I'll be a "proper dad" then. The breadwinner. I'll pay rates again. I won't be a scrounger.

They say scroungers are ruining this country. It shouldn't be allowed. It's got to stop. I reckon that's about right. Only I can't be much of a scrounger because I don't even make a living out of it. I'd like to be one of the scroungers in the country houses. They don't work either but everyone thinks that's alright. And it is. They don't need to. They've got suckers like us to do it for them.

I don't really hate them. What's the point? I wouldn't give all my money away either. It wouldn't change anything. It's the system. That's my answer to everything it seems like. But it is. It's the bloody money system. I'm in Sainsbury's in front of a freezer full of lamb. I don't remember when we last had lamb, and what's between me and that freezer besides pure air? The money system. It might as well be a stone wall. I can't get through it.  They even throw stuff away sooner than let me at it.

I don't mean to go on, I know it's not much different anywhere, except where it's worse. You go down any street in the world and look at the faces. All the same. Pinched and worn-out. Some starve, some get fed. None of them enjoy it. Nobody's really happy in the money system. And no-one knows what to do about it because no-one listens. They're too busy chasing rainbows.

And here's me on my tacky MFI sofa that's already coming apart at the joints, trembling. I'm still trembling on account of the TV licence man that came today. Bit I'm also trembling because it makes me think of all the money we haven't got and all the things we need it for and it gets me like that sometimes. And I'm trembling now because I've remembered we're four months behind with the payments and I'm wondering if tomorrow it's going to be the bailiff who knocks on our door.

Paddy Shannon

Living in the Past (2014)

Book Review from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Penguin £8.99.

This is another wide-ranging book by Diamond, following Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. By ‘traditional societies’ here are meant those living in small groups and subsisting by hunting-gathering or agriculture. This covers a spectrum from bands with just a few dozen individuals, through tribes with hundreds of people, to chiefdoms with several thousand people and more complex social organisation. All humans lived in one of these systems till around 11,000 years ago (which, in evolutionary terms, really is ‘yesterday’) and many have done so far more recently.

Traditional societies of course differ, and not just in terms of the size of the group. Thus many such societies have engaged in quite bloody inter-group warfare, but plenty have not, and Diamond argues, ‘All human societies practise both violence and cooperation; which trait appears to predominate depends on the circumstances.’ War may take place over resources such as land (and women). But nobody fights all or even most of the time, whereas we have to co-operate in order to survive. And even those who fight have to co-operate with each other against the enemy.

This theme of co-operation is returned to when discussing childhood and play: ‘Whereas many American games involve keeping score and are about winning and losing, it is rare for hunter-gatherer games to keep score or identify a winner. Instead, games of small-scale societies often involve sharing, to prepare children for adult life that emphasizes sharing and discourages contests.’ This illustrates one of the book’s strengths, its recognition that the way people live now is absolutely not the only possible way.

Diamond does claim, though, that almost all human societies have had religion or ‘something like it’. Religion is claimed to fill various functions, such as providing comfort (‘the heart of a heartless world’, as Marx said), which may explain why, on the whole, poorer countries tend to be more religious than wealthier ones. The US, of course, is an exception to this tendency.

In his epilogue, Diamond makes the point that modern-day hunter-gatherers who encounter Western life-styles are keen to adopt them, as they are understandably attracted by material goods, education, healthcare, longer life-spans, and so on. And some traditional life-styles have advantages and shortcomings which may be two sides of the same coin: nobody is lonely but there is little room for personal privacy.  So earlier social forms were not versions of paradise. But, for instance, traditional societies had few or none of the non-communicable diseases that kill most Westerners today, such as hypertension and heart attacks.

Paul Bennett

Football Wars (2012)

From the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1969 rioting by fans during a World Cup match between Honduras and El Salvador appeared to trigger a four-day military conflict –the so-called football war. In fact, the Salvadoran generals merely used the rioting as a convenient occasion for launching a planned attack on Honduras. The main cause of tension was land disputes between Salvadoran migrants in Honduras and local farmers.

Nevertheless, competitive sports like football do have connections with war. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The connections are especially striking where competing teams represent different nations and the memory of past wars is still fresh –or is artificially revived by nationalist politicians and publicists.

The Euro 2012 soccer finals, co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, offer a veritable feast of national and racial hatred. When Russia played the Czech Republic in Lvov (western Ukraine) on June 8, Russian fans threw lighted fireworks and fought Ukrainian fans. When Russia played Poland in Warsaw on June 12, Russian fans clashed with Polish fans and police, leaving 15 injured. Fans from several East European countries have made black players on West European teams targets of racial abuse. And so it goes on. 

The East European media have played their part in fomenting hatred. For example, on the eve of the Russian-Polish match Polish newspapers took care to remind their readers of the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’–the victory of Polish arms in the war of 1920 with Bolshevik Russia.

When talking about ‘football hooliganism’ it is important to distinguish between spontaneous acts by excited fans and the much more serious violence orchestrated by the gangs or ‘firms’ that are attached to many football clubs. These firms are paramilitary organizations that supply commanders, provide training in armed and unarmed combat and conduct preliminary reconnaissance of unfamiliar terrain. They are often infiltrated or even controlled by ultra-nationalist political groups that recruit among fans.

On June 13, The Sun Today described a training and indoctrination camp set up on an abandoned Soviet military base near Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine by Patriot of Ukraine –the paramilitary auxiliary of the fascist Social-National Assembly (SNA). The SNA website (sna.in.ua) –under the motto ‘Strength! Order! Wellbeing!’–explains that Patriot of Ukraine is “the revolutionary avant-garde of the Ukrainian social-nationalist movement”and was established to “purge the nation”and guard the SNA.

The SNA is related to the All-Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom’ (Svoboda), which has captured control of large areas of western Ukraine, including Lvov and other cities, and is poised to enter the national parliament. Both have their origin in the old Social-National Party, but Svoboda has cultivated a more respectable image. You can find videos of their torchlight marches through Ukraine’s cities at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/120329/ukraine-svoboda-nationalist-party-nazi-echoes-hitler-pt-2.

The ‘national identities’ inculcated through competitive sports impart a sense of meaning and importance. They offer an illusory escape from humdrum lives. For the ‘hooligans’ there is also the temporary emotional release and addictive adrenalin rush of acted-out aggression –cheaper and perhaps less risky than alternatives such as drugs. The identity and meaning are sham, because ordinary working people live much the same lives and face much the same problems everywhere. National identities have nothing to do with real life. But they do the ruling class a great service by blocking any alternative identity rooted in real life –an identity capable of uniting working people throughout the world in the fight for a life from which we will not feel the need to escape.

Stefan

Sport and the Spirit of Capitalism (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today the scandal in professional cycling is doping: a hundred years ago it was racism.

Traditionally, things have tended to be difficult for the American athlete who happens also to be black. Jesse Owens, snubbed by his own President, had to travel to the 1936 Berlin Olympiad for the “warmest ovation of his life” – and a friendly wave from the Fuhrer himself – whilst a young Cassius Clay, disgusted by his homecoming reception some 24 years later, reportedly consigned his Rome Olympic Gold to the muddy depths of the Ohio. Practically unknown today, although in his time as famous as Owens or Clay, is cyclist Major Taylor. Why?

In the couple of decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, cycling was as hugely popular in the USA as baseball or boxing. Before the arrival of the motor car and aeroplane, it was effectively the world’s fastest sport with its own galaxy of highly-paid superstars, drawn mainly from the ‘artisan classes’. However, as the century progressed this popularity steadily diminished until, by the outbreak of World War Two, it had sunk into almost total oblivion; its traditions and gladiators – particularly its black ones – forgotten.

Marshall‘Major’ Taylor – as a performing trick-cycling youngster, he sported a mock-military tunic – was born into rural Indianan poverty in 1878, his slave parents having crossed into freedom from Kentucky. Effectively adopted by a wealthy white family as companion to their only son, he spent several happy years during which he was treated, and encouraged to view himself, as racially equal. Taylor was, therefore, no Jim Crow-era ‘uppity nigger’, never having been a ‘downity’ one in the first place.

Such lifestyle gave him access to the unheard-of luxury of a bicycle, upon which machine, when he duly returned, aged thirteen, to his birth family, he displayed such prodigious competitive prowess that, allied with his acrobatic skills, he was able to turn professional some five years later.

World champion

His rise thereafter was meteoric. Within a couple of years he had won both national and world titles, broken and re-broken no fewer than seven world records – and all in the face of appalling racial hostility. With cycling’s then governing body, the League of American Wheelmen attempting an outright colour ban to supplement prevailing member antipathy, Taylor experienced frequent difficulty both entering events – and then exiting them in one piece. Under the noses of prejudiced officials, he was routinely fouled and assaulted, at best having to single-handedly overcome the combined efforts of the entire field. Spectators and journalists, however, loved this gutsy, stylish rider – “the few hissed: the many cheered” – and promoters, recognising his box office appeal, welcomed him.

A devout Baptist, Taylor’s refusal to compete on Sundays effectively precluded further world titles and when physically attacked his response, invariably, was to turn the other cheek – and simply pedal a bit faster. Over several years he was, unquestionably, the best short-distance cyclist on the planet, idolised throughout Europe and the Antipodes, practically unbeatable in fair competition.

Retiring in 1910, Taylor, like so many sportsmen, struggled with life-beyond-adrenalin. He entered the fledgling motor trade but proved a better cyclist than businessman. Ever-generous and charitable, his fortune slowly evaporated, his marriage foundered, his health collapsed and dying penniless in Chicago in 1932, his unclaimed corpse was accorded a segregated pauper’s burial.

So much for ‘sport’ within class-divided, socially fractured society. In truth, how could it be otherwise? With life for billions a constant struggle for basic economic subsistence or paltry reward – a rat race – its recreational elements must surely reflect this. Where winning, acquiring, surviving are the overriding imperatives, then cheating, shortcutting, colluding will inevitably follow. And anyway, the race itself is pretty well fixed – odds fiddled, running order predetermined, from boudoir (parked Bentley or park bench) to battleground (boardroom or building site).

When the rat race is over

What then, when humanity has finally transcended the rat race? With the world’s resources now the common heritage how will societal attitudes towards sport have altered and in what ways might the calibre of performance have been affected? Will there actually be competitive sport?

The great post-war Australian coach, Percy Cerutty once averred that the finest athletic displays he ever witnessed were in Aboriginal communities where, uncluttered with and unfettered by what he called “Western values” and religious hang-ups, participants deported themselves with a natural elegance and fleetness of foot, and could endure levels of pain and suffering well beyond those of their ‘civilized’ counterparts.

Replicating that in a concrete stadium would, however, have been problematic. Chucking a spear across an empty field, jumping in triplicate into a pit of sand, lumbering endlessly around a plastic track with neither tasty kangaroo up front nor hungry crocodile behind to stimulate the pace? And what use would a communistic tribesman have had for a gold medal except to dangle it on his didgeridoo?

Such issues will be, of course, for society’s members – locally, globally, varyingly – to settle. Many will doubtless see sport purely as a means of healthy exercise and recreation whether strenuous and vigorous or painstaking and skilful; others may prefer to merely spectate or do nothing.

Some competitive elements and means of recording may well of course linger: football retaining its goalposts and referees, athletics its measuring tapes and stopwatches, judo its belt and points systems, but gone surely will be the all-pervading need to defeat, vanquish and rout: the tackle above the ball, the punch below the belt, the bouncer, the beamer and the hypodermic. Imagine: the Corinthian Spirit restored; amateurism regaining its true meaning and status within sport – and beyond. Imagine: world festivals replacing international competitions; sport for sport’s sake. Imagine too: divisive national flags recycled into cleaning mops; chauvinistic anthems supplanted by…Imagine.

And if some future Major Taylor is observed swooping around a velodrome with a posse of somewhat paler gentlemen in his wake, there will be no question whatsoever of bullwhip or hood: he’ll simply be pedalling a wee bit faster.

Andrew Armitage