The Euro-Elections in Ireland (2014)

From the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In common with all other EU states, European elections took place in Ireland last month. There were also elections to a reformed local government structure.  In spite of the interest which the mass media devoted to both these spectacles, it’s a close call to decide which poll epitomised most the lack of real and meaningful politics under capitalism.

Socialists make the claim that national parliaments are little more than talking-shops; full of theatrics, posturing and verbosity whose main output are inconsequential debates on the issues of the day. All the while, the fundamental business of capitalism goes inexorably on, irrespective of whatever pronouncements and edicts emanate from those self-important halls. This criticism is even truer of the European Parliament and local councils. For the former, the inability of the European capitalist class to agree on a trans-national system of governance for the Union has rendered the Parliament at Brussels more meaningless than its national counterparts. One obvious manifestation of this in Ireland, as with many other EU countries, is the apathy and consequent low voter turnout that the Euro-elections engender. It is only the second division of politicians who contest these elections; the jibe that it is usually those politicians whose national careers are behind them and who are in search of a comfortable retirement home still rings true.

Most voters, even those with a reasonable interest in political life, would be hard-pressed to name even a couple of their MEPs (apart from the few ‘colourful characters’ who inevitably are present) and know much less about any accomplishments of the members. Of course this can sometimes work to the politicians’ advantage; one Irish MEP in fact has had prolonged absence from the Parliament in Brussels/Strasbourg (due to illness) but given the extremely low profile attached to these positions, this has not been noticed by the electorate and so poses no electoral risk whatsoever in his bid for re-election. Nonetheless competition was quite fierce between the rival candidates. This was accentuated this time around because there were fewer seats available as a result of the need to accommodate enlargement of the organisation to Eastern Europe whilst not increasing inordinately the number of parliamentarians. There’s no doubt that the generous remuneration on offer and relatively light demands of the job are attractive to many career politicians.

State of play

What is the state of play between the rival political parties? The ruling coalition of Fine Gael and Labour stood on their record in government for the last three years. They came to power in the 2011 general election replacing the absolutely discredited, previous administration consisting of a Fianna Fail / Green Party coalition. Their main task in that time has been to implement the budget cuts demanded by the troika (EU Commission, ECB and IMF) who came to Ireland’s rescue after the financial crash of 2008. They now have a predicament because of Ireland’s recent exit from the bailout programme. Prior to that all cuts to social welfare, health, education etc could be blamed on the bungling of the previous government and the strict conditions attached to Ireland’s financial aid programme. Now it is more difficult to justify the continuing cuts and the extra taxes on home-owners and new charges on previously free commodities such as water.

That long-time ‘natural party of government’, Fianna Fail is hamstrung as it is still identified by its gross incompetence in the handling of the economy during the last doomed years of the Celtic Tiger and as they made the initial agreement to the stringent bail-out terms in 2010, they cannot logically oppose its consequences of austerity on the working class.

Sinn Fein was the major winner in terms of tapping into the public disenchantment with the establishment parties; in fact something similar to the ground being staked out by UKIP in Britain although Sinn Fein occupy a different position on the conventional political spectrum. It’s all part of their progress from solely being the political wing of and apologists for the IRA to being a ‘radical’, left-of-centre movement. However even that radicalism is now being dropped as too intimidating to the voting public on the basis that it could hinder the party’s electoral advance. Sinn Fein is now positioning itself as a much more ‘respectable’ party which inevitably means their erstwhile ‘socialistic’ policies are now being discarded and being replaced by a more mainstream platform although some leftist rhetoric is maintained for effect.

The impact on the election outcome of the recent arrest of Gerry Adams was difficult to gauge. On one level it cemented his appeal to hard-line republicans and the fact that he recently spent four days in a British police station being questioned about ‘republican activities’ during the ‘armed struggle’  did him no harm. As against that there is the crime he is associated with and its resonance with the wider public particularly down South. Jean McConville was a woman, a widow, a mother of ten children. Even in 1972, PIRA recognized the damage the claiming of her execution would do to their image and hence her fate of being secretly buried rather than the usual end of those the IRA termed ‘informers’; beaten, shot dead and their bodies dumped along the border. The fact that former close ‘comrades’ have implicated him directly in her murder made the Party nervous.

There was also a clutch of minor groups and independent candidates going forward. The minor groups tend to occupy the left end of the spectrum and broadly indulge in Euro-sceptic rhetoric and promoting ‘grassroots resistance’ while the independents can be impossible to meaningfully classify though are usually inchoate populists and as likely to be right wing as left wing.

Proliferation of posters

Apart from media coverage, the other unmistakable manifestation of the on-going election campaign was the proliferation of posters on any available lampposts and poles. These were remarkable for their uniformity and bore the imprint of some prior consultation with an advertising agency. More than half of the poster space was taken up by a picture of the candidate, photo-shopped onto a bland background. A shirt and tie is the standard attire for the men, jewellery and make-up for the women. About a third of the poster had the candidate’s name in large letters with the word ‘Vote’ prominently displayed beside it. Interestingly the name of the party that the candidate is representing was quite small: with the demise of major ideological differences between the parties and the weakening of the party system, increasingly elections are morphing into straightforward personality contests.

Generally the posters for the mainstream politicians carried no slogan. Even when one was present it was only distinguished by its vacuous nature; ’Power to the People’, ‘Strengthening Your Community’, ‘Working For You’ etc. etc. As to Sinn Fein, twenty or more years ago their candidates’ pictures on their posters had the appearance of men still in or recently released from prison (which indeed quite a number were). Now they are more likely to be young, presentable and female designed to obscure any association with balaclavas, car-bombs and Armalites.

The impact of money on the election process was easy to discern from the appearance of the posters. Those of the independent candidates and fringe parties were smaller, more likely to be mono-chrome rather than glossy colour and much less ‘professional’ in appearance. One redeeming feature of them is that at least these posters had some quasi-political slogan on them indicating an attempt to promulgate a message rather than relying on personality. In fact the overall nature of the posters can be seen as a succinct metaphor for the state of politics now. Any real engagement by the electorate with the process is being diminished with time which means the parties themselves realise it is pointless devoting time and space to programmes or manifestos. Image and spin is much more important to success which entails the indiscriminate harvesting of votes and is unconcerned with any understanding or agreement with policies.

No difference

It’s a pity that the opportunity that elections present, in terms of a slightly higher interest by the general public in politics, is completely wasted. The fact that people don’t engage is probably because they realise, either consciously or subconsciously, that the result of these elections makes no difference to their lives. If you have a house and job, you’ll probably continue to have both after this election. If you’re unemployed, you may or may not have a better chance of picking up a job. If you’re a billionaire, you’ll almost certainly remain very wealthy whoever wins on election day. There is an unstated realism at play; at some level the electorate know full well the pointlessness of this charade in terms of real impact on their lives.

When we contest elections we don’t engage in this type of smooth and glib electioneering. We do not involve ourselves in the hiring of image consultants and spin-doctors, the cynical analysis of focus group responses to discern where lies the greatest electoral advantage or the cultivation of the media to project some image. We openly state that our aim is the replacement of the current basis of society (capitalism and production for profit by an alternative society (socialism and production to meet people’s needs) and we work towards this aim.

Kevin Cronin

Marx (2012)

Book Review from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s Das Kapital for Beginners by Michael Wayne; Illustrations by Sungyoon Choi. www.forbeginnersbooks.com. US $16.99. 138pp.

This little book is on the whole an excellent and handy introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx. Most of it is quite readable and fairly easy to follow, and pretty accurate in its summary of Marx’s Das Kapital. It also touches on a number of his other books in passing. Its main virtue is that it succeeds in showing some of the ways in which Marx’s ideas are in fact as relevant as ever today, despite the widespread myth that he was discredited by the events of the twentieth century.

Marx analysed the social and economic system he lived under in studious, methodical detail by starting from the very categories used by the bourgeois economists themselves: the commodity, the exchange of commodities and then, most important, the buying and selling of labour power, which is at the core of the system of wage-slavery, a system we still live under in 2012 throughout the world. Marx solved the paradox of the origin of profit created in the production process. He did so, as explained very well by Wayne, by distinguishing labour from labour power. The latter is the worker’s ability to work for a given number of days, whereas simple labour is the work performed during this time. If you pay someone a wage of £500 per week, that is what they need to live on and carry on being fit for work. You have bought their labour power for the week. But they will be able to generate £500’s worth of value well before the week is over, and the surplus belongs not to them but to the employer.

The chapter on ‘Reproduction And Crises’ is both the weakest and most problematic, as Wayne allows himself to get bogged down in the tortuous debate as to exactly how it is that capitalism runs periodically into crisis, and whether there is an underlying tendency for such crises to get worse over time. Within the Socialist Party we have sometimes debated among ourselves about the precise mechanics of this. Wayne leans, at times, toward an ‘underconsumptionist’ description of capitalism, which is flawed as it neglects to take account of the “purchasing power” of capital itself. He also gets lost in some dubious mathematics and loses track of how little some of this matters as against the urgent need to end capitalism, however its crises are caused. He redeems himself, however, by the well-chosen summary that “the overall anarchy of the market” is the ultimate cause of crises.

Given the gross distortions and misrepresentations of Marx’s ideas sustained through the twentieth century Russian experience of Bolshevism, Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism, it might have been apt to devote at least a page or two to noting how Lenin twisted Marx’s ideas for socialist revolution into his manifesto for minority-led insurrection to establish industrial capitalism in Russia in the early twentieth century. This laid the groundwork for the Stalinist dictatorship which followed and did incalculable damage to the progress of genuine socialism in the world today because it was done under the banner of “socialism” and “Marxism” rather than being named more honestly as the capitalist revolution that it was.

Instead, Wayne devotes a disproportionate six pages of his 138-page book to extolling the virtues of the Italian intellectual Gramsci as a kind of missing link. This, like Wayne’s pessimism about the transformation to socialism (see below), arises from a lack of conviction that ‘ordinary’ members of the working class can have the ability to reach socialist consciousness themselves, as a simple and direct result of their own experience of capitalism. He shares with Gramsci the arrogant assumption that a special category of ‘intellectuals’ (including presumably Wayne as well as Gramsci) have the historical role of teaching the workers about the exploitation they are experiencing.

Perhaps the best and most thought-provoking chapter here is that on ‘Commodity Fetishism And Ideology’. Wayne explores Marx’s fascinating insights about the way in which social relationships in capitalism are skewed by the power given to objects and the force of economic imperatives. This is a very rich seam which Marx opened, and is still worthy of much further research and exploration. This is about the ways in which our present social system increasingly causes personal misery, alienation, depression and cultural implosion, all of which are becoming more and more pressing issues in our present era.

There is a grave disappointment in the final pages of Wayne’s book. Having usefully outlined some of the positive ways in which socialism will liberate humanity from the limitations of the market system, he then abandons the revolutionary agenda to state that once production for need and collective control of production arrives, ‘various forms of collective ownership and control would grow, while both the state and the market for labor power would diminish. This could only take place over what presumably would be a long period of transition, spanning many generations’ (page 135).

In support of this ‘gradualism’ he quotes Marx (page 132) saying that

“the time which society is bound to devote to material production is shorter...in proportion as the work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labor from its own shoulders to those of another layer of society...”

Looking at the original German and the French translations of this passage (at the end of chapter 17 of Volume I of Capital), however, it appears most likely that Marx was not using the phrase “more and more” to imply a gradual change over generations, but simply to make a mathematical point about proportions. In much the same way it might be explained that the more you remove the air from a fragile container the lower its pressure, and the more and more likely it is to smash. This does not mean you are proposing that such a container might have a half-an-half vacuum for generations.

In fact, once we have a majority who understand that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, the change from capitalism to socialism will be enacted, pure and simple. You just cannot have the co-existence of socialist and capitalist relations of production in the world for any significant period of time, and certainly not for generations. This should be clear to Wayne and his readers from every observation throughout the rest of his book about the all-encompassing global nature of capitalism and, by extension, of the very different system which must replace it.

Clifford Slapper

"Communist Kids" (1997)

Book Review from the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Children of the Revolution: Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain by Phil Cohen, Lawrence & Wishart. £12.99.

To begin with I was quite excited at the prospect of reading this book. In a sense I would be returning to my childhood, to a life shared with a Communist Party father, and then later on to a schism in that relationship during the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the revelations about Stalin, and to my subsequent resignation from the Communist Party at the age of twenty-two.

Although it would be true to say that I could identify, politically and emotionally, with some of the experiences of the "children" interviewed, there are nonetheless, major differences. Whilst I lived with a father who possessed a paid-up CP card but was not active within the CP the people portrayed in the book are offspring of parents who were very active within the party and also often held leading positions in the CP and the trade union movement. Despite my father's infatuation with Communist Party ideals, the fact that he met few other party members meant that he did retain some original Marxist thinking, so that although he always supported the Soviet Union he most certainly never claimed they had socialism and he believed implicitly in the abolition of capitalism. Also only two of the people interviewed in the book were born in the thirties (1936 and 1937) others in the forties and fifties and one in the sixties, while I entered this world in 1935 and eventually became a member of both the YCL and the Communist Party where I was to remain for about six years.

But I found much in this book to depress me. When those interviewed use the word "socialism" none of them gives a satisfactory definition of it. Neither does anybody talk about the abolition of the wages system, although all appeared to believe in a fairer distribution of wealth and social justice, apparently this to be achieved by reforms to take place sometime in the future. Most disturbing is that even with the full knowledge of the denunciation of Stalin and the tragedy of the Hungarian uprising the children could still see no reason not to join the YCL and the CP not so long after these very events had become a catalyst for my leaving. But, as Phil Cohen says in his introduction, "Values are partly a question of upbringing affected by what you know will please your parents, and the experience that shape you as a person, which are inevitably bound up with your parents. But the benevolent paternalism of the CP could be stifling to those growing up within it. Teenage rebellion was not easy when you were told that saving from the world from imperialism was the key thing in life." Quite so, but similar pressure did not prevent me from making my exit from the CP in 1957 and what is more I still held to the basic tenet of socialism somewhere in the back of my mind.

But some lessons had been learnt. Another contributor states "We weren't a revolutionary party at all, and I was a member for thirty years, half of its existence. We had the rhetoric, we talked about the class moving this and that but we never saw it in those terms. Even when we analysed our electoral work, which I now look back on as a complete waste of time, we presented the lowest common denominator of the argument: that we were part of the anti-Tory movement and a lot of people who couldn't bring themselves to vote communist would be stimulated to vote Labour, so we were vital to help return Labour candidates. To some extent that was true, my great moment was getting five hundred votes in the East Lewisham constituency and people saying to me there was absolutely no doubt I had helped Labour to get elected. But what is revolutionary about helping to change the complexion of parliament."

To Communist Party parents the education of their children was of vital importance so that as a result most of those interviewed have professional jobs or careers. I had a rather different experience where my father saw nothing wrong with manual work or labouring although he did tentatively suggest I might feel more comfortable in an office. My own experience of being a member of the CP was that those members with well-paid careers or important political administrative posts were much admired. I'm not saying that this was in any way party policy, but doctors, teachers, writers, scientists and so on were regarded with a good deal more respect that, say, factory workers or shop workers. During my time in the party I was very much aware of this, perhaps because I was a factory worker at the time. Another theme running through the book is of the liberality and freedom permeating the children's childhoods. Books, family discussions, and always a feeling of being somehow "different" from other children. My own experience too, but some of the children say their parents exhibited a kind of religious fervour and a streak of puritanism.

This book cost me a couple of sleepless nights; reading it forced me to examine my own political life since 1957. I too joined the Labour Party, but briefly and for infiltration purposes, and I became quite active in the peace movement, whilst always arguing from a working-class standpoint.

This is a fascinating book, well worth reading, but at the end of each and every interview I felt disappointed, let down, as though I had come to expect something "other" from the children, perhaps even fuller analyses of why they had come to join the CP at such an inauspicious time.

Heather Ball

Obituary: Sam Orner (1973)

Obituary from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have to report the sad news that one of the tough old stalwarts of the Socialist Movement — Sam Orner — has passed away at the age of 79. Sam led an active and eventful life and spent nearly the whole of it in the struggle against social oppression.

In 1913, when about 19 years old, he joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) which was connected to the Socialist Party of America. Then he was attracted to the excitement of the "Wobbly" movement and became active in the I.W.W. He travelled all over the United States, often riding the rails in the freezing cold or the scorching sun, helping to organize the low-paid workers, particularly those employed seasonally in the fields.

He was at one time a speaker for the S.P. of A. and spoke at meetings all over Brooklyn, at Coney Island, Brownsville and Williamsburg. In 1921 he was conducting classes concerned with Marx's Value, Price and Profit. However, in 1923 Sam came in contact with and joined the Socialist Education Society. This was the fore-runner of the W.S.P. in New York City.

In the early 1930's, he took part in organizing the New York taxi-cab drivers. When they struck in 1934 he was compelled to leave the W.S.P. to concentrate upon the involved affairs of the union. This was the strike that formed the subject of Clifford Odets' play Waiting For Lefty. Our Sam Orner was "Lefty". As he did not fall in line with the views of the gangsters who were seeking control of the union he was badly beaten-up and taken to hospital. A friend got him out of the hospital before the mobsters could finish him off.

He finished with cab-driving and rejoined the W,S.P., speaking frequently in Union Square. His name appeared for many years in the back-pages of The Western Socialist for interested readers in the New Jersey area to contact. He was always an active member. In 1965, he made a trip to England and spoke at a Trafalgar Square meeting as well as elsewhere. On the 4th of July of this year, Sam suffered a stroke from which he seemed to be recovering. But on the 13th August he had another stroke and for three weeks thereafter he lay in hospital until he finally passed away on September 2nd.

All his life, up to the last, Sam was a tough and fearless warrior in the working class movement. When the present writer saw him lying in agony in the hospital he was reminded of an old poem:

See an old unhappy bull
Sick in soul and body both . . .
Waiting for the flesh that dies.

People of Sam's calibre leave a gap when they go. There are many who have been indebted to him for help in the past, both financial and otherwise. A long time ago, one little girl in Boston used to call him "Sammy Claus".

He was like a dynamo, and his impatient activity was inclined to arouse antagonism at times. However, he was a sincere and energetic advocate of Socialism, which was his main interest in life. By this he will be remembered now that he gone to the realm of eternal silence. Would that there were more Sam Orners.

GILMAC.

The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is 150 years since Friedrich Engels wrote his classic The Condition of the Working Class in 1844. He described in graphic detail the wretched lives that workers were forced to lead at that time, and he looked forward to the early ending of the capitalist system and its replacement by socialism. His hopes have not been realised, and today we may ask two questions: (1) in what ways and to what extent have the conditions of the working class changed since he wrote? And (2) is the call to abolish the capitalist system and replace it by socialism as valid today as it was then?

In 1844 the Industrial Revolution was approaching its zenith. Engels vividly documents the sordid conditions in the working class districts of the great towns; the effect of competition ("the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society"); the immigrant Irish workers willing to take even lower wages than the impoverished English working class; the poor health and short lives that were the rule, and the drunkenness and depravity that were common; the factory hands exploited long hours in filthy and often dangerous conditions, by day and night, women and children as well as men.

There is no doubt that working and living conditions in Britain have vastly improved for the working class in the last 150 years. Workplaces are cleaner and safer, hours of work are generally shorter, homes better constructed and furnished, health improved and longevity extended. Yet in some ways the situation has not changed that much. This is what Engels wrote about London:

"The turmoil of the streets have something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels . . . The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space . . . the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains."

Today most workers have more than a bare existence, but the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider. We are encouraged by the system to pursue our private interest and this does lead to isolation and brutal indifference, mitigated only by the collective efforts to resist the inequalities and the injustices.

The stern realities of capitalist employment are the same now as then. We work if an employer can see a profit in employing us, otherwise we don't. The current version of the system is more than hitherto. Relatively high paid managers do the dirty work of the capitalist class by hiring and firing workers, organising their exploitation and breaking their strikes. Such is the anarchy of the system that managers are sometimes called on to fire other managers.

On the second question of whether the call to socialism is as relevant today as in Engel's time there can be little doubt. Defenders of capitalism point to the improvement in the material conditions of life for the mass of people over the last century or so. Certainly most workers are better housed, better fed and better clothed than they were. How much this is due to the beneficence of the ruling class and how much to their opportunities to extract profits from getting workers to improve their own conditions is another matter.

But working-class life is still far from ideal, still far from the life that is possible if production for profit were replaced by production solely to meet needs. More purchasing power entails poverty of another kind, that of economic insecurity, of worry about losing the job on which "prosperity" depends. And we must not forget that, even if the material conditions of working class have improved in the economically "advanced" countries, many workers and their families in the Third World still suffer deprivations comparable to, if not worse than, those described by Engels.

In 1844 there might have been some excuse for not demanding an immediate end to the system that produced poverty for the mass and riches for the few: the wealth produced by workers was far less abundant. Today there is no such excuse. We have the means - the knowledge, the accumulated capital, the technology and the willing workers - to meet all the reasonable needs of all the world's population. What stands in the way is the support given to the profit system.

Engels understood well the nature of socialism, even though he was over-optimistic about when it would come. He wrote of "the moment when the workers resolve to be bought and sold no longer" and of "the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat". The language may be archaic but the thinking was and is sound. Socialism is not out of date. It is more needed and more practically possible than ever.

Stan Parker

The Games (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Olympic Games are upon us again, with their displays of athleticism and endurance and their political threats. The inspiration for the founding of the modern Games is said to have been the idea that the ancient ones were a reason for the Golden Age of Greece (which rested, in fact, on the exploitation of slaves). The various national representatives to whom Baron de Coubertin put his belief in 1894 might have told him he was a mistaken ass, but set that aside in favour of the prospect of a regular festival of commerce and the nation-state.

The presumptions of the Olympic Games were socially irrelevant even in 1894. Running, jumping, javelin-throwing, boxing and wrestling, equestrianism were valued as military exercises in the ancient world, as archery and quarter-staff were in the Middle Ages; at the end of the nineteenth century the modern era in warfare was beginning and national armies were being remodelled. Amateurism in sport, which the Olympic movement took for granted, was starting to be replaced by professionalism. To the extent that amateurism survived, it opposed the Olympic ideal of transcending social status, since it was plainly the province of the leisured and better-off.

It may be thought this irrelevance is the virtue of the Olympics—that they represent sport for its own sake not as a contribution to other purposes. Nothing would be less true. From the London Games of 1908, the last ones to be monopolized by Britain and the USA, they have provided a bargaining-counter for political conditions. The Germans were excluded from the 1924 Games in Paris; before the 1936 ones in Germany there was a strong movement in the USA against participation. Germany and Japan, the defeated nations in World War II, were absent in 1948, and at every Games since then there have been withdrawals and threats of them on political grounds. The present ones in Montreal were preceded by a dispute over the recognition of Taiwan as "The Republic of China" that involved a trade deal between Canada and Communist China and a threat by America to withdraw—implying an irreparable loss of commercial support—from the Games, and then the withdrawal of 21 African and Arab states in protest against New Zealand's inclusion because the latter had played games with South Africa.

For each nation the Olympic Games are a manifestation of strength; not simply the symbolic vigour of its young men and women, but the amounts of money put into colleges and facilities. The prowess of the USSR since it first won Olympic medals in 1956 has had this effect and since 1960 athletes from the African countries have begun to come to the fore. On the other hand, the scantiness of victories for British competitors is taken as a conformation that Britain is "in decline". The staging of the Games also carries prestige for the nation concerned, implying prosperity and confidence to deal with a rush of commerce.

Given this importance in the economic and political rivalry between nations, the "true spirit of sportsmanship" of the Olympic oath (pronounced on behalf of the competitors before each Games) becomes derisory. Amateurism has been demolished by the intensity of the competition, which demands full-time training; likely Olympic participants are supported by their governments or by commercial firms in return for advertizing. However, the continual pressure for higher levels of performance has inevitably led to devices for overcoming physical limitations. The spectacle now is of athletes driven on by stimulants, heavy men enlarged by steroid drugs and, in the case of girls, pills to suspend their menstrual cycle. In an interview published in the Sunday People on 11th July a champion hammer-thrower said: "One thing's certain—the influence of drugs on performances will be at its peak . . . It's the only way you can compete with the world's best, particularly from the Iron Curtain countries."

It is still claimed, in periods of respite from them, that sporting contests promote good will among nations. What can be seen clearly from the Olympic Games, as well as international football and most other contests, is they do nothing of the kind; they do not even start with that intention, and usually end with an intensification of ill-will. Of course sport in itself is not a cause of international rivalry. Its development into world competitions is an effect of nationalism—the political voices of the economic structure of capitalism. Nor is there anything wrong with games and contests as such. Indeed, one of the regrettable consequences of big-scale sport with commercial and political motives is the damage done to sports as recreation.

In the light of the tensions which now surround them. It is possible that in a few more years the Olympic Games will be abandoned and replaced by competitions among particular groups of countries. In that case, each will no doubt swear its dedication to the highest sporting ethics before trying to do down the others by every means. That is not human nature: it is the ubiquitous reflection of the capitalist system. When we talk about Socialism, it is not just "politics". It is the desire for a world where we can enjoy ourselves and exercise the co-operative faculty which distinguishes man and capitalism does its best, but never manages, to stamp out.

Robert Barltrop

World without Money . . . (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

You must be joking! It'll never work. Where's the incentive? What about greed? How could you make it work? It's a theory, it's never been tried; at least we know that capitalism, warts-and-all, works.

Not one, but a combination of the above objections to socialism is responsible for the fact that we still live under capitalism today. Socialism is a co-operative system which relies on the agreement of the majority of men and women throughout the world. For them to agree and agree to co-operate, they first have to know about it. Unfortunately the Socialist Party and its Companion Parties in other parts of the world do not have the resources of the major political parties or organised religion to spread our message, but we use our voice and whatever means are available to us to do so. We are fully aware that until we do, we cannot achieve the sane world where everything is produced in sufficient quantities to satisfy people's needs and not for profit for the minority. Now to address the objections made above.

Duncan is a gardener. He works hard but does not get paid. Neither does Lesley, who is a printer. An interesting article in Choice (July 1994) tells of the spread of LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), an arrangement where money is only used for dealing with "outsiders" and the community operates through a complicated barter system. People go on a register listing their special skills or goods and earn points which are registered centrally for work done. When they need goods, they "pay" from their accumulated credits; even "overdrafts" can be arranged in case of need. The Socialist Party does not advocate such a system, or barter of any kind. What this community (like other co-operative ventures operating without money within their communities) proves is that the contention "no money, no incentive" isn't true and that satisfaction of doing needed work, well done, is incentive enough.

Nor is it sensible to suggest that, with things freely available, people will be greedy and take more than they need. Under capitalism we are constantly brainwashed to judge people by their possessions; hence the urge by so many to prove their "worth" by what they can acquire. The argument fails when that "value" judgement us removed. For instance, people with free travel passes under capitalism do no spend their days making unnecessary journeys.

How will goods be ordered and distributed? We don't know how far technology will have developed when socialism is established, but capitalism's methods today point the way. When you go through the check-out at the supermarket (note: they are no longer referred to as "tills") the bar code on each item is read by the computer, which feeds the information direct to the warehouse for replacement. The computer at the warehouse automatically arranges for this, at the same time checking stock and reordering if necessary; and so on down the chain to the raw materials suppliers.

At the check-out the prices of all the items in your basket are added up and you either pay with notes and coins or get it charged on your plastic credit card. In a socialist society there will be no need for this last stage. The last objection should perhaps not be taken too seriously; "socialism is a theory . . . " For thousands of years to the present day, millions upon millions of people have believed in different versions of "pie in the sky when you die" and have lived their lives accordingly. No-one has ever been there; no-one has ever seen it. What we propose is more believable, sensible and achievable.

Eva Goodman

Why I Joined the SPGB (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having found some of the previous contributions on this subject to be quite fascinating, I would like to join in. After a pretty normal childhood in a petty-bourgeois Jewish family in darkest Manchester with fairly strict religious ideas till around the age of seventeen, I entered the rebel period (to be told by father that I would soon grow out of it like all the others; at the age of 92 he still thinks I will). Then, as now, it was obvious to any teenager with the slightest pretence to thought of any kind, that society was an unpleasant mess and could surely be made a damn sight nicer. Which meant, of course, that one must latch on to one of the left-wing parties or groups (my! how times haven't changed). It happened that at that time there was a new splinter group of the Labour Party coming into fashion led by a wealthy lawyer called Stafford Cripps — a sort of Wedgbenn of his day, though even more of a hypocrite but less of a clown (well, he had to be).

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This mob had a branch of sorts in the town so there I went to see how we we were going to change the nasty world of the 'thirties into a place fit for humans to live in. I didn't last very long (true, it didn't either; but I went first). Although I was young and keen and no doubt starry-eyed, I simply couldn't follow what they were on about. There was talk about nationalizing the Lancashire cotton mills and I seem to remember discussing a pamphlet on the subject by Zev Hutchinson (don't ask me who he was; I haven't the faintest idea — it is just that his name caught my fancy). But it was all terribly boring and seemed to have no relevance to anything as far as I could see. Also, young and foolish as I was, I soon got the feeling that the few people who were doing the talking were ambitious types on the make. Concerned with making a world fit for them to live in, and not really all that worried about the rest of the heap. One of them was a quite nice-looking, red-headed bird a couple of years older than myself and I remember thinking that here was someone who was going to make something out of all this political claptrap. Her name was Barbara Betts and in later years I sometimes thought how wrong I was in my prediction because after all she disappeared without trace. It was only quite recently that I got the message that a Barbara Betts who was then working as a trainee buyer in Lewis's store in town was rather better known and in a better-paid job by her name of Castle.

After pottering around for a year or so, I had a lucky break. In the local library I came across, quite by accident, a journal I had never heard of, called (yes, you've got it; if only lots of others would get it. A few million circulation would be rather useful) the Socialist Standard. I know it sounds awfully corny to say this, but the very first reading was really a blinding light. I could understand it! I had really felt quite miserable with the pamphlets of the Socialist League (or with the Daily Worker or Daily Herald); apparently the others were quite happy reading and discussing them while I was out of step and found them boring and almost meaningless. So here was a party, whose existence I had never even heard of, talking the kind of language I could almost drink like nectar. (I remember immediately buying a bound volume of old Standards for fourteen bob and having an awful row with my father for wasting my money like that.)

So the next thing was to visit the branch which was listed in the paper. It met in the parlour of two great Socialist stalwarts, Bert and Edie Atkins and I think there were two—or it could have been three—other members in sight. And, remarkably enough, one of them was Uncle Joe, my mother's brother. I used to see him quite often and when I asked him why he had never mentioned the SPGB to me he replied that he thought it would upset my family if their little lad was to get mixed up with revolutionary Socialists so he kept quiet about it. (As, with failing eyesight, he reads this article, I hope he realises that this mention is intended as a salute.) And I well remember, when expressing the wish to join the little throng, Bert giving me a long lecture to the effect that it was no use my joining if I was a young man in a hurry. The party was miniscule (looking round the room I did not find that hard to believe) and I must realise if I joined that the road to Socialism was going to be a long and stony one. So, in all my long years of membership, I never became disillusioned; Atkins had made sure I had no illusions in the first place. And sadly one must confess that the real Socialists in the great working-class city of Manchester, with some quite proud traditions from Peterloo onwards, could still meet in the Atkins's parlour. And this despite the fact that one of the young comrades was the daughter of Tom King — a proud honour as he was a founder-member of the SPGB. A place in history.

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I will not waste more space as there is nothing special about my story. But perhaps I did create some sort of record. The very first time I took the platform at an outdoor meeting (I was giving the party view on the Stalin Terror which was then at its height) the soap-box was literally smashed from under my feet by a rush of Communist Party thugs. It was their only answer to my criticism. It still is the only answer that they can think of, although they are more circumspect nowadays.

L. E. Weidberg

America’s Wars – On Drugs (2012)

From the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The United States military are stuffing their hired killers with drugs. According to the Toronto Star (28 April), after two long-running wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq – more than 100,000 active duty US Army troops last year were taking prescribed anti-depressants, narcotics, sedatives, anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, caused mainly by escalating combat stress. 

Almost 8 percent of active-duty personnel are currently on sedatives; and 6 percent are on anti-depressants, an eightfold increase since 2005. US lawyers are blaming the military’s heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their army clients’ aberrant behaviour. Troops are sent out on deployment with up to 180 days’ supplies of so-called medication, much of which they can swallow at the end of just one “anxious day”. And solders with injuries easily become dependent on narcotic painkillers.

James Culp, a former army paratrooper, and now a high-profile military defence lawyer, who recently defended an army private accused of non-state murder, rhetorically asked:

“What do you do when 30 to 80 percent of the people that you have in the military have gone on three or more deployments, and they are mentally worn out? What do you do when they can’t sleep?”

And he answers himself: “You make a calculated risk in prescribing these medications.” Indeed, the modern army psychiatrist’s kit is likely to include nine kinds of anti-depressants; benzodiazepines for anxiety, four anti-psychotics, two kinds of sleep aids and drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity, according to a 2007 review in the Military Medicine journal.

But it wasn’t always like that.

There was some early ad hoc use of psychotropic drugs during the Vietnam War. Prior to the war in Iraq, however, American soldiers were not permitted to go into combat on psychiatric drugs. Now, some troops in Afghanistan are prescribed drugs that have been associated with paranoia, rage and violent anger spells, and urges to suicide. And all this following training to kill! And show aggression…

Not surprisingly, an increasing number of soldiers and marines behave similarly when not in combat. James Culp relates just one example among many. Last year, Private David Lawrence murdered a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 12½ years, but this was later reduced to 10 when it was revealed he was suffering from schizophrenic episodes. He said he was hearing female voices. He was prescribed Zoloft for depression and Trazodone. The voices got worse and he began seeing hallucinations of the chaplain, minus his head. He then walked into the Taliban’s cell, in the jail, and shot him dead. His father said: “They give him a gun and he does that!” Presumably, like most people, Private Lawrence was not normally aggressive or violent. But fighting in one of capitalism’s wars made him so.

Peter E. Newell

Carrying the platform ten thousand miles (1977)

From the March 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

When two members made known that they were visiting the USA as speakers as well as fraternal delegates to the conference of our Companion party of the WSP, the Socialist Party of Canada wanted them too. The result was that by the time our pair arrived in Boston on 9th October an itinerary right from Canada, down the West Coast to California and back to Montreal, had taken shape.

Things started moving in Boston, Pennsylvania, New York City, New Jersey, and New York State. A flood of striking publicity material went out to radio stations and universities; lectures, seminars and interviews were lined up.

The tour started with a one-hour talk on the history of the SPGB at the Boston Conference. Monday being Labour Day made an ideal occasion for an outdoor meeting—out we went, quickly gathering a crowd before whom we had a running debate with a divinity student on Socialism versus religion, Next morning we were up and away for our first college date a Stroudsberg University, Pennsylvania. 50 students of the political science faculty were the audience; "Marx or Lenin" was the subject. Then to New York for the Barrie Faber radio show (biggest commercial station in New York) with seven speakers, who started arguing about Carter and Ford but ended discussing Socialism.

And so it went on day after day. College lectures, radio programmes, newspaper interviews across the continent, finishing with a great meeting of students at Bishops College, Lennoxville, Quebec, on 15th November. In 44 days we gave talks at some of the biggest colleges in North America including Winnipeg, Vancouver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We had to refuse others because of the itinerary. We had invitations to Columbia, New York, and New York Polytechnic (whose dean of political science interviewed our man on WBAI radio). Berkeley, California, and Edmonton, Alberta, wanted notice which we could not give to organize lectures for the whole faculty.

There were twelve radio interviews, in most cases phone-ins—sometimes two hours answering questions about the SPGB and Socialism, the Labour Party, Marxism, the Communist Party, etc. In Winnipeg an irate lady shouted "Get the old goat off the air and out of Canada at once"; whereupon another rang in to apologise profusely. The response to the interviews was terrific, and the interviewers were delighted. Jack Webster, whose programme is heard by millions on the West Coast, said: "You are listening to a real Socialist now—not a British Labour Party phoney." He added: "I'm going to announce your meeting at the Langara College"—which he did, with the result that the hall was packed.

On television in Vancouver City we had five minutes to answer questions like "What is your opinion of Russia today?" The studio audience applauded the answers spontaneously, and the producer said "We could have done with half an hour of you!" At Bucknell University they gave out a leaflet describing our speaker as "a modern Robin Hood who stands up for the poor against the rich, every Sunday in Hyde Park, London".

Then three days' trek in the Greyhound bus across Ontario. Anyone who thinks the world overpopulated should make the trip: in two days we saw one man and two moose. Arrived in Winnipeg, radio all the morning, university in the afternoon, having broken our journey to speak at Sullivan County College, Monticello, NY State. A debate with a City Councillor on aspects of Marx. In Edmonton listeners rang in and offered to drive us to the university. Whole afternoon discussing with political science tutors. Another 1500 miles through the Rockies, arriving in Vancouver at 12.45 a.m. They greeted us with bad news: we had to be up again at 5 to catch the ferry to the Island, to be on TV at 10. More colleges, more radio shows. In Vancouver we met Chris Luff (94) and Harry Brownrigg (91) and photographed Lestor's Corner (could not speak there—it's a car park now).

5th November, the long drive to 'Frisco. In Los Angeles we gate-crashed a meeting of the "Marxist Group" at the university; after speaking, we were pressed to stay for more—sorry, we have to go! All aboard the New York bus! Change at St. Louis and Chicago! (How we groaned that, of all the cities of the USA, in this one—home of the IWW and the Kerr Publishing Co., famous for its Socialist lectures in the 'twenties, we had no meetings.)   

3,500 miles later we were greeted in Montreal and spent the day discussing plans and books, arranging articles for Socialisme Mondiale. From there a hundred-mile for another smashing meeting! and next day, straight through to Boston to report to the NAC of the WSP on Sunday morning. After that, we boarded the London place to arrive back at Heathrow on 22nd November.

The hospitality of the American and Canadian comrades is fabulous. Our grateful thanks to Larry, George, Jim and Doré in Victoria, Carrie in Boston, Jean in New York, Jack in Stroudsberg, John and Anne in Winnipeg, Phil and Ben in Monticello, Bill in Vancouver, Brian and Bill in LA, Harry and Renée in San Francisco, Serge and Michelle in Montreal—their hospitality made it all possible. Sam Leight gave tremendous help, and George Gloss generously underwrote the trip.

Some college lecturers, like Dr. Bill Coope, gave great help and went out of their way to arrange things for us. Why colleges in Britain are so slow in taking opportunities is perplexing. When Jack Webster asked "Why do you do it?" we replied: "There is no greater satisfaction in this life than spreading knowledge to the benefit of humanity."

We don't even know if we made one member. We do know we revelled in every second of it!

Horatio and Steve

Another wall in the brick (1982)

Film Review from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pink Floyd's The Wall touches on nearly as many of capitalism's social evils as any issue of the Socialist Standard; except, of course, for an analysis of the cause of the problems. The film depicts with powerful imagery some of the contradictions of capitalist society. Capitalism is represented as the Wall — bureaucratic, alienating and destructive and made up of homogeneous bricks (we workers, no less) plastered together in hideous uniformity. From childhood it moulds workers into blind, submissive bricks in a structure which then exploits their ignorance and apathy for its own purposes.

The film portrays schoolchildren unquestioningly falling into sausage-machines, where they are turned into uniform shapes for the easy digestion of society. The purpose of education in our Buying and Selling Of People System (in suitable sausage form after the authoritarian schooling) couldn't have been more basically, and starkly, portrayed.

The eternally-flying white dove of peace soon explodes into the monstrous eagle of war, revealing both war and peace as products of the Wall society. Soldiers are shown as people at home see them (and as they most commonly are) —as prey of their murderous devices. The war brings them, however, only suffering and destruction. When it ended the soldiers waving from trains are received to the song of Bring The Boys Back Home, while a little boy helplessly searching for his missing father is testimony that not all the boys are brought home. The next theme of continuing war in the minds of the living is embodied in the fatherless boy, who is haunted in his sausage-forming years by war images so overwhelming and incomprehensible. The child becomes a rock-star (played by Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats), and yet another controlled brick of the establishment.

This rock-star is but a puppet commodity, not unlike the school headmaster whom we witness in one scene being controlled by strings from above. His mind and life have been drained by his success, and he finds himself alienated from the luxurious commodities that are his walls. This estrangement is further sharpened by his excessive viewing of television, particularly its extolling of the virtues of war and hierarchy, which so blatantly contradict his youth experiences of both war and school. But so absorbed is he by his lifestyle that his personal relationship and career are destroyed. He eventually has a nervous breakdown, culminating in a nihilistic act against his many possessions.

The politics of the film are very shallow and naive. Romantic visions of young people breaking through gates (there are many scenes of chained doors being broken into) only lead to opposition by the brute force of the state. The film also suggests a neo-Nazi  regime as the possible, almost logical outcome of the political exploitation of the present disillusionment.

One line of a song in the film, sung by children in the chorus goes: "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasms in the classroom. Teacher leave them kids alone. All in all you're just another brick in the wall". So what's wrong with a demolition job and the building of a free, democratic society in its place?

LEVAR

Soapbox to Soundbite (1997)

Book Review from the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stilled Tongues—from Soapbox to Soundbite. by Stephen Coleman, Porcupine Press £8.95

First impression leave us with the idea that this book is about street oratory in the major cities of this and other countries during the past two centuries and nothing more. But there is a great deal more. To be sure, there is a very good account of that astonishing phenomenon, the outdoor political meeting, which developed in Britain between the end of the nineteenth century and the years immediately following World War II. There is also an account of the development of these street parliaments in the teeth of ruling class opposition from the end of the eighteenth century.

Today the theatre of outdoor meetings, where the person on the platform had to defend his thesis in a free-exchange with the crowd or lose the audience, has been replaced by the spectacle of politicians and entertainers (frequently the same persons) who cannot be questioned—Kilroy and Matthew Parris, Brian Walden, David Mellor and Alan Clark.

The world of working-class auto-didacts who flocked to the public meetings places—"Speakers' Corner at Marble Arch (frequently confused with Hyde Park Corner), Tower Hill, Finsbury Pavement, etc. in London and in all of the other cities of the country also attracted many who had benefited from a more formal education. Around the turn of the century dramatists and literary figures, Bernard Shaw, William Morris and many others did not shrink from sharing the platform with the great unwashed. And at election times even politicians emerged with the object of manufacturing another five years of consent.

Coleman's selection of Methodist figurehead Lord Soper and raconteur Bonar Thompson as representative is arbitrary but he could not do otherwise. The scene he describes was so crowded with larger-than-life figures that his theme could easily have got lost in the welter. This outdoor university with its hundreds of academias-complete-with-dialectics in cities of this and other countries echoed the Greece of the Ancients. The students went away determined to read the recommended texts: Mutual Aid, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Das Kapital, and mouthing the cabalistic names of the authors, Prince Kropotkin, Friederick Engels, Joseph Dietzgen, Karl Marx.

There was no such tedium for the second of Coleman's orators. Bonar Thompson, with his soft Irish accent, spoke with the hope of collecting a few coins outside the Park after his stint, and relied on wit and paradox to entertain his listeners. The Rev. Donald Soper was, on the other hand, like most speakers, in earnest. He was a militant pacifist as part of his Christian belief and held the Socialist Party in great esteem for its anti-war stance, even to borrowing some of the socialist rationale to reinforce his moral repugnance for militarism.

The second half of Coleman's book, titled: Oratory to Oprah, The Twilight of Public Discussion, deals with the subject as it was affected by developments from the late 1950s on. Sophistication of the media grew—the BBC of Lord Reith's era had dropped the announcers with the cut-glass accents during the War. They could be too easily imitated by foreign propagandists who had been educated in English public schools. Reproducing the accents of Lancashire Wilfred Pickles or Hampshire John Arlott was another matter. But populism did not mean losing control. And television reemerged from its primitive and privileged pre-war form ready-shielded from popular intervention. The coming of commercial TV should have duplicated the situation in the press where millionaires had long indulged their prejudices. But the drive to get viewers and raise advertising rates tempered this tendency. Nevertheless "Britain has seen an appropriation of mass discussion by remote and unaccountable media agencies, and co-extensive with this has been an etiolation of autonomous discussion which has been unmistakably disempowering."

From the radio programme The Brains Trust of the 1940s to the end-to-end quizzing of experts in politics and economics on today's TV programmes, there have always been no end of people offering to do our thinking for us. This book was published just before the election. The result will not call for any re-consideration of the conclusions drawn here—they are too profound. But the devastating scale of the rejection of contemporary politics without any compensating endorsement of anything else on offer cannot be of comfort to our minders.

Ken Smith

The Wings of the I.L.P. (1929)

From the January 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

The possession of wings is a mixed blessing to an organisation, though it may be the means of keeping afloat those that possess little else. However, it is certainly a very popular complaint nowadays and afflicts alike Tory, Liberal. Labour, I.L.P. and Communist Parties. Its growth was slow at first, like all malignant diseases, but the example of Russia has given it a tremendous boost in post-war days.

At present the disease has reached an acute stage in the I.L.P., and the inevitable disintegrating process has set in. One by one the "intellectuals" who held sway in the past are leaving the ship, and intellectuals of the present are taking control of the ship.

The difference in essentials between the latter-day misleaders and their forerunners would require the liberal use of a microscope to discern.

The basic difference in policy may be summed up as follows: In the early days the policy was "Good old Keir Hardie"; in the middle period it was "Good old Ramsay MacDonald"; in the latest period it is "Good old Jimmy Maxton," the pirate who is stealing the laurels of the older warriors. The reason for these various policies is simple. The I.L.P., in the main, is concerned with men and not principles.

The official organ of the I.L.P. is a good illustration of this fact. Week after week it publishes pictures of "prominent" people in the "Labour Movement," and gushes over the doings of one or another. In its issue for November 23rd its front page contained photos of twenty of its contributors as an inducement to the workers to buy it. And this supposed to be the inauguration of a new policy.

But, as mentioned above, the wing trouble is becoming acute. Maxton, like his predecessors, is finding it difficult to keep his feet in two camps at the same time. However, the fight for popularity between Maxton and the older gang is bringing forth some rather useful information of the uselessness, from the working-class point of view, of the reactionary policy of the I.L.P. Here are two informing items:-

I made a statement at the Conference that at the present time there is not a single constituency in the country where there is a majority of convinced Socialist electors. We have plenty of districts, such as Bermondsey, where there is an overwhelming Labour majority, but it is a sheer delusion to think that the greater number of these people understand what we mean by Socialism. They neither understand it nor want it. (Dr. Alfred Salter, in a letter to the "New Leader," 12th October 1928.)

Now it must be admitted that that is a very frank statement from a man who, on his own confession, has been elected to Parliament by the  votes of non-Socialists. If the voters for Dr. Salter neither understand nor want Socialism, then obviously any action in the direction of accomplishing this end would be contrary to the wishes of his supporters and would jeopardise his seat. Dr. Salter, then, on his own admission, did not get elected through professing any Socialistic ideas.

He wrote another letter (or article) to the "New Leader," which appeared on December 7th. In this he said:- 

Many of us who are long-standing members of the I.L.P. have been distressed during the past two or three years at what we regard as the disastrous leadership of the N.A.C. We know first-hand that the membership of the Party is decreasing seriously, that old stalwarts and supporters are resigning, that branches are disintegrating, and that finances are declining. We know that the Special Effort Fund this year is practically a failure owing to numbers of the usual subscribers refusing to contribute. We see the I.L.P., to which some of us have given the best years of our lives, going down to utter wreck and destruction.

A pleasant state of affairs, this, after half a century of "gradualness" and the "little by little and bit by bit" policy! When we have urged the necessity of advocating Socialism, we have been told by I.L.P. protagonists that we were in too much of a hurry and that their policy of Socialism "in bits" was the way to build up a strong organisation. It looks like it!

Gilmac 

The Fetishism of Money (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “fetish” came to be used by anthropologists to mean “an inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed magical powers.” Often such objects took the form of amulets and in some cultures this practice still continues. In our more developed society this is dismissed as superstition. But whilst the wearing of amulets may not be that common, despite our technical culture “fetishism” is a deeply entrenched part of political thought. 

In Marxian theory the “fetishism of commodities” is the illusion that in buying and selling the values being exchanged are part of the physical make-up of the commodities themselves. If this were true it would mean that buying and selling, and the tyrannies of the profit system, could never be removed. But in fact, the values of commodities result from wage labour as part of the economic relationships of the capitalist system. In socialism, with people co-operating to produce directly for needs, the commodity form of goods will disappear leaving the community with free access to simple articles of use.

In religion, gods are products of the human imagination given powers to dominate the lives of those who create them. The destructive effects of religion are evident in the many conflicts that divide people throughout the world but this does not end with subservience to imagined gods. There is also the fetishism of money. This also attributes powers to an alien force that dominates our social affairs. Part of the fetishism of money is the illusion that money has its own productive powers. Particularly in politics, money is fetishised as having the power to solve problems because without it nothing can be done.

How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources”? What is meant by resources is always money. Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care or safe reliable trains or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement. Not just in Whitehall and Westminster but in Borough, District and Parish Councils throughout the country the same mantra is chanted week in and week out, year after year, “if only we had more money, something could be done”. This ignores the fact that productive resources are materials, means of production, transport, energy, communications and networks of infrastructure through which goods and services are produced. And all these depend on one single resource which is labour. These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend and there is an abundance of labour to provide for needs.

At times there may be millions of unemployed people, factories standing idle and unused materials being stockpiled but capitalist politicians still repeat, “We do not have the resources.” They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. The powers of the community to solve problems can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.

Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem. For example, in the last two elections Labour made a commitment to reduce child poverty. For this, they hope to use money. “The chosen means is also clear: a new form of child support which starts in 2003. But it will be costly, as the budget will reveal for the first time.” (Economist, 23 February)

“Poor children are defined as those living in households whose income, after housing costs, is below 60 percent of the median – the income in the exact middle of the income distribution.” Poverty is of course relative and this degree of poverty in Britain is not as severe as the poverty of children in undeveloped countries where 40,000 children under five die in poverty every day. In Britain, child poverty generally means substandard housing, poor conditions in the home, exclusion from benefits enjoyed by better off contemporaries, and poor diets (fats, sugar and carbohydrates).

Any kind of child poverty is a total disgrace and would be easily removed in socialism within a very short time. Under the Labour governments there has been a marginal improvement. According to the Economist,

“Progress has so far been slow. In 1996/7, the year before Labour took office, the number of children living in poverty was 4.4 million. By 1999/2000, this had declined only to 4.1 million. A more substantial decline to 3.5 million is expected for 2001/02 as reforms such as the working families' tax credit (WFTC), introduced in October 1999, take full effect. But this will still mean that the government has failed to meet its earlier pledge to remove more than a million children out of poverty in Labour's first term. To cut the number of poor children by around a million would cost as much as £6.1billion. The pledge to reduce child poverty is proving to be an expensive one.”

Socialists would say not just expensive. Because it relies on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money, the hope of any Labour government ending child poverty is impossible. Labour and Tory governments having been making the same promise for many years and they have all failed.

Appeals for money

But the magical powers of money to solve problems dominates not just the world of reformist politics, it also dominates the many charities that constantly ask for money. A recent example is an appeal run by Oxfam on TV:

  “What do we dream for our children? Health, happiness, success? A safe place to sleep at night? A drink of water that won't kill them? Never to be hungry again? We all want the best for our children. For some people that starts with such simple things. All they want is a better world for them to grow up in. It's not much to ask and all we are asking of you is £2 a month. 

In over 70 countries Oxfam is helping people work themselves out of poverty. They never give up and neither do we. Will you stand alongside us too? With your £2 a month we can help them with seeds, tools – help them build wells with clean, safe water give children an education so that they can have a chance of a real future free from hunger and pain. All people want is a better life for their children. Please do something remarkable today and help make a dream a reality. Telephone Oxfam today and give £2 a month.”

It is not the purpose here to criticise those who want to do something to help others in desperate need. In a way, their willingness to help provides a hope for the future. But the brutal facts have to be faced, that during the past 25 years during which time OXFAM and similar organisations have been appealing for money to solve problems, the number of seriously undernourished people has, according to the FAO, almost doubled from 435 million in 1974/5 to over 800 million in 2000. In view of this we are bound to point out that when OXFAM claim to be in over 70 countries “helping people to work themselves out of poverty,” so far as the general problem is concerned this statement is misleading. If OXFAM and its supporters were to also join the work of organising for socialism, that would be a significant step forward. What could be their objections to a world organised solely for the needs of people? Surely this is what they claim to want. By working for socialism they could see an end to the need to make appeals for money.

Following the volcanic eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in Congo the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast its Goma Crisis Appeal (25 January). This included what given amounts of money could do. For example, “£30 will treat 18 people for severe malaria – £100 will provide clean water to 4,000 people for a week.”

We may not go as far as Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.” But it does remain true that appeals for money to alleviate suffering tend to perpetuate the system that causes the suffering. Moreover, the idea that such suffering results from natural causes is not always the case. Most natural dangers known and socialism would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters. Also, contingency plans would exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe. Emergency supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers would be moved quickly to the area of crisis. The present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them.

The fetishism of money is part of the ideology of the profit system that claims uncountable victims across the world. In the Pre-Colombian societies of South America, in homage to their gods, human sacrifice was widely practised. For example, this was a gruesome ritual amongst the Aztec people in what is now Mexico. “In the heart of Tenochtitlan the pyramid rose as an architectural fetish, charged with the powers of all the offerings, and the blood from thousands of sacrificed human beings. The structure was the terrifying centre of the Aztec world” (The Aztecs, Richard F. Townsend).

Many of the sacrificial victims were children and we think of this as barbaric. Perhaps for this reason we now prefer to keep out of our minds the fact that every day we sacrifice many more children's lives than the Aztecs could ever manage. We sacrifice them in homage to the god of money, on the altar of the capitalist system. 

Pieter Lawrence

Action Replay: Missing the Green (2014)

The Action Replay column from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

A good walk spoiled is the standard cliché about golf, but it seems that it is far more than a country stroll that can be ruined. According to a recent report (Observer, 27 April), in Surrey more land is used for golf courses than for homes. Green belt land for golf courses is fairly cheap, as the planning system means that it cannot be used for housing (and the price of land for housing has been growing rapidly in the last couple of years, especially in the south of England). Living near to a golf course can raise house prices, though.

And golf uses up more than just land. Maintaining a golf course can require enormous amounts of water, especially in drier areas such as the Mediterranean. Golf tourism, in Spain for instance, means massive demands on water, increased by the visitors who swarm to hotels near the courses. Use of pesticides can affect groundwater and the building of a course can reduce the number of local animal species. There is a Global Anti-Golf Movement (www.antigolf.org) which advocates, inter alia, ‘an immediate moratorium on all golf course development’.

There are many municipal courses, especially in Scotland, but for the most part courses are private property, with keep-off signs, and clubs may be exclusive and very expensive to join. It is often claimed that golfers are mostly comfortably off and in older age groups. So many will have a fair amount of disposable income, with the chance to spend freely on equipment and the socialising that is part of the game.

As a result golf is very big business, involving massive expenditures, on building courses and buying equipment. According to a 2013 report, golf contributes €15bn to the European economy (compared to €56bn in the US) and is responsible for 180,000 full-time-equivalent jobs. It did badly in the recent recession, as many people cut down on club membership, but apparently not so badly as other ‘hobbies’. Golf is also seen as important for some business people, a means of building relationships with others or seeing how someone behaves under stress, how ‘sporting’ or fair-minded they really are. Hence its description as ‘Corporate America’s No. 1 pastime’. A course can even be a place to confirm business deals, so combining exercise with a chance to make a profit.

Paul Bennett