Mixed Media: Oh What a Lovely War (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London revived in February this year the anti-war musical entertainment Oh What a Lovely War to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The original production by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, Charles Chilton, and Gerry Raffles opened at the same theatre in March 1963. Littlewood's Theatre Workshop was notable for left-wing and proletarian productions such as Brecht's Mother Courage, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan's dramas and the musical play Fings Ain't What They Used T'Be by Frank Norman.

The 2014 production was directed by Terry Johnson, writer of Insignificance. Production design was by Lez Brotherston who wrote 'Joan Littlewood wrote it as a piece for a bunch of actors presenting a story, rather than very real characters. It was very Brechtian.' Littlewood indeed used Brecht's ideas on the politicisation of theatre to better convey the realities of war, using minimal props and Brecht's half-curtain for rapid scene changes. Littlewood like Brecht was searching for truth in the dramatic realisation of soldier's stories. Littlewood was influenced by the Expressionist techniques of Meyerhold in Russia, Erwin Piscator's use of newsreel in Germany, and the Theatre National Populaire use of bare stage and pinpoint lighting. She combined a European aestheticism with a deeply English love of popular theatre evidenced in the Pierrot costumes. Oh What a Lovely War is a pierrot show with songs, battles, a few jokes and is anchored in a seaside tradition. The presence of music-hall is evident in the way the MC (Shaun Prendergast in the 2014 production) chats to the audience as they come in.

Oh What a Lovely War is sourced in the songs of the First World War, Barbara Tuchman's August 1914, Haig's diaries, memoirs by Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves plus Alan Clark's 1961 military history The Donkeys. Clark identifies the High Command of French, Rawlinson and Haig as responsible for the virtual destruction of the old professional British Army in 1915. Clark's book title originates with Falkenhayn's Memoirs where it is written 'Ludendorff: 'The English soldiers fight like lions', Hoffman: 'True, But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.' The play clearly portrays working-class lions being exploited by upper-class donkeys, the main villain being Haig whose contempt for the working class is clearly evident in his diary entry 'mostly gamekeepers and servants' after hearing 13,000 men were killed in three hours during the battle of Passchendaele where they gained one hundred yards.

The working class soldier is central to the play, everything is viewed from his perspective and sympathy for the working class soldier is paramount. We wrote in the Socialist Standard ofAugust 1964 that it was a 'witty and savage denunciation of the murder of a generation.' In a letter to Littlewood and Raffles on 5 June 1963 Bertrand Russell wrote ‘a statement on war such as I have not experienced... I wonder that it has been allowed on a London stage.’ The newsreel panels in the show are grim statistics of the casualties in the so-called 'Great War': 10 million dead, 21 million wounded, 7 million missing, the battle of the Somme July to November 1916 – 1.5 million casualties. The 1963 programme read: 'In 1960, an American Military Research Team fed all the facts of World War One into the computers they use to plan World War Three. They reached the conclusion that the 1914-18 war was impossible and couldn't have happened. There could not have been so many blunders nor so many casualties.' We wrote in the Socialist Standard of August 1964: 'When war broke out in 1914 it was much vaster and grimmer than anything the Victorians had seen, something for which people were totally unprepared.'

In Act Two the MC announces 'Part two of the War Game, find the biggest profiteer' and we have a scene of British, French, German, and American Munitions Manufacturers with a Swiss banker, which identifies international capitalism as the cause of the First World War and the ultimate beneficiary: 'two peace scares in the last year. Our shares dropped forty per cent, caused a flutter on Wall Street' and 'I'm a patriot, but I'm also a businessman; my stockholders must have dividends.' The suffragette and anti-war left-wing communist Sylvia Pankhurst makes an appearance reading a letter from Bernard Shaw: 'The men of this country are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the lusts and lies and rancour's of bloodthirsty men who love war.'

American capitalist Henry Ford was honest when he said 'Tell me who profits by war, and I will tell you how to stop it.' Oh What a Lovely War contributes to an anti-capitalist and an internationalist outlook but needs some socialist rigour so we say, as we did in 1914, 'Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.'

Steve Clayton

Designer politics (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are many ways to try to persuade people to buy a magazine: from putting a picture of a glamorous celebrity on the cover to promising a "shock, horror" story inside. Other magazines and journals try to attract readers by advertising special offers and free gifts. For organisations whose main concern is profit this comes as no surprise. The competition for readers is intense not least because a large circulation will attract profitable advertising. It is little wonder that the packaging and the gimmicks become as important as the content.

So, bearing that in mind try to guess which monthly journal in a recent issue contained within its stylish covers a special offer for unisex boxer shorts ("They're stylish! They're fashionable!"); another offer for "extra strength" condoms ("Teatless for the aesthetic among us"); and a feature on what to buy and where to go on Valentine's Day? A number of possible candidates come to mind. City Limits or Time Out perhaps whose main purpose is to inform young Londoners where to go or what to see? Or one of those glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan directed at the "liberated" woman-about-town? Or a spoof article in Private Eye maybe? 

No! It was the magazine that still refers to itself as the "Theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist Party" - Marxism Today. To be fair there was an attempt to try to give the boxer shorts some political significance. The reader was offered a choice of two styles - one with the word "Proletariat" in cyrillic lettering printed all over them; the other featuring the Aeroflot logo! (No, this really wasn't a Private Eye spoof). It was perhaps slightly surprising that Marxism Today was selling boxer shorts with an apparently pro-Soviet appeal since it is the journal of the Euro-communist lot in the CP. Or maybe it was a closet gesture of support for Gorbachev, who, if the western media are to be believed, is as trendy and style-conscious as Marxism Today. It was harder to try to discern any kind of political message behind the ad for the condoms, although they are, we are told, "brought to you exclusively by Red Stripe".

The Valentine's Day feature began with an overt attempt at making a political connection by suggesting that "the obvious gift for an activist" is a telephone answering machine. "Late for meetings?" it continued, "buy them Stephen Rotholz Icon watches". Or perhaps a £650 hand-made bicycle is more up your street as a present for your "Valentine"? Or a piece of Lalique glassware costing, we are helpfully informed, from £50 to £15,000. And for that special Valentine's night out? How about dinner for two at a Burmese restaurant which will cost you £30? Marxism Today even comes up with a suggestion to fill the pregnant pauses should the after-dinner conversation begin to flag. Shares and share fluctuations, of course! And for anyone with a conscience then Marxism Today helps us off the hook by announcing that "popular capitalism may be subverted with information from Stewardship Unit Trust, who will invest your money in ventures which don't have connections with alcohol, tobacco or defence industries". Well that's okay then. Ideologically sound shares!

Marxism Today claims to be a serious political journal. It's true that in between all the trivia quoted above there were some serious political articles aimed mostly at the trendy broad left rainbow coalition of good causes. Class politics are out. Life-style politics are most definitely in. Forget about trying to change society in any meaningful way and concentrate instead on changing your image and Marxism Today will tell you how. Design, presentation and packaging are being used to disguise the emptiness of their politics in much the same way as Conservative, Labour and Alliance parties which give as much attention to the colours, logos and wrappings of their policies as they do to the content in their attempt to sell them to the punters. The idea that you can win people over to your side by the packaging rather than the content of policies is nothing new. Elections, in particular, have always been long on fine-sounding rhetoric and short on incisive political analysis. Offering their readers designer Marxism Today condoms and boxer shorts is just the 1980s' version of politicians "buying" workers' support with free beer.

Marxism Today must be totally out of touch with the lives of the majority of workers in this country for whom whether to buy Lalique glassware or an answering machine as a Valentine's Day present is not a decision that they are likely to be losing much sleep over. Most people do not lead the lives of trendy lefties giving support to a handful of "good causes" because they've received the ideologically sound seal of approval from the political "style" gurus. Trying to win support and readers with gimmicks like boxer shorts and condoms shows contempt for workers and is no substitute for sound analysis of capitalism and convincing arguments for socialism. The Communist Party has always been short of both so perhaps, after all, it's not surprising that they've given up trying to sell politics and have turned to selling "lifestyles" instead.

Janie Percy-Smith

Cooking the Books: The Falling Rate of Profit (1) (2014)

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

In his much talked-of book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (to be reviewed next month) Thomas Piketty has a section headed ‘Back to Marx and the Falling Rate of Profit’ where he accuses Marx of holding that ‘capitalists accumulate ever increasing quantities of capital, which ultimately leads inexorably to a falling rate of profit … and eventually to their own downfall.’ Earlier he had said that Marx’s theory ‘implicitly relies on a strict assumption of zero productivity growth over the long run.’ Since Marx’s ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ is based precisely on a long-run growth of labour productivity this is a bizarre accusation.

A clue as to what is behind it is a passage elsewhere where Piketty equates ‘economic growth’ with ‘growth in output per capita, which is productivity growth’. So it is this that Marx is accused of ignoring. It is true that Marx does not employ this concept but it is not true that he was unaware of it, as in section 5 of chapter 25 of Volume I of Capital on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ (which Piketty himself cites) Marx does compare the rate of increase of profits and the rate of increase of population for the period 1853 to 1864. He even quotes from the Registrar General’s report on the census of 1861 that ‘rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth.’

In any event Marx would not have regarded total output per capita as a measure of productivity at national level. He would have defined this rather as total output divided by the number of productive workers.

What Piketty appears to be trying to do is fit what he thinks is Marx’s view into his own categories. He lays down as a ‘first fundamental law of capitalism’ that the share of income from capital in national income = the rate of return on capital multiplied by ratio of the stock of capital to national income. This last, known in conventional economics as the capital/income ratio, or the stock of capital expressed as a multiple of national income (or output, the same thing), is obviously affected by the rate of growth of national income.

Piketty is accusing Marx of assuming an unlikely very high and rising capital/income ratio. According to his first fundamental law of capitalism, the higher is this ratio the higher too is the share of income from capital in national income. If, for instance (as Piketty points out Marx assumes in some of his examples), the stock of capital is ten times annual national output and the rate of return on capital is 5 percent, then capital’s share of national income is 50 percent. Piketty adds that if the capital/income ratio ‘is extremely high, then the rate of return on capital must get smaller and smaller and closer and closer to zero, or else capital’s share of income will ultimately devour all of national income.’ This was why, according to him, Marx had to assume a falling rate of profit.

Piketty says that the only way out of this difficulty is a reduction in the capital/income ratio brought about by an increase in the growth of national income per capita. But Marx does not need rescuing by introducing this since he never held the theory Piketty attributes to him. Marx did hold that there was a slow long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall (though not for the reason Piketty gives) but he also listed a number of counteracting tendencies too. This meant that there was nothing ‘inexorable’ about it.

Material World: China’s Ghost Towns (2014)

The Material World Column from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Retail property including housing is estimated to account for around 20 percent of mainland China’s gross domestic product (GDP). China has used more concrete in the last three years than the US did in the whole of the 20th century, enough to build a road 5m wide from Canary Wharf to the Moon. Much of this concrete usage has gone towards swathes of empty houses. The number of empty homes in China reaches 50 million, twice the number of homes there are in the UK. More than one in five homes in China’s urban areas is vacant. Official estimates said that in mid-2010, 18 percent of all households in Beijing owned two or more properties.

The Hong Kong-based brokerage firm, CLSA, spent a year on the ground in China, examining more than 600 projects across a dozen cities. Their research suggests that there is a problem of excess capacity in the real-estate market in third-tier cities. China’s vacancy rate for property is rising and expected to exceed 20 percent between 2016 and 2017, largely buoyed by over-investment. Every industry from cement to shipbuilding is plagued with over-capacity. Too many blocks of apartments and shopping malls paid for with too much debt, frequently financed by the shadow banking system. China’s growth has been about the largest credit expansion in modern history.

Local governments in China are in a perpetual cash squeeze because they have to hand over a bulk of their tax revenue to the central government and because the central government often orders localities to build all sorts of infrastructure projects but neglects to assist with funding. With taxes collected centrally and then redistributed to local governments, land has become the principle source of income for provincial officials, who normally can expect a redistribution of only 50 percent of fiscal revenue after paying 85 percent of the municipal purse. Grandiose land projects, therefore, are ripe money-making schemes for officials. Because the State and therefore the Party owns all of the land in China, local governments solve their funding problems by seizing land from their poorest residents, giving them a paltry sum in return, and then they sell the land to developers, essentially flipping real estate on a massive scale.

‘This creates bubbles, because the prosperity of properties and cities ultimately comes from the accumulation of people, but developing real estate alone doesn’t create jobs—so [these new towns] don’t attract laborers or their families. As a result, only the land per se is ‘urbanized,’ and so become the ‘ghost towns’ that we see’, says Pan Yingli, a professor of finance at the Research Center for Modern Finance at Shanghai Jiaotong University. ‘Local governments borrow a lot of money [to build these towns] but [these towns don’t create] the industries or population to produce enough fiscal income to pay them off. These debts become bad loans and add to the risks for the banks. And the banks’ solution to this is to extend maturities—in other words, to lend them more money to pay off their old debts.'(theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/chinas-eerie-faux-european-ghost-towns/282872/)

The city of Kangbashi, built for a population the size of Pittsburgh, is nearly empty. It was built a decade ago to house around a half a million people. At the time the region, known as Ordos, was rich from selling coal and sits atop one of China’s largest coal deposits. But today, coal prices are at an historic low, and Ordos is in so much debt that it had to borrow tens of millions of dollars from a local developer just to pay the salaries for its city employees.

Some make the case that these cities are being built to cover the expected internal migration from China's countryside to the cities. The country's urbanisation rate increased from 17.4 percent to 46.8 percent between 1978 and 2009 and is expected to grow to 64 percent by 2025. According to these voices, they're just a little premature in building those cities.

‘I'm not so sure if we have a lot of these ghost cities, but there's clearly a lot of empty real estate’ in smaller cities, said Maarten-Jan Bakkum, senior emerging market strategist at ING Investment Management. The longer these homes stay unoccupied, the less likely they will ever be occupied, Bakkum said. ‘If it stays empty too long, decay is very fast and the quality is not always good,’ he said. ‘You have the risk of these areas of cities or maybe even complete cities that will stay empty forever and will slowly fall apart.’ (cnbc.com/id/101678673#)

Closer to home, in Ireland, we see a similar example of capitalism in action. There, too, profit-driven developments built in the wrong locations and created a series of ghost housing estates where nobody wants to live (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8653949.stm)

ALJO

Editorial: World War One – A Disaster for the Working Class (2014)

Editorial from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty  years ago, on the 50^th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the general opinion expressed by commentators was that it was not something to be spoken about in favourable terms. It was a terrible tragedy not a glorious historical episode.

In those days anti-war sentiments were more widespread than today. Maybe because many were still alive who remembered its horrors. Maybe it was because the main war going on at the time – in Vietnam – was particularly unpopular. In any event, the Military Wives would have stood no chance of topping the charts at Christmas.

Today things are different. Historians have been found to eulogise the war as necessary and just. From the point of view of the British ruling class this is true. All its war aims were achieved. Competition from German capitalism was crushed and its attempt to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad was thwarted. German colonies in Africa passed under British control as did, on the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the oilfields of Mesopotamia (now Iraq). The British ruling class had every reason to be satisfied with its outcome.

So it is natural that a historian with their interests at heart such as Max Hastings should revive the arguments used at the time to justify British participation in the War. Rather surprising is the position of another pro-ruling class historian, Niall Ferguson, who argues that Britain should have stayed out and let the Continental Powers fight it out amongst themselves. This was in fact the position taken up by some members of the Liberal government  at the time.

From the ruling class point of view Hastings clearly expresses their interests better. If the British state had not joined in, it would have not acquired Germany’s colonies nor the oilfields of Mesopotamia. And if German capitalism had won British capitalism would have faced a strengthened competitor on world markets and a threat to its Empire.

But what about the workers? Although they had no interest in the issues at stake – colonies, markets, trade routes, investment outlets – many were persuaded to support their respective ruling classes, in France and Germany as well as in Britain. A large number went willingly to the slaughter without needing to be conscripted. This was a measure of the general lack of a socialist or a class consciousness. Not considering any alternative to capitalism most workers in the combatant states were persuaded to identify with the interests of their rulers.

Is the situation any different today? Nationalism and a lack of class consciousness are just as widespread now as they were in 1914. This means that workers today could also be manipulated. Glorifying the First World war as necessary, and those whose lives the state sacrificed to achieve the ruling class’s war as heroes, is part of the process of keeping this possibility alive. To combat this is why we are publicising as still relevant the anti-war and anti-capitalist position we took up in 1914.

What is capitalism? (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Anti-capitalism" has become a popular slogan, and a good thing too. But if this is to have a positive impact people have to be clear as to what they mean by capitalism

To put our cards on the table straightaway, what we mean by capitalism is an economic system where productive resources are used as "capital", i.e. they are used to produce more wealth with a view to profit; this sets in motion an impersonal and uncontrollable economic mechanism which leads to the accumulation, in fits and starts, of more and more capital, of more and more wealth used to produce further wealth with a view to profit. Capitalism is, then, a system of capital accumulation. Hence, of course, its name.

Not just a market economy

This is not how defenders of capitalism like to portray things. Many shun the c-word and talk instead about a "market economy". To most people a market is a friendly place where you buy things you need so the term "market economy" is employed so as to conjure up the idea of an economy geared to serving consumer demands.

It is possible to envisage such an economy on paper but it would be vastly different from capitalism. It would be an economy of self-employed farmers, artisans and shopkeepers, each producing a particular product which they would exchange on the market, via the medium of money, for the products produced by the others which they needed. There would be no profit-making, no exploitation and no accumulation, just independent producers exchanging their products for their mutual benefit.

The farmers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers and others would be producing their particular products which would sell at a price reflecting the average amount of time required to produce it. There would be no profit and no exploitation because everybody would be receiving the full value of what their labour had produced. They would just be exchanging so much labour in one form for the same amount in a different form.

Marx called such an economy "simple commodity production" (a commodity being, for him, an item of wealth produced for sale), but it is doubtful whether it has ever existed in a pure form. The nearest that may have come to it would have been in some of the early colonial settlements in North America, but even Adam Smith writing over two hundred years ago in 1776 assumes an economy in which there is already production for profit and accumulation.

Capitalism is indeed a market economy, but not a simple market economy. A key difference of course is that under capitalism production is not carried out by self-employed producers but wage and salary workers employed by business enterprises. In other words, under capitalism, the producers have become separated from the means of production. This makes all the difference. The producers are now not bringing to market what they have produced (that belongs to their employer, the owner of the means of production) but only their working skills, so they receive the value not of their product but only of their ability to work, which is less. The product is still under normal circumstances sold at its full labour-time value but the proceeds go not to the direct producers but are pocketed by the owners of the means of production. Profit is the difference between this and what they pay, as wages and salaries, for the working skills they purchase on the labour market.

Production for profit

So capitalism is not a simple market economy. Marx explained the difference well when he said that what happens in a simple market economy is that the producers brought to market a product of a certain value which they sell for money in order to buy another product or products of equal value. The economic circuit is commodity-money-commodity (C-M-C), the aim being to end up with a basket of useful things. Under capitalism the economic circuit is different. A capitalist sets out with a sum of money which they use to buy commodities (factory buildings, raw materials, working skills) that can be used to produce other commodities with the aim of ending up, after these other commodities have been sold, with more money than they started off with. So the circuit is now money-commodities-more money (M-C-M').

It is now clear why capitalism cannot be described as an economy geared to satisfying consumer demands. The products of capitalist production have to find a buyer of course but this is only incidental to the main aim of making a profit, of ending up with more money than was originally invested. Production is initiated not by what consumers are prepared to pay for to satisfy their needs but by what the owners of the means of production calculate can be sold at a profit. This is what makes the wheels of capitalism grind—or not grind, or not grind so quickly, as the case may be—depending on the level of the rate of profit.

But the picture of capitalism is still not complete. Capitalist investors want to end up with more money than they started out with, but why? Is it just to live in luxury and consume in riotous living? That would suggest that they aim of capitalist production was simply to produce luxuries for the rich. Once again, it is possible to envisage such an economy on paper. Marx did, and called it "simple reproduction", but only as a stage in the development of his argument. By "simple reproduction" he meant, logically enough, that the stock of means of production was simply reproduced from year to year at its previously existing level; all of the profits (all of M' less M) would be used to maintain a privileged, exploiting class in luxury and idleness. As a result the M in M-C-M' would always remain the same and the circuit keep on repeating itself unchanged.

Capital accumulation

This of course is not how capitalism operates. It is not a "steady state economy". On the contrary, it is an ever-expanding economy of capital accumulation. In other words, most of the profits are capitalised, i.e. reinvested in production, so that production, the stock of means of production, and the amount of capital, all tend to increase over time (not in a smooth straight line, but only in fits and starts, but that's another story). The economic circuit is thus money-commodities-more money-more commodities, even more money (M-C-M'-C'-M'').

This, however, is not the conscious choice of the owners of the means of production (given the choice, they'd probably prefer to consume it all themselves). It is something that is imposed on them as a condition for not losing their original investment. Competition with other capitalists forces them to reinvest as much of their profits as they can afford to in keeping their means and methods of production up to date. As a result there is continuous technological innovation. Defenders of capitalism see this as one of its merits and in the past it was insofar as this has led to the creation of the basis for a non-capitalist society in which the technologically-developed means of production can be now—and could have been any time in the last 100 years—consciously used to satisfy people's wants and needs.

Under capitalism this whole process of capital accumulation and technical innovation is a disorganised, impersonal process which causes all sorts of problems—particularly on a worldscale where it is leading to the destruction of the environment and the absolute impoverishment of many formerly independent producers in the so-called Third World—which have rightly ignited the anger of the new wave of anti-capitalist protesters.

Alternatives, viable and unviable

Unless these anti-capitalist protesters take the time to study what exactly capitalism is and how it operates they risk not advocating a viable alternative. (We are assuming of course that they want to be pro-something and not merely anti-capitalist, not merely a feeble counterweight within capitalism to the excesses of certain international capitalist organisations and corporations.)

One danger is that the anti-capitalists will be diverted into campaigning to try to put the clock back by returning to the simple market economy that may have existed in early colonial North America. This is an important strand in Green and anarchist thinking as exemplified by the slogan "small is beautiful". We are offered the idyllic picture of an economy of self-employed smallscale producers producing for a local market or of an economy composed entirely of LETS schemes. This wouldn't be capitalism but it wouldn't be possible either, if only because enough to feed, clothe and house the world's present population would not be able to be produced on this basis.

More sophisticated Green thinkers, sensibly, don't want to go that far. What they advocate is a steady-state market economy, a variant of Marx's "simple reproduction". The idea is that the surplus would be used not to reinvest in expanding production, nor in maintaining a privileged class in luxury but in improving public services while maintaining a sustainable balance with the natural environment. It's the old reformist dream of a tamed capitalism, minus the controlled expansion of the means of production an earlier generation of reformists used to envisage.

But it is still a dream because it assumes that a profit-motivated market economy can be tamed, and made to serve human and/or environmental needs. History has proved that it can't be; capitalism has shown itself to be an uncontrollable economic mechanism which operates to force economic actors to make profits and accumulate them as more and more capital irrespective of the consequences. This mechanism first came into operation in the 16th century and since then has spread to dominate the whole world in the form of the world market. Capitalism today could in fact be described as the profit-motivated, capital-accumulating world market economy.

Other anti-capitalist protesters see this fact that capitalism is a world system as being the problem and the solution as being to break it up into separate capitalisms operating within national frontiers behind protective tariffs walls. This hardly justifies the description "anti-capitalist" of course, and parallels a nasty strand of nationalist thinking which has always associated capitalism with a sinister "cosmopolitan" conspiracy. Indeed, the danger is that, in the absence of being presented with a credible alternative, it is here that the "anti-capitalist" protests will find the loudest popular echo. The US labor unions took a nationalist line in Seattle and in Britain the Green Party has already endorsed the reactionary "Save the Pound" campaign.

So, given that anything that rejects technology and the existence of one world is a non-starter, what is the credible, viable alternative to capitalism as a world system of production for profit and uncontrolled and uncontrollable capital accumulation? It's where all the productive resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of the people of the world—"make the Earth a common treasury for all", as Gerrard Winstanley put it right at the beginning of capitalism—so that they can be used, not to produce for sale on a market, not to make a profit, but purely and simply to satisfy human wants and needs in accordance with the principle of, to adapt a phrase, "from each region on the basis of its resources, to each region on the basis of its needs".

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: More conservative mottos (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

That wage increases cause price increases is an old lie. This assumes that capitalist firms can raise the price of their products at will. But they can’t. They can only charge what the market will bear. Workers are in a basically similar position. But the market for products and the market for labour power are two different markets. Assuming that firms are charging what the market will bear – and they’d be foolish not to – then, if the labour market allows the workers a chance to push up wages, firms just have to live with increased costs and lower profits for the time being.

It is because wage increases eat into profits – not because they supposedly cause “inflation” – that employers fight them and, as far as they and the media are concerned, any old argument, even one that’s not true, will do to oppose and discredit groups of workers demanding a wage increase.

In any event, even if a wage increase in a firm did lead to an increased price of that firm’s products, that would not be inflation, which is an increase in the general price level. Such an increase can come about for various reasons – increased demand for products in a boom, a fall in the value of gold when it’s the money-commodity, and an overissue of a inconvertible paper currency. Even though the double-digit inflation of the 1970s is over, inflation still exists today and is mainly caused by inflating the currency. The Bank of England has a remit to inflate the currency by 2 percent a year. Which is why both prices and wages tend to increase annually by more or less this amount, depending on conditions in particular markets.

The view that wage increases cause price increases has long been argued over. In 1865 the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association in London devoted four meetings to discussing it. At the last of these Marx decisively refuted the argument in a lecture that was published after his death as a pamphlet Value, Price and Profit. This has now been republished, under what was its original title of Wages, Price and Profits, by the Communist Party of Britain, which publishes the Morning Star and which is the real political successor to the old Communist Party of Great Britain (and not to be confused with another group which has usurped this name and which publishes a paper called the Weekly Worker).

After explaining why workers should always press for the highest wages they can get, Marx famously urged the unions:

“Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner therevolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”

In his introduction, Robert Griffiths of the CPB’s Economic Committee can’t ignore this and has to pay lip service to Marx by writing that he held that “workers would forever be commodities to be exploited until capitalism and its wages system were abolished”. But he then ignores this completely, going on to advocate that unions should aim at, as well as higher wages, “statutory price controls”, “better state benefits and pensions”, “more public services”, “controls on the export of capital”. All of which assume the continuation of capitalism.

If Marx returned today we know what he would say: Instead of the conservative motto ‘statutory price controls/better state benefits, etc, etc’ the unions ought to inscribe on their banners the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolition of the Wages System’.

Pathfinders: War – the Enders in Sight (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent news that a US soldier in Afghanistan has gone loopy and machine-gunned a whole bunch of small children will have shocked even those veteran war-observers with long memories of such ‘My Lai’-type massacres. With the omniscience of modern communications it is no longer feasible to hush up such inevitable excesses, and the incident is bad news for politicians and strategists trying to wind down Western involvement in Afghanistan and extricate their countries with some shred of dignity.

But it will also add weight to the arguments of developers aiming to remove human agency altogether from the battlefield. As technology and economies of scale continue to accelerate, these arguments are gathering force. Existing military ‘training’ involves the unsavoury business of trying to turn sentient mammals into cold-blooded killing machines without conscience, self-regard, emotion or independent thought. The problem is, it doesn’t work and never has worked. Despite thousands of years of history and the most intense training schemes ever devised, humans are just not very good at war. Most soldiers in wartime never fire on or even at the enemy, despite their supposed motivation for doing so. Of those that do, the stress can easily send them over the edge, resulting in embarrassing murder sprees.

Practically and tactically, robots are better. They shoot what they are supposed to shoot; obey without demur; don’t rape or torture; don’t sleep, eat, desert, mutiny, fight each other, get ill or go mad; they retain functionality even when damaged; and they do not tie up rescue resources when badly damaged. No grieving populations need await casualty figures; no moral tide threatens to wash away public resolve; no breast needs beating at military reversals; no songs of regret need writing about Little Johnny never coming home because Little Johnny never went in the first place. If war has its own form of utopia, this is it.

The main problem with robots is that they are stupid and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Artificial intelligence systems can give a measure of independent decision-making to battlefield robots along the lines of the self-driving car or the Mars-lander, but giving autonomy and firepower to machines risks the same kind of blow-back effect that banished gas as a viable battlefield weapon. For the moment, humans have to be in charge.

The process of robotising warfare is however under way.  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones fly sorties and strafe enemy targets, while improvised explosive device (IED) drones trundle up to suspicious roadside objects in a selfless act of identification before the bomb disposal experts move in. The Pentagon recently invited manufacturers to design ‘disposable’ satellite systems for intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance that could be launched in the field by a soldier using a handheld device (BBC Online, 14 March). Research is ongoing into powered exoskeletons. Essentially, these install the human controller inside the armoured robot. Problems with power supplies, however, mean ‘robosquaddie’ is still some way off.

One might be tempted to imagine future battles being fought entirely between robot armies without any direct human agency at all, but although socialists wouldn’t complain about the lack of worker self-sacrifice involved, this is unlikely. The 1985 novel Enders Game, currently in film production, describes a society where war is fought remotely like a computer game, and in the gradual distancing of humans from the live action we can indeed see signs of the virtualisation of war.

The future of war is not on any physical battlefield, where indestructible Terminators can too easily be hacked and turned against their own side. It is in the virtual fields of the internet, fast becoming the nervous system of the world. Already awash with amateur viruses and professional adware and spyware, the internet is now hosting covert state attacks on social and political infrastructure. Last November Foreign Secretary William Hague warned of such attacks during a cybersecurity conference in London. He avoided mentioning China and Russia by name but in any case the finger points in both directions, and most state administrations have some form of a cyber ‘defence’ department devoted to hacking and undermining economic adversaries.

All this is to put in somewhat larger perspective recent news reports about the ‘boring’ nature of ICT lessons in British schools. That the state should decide to direct so savage a critique at a central part of its own education strategy is surprising and the question needs to be asked: why this, and why now? The ICT syllabus was, like every other syllabus, designed around the supposed needs of future employers at a time when young people had little access to computers and wouldn’t know a spreadsheet from a spark plug. Today computers are vastly easier to use, but more to the point, with social networking changing the youth lifestyle, students are often more tech-savvy than their mostly unqualified teachers. The overwhelmingly office end-user orientation of the school syllabus will comfortably turn out armies of low-paid administrative assistants, but that’s not going to reignite the white heat of British technological creativity and employers know it. Apps, games and cyber-security are where it’s at, and for that you need to get ‘under the bonnet’, down among the program code. The recent anti-establishment successes of hacktivist groups, Anonymous and Lulz-Sec have caught states flat-footed, but they’re catching on fast. Virtual war is coming, and the state with the most IT-literate population will be the one which wins, or at least survives, the coming cyber-conflicts.

For socialists there is an upside to all this. As the needs of capitalism become ever more sophisticated, power flows into the hands of the workers whose job it is to run that system. But it is a perpetual arms-race between the ruling elite and workers, each one learning to be smarter, faster and more devious than the other. When workers in Iran, Burma and Egypt broke out in rebellion, the state shut down communications channels in a massive denial-of-service which protesters found ways around. But in Syria the regime was cleverer and hacked the rebels’ own communications, flooding them with gibberish. The Syrian regime may win in the short term through sheer medieval brutality, but you can’t run a modern state without a sophisticated infrastructure and a working class trained to run it. And that inevitably gives capitalism its Achilles heel, and workers their ultimate weapon against war itself.

Mixed Media: 'Feminist Awakening' (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Feminist awakening

Hattie Morahan was effervescent as Nora Helmer in A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen at the Young Vic last year.

Ibsen, the father of modernism brought a realism and naturalism to the theatre with A Doll's House (1879), and was an influence on George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill. Ibsen's play highlights the lack of women's freedom, and was critical of marital roles in middle bourgeois society. In the middle bourgeois class, hearth and home, domesticity, motherhood and wifely duty were sacred institutions.

A Doll's House depicts the feminist awakening (‘I'm a human being before anything else’) of Nora, a 'good' middle bourgeois wife of a lawyer, and a mother, who begins the play as a beguiling 'doll'. Nora ends the play as an emancipated 'Woman', literally flying the nest, abandoning her children, and her act of slamming the door as she leaves has come to represent the play itself. Ibsen commented that ‘a woman cannot be herself in modern society since it is an exclusively male society’.

Eleanor Marx was an admirer of A Doll's House, and played Nora in a 'private' performance in a Bloomsbury house in 1885 with Edward Aveling as Helmer and George Bernard Shaw as Krogstad. In 1886 she wrote the article The Woman Question where she identified that ‘the position of woman rests on an economic basis’ with ‘no solution in the present condition of society’ but in socialism ‘the woman will no longer be the man's slave but his equal’. Eleanor Marx quotes Ibsen as Helmer says to Nora ‘home life ceases to be free and beautiful directly its foundations are borrowing and debts’. In her 1891 article A Doll's House Repaired, Eleanor Marx satirises the English petty bourgeois reaction to the play and ‘repairs’ the last act in a parody ending.

Eleanor Marx criticised bourgeois women reformers who advocated palliative not remedial measures but in the early 20^th century bourgeois women became prominent in the Suffragette movement which campaigned for middle bourgeois women to get the vote on an equal property qualification as men. The Socialist Standard in 1908 wrote that the Suffragettes, who were campaigning in practice for ‘votes for rich women, were ‘a bulwark of capitalism directly opposed to the interests of the working class’ and that ‘the salvation of working class women lies in the emancipation of their class from wage slavery’. The Suffragettes suspended their campaign in 1914 to support the Great War. In 1912 Rosa Luxemburg said the vote for proletarian women could ‘threaten the traditional institutions of class rule and advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle’.

Emma Goldman in her work The Significance of the Modern Drama of 1914 concluded about A Doll's House; ‘when Nora closes behind her the door of her doll's house, she opens wide the gate of life for women, and proclaims the revolutionary message that only perfect freedom and communion make a true bond between man and woman, meeting in the open, without lies, without shame, free from the bondage of duty’.

Steve Clayton

Towards Post-Industrial Capitalism? (1998)

From the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1973 Daniel Bell's seminal work, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, was published. Its impact on the emerging discipline of socio-economic forecasting—or "futurology"—was considerable. But what exactly does a "post-industrial society" mean?

Robert L. Heilbroner in his Business Civilisation in Decline defined its core features as: the growing predominance of the tertiary (services) sector over the primary (agriculture and mining) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors of the economy; increasing emphasis on the role of knowledge-based inputs and education; and, finally, a decrease in the highly polarised class conflict of traditional (industrial) capitalism with the emergence of less hierarchical; organisational structures more suited to the socio-economic environment of the late 20th century.

This concept of a post-industrial society rests on the assumption that social development is essentially driven by technological change. The invention of the first programmable digital computer during the Second World War—to decode military messages—is seen as marking the start of what Alvin Toffler called the Third Industrial Revolution. Based on the application of ever more sophisticated information technologies, this revolution is now seen as gathering pace, precipitating a "general crisis of industrialism" and heralding what is exponents claim is a new kind of society.

It is tempting to draw parallels here with a Marxist scenario of social change. For Marx, it was development of the "productive forces"—roughly speaking, technology—that is the driving force of history. As these productive forces develop, they come into conflict with, and are increasingly held back by, the existing "relations of production"—the system of property relationships that define a particular mode of production. This ushers in a period of social revolution, of growing class struggle, in which the political victory of the ascendant class over the old ruling class establishes a new system of property relations more compatible with the developing productive forces, as exemplified by the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

However, there are significant differences between this and the theoretical model espoused by the exponents of post-industrialism.

Technological determinism

Firstly, the Marxist model gives primacy to the concept of the "mode of production". It is the mode of production which essentially defines the kind of society we live in and by this is meant the combination of relations and forces of production. Technological determinists, on the other hand, tend to focus on the "forces of production" but why did they downplay the importance of property relations?

One reason is the theory of "convergence" which gained currency among social scientists during the Cold War. According to this, industrial development would cause the Russian bloc countries and the advanced western economies to increasingly resemble one another in social structure and outlook. How then could one account for such similarities if—as it was assumed—the "communist camp" and "capitalist camp" represented two different modes of production? This led commentators to infer that the concept of the mode of production had little explanatory value.

By contrast, Marxists pointed out that the world was not divided into two opposing social systems each rooted in distinctive mode of production. There was instead a single world system based on a capitalist mode of production with so-called communist countries representing a variant of this mode of production—namely, capitalism run by the state, or "state capitalism".

Another reason has to do with the oft-stated claim that there has been a decisive shift in power from the capitalist class to a technocratic or managerial elite. Prominent advocates of this view include Burnham (The Managerial Revolution) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State). Toffler put it this way:

"Left-wingers are so obsessed with the idea of property—ownership—that they are often blinded to the actual facts of the matter. The very concept of property is turning itself inside out. The people who dominate advanced 'capitalist' countries are not necessarily those who 'own the means of production'. Increasingly, the people who dominate do so because they control the means of integration—they are the managers. In the US, which is supposed to be the heart of world capitalism, property has been losing its significance for a generation. Basic decisions about the future of our society in the United States have been, and are being, made by business executives who often have no ownership of capital or of machines, whatever" (Previews and Premises 1984, p. 101).

In a world in which the ten richest individuals own as much wealth between them as the combined national incomes of the 48 poorest countries put together, according to last year's UN Human Development report, such observations seem grotesquely inapt. But even if "basic decisions about the future of our society" are being made by individuals who may not themselves possess enough capital to qualify as capitalists, that is not the issue. What matters is the context in which, and in whose interests, such decisions are made. It is not the motivation of individual capitalists that concerns us but the logic of capital accumulation itself with its manifold consequences for the rest of us.

A second major distinction between Marxism and technological determinism concerns the relationship between technology and society. For Marxism, technological progress is not an autonomous process impacting upon and altering the nature of society from without; rather it both conditions, and is conditioned by, society. As Marshall McLuhan put it rather well, "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us".

As Kortunov adds in his The Battle of Ideas in the Modern World, that while the "apologists for technological determinism" appear to borrow Marx's idea that the "development of the productive forces is the basis of historical development", they, in fact, "completely distort this idea inasmuch as they separate the productive forces from the relations of production and discuss them apart from their connection with (the) socio-political formation".

Lean production

In his historical survey of changing production techniques in chapter 7 of his The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin describes how in craft production highly skilled workers using hand tools crafted their products to the design specifications of individual buyers, the essential characteristics of this form of producing being its high degree of flexible but low level of output. With industrial production, based on the moving assembly line, the very opposite is true: high volume production alongside an inflexible technology. The "American method", as Rifkin dubs it, really began in Henry Ford's automobile factories in the early 20th century. The design function was effectively separated from actual production with the worker being reduced to the status of an unskilled appendage to the machine, routinely assembling standardised products for the mass market. The need to maintain continuous production to justify investment in such costly machinery necessitated a hierarchical system of management characterised by a pyramidal command structure through which information flowed up and decisions flowed down.

Then in the early post-war years a new system emerged, called "lean production". Originating in Toyota's factories in Japan, this differed from both craft production and industrial production in its ability to combine the flexibility of the former with the high volume output of the latter. Underpinning this new approach was the increasing application of information technology, such as automated robots, and the "flattening out" of the traditional management structure. Hierarchical decision-making was largely replaced by multi-skilled teams with groups of workers collaborating at every stage, from design to quality control, with each team member contributing to a process of continual improvement ("Kazen") while simultaneously being allowed access to all computerised information generated within the company.

From a socialist perspective, this development is an interesting one, presaging the "polytechnic worker" Marx saw as the mainstay of a socialist system of production. It also confirms our belief in the link between motivational commitment and a more egalitarian approach to decision-making. However, it would be naive to separate such a development from its capitalist context. Its internal repercussions for the enterprises concerned are a sharp contraction in the number of workers employed, significantly longer hours spent working, and increasing levels of stress arising from the pressure to conform to work schedules dictated by the team; externally, it has meant an increasing emphasis on "out-sourcing"—contracting out work to often poorly paid, part-time or temporary workers in the interests of "greater flexibility".

This shift from craft production to industrial production and finally "lean production" today cannot simply be viewed as an autonomous technological development; at every stage it was driven by the need to accumulate greater profits by driving down unit costs. This meant employers searching for more effective ways to exploit their workforce. The current trend is away from the kind of heavy-handed coercion associated with traditional management towards a system of "management by stress" which simultaneously allows firms to better utilise the "knowledge assets" of their workers. Hence the growing emphasis placed on education by governments.

Initially, when the more traditional kind of enterprises began to invest heavily in information technology the results proved rather disappointing. However, as Rifkin points out, by the early 1990s, this picture began to change with many major corporations in America registering sharp increases in productivity. What made that possible was precisely the "re-engineering" of corporate structures, enabling such corporations to make more profitable use of the technology at their disposal.

This process along with its associated "downsizing" of the workforce is now sweeping through every sector of the economy. Unlike in the past, when job displacement in the primary and secondary sectors was largely cushioned by the growth of the service sector, that sector is now itself succumbing to structural unemployment brought on by automation. According to Rifkin, with no new sector on the horizon capable of generating more jobs we face the prospect of steadily growing unemployment, albeit masked by the growth of part-time work.

With ever fewer opportunities for formal employment and with governments increasingly constrained by market pressures to curtail their welfare budgets, how, it might be asked are increasing numbers of workers to obtain a livelihood? The oft-mooted concept of a universal "social income" does not really address this problem since what is being proposed is little more than a glorified form of social welfare which governments could not afford and which moreover would tend to undermine the capitalist work ethic now being reinforced by the system of "lean production".

The dilemmas that this scenario presents have led commentators like Rifkin to talk tentatively of the "Dawn of the Post-Market Era" and the growth of voluntarism as an alternative to paid employment, all of which is music to the ears of socialists. But we would be neglectful if we did not add a word of caution: capitalism is not going to disappear of its own accord. Not that such commentators envisage its complete disappearance, but if that is what we desire then this has of necessity to be the work of a politically conscious socialist majority.

This brings us finally to a third major distinction between Marxism and technological determinism: the notion of human agency. Whereas Marxism sees human beings as the makers of history, technological determinism sees history as the outcome of a technological imperative. Whether or not that imperative will lead to the dramatic decline of the "global labour force" now being prophesied, bringing us to the very threshold of a post-market society, it is for human beings themselves to finally cross that threshold. Insofar as we have that choice, our future has not already been decided.

Robin Cox

Material World: Bashing the Bushmen (2014)

The Material World Column from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently warned ‘Preventing people’s access to safe water is a denial of a fundamental human right...deliberate targeting of civilians and depriving them of essential supplies is a clear breach of international humanitarian and human-rights law.’

Botswana uses water as a weapon against the Kalahari bushmen in an attempt to force them from their land. The government smashed their only major water borehole, a terrible act that was only overturned in court years later. It has continued to forbid them access to wild-life water-holes and mining water supplies.

The indigenous Bushmen people (or the San or Baswara, all names having pejorative roots) have been in conflict with the Botswana government for several years. Many live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where they have continued to be persecuted to drive them from their land. Banned from hunting, and forced to apply for permits to enter the reserve, they are now being pushed to the brink of extinction. The government policy is clearly to intimidate and frighten the Bushmen into staying in the resettlement camps, and making the lives of those who have gone back to their ancestral land impossible. The government boasts that all San in Botswana get free schooling, free medical help and if they register they receive free food. Despite government promises of a better life outside the Reserve many are now gripped by alcoholism and HIV/AIDS, previously unknown.

‘We are used to feeding ourselves – now dependant on government hand-outs, we are being made lazy and stupid,’ says Sesana. ‘Now we are being treated like dogs. The dog is the only thing that can't bring its own food home. It has to wait for its owner to give it some food.’

Goiotseone Lobelo speaks fondly of life in the reserve, where she would wake up every morning and join the women in the village in collecting berries, nuts and roots to eat. ‘I miss my home and the way we lived. Life was easy, there were lots of fruits, animals and there were no bars and no beer. Now we are lost,’ says Goiotseone. She remembers the day they were forced to leave ‘The police came, destroyed our homes and dumped us in the back of trucks with our belongings and brought us here. They dumped us here like we are nothing.’

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds. Gem Diamonds has stated publicly that its Gope mine contains a diamond deposit worth an estimated $3.3 billion.

At the same time as preventing the Bushmen from accessing water, the government allows a safari company to operate a tourist camp in the reserve that made no provisions for the rights of the Bushmen on whose ancestral lands the camp sits. While Bushmen  struggle to find enough water to survive on their lands, tourists sip iced cocktails by the swimming pool.

Desmond Tutu has condemned the eviction of the Kalahari Bushmen. ‘The San Bushmen represent a 100,000 year-old culture that we should consider one of the world’s treasures. And while progress is necessary, it cannot be that the only way to achieve progress is to remove the San from their ancestral lands and drive their traditions away. We’ve already seen this with the American Indians, the Aborigines, and it is also happening with the Tibetans. When a culture is destroyed in the name of progress, it is not progress, it is a loss for our world. Hundreds of thousands of years of wisdom, knowledge of nature, medicines, and ways of living together, go with them’ (a plant used by the San was patented and licensed by a pharmaceutical company to produce an appetite suppressant drug for dieting).

In February this year Botswana’s President Khama was a guest at a conservationist conference, alongside Prince Charles and Prince William. Khama has banned all hunting nationwide under the pretext of clamping down on poaching. However, it emerged that trophy hunters who pay up to $8,000 to hunt giraffes and zebras are still being allowed to hunt on private ranches that have been exempted from the ban. Yet Bushmen who hunt with spears, bows and arrows are being arrested, beaten and jailed for subsistence hunting.

Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry, said ‘Banning hunting in order to feed your family, but allowing the wealthy to hunt for trophies, plays to a lobby still rooted in racist beliefs about tribal peoples’ inferiority. The national park movement entailed the enforced eviction, often the complete destruction, of the tribes who lived off the land. Satellite imagery now proves that many tribal peoples are the world’s best conservationists, yet they’re still being destroyed. It’s not ‘conservation’; it’s just an old colonial crime, and it’s time the responsible organizations opposed it. Instead, they hide behind hollow policies, while continuing to support governments guilty of such inhuman behaviour.’

ALJO

Obituary: Tom King (1881-1970)

Tom King at the 1905 SPGB Annual Conference.

Obituary from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is our sad task to record the death in a Manchester hospital late in December, of the last of our founder members, Tom King, aged 89 years. We recognise, of course, that it is not only our loss but that of his family to whom we extend our deep sympathy.

Tom led a full life and like so many pioneer Party members was a respected craftsman, in his case, in the sphere of water and heating engineering. He grew up in Hertfordshire and it was as a member of the Watford branch of the Social Democratic Federation (founded in the year of his birth) that he came into association with that group of men and women that was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the contradiction between the Marxian theories of their economic classes (run in Watford by Jack Fitzgerald) and the political opportunism and reformist programme of the Federation.

In 1904 they were to make a clear break following a conference at Burnley, they made history by setting up the first working-class party in the world to be based upon the clear-cut scientific Socialist principles, the first to recognise that political democracy within capitalism can and must be used for revolutionary ends, the first to be wholly democratic in structure, without leaders or led.

Because of the strong foundations upon which it had been built, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was proof against the myth that Socialism was the outcome of the Russian revolution and from 1917 in our journal, the Socialist Standard, consistently pointed out that it was state capitalism that was being developed under Bolshevik rule.

Through both world wars this firmly knit organisation remained loyal to the idea of international working-class solidarity.

The research historian will not find the name Tom King listed among the initial members although his wife-to-be figured early on as the Watford Branch Secretary under her maiden name of King. It was to confuse the authorities when he was 'on the run' during the first world war that Comrade Wilkins came to be known as Bill France and then, being settled in Manchester, hence called Tom King for the rest of his life.

Sixty-six years after playing a part which will guarantee him at least a modest place in history, the Party he helped found, remains largely unknown to the vast majority of workers in this country and the capitalist system he sought to replace by world Socialism continues in being with the tacit support of those millions of people. Yet progress has been made, however slow, however little in relation to the immensity of the task. We do not stand alone. Our sense of loss on the death of a pioneer is shared by comrades as far afield as Vancouver and Stockholm, Boston and Vienna, Auckland and Jamaica — small in numbers but resolute in their determination to carry forward the often unromantic but none the less revolutionary work of making more Socialists.

William Morris, who had also broken with the SDF, wrote of the Socialist future as he imagined it might be in his book "News from Nowhere". In those happier days to come he supposed that toast would be drunk from time to time to the memory of those who had struggled in the early days to make it all possible. Tom King was one such.

E. S. G.