Labour's head-banging exercise (1989)

From the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Popular working class politics is in a state of great confusion. There is uncertainty, disillusion, a prevailing sense of failure and, above all, a lack of clear direction.

It is not a case of uncertainty arising from a question of what to do next, after making great progress in the solution of problems. No-one would say that. Indeed, the great social contradictions which beset society are still with us. We have millions of unemployed; there is poverty and homelessness; in every modern state there is a vast arsenal of weaponry which threatens our annihilation. We have the obscene waste where vast resources are allocated to the military when people are starving and then the human priorities should be demanding that we build houses, improve our medical services, clean up our environment, and undertake many other lines of social action to serve needs.

Irrational Politics
If we look at the present times in which these problems are being expressed we find that this is in the language of what might appear to be madmen. You've only got to listen to the news on any day and hear the talk about the trade deficit . . . interest rates . . . productivity . . . wage settlements in relation to increased prices  . . . the strength of the currency . . . the level of government spending.

Most people don't understand any of it but the professional politicians who run the system are permanently trapped in this economic gibberish which is totally irrelevant to what has to be done in terms of solving the social problems we face. To see its irrelevance you've only got to look at the record. For the past hundred years this has been the language of those who run the system, yet it has never helped to clarify the nature of our problems. Nor has it ever led to any practical action which could solve them. Yet it goes on being repeated, year after year.

One of the reasons for this political irrationality is because politics has become dissociated from experience. The kind of arguments which went on at the last Labour Party Conference all too place as if the past never existed. The rational way to begin an understanding of our problems should be to examine what did happen in the past and to ask important questions about it: What were we hoping to achieve in the past? What action did we think would be effective? What happened as a result of that action? What were the reasons why we failed? What lessons should be learned from that failure?

Neil Kinnock's Ambition
That doesn't happen and the example of the Labour Party can suggest some reason why. The professional politicians who are in the main controlling positions in the Labour Party and who get their living by being MPs don't want to face up to the past because it only brings out their failures. They've got a vested interest in forgetting it: they want to go on being professional politicians in positions of power. They want to form a government.

They are desperate to form a government. You've only got to see Neil Kinnock on television and in other places. He will say and do anything to form a government. He'll run the market system better than the Tories—those are his own words—just to be Prime Minister of a Labour government. He can't afford to think about the past. He wants to forget it and pretend that it doesn't exist. He needs to create the illusion that he has a unique opportunity to solve our problems which no other politician has ever had before. But we can't just blame him. He is only one of those who are trapped in the prevailing state of political neurosis where action is dissociated from experience.

Even the ordinary constituency workers at what they call the grass roots level whose time and energy keep the Labour Party going want to forget the past. They don't want to face up to the fact that their hours of campaigning to get Labour MPs elected in the past all came to nothing. Indeed, if they looked at it honestly and objectively, they would have to confront the fact that it didn't just come to nothing: the Labour government between 1974 and 1979 did all the things which were the opposite of what they said they would do.

The Facts
What are the facts? Have a look at the 1974 Labour Party manifesto.

They said they would solve the problem of unemployment. What happened? Under the Labour government unemployment doubled. It went from 630,000 to over 1,300,000. This was the opposite to what they said they'd do.

They said they would increase the proportion of national resources allocated to the health service, education, welfare, pensions and other benefits. What happened? Under Callaghan as Prime Minister and Healey as Chancellor they cut spending on all these services.

They said that with an expanding economy industrial relations would be improved. What happened? The country was beset with the chaos of strikes—the notorious winter of discontent which actually led to the Tories under Thatcher being voted into power.

They said they would defend the poor against the rich. What happened? When they took office, wages and salaries accounted for 72 per cent of all distributed income. Profits took 28 per cent. When they left office, wages and salaries accounted for 68 per cent and profits took 32 per cent. This again was the opposite of what they said would happen.

So, on all these counts—unemployment, government spending, industrial strife, and the distribution of income—things were worse when they left office in the 1979 election.

The Problem is Capitalism
There is now supposed to be a great debate taking place in the Labour Party since they don't know what they stand for any more. In any rational response, the first thing you would expect is that they confront the reasons for their past failures. But they're not doing that. Their so-called policy review is a public relations exercise. All that's come out of it is the same old failed methods. It's another phase in the same old process of political head-banging, with Neil Kinnock as their leading head-banger. Not that he cares. All he wants is to be Prime Minister, as he's made abundantly clear.

For workers, the problem is capitalism. We produce all the wealth—in fact we run the useful parts of society from top to bottom—but we don't get all the benefits of our production of goods and our running of services and we don't have direct control of the society we run. Our economic function under capitalism is to produce wealth for an exploiting and parasitical class, the capitalist class.

Since the beginning of the century, when the Labour Party was formed, these basic facts haven't changed. We had capitalism then and we've got capitalism now. Workers were exploited them we're exploited now. The rich had luxury then and they've got it now. Workers had the problems of housing, making ends meet, and economic insecurity then and we've got the same problems now. This is in spite of the fact that we produce every bit of useful wealth that becomes available and run all the useful services that people need.

Capitalism produced for profit then and it produces for profit now. When there was no prospect of profit then, workers became unemployed. It is exactly the same now. At the turn of the century the privileges of the rich were based on their ownership of the means of production and all natural resources and on their control over workers through the state machine. It is exactly the same now.

The Socialist Solution
It isn't enough just to have a clear understanding of what causes the problems of the working class; we must also have a very clear understanding of how they could be solved. That solution is socialism.

Socialism means a society based on common ownership, democratic control, and production solely for human need.

By common ownership we mean a society where all means of production and all natural resources will be held in common by the whole community. In socialism there will be no individuals or groups in society exercising ownership rights of any kind over manufacturing industry, energy supply, transport or communications, nor over land, oil, metal or mineral deposits. All these will be available for use by society for providing for people's needs.

By democratic control we mean a system of administration where social policy and action will be decided by the democratic decisions of the community. Communities will be free to make their decisions about what needs to be done and, within the limitations of what is practicable, will organise social resources so as to achieve the objectives of those democratic decisions. This will entail the conversion of the present state machinery, which represents the power of the capitalists to maintain their monopoly of the means of life, into the required democratic institutions.

Production solely for human needs will replace the present capitalist system of exploitation where workers sell their mental and physical abilities for wages or salaries and produce commodities for sale on markets. Production solely for human need on the basis of common ownership will mean people cooperating to produce goods and maintain services directly for needs and in line with democratic decisions. This will be a practical and straightforward system of useful work producing useful goods free from the economic constraints of production for profit, without any exchange of any kind and without therefore the use of money.

Production will be humanised in the sense that human beings won't have a price put on either their ability to work or the product of their work. Jobs won't have a price on them, nor will goods, nor will needs. Instead of working for wages people will cooperate, and this will bring work under the control of those who carry it out. It will be the self-determined activity of individuals responding to the needs of the community of which they form a part and who have the responsibility and the real power of decision-making and action.

That is the sane system we must establish and it is the only sensible definition of socialism.

Pieter Lawrence

Socialists confront Mr Tony Benn (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Benn may be the next Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain. Almost alone among the Labour leaders, sunk in a gloom as they are after their party's defeat last May, he offers a plan for Labour's future, with an optimism that they will one day once again get power over British capitalism. 

So we were surprised when he agreed to be interviewed by the Socialist Standard about his policies and attitudes as he expresses them in his recent book Arguments for Socialism. Defenders of capitalism are notoriously difficult to persuade to match their case against ours. The interview (which Tony Benn preferred to call a debate) lasted an hour and our published account of it has needed to be abridged.

In truth, Benn's plan for Labour's revival is little more than a paper thin assumption that, with a few constitutional changes, his party will be able basically to alter its nature. It will, he hopes, be able to throw off its past as a party which has run capitalism firmly in the interests of the capitalist class and begin to run society in the interests of the majority. There is no evidence to support this assumption; indeed after every electoral failure Labour tries to bolster its confidence by telling itself, and us, that it can and will change.

Benn's political ideas are basically that if there are enough small reforms imposed upon capitalism the system will, in a way which has yet to be explained, suddenly stop being capitalism and become socialism. In the case of Benn, even this shaky argument might have been a little stronger if he had been able to give any idea of what socialism is or even to know whether the Labour Party stood for socialism.

He claims that reforming capitalism is "doing something", as opposed to socialists who are "pure" and "impotent". This is a familiar, not to say exhausted, argument - one which continues to exist only because those. like Benn, who put it forward do so by ignoring reality and experience.

The working class have had plenty of time to become familiar with Labour governments and with Labour politicians who - no matter what the effect of their anti-working class policies, no matter how obvious their failures to eliminate capitalism 's problems tirelessly assure us that a vote for Labour is a vote for a better society. This, again, flies in the face of reality.

One final point. Benn, as we have said, is a leading politician But his justifications for capitalism, and his objections to the principles of revolutionary socialism which are uncompromisingly put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, were exactly the same as those we confront all the time, wherever we are and whenever we state the case for the new society of common ownership.

Socialist Standard: You claim to be a socialist and to stand for something which you describe in your book Arguments for Socialism as democratic socialism. Now the Socialist Party of Great Britain also claims to stand for socialism and because of this we are hostile to the Labour Party. So it is clear that we and the Labour Party differ about socialism and what it is. Could you tell us how you define socialism?

Tony Benn: I suppose there are many schools of socialism in this country. There is the Labour Party, which is not particularly ideologically united; there is the Communist Party, there is the New Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, the International Marxist Group. There are an enormous number of schools of socialist thought and I suppose that discussing socialism is like discussing religion. I think that if you look at British socialism you have to see it in two ways: first of all you have to see those sects of socialist thought, all of which are very valuable, as a means of illuminating what is happening. Then you have to ask yourself a second question: how does the working class movement in Britain mobilise itself for social change by defending its interests against those hostile to it, and how does it secure advances on limited fronts or major fronts? The Labour Party comes in the second category. It is the instrument of the British working class movement but there is no ideological test in the Labour Party. There are people in the Labour Party who in other countries would be Christian Democrats and there are others who in other countries might be communists I suppose — or anything in between and beyond. So the Labour Party has never purported to stand for a particular school of thought and to that extent it lacks the purity the SPGB would like to see. It's an instrument.

Socialist Standard: That doesn't answer our question of how you define socialism: you don't define socialism in terms of a basic change in society.

Tony Benn: In the preface to the book I identify some of the influences in my life that brought me to a view that I describe as socialist and only I can decide how I'm to be classified. But the influences that were present in my life have driven me to conclusions that the structure of society needs to be changed in such a way as to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families. If you want to put it in the classic language: "To secure for the workers by hand and by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof as may be obtainable on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange."

Socialist Standard: Could we move on from there and ask you about a specific feature about society which is drawn from your book. The actual statement is: "Investors there will always be." You follow this up by saying " . . . but there is no valid reason why the investors' money should give them first claim to control over those who invest their lives." Now socialists would argue about the detail of that statement at some length but for the moment we would like to ask you how you would reconcile the existence of investors — which necessarily means other people who work to produce the yield on the investments, in other words exploitation, profit producing — with a system of society which, in any rate in part, is defined in Clause Four as "common ownership"?

Tony Benn: Well, if you have savings in the Post Office Savings Bank are you an investor? If you have money put aside in a pension fund are you an investor? If you are a borrower for the purpose of buying your own house, is there anything wrong in borrowing money that you may yourself have invested in a Building Society? I don't think that raises the question of socialism at all: the right of people to put aside from their current earnings money that they wish to invest. What really matters is whether that gives them command over the livelihood of others and that is the key difference, as I understand it. I've never heard the argument put forward by socialists that it's wrong for somebody to put aside money from their earnings to provide for their holiday or their retirement. It seems to me to be perfectly compatible with socialism.

Socialist Standard: We don't think, when you were talking about "investors", you mean people with small amounts of savings in something like the Post Office. You have to draw a distinction between people in pension funds and the sort of people you're referring to in your book when you say you came to the realisation that banks and the big financial institutions actually controlled what you did, rather than the other way round. Does your answer mean that you do envisage a socialist society as having investors?

Tony Benn: I think the question really would entirely depend, in this context, upon whether the financial institutions were publicly owned, which I think they ought to be, or not. If you have the pension funds in public ownership and those pension funds then put their money into a publicly owned industry like Leyland for the purpose of expanding motor car production they are investors. What I am saying is that neither the state investor, nor the private investor should have the power to determine matters of industrial policy that are properly the concern of those who work in those firms. I've never heard the argument used that socialism would abolish the concept of investment, because investment is the transfer of surplus into future production or into some other socially desirable purpose. The question is, who does it and what are the consequences of it?

Socialist Standard: Socialists—members of the SPGB—would say that your vision, which you call socialism, looks very much like capitalism. In your book you indicate that you think that governments, including Labour governments, failed to affect problems like poverty; in fact you mention something like "we aim to eliminate poverty" and you say a couple of lines later "This is a very old aim." So if you're arguing that Labour governments have failed to eliminate poverty and other problems like unemployment which you draw attention to in your book, do you not think this is a basic failure, something to do with the capitalist system of society rather than with personalities in the Labour Party?

Tony Benn: Oh, yes. I don't think it's got anything to do with personalities in the Labour Party. In 1959 the Labour Party was persuaded to abandon socialism on the basis that capitalism would always give you growth and welfare, full employment and so on. That was one of the features which explained the failure. Other features you could go into in greater detail, but the main one was that we abandoned the attempt to make fundamental changes. But that no more shakes my confidence in the Labour movement, as the instrument of social change, than a defeat in a general election shakes my confidence in the validity of the ballot as means of determining who should be in power.

Socialist Standard: The argument, surely, is that the Labour Party has been in government roughly half the time since World War II and by your own arguments this "fundamental and irreversible shift in power" has not happened. We can try and put it a bit further; it won't with a Labour government, whichever Labour government, whether it's your brand or Callaghan's brand or whatever. You're not actually trying to affect the fundamental basis on which society works. For example, nationalisation is one of the things the Labour Party has always taken Clause Four to mean — it was intended to shift the balance of power and it hasn't done so in the industries which have so far been nationalised. You've got to be responsible for the Labour Party; your record since 1945 is one of, on your own definition, somewhat large failures.

Tony Benn: If we are asked to justify our record, as we are, then I must ask the SPGB what it has got to show for its record of great purity and but little influence and political impotence. However we make changes it will take time and we have to be both impatient and patient at the same time. These changes cannot be carried through overnight.

Socialist Standard: Could we take you up on the point of unemployment? In your book the conclusion you come to, having outlined the problem pretty adequately, is to say that we should not lay the blame for what has happened at the door of any individual or any group of individuals. A couple of sentences later you say "These contradictions are fundamental to the economic system under which we operate." Now that's what socialists are talking about. We are saying that problems like unemployment are not susceptible to being reformed out of existence. We argue that a basic change in society is needed.

Tony Benn: It's not due to personalities but it is due to something being fundamentally wrong. If you say that reform had never secured change, how do you explain, for example, the very substantial change that did occur when the Combination Acts were repealed viz-a-viz the role of the trade unions—or the impact upon society, which has been very profound, through the extension of the franchise? I think that to say that reform is always wrong because what is needed is fundamental change entirely misses the point that, to be effective, reform has to be fundamental and this becomes a semantic argument.

Socialist Standard: First of all we don't think that your reforms are actually doing what you claim they are doing. To put it another way, if the Labour Party got all that you claim it would like to do, that would not be fundamental change. Things are changing every day — there's been fantastic changes, some of which the Labour Party has helped, some of which it's held back. You talk about unemployment, say you have got to do something about it but you can't; ultimately unemployment is one of those inevitable problems which keep cycling up and down in this society. This is what's happening now, it happened last winter and the Labour Party, even at its best, is not going to stop that.

Tony Benn: That is a view, which  is very common on the ultra-left, based upon pessimism — that doing anything is a waste of time because you're bound to fail. In some circumstances, as now, we are in a mainly defensive posture, to prevent the destruction of the Welfare State and the rise of unemployment to two or three million. It would be a remarkable achievement for the Labour movement. Our first function, as a representative of the British working class movement, is defensive. At the same time we have then to organise and explain and analyse and mobillise and then win a majority for a change.. Now you can say "If you do all that it's simply not worth doing. It won't do anything you describe." Well that form of pessimism feeds sectarianism because having dismissed the entire Labour movement in which the hopes of the British working class have been put, in one shape or form, for a century, it justifies the view that you should like in a little world of purity and impotence. I'm driven to say that although I don't think you are either pure or impotent.

Socialist Standard: You accuse of being pessimistic; we would say that what you are doing is confusing, creating a fog, because you're building up hopes of all sorts of people who are desperate for a change yet you can't put them in a situation where they can bring about that change.

Tony Benn: What I'm saying is that while the present structure of economic and industrial power remains the problems of our society are inevitable and until we open our minds to a different concept of society we can have Labour governments in office but never Labour governments in power. And we can have Labour governments in power and never have socialism in practise.

Socialist Standard: We urge the working class to learn from their experiences and one thing which is signally clear is that at the moment they are not learning from their experiences. In particular, they don't learn from their experiences of government. You mention the 1945 Labour government; well you know the sort of policy that government carried out. For example they took the working class of this country into the Korean war, they immediately imposed an attack upon working class living standards, they behaved in the accepted way of any capitalist government. And that has been the history of all Labour governments up to now. Now the socialist attitude is that the working class should learn from their mistakes. Could we tie that up with a point about fundamental change needing consent; we argue that in order to change society there has to be a socialist consciousness. Now do you think that when a Labour government does this sort of thing — when it attacks trade unions, for example, when it attacks working class living standards, when it prosecutes the wars of capitalism, when, in other words, it behaves pretty well like any Conservative government — do you not think that to call that socialism, or to say it has something to offer the working class, does anything but raise consciousness? It causes confusion.

Tony Benn: I draw the same distinction as between the organisation of the church and the christian message, which has survived, despite the organisation of the church over a long period. I don't regard any human organisation as being capable by its nature of reflecting in a pure form the socialism the Labour Party professes. What I'm saying is that the Labour Party is the only instrument by which socialism can be introduced. Socialist governments have had some successes and some failures. I've never argued that Labour governments are socialist in themselves but they are the instrument through which socialist ideas can be introduced.

Socialist Standard: It looks to us just the opposite. If you didn't know the names, didn't know who was who, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If you dropped from Mars at the time of the last Labour government and heard Callaghan last winter, how would you tell that that was supposed to be the instrument for introducing socialism? You are asserting what you want to believe; you've got your eyes closed to what is really going on in the Labour Party.

Tony Benn: Well that's perfectly fair comment and criticism. If I'm asked to justify the Labour Party I will look at the resolutions that have been passed by the party Conferences. Those of them that have been implemented embrace real and fundamental socialist concepts. Nobody is going to persuade me that the National Health Service was not a fundamental change in the opportunity and access the people have to good health. The comprehensive schools do represent a fundamental change in the concept of education. Legislation designed to advance trade unionism has fundamentally altered power relationships at work. Now those are only three examples. But to say that the whole thing is a fraud and has been intended to confuse and divert people is to do less than justice to the common sense of the people who support the Labour Party.

Socialist Standard: Do you think, then, that whatever comes out of the current enquiry into the organisation of the Labour Party, a Labour government would ever respond to a decision by your conference which it saw as being against the interests of British capitalism? For example, if the Conference passed another resolution to abandon unilaterally British nuclear weapons, weapons which a Labour government thought, as all Labour governments have thought up to now, are very necessary to British capitalism — do you really think they would scrap the weapons?

Tony Benn: Well if you're saying that democracy is impotent in the Labour Party, and is destined to be impotent in the Labour Party, you're saying that democracy is impotent everywhere. If the Labour Party, by changing its Constitution so that its leader is accountable, its policy is determined by its members, its MPs can be reselected — if you are saying that all those things are destined to fail, you are saying that there is something inherently wrong about the Labour Party, that even if it adopted your policy en bloc it could never be capable of implementing it. And this again is a form of institutional pessimism which I simply can't accept.

Socialist Standard: If the Labour Party adopted our policy en bloc it wouldn't then be the Labour Party — it would be a different party, that would stand for socialism. You see, the SPGB says — we want socialism. We define it very clearly, we talk about a world common ownership society with free access, voluntary co-operation. That's the society we are after. We are not a "broad church", we are not a broad movement, we are after socialism and nothing else. Now you say you want fundamental change but on the other hand you also say you want what the Labour Party wants. Now a lot of members of the Labour Party, as you know, are not for fundamental change at all. They are for very small reforms because that is the way they see the Labour Party making progress. But we would like you to be specific about what fundamental changes you want.

Tony Benn: Well I'll do the best I can, but I will be referring to policies that have been adopted by the Annual Conference which are: that the crisis of investment has got to be resolved by diverting the nation's savings to re-equip the nation's industry in circumstances that are accompanied by, and indeed promoted by, expansion of public services. We want a society where all those who exercise power are accountable to those over whom they exercise it. Now you might say that's a very generalised phrase but it's no more generalised than saying we want a world full of good people to work with each other because that's the "second coming". In any circumstances I can foresee for the next century or more, any little bits of socialism you create will be operating within a hostile sea of capitalism or fascism or international control of some kind or another. To reject the idea of piecemeal changes because there has not been a total change can become an excuse for not even trying. I'm arguing that socialism is always going to be piecemeal advance towards a change because you do not have it within your capacity to make the big change at once, which could not in any case be made without winning people's hearts and minds to the benefits of little changes, and that has got to be done in other countries as well. I will accept that your dream world is broader than my dream world but my dream world is perfectly capable of encompassing yours. I don't quite understand how your dream world would help me in trying to deal with the day to day problems of the people I try to represent.

Socialist Standard: The case for socialism is not a matter of pessimism or a dream; at the matter it is a matter of diagnosis. In answering the question about fundamental change you promptly started to talk about piecemeal change and that really is the whole kernel of it. There have been centuries of attempts at piecemeal changes — some of them you discuss in your book — and yet capitalism today is as terrible a system to live under as it ever was. The working class still have tremendous problems and there are still people like yourself who are putting forward policies to deal with them. Now our diagnosis of that situation is that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and all organisations — and we include them all in this — are going to fail if they don't recognise that basic fact. So we say, as part of our diagnosis, the remedy comes next: a fundamental change in society, a social revolution, and that is something the Labour Party has never stood for.

Tony Benn: All I'm saying is quite simply that if you are going to make an advance you have got to be prepared to tackle problems on a piecemeal basis, by which I mean discrete areas that you change.

Socialist Standard: I'm glad you're not a doctor. I wouldn't goto a doctor who said that, when I had a problem, tackle that problem just as it comes up. We are saying that the logic of your argument leads, not to socialism but to different forms of capitalism. By establishing socialist society we will not be chasing after all these little problems one after another, which is what you advocate. We will be actually changing the society which causes the problems.

Tony Benn: But you skip the whole problem of how you create a socialist society. You simply say — "If things were different, you would have a better life." It is no good me going to somebody and saying "If things were different you wouldn't be out of work, your mother wouldn't have to wait two years for an operation". They want to know, how do we make it different? And frankly, if I as a minister approached the problems that way, there would have been no interest at all. If people simply went to ministers and heard this interesting lecture about how under socialism it would be different and then were sent away with our problems round our necks, it would be a disaster.

Socialist Standard: You are saying that a socialist can't exist in a Labour government, which is absolutely correct. Or in the Labour Party.

Tony Benn: Well, anyway I've enjoyed it very much. A stern cross-examination.

Ralph Critchfield

Ronnie Warrington

Uncles (1999)

A Short Story from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I was a very little girl my family had a benefactor called Uncle. At the time I thought he was a relation of ours. In those days it was considered to be impolite for children to call adult friends and neighbours by their first name; it would have to be Auntie Betty or Uncle Fred even when they were no relation to you whatsoever. But my parents were rather unconventional and so dispensed with this silly tradition. So I thought this Uncle must be a real uncle even though I had never met him.

What was bewildering for me was listening to my parents discussing him. Mum would say "I'll take your suit down to Uncle's on Monday and get it back in time for the weekend." Dad wouldn't be likely to wear his best suit for work. He had a working uniform of dark blue denim with WBC (Woolwich Borough Council) etched on the back of the jacket. His suit was worn at weekends only. Uncle paid my mother for the loan of the suit, and sometimes she would let Uncle borrow my eldest brother's suit as well. This led to a terrible quarrel in our house. Alex, my elder brother, had a new girlfriend he was constantly trying to impress. Whenever he brought her to the house my younger brother and I would mouth the word "Yuk" to one another; they were forever kissing each other and we thought they were sloppy. Anyway, the row was over the fact that Mum had taken Alex's suit to Uncle's and had failed, for some reason, to get it back in time for the weekend when the beloved girlfriend was due to visit. They all shouted at each other for hours and Dad told him to get out if he didn't like it. He said very angrily, "It's to put food on the table." It was an ugly scene.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to imagine this Uncle of mine. Why would he need to pay Mum for the loan of Dad's rather tatty suit? And what would he want with Alex's suit too? I even asked a couple of the kids at school if their dads and brothers had uncles who borrowed their clothes and, looking mystified, they shook their heads. One girl told me, "My dad hasn't got a suit."

Then the day came when I was to meet Uncle. I had been away from school with a head cold and as Mum refused to leave me alone in the house when she went out, we both got on a tram to town. Mum carried with her one of those battered, cardboard suitcases, the only kind poor people could afford in those days, and a woman who got on the tram at the same time asked me, "Going on your holidays, are you?" I told her, "No, we're going to Uncle's, aren't we Mum?" Later Mum glared at me saying, "Must you show me up like that?" All my life I've felt sorry for children. They are seldom given any examples of how to be truthful, and adults have so much more practice in lying. Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, "Out of the mouths of babes and of sucklings"? Well, something like that.

In town I trotted alongside my mother excited at the prospect of meeting Uncle at last. We turned into an alleyway and there stood a small building with three brass balls over the top of the door. Inside it was dim and dusty and there was a counter like ordinary shops have. A man appeared suddenly from a door behind the counter and Mum opened the case and took out the suit. He looked the suit over and then gave her some money and a ticket. I watched this transaction with great interest. Some uncle—the man ignored me! I had a real uncle who used to pat me on the head and say, "You're a little beauty, just like your mother," and sometimes he would give me a packet of sweets and tell me not to talk so much.

This man was not my uncle. He wasn't pleasant to my mother, nor she to him. She resented him. Well, who wouldn't resent a man who took your husband's suit, laid it on a dusty old shelf somewhere, lent you money and charged you interest on it?

Mum picked up the empty case and we traipsed back through the town and caught a tram home. My mind teemed with questions, none of which I could give a name to and something warned me against trying to voice any of them. That day, young as I was, I saw the rudiments of capitalism—that every action must involve money, that nothing, absolutely nothing, can exist without exploitation to make the system work. Of course I didn't really understand that at the time, but I peered out at the world, short-sighted though I was, and suspected that it was a very strange place indeed. And so it is. I waited for the adults to discover my myopia and recommend spectacles. When at last I got them the world came into sharper focus and my mind reeled at the absurdity of it all, that humans arrange affairs in such a way as to create chaos. Uncle's was a tiny part of the personal experience which shaped me into the person I am today and into being a socialist. That experience was invaluable I think.

Heather Ball

Bolshevik primer (1969)

Book Review from the September 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ABC of Communism by N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. Penguin, 8s.

For half a century Bolshevism has been a blight on the working class movement. But recent years have seen an important tendency, especially among many young workers, not only to recognise Russia as state capitalist but also to question Bolshevik methods and the theories from which they are derived. To do this many have been going back to the classics of Marxism and Leninism and it is no accident that over the last few years several major works which have been unavailable for decades have suddenly been republished as commercial propositions. So the very fact that Penguin now find it profitable to bring out from its mothballs the ABC of Communism is significant.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky belonged to the generation of old Bolsheviks which was systematically murdered by Stalin in the 1930s. After allying himself with Stalin against the opposition led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, Bukharin ended up as one of the defendants in the Moscow trials and was shot in 1938.  Preobrazhensky was expelled from the Bolshevik party along with Trotsky in 1927, but after 'recanting' he was readmitted for a short period in 1929 — only to be arrested and executed later.

Their ABC, however, was written before this (in 1920) as a commentary on the programme adopted by the eight Bolshevik party congress in March 1919. Over the next ten years it was accepted as "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge" and was published by Communist parties throughout the world.

The ABC now stands as a monument to the utopian dream of Lenin and and his comrades in the early days of Soviet Russia. World socialist revolution was the order of the day — "What Marx prophesised is being fulfilled under our very eyes. The old order is collapsing. The crowns are falling from the heads of kings and emperors. Everywhere the workers are advancing towards revolution . . ." But it is more than this — it also shows that, for all its defects, their understanding of capitalism and Socialism was far more penetrating than that of their latter-day disciples. So Bukharin writes that a fundamental "characteristic of the capitalist system is the existence of wage labour" and, referring to so-called "state socialism", that "here, likewise, there is no trace of socialism. We have state capitalism, based upon forced labour". Contrasted to this is "proletarian communism (or proletarian socialism)" — "a huge co-operative commonwealth". "The communist method of production presupposes  . . . that production is not for the market, but for use": " . . . we no longer have commodities, but only products". 

It is also interesting to note that while most would-be Bolsheviks now talk in terms of 'generations' before the wages system could be abolished in Socialism, Bukharin — even though he was influenced by Russia's industrial backwardness and low level of production — merely writes that:

At first, doubtless, and perhaps for twenty or thirty years, it will be necessary to have various regulations. Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed.

So we can warmly recommend the ABC of Communism as required reading for all sub-species of neo-Bolshevik. Although it contains numerous theoretical errors, it should introduce many of them to certain basic socialist ideas — which they have certainly shown no signs of being familiar with up till now.

John Crump

Leigh Burr-Parti makes a mint of money (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leigh Burr-Parti: "We are the masters now." (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communities, International and Otherwise (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concept of a community is generally viewed in a positive light. So people may speak approvingly of community involvement in some project, or community support for some idea. You may live in a thriving community, or one that is undergoing community regeneration.

Dictionaries offer various definitions of community, often along the lines of ‘a social group residing in a specific locality and often having a common cultural and historical heritage’ (adapted from dictionary.com). A community can be a place itself, or ‘a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists’.

This last definition is the one that underlies such expressions as the gay community, the Jewish community or the scientific community. The common characteristics may include sexual orientation, language or religion, among others, and need have little or nothing to do with where people live. There is often an assumption here that members of communities of this kind do indeed share the same interest, whatever that may be. People may claim to speak for a particular community or to be community leaders, though it is not always clear on what basis such claims are made.

Benedict Anderson wrote a book on nationalism called Imagined Communities, since nations could not be proper communities in any real sense. A similar point might be made about other uses of the word, such asthe business community, which presumably points to the capitalist class, especially one within a particular country. They may share the interest of deriving profit from those they employ and of having their access to markets and trade routes defended. Yet they hardly constitute a community in any other way, and are often at each other’s throats in terms of competition for sales and profits. They may resemble another group viewed in similar terms, the criminal community.

Another use, and a very frequent one, is the international community. This might be taken to refer to the General Assembly of the United Nations, but it usually has a rather more specific meaning. Noam Chomsky points out (www.chomsky.info/articles/200209--.htm) that it often just means the United States and some allies and clients, and he refers to this by the label Intcom. The international community in this sense is those who rule the most powerful capitalist state plus those who hang onto its coattails. Whenever you read or hear about the international community, you should ask yourself who it really includes: does it perhaps mean a tiny but extremely powerful and influential group of people who do indeed see themselves as ‘distinct in some respect from the larger society’? Of course, it is nice for them if they can pass themselves off as representing the consensus of the world’s population.

The Socialist Party’s Object speaks of the means of production being owned and controlled ‘by and in the interest of the whole community’. This means what it says: all the people of the Earth will own the land, factories, offices and so on in common. And we will form a true community, one with shared interests but not distinct from or in opposition to anyone else or any other group. The global community of World Socialism will truly be a positive notion, offering support and opportunity for all those who are part of it.

Paul Bennett

Leigh Burr-Parti: Whom did you do in the second Great War? (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let’s Make a Real Socialist Revolution (1967)

From the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Revolution” has an exciting ring. It is an advertiser’s word, a punchy politician’s word. Like all such words it is over-used, and losing a lot of its force. Every new model of car has its half-dozen or so revolutionary innovations, and every new model of politician calls for a revolution in our approach to this, that and the other.

Clearly at least one meaning of the word is a very big change. That is why the adman and the MP use it so often. They spend their days trying to pretend to us that little things are big.

When socialists say that we need a revolution, we too are calling for a very big change. But we are not using the word as a sales gimmick. In the sort of world we want there will be no private or government ownership, no money, no state and no armies. You must agree that this kind of sweeping change would indeed deserve the name “revolution.”

We need a revolution because the world’s most terrible problems, such as war, poverty and loneliness, cannot be solved any other way. Reformers, social workers, charitable individuals, priests and other well-meaning folk, have all failed. By now most of them realise they will never actually solve the problems they are tackling. They are like nurses on a battlefield: all they can do is to keep slapping on the bandages and hope that somehow the slaughter will stop. And to many of them occurs the agonising thought that they are helping to keep it going.

If revolution is the only answer, why can’t people see that this is so? Because they are trained not to see it. The brainwashing we get at school, on television and in the news, papers tells us that things are getting better all the time, that it is good to be patriotic, that everything hinges on “our” balance of payments, that we have a duty to work harder, that the sweet life is within our reach.

But the most effective indoctrination does not come through the mass media. It comes from our family, friends and workmates. We all desperately need the acceptance and approval of other people, at 1east someother people. In the homes, factories, offices, pubs, bingo halls and shops these words are uttered thousands of times a day: “You can’t change human nature.” “Just look after number one.” “Why don’t they go back where they came from?” “We fought for these youngsters and look how they repay us.” “Britain’s going to the dogs.”

These are ritual statements. The people who make them don’t want to discuss them, have probably never speculated that they might be wrong. Every society has its stabilising platitudes, along with more or less universally accepted codes of conduct and belief, but that does not mean they cannot be changed if they are called into question strongly enough. For the moment, however, the workers continue to accept the “rules of the game”. It is quite all right to put on a uniform and kill thousands of little boys and girls with bombs and napalm, but perfectly hateful to kill one little girl on Cannock Chase . . . that’s just one of the rules, no more open to question than "Fiddle the company but don’t fiddle your mates." In the same way, most people will readily condemn those who live off the Social Security when they could be working, but will vigorously defend the rights of the much larger number of people who live in luxury yet never work because they own capital.

It must also be admitted that the routine of life under capitalism does not always tend to arouse a questioning or critical attitude. Our work is miserable so we live for our "free" time. But our jobs so mould our outlooks and sap away our exhilaration that even during our leisure we cannot live life to the full. So we seek to tickle our tired selves with ever-hotter, ever-faster, ever-shallower experiences, or we are frightened into a frantic drive to get more personal possessions, since these seem to give a measure of security. We are so involved in the daily struggle to make a living that we have no time for living. Nor, in most cases, for thinking. People prefer to be lulled.

Many workers can clearly see the vast gulf between the pampered minority who own the world, and the rest of us, the propertyless wage-slaves. But they think the way out is merely their own individual advancement, not a social revolution. Obviously there is nothing wrong with a person’s wishing to move up within capitalism: it is inevitable that workers will want to do so. But rags to riches stories are rare: that is why they make headlines. Under feudalism the ambition of the capitalists was first of all only to become feudal lords, and some did. But eventually the interests of the capitalists became so much opposed to feudalism that they had to destroy it. In the same way the modern working class is learning that any progress within the confines of capitalism leaves the roots of the problems untouched, and often creates new problems.

Despite all the ideological cul-de-sacs and mass-produced soporifics, capitalism goes on sowing the seeds of its own-destruction. It demands healthy, educated slaves, workers trained to think clearly and critically. In the West, it promises an age of automated abundance and maximised happiness (after we’ve all tightened our belts for a few years, just to get us over these annoying little economic upsets). Soviet capitalism is lumbered with an even more onerous prospectus: it promises its workers the withering away of the state and free access to wealth – socialism, in fact. But in Russia, as everywhere else, the state is constantly extending its sophistication and scope, and cash becomes an ever more hallowed icon.

The present upheaval in China is but part of capitalism’s growing pains. However we should not discount the effect of capitalist revolutions on working class thinking. Marx’s researches were part of the welter of thought aroused by the French Revolution. The Great Proletarian Cultural Fiasco, though much of it is sublime idiocy, directly affects the lives of a fifth of the world’s population. It is helping to sweep away archaic family structures and other traditional “dead weights”. Capitalist revolutions have always appealed in their propaganda to the “broad masses”, and represented their aims as being the welfare of the majority, but ultimately this makes trouble for capitalism, because there are always some workers ungrateful enough to take their masters at their word, and to wonder why, after all, we never seem to reach the Promised Land.

In Europe and America we have seen the rapid growth of “peace movements” like CND, followed by their collapse as they came up against the stone wall of capitalism’s essential need for competition backed by violence. We have also seen a great deal of disillusionment, despair, and escapism – and the growing realisation that problems like war cannot be amputated, or treated in isolation, but are bound up with the whole organisation of society. The satire wave, Bob Dylan, the Provos, Hippies and Diggers are all signs that many thoughtful people – especially young people, not yet brought to heel by war or slump – are casting around for an answer.

The workers will increasingly see how deeply entrenched are the causes of their misery. Patches, tinkering and minor adjustments will in the years ahead seem more and more futile. The crying need for root and branch change will be obvious to ever greater numbers. The membership of the Socialist Party, and its six companion parties, will grow at a faster rate, and new parties will be established in more and more countries. As the socialist movement’s size grows, its ability to spread its ideas will also grow.

Faced with the spread of this determined, uncompromising movement, with its withering contempt for stock idols like “the national interest,” the promises of our rulers will become even wilder. To stem the socialist tide the capitalist parties will sink their differences and draw closer together, much as religions do today in the face of the world avalanche of atheism. Reforms now derided as Utopian will be two a penny - in an attempt to fob off the workers. Perhaps, for example, capitalism will provide a batch of free services, on the understanding that this is “the beginning” of a free society, but socialists will not be taken in.

Finally the time will come when a majority of workers, in the majority of countries, will send their delegates into the parliaments of the world, thus taking control of the state. From then on production will cease to be organised at the dictate of profits. Instead, the (now rather eccentric-sounding) principle will prevail that things will be produced to satisfy needs.

Immediately there will be a rapid growth in the amount and quality of useful goods produced. There will no longer be any patents, so all productive units will have access to the most advanced technical processes. There will no longer be any banks, stock exchanges, wages offices, advertising agencies, and although some of the workers previously in these fields will continue to be concerned with statistics relating to production and distribution, hundreds of millions will be released for housebuilding, food production and other rapidly-expanding sectors. It is reasonable to suppose that, since the revolution will not take anyone by surprise, many workers will have been, within capitalism, training themselves for their new occupations in socialism. Resources and manpower invested in armaments and the space race will be switched to the satisfying of human needs.

Onslaughts will be made upon centres of backwardness and destitution: these will not be given the ludicrous cinderella priority now awarded to “community development,” but instead the top priority now given to “Defence”. In fact, since socialism will grow directly out of capitalism, the present organisational machinery of the armed forces could be used for this end, since they are the best thing capitalism has developed for moving men and materials fast.

Socialism will be a planned society, not in the present-day sense of an authoritarian state empowered to sort out the conflicting interests of hundreds of profit-grabbing corporations, but as Engels put it nearly a century ago: “The seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organisation on a planned basis . . . The conditions of existence forming man’s environment, Which up to now have dominated man, at this point pass under the dominion and control of man, who now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as he has become master of his own social organisation . . . It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.”

Steele

A (well-deserved) turn for the worse for Leigh Burr-Parti (1976)

From the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rake's Progress (1976)

Book Review from the December 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Harry Pollitt, by John Mahon. Published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1976.

Reading Johnny Mahon's fairy story, one wonders why anyone else ever bothered. A little bloke from Manchester called Pollitt did it all. You name it, he did it. Who stopped munitions going to Russia? Who organized the strikes in the 'twenties? Who rallied the dockers, boilermakers, policemen, tailors and busmen? Who initiated the hunger marches? That's right. Who organized the Minority Movement? Oh, blimey. Who put the Communist Party back in its feet in 1923 and 1929? Who inspired the British battalion of the International Brigade? Who instigated the Second Front and put Britain on the right road to Socialism? Our Harry.

No wonder he said himself, after twenty years of this lark, that he was exhausted. he even ran the Committee for Work among the women for a while. What a man! The sheer strain of trying to keep up with Stalin's manoeuvres was enough to upset anybody. And (as is well known) poor old Harry was not too good at reading the signs of the times: even with Svengali Dutt behind him. In fact, Dutt was even poorer at it. This phoney guru, with his fake Eastern Mystic act, was worse that his pupil—predicting the collapse of capitalism for six months in 1930.

Pollitt made the ghastly mistake of jumping to the conclusion that Stalin would oppose Hitler in 1939, when it was obvious that he would unite with anybody to save his own skin. Mahon says they "were surprised" when they heard of the Stalin-Hitler pact. Springhall came back from Moscow with Stalin's orders: "it was an Imperialist war—nothing to do with the workers." In three days the Central Committee of the CP turned a complete somersault — opposed the war, and sacked Pollitt. And who was the louse who effected his dismissal? His own great mentor, R. Palme Dutt.

Packed off to Manchester in disgrace, he replied, when somebody said the office was cold: "It's my Siberia." But give the devil his due. Nine months later, Hitler did invade Russia, and the Imperialist war became "a war of liberation" and "an anti-fascist war" overnight. This could have been Harry's moment of truth. His critics confounded, he could have proclaimed "I told you so"—if he hadn't already made the most crawling capitulation, writing to the Central Committee that he would loyally carry out their instructions "to the letter".

Actually Pollitt was by no means the best orator in the CP. He was a maudlin sentimentalist, a hysterical crowd-puller, playing on the emotions. As one who listened to dozens of his efforts, this writer never detected penetrating erudition or studious application. His orations were of immediate, usually trivial import—"the day-to-day issues". The lengthy list of pamphlets, books and articles attributed to him were frequently written by others (including Mahon himself); certainly by Dutt, or Petrovsky the Comintern agent shot in Russia.

The story of his life is typical of dozens of bright young working men at the turn of the century. The workers were becoming articulate. Tom Mann, John Burns, Ben Tillett and scores of others emerged. Pollitt was the secretary if the Openshaw Socialist Society and wrote the first election leaflet it published. It disaffiliated from the Labour Party and the Trades Council and ran a radical campaign attacking reforms as a capitalist trick.

The word Socialism implies a complete revolution in the internal workings of the Capitalist system. Social Reform proposes nothing of the kind  . . . Reforms serve two important purposes. (1) They keep the worker in a better working condition. (2) They bolster and patch up the evils of Capitalism,

This was written by Pollitt in 1910, and according to Mahon he learned it from Moses Baritz (page 28). How was it that Pollitt could finish up going to see Lloyd George to ask him to help inspire the Second Front, and standing on Tory platforms supporting Tory candidates? It is obvious that even in the 'twenties he had become a job-hunter, applying to the ILP in West Ham for a paid organizer's job. His first position was as full-time organizer of the "Hands off Russia" campaign. Any real biography would have shown him to be a slick and wily operator, seizing control of the "Industrial Dept" in 1923 and the Executive in 1929.

Mahon has written 500 pages about Pollitt without even mentioning his disastrous order to break up other parties' meetings (Daily Worker, 1932). His book calmly quotes Pollitt's complete renunciation of his life's work (the violent overthrow of capitalism by "heavy civil war") in oily phrases about "peaceful take-over", "Only by the majority", "re-adjusting the State" (not smashing it)—denying everything Lenin advocated. This, Mahon says, is Harry's great contribution to the debate on "the British Road to Socialism". He should have gone into advertizing!

Right up to 1952 Pollitt was in Moscow eulogizing Stalin. But in 1957, after Stalin's death and exposure, Mahon says, Pollitt "didn't know" of the systematic extermination of the entire Bolshevik Old Guard. He "didn't know" of the assassination of Bukharin, Ryansanov, or the Losovsky he professed to admire so much. This is like the people in Germany who "didn't know" there were ant concentration camps.

At a comparatively early age (66) Pollitt had burned himself out. All to be "the leader". Was it worth it? Certainly not for the working class.

Horatio

Utopia (2012)

Book Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Searching for Utopia. The History of an Idea, by Gregory Claeys. Thames and Hudson, London, 2011. £24.95.

Gregory Claeys has provided an extensive and lavishly illustrated survey of utopian thought. In its early chapters it ranges from ancient origin myths through to the classic texts of Thomas More. It then moves on to look at the modern era; it includes visions of model communities by Robert Owen and others, and comes right up to date with modern science fiction and dystopian views of the future. Claeys’ definition of utopia is broad and covers the exploration in a plausible way of “the space between the possible and the impossible”. The role of utopia, for Claeys, is crucial to the process of social change as it transcends the distance between this world and the ideal described. Utopia can be used as a literary means of closing the gap in our imaginations between where we are and where we want to go.

Claeys, however, goes much further in his claims for utopia, without which, he argues: “humanity would never have struggled onwards towards betterment. It is a pole-star, a guide, a reference point on a common map of an eternal quest for the improvement of the human condition” (p.15). In a rather bleak concluding chapter the future of humanity is proffered as hinging on the success of a “realistic utopianism”, which is liberal, forward-looking, scientific and tolerant.

For Claeys it is the idea, the vision of society depicted, which drives change. There is no explanation offered as to why ancient societies looked back to religious or mythical origin-myths or why utopia became more and more anchored in this world. Nor is there an exploration of why some utopias fail to connect with wider society whilst others add fuel to rapid social and political change. Claeys points out that ancient and medieval utopias assumed scarcity and hierarchy but that this changed in the modern era as utopias came to stress the possibility of abundance and equality: “The decline in religious belief accompanying modernity has …displaced the search for equality in the afterlife by an enhanced desire to achieve it in this life” (p.13). He does not, however, discuss how these changes in ideas about human potential relate to the material world in which the ideas emerge.

The treatment of Marx suffers for the same reasons. Claeys’ approach results in a skewed perspective as it searches for Marx’s ideas of what a socialist future would look like. There is an attempt to see Marx “as the greatest of all modern utopian writers”because he projected “the utopian scheme”of community of property to a large audience. It is argued that in the Communist Manifesto Marx (and Engels) proposed “a highly centralized system of economic administration in which credit, transportation and the method of production generally were to be managed by the state” (p.145). This is taking some proposals in the Communist Manifesto and using them to make conclusions about Marx’s thought that are grossly distorted. In 1848 Marx and Engels envisaged state control of industry as a means of developing further the means of production to allow the possibility of communism –a proposal Marx did not think necessary later in his life as by that time the means of production had vastly expanded.

In fact, Marx was loath to lay down ideas of a future socialist society beyond its broad character of bringing class exploitation to an end (of which the end of money and the state would be consequences). His contribution to socialist thought was not to propose ideas of what socialism might look like but to further understanding of the social and economic processes that created its possibility and necessity.

Claeys’ book is a wide-ranging primer on the history of utopian thought.  For the socialist reader it highlights the still useful distinction made by Engels between utopian socialism and scientific socialism. The former seeks to implement an idealised plan of society which would spread by force of example. The latter seeks to develop an understanding of the underlying material forces operating in society, now and in the past. In so doing it aims to build a consciousness of class exploitation and the need for a revolutionary transition to socialism based on working class social and political consciousness of this economic exploitation. The idea of socialism as a plan of an ideal society has little relevance to scientific socialism because the future society emerges from class conscious revolution moulded in the process of working class self-emancipation and not derived from a prior blueprint.

Colin Skelly

Put one in his leg, Ellen (1954)

From the June 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Case of Mickey Spillane

"The most startling mystery story writer in the publishing world today" has, the papers say, given it up. Well, time will show; in the meantime, his seven novels go on selling and his film goes on showing.

Mickey Spillane found fame as nearly overnight as makes no difference. His first book, "I The Jury," was published in 1949; his fifth, two years later, sold two and a half million copies at the first printing in America. In this country, where the reading public borrows rather than buys his fiction, something over a quarter of a million Spillane novels have been sold. To call them mystery stories is misleading; they belong to the literary genre known as "toughies," and the mysteries are only less transparent than the heroines' dresses.

The aim of the "toughies" is to assault the senses, chiefly through the description of sex and violence (together or separately, and in every conceivable form). Malevolence, brutality and lust are the unvarying subject-matter; everything is larger than life and only half as natural. The style of writing is a magnifying glass held to the profusion of ere'histic incident. Its facile craftsmanship—extraordinary in its technical excellence, and as unrelated to art as a chorus girl to a ballerina—leaves no effect unexploited. Spillane reduces description to a series of simple, evocative metaphors; buildings are "towering canyons," a bridge "a spidery steel skeleton." Incident is iterated and reiterated to impress by cumulation, as in this passage from "One Lonely Night":

"Two murders. Two green cards.
It was the same way backwards. Two green cards and two murders.
Which came first, the murders or the cards? Murder at odd angles. Two murders. Eight odd angles. Yes, two murders. The fat boy got what he was after. Because of him the girl was murdered no matter how. So I got him. I was a murderer like they said, only it was different. I was just a killer."

It is the school of journalism's sixth-form stuff, a tale told in headlines. The stories unroll rather than unfold with scarcely ever a pause: something is always happening—generally something unpleasant.

The Mickey Spillane novels represent the latest stage in the development of the thriller, which practically dates from the Industrial Revolution. Its original form, the Gothic novel, derived from the sentimental reaction against the rapid onset of the machine age—a mediaevalist enthusiasm which, running through literature, painting and architecture, enthroned ruins, broken traceries and ivy-clad towers as symbols of romance, beauty and freedom. From a revolt against restraint and ugliness, however, it became a drug for minds bored and uneasy; the ruins became popular literary settings where—to quote from one of the novels—"horrid noises and still more  horrid sights were heard and beheld." The new conditions of town life and the division of labour were—and are—responsible for the lack of variety and emotional satisfaction that in its turn created a demand for vicarious satisfaction, even though the mass reading public had yet to come into being. Some of the titles tell their own stories: "The Nocromancer," "The Mysterious Warning," "Who's the Murderer?" and "Horrid Mysteries."

With the development of the centralized State, the main stream of thrillers gradually evolved from simple eeriness, through crime stories where graduated exercises in legal justice were performed, to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes embodied all the social ideals of his time; a townsman of remarkable individuality, contemplative, a scientist yet something of an aesthete too, thrusting  at crime and recalcitrancy with the sure lance of logic that the Queen's subjects might ride at peace in their hansoms. The police, agents of a still immature State machine, were clumsy accessories to Holmes's analytical feats, even though the ultimate glory was theirs. Thirty years later, however, crime stories had a new maestro—"Edgar Wallace for thrills," the yellow covers said—and in his novels the police were supreme. The formula was much the same—crime, mystery, clues and climax—but the social setting had changed. Science, which afforded Holmes his weighty deductions and his monographs on dust and cigarette ash, now had produced fast cars, telephones and forensic laboratories. Liberalism was slipping fast into its grave, and the State had become more efficient, more powerful and more impersonal. Even the language had changed; the leisurely prose and the meticulously reasoned explanations which held Watson spellbound had given place to the slick, terse narrative of modern popular journalism.

Whatever the other differences between these writers and Mickey Spillane, one is paramount. The "toughies" are all violence; Conan Doyle and Wallace never considered it. Few of the Sherlock Holmes stories have murder as their cause, and some do not even involve any criminal offence. The master criminal, Moriarty, is an intellectual megalomaniac, representing possibly another facet of the same social ideals. Almost the same may be said of Wallace's books. His characters are more sophisticated, but little less pacific; the most frequent crime is burglary, and at least one of Wallace's thrillers does not deal with crime at all.

The "toughies" arose in America in the late nineteen-thirties, though the most famous early exponent, James Hadley Chase, was not an American. Their style owed much to Hemingway and the other realist writers, their content to "True Police Cases" and "Real Crime Stories." Reference has already been made to the mode of writing. It is writing for an age of speed, aiming at quick impact through simple graphic images and emotion-laden phrases, its staccato sentences echoing the rattle of the typewriter. Everyone calls everyone else a bastard; everything is told brusquely and forcefully in such terms as "She gave him the drink in the eyes, glass and all" or "If he tries to scram, put one in his leg, Ellen."

There is an obvious debt, too, to the films—though its nature is not quite so obvious. In recent years "toughies" have come to the screen, but it was the classic gangster films of twenty or so years ago that established and popularised the conventions of the fabulous gangster world. Essentially, those films were "horse operas" in disguise, with Buicks instead of snow-white steads, gats instead of six-guns, racketeers instead of rustlers and crap games instead of rodeos. Apart from the properties and conventions, the films' biggest influence in the tough gangster story has been a matter of technique of narration: the close-up, the heightening of sensation by viewing from unusual angles, the dramatic possibilities of swift cutting and so on.

There are two outstanding motifs in the Mickey Spillane novels: stimulation, and escape into a world not far away where desires are realised. The two are interwoven—take this passage from "The Big Kill":

"The little guy stared too long. He should have been watching my face. I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. He dropped the sap and staggered into the big boy with a scream starting to come up out of his throat only to get it cut off in the middle as I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel. The big guy tried to shove him out of the way. He got so mad he came right at me with his head down and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling."

Plenty of stimulation, for those who want it; and a phantasy—helped by the use of the first person—of revenge for the humiliations of everyday life in an unequal world.

By the same token, there is little room for thought or knowledge in Spillane's world. Mike Hammer, the moronic private detective of the novels, is guided by drums pounding in his ears that tell he must kill: "I make my own rules as I go along and I don't have to account to anybody." The rules allow all-in beatings-up, slappings-down and tuppings, and strictly exclude mental holds.

The innumerable sexual adventures of Spillane's surly Samsons are unvarying variants on a single theme—domination over beautiful women. The girls are always over-developed both physically and emotionally; a jerk of the head brings them running and a shake of the head leaves them waiting. Thus, Mike Hammer and the brunette from Texas:

"She said 'Mike  . . .' again and struck the match . . . There was only the sheet over her that rose and dipped between the inviting hollows of her breasts. Ellen was beautiful as only a mature woman can be beautiful. She was lustful as only a mature woman can be lustful.
'Tuck me in, Mike.'
The match burned closer to my fingers. I reached down and got the corner of the sheet in my fingers and flipped it all the way back. She lay there beautiful and naked and waiting,
'I love brunettes,' I said'
The tone of my voice told her no, not tonight  . . . "

Opportunity, as they say, would be a fine thing; and that, presumably, is what the reader feels.

What distinguishes Mickey Spillane's novels from others of their kind in the occasional interpolation of a crude philosophy, spoken in the first person, justifying the brutality and all the rest. Apart from adding a little in the way of realism, these discourses are curiously near the truth. For example:

"He had to go back five years to a time he knew of only second-hand and tell me how it took a war to show me the power of the gun and the obscene pleasure that was brutality and force, the spicy sweetness of murder sanctified by law.
That was me. I could have made it sound better if I'd said it. There in the muck and slime of the jungle. . . . I had gotten the taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization."

Spillane—who was a wartime pilot, and is a Jehovah's Witness—plainly identifies himself with his heroes. His photograph on the jackets is almost a reconstruction from Mike Hammer's self-descriptions; the name is the same, and there are several references to his war service.

It is clearly intended that the reader, too, should identify himself with the hero. Every kind of herd prejudice is appealed to. "One Lonely Night," written in 1951, is a fierce attack on Communism. There is not the faintest indication of what Communism is about, only a Black-Hand-Gang atmosphere. The Communists' headquarters is straight out of a boys' adventure yarn, with maps and secret plans and microfilmed documents, and the conspirators themselves are all so vividly labelled—long hair, sinister looks, etc.—that one wonders they dare walk down the street. But, whatever they were up to, Mike deals with them. McCarthy is weak stuff compared with Mike. Mike shoots the lot.

Why has all this come to be? Why are violence, prejudice and near-pornography best-sellers in the civilised world in 1954? Partial answers have already been given; the whole answer is that the "toughies," like all popular reading matter, mirror the consciousness of the age. Nothing in Mickey Spillane is immoral—nothing, that is, conflicts with the commonly held ideals and behaviour-patterns of our time. The brutality is used by "good" against "evil"; the ends justify the means, say the mores of modern society. If the big bombs are justified by their purpose, it is hardly in proportion to complain of Mike Hammer's gun. Spillane himself says much the same thing when he writes of "murder sanctified by law." The State everywhere trains killers—and they kill because, like Mike Hammer, they have been given strong enough prejudices.

As for the sex, that goes with the rest. The family is no longer the stable, carefully preserved group of the days of Gothic romance. Lust goes hand in hand with violence, and violence is always incipient in our power-ridden, war-haunted world. Socialists want to change it for a world in which "The Big Kill" won't exist—the Mickey Spillane sort, nor the nuclear fission sort.

Robert Barltrop

Leigh Burr-Parti: Whose side is he on (as if we didn't know)? (1976)

From the May 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard