The economic crisis—the Marxian explanation

From the April 1984 issue of the World Socialist

At the present time world capitalism is in depression. Throughout the world there are millions of unemployed. So it is important to know why this depression is happening, whether or not it could have been avoided. Will it pass away, and if so, when? Will depressions happen again in the future?

We hold that depressions are inevitable under capitalism, and that no reformist policies based on Monetarism or Keynesianism, or anything else, will make any difference. We agree with Karl Marx that capitalism and depressions go together and that the only way to get rid of depressions is to replace capitalism with socialism.

CAPITALISM'S TRADE CYCLES

"Capitalist production moves through certain periodical cycles, it moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, over trade, crisis and stagnation" (Marx, Value, Price and Profit)

Nowadays we would use the word "boom" where Marx used "prosperity" and "depression" where Marx used the word "stagnation", but these terms mean exactly the same thing. The cycles are not tidy and regular like the movement of a clock. It is not possible to say how long will be the period between the end of one depression and the arrival of the next crisis, and it is not possible to say how long a depression will last. Some depressions have been quite short, but what was known as the Great Depression in the last quarter of the 19th century lasted for twenty years. There were ripples of partial recovery during this long period which faded out.

It seems safe to accept, as did Marx, that the period of prosperity, or boom, never lasts for long. Marx put it that boom conditions are the harbinger of a coming crisis, but the Keynesians and the Monetarists believe that they have discovered a way in which governments can make the boom permanent.

Marx did not use the term "crisis" to mean the same as "depression". The crisis is the sudden break which brings the boom to an end, the depression is the decline of production and increase of unemployment which comes after the crisis. It is important to recognise the difference between these two stages of the trade cycle, because the factors which govern the period up to the crisis and the crisis itself, are different to the factors which operate during the period of depression.

The state of quiescence, as Marx called it, is the period towards the end of the depression when production has ceased to fall and when unemployment has ceased to grow, when things are moving along a fairly even but low level. We seem to have been in a period of "quiescence" for the last year or year and a half; in other words, unemployment having increased fairly rapidly about two or three years ago, and production having fallen sharply, in the last year or so, things have been moving along fairly quietly, without getting worse.

The period of "growing animation" is when most industries are working to full capacity and unemployment is correspondingly very low. The boom moves into the next phase which Marx called "overtrade", when a number of industries find that they have each produced more than they can sell at a profit in their particular market. Then comes the sudden crisis followed by the depression.

HOW THE BOOM ENDS

It is important to be clear about the state of "overtrade" which produces the crisis. It does not mean that there is a fixed total size of the market and that a crisis occurs when total production exceeds it. After every depression the total market and total production have gone to higher levels and will do so again. Nor does it mean that each and every industry is at the same time producing more than can be sold in its market. Such a situation does not arise and the term "general overproduction" is meaningless. Each industry produces for its own particular market but to some extent the expansion of production in one industry creates a larger market in some other industries. If, for example, British motor manufacturers, having produced and sold a million cars last year, decided to expand production so that, in total, an additional million cars are being produced this year, the production of this additional million will create additional markets for steel, rubber, glass, engines and other requirements of expanded motor car production even before the additional million cars are sold.

What actually happens in the boom is that some industries produce too much for their particular market. Competition to sell the excess reduces prices, leading to reduced profits, or no profit at all. Companies then scrap plans for further investment, reduce output and sack workers no longer needed. This in turn affects the market for other industries and if the combined effect is large enough, results in depression with its heavy unemployment.

In the autumn of 1973, after a period of expanding production and falling unemployment, a survey of companies was conducted, asking them if they were producing below capacity and if not, why not. While a considerable number reported that they were producing below capacity because of falling orders, about half the companies had more orders than they could meet and were producing below capacity because they could not recruit enough skilled workers or could not obtain enough materials and components. Among the listed scarce materials was steel. A few years later, when unemployment had risen sharply, there was a surplus of steel for which no market could be found and steel workers were being made redundant.

The capitalists in each industry are in business to make profit—the more the better. How much they succeed in making depends on several factors. Their profits will increase with bigger sales and higher selling prices, and a lower wages bill. Their profits will fall if sales fall or selling prices fall or the wages bill rises.

As heavy unemployment tends to depress wages, unemployment is also a factor. This has led some British Labour Party spokesmen to put the view that the Thatcher government in Britain deliberately created 31/2 million unemployed in order to hold down wages, help curb the rate at which the general price level is rising, and also to increase the amount of profit going to the capitalists. If it were true that governments control the rise and fall of unemployment, the Labour Party would need to explain why, in the four periods of Labour government in Britain in the 50 years 1929-1979, unemployment was higher at the end of each of the four periods than it was at the beginning.

If governments had such control, no government would want heavy unemployment, and the capitalists would want to have the unemployed at work producing profits for them. Capitalism is not under government control in that way: crises and depressions occur from time to time irrespective of the party in office and the policies it applies.

The Labour Party case against the Thatcher government is that Mrs Thatcher deliberately increased unemployment from 5.4 per cent in 1979 to 12.5 per cent in 1982 in order to depress wages and increase profits. But the reverse happened. Wages went up and profits went down. Official figures show that "income from employment" rose between 1979 and 1982 by £41,000 million while gross trading profits of companies fell by £331 million. More light is shed on it by showing gross trading profits each year as a percentage of total income from employment in that year. The percentage rose from 17.7 per cent in 1975 to a peak of 25.2 per cent in 1979, after which it declined each year, to 18.3 per cent in 1982. So, in the years 1979-1982, as unemployment went up, the relative amount of profit went down. With the recent expansion of sales, profits are now rising sharply again.

Looking further into the question, what causes a boom to develop into a crisis, it is useful to start with the early 19th century French economist J.B. Say, who thought that capitalism is a self-regulating system which, if left to market forces, would keep industry working to full capacity. He is remembered for his saying "every seller brings a buyer to market", by which he meant that every capitalist who sells a commodity then has money with which to buy another commodity.

But, as Marx pointed out, while each seller is able to buy another commodity, "no one is forthwith bound to purchase because he has just sold". He may choose not to do so and "if the split between the sale and the purchase becomes too pronounced", this "asserts itself by producing a crisis".

An example of this is the General Electric Company. At the beginning of the present depression, having sold commodities they had £400 million "cash" but instead of using it to buy materials with which to produce more of the commodities in their range of products, they chose to lend it and get income from the high current rates of interest. By the end of 1983 GEC's "cash mountain" had reached £1,400 million.

If GEC had behaved as J.B. Say supposed, they would have used their cash to recruit more workers, and expand output, but like many other companies, they have been closing some of their factories and declaring workers redundant. They have not done so because, so far, they have seen no prospect of making more profit by doing so.

NO SOLUTION IN MONETARY POLICY

Many economists and politicians blame the banks for the depression. They say that if only the banks would lend money to industry, production would expand again and unemployment would fall. The banks are in business to make profit by re-lending the money depositors lend to them and they do not need economists and politicians to tell them how to run their business. But banks are only interested in lending more money to companies which themselves see prospects of using it profitably. When trade improves and companies can expand investment and production profitably, there is no dearth of funds for that purpose, either direct from investors or through the banks. Marx dealt with the fallacy that depressions are the result of industry's inability to borrow funds and his case receives striking confirmation in the fact that, far from wanting to borrow from the banks, some of GEC's cash is lent to the banks.

Why does the prospect of investing profitably disappear for many companies and a crisis occur. One of the factors already mentioned is that some industries find at the height of the boom that they have produced more than can be sold at a profit in their particular market. It is inevitable. In the period of recovery from a depression the market for each industry is seen to be expanding, and the firms in that industry in each country are set to take advantage of the expansion. But they do not know with any precision how great the total expansion will turn out to be, and even if they did, they are in competition with each other and each section tries to get in as quickly as possible and to capture as large a share as it can. As Marx said, they all behave as if the market is limitless.

Another factor is the rise of wages causing a reduction of profits. In the phase of expansion and boom unemployment falls and the unions are in a position to push wages up. A general rise of wages beyond a certain point will wipe out profit for some companies and will influence the decisions of the more profitable companies about further investment and expansion of output.

A popular belief among trade unions is that raising wages is a cure for depression because it "expands the market". But of course a rise of wages does not "expand the market". What it does is to expand the market for the goods the workers buy, but correspondingly reduces the market for the consumer and luxury goods bought by the profit receivers and reduces the amount available for investment.

Marx dealt with the argument that raising wages would solve the problem by pointing out that in the boom wages do rise but without the supposed effect of averting a crisis.

If one were to attempt to clothe this tautology with a semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working class receive too small a portion of their own product, and the evil would be remedied by giving them a larger share of it, or raising their wages, we should reply that crises are precisely always preceded by a period in which wages rise generally and the working class actually get a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption. From the point of view of the advocates of "simple" commonsense, such a period should rather remove a crisis. It seems, then, that capitalist production comprises certain conditions which are independent of good or bad will and permit the working class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always as a harbinger of a coming crisis. (Capital Vol II, page 476)

In the real world of capitalism the total demand for commodities is not increased either by raising wages at the expense of profits or by raising profits at the expense of wages, but there is a widely held belief today that there is another source of increasing demand in the supposed power of banks, by their lending transactions, to "create deposits" and thus add to total purchasing power. This belief was aptly described by the late professor Edwin Cannan as the "mystical school of banking theorists". It is held by the Keynesians and by the Monetarists. It is quite baseless; the banks can lend no more than depositors choose to lend them.

If the "mystical" theorists were right and the banks could create deposits which depositors could withdraw and spend on purchasing commodities, it would follow that the price level is determined by the banks. If you think that nobody could hold such an absurd view, this is what J.M. Keynes wrote in his book Monetary Reform:

The internal price level is mainly determined by the amount of credit created by the banks, chiefly the Big Five. .. The amount of credit, so created, is in its turn roughly measured by the volume of the bank deposits ... (1923, p.178)

According to this, if the banks "create" more deposits prices go up and if the banks "create" less deposits, prices go down. There is nothing in actual experience of capitalism to justify this fallacy, any more than there is in the Keynesian belief that depressions could be averted by the government borrowing more and spending more, or in the Monetarist belief that depression could be averted by the government borrowing less and spending less.

It was in 1977 that the British Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, having seen unemployment rise from 600,000 to 1,700,000, announced the abandonment of Keynesian doctrine and the adoption of the Monetarist policy continued by the Thatcher government. Though unemployment did fall a little for a time, it then rose to 3½ million. Seven years after the adoption of Monetarism, it is still over 3 million.

IRRELEVANCE OF KEYNESIANISM

The Keynesians have two showpieces. One of them is Roosevelt's New Deal which is supposed to show how successful Keynes was. The other is what has happened in Britain between 1945 and 1977.

The man who said Roosevelt's New Deal was a piece of Keynesian success was Professor Dudley Dillard, Professor of economics at Maryland University, who wrote a book called The Economics of J.M. Keynes, published in 1948. Dillard said that Roosevelt in his New Deal did all the things which in 1936 Keynes advocated should be done in a depression. He ran a high budget deficit, he borrowed the money, he increased government expenditure, and government investment. Dillard said that it was a great success, and that the economic expansion between 1933 and 1937 "was one of the most rapid in the history of American business cycles. The speed of the recovery was undoubtedly conditioned by the depths to which activity had plummeted in 1932. It was nevertheless a remarkable recovery which was nurtured by fairly large-scale borrowing."

You will notice, by the way, that Dillard hedges a bit; he doesn't say that it was the only recovery, he says it was one of the most rapid. But Dillard did a useful thing. He compared America under Roosevelt with what was happening in Britain at the same time under the Ramsay MacDonald National Government. Whereas Roosevelt was running a policy which Keynesians later claimed was in line with their views, the British government were doing the opposite. In 1932 they were running the same policy which Mrs Thatcher is running now. So you have the two contrasted, Keynes in America and anti-Keynes in Britain, and what actually happened?

In 1932, unemployment in America was 24.1% and 22.1% in Britain. Five years later, in 1937, unemployment in America had fallen to 14.3%. In Britain it had fallen to 10.82%. The same thing happened in both countries; it was a bit more favourable in the anti-Keynesian Britain than it was in the Keynesian America. What sort of success is this? In 1938, which was 6 years after Roosevelt had obtained power, unemployment in America was 19.1 % and it was 13.5% in Britain. In other words, after 6 years of Keynesian policy, it was double what it was in America in 1983 in the midst of this present depression.

There is one other interesting aspect of this. The Keynesians say that if the government spends more it will not only create jobs directly, but it will stimulate private industry so that the private capitalists will spend more and invest more so you get the jobs being created both directly from government expenditure and throughout industry generally.

It would not however be of any use for the government to increase expenditure, if at the same time the capitalists were reducing their expenditure. What happened in America? If you compare the pre-depression year 1929 with 1938, government expenditure went up from 22 billion dollars to 34 billion dollars. That was an increase of 12 billion dollars. Fine, jobs were created and all the rest of it. But at the same time, private investment went down from 39 billion dollars to 21 billion dollars. So while government expenditure was going up, private investment was going down, which explains of course why unemployment was 19.1%. Dillard recognised this and he actually says that private investment "remained abnormally low" during that depression.

He and Keynes both worried about this. They said that it didn't seem to work the way they thought it would, and they both put forward the view that perhaps it would have been all right if only Roosevelt instead of increasing government expenditure by a mere 12 billion dollars had increased it by more. It is worth noticing that in Germany in 1920 to 1923 when the government didn't just increase expenditure by 22 billion dollars, but were doubling expenditure every month, after 3 years of it 25% of the German workers were out of work and nearly another 25% on half time.

BRITAIN AFTER THE WAR

The second showpiece of Keynesianism is what happened in Britain between 1945 and 1977. It is absolutely true that in the first ten years after the war unemployment was abnormally low in this country and averaged about 2% or less, but from 1955 unemployment began to rise there. Unemployment never remains absolutely stable, it goes up and down in this way, and in 1955 it began to rise. It went up from 500,000 in 1955 to 700,000 in 1963, 800,000 in 1968 and up to a million in 1970 under Heath and to 1,700,000 under the Labour Government in 1977.

Was Keynesian policy really the reason why unemployment was very low for the ten years after the war? We can quote two Keynesian economists. One is J. Robinson and the other is Alvin Hansan, who wrote in 1950 and 1953, both of whom, though they were Keynesians, said that the low unemployment was nothing to do with Keynes and that it would have happened in any event.

Now look at the real reason why unemployment started to rise after 1955. During the war, Germany and Japan, and some other countries, were devastated. They were no longer in the world market producing goods. It took them years to recover. They recovered, largely with the aid of American finance, and when they did so, they didn't only have their factories rebuilt, but they had them completely modernised and re-equipped, so that Germany and Japan became the leading cheap producers of commodities in the whole world. And as Germany and Japan came back into the market, British exports were squeezed out. There is quite a useful way of looking at it. There are figures available showing 11 countries, which included Germany and Japan, and their total export of manufactured goods and the proportion going to British capitalism. You can see that in 1955 the British proportion was about 20%, and you can see it coming down to 16%, 18%, 15%, 10%. You will have noticed that it was recently announced that for the first time in British history, Britain is now an importer of more manufactured goods than it exports.

So it can be seen that the two showpieces of Keynes had nothing whatever to do with Keynes. It did not work and the whole claim made for Keynesian policy is an illusion.

The course of events has justified Marx's explanation of crises and depressions against both the Monetarists and the Keynesians. It only needs to add that, unlike Keynes and the Monetarists, who were vainly trying to improve capitalism, Marx reached the conclusion that the only solution is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle (Britain)

A Page of History: the 1834 Canut Revolt in Lyon (2015)

From the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year was the 180^th anniversary of the 1834 Canut revolt in Lyon. Engels had described the earlier Canut revolt in 1831 as 'the first working-class rising' (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) in the early years of the modern capitalist period. In October last year the OECD released its study How Was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820 which concluded that 'global income inequality has returned to levels recorded in the 1820s – when the Industrial Revolution produced sizeable wealth gaps between the rich and poor' (Common Dreams, 2 October). This study was shortly followed by the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2014 which stated that 'the richest 1 percent of the world's population own more than 48 percent of global wealth' (Guardian, 14 October).

It is said that modern capitalism was born in 1825 after Britain revoked its law against joint-stock companies (the 1720 Bubble Act), Britain had gone on the Gold Standard in 1821, the business cycle began, and the 'Panic of 1825' was the start of modern economic cycles and crises. It was the first international economic crisis occurring in peacetime.

Capitalism imprisoned the working class in either workhouses, the 'bastilles of the proletariat' or in the factory described by Marx as 'The House of Terror... realised a few years later in the shape of a gigantic Workhouse for the industrial worker... called the Factory' (Capital).The 1832 'Great' Reform Act did not extend the franchise to the working class, and when on 16 October 1834 (180 years ago) the Palace of Westminster (House of Commons) burned down, the people cheered in the street.

In France at this time during Louis Philippe's reign of 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom, the July monarchy gave freedom to the industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie, enriching the bourgeoisie and attacking the working class who were attempting to organise themselves. Greed was at the heart of French capitalism typified in Prime Minister Guizot's slogan 'Enrichessez-vous' (Enrich yourselves) from 'Enrichissez-vous par le travail, par l'epargne et par la probit' (Enrich yourselves by work, saving and probity' (Liberty-Tree.ca), and artist Honoré Daumier caricatured the bourgeoisie perceiving the meanness and mediocrity of the bourgeois class. Marx pointed out that 'the July monarchy was nothing other than a joint stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth' (The Class Struggles in France) while republican Lamartine worried that 'the proletarian question is one that will cause the terrible explosion in present-day society, if society and government decline to fathom and resolve it' (War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval).

Silk Weavers

In Lyon, the second city of France, the main industry was textiles in particular the silk weaving industry which had begun in Lyon in the fifteenth century, and would become the capital of the European silk trade. By the middle of the seventeenth century over 14,000 looms were in use in Lyon spinning the silk from the silk worms in the mulberry trees grown in the departments of Drôme, Gard, Vaucluse, and Ardèche. By 1830 Lyon had a population of 133,000 people, of which 25 percent worked in the 'Fabrique'. Silk and silk-related products accounted for half of Lyon's total commercial income and a third of the value of all French exports.

The Lyonnais silk weavers were known as 'Canuts' which probably derives from 'canette', a spool used in silk weaving. The Canuts worked on huge Jacquard mechanical looms in poor working conditions largely in the Croix-Rousse neighbourhood. The Jacquard loom was introduced after 1801 and greatly benefited silk production although for the worker it was expensive and enormous: it needed its own building with extra high ceilings and reinforced floors. The Canut lived and worked in the same building as the loom, and the weaver bore the costs of maintaining the loom. There were about 8,000 chief weaving craftsmen (Canuts), and 30,000 apprentices, women, and errand boys who lived and worked with the Canuts, everybody working 14 to 18 hours a day in buildings lacking ventilation.

The Lyonnais bourgeois class of silk manufacturers and bankers were known as 'fabricants' and numbered about 1,400. They, through the 'Fabrique' governed the Lyonnais silk trade, and contracted with the Canuts for a specific order or per price. The Fabrique had a raft of anti-worker regulations such as in wage disputes, the employer's word was taken without question while workers had to prove wrongdoing, and also associations (ie. trade unions) of more than 20 workers were prohibited. One hated regulation was that 'each worker was required by law to carry a booklet called a 'livret', in which his or her employer kept notes on the terms of service, personal conduct, debts etc' (Silk in Lyons Erika Budde). The Fabrique also wanted to abolish the professional requirements (apprenticeships) to be a 'master weaver' so anyone who could afford a loom could become one. The Canuts had a thriving working class culture with a great emphasis on education; 'by the late 1700s, 70 percent of male silk workers were literate' (Budde), and Lyon had two workers newspapers. Marx wrote that 'the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began' (Capital).

In 1831 there was competition from imported English silk which led to price decreases, the economy was in a downturn, and the Canuts struggled to maintain an adequate standard of living. The Canuts wanted a minimum price for silk which was refused by the Lyonnais bourgeoisie. In October 1831 the Canuts seized the arsenal and repulsed the localNational Guard with a slogan of 'vivre libre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!' (live free working or die fighting!). This was the first working class uprising in modern capitalism. The revolt was quickly suppressed by Napoleonic officer Marshal Soult with 20,000 soldiers, and with little bloodshed. Engels identified that 'the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front' (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

The Lyonnais bourgeoisie refused to set a tariff, a fixed minimum, statutory wage for the Canut silk weavers which they had during the Napoleonic Empire. In 1833-34 the Lyonnais silk industry was booming, and Canut wages had increased which led the Comte d'Argout, Governor of the Bank of France to write to the King: 'the manufacture is in a state of simply fabulous prosperity' (Guy Antonetti Louis-Philippe). The Lyonnais bourgeoisie sought to lower the wages of the Canuts which caused a general strike in Lyon in February 1834. The Canut leaders of employees' benevolent associations such as Medailles de la Societe de Secours Mutuels des Ouvriers de Sole (Silkworkers Provident Society) were arrested and sent for trial in April.

Bloody repression

At the same time as the Canut leaders were on trial, the French parliament was discussing restrictions on republican groups, collective bargaining and the rights of association for workers. This anti-working class legislation was passed on 9 April 1834. On the same day the Canuts took over parts of Lyon, erecting barricades, raiding the barracks and taking arms from the arsenal. The National Guard were forced to evacuate the town. The Canuts adopted the French Republican Calendar, 9 April 1834 becoming Germinal 22, Year XLII of the Republic in homage to the 1789 great bourgeois French Revolution. This revolution did not solve the socio-economic problems facing the working class in France. The Canut revolt was not a political revolt but an economic one, at this time the franchise being limited to the bourgeois class.

The bourgeois class strategy under the leadership of Thiers, the Interior Minister, was to abandon Lyon to the Canut rebels, surround it and then retake it, a tactic again used by Thiers against the working class in the 1871 Paris Commune. Thiers was a resolute enemy of the working class, described eloquently by Marx as 'that monstrous gnome, [who] has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own class corruption... consistent only in his greed for wealth and his hatred of the men that produce it' (The Civil War in France). Thiers had Lyon subjected to artillery bombardment then had the army retake the town between 11 and 15 April during what became known as 'sanglante semaine' (bloody week). The Canut revolt was crushed with 600 workers, men, women and children killed by the army and police and 10,000 workers imprisoned or deported to the colonies.

The bourgeois class were just practising their revenge on the working class which would find fulfilment in the 1848 June Days in Paris when 10,000 workers were either killed or injured, while over 4,000 were deported to Algeria. All this pales compared to the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune when 30,000 communards were killed by a vicious bourgeoisie. The capitalist class is ruthless when they feel threatened in their minority ownership of property and capital.

The Canut revolt of 1834 as the first major working class uprising in modern capitalism signifies that 'philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat' (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) but the lessons of the 1834 Canut revolt were not learned by the working class for several decades. Engels pointed out in a letter to Paul Lafargue of 11 March 1892 that 'the era of barricades and street fighting has gone for good; if the military fight, resistance becomes madness.'

Engels on street fighting

Engels summarised the nineteenth century of working class street fighting in his 1895 Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France: 'rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, had become largely outdated... everywhere the bourgeoisie had thrown in its lot with governments... and feasted the military moving against insurrection. The barricade had lost its magic; the soldier no longer saw behind it the 'people' but rebels, subversives, plunderers, levellers, the scum of society; the officer had in the course of time become versed in the tactical forms of street fighting, he no longer marched straight ahead and without cover against the improvised breastwork, but went round it through gardens, yards and houses.'

In the same essay Engels saw 'with this successful utilization of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly took on a more tangible form' with organised working class political parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, and from 1904 the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Since control of parliament is obtained via elections based on universal suffrage, a socialist majority can win control of the machinery of government and the state through winning a parliamentary majority via the ballot box. The state is the institution with the power to employ socially-sanctioned physical force, it is an expression of and enforcer of class society. On the eve of a socialist election victory, the working class would already be convinced of the need for socialism and would have organised themselves in parties, unions, councils and other bodies ready to keep production and administration going, and socialist ideas would also have penetrated into the armed forces. If die-hard capitalists attempted a coup against a socialist majority, the armed forces would tend to side with those who have the undisputed democratic legitimacy, ie. those who want socialism. Even anarchists concede that 'the majority of military personnel are working class, and however indoctrinated they are, we doubt that they will be prepared on the whole to shoot down their friends, neighbours and relatives' (Beyond Resistance).

As socialists we remember the working class struggles of yesteryear such as the Canut revolt of 1834. Slavoj Žižek paraphrasing Walter Benjamin says 'the authentic revolution is not only directed towards the future but it redeems the past failed revolutions. All the ghosts as it were; the living dead of the past revolution, which are roaming around, unsatisfied will finally, find their home' (The Perverts’ Guide to Ideology).

Steve Clayton

Observations: Right to work? (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is sometimes said by socialists—perhaps half jokingly—that campaigns for the "right to work" are part of a conspiracy by the capitalist class to confuse the minds of workers. Certainly, there used to be a campaign in the 1970s called "The Right to Work", which was a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party. And you can't get a more confused and confusing bunch of people than they are.

So why do socialists object to the demand for the "right to work"? Because in effect the "right to work" is a demand to be employed and employment is servile, exploitative and a denial of workers' needs according to ability. But to understand these claims we must briefly look at the history and function of employment, of wage labour.

The wages system (including salaries) is the central social relationship of capitalism. All the other features of capitalism — money, commodity production and the state — can be said to facilitate the functioning of wage labour. This is so because it is through wage labour that the capitalist class gets its privileged income and accumulates capital. Because the capitalist class own the means of life (factories, offices, farms, transport and so on) we workers, as a class, are forced to sell our labour power by time in exchange for wages and salaries. During our time in employment we have the capacity to produce a a greater value of goods and services than the value of the wages we receive. This socially produced surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist class. It is because the working class is compelled to sell its labour power that it is possible to speak of wage slavery and workers are exploited in the process. Moreover, the wage labour and capital relationship is a barrier to the fulfillment of human needs. One of the most important human needs is useful and creative work in co-operation with others and this is central to what socialism will be. But within capitalism this vital need is constantly being frustrated by the inherent class antagonism of wage labour and capital.

Of course, wage labour existed before capitalism but it was not the predominant method of exploitation. In Western Europe capitalism was preceded by feudalism, in which exploitation took place through serf labour. Under such a system the peasants had some control of the land they worked, to provide for their own subsistence needs. However, the peasants were compelled to perform surplus labour for the ruling class (for example, working two or three days a week on the lord's land). The surplus wealth was directly and physically appropriated by the landowning aristocracy and the Church. Exploitation was plain to see. The illusion that exploitation ceased when the peasants became "free" wage workers derives from the way that wage labour conceals the extraction of surplus labour. We cannot distinguish between necessary and surplus labour during our time in employment, but both are there nevertheless. It's how the rich get rich.

Nor did the peasants, for the most part, freely and voluntarily take up wage labour. Through the enclosure movement many were forcibly deprived of their land and had to look for employment in the towns and cities. As capitalism took on its industrial form in Britain, in the late 18th century, even the old cottage system of putting out work became transformed in to wage labour. The new working class could see the situation for what it was and they didn't like it. Some demanded the abolition of the wages system. But eventually wage slavery developed a slave mentality and a slave's demand: "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work". And during the inevitable phases of of economic depression and high unemployment could be heard the equally pathetic demand to be exploited, the "right to work".

We are still an exploited class no matter how high a particular wage or salary might be. The demands of profitability and markets sales dictate that there never can be a "right to work" in capitalism. Calls for such a right pose no threat to the capitalist class and their system of employment. On the contrary, such a demand encourages the capitalists to believe that wage labour and capital are here to stay, that they are eternally the masters. Indeed, it would seem that demands for employment are more plausible coming from the capitalists. In the state capitalist countries (like Russia, China, Cuba) employment is an offer the workers cannot refuse. In Britain the new Employment Training Scheme for the long-term unemployed may become compulsory. It seems that our masters are concerned that some of us may be losing our appetite for wage slavery. Just imagine a movement demanding the right not to work — for wages or for capital. Now that really would worry our masters!

But wage slavery is not kept going by any conspiracy. All that is required is a slave mentality by the great majority, unwilling to realise that the fetters which bind them can be broken.

Lew Higgins

William Morris as a socialist (1965)

Book Review from the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Morris: The Man and The Myth, by R. Page Arnot.

William Morris, the poet and designer of the Victorian era, is not generally thought of as a Marxian Socialist. He is either praised for his artistic contributions or pictured as a Utopian sentimentalist. In fact Morris was a prominent and active member of one of the pioneer Marxist organisations in Britain, the Socialist League, which was founded in 1884 by a group of people who broke away from the Social Democratic Federation because of the dictatorial attitude of its founder, H. M. Hyndman.

The League, in the words of its manifesto, advocated "the principles of revolutionary international socialism." This manifesto was written by Morris. Morris also served on the League's executive committee, edited its official journal, wrote pamphlets and leaflets, addressed indoor and street-corner meetings and sold its literature. An examination of his writings will show that Morris had a clear grasp of the theory of exploitation and the materialist conception of history.

Economics, and history were not, however, his specialities. Where Morris can be said to have made a real contribution to socialist theory is in bringing out the positive side of Socialism. Anyone who regards his News from Nowhere as mere Utopianism misses the point altogether. Morris was not painting a detailed picture of the future society rather was he outlining what he saw as the possibilities of Socialism. He was attempting to describe what relations between people could be like when freed from the cash nexus. Other of his writings such as Art, Labour and Socialism and Useful Work versus Useless Toil explains why is a drudgery under capitalism and how it can be pleasure under socialism.

William Morris's views are interesting for another reason. The early Marxian Socialism movement in Britain and North America spent much time in discussing whether a Socialist party should have a programme of immediate demands, of parliamentary reforms. This question came uo for discussion at the annual conference of the Socialist League in 1887.

The League contained many diverse elements including out-an-out anarchists. Some of the branches (supported incidentally by Engels) were in favour of trying to get into Parliament and drawing up a list of "palliatives" as a parliamentary programme. The anarchists, naturally, were opposed to this. So was William Morris, but for different reasons. While not opposed to parliamentary action altogether, Morris was opposed to the League acquiring a programme of palliatives or reforms.

In his opinion there was a need of "a body of principle" to abstain from such opportunism. He suggested that for a Socialist organisation to contest elections on such a programme would end in the election of Socialists on non-Socialist votes. Morris was, however, prepared to work with those who favoured a reform programme and after he had resigned from the League following its capture by the anarchist section he signed a manifesto, together with Hyndman and Bernard Shaw, calling for a united socialist party.

Twenty years after the breakaway of the Socialist League from the SDF, another break occurred—and for the same reasons, Hyndman's dictatorial attitude and the organisation's opportunism. Those who broke away were to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain. From the very beginning, after the benefit of further discussions of the issue of a reform programme especially in America, the Socialist Party was—and still is—uncompromisingly opposed to a programme of immediate demands.

It would be ungenerous of us not to recognise that William Morris usefully contributed to the discussion among early socialist which led to the adoption of this principle by our party. Morris was quite conscious of the fact that his position was a departure from that of German Social Democracy.

This book contains further information on Morris' position on this question, with the publication for the first time of some of his letters to J. L. Mahon, who was for a time the secretary of the League. Page Arnot has done some useful research but the commentary in this book, despite the new material, is incredibly bad.

Arnot creates a new myth, one of Morris as a forerunner of the so-called Communist Party of which he (Arnot) is a member. We are told that because of his position on reforms Morris was a "leftist" of the sort attacked by Lenin in his Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (incidentally a type which has always been given short-shrift by the Communist Party). Surely the choicest piece of distortion is that which tells us that the British Road to Socialism, the current programme of Arnot's party, is a detailed version of News From Nowhere!

Adam Buick

Capitalism - driverless train (2000)

From the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than 90 percent of history and what we can deduce of prehistory, people were autonomous. They produced what they needed and consumed it, guided by millennia of inherited skills, whether as hunter-gatherers, herders, or cultivators. In some places, prisoners of tribal wars were used as slaves but this was nowhere the prevailing mode of production. Where conspicuous consumption required that some could reap where they had not sown, as Adam Smith put it, this was achieved by extortion, less frequently by wholesale theft. A law of logic, even more than of history shows why parasites rarely kill their hosts.

All this changed when the extortionists had the clever idea of stealing not only the produce but the means, i.e. the land itself. Done on a wide enough scale, it provided not only capital in the form of land but destitute people who had no alternative but to work for wages. The activity began in England during the reign of Henry VII (the late 1400s) and has been maintained ever since.

Out of control

The creation of order relies upon feedback, negative feedback, information that guides self-correction like the rudder on a boat, the sensor on a guided missile, or the thermostat on the radiator. Human societies behaved like this until those homesteaders were driven off their land in the fifteenth century and subsequently almost everywhere else in the world. The division of society into those who had land/wealth/power and the majority who did not have enough to free themselves from being beholden to the robbers and their heirs blocked the feedback or drowned the information in "noise". Put simply, the homesteaders could always repair the roof damaged in a gale, or even rebuild the house with the help of neighbours. The salary earner who has just been fired has no means of paying the mortgage and has to face being put onto the street like those thousands stuck with "negative equity" at the end of the 1980s, and who had their houses "repossessed" by the building societies. There was no self-correction or feedback.

The experience of disasters during the 20th century, both natural and man-made, has led to demands for an explanation in the hope that action can be taken to deal with situations like the possibility of a stock-market crash, or when war, environmental devastation, mass starvation, or epidemics threaten us. The natural sciences: physics, chemistry, have always been looked to for an understanding of the non-living world, and tremendous progress has been made in recent centuries. No such progress has been made in the social sciences of economics and politics. The economist Paul Ormerod wrote recently in The Death of Economics that he had wasted his life on the subject. The financier George Soros was scathing and the electronic-engineer-turned-economist Brian Arthur turned his testing criteria on economics and concluded that most of its premisses were simply false. He argued that the market does not tend to equilibrium, does not supply the best product at the lowest social cost and that virtually all of the other assumptions dear to economists, whether free-marketeers or reformists, were false.

The same has happened in political science and sociology. Psychology, as other than a medical subject when it tends to be called psychiatry, flourishes only in the United States, along with astrology and witchcraft. The gurus of yesteryear, Freud, Adler and Jung, are mistaken for a pop-group by the young or are not taken seriously by the old in Europe, their place of origin.

None of the foregoing need mean that the social sciences are beyond scientific investigation, just that they have not been subjected to it. Instead of the routine observation-classification-hypothesis-and testing that the natural sciences have adopted since the end of the Age of Faith, the social sciences have wandered about in a fog of anecdotes, arguments from Authority (Lacan said or Freud found, etc) and an atomistic view of the subject matter, which is really about relations and not the human atoms themselves.

This last is the main source of the problem and comes as a consequence of taking the capitalist market as the paradigm. The division of society into those who live from wealth and the great majority who have to hustle because they have little or no wealth (many Americans whom we have been told are the richest of all, have negative wealth, because they are living on credit) means there is no community to analyse. A community can consist only of autonomous people; a business or an army cannot be a real community, neither can a country or a continent divided into employers and workers. A political, social, or economic analysis without this fact as the starting point is like Hamlet without the Prince.

World domination

American governments have enjoyed world domination at least since the end of World War Two. British governments enjoyed similar power until the beginning of the First World War which bankrupted the European powers and left the world market to American business. General Clausewitz said that war was the continuation of diplomacy by other means. He could have argued that trade is the continuation of war in a similar way. The inter-war years were characterised by conflicts over trade and charges of dumping, protectionism, and attempts to control the market. The US economy, which had grown up during the 19th century behind the highest tariff wall in history, was now the advocate of free-trade, or at least was until the Wall Street Crash in 1929, when, with a quarter of the labour force unemployed, it retreated back into its shell.

It was only the beginnings of preparation for the Second World War that revived capitalism in the middle 1930s. At this same time the American government found itself in control of the world monetary system. Britain's government had taken the pound off the gold standard and the dollar took over. Keynesian economics preached that the cause of capitalist crises was lack of demand and the solution was to print more money. Under FD Roosevelt the American government took it up enthusiastically, using dollars printed in the back room to buy up raw materials, companies and markets around the world, and also gold, which lent credence to the dollar.

The size of the American economy allowed it to increase this dominance after the war. Competition from European film-makers was crushed and the only work for actors and directors was in Hollywood which could dump the ends of its production runs on Europe for little more than the cost of the celluloid. Publishing and television has gone the same way in Britain where a common language does not present any barrier whereas Continental media industries can use theirs as a partial defence.

With the advent of television the take-over continued and similarly with recorded music and book publishing. Seventy-eight percent of the "British" press is foreign-owned, mostly identified with American-based interests. We are not in the business of defending British capitalism or any other version; workers do not, by definition, own newspapers, but it is hard enough identifying our interests filtered by London, let alone through Washington.

Most of the old publishing houses, Hodder, Unwin, etc are now merely a floor in a New York corporate skyscraper and while the reason for publishing is sale and profit, as it always was in the last analysis, James Joyce and Marcel Proust could today not expect anything more than a rejection slip. The first because he is too obscure for the mass market, and the second because a twelve-volume novel would take up too much space in an airport kiosk.

With scholarly work, most of the writers tend to be American because the new requirements dovetail into their academic system where universities function like businesses competing for government and private funds. Teachers are expected to produce written material to promote the university, under the maxim: "Publish or Perish", regardless of whether the writer has anything of value to say or not. American teachers complain that their students are interested only in making money. The most popular degree is that of MBA (Master of Business Administration). Ideas and scholarship are for nerds and losers.

What's it all about?

The business columns are always full of booms or slumps. Ten years ago the Japanese economy crashed. In Tokyo property is worth one-seventh of what it was before the crash. The American stock-market is propelled by people borrowing to invest in the electronic media, often in companies which have not even traded, let alone made a profit. The shares are being bought upon the assumption that they will continue to rise on the Exchange. This is just what happened in 1929 and it ended up with half the workforce unemployed.

Could the integration of the European market and economy save us from such a threat? Short-term, possibly. The anticipation of longer production runs, easier access to the richest market in the world, and protection from American producers where it is sought—in effect, to enjoy the privileges American producers enjoyed for most of the last century—could generate a euphoria to keep production running for a while.

But ultimately the logic, or lack of it, peculiar to capitalism must take over. The "information" from consumers as to their needs and wants is impeded by the "noise" from the market—and from the lack of means, of what economists delicately call "effective" demand, i.e. consumers lack the money, so production has to stop.

Political organisation even on a continental basis will still not match the economic spread of the market which is world-wide, but it would still not affect the issue anyway. The real cause of capitalist crises lies in the division of people into producers and consumers: gain for the one is loss for the other, there is no common interest and therefore no community. The disequilibrium that results is at the bottom of all the stop-go, booms and slumps, that characterise the "system"—or lack of it.

It is at this point that we part company with George Soros, Lester Thurow, Paul Krugman, Benjamin Barber, Daniel Burstein, Manuel Castells, and all the other writers and academics who are trying to make sense of what is happening. This is not to minimise their contribution. But the mass of facts they produce is not matched by any paradigm or hypothesis to make sense of them, and to guide any action to deal with them.

Whether globalisation is a good or a bad thing is neither here nor there. For the great mass of people there is no choice as long as the market-based system is maintained. The forces driving capitalism do not include their/our wishes. A class-divided society does not have control via feedback, or self-correction, merely random behaviour like a driverless train, an avalanche, or a rockfall.

Ken Smith

We Mean No ill! (1924)

From the June 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is the name given to a future state of society in which all the people physically and mentally fit will take a part in doing whatever is necessary, according to their capacities, and in return will receive whatever they require that is within the power of Society to provide, with due regard to the needs of each. The more important of such things are food, clothing and shelter.

We only require the best food and in sufficient quantity to keep us satisfied and healthy; it is not essential that we should have an endless gorge. We only require the best of clothing and in sufficient quantity for comfort and adornment; it is not essential that we should make ourselves into clothes horses. We only require sufficient housing accommodation to enable us to live comfortably and free from foul smells and unsightliness; we do not require an endless number of rooms to get lost in.

There are people so satiated with food that eating has become a bore; we would relieve them of their boredom. There are others who are in an eternal sweat changing from one suit of clothes to another; we would ease their toil. There are others again doomed to occupy vast mansions of numberless rooms; we would relieve them of their solitude.

There are people again, and these are the great majority, who know not the meaning of a stomach regularly filled with the best of food, clothing in sufficiency and patchless, houses comfortable and sanitary; we would see them lifted out of their misery and placed in the midst of comfort and security.

We would convert the lives of one class from the endless hurry after pleasures that do not satisfy to the leisurely pursuit of useful work that elevates and is a pleasure in itself. We would convert the lives of the other class from toilsome work in occupations they detest, that does not always guarantee them even a bare existence, into work the performance of which will fill them with joy and leave them to end their days in tranquility.

Why then does the one class view our friendly offers with hatred whilst the other views them with suspicion and apathy? Heigho! This is a funny old world!

Gilmac

Editorial: Break the Link With Labour (1993)

Editorial from the September 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Should Labour cut its links with the unions? The Labour Party can do what it likes, but if the question is put the other way round -  should the unions cut their links with the Labour Party -  the answer is yes, they should have done this years ago. In fact they should never have set up and financed the Labour Party in the first place.

Unions and the Labour Party have different aims which in the end are incompatible and antagonistic. The unions seek to get the best deal they can for the sale of their members' labour power to employers. But wages, working conditions and terms of employment can only be improved at the expense of profits.

The Labour Party, on the other hand, now more openly and obviously than ever, seeks power to run the capitalist system. But running the system -  the profit system - inevitably involves giving priority to profit-making over everything else. This is why the Labour Party, when in government, has always opposed strikes, imposed wage restraint and clashed with the unions.

The mystery is why the unions haven't broken with Labour years ago. Why didn't they break with Labour in 1924 when the first Labour Government threatened to use the Emergency Powers Act against striking tramworkers? Or in 1931 when the second Labour Government cut unemployment benefit? Or in 1950 when the post-war Labour Government prosecuted gasworkers for going on strike? Or in 1966 when Harold Wilson imposed a wage freeze? Or in 1979 when Callaghan urged workers to cross picket lines?

Despite this appalling anti-working-class record, the pressure today to weaken the link between the unions and Labour is coming not from trade unionists but from the Labour politicians. For crude vote-catching reasons, John Smith wants to reduce the way the unions have in selecting Labour Party candidates and in formulating Labour Party policy. But he doesn't want to go all the way - he still wants the unions to finance him and the rest of his gang of political careerists.

The way this is done is a scandal in itself. Unions are voluntary organisations maintained by the contributions of their members. But unless union members go out of their way to sign a declaration that they don't want any of their contributions to go to the Labour Party, a part of their money is diverted to financing the Labour politicians' vote-catching machine. As a result many workers who have nothing but contempt for the gang of Labour fakers at Westminster end up paying money to them without being aware that they are.

Since Labour politicians opened the question of union links, trade unionists should seize the opportunity to break all organizational and financial links with the pro-capitalist Labour Party. These have served no useful purpose in the past and certainly will not in the future.

It is not the concept of the working class taking political action that is wrong. On its own, trade union activity, though essential, is a never-ending battle which at best can only mitigate but never end our exploitation for profit. It does need to be supplemented by political action but of a quite different kind to electing Labour MPs.

We need to organize ourselves, democratically without leaders, into a political party dedicated solely to replacing capitalism by a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. In other words, into a real Socialist Party. Not the fake socialist party Labour once claimed to be, nor the openly pro-capitalist party is now so obviously is.

Backwaters of History - 8 (1954)

From the June 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Münzer and the Thuringian Revolt

Eight thousand men were on a hill near Frankenhausen listening to a speech from their leader. They had fortified themselves behind a barricade of farm waggons and carts and, during the period of a truce arranged with their foes, they were debating the terms of surrender offered them.

At the foot of this hill, the Schlachberg, was encamped a well-armed and disciplined army, also of eight thousand men, led by the Duke of Saxony, the Duke of Brunswick and the Landgraf of Hesse. On the 15th of May, 1525, the dukes had granted the truce to the army of ill-armed peasants and workers on the hill-top, to give them time to consider the terms offered, unconditional submission and the surrender of the peasants' leaders, particularly Thomas Münzer.

Some of the insurgents on the hill were for accepting the terms in the face of the formidable opposition lined up against them. Münzer had the two foremost advocates of surrender beheaded and then proceeded to harangue his following. He denounced the enemy with more than his accustomed vehemence, he made rousing allusions to Biblical heroes, how small forces of chosen people had conquered hosts and he concluded by pointing to a rainbow that appeared, just at the moment, as an omen of success.

Before the period of the truce had expired, and whilst the peasant army was still unprepared, the enemy opened cannon fire on their camp and charged through the barricade, mowing down the defenceless peasants left and right, pursuing those who escaped into the town of Frankenhausen where the massacre continued. Münzer was discovered in hiding and, after a period of imprisonment and a letter of "confession" to his followers, he was beheaded. So ended the most significant battle of the German Peasants' War.

The Middle Ages closed on a scene of economic transformation. Commercial activity was shaking the foundations of the feudal system. The feudal peasant and the feudal lord had obligations to one another and the peasant had a measure of security together with a limitation to the degree of exploitation to which he was subject. This was changing to a system of merciless exploitation where taxes, tithes, etc., were continually increased and new methods ever being devised to extract more surplus wealth from the peasantry, which the feudal lord could change into florins, guilders or ducats. Common land was seized and tenant farms confiscated thus giving rise to a class of proletarian cotters.

This increase in exploitation and oppression gave rise to the great peasant revolts throughout Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. The peasants, armed with spears and axes, rose against their tormentors in France in the 1350's, in England in the 1380's, in Germany throughout the fifteen century culminating in the Peasants' War of 1525, and later in Sweden and Denmark.

The economic changes gave rise to a confused mass of conflicting interests. The nobility, the peasantry, the merchants, the artisans, the proletarians, the wealthy priesthood and the poor wandering priests, all had interests peculiar to their own grouping. But through these various oppositions there was a dividing line that gave the majority of the people a mutually common enemy—the Catholic Church. The wealthy, grasping Catholic Church, centralised at Rome, was regarded by all strata of society as the exploiter par excellence, sucking wealth from all the sections of the community and pipe-lining it over the Alps to the Papal headquarters.

On the 31st of October, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church at Wittenburg and gave impetus to a movement which took him and others along with it. Luther started by fighting only against the excesses of the Catholic Church but was carried along by the current to urge violence and the use of fire and iron for the extermination of the cancer that he said was destroying the world.

The struggle that developed was between the Catholic conservatives on the one hand and an alliance of middle-class reformers and revolutionary peasants and proletarians on the other. The peasants at the outset aimed at a re-establishment of their feudal liberties. The famous twelve points around which most of the German peasant revolts centred are evidence of the outlook. Condensed they were:

1. Religious toleration.
2. Abolition of tithes.
3. Interest to be limited to 5 per cent.
4. All water to be free.
5. All woods and forests to be free.
6. All game to be free.
7. Abolition of villeinage.
8. No obedience to a lord, only to the emperor.
9. Re-establishment of old-time justice.
10. The right to elect persons in authority.
11. Abolition of death dues.
12. Re-establishment of the common lands that had been appropriated.

As the revolt grew, large sections of the peasants accepted and supported the communistic reachings of men like Thomas Münzer and Nicolas Storch. The middle-class allies drew away from these communist groupings and Luther turned on them ferociously, urging the nobles and merchants to strangle the peasants as they would mad dogs.

Münzer's teaching, like all teaching of the time, was cloaked by religion. Freedom and Equality must reign on earth. The princes and the nobles denied freedom and equality to the poor, so they must be overthrown and the "common man" must be raised in their place. This was the kingdom of God and all who would not become citizens must be killed or banished. The great barrier to a real awakening of the inward light was the riches of the world. So, in the kingdom of God, there must be no private wealth. All things must be held in common. That was the essence of the teaching that caused thousands of peasants to flock around Münzer.

After a brief and adventurous career (he was only 28 years of age when he was executed) Münzer made his headquarters in Muhlhausen, where he joined forces with Heinrich Pfeiffer, an ex-monk who was the preacher and leader of the local merchant guildsmen and artisans. Pfeiffer and Münzer with their joint forces overthrew the patrician council that governed Muhlhausen and established themselves as benevolent dictators of the town and surrounding districts. Münzer proceeded to put his communist teachings into practice. He took over the Johanniterhof, the monastery of the monks of St. John, and established an equalitarian organisation holding its wealth in common. Thousands of peasants from the surrounding countryside flocked to the town where Münzer preached to them from the Marienkirche, sending out missionaries to the districts around. The communist agitation spread to Erfurt, Coburg and into Hesse and Brunswick.

During the two months of Münzer's regime in Muhlhausen, Pfeiffer with a large section of the twon population, concerned themselves not with communist ideas but with their own local revolt and establishing their own power in the local government. When word was received that the armies of the Dukes were marching against the town and Münzer took his force out to meet them, Pfeiffer remained inactive inside the walls of the town.

A body of Münzer's followers were encamped on the hill outside Frankenhausen and he marched his poorly armed and untrained force to support them. It was here that he met the military defeat that ended his career and his life. The Dukes then turned on Muhlhausen where most of Pfeiffer's supporters deserted him in terror and surrendered the town. Pfeiffer was pursued, captured and, with Münzer, tortured and beheaded.

Münzer had visions of a universal social revolution and he was one of the few leaders of the Peasant War who tried to bring unity into the German peasants' movement by establishing communications between centres, His teachings expressed the vague desires of a vital section of the society of his day. Through him they were given a certain definiteness and in every great social convulsion since his days those ideas arise until they merge into the ideas of the working class of to-day.

History abounds with examples of revolutionary classes seeking and using the support of workers and peasants to gain their ends then turning ferociously on them when they start to voice aspirations of their own. Martin Luther offers an outstanding example. His words when the peasant revolts were being suppressed show his spite and viciousness.

" . . . the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants. They should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog. Therefore, dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain."

(The Peasant War in Germany, by F. Engels.)

Books to Read:

The Peasant War in Germany by Frederick Engels.

The Peasants' War in Germany 1525-26 by E. Belfort Bax.

Essay, "The Reformation" in "Crises in European History" by Gustav Bang.

W. Waters

1492 and all that (1991)

Book Review from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth. By Hans Koning. Latin American Bureau, 1991.

The romance of Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, and the inevitable celebrations to mark the anniversary in 1992, are the subjects of this study which attempts to reassess Columbus and put the record straight on his character and place in history. It also confronts the issue of "civilisation" versus "savagery" and the ideology which sees the West as culturally superior and as the ideal to which all people should aspire.

For Koning 1492, the year in which Columbus supposedly "discovered" a new world already widely inhabited, "opened an era of genocide, cruelty, and slavery". The motivation for exploration lay not so much in discovery but in the extension and consolidation of the trading rights of rival European powers and in the desire to finance expansionism and acquire spheres of economic influence and political domination.

That the world was round was commonly acknowledged. Columbus's belief that Asia could be reached by a westerly route was based upon a lamentable and stubborn ignorance as to the size of the world. In his public statements Columbus claimed to be motivated by a desire to convert the "heathen", although this seems to have quickly given way to a policy of genocide or enslavement. In fact, the peaceful, generous and friendly innocence displayed by the original inhabitants of the "new" world, and recorded by contemporary observers, was to place them in a perilous position. Decisions as to their fate were being made elsewhere. The desire for gold at whatever cost, and the necessity of economic domination, led to a global arbitration by Pope Alexander VI, who divided the new world between Spain and Portugal, although somewhat to the chagrin of France and Holland.

Unaware of this decision, the inhabitants of the so-called new world were not long in feeling the consequences. The later activites of Pizarro and Cortes have been widely documented yet the systematic brutality of the original conquerors should not be underestimated. The rapid annihilation of the Arawaks, for instance, would necessitate the importation of black slaves from Africa to replace them by 1550. As Koning argues, the brutality of the Spanish and, for that matter the Portuguese on the Guinea coast of Africa, persisted until chattel slavery became uneconomic: "men became humane at the very moment inhumanity lost its business advantage".

As to Columbus, in contrast to his ambitions, the rewards he received were small and mostly honorific, for at this point in the conquest the anticipated gold was not sufficiently forthcoming. In a sense Columbus was as much a product of his time as we are of ours. What we should not do, however, is to hide reality beneath a mythology of the heroic discoverer and the coming of civilisation. But neither should we become complacent in our reading of history. The economic momentum that motivated and legitimized the Spanish conquest of America 500 years ago is the same to which we are victims today.

Philip Bentley

Women's movement (1983)

Book Review from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is to be done about the family? edited by Lynne Segal (Penguin Books)

This collection of essays by seven women looks at the family from different points of view while always keeping the oppression of women at the centre of the analysis. The first essay describes the protest movements of the 60s which rejected all traditional family values. These were short lived and led to nothing but another protest movement: the new feminism of the 70s. The next essay shows how feminists moved away from trying to live out their ideals in alternative households towards a theoretical critique of the family and finally came to concentrate on reforms, often within the Labour Party. This is followed by an attempted Marxist analysis of the particular oppression of women in capitalism, but comes to the disappointing conclusion that the problem simply lies in the social division between productive and reproductive labour. The next essays concentrate respectively on childcare, sex as a product of the family as we know it, communes as alternative families, and the Welfare State in relation to women's economic dependence on their husbands and their need for some form of independent income. The concluding essay takes stock and tries to answer the question posed in the title of the book, but in doing so it has to admit that things have not improved very much at all and that there is no sign that they are going to. 

In this book we find all the typical questions that feminists ask: Why is housework not recognised by society? How can one find security and warmth in association with other people without the pressures of family life? Can the needs of children and women be reconciled? How did women become pure providers? Why can't housework be shared? Who is responsible for the oppression of women, capitalism or men? There do not appear, however, to be any answers to these questions nor any solutions to the problems they raise. In fact one has to feel some respect for the intellectual honesty with which these women look at their involvement as feminists and clearly see the contradictions within the movement and their failure to achieve their aims. But at the same time one cannot help wondering why, if feminists can see the drawbacks and limitations of most reforms and admit to a "depressing failure to improve women's lot generally" (p.221) they do not turn to other solutions and start asking different questions. If they can wonder why "women who form 40 per cent of the population only get 25% of the pay" (p.221) they might consider why the working class, who form 90 per cent of the population and produce all the wealth, only own about 38 per cent of the wealth.

It seems almost as if these writers did not want to find the real solutions outside their movement. Denise Riley, in the face of all the evidence, writes:

But there is no automatic opposite [to the present system] — a  socialism of abundance which would pay full and imaginative attention to the needs of women with children; plenty does not spontaneously flow from a new socialist order, any more than refusing public welfare provision is a timeless characteristic of capitalism (p.129);

and Lynne Segal includes the following comment on her concluding remarks: "But whether we like it or we don't, family life will continue to change" (p.230). Their attitude is one of passive resignation (how ironical in committed feminists!) which leads them to fear that the system will not treat them well, or hope that it might if they plead with it as they all do at the end of each essay, giving long lists of "we want this, and we want that . . . and is it too much to ask?" The mistake they make is precisely to "ask". If we want things to be a certain way, then we must run society ourselves instead of allowing it to be run in the interests of a tiny minority.

The word socialism is used a lot in this book, but mainly as a label that says something about the person wearing it (that she is a good sort of person who wants to improve the lot of people generally), not as a definition of a form of society. Pity. Because that form of society, run by the majority of the people in their own interests, without distinction of race or sex, without wages or money and therefore without property or economic dependence of any kind, would be a good place for a woman to live.

Christine Moss

Obituary: Ted Lake (1977)

Obituary from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is always sad to record the death of older members who formed the backbone of the Party in its critical years. If we refer to the early days as our "vintage era" it is because we are grateful for the unremitting efforts of men like Ted Lake who against tremendous odds ensured the future of the Socialist Party.

Ted joined in 1910 and commenced speaking in 1912. His first meeting was at Buckhold Road, Wandsworth. At that time the Party was running 25 outdoor meetings per week in London, with a strength of thirty speakers. The list that month showed names like Fitzgerald, Anderson, Kohn, Fairbrother, Hoskyns and Fox. Ted was the last of the line and was 88 when he died in January of this year. He was a member of the old Battersea branch, and later SW London branch. He introduced his wife Min to the Party in 1926 and she died only a few days before Ted. Both transferred to Central Branch in 1958 when they retired to Banstead.

On the death of Jack Butler by a bomb in 1944, Ted was elected Party Treasurer and held the position until 1968. He was also a member of the Executive Committee for over forty years. The Party was always short of cash. The EC had to think twice before any venture. With Lake as our hard-headed Treasurer sitting at the EC table we had to think three times. Good husbandry was never better practised and never was an EC so cost-conscious as with Lake at the financial helm.

Ted will be remembered for his irreconcilable opposition to the Party's decision to contest Parliamentary elections. He felt that, bearing in mind the size of the Party, we ought to wait until we had greater support among the working class. Originally the 1944 Annual Conference decided to contest St. Pancras, Marylebone and Paddington. Lake referred to these as the "Railway termini". When we finally chose North Paddington in the 1945 General Election we booked the Metropolitan Music Hall for a mass meeting. Ted remarked wryly  that the electors would be treated to a "new turn". In the event the meeting proved successful beyond expectation; over 1,700 people attended, and several hundred more could not get in. The great enthusiasm and energy of the members caused him to thaw slightly in his anti-election tradition but he never abandoned it.

He lectured for many years, his favourite subject being the State. Forced by his wife's health and his failing eyesight to give up his activities at the age of 80, he managed to appear occasionally at Conferences. Some months before his death he was anxious that his books should find a place in the Party library. This was arranged before he died, and thus we are still able to benefit from a life spent in the splendid cause we have become heir to. To members of his family we offer our sympathy in this double bereavement.

J. D.

Mixed Media: Our Big Land (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Big Land by Romani writer Dan Allum was directed by Amy Hodge last year at the Oval House Theatre in Kennington, London. It is a brutal, bloody and beautiful drama, a 'mystical, dark, epic poem' according to Allum (InSuffolk, 14 February 2014) which centres on the 'bauro diklo', a sacred storytelling/fortune-telling shawl passed from mothers to daughters which symbolises Romani spirit and culture.

The Romani matriarch Oceania is played by Robyn Moore who was memorable in 2003-04 in the working class TV soap opera EastEnders. Her son Roman is played by Samuel Edward-Cook, and Sophie, the Gadje (non-Romani) house dweller who is drawn into the world of the Romani as a child, is played by Scarlett Brookes. Allum puts women at the central place of the narrative as Oceania perceives in Sophie a 'gypsy heart', and we see Sophie grow from a girl to become a strong woman.

Allum was inspired by the memory of  'when I was a  kid we used a camp in Essex and in the wood was a traveller mother and – no father. They wouldn't mix with the travellers and non-travellers. It was quite mysterious, and I never forgot about them' (Oval House programme February 2014).

During the early part of the play we hear the cautionary petty-bourgeois nursery rhyme for children; 'My mother said never to play with the gypsies in the woods and if I did she would say, naughty girl to disobey.' The Romani live in the forest apart from bourgeois society. Oceania refers to 'keys for a cage' which symbolise the capitalist fetish for home ownership and private property.

Bourgeois society fears the Romani, and the woods or forests where they live come to have supernatural powers which frighten bourgeois sensibilities. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter set in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1640s, the woods for the Puritans become a symbol of darkness where the devil and his witches reside. The woods are the only place that Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne can meet away from the stern, repressive laws of Protestant society. Protestantism was a result of developing capitalism and was its ideological justification.

Oceania is dismissive when Sophie appears in her school uniform; 'uniforms are for prisons' and later says  'How can you understand freedom, when you've never had it?' Sociologists  have described the Romani as usually engaging in self-employment rather than the more common  wage-labour of capitalist society,  sometimes claiming ‘the Gypsies history is also the history of their refusal to be proletarianised’ (Judith Okely The Traveller-Gypsies), but  Gypsies could also be classified as ‘petty-bourgeois’ under the Marxist definition as they work independently yet are ‘dependent on a wider economy within which they circulate supplying goods, services and occasional labour’ (Okely). It is also important to point out that 'Gypsies enter the market without the protections afforded non-Gypsies, often working in the alternative economy in casual employment' (Brian Belton, Questioning Gypsy Identity: Ethnic Narratives in Britain).

Oceania, Roman, and Sophie later face eviction from their land with bulldozers at the gate which evokes the tribulations of the Irish Traveller community at Dale Farm in Essex who had lived there from the 1980s to the 2011 eviction by bailiffs and riot police. The Dale Farm eviction took place at the same time as capitalist media stereotyping and misrepresentation of the Romani and the Irish Traveller community in 'reality' programmes such as My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. This prompted  Billy Welch, spokesman for the Romani to say 'While Channel 4 should be praised for at least differentiating between Irish Travellers and Romani Gypsies, the first three episodes have in fact focused exclusively on Irish Travellers and their traditions: They called the show Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and you've yet to see a Romani Gypsy in it' (Guardian, 7 February 2011).

Allum's play is defiant and proud with Oceania declaring 'the Romani Nation won't bend or break.' The Romani people need their strength to combat the hostility of capitalist society; at the 2012 Tory Party conference, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles demonised Romani and Traveller communities when he vowed to 'stop caravans in their tracks' (Guardian, 12 October 2012). In August 2013 Pickles declared 'I want all councils to be ready to take action straightaway to stop illegal camps and unauthorised sites' (Inside Housing, 9 August 2013). This follows the scrapping of diversity and equality guidance so that Romani and Travellers can be persecuted. It has been identified that 'there is a recognised national shortage of legal pitches for Gypsies and Travellers' (Inside Housing, 9 August 2013).

Our Big Land is clearly opportune, what with Pickles declaring war on the Romani, and also the Tory government and UKIP opposition to eastern European (aka Romani) immigration. And, in essence, the persecution of the Romani is 'camouflaging the failures of capitalism, particularly in times of economic slump, by seeking out scapegoats' (Socialist Standard, January 2014).

Steve Clayton

The Same Story (1971)

Book Review from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The English and Immigration. By John A. Garrard. Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations. £3.25

It is well within living memory that the Fascists were ranting on street corners about the threat to our culture, our prosperity, our health, posed not by coloured immigrants but by Jews. They told lurid stories about creeping Jewish control of the country; about their dirty habits; about their sexual prowess. Workers who were beaten, confused and angry at what capitalism was doing to them were easy game for this type of malicious propaganda. They were looking for a scapegoat; they found it in the Jew, as their children find it now in the coloured immigrant.

The influx of Jews fleeing from persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914 was one of the two major movements into this country during the past 75 years. The other, of course, was the coming of the Commonwealth immigrants after 1948. Inevitably there are similarities between the two, between the reasons for them, the reactions they aroused and the official way of dealing with the situation.

In the case of the Jews, the great majority went into trades which were experiencing a belated conversion from domestic to factory production—bootmaking, tailoring, cabinet making. The immigrants provided a handy pool of labour to carry over the transition and were subjected to the infamous sweating system.

One trade union leader complained in 1894 that the Jews worked for fifteen hours a day " . . . on cold coffee and bread and cheese . . . " By a process of "reasoning" which we are by now familiar with, popular prejudice quickly arrived at the conclusion that, as the Jews tended to work in sweated trades, they must have originated them. The truth—that sweating was practised in many trades which had scarcely heard of immigration—went almost unnoticed in the hysteria of prejudice.

The official answer to this was the Aliens Act of 1905, which was guillotined through Parliament and celebrated by the Bethnal Green Tories with a great firework display. A year later the Liberals were in power and they tended to emasculate the Act—unlike the Labour government of 1964 which, while paying lip service to international brotherhood, outdid its Tory predecessor in racist legislation.

John Garrard's is a well researched, very readable, book which makes our case — that the prejudices of capitalism do not change and are not to be changed by the lawmakers. Here, for example, is a judge speaking in 1903, in sentiments which might come from a Powellite today:

 . . . we have the riff raff of the whole world pitchforked into this country, and we spend days and days at the Court every session trying these disreputable foreigners.

Not that those who claimed to be socialists were exempt from the charge of prejudice. Garrard has a passage on alien immigration and the new left which illuminates the confusion and racism among the unions and the "labour" movement. The TUCs of 1893, 1894 and 1895 passed resolutions against the landing of "pauper aliens", which was as nice a way of avoiding saying what they meant as the currently fashionable support for immigration control on the grounds that England is overcrowded.

If the prejudice of capitalism remain unchanged this is because the system does not alter basically. Nor do its problems, nor the confused and ignorant attempts at dealing with them.

Ivan

Love of Money under attack (1995)

Theatre Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Volpone, Olivier Theatre

Playwrights of yesteryear who were anxious to pillory social attitudes and beliefs had to handle their criticisms carefully.

In 1597 Ben Jonson was imprisoned for three months for taking part in the "lewd and seditious" comedy The Isle of Dogs. Jonson clearly learnt his lesson. In his comic masterpieces, Every Man in His Humour, The Alchemist and Volpone—written at the turn of the century—his barbs and brickbats were more subtle if nonetheless devastating for all that.

Jonson believed that it was "the office of the comic poet to imitate justice and instruct in life", and in Volpone, currently in repertoire in an exhilarating production at the National Theatre, his target is described in the programme as "the immorality if nascent (emergent) capitalism". Jonson gives animal names to many of his characters—most of whom are prepared to lie, cheat and manipulate in order to further their interests—and their brutish behaviour starkly illustrates the depths to which humanity can plummet when self-interest and competition reign supreme.

Although it might seem superficially that love of money is under attack, it is very clear that Jonson is concerned with a more substantial target: beliefs and behaviours which are characteristic of capitalism and which, if their nature, make money the supreme goal. J. M. Keynes offers the revealing opinion that:

"The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

Keynes seems unaware that the love of money, as a token for capital, is the engine which drives society. To criticise people in a capitalist society for wanting money seems akin to complaining that carnivores like, and at the extreme will kill for, meat. Jonson understood this even if Keynes didn't, but he is too discrete to say so directly. When a dramatist has been imprisoned for giving voice to his opinions it is perhaps understandable if, subsequently, he leaves it to the audience to read between the lines.

Socialists with an evening to spare will enjoy Jonson's trenchant observations, the marvellous playing of a wonderful cast, and a production which drives the action forward at a helter-skelter pace across the wide expanses of the Olivier stage.

Michael Gill 

Especially the male of the species (1996)

Book Review from the November 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (AK Press £3.50)

Valerie Solanas, the rebellious radical feminist who attempted to shoot Andy Warhol dead in 1968, wrote the SCUM Manifesto as a declaration of war on the male sex and all she claimed it stands for. According to Solanas, war, authority, government, the market economy, sexual abuse of children and mental illness were all created by - and perpetuated by - the male of the human species. Solanas contended that:

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civi-minded, responsible thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex".

It is, of course, gratifying that someone else should have independently come to some of the same conclusions as us about the necessity of destroying capitalism and its poisonous relationships, but Solanas other ideas - indeed her central contentions - about the male sex only serve to discredit her opposition to the market economy and money.

Her grotesque anti-male sexism - she called men a "walking abortion" who would "wade nostril-deep through a pile of vomit at a chance of achieving sexual gratification" was almost certainly more a product of her own abusive childhood and early sexual relationships than a rounded and considered comment on the intricate nature of bourgeois society and the human attitudes it engenders.

The SCUM Manifesto, in fact, is a nicely strung-together sequence of provocative phrases and slogans, containing wild assertions which are at no time backed up by augmentation or evidence. As such, it has probably brought little but derision to advocates of the moneyless society, and for that reason it's republication cannot be entirely welcomed.

DAP