Manchester Workers Crowd to Party Meetings (1939)

From the July 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those already acquainted with the Socialist Standard and the Socialist Party will know that until now all the editorial, propaganda and organisational work of the Party has been carried out on a purely voluntary basis. We have never concealed the fact that, as far as we are concerned, it was a case of making a virtue of necessity. For, although we have recognised for a long time the desirability, not say the necessity, of comrades devoting their full time to working for Socialism, we have never been in a position to make this possible.

For the first time in the history of the Party the energy and self-sacrifice of Party members and sympathisers has made possible the appointment, for an experimental period, of a full-time organiser-propagandist for the Provinces. During the last two weeks Comrade A. Turner has been in Manchester, and has been devoting his energies to propagating the case for Socialism, and in assisting the Manchester branch in its organisational work. In spite of the difficulties which are bound to arise in connection with what is for the Party a new venture, the results so far more than justify the most sanguine anticipations. If members and sympathisers of the Party could have witnessed, as the writer of these notes did, the keen and intelligent interest with which almost a 1,000 workers from the Fairey Aviation Works listened to the Socialist case; if they could have seen the smaller, but no less keenly interested audience at lunch-hour meetings outside the Manchester Tramways Dept. and finally, could have seen the large and attentive audiences that attended our Sunday afternoon and evening meetings in Platt Fields and Stevenson Square, their hearts would have leaped with joy!

But the results so far obtained have not been confined to well attended propaganda meetings. From quite reliable sources we know that the series of dinner-hour meetings held outside the works mentioned above has resulted in keen discussions of the Party's case within the works. Many workers who, until now, were ignorant even of the existence of the Party are debating with their workmates the policy of the Party in relation to war and the other social problems with which the workers of Manchester, as elsewhere, are faced.

At the last weekly meeting of the Manchester branch more visitors were in attendance than ever before in the history of the branch. As a result of special appeals and announcements we hope that this week's attendance will cause serious concern — to find the necessary accommodation! A series of lectures has been started, and will be given every Monday at 8.30 at the party rooms, 15a, Shudehill, Manchester. All readers of the Socialist Standard in Manchester and district are heartily invited to attend and bring along their friends.

Last, but by no means least, and in spite of the relatively unfavourable weather conditions, we have to report record sales of literature. During the fortnight Comrade Turner has been in Manchester, the branch, with his assistance, has managed to dispose of £5 2s. 6d. of literature.

This, then, is a brief, and we fear, inadequate report of the beginnings of an effort which it is hoped may become a permanent feature of our Party life. Here is something which is worth while, and which deserves and demands the whole-hearted support of every member and sympathiser of the Party. With the active, and above all, the financial support of all concerned, it will be possible to gave not only one full-time worker for Socialism, but many. What is now being done in Manchester can then also be done in every important industrial centre of Great Britain, and we shall the be an appreciable step forward in what is at the moment our most pressing task in the struggle for Socialism—the building of a strong Socialist Party.

Arthur Mertons

Editorial: Police Spies and the Communist Movement (1930)

Editorial from the August 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 6th the American Communists organised a demonstration in Union Square, New York City. The police were ordered to clear the streets on the ground that the Communists had not obtained a permit for a parade. Five Communist leaders were arrested and the crowd were beaten up by the police with great brutality.

That, of course, is a common story. There is, however, an additional feature of some interest. The Police Commissioner, Mr. Grover Whalen, declared on the following day that he had his agents inside the Communist Party keeping him informed as to all their plans and the movements of their leaders. He was greatly amused because the uniformed police, in order not to give away the spies to the Communists, cracked their heads along with the others. Mr. Whalen has also supplied to employers the names of workers who are members of the Communist Party.

We refer to this because it illustrates once more the danger to the workers of organisations which advocate violence, and attempt to carry on illegal activities in the absurd belief that they can do so in secret. Illegal activities result invariably in some unfortunate workers falling into the hands of the authorities and paying with imprisonment for the dangerous policies of their leaders. In this country during recent months there have been several heavy sentences on workers caught distributing inflammatory leaflets to soldiers. The Communist Party leads its unfortunate victims into trouble and can do nothing whatever to help them. Even if they succeeded in getting in touch with soldiers or sailors, it is almost certain that the latter would be discovered. It is exceedingly doubtful whether any of the so-called activities of the Communists are secret from the police. The only people who appear to be kept in the dark about the activities of their leaders, are the rank and file members of the Communist Parties.

A few years ago the American police were actually able to get one of their agents sent as a Communist delegate, to represent the American Communists at a Congress in Moscow.

The only sound line for the socialist movement in countries such as Great Britain and the U.S.A. is to organise on a basis which makes secrecy unnecessary. This rules out the Communist policy of street fighting, but that policy is one which is of no use to the workers. On the contrary, it has, in many countries, often been engineered by the authorities themselves, through their inside agents.

Double Jeopardy (1993)

Book Review from the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Double Jeopardy. The Retrial of the Guildford Four by Ronan Bennett. (Penguin Books £4.95)

On 5 October 1974, history, prodded by events in Northern Ireland and served by an IRA gang, visited Guildford. Bombs were left in two public houses and seven people were murdered and ten times that number injured.

The anger of the bombers was reciprocated in the subsequent thuggery of the police, in the frame-up of three innocent men and one innocent woman all signally undistinguished in any ability to defend themselves, in a remarkably incurious judge and a jury of people who knew that British justice does not make mistakes.

But British justice had made yet another mistake and, after that, the mistakes kept happening and they were generally facilitated by the Labour Party's anti-Irish Prevention of Terrorism Act. But the police had been too undiscriminating, too anxious for convictions and their choice of victims were so lacking in any vestige of reality that questions were bound to arise.

Anyone familiar with IRA organization knows that "hoods" (IRA-speak for ordinary criminals) are not, for obvious reasons, welcome in the organization. One of the Guildford Four, Conlon, in his book, Proved Innocent, admits that he and Paul Hill were involved in petty crime, heavy drinking and drugs. Judith Ward lived in a world of drug-induced make-believe and Armstrong, whose confession started the ball rolling, is described by Bennett thus:

"By his own admission he was at the time a habitual drug-user, taking anything and everything he could lay his hands on. He lived with motley crews in squats and abandoned houses in the Kilburn-Cricklewood area, he signed on, he shoplifted from supermarkets and fantasized with his friends about 'big scores'."

If the police and the judiciary were prepared to see these unlikely characters as IRA bombers many others were sceptical and a number of people who knew their way around started looking at the police case. The upshot was that after nearly fifteen years in prison, the Guildford Four, like the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six, were exonerated. They had won a famous victory over British Injustice!

The be-wigged fraternity who administer the rules of British capitalism were not amused. Bennett argues that senior figures in the judiciary relayed comment about the guilt of the Four on a lobby basis. Some, like the Recorder of London, Sir James Meskim, voiced his bitterness, inferring that the Four were really guilty, but, after a newspaper article claimed that some of the Four were going to sue, he retracted his statement.

Lord Denning, paragon of the British legal system, revealed the arrogance and bitterness that lay under his wig when he told the Spectator that it would have been better of the Birmingham Six had been hanged so as to avoid damaging campaigns on behalf of plainly guilty men. It was the attempt by British justice to retrieve the situation through indirectly re-indicting the Guildford Four that is the substance of this book. Bennett, with skill and insight, reveals a squalid conspiracy of legal eagles, journalistic liars and the police to tailor the finding of a subsequent trial of three of the many police officers who were instrumental in kitting out the Guildford Four so as to make it appear that the Four were guilty.

Socialists have no illusions whatsoever about the justice enshrined in the code of rules needed to run a system based on theft and exploitation. But Bennett's exposition of this particular legal scam is an interesting read and one that shows that, in court, scoundrels are not confined to the dock.

Richard Montague

Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Ireland (1950)

From the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a welter of violence and confusion is suggested by the term "Irish Politics." It brings to mind Sinn Fein, the Easter rising, De Valera, Home Rule, Fine Gael, Costello, Black and Tans, Irish Free State, Fianna Fail, Connolly, Ulster, Cumman nan Gaedheal and a host of other things that are difficult to sort and see in their proper perspective. Why is the country divided into Eire and Northern Ireland? What are Fine Gael and Fianna Fail? Who are Mulcahy and McGilligan? What is Vocationalism? These are questions that it is difficult to answer from the news and reports contained in English newspapers.

Our companion party, The Socialist Party of Ireland, has published its manifesto and all these questions are answered in language that is simple to understand. Our Irish comrades draw no punches. They take each of the Irish political parties including Labour and Communist, both in Eire and in Northern Ireland, and they lay them wide open to show what they are and what interests they serve. The manifesto shows us the condition of the Irish workers before and since the establishment of the Republic. It tells of the differences between the two Labour Parties in Northern Ireland and the two Trade Union Congresses that function there. It treats of the "Border Question" and the way in which it is used to confuse the Irish workers. From this manifesto we learn of "Vocationalism," a peculiarity (?) of Eire politics, which, upon analysis by our comrades, turns out to be nothing more nor less than the "Corporate State."

This is a pamphlet well worth reading by workers in all parts of the world. Its language is forceful and it hits out at all the Irish confusion-mongers and enemies of the working class in that island. Its statements are proved by quotations from the mouths of politicians that it condemns. It is a welcome addition to a Socialist library.

You should read these 28 pages of information-packed writing. The price is only 6d. plus postage.

W. Waters

The Three Pillars of Marxism (1995)

From the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to all the political pundits, the collapse of state capitalism (or "communism" to them) in Eastern Europe and elsewhere represented a refutation of the theories of Karl Marx. Needless to say, not a shred of evidence derived from Marx's writings has ever been produced to support this view. The main theories of Marx are as sound as ever.

To be a socialist is not to be chapter-and-verse Marxist spouting quotations from the works of Marx and Engels at every given opportunity, rather in the manner of Jehovah's Witnesses, whose ability to regurgitate passages from the bible compensates for their general lack of understanding of life. The Socialist Party is indeed Marxist, but in the sense that we agree with the bases of Marx's main theories and apply these to all aspects of society. A knowledge of Marx's view is, therefore, a useful adjunct to understanding the case for socialism.

Broadly, the essential principles of Marx's theory are three — the materialist conception of history, the class struggle and theory of surplus value. They do not exist independently, but are interrelated and one cannot be used without reference to the others.

The materialist conception of history argues that the general course of historical development is ultimately determined by the changing character of the powers of production.

Productive powers are simply the human command over nature and its resources that enable humans to live. As the powers of production develop, there is also a change in the class structure of human society, and political structures and social ideas change accordingly. Throughout history, as people have developed new and improved ways of tapping and harnessing the world's resources with a greater productive output, there have been corresponding changes in social and economic relationships. This is because any advance in the way people exploit the world's resources, any development in human ingenuity in the arts of producing and distributing wealth, requires a more complex system of social organisation.

Marx saw human history as a succession of epochs, each characterised by humankind's advancing knowledge of the productive arts. In past history, Marx identified three phases of development following the break-up of the classless tribal communism under which all humans originally lived: societies based on slave labour; feudal society, where labourers worked the land giving a share of what they produced to lords and barons for the privilege, and society as we know it, based on wage labour.

These three broad phases Marx saw as paving the way for a fourth, in which "pre-history" would end and true human history would begin — Socialism — a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing wealth, a moneyless society free of rank and privilege and of exploitation by any dominant class. Marx saw socialism as a society in which each would take from the stockpile of communal wealth according to their needs and plough back into society according to their physical and mental ability.

Marx believed that each economic phase of human development went hand-in-hand with a particular political structure. Slavery went with the despotic states and belligerent empires of the ancient world; serfdom was accompanied by the feudal system that based rights, privileges and duties on the tenure of the land; and the wage system (capitalism), where propagandists claim is the economic system for political democracy, allows its subjects certain legal and political rights. Capitalism, however, is as exploitative as all preceding systems, surviving by living parasite-like off the back of the majority working class who must continually sell their mental and physical powers to live.

Marx believed that a democratic society would only come about when the means of production and distribution were collectively owned and their fruits freely available to all.

Class struggle

Marx's theory of the class struggle ties in with the materialist conception of history. For Marx, conflict had been the dynamic for human progress. In human history there was no smooth transition from one historical epoch to another. The dominant class withstood change even when their system of authority ceased to be a method for advancing the powers of production and became a hindrance to their improved use.

Therefore, once a ruling class had outlived its usefulness, the productive powers having reached a potential it could no longer accommodate, it had to be removed from power by the class below, the class with an improved method of organising production and distribution of wealth.

The ancient and classical empires which operated a system of slavery were overthrown by the lords and barons of the feudal system, and the feudal aristocracy was in turn overthrown by the burgeoning merchant and capitalist class, with their improved system of production, but for profit not use.

The capitalist class, Marx argued, could only be overthrown by the working class, the "proletariat", the exploited majority. Marx believed it was the responsibility, the "historic mission", of the working class to see the forces of production and distribution fully socialised by becoming the common property of the whole of society.

The fourth stage of human history will be when true human history begins, because a victory by the working class over the capitalist class would unchain the powers of production and because a society of free associated labour would leave no subject class capable of being exploited. Once the working class had consolidated their position, classless society would spring up, free of rank and privilege, with production unfettered by the bondage of the money system, and with the exploitation of one section of society by another expunged for ever.

Surplus Value

Marx's third general theory is that of surplus value. In the simplest terms, Marx realised that the wage slaves, the people who needed to work to exist but couldn't work unless they exchanged their mental and physical powers for a wage, were continually being exploited. This is because the capitalists, by virtue of their ownership of the means of producing wealth, appropriate a share of the product of their labour.

Because capitalists have the upper hand, stemming from their ownership of the means of wealth production, they are able to buy a workers' power to work on terms favourable to themselves, paying the worker less than the value of what they produce. The difference between what workers are paid for their labour power, and the price the capitalist gets for the finished commodity, once overheads have been taken care of, is what Marx called surplus value — the source of profit, in a sense wide enough to include rents and interest as well as industrial and commercial profits.

The reason the majority working class have never posed a threat, so far, to the system that exploits them is because most believe there is no alternative system. The explanation for this can be found in Marx's materialist conception of history. Marx observed that the ruling class of any historical epoch controlled not only the economic sphere of society. Their influence extended further. They perpetuated their own philosophy and ideas that justified their position as masters. So prevalent have been their ideas that so far the subject class take them for granted but this is being continually undermined by the contradictions of capitalism.

Marxism is not a dogma, but a system for the understanding of human history and society. It basically asserts that as securing the means of living is the predominant influence in human life, it has to be the most dominant historical influence.

John Bissett

What will they put in place of Keynes? (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Except in the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Keynes has for forty years dominated the British scene — the economists and politicians, the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties (including the Labour Party's "left-wing" fringes and hangers-on), the TUC and trade unions, all (with few exceptions) swallowed the Keynesian nostrum that full employment can be maintained and crises and depressions avoided by keeping up "demand": giving people "more money to spend", as the Labour Party defined it. All it meant in practice was "printing more money" — inflation — with the result that prices are now nine times what they were in 1938.

It has received such a battering that its adherents have deserted in droves. Not quite all, however; there are still groups such as the Labour Party "left wing", the Bourbons of the economic world, who still go on mouthing the old incantations as if nothing had happened.

Now however comes their problem. What are they to put in its place? Several new nostrums, or rather old ones revived, have been offered. Sir Keith Joseph, representing one wing of the Tory Party, puts forward his "social market" policy which means going back to a less-controlled and more competitive capitalism but with welfare provision for the needy.

Professor R. R. Neild (The Times, 30th September 1976) leans in the opposite direction. Arguing that British capitalism cannot stand up to competition from Japan, Germany and other more efficient and cheaper producers, he wants the adoption of wholesale, long-period "protection" to keep out cheap imports and enable home industries to be rebuilt and modernized behind a protective wall. He recognizes, as Marx did a century ago, that it is only the cheap producers, able to dominate the world markets, who want "free trade". He thinks that the objections of the European Economic Community can be overcome.

Doubtless the Labour and TUC advocates of import controls will rally round the doctrine. Professor Neild is the repentant Keynesian who wrote to The Times on 26th Feb 1974 announcing that he and other economists had deserted Keynes and had come to the conclusion that "its application in policy making has been a major cause of Britain's post-war economic troubles".

Behind the "Times."

The Times and its Economics Editor, Peter Jay, have also been moving backwards. They want something like the restriction on currency issue exercised in the 19th century by the gold standard, with a Currency Commission to do the job. They have gone a long way from the Times editorial of 15th October 1968 which dismissed as a "crude error" the belief that "price inflation could be tempered by printing fewer notes". Incidentally, Peter Jay (30th September 1976) fears that the Labour government will revert to the "expansionist" doctrine and produce a big new surge of inflation in 1977.

For the moment the Labour government says it has set its face against that policy. The Prime Minister, Callaghan, in his speech to the Labour Party Conference declared: "The option of spending our way out of a recession existed no longer." (Financial Times, 29th Sept.) Promising no more borrowing (followed a day later by news of an application to borrow 2,300 millions from the International Monetary Fund) he also made a cryptic reference to the Labour government having "even borrowed ideas" presumably meaning that he at least has discovered that the Keynesian doctrines are fallacious. But what he went on to offer was the policy of enabling companies to make bigger profits — the same old capitalism.

Against him are other Labour Party groups who think that the remedy is "socialism", meaning more state capitalism; but Jack Jones, General Secretary of the Transport Workers' Union, promptly punctured this belief. Speaking at the Labour Party Conference he said: "If we had public control of the lot we would still need to get the balance of payments, the level of borrowing and investment right before we could get a lasting cure of the inflation problem." (The Times, 30 Sept.) He called it "socialism" but has to recognize that it would be capitalism.

There is of course one idea that none of them has borrowed or will look at — the Socialist idea put forward by Marx, that there are no ways of making capitalism work in a way satisfactory for the working class.

Edgar Hardcastle

What is a Commodity? (1951)

From the October 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Often when discussing with friends, sympathisers and others we use the term, "commodity." This seems a very simple word, easy to understand, but we wonder how often it is misunderstood. We fear, very often. Let us therefore examine the question for a while.

The first essential characteristic of a commodity is that it is something produced primarily for sale at a profit. That is the object of its production. For the capitalist, if there is no profit there will be no production.

Commodities must, of course, be useful things, otherwise they could not be sold. But all useful things are not commodities. The air we breathe, for example, is the most useful thing of all, but it is not sold. We can have what we want of it without let or hindrance. We do not doubt if capitalists could monopolise the air, they would do so and we should have to buy it at so much a breathful. Also, when we say that commodities must be useful, this statement is capable of some amplification. It would be truer to say that some people consider them to be of use. Take, for example, patent medicines. It has been shown quite often that some patent medicines, far from being useful are, in fact, harmful. But still, Mrs. Jones buys regularly a bottle of Blogg's Backache Pills which may do her a lot of harm, quite confident that they will make her young and sprightly again. Or take the atomic bomb. This is obviously very harmful to the mass of the population, but for a minority, the capitalist class, it is useful, in that it defends their position of wealth and privilege against rival capitalist powers. And so, the question of use must be dealt with carefully.

We said earlier that a commodity is something that is produced for sale. This does not mean that everything that is produced is a commodity. If, for example, with our simple tools we make ourselves a chair at home for our own use, that is not a commodity. It has not been produced for sale. It may be equal in every way to the chairs on sale in a shop, but not having been produced for sale, it ranks only as a use-value.

Commodities are a fundamental form peculiar to the capitalist system. They only existed in chattel slavery and feudalism as by-products, the motive of production being the satisfaction of needs. It is true that under feudalism and chattel slavery there was a privileged class but their privilege came from the ownership of land, not the ownership of money as under capitalism. Under feudalism the serfs could be certain of the means of subsistence, mean as they were. Under capitalism no worker can be certain of them unless he can sell his mental or physical energies for a wage.

We are sometimes asked if rare works of art are commodities. The answer is, No. Another quality that a commodity must have is that it must be capable of reproduction. If an article cannot be reproduced it cannot rank as a commodity.

All commodities are not necessarily tangible things. There are, for example, services. If we purchase a ticket to enable us to travel on the railway, we are really purchasing a commodity, that is, the use of the railway to carry us from one place to another. The same thing applies to services like those of a chimney sweep, or a hairdresser, or a concert singer and many other things. These services conform to the definition of a commodity in that they are useful, they can be reproduced, but they are produced solely for sale or exchange.

Let us now come to what, for the capitalist, must be the most important commodity of all—the labour power of the workers. This is the point at which we disagree with the non-Marxian economists. They do not recognise the existence of labour-power as distinct from labour. We claim that the worker does not sell his labour to the capitalist, but his energies—his power to labour. When we offer ourselves for employment we have no labour to sell but the ability to labour—our labour power. And labour-power is another commodity like all other commodities, with one important exception. It produces more value than it contains itself. It provides the capitalist with his wealth. It produces what we call surplus value, that is, the value over and above what the worker takes in the form of wages. For the capitalist, all efforts are directed towards increasing the amount of surplus value produced by the workers.

We invite you to join with us in ending commodity production. It is the key to all our problems. It can only be ended by Socialism, when again the motive for production will be the satisfaction of human needs. Just us now—quickly.

Clifford Groves

50 Years Ago: Where We Stand (2015)

The 50 Years Ago Column from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists advocate a world where the whole of humanity is united about social relationships of equality and co-operation. The identity of the Socialist even now is not with any national grouping, brand of religion, any alleged ‘race’ or local culture. The Socialist has no loyalties to Britain or America, to Protestantism or Catholicism, to white men or brown men, to Welsh culture or African culture. By his perspective of history, by his knowledge of the economic nature of modern society, the Socialist has gone beyond the shallow allegiances that misdirect the attitudes of those who are still burdened by nationalism, religion or racism. Our argument is that if the majority were Socialists, the security of all men in material comfort in a world of harmony and freedom would at last become a reality.

It is true that the world picture of racism at present is gloomy; it is a running sore of a problem, frequently accompanied by outbursts of physical violence. Apart from its form as widespread prejudice, in some parts of the world it is still maintained as official government policy. Although it is the product of different historical conditions, and although up to now the South African Government has not begun to build gas chambers, apartheid is in direct descent from the Gestapo's ‘final solution’. Racism may be dormant in Hamburg, but its ugliness has reappeared in Smethwick and Notting Hill.

Socialists have no hesitation in taking a stand. We condemn racism. To us it is repugnant. We are opposed to any attitude that discourages the unity of the working class. Even so, our disgust is extended by an understanding of the problem. Disgust without knowledge is impotent. The racists of Johannesburg, Salisbury, Birmingham Alabama or Birmingham, England, are not inherently evil men. They are men who are moved by fear, insecurity, frustration and ignorance, all of which are attitudes conditioned by social forces. The working class of Smethwick have a social history of struggle and insecurity. They are on the defensive, they are anxious to protect jobs, a standard of living, a standard of housing, that they feel has been hard won. Mere condemnation will not help them. They have to realise that they are victims of a universal situation that impinges on members of the working class wherever they exist.

(from editorial of special issue of Socialist Standard on the Race Question, June 1965)

Obituary: Frank Evans (1993)

Obituary from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Older members will be saddened to learn of the death in October of Frank Evans at the age of 86. Frank Evans was the son of an early Party member who himself joined in 1929. He was one of the handful of members who, before the war, had had a university education. After the war he was active in the old Lewisham branch, contributing to the work of the Party as an indoor lecturer, occasional writer and, above all, as a tutor for the well-attended series of education classes the Party ran for the influx of new members in the immediate post-war period. When he retired from his job with the old London County Council he moved to Somerset where he lived for the rest of his life.

Frank Evans will also be remembered for his controversial contribution to the ferment of ideas in the Party in the early and mid 50s. In a series of articles entitled "The Nature of the Socialist Revolution" that appeared in Forum, the Party's internal discussion journal, he developed a frankly gradualist conception of the coming of socialism. According to him, society, thanks to increasing productivity, was evolving in a more equal and human direction; exclusive property rights, class privilege, the coercive state and money-commodity relations were gradually withering away. The end-result of this process would be a society of common ownership and production solely for use. From this he drew the conclusion that what socialists should be doing was to identify, and identify with, these tendencies rather than seeking to get the working class to take their class struggle against economic exploitation a stage further and establish socialism as a revolutionary political act.

Today few would argue that society is evolving in a more equal and humane direction, let alone a socialist one, but the then recently-established welfare state, the growth of the state sector and state control generally, and the (unexpected) post-war boom gave this view a superficial plausibility in the 1950s. In one sense this was an attempt by someone from a Marxist background to grapple with developments within capitalism which Marxist theory didn't expect to happen, in particular not just the non-appearance of a slump after the war (which was widely expected in the Party) but the actual improvement of the living standards of most workers leading to an attenuation rather than the accentuation of class antagonisms.

Needless to say, these views were highly controversial as they challenged not just the Party's theory of socialism coming through the class struggle but also its refusal to advocate reforms. They were shared, however, by a number of other members, most of whom left in 1955. Frank Evans himself did not leave until 1958 and, no doubt because his father had been a member and his sister still was, always retained a sentimental attachment to the Party and kept in touch with members.

A Knight exposed (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Ted Knight, leader of Labour-controlled Lambeth Council, is a politician whose lips produce a stream of radical cliches. Presiding over one of the most impoverished boroughs in London, Knight's response takes the form of left-wing posturing and bureaucratic exercises in reformist futility. Knight and his fellow Labour councillors have a relationship with their NALGO and NUPE workers which is widely acknowledged as one of the worst in London. This is not unrelated to Knight's autocratic style of power, which currently depends on the defection of one councillor to the Labour Party from the SDP; there was no election after the defection and Knight is therefore ruling Lambeth despite the fact that most of the councillors elected were not of his party.

On 28 April the Socialist Party of Great Britain set up a literature stall inside the Friends' Meeting House in Euston, London. The rally which were attending was called A New Social Order For Britain and, in addition to the opportunity to sell and give away socialist literature, over an hour of the meeting section of the event was due to be allocated for speakers from the floor to state their case. So seventeen Socialist Party members entered, talking to people at the literature stall, visiting the other stalls and seeing what ideas they had to offer and preparing to have our say in the discussion period.

From the start, it was a strange event. The politicos were there alright: Camden Labour Party, the Peace Pledge Union, CND, SERA and the Ecology Party. As a group of us entered we saw immediately that this was no ordinary lefty set-up: a procession of harmless-looking folk were doing a "sacred dance" around the hall. While they did the Greenham shuffle, apologetic stewards tried to get the admission fee out of us: £2 to get in ("Well, you do know that Tony Benn's speaking, don't you?") and 70p. for the unemployed, old, young, ill, oppressed—they ended up owing one of our lot £1.40.

Once inside it became clear that this event was an occasion for all sorts of people to search into the recesses of their minds for peculiar ideas to present to those who would listen: Pagans Against Nukes, the Vegan Society, Kingston Natural Healing Centre, Celtic Friends of the Trees, Playworld. Socialists are not unwilling to listen to and learn from such people and, to tell the truth, many of their ideas were considerably more practical than the conventional wisdom of non-fringe thinking which workers are taught to revere. Of course, there were astrologists and religion-pushers and the odd con-man who was clearly there only to earn a few quid by exploiting the gullible. But it was a pleasant atmosphere and it was right that a socialist presence was there to counter the distortions being handed out from the Labour Party stall.

At about two o'clock the public meeting was due to begin in the main hall. Socialists spread ourselves around. A few hundred workers listened as Joan Andrews, the organiser of the event, made it clear that we were here to make plans for an "Alternative Britain". On the platform were Tony Benn (head in hands), Rex Andrews (Quaker), Helen John ("a Greenham woman"), Jonathon Porritt (Ecology Party), Angela Warner (anti-vivisectionist), Guy Dauncey (trendy writer) and, in the chair, Ted Knight. Ted stood up. So did the four rows sitting behind me. Ted cleared his throat to allow a few radical cliches to ascend to his mouth, but before he could do so the people behind were shouting him down: "We don't want Ted Knight to chair this meeting. He's an enemy of working-class people. He evicted us and our mates at four in the morning from our council flats in Brixton."

Ted tried to talk over them, but there was a victory of real feeling over empty rhetoric and the demonstrators were drowning them out. Their story, it seems, is that Lambeth Council used riot police, accompanied by dogs, to burst into the flats of these workers and evict them from their homes. Who could blame them for wanting to see Knight off a platform debating a "new social order"? For nearly an hour the row continued. At one point Guy Dauncey and a few other trendy nice-guys grabbed the microphone and vainly urged the audience to sing a song of peace to drown out the dissenting shouts.

Socialists argued with the demonstrators that the best way to proceed would be to destroy Knight in argument rather than destroy the meeting. One socialist suggested to Knight that the only democratic and honourable thing for him to do would be to leave the meeting. Knight insisted that he would stay and that, despite there having been no vote electing him to the chair, he would tolerate no vote to remove him. Before very long four van-loads of police were on the scene. A vote was taken as to whether they should be brought in; socialists voted against and the vote was lost overwhelmingly.

There was one card left to play as far as the platform leaders were concerned: bring Benn to the microphone. Everyone would listen to Benn. And sure enough, they did. Even the evicted workers—who had been thrown out of their homes on the order of Benn's party—were silenced when the radical opportunist stood to address them. At first the old performer had them eating out of his hands. He had been at a meeting in Brixton with Ted Knight the previous week and collected £2,000 for the miners. It was outrageous to suggest that a leader of Knight's quality could be anything but an upright socialist. Applause greeted his every word and even one or two of the evicted workers of Lambeth felt the revival of blind faith. And then Benn made the big mistake: if the miners were here, he said, and if they could see the behaviour of these noisy disrupters over there, they'd soon sort them out. A threat. "Well, the bloody miners aren't here, mate" shouted a voice and within a few seconds Benn's microphone had been smashed, the stewards were fighting with the demonstrators and the boys in blue rushed into the meeting to defend Tony Benn against the attack of those he incited to violence by making threats on behalf of workers who were not present. (Had the miners been present maybe they would have supported the evicted workers rather than the radical Viscount.)

Benn finished his speech with the microphone volume at full blast and the disruptors safely locked away in Metropolitan Police vans. After Benn came plenty more reformist waffle: Porritt the Ecology-man spoke about the importance of spirit and the Greenham woman was so self-righteously stale that it was painful to listen. Angela Warner of the BUAV made an informative and emotionally stirring speech, showing how capitalism finds it profitable to cause pain to animals and humans for the sake of profits. Of course, her conclusions were reformist, but it would be a great step forward if we could persuade her and her movement to join the real campaign against the profit priority. Guy Dauncey's speech sounded like a psychotherapeutic confession and, in the middle of it, he asked us all to sit for two minutes in silence so that we could contact our inner selves (which, after my lunchtime vegetarian curry, I had been thinking of doing during Tony Benn's speech). Socialists love organised silences because they provide us with an opportunity to do some talking. So, several hundred workers sat in silence while several of us shouted out that "Silence is what the bosses want. It's time to speak up for yourselves". "Knight, Benn and the Labourites are not socialists, but mere defenders of state capitalism. They have no alternatives to offer." "Socialism means a world of common ownership and democratic control. A world without buying or selling or money. The abolition of the wages system." It was an educative silence.

Then came the discussion period. Knight agreed to let each contributor speak for three minutes at the microphone. A few christian lefties complained about the earlier disturbance and said that they had come to be energised and were now feeling bad vibes. A woman who seemed to be from the Bloomsbury Circle advocated Henry George's scheme for land reform. Then came the first socialist, who used his time to expose the anti-socialist case of Knight and Co. Then came a spiritualist from Devon who spent two minutes saying that he felt angry about society and then spent what seemed like a long weekend singing a song which proclaimed that socialists are Anti-Christs. We advised him not to give up his day job. Then, by luck, another socialist was invited to have his say. Bob Moran made clear what sort of a society he wanted to live in and urged those agreeing to find out about and then join the Socialist Party of Great Britain. After listening to five more contributions—including an interesting one from a socialist sympathiser who had met us during the last election campaign and another from a man who said that the only way to end the problems of society was to abolish money—it was my turn.

Let us be in no doubt: there are very many workers who are ready and willing to listen to the case for world socialism and to take it up with enthusiasm. Optimistic we may be but socialists have a message which is irresistible and the most urgent and exciting task of the moment is to work for a speedy termination to the system which enslaves the majority class.

Steve Coleman

The Costing of The Earth (1994)

Book Review from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World. by John O'Neill (Routledge. £11.99.)

This book is an attack on the philosophical basis of so-called "cost-benefit" analysis as a method for deciding whether or not some project with consequences for the environment should go ahead. Cost-benefit analysis involves giving a monetary value to the costs (e.g. loss of amenities, destruction of wildlife habitats, pollution) and benefits (e.g. some new amenity, more jobs, journey times saved).

What price the market?

The value of a landscape or habitat is calculated as what people would be prepared to pay, either directly or in terms of monetary benefits forgone, to retain it. If, in the end, the monetary value of all the benefits is greater than the monetary value of all the costs, then the project should go ahead. This in fact is how such decisions are made today.

O'Neill argues that such a method does not protect the environment as it takes people's preferences as they have been shaped by capitalism which encourages us to judge everything in terms of how much money it brings or saves us as individuals. Given this, cost-benefit analysis will always reflect the fact that most people prefer to have more money over all other considerations and often have no real choice in the matter. Much of O'Neill's book is written in the technical language of moral philosophy and so will be of interest mainly to students studying that subject. A couple of chapters, however, in respectively, "pluralism, incommensurability, judgement: (Chapter 7) and "market, household and politics" (Chapter 10), will be of wider interest.

In the first of these O'Neill argues that cost-benefit analysis is misconceived in seeking to reduce everything to a single common unit (monetary value). The anti-socialist von Mises even argued that, unless everything had a price tag, it would be impossible to make a rational choice between two alternative projects or methods of production. O'Neill replies that this is nonsense: comparisons and choices can be made on the basis of other considerations than monetary costs, as had been pointed out by the Austrian Marxist (and later logical positivist philosopher) Otto Neurath: 

"For Neurath, a socialist economy, since it was to consider the use-value of goods only, would have to be an 'economy in kind'. In such an economy, while physical statistics about energy use, material use and so on would be required, there would be no need for a single unit of comparison. Thus in 1919 he wrote in a report to the Munich Workers' Council that, in considering alternative projects: 'There are no units that can be used as the basis of a decision, neither units of money nor hours of work. One must directly judge the desirability of the two possibilities.' Such direct comparison will need to appeal to political and ethical judgements, including concern for future generations."

making informed practical judgements on the basis of past experience and general policy considerations will no doubt be what will happen in socialism. Money won't come into it, nor the insane attempt to put a price tag on everything.

In the other, final chapter, O'Neill discusses two alternative ways that have been suggested for making decisions about the environment on a non-market, non-monetary basis. The first is to restrict the operation of the market to a defined sphere, not including environmental matters. The other is to abolish the market altogether. O'Neill opts for the second, rejecting the first on the following grounds:

"within the economic sphere itself to leave the allocation of most resources to the market is incompatible with the realization of environmental goals. The market responds only yo those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the inarticulate, both those who are contingently so - the poor - and those who are necessarily so - future generations and non-humans - cannot be adequately represented. Moreover, a competitive market economy is necessarily oriented towards growth of capital, and such an orientation is incompatible with a sustainable economy."

In other words, what O'Neill calls a "non-market order" is the only framework within which humans can organize their interaction with the rest of nature in ecologically acceptable ways.

Adam Buick

Human Nature and Morality (1959)

From the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ethics of Marxism (3) (See Parts 1 and 2.)

After Marx died there grew up a legend that his theory of social causation was too narrowly mechanistic to provide accommodation for any sort of ethics. No doubt Marx, in combating the sentimental "moralising" of certain utopian contemporaries who called themselves "the True Socialists," had leaned so far backward as to give semblance if not substance for fathering on him views whose alleged paternity he would have disclaimed.

Socialism as a Humanism

The humanistic Socialism combated by Marx, like its contemporary counterpart, was a pseudo-political trend, inspired by the literati, philosophers and pundits. Moses Hess was for a time their most representative spokesman. For the early humanists as with the latter day ones, Socialism was not a question—of by bread alone—even though bread might be included. Socialism was primarily a question of moral values. Stress was laid on brotherly love, the dignity of man, concern for the individual, etc. From such political piety, Socialism came to be defined as—"the ethics of love." Then, Socialism took the guise of contemporary humanism. Now, humanism assumes the role of contemporary Socialism.

Like many of the views Marx fought against, the arguments of the True Socialists have turned up over and over again in a variety of social situations, tricked out each time in fresh frills and flounces, as if making their first bow on the stage of world history.

Humanism the Classless Ethic

Common to all shades of this humanistic approach, right up from Hess, Grun, Bernstein, Lansbury, to the current version, is the tenet that Socialism is not basically a question of economic interests but humanitarian ideals. Not a matter for the stomach, but an affair of the heart, and that a moral revolution must be the prelude to the social revolution. Not only, argue the humanists, have men altruistic feelings, but implicit in these feelings are the ideals of Communism. All that is necessary is to encourage and help promote these altruistic tendencies, to actualise the Brotherhood of Man based on universal love.

If the true nature of man is some residual and permanent quality of the human species, then every man is at least in embryo a Communist, able, given the right social milieu to lead with others of his kind the good life. But what the right kind of social conditions necessary for this are , the humanists all through the ages have been very vague about. Again, if the essence of man is his "true nature," then this human essence transcends all social systems and classes. Landed proprietors, capitalists, peasants and wage workers, are all equally capable of actualising their "true nature" into the Communist way of life. Thus, while many humanists have called for the abolition of all classes they have done so in the name of an abstract classless ethic. While they will admit that the class struggle itself is inevitably engendered by the competitive and egotistical character of Capitalist society, they nevertheless hold that it militates against the growth of humanistic ideals by giving emphasis to men's material differences instead of stressing their human sameness. Many humanists have even talked about the necessity of prosecuting the class struggle, but how can one ask men to give up their class beliefs and disregard class interests and then call upon one class to oppose another?

Human Nature as an Historic Variable

Humanism with its apotheosis of an abstract humanity becomes a form of religious fixation. That is why its idealised concepts and phrases become bulwarks of ideological defence of reactionary interests, especially clerical ones. The so-called Catholic Socialism, with its "rights" and "duties" of an alleged classless brotherhood of men has borrowed heavily from humanistic sources. Indeed, those whose Marx in the Communist Manifesto called feudal-Socialists, cashed in on the literature of the True Socialists to use as an attack on the German bourgeoisie.

The ethical assumptions of all varieties of what is called the humanistic Socialist view is based on the fixity of human nature. They share this view with theological theorists, the difference being that the former hold that this basic human nature can be placed in such absolute categories. Both Marx and Engels held that human nature was not an absolute constant but an historic variable. In fact, Marx and Engels always insisted that the "human nature" to which humanists and the clericalists appeal, each in their different ways, cannot serve as a guide to social organisation. It is not human nature which explains society, but society which explains human nature. There is no given human nature independent of time and place. There is only an historical human nature, that is a specific expression of human nature in a definite social context. To put it more precisely to understand the nature of the human, one must understand the nature of the society in which humans live. When we adopt such a criterion we discover that there is no immutable human nature, no homogeneous pattern to which a universal appeal can be made for the justification of concrete social questions. There can be no overall moral agreement or ethical unity in a social system split by class interests and antagonisms. Inability to understand this not only leads Humanists to talk of "man as he is" or "the human as such," but they identify this abstract category with concrete man as he exists in a given society. That is why in the Communist Manifesto Marx shows how "the True Socialists" proclaimed "the German nation to be the normal nation and the German Philistine the normal mind." An illusion, one might add, shared by the so-called schools of empirical sociology.

Class Demands v. Ethical Neutrality

Contrary to what humanists believe and apparently Mr. Taylor (Is Marxism a Humanism*), all ethics can be shown to have a class bias in a class system, and further there can be no genuine class ethic unless backed by class demands. That is why on concrete social issues one cannot appeal to man as such or "the normal human." Neither is there some ethically neutral tribunal to which opposing class rights can be impartially referred.

Capitalist society consists of buyers and sellers of labour-power. The worker as a seller of labour-power cannot assert his "right" to maintain or improve his living standards via ethical appeal or moral law. He can only seek to enforce his right through active organisation with others of his kind. Nor is the Capitalist under a moral obligation to waive or even remit in any way the unpaid labour of the worker—profit—back in the form of increased wages. Not only has the Capitalist a legal right to profit in the category of unpaid labour, but from his standpoint a moral right as well. Behind this moral right stands custom, tradition, religion, the classless ethic—and the State. As Marx points out in Capital, "There is here, therefore, an antimony, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides."   

In a society such as Capitalism based on a permanent class conflict with its subsidiary conflicts, national and racial, there can be no genuine appeal to a neutral ethics. That is why Marx never invoked, Humanity, Justuce, Mercy, etc., as agencies for solving social struggle. For the same reason he rejected the abstract classless morality of Kant and Christ. Morality for Marx is not eternal or natural but active and social. Morality to be genuinely effective must be based on men's needs and in a class society on class needs. It is true that ethical ideals, like truth, duty, honour, the rights of men, etc., acquire a seeming eternal form, for all men profess to strive for these things. But social analysis shows while the forms of these ideals are the same, the nature of these ideals differ from social epoch to social epoch and from class to class. So if the question is posed whose truth? Whose duty? What rights of men? one will find in the answer a class standpoint. Crack the shell of a classless absolute ethic hard enough and the kernel of a class interest will be found. Marxist ethics do not invoke "Truth," "Duty," "Altruism," they demand a state of affairs where these things have a different content from the existing ruling morality. Marxist demands are then from the standpoint of the working population, a class demand and this incorporate a class ethic. It is the real needs of the working class which constitute the watershed of its class morality. Humility or self assertion, unselfishness or selfishness are themselves neither virtuous nor vicious. It is the actual social situation and the human needs of men which provide them with their truly moral quality. While the classless as well as conventional ethics might see the demands of the working class as a form of selfish assertion, it is only by such assertion that this class can secure for itself a decent existence and develop the possibilities for its own emancipation. To neglect the struggle which thus involves on the grounds of unselfishness and concern for other class individuals, weakens the moral content of its own demands and could only lead to servile, degrading and inhuman conditions for the vast majority.

For that reason the demand for the abolition of classes can only be a class demand, whose objective, because there are no other classes left to exploit, carries with it the demand for a classless humanity. Because it is a concrete class demand, engendered by a specific social situation, and capable of realisation, it carries with it the moral quality of the truly human. For the working class to be concerned to the exclusion of its own interests with the souls of its "enemies" is itself a policy of despair and its ultimate logic the perpetuation of a soulless system. That is why we reject the classless ethic of religious theory and the school of bourgeois morality with its intuitive ethics based on the private individual. In effect such moral views turn out to be a disguised defence of the status quo. Nor do we accept the monastic conception that men in order to achieve Socialism must first become saints if for no other reason having become saints it will not be necessary for them to achieve Socialism.

In the final article we shall seek to show that although the Marxist ethic is frankly a class ethic rooted in the character of social development it attains the stature of a humanism whose aims and ideas are loftier and more enduring than any current humanist model.

Ted Wilmott

"Don't talk to him" — the Militant Way (1988)

From the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's a breezy but bright March Saturday afternoon in Swansea's pedestrian precinct. We find our usual Standard selling pitch occupied by Militant supporters. But there's plenty of room for us to set up our placards a few yards away. The Militants look at us as we shout our wares. There are four or five of them and they're all young — say 15 to 19. As well as selling their paper, they're giving out leaflets and collecting money for a demonstration of the 'Youth Trade Union Rights Campaign' (YTURC) on the Monday.

One of them, a girl of 16 or 17, comes up and asks what our journal is. I start explaining to her that we see socialism as a moneyless, free access society without buying or selling and without private or state ownership — unlike Militant who argue for state ownership of the main industries. She interrupts me firmly but politely to tell me I've got it wrong about Militant and they stand for different kinds of ownership divided up among different groups of people, but admits she can't quite remember the details of that division.

So far, so good. An interesting, peaceful discussion. But suddenly it turns ugly. I'd already noticed that one of the Militant group, a tall, fidgety lad of 18 or 19, has been casting hostile glances towards us. Now he can't suppress his anger and he strides over. "Don't talk to him", he orders the girl.

I'm taken aback, and so is she. I recover fairly quickly. "She can do what she likes", I say. "You're not her master." "F. . .  off", he says, by now looking full of hate and ready for violence. Another of his group comes up to flank him, a small fellow, but agitated and just as threatening. "You're mad", the first one goes on. "That's a high level of debate", I respond, not finding anything better to say. I turn back to the girl, who's looking confused and embarrassed, and tell her she should do exactly what she likes and that the really important thing is to think for herself. She sort of apologises and says she's got to carry on collecting money as they need to raise £20 for a minibus on Monday.

It dies down and we get back to our selling. Someone I know from a local left-wing group comes past and I tell him what's happened. He's not surprised. YTURC is a Militant-organised campaign, and he knows the boy — Paul's his name. Paul used to be with them, now he's moved to Militant and he's having a pretty bad time. He'd got up on a dinner table in the refectory of the local college where he was studying and shouted" "Everybody on strike tomorrow". For his trouble he got expelled. This, I suppose, helped to explain his frustrated, almost disturbed behaviour.

But it didn't end there. We took a break and went for a cup of tea downstairs in the Co-op. One of our group saw Paul come down to have a look round but paid no attention. He should have done, because when we got back upstairs in the street, the Militant were gone and our advertising placards were gone too — three sturdy boards with posters stuck to them. Hard to believe they'd stoop to nicking our placards, but they had.

I was sorry we hadn't got hold of one of their leaflets to find out where their demonstration was being held on Monday. When I eventually found out it was too late. Monday's evening paper told me that it had been held outside the Conservative club and that Paul was in the thick of it again — shouting and swearing, so the report said.

End of story? Not quite. Three of us went back the following Saturday morning when we knew Militant usually sell. We had the vague hope they'd be using our boards. They weren't. I bought a Militant from one of their local leading lights, Alec Thraves, and I told him what had happened the previous week. He said he was surprised and that wasn't their way. He said he would look into it. Them we saw the small flanking lad from the previous Saturday and we went up to him. When I said we wanted to talk about the missing boards, he became agitated again and raised his voice. "Don't you accuse me of stealing", he shouted. "If you're calling me a thief, go and call the police." "We're not accusing you, we just want to talk to you . . ." But having apparently pleaded guilty by his behaviour, he'd backed away at speed and had got to the cover of his other sellers. What did Alec Thraves think? "I'll find out about it", he said. If he did, he's not told us.

I read the Militant newspaper when I got home and read about their proposed "division of ownership". I'm not surprised the girl didn't remember the details—it's extremely complicated. But what, I remarked to John, a fellow Standard seller that afternoon, would happen to us if Militant did have their way and the Pauls and co. of this world had the whip hand? Would we be tolerated — or silenced — when we continued to oppose all forms of state and private ownership and advocated instead complete common ownership of all the earth's resources and products?

That's something it would be nice if Paul and Alec thought about. I'll try and get this issue of the Standard to them so that they can.

Howard Moss

American Noahs (1982)

TV Review from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those who keep lists of the terrors the future might bring (as if the suffering of the present were not enough), it seems a new prospect has arisen: nuclear war, followed by the survival only of some vicious Christians.

We live in a time of rapid social change; contradictions inherent in the present form of society make social revolution even more urgent. As in previous such periods of heightened class conflict and questioning of old prejudices, there is a polarisation of ideas. On the one hand, the force for creative production, democracy and the removal of the barrier of private property; and on the other, the desperate and conservative reaction against it. One manifestation of this desperation, the American Survivalists, was the subject of a documentary on BBC 1 on 29 June.

The Survivalist movement consists of some two million Americans who fear some impending disaster and are taking steps to arm themselves against this often vague threat. Generally higher-paid workers or capitalists — white, patriotic and Christian — they speak of the threat of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown, riots, marauders and the "coming hard times". What unites the Survivalists is the religious idea that the relations formed between humans in society are beyond our control. For them, war and conflict cannot be dealt with by conscious, democratic co-operation, but must be "accepted" and prepared for. Like CND, the Survivalists have not recognised that war and poverty are direct consequences of the capitalist social system, so that they struggle in vain with the effects while leaving the cause intact. Unlike CND, however, some Survivalists have a moral preference for, rather than against, nuclear war.

Kurt Saxon, for example, writer of many "survival" manuals, stated in an interview:

We have over eighty million social dependents and if I could press a button and they would all be gone, then everything gets straightened out; but I can't find the button . . . the culling is coming.

An army general who runs courses in self-defence and fire-arms use at 3000 dollars per course, spoke of the "have-nots preying on the haves":

Our country depends on individuals, and yet there are a lot of socialists, communists, all which I class as idiots . . . there are more idiots in the world than there are non-idiots.

How, then, do these people propose to survive the coming "hard times"? By asking why the interests of "haves" and "have-nots" do not harmonise, or considering the possibilites of human co-operation? No, as Christians they stand by the holy writ of Romans, chapter 13, and oppose socialism. One of their bookshops stocks a "source book" called How To Kill, Volumes 1-5. (What would happen of the imaginary assailant had also read this?) One isolated group of armed Christians hiding in the hills pray to "God" to teach them how to hate, and one of the fresh recruits told how his real fear was not so much of nuclear destruction, but of destruction of the nuclear family:

When homosexuality is on open view and not hidden anymore, you know it's getting bad. When witchcraft and communism is everywhere you know it's getting bad.

Survivalism has become a market with a turnover of billions of dollars. But this is clearly a reflection of the wider class divide between poverty and property, and of the increasing war and violence arising out of the development of world capitalism generally. One man had gone to live with just his immediate family, in total isolation. He was trying to cut himself off from the complications of life in modern America, and moaned that

The situation where people want things is happening now. If they can't get it one way or another they'll get it another way.

But there is no need to try to run way from living together as part of society, to become cut off from all of the potential benefits of modern technology. The power struggle between the two classes is inherent in capitalism, not in human society itself. Future society can function without classes and property. One of the instructors in the secret military training school for "survival" urged his pupils to remember that there had never been peace "since the world began" because people fight, for example, over jobs. But before the advent of private property people did live in peace, and the competitive struggle over jobs is itself an integral feature of the capitalist market system.

These Christians taking up arms against the "threat" of communism and chaos believe that "God" has called them together and that it is their duty to "survive", however many infidels they may have to kill. Such a philosophy might suit the last ruling class in history, threatened on its last legs by social sanity breaking out across the world. But in reality, as soon as a majority are willing democratically to reject class rule, all the guns and prayers in the world cannot hold them back.

Clifford Slapper

Labour's sorry story (1997)

Book Review from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rape of Socialism by Donovan Pedelty (Prometheus Press 1997. £13.95)

This is an important book. Not on account of its length, of nearly five hundred pages although if Pedelty had left any gaps there would be a rush of nit-pickers to point out that there, precisely, were the holes in his argument. Instead he protects his flanks with an elegant run-through to how we got to where we are from where we were.

The first hundred pages deal with the Conservative Party and where it came from, right up to the hijacking at the beginning of the 1970s by a cabal of largely lumpenbourgeois elements (lower "middle class" to you, dear).

His account of the party's origins is detached and free of bombast, however cynical and scoundrelly his subjects were. They are here, the Salisburies and the Churchills, Burke and Bagehot, Peel and Disraeli. Those of us who are not historians are led through the minuets and gavottes of the ruling  élites in lucid style. We learn that the Conservative Party never trafficked in ideology or was ever much taken with ideas. What it was about was always power. Promise anything, get elected, and do what you want. A week is a long time in politics.

Parliament never did deal much in policies or ideas and the Tories have never had any—with the exception of Thatcher's and that was pinched.

The scenario, with Labour getting the message and pinching the Tories' idea, i.e.e. not to have any idea, has caused anguish and confusion in Lord North Street. The Gentlemen's Party, devoted to "property and paternalism" had been taken over by the offspring of small traders and professionals who had to grammar school and thence to Oxbridge, and the public school lot were elbowed aside. The new lot were just as keen on getting some property but were not so worried about paternalism.

The other four-fifths, and more important part, of the book deals with the Labour Party and its background, but particularly and in detail with its post-World War II history. For those who lived through the period, it is salutary to be reminded of the follies and buffooneries, the clowns and the arseholes who strutted their Andy Warhol "fifteen minutes of fame". For those who weren't around, the book is a valuable corrective to the official version in helping them to make sense of our little bit of the world.

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. We are not alone and Pedelty is the proof of it. Despite his scholarship, he is no Marxist (and neither was Marx, of course). He is coming in from a totally different direction. His inspiration is Kropotkin. But unlike some anarchists, he is not lairy of the slog of trying to find out just how the rip-off takes place, and he does it without the brain-deadening and thought-excluding pseudo-Marxist jargon that often accompanies otherwise worthy efforts.

Pedelty's evidence makes uncomfortable reading for apologists of all the major parties. Tories were responsible for as many reforms as Labour. They drafted the Education Act, making higher education a possibility for the proles. They had anticipated the Welfare State in the late 1930s, and the groundwork was supplied by William Beveridge, a Liberal. They were all for consensus just as Whigs and Tories had been a hundred years earlier, and he quotes Hazlitt: "rival stagecoaches splashing each other with mud but travelling by the same road to the same destination".

And from those same Whigs (whose laissez-faire creed was exhumed by Thatcher and Co.) to the Labour Party of our time, none of them wanted to allow the people control over their own lives. From Bagehot, who feared that competing before the swinish multitude for support might cause Whigs and Tories to lose control over them, to Labour's stage-managing of its conference so as to keep out unwelcome voices, a lid has been kept over things.

Pedelty's conclusions, entitled Hope Deferred, are that while Labour might abandon all commitment to pseudo-socialism "without serious damage; it cannot without dishonour desert the cause of social justice". But if political power excludes the possibility of social justice, what then? If a market economy (controlled or free), depends upon unemployment (the reserve army), and relative scarcity (otherwise glut and collapse), not to mention other integral features like war preparation (the continuation of diplomacy by other means) and crime (the most efficient way of pursuing self-interest), how can we hope for social justice?

Thus surely is what it is all about. A system is a system is a system. not a group of unrelated particles. They function as a unit or not at all. Systems have their built-in homeostasis, their self-guiding mechanism, their negative feedback, like the ball-valve on my lavatory flush or the thermostat on the radiator. Interfere with them and you will be flooded or the boiler could blow up.

But Pedelty knows all this. We all know there is a paradox. Systems can only change all-of-a-piece because what we are talking about is not things but the relations between them. So what do we do meanwhile? Life must go on, life will go on because of what we are, human beings, and we will defend our corner as best we can. But if we try to square the circle, to make the system behave other than how it can behave, we shall repeat the tragicomedy of Labour during the last hundred years.

Pedelty goes back for an answer to earlier figures who saw more clearly that trying to reform the system or introduce some follow-my-leader solutions were doomed from the start, and concludes that we must choose: "Fighting on to reignite, regenerate, repropagate, those brave ideals dreamed by the utopian heralds of a new society."

Ken Smith