Cobdenism & Socialism (1919)

From the September 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

A REPLY TO PHILIP SNOWDEN.

In the issue of "Common Sense" dated 16th August last, Mr. Philip Snowden, Chairman of the Independent Labour Party, in the performance of his function as a capitalist hireling and misleader of the working class, tries his utmost to traduce Socialism and identify Socialist principles and policy with those of his capitalist masters. He opens his column-and-a-half of lucrative trash with the cynical statement that "The superficial Cobdenite and the superficial Socialist would probably declare that Cobdenism and Socialism are the antipodes of political and social theories."

The implication is, of course, that Mr. Snowden is not either a "superficial Socialist" or a "superficial Cobdenite." He is right. Qualify the Socialist and the Cobdenite in any way and to the very utmost limit that will leave them still a Socialist and a Cobdenite respectively, and you have not the political likeness of the Chairman of the I.L.P. in either. Both the Socialist and the Cobdenite, superficial (whatever that may mean) or otherwise, must declare that Cobdenism and Socialism are the very antipodes of the social and political spheres. It is only the pretenders, the twisters, the hired assassins of working class thought, that try to reconcile the one with the other, and the sordid and sickening motives that lead them to do so protrude like the stinking members of a half-buried carcase from the slime of some pestilential pool.

When Mr. Snowden says that the "aim and purpose of Cobden and his school" as he understands it (sic), "is precisely the aim and purpose of Socialism," he lies. He does not understand the aim and purpose of Cobdenism to be "to secure the largest possible measure of individual liberty in a well ordered State and in a well-ordered world." No one knows better than Mr. Snowden that the school of Cobden are not at all concerned with the liberty of the individual where that individual is a worker; no one knows better than Mr. Snowden that Cobden and all his school and disciples—yes, even as he understands them—cling with might and main to the capitalist State, the capitalist world, to the last pinch of gunpowder and the last loyal bayonet; and no one in all the wide world knows better than Mr. Snowden that, except from the capitalists' point of view, the capitalist State and the capitalist world can never be well ordered.

When Mr. Snowden says "Cobden differed from modern Socialists in his ideas as to the best method of attaining that desirable state of complete individual liberty, but there are certain fundamental conditions of attaining to that state of liberty, without the practical application of which neither Socialism nor any other plan of social organisation will achieve the purpose," he is simply resorting to "Words that weary and perplex, and pander and conceal." The fundamental condition under which alone the Cobdenites can realise their aspirations is the slavery of the workers based upon the class ownership of the means of living. The fundamental condition for the achievement of the aspirations of the Socialists is the abolition of class ownership—of private ownership in any form—of the means of living, and the establishment of society upon a basis of common ownership, as the only method of setting the workers free from the domination of those who own the means whereby they live.

Brought face to face with this aspect of the case, the Chairman of the I.L.P. would have to admit its truth. This in itself proves the falsity of the implication of his statement concerning the probable declaration of the "superficial Cobdenite and the superficial Socialist." The Cobdenite stands for the abolition of private property. These two things ARE "the antipodes of political and social theories," all the bought and paid for capitalist servants of the I.L.P. notwithstanding.

"It has been customary previously, whenever any reference was made by Socialist writers and speakers of fiscal policy, to dismiss the controversy between Free Trade and Protection as a quarrel on the most effective method of enriching the exploiting classes," our confusionist goes on. "But when Mr. Chamberlain made the issue one of practical politics the Socialist realised that the matter was one which vitally affected the welfare of the wage-earning classes."

The argument that that which, when it was merely in the merely controversial field, was "a quarrel on the most effective method of enriching the exploiting classes," could, when it was made a question of "practical politics", become a matter vitally affecting the welfare of the workers is the argument of the opportunist twister. What he really means is that as long as the Protectionists did not seriously threaten to impose their fiscal fetters upon the Free Traders, Mr. Snowden and those of his kidney, for and on behalf of whom he lays claim to the title "Socialist," could afford to tell the truth about the question of Free Trade and Protection, but as soon as the question became an "issue of practical politics," a rallying cry for party leaders, a plank for party platforms, an inscription for party banners, a bait to trap the votes of workers in their exploiters' interests, then the pretenders became involved. They had to enthuse. They had to discern in the question something that had never revealed itself to them before. Why? I will tell you.

Some time ago Mr. Snowden declared that the Labour Party is not a Socialist party, and that its fucntion is to keep the Liberal Party in office. The inwardness of the statement provides the explanation for his brotherly feeling towards the Cobdenites. He himself is no stranger to the Labour Party, which is the medium for providing £400 a year for certain twisters who are ready to keep the Liberals in power when they are in power, and to help get them into power when they are under a cloud. Mr. Snowden is simply trying to get his bread buttered—that is all.

Refuse to be the victim of the labour sharks any longer.

A. E. Jacomb

Old Mr. Capitalism (1977)

A Short Story from the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor old Mr. Capitalism. He was in a very bad way indeed. Pains all over his body, from head to toe. He put on his hat and coat and decided yet again to see his doctor.

Poor old Mr. Capitalism. He could hardly walk, dragging his feet along as though each step were his last, and causing many a sympathetic eye to glance knowingly in his direction. After all, he had been around a very long time. Too long, he had heard some say—sometimes discreetly, sometimes openly for all to hear.

"Not you again, Mr. Capitalism," the doctor shrieked, and rose from behind his desk to help the wheezing old man into a chair.

"I'm afraid so, doctor," Mr. Capitalism sighed. "I've been having those same old pains again. All over me they are. I just can't get rid of them."

"Take a breath and tell me all about the,," the doctor said. So poor old Mr. Capitalism gathered as much strength as he could muster and poured forth his troubles.

"Well, to start with," he began, "I've got those Conservative pains in my  . . . you know, doctor . . . "

"Posteria?"

"Yes, that's right. I've tried everything. Exercise, hot flannel, the lot, but they're always there—as though they sort of like me the way I am, old and decrepit. It's hard to explain really. All I can say is that they're nothing but a pain in the  . . . the  . . . "

"Ar . . . posteria?"

"Yes, that's right. Then there's those Labour pains I get in my stomach. If I wasn't a man I'd swear it was  . . .  They double me up at times. It's a queer sensation. I get the feeling they're trying to change my basic metabolism—you don't mind me saying that, do you? trying to change the way i walk and things like that. Yet fundamentally they're just the same as the Conservative pains in my  . . . my . . . "

"Go on," urged the doctor impatiently, getting a little tired of the same old complaints. "What else is the matter with you?"

"Well there's this other pain, the one in my neck. You called it the Liberal pain, I think. I get it when I'm undecided, you know, like when I can't make up my mind. It's as though it doesn't quite know whether it wants to be a Conservative pain or a Labour one, if you can see what I'm driving at? Then there's the same old CP ailment, those red rashes that keep appearing at odd places on the surface of my body."

"You've been sleeping under the bed again, haven't you?" the doctor said chastisingly. "What have I told you about the little bugs that dwell under mattresses and on bedroom carpets?"

"I know, doctor, but sometimes I get to thinking that perhaps if I sleep that way my other pains will disappear and I'll only have to worry about the rashes."

"Rubbish. I've told you before that they're really no different, and will give you exactly the same suffering."

"I know," old Mr. Capitalism acceded with a groan. "But I've tried everything else, haven't I? I took those reform pills you gave me but the relief only lasted for a very short while. It hardly seemed worthwhile taking them. Then there was the anti-inflation medicine and the wage-policy drug. Even the TUC capsules didn't make a scrap of difference. I don't know what's going to become of me, doctor. What kind of future has a man in my position got to look forward to?"

He left, and the doctor shook his head. "Poor old fellow, he's not long for this world." He rang the bell and asked: "Where's my next patient, nurse?" 

"There aren't any," she said.

"No patients! Nobody ill! What's happened?" said the doctor.

"A new crowd moved into the neighbourhood today", said the nurse. "They say they don't need any pills or potions, and the've got a big van waiting to—"she whispered in his ear.

"Bury Mr. Capitalism! He's not dead yet."

"As good as," said the nurse." I'm thinking of helping them actually. They're re-naming their house 'Socialism'."

"I'll come with you," said the doctor. "Old Mr. Capitalism was as much as I could stand."

Paul Breeze

The Baader-Meinhof terrorists: Majority understanding or minority action? (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 5th September this year, Dr. M. H. Schleyer, a West German industrialist and ex-member of Hitler's SS, was kidnapped. He was later murdered. Connected with this, a Lufthansa aircraft carrying 86 paasengers was hi-jacked, and the pilot was later killed.

These activities were carried out by a group of West german terrorists or, as some people call them "freedom fighters": the Baader-Meinhof group. Hi-jackings and kidnappings like these have been happening fairly frequently in recent years.

Who are these terrorists? Groups like the Baader-Meinhofs, the Angry Brigade, the IRA and the PFLP in Palestine are all minorities in their countries of origin; and they act, generally, by attacking an individual, or several individuals, to frighten and coerce a number of others. Sometimes, as with the various factions of the IRA in N. Ireland, the activities of the terrorists take place mainly in their own countries. Such groupings may be given support by sympathizers in foreign countries; the IRA is given funds and weapons by some of the Irish in America. At other times, as for example the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, international terrorist groups act in countries in which they have no interest but which serve as a stage for some spectacular kidnapping or hi-jacking.

Aims
What are the aims of these people? It is often difficult to answer this question, because the Angry Brigade and the Baader-Meinhofs  are minority groupings who are unsympathetic to the existing state machine. Hence they are unlikely to get publicity from the press and television etc.

One can understand something of the aims of groups like the Baader-Meinhof by their actions, and by the occasional piece of propaganda. On the 21st October this year, the Paris daily Liberation, carried this statement from the Baader-Meinhofs: "We will never forget the blood spilled by Schmidt and the Imperialists who support him. The battle has only begun. Freedom by the anti-Imperialists." (Quoted in The Times Oct 21 1977).

So, like the present Eurocommunists, the Baader-Meinhofs believe that the section of the population to be overthrown is not the capitalist class as a whole, but only part of that class. (The Eurocommunists would claim that it is the "monopoly capitalists" whereas the Baader-Meinhofs make out that it is the "Imperialists".) And like the 19th century Blanquists, the Baader-Meinhofs believe that they can change society by confrontation with the state power. But it is impossible for such action to succeed, because they have to take on the ruling power: the existing army, the police force, etc. The existing state machines have access to vastly greater resources to build armaments etc. than any minority group can hope for. Often the result of terrorism is to increase repression. The governments of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina have adopted ruthless methods against terrorists; and there has been talk, in the Conservative Party in Great Britain recently, of bringing back hanging for terrorists.

The British government refused to give way to the demands of the Tupamaros when they held captive the British Ambassador to Uruguay Geoffrey Jackson. And the Dutch Government held firm while the industrialist Dr. Herrema was held by members of the IRA in 1975.

Moreover, in the rare event of the minority grouping succeeding in taking over state power by force, it is inevitable that the group will have to maintain power by force, or by being prepared to use force if and when necessary. In the 1940s in China, Mao Tse-Tung and his guerilla army succeeded in building up a sufficiently strong force to overthrow the legitimate government of the Kuomintang. They were able to do this partly because of hostility among large sections of the Chinese peasantry towards the Japanese who were occupying parts of China. But the Chinese "Communist" party have kept a 2.5 million strong so-called "People's Army" (which, of course, is not an army of the people, a concept which is nonsensical, but an army which, if necessary, would act contrary to the interests of the people.)

Terrorism is no new force of warfare: the slaves led by Spartacus in Rome were in many ways like the PFLP. But, as a form of "warfare" it does seem to be growing. Richard Clutterbuck, in a recent book on the subject, argues that though as old as civilization, terrorism has replaced old-style wars between armies as a form of international coercion. Whether or not this is true terrorism cannot be an agent of socialist revolution, because Socialism requires a majority understanding and accepting the socialist case. Instead, terrorists are making the task more difficult by bringing into disrepute the word Revolution.

Alison Waters

Lion That Failed to Roar? (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell’s Faded Lion. Anthony James. Imprint Academic. £14.95. 2015.

The focus for this book is the ‘Moral Atmosphere of Britain 1945-2015’ as the subtitle would have it, and it is an entertaining and potentially thought-provoking read. The book examines the evolution of British society since Orwell wrote about Britain as the Second World War was coming to an end. James has travelled widely and he is able to draw on many of his experiences to give a comparative slant to his observations. He especially focuses on Britain’s insularity and failure to live up to the revolutionary hopes he says Orwell had for it.

He writes from a generally radical and leftist perspective without any transparent alignment with any particular political party. As often seems to be the case with books like this, much is traced back to the Thatcher era and its shortcomings, though perhaps without a full recognition of the wider economic forces within capitalism that brought this sort of phenomenon about (including, over time, in other countries).

While well-written in many respects, the book suffers structurally. This is mainly because it is part political tract, partly a collection of literary critiques and part personal memoir. It is the latter that appears to be its greatest strength – while the politics is quite strong on the analysis there seems little by way of clear solution proffered, while the literary sections read rather like a series of mini-book reviews of the works of the major authors of post-war British fiction melded together, not altogether successfully. The style is journalistic and the narrative thread that links these various elements is not perhaps as strong as it might be.

The best section relates to a period James spent in a South Wales hospital and turns out to be the inspiration for the book. It examines the treatment he received, the conditions of the hospital workers and – most perturbing of all – the views of a number of the fellow patients he was forced to share a ward with. Let’s just say the fact that UKIP got around 20 per cent of the vote in many South Wales valley seats at the recent General Election is entirely consistent with the account here and the interpretation James places on it. The challenge is still how to transform these types of views within the working class and the assumptions that seem to underpin them.

Dave Perrin

From market town . . . (1984)

The Place Where I Live Series from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As you approach Basingstoke from the direction of London, whether by train or motorway, the first thing to loom up through the trees is a giant office block. This is the AA building. Then, as you get nearer, other office blocks appear, together with factories, storage depots and extensive new housing estates, all aggressively modern and encircled by a complicated  system of roads that has given rise to the jibe of "roadites". The immediate impression is of a modern town, but Basingstoke is in fact ancient. Old Basing, now a picturesque village on the outskirts of the town, is of Saxon origin. An important battle was fought here in the ninth century when the Danes defeated a Saxon army and opened the way for a Danish invasion of Wessex. Basingstoke, originally called New Basing, was laid out somewhat later as a market town and communications centre, to take advantage of the growing economic importance of the area. It became known as Basingstoke in the eleventh century, and was dominated by Basing House. As so often happens, the child was to outgrow the parent, and Basingstoke was to develop into an important market town while Old Basing remained a village. Much of the old town still exists, and once can trace remnants of a medieval grid-iron plan with alleys that were once streets.

In the 1960s Basingstoke became a London overspill town and in just over a decade the town more than doubled in size, houses and factories covering what were green fields and woods as late as 1970. The whole place has been transformed; a huge modern shopping precinct was built, and what was the old traffic-choked High Street is now closed to all vehicles, with tubs of flowers dotted about while through traffic is diverted. Many thousands of Londoners have come into the area since the beginning of the scheme, thus reversing a trend that has existed for centuries in which people from the country flocked into London. Now they are moving out. So Basingstoke has grown, but to somebody who grew up in West London between the wars when thousands of acres were covered by urban sprawl and a whole county — Middlesex — disappeared under bricks and mortar, it still seems pretty small. You can still stand in the centre of the town and see the open country which surrounds it, or stand on the hills outside and look right across to the hills on the other side.

The town lies in a valley between chalk hills, a continuation of the North Downs, including the famous Watership Down. The area is officially designated as an "area of outstanding natural beauty", a hiker's paradise crisscrossed by ancient green lanes and footpaths. The beauty of the area has long since been recognised by the wealthy who can afford to choose where they will live, and who used the chalk streams and extensive woodlands for their expensive sports of shooting fishing. The famous trout stream, the River Test, rises within the boundaries of Basingstoke. These activities have been an important factor in controlling the effects of modern agriculture. The sale of fishing and shooting rights are highly lucrative; vast sums of money are involved. Fly fishing requires plenty of insects; these, in turn, require trees and undergrowth near the river. This acts as a check on excessive reclamation schemes by river boards. After all, if you are paying large sums of money to fish, you do not want to do so on a glorified drain. Likewise, game birds require woods, spinneys and hedges in which to to breed, so the grubbing up of woods and hedges is slowed down. Unfortunately natural beauty and wild life do not carry a price tag. This makes their preservation difficult, but a threat to profits is another matter and carries a lot more weight.

The change from market to London overspill has merely accelerated a process which has been taking place in market towns all over the country. When the heavy axes and  ploughs of the saxons began to cut land, a pattern began to emerge. That pattern, of a largely self-supporting rural economy with farms and hamlets centred around a market town was to remain largely unchanged into this century. From time to time other patterns have been superimposed on it — the monasteries backed by the wealth of the Church; manufacturing such as iron and cloth production; huge country houses in their extensive parks, financed by industry, commerce or the profits of the slave trade. However the underlying pattern remained unchanged. Each area had its mills and tanneries, forges and breweries and its skilled craftsmen — the wheelwrights, carpenters and masons. While the country produced food and timber, flax and leather for the towns, it supplied much of its own produce. The towns that formed the heart of these areas became not only market towns but centres of administration, communication and supply. Basingstoke was such a town. The Basingstoke canal was cut through to take local produce to London and Basingstoke later became an important rail junction. This pattern began to alter with the Industrial Revolution, which brought in mass produced goods while the railways brought in newspapers and coal as well as holidaymakers. The growth of population and the growing army of industrial workers first boosted the production of food and accelerated the enclosures, but later the opening of the vast wheatfields of North America and the cattle production of the Argentine undermined British agriculture and produced a slump. But the pattern was still recognisable until the 1939-45 war.

The last forty years have seen the end of that pattern. The isolation of the country is at an end. Modern agriculture is highly mechanised and its labour force is small, while better paid townspeople fill the cottages. Village shops stock the same packaged foods, cartons of milk and imported fruit — in many cases even mass produced sliced bread — that are stocked in the town supermarkets. The car has made transport easy, but the major changes have been brought about by electricity. The ugly pylons which stride across the country like a gigantic clothes line have brought electricity to the most isolated parts of the country. One can go into the most remote farmhouse and find television sets, hi-fi equipment, videos and washing machines. This has completely changed the character if towns like Basingstoke. Before the coming of electricity and piped water the needs of the country were different to those of the town. Oil lamps, stoves and cookers fired by solid fuel and battery powered radios were all stocked by shops in Basingstoke alongside agricultural tools. Today the shop windows look the same as anywhere else and carry the same names over the doors. Its Haymarket is now a theatre and its old town hall has been turned into offices.

Basingstoke is now the centre of a new giant authority called the Borough of Basingstoke and Deane. The top-heavy structure incorporates a large area of countryside with villages and small towns. Not that it is in any danger of going the way of the Greater London Council or South Yorkshire, because it has a large built-in Tory majority, so much so that one suspects they could put up Tony Benn and he would get elected. This does not apply to Basingstoke itself, where political feelings are pretty evenly divided among the main capitalist Parties.

The growth of Basingstoke over the centuries has been pretty low key, but it entered the history books during the civil war with the siege of Basing House. This was the largest private house in England and was converted into a fortress. It held out for the Royalists for years. Astride a main road from London to the West, it was a thorn in the side of Parliament until stormed and destroyed in 1645. Today a tourist attraction, its ruins covered with wild flowers in the spring, fitted with a museum and teashop, it is difficult to realise the savagery that took place there. Today the town is pretty peaceful, only the occasional Saturday night punch-up to disturb the peace, but in 1830 the south was gripped by a wave of unrest known as the Swing riots. Gangs of agricultural workers roamed the countryside smashing machinery and setting ricks afire. This alarmed the government into savage reprisals. Later, in 1880, the arrival of the newly formed Salvation Army alarmed the brewers who feared the pubs would be closed down, and therefore stirred up feelings against them. Riots broke out in which not only the Salvation Army but non-conformists in general were attacked and shops damaged. Rowdies from outside the town swelled the numbers of rioters to over 2,000 and swamped the small police force. Mounted troops were called out to clear the streets. After a couple of years the agitation died down when it became obvious that the pubs were not going to close down. The rioters justified their actions as defending liberty and personal freedom.

While many parts of the country are in decline because the industries on which they were based have become obsolete, the opposite has happened in the Southern counties. Economically important for centuries Wessex, to give it its ancient name, was largely missed by the Industrial Revolution and went into decline, its old industries superceded by the new mass production. But in the last 40 years new modern industries have flooded into the area. It is on the edge of the so-called Silicon valley which runs from Reading to Swindon, and contains many vast government establishments; well-known places like Burghfield, Aldermaston and Greenham Common are near Basingstoke. For years Basingstoke had one of the highest employment rates in the country and although, like everywhere else, it had been hit by the recession, the employment rate is still comparatively high.

Along with the new industries and large concerns moving their offices out of London has come the growth of tourism. New exploration for oil is taking place in three places near Basingstoke. One can only hope that the "uglification" will be confined to the comparatively inoffensive "nodding donkeys".

So the wastefulness of capitalism goes on. Factories stand idle and derelict in one area while in another fertile land goes down under concrete. Fifty years ago it was the market gardens of Middlesex or the farmlands of Kent, today it is Hampshire and the Thames Valley; tomorrow it can be anywhere else. As for the people, if you are in a declining area, that it just too bad — your misfortune in fact. This will continue; that is one thing at least of which you may be sure, until those same people begin to understand what is going on and take steps to change it.

Les Dale

A Better Red, But Dead (1975)

Book Review from the January 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nikolai Bukharin, by Prof. Stephen Cohen. (Wildwood House, £4.50.)

Yet another American biography has appeared of Bukharin, meticulously documented and annotated in the way in which the American universities have made their own. But having waded through 400 pages of the most minute recapitulation of Bukharin's speeches and articles over twenty years, one is forced to ask: Was it worth it?

What we have here is the painful record of one leading Bolshevik's repeated somersaults and turnabouts in striving to adjust to the cold hard facts of life: from the famous ABC of Communism, the Russian CP's in the early years, to the call to the Russian peasants to "enrich themselves" in 1932*.

Already, in 1920, Bukharin was at odds with Lenin over the definition of State capitalism, and especially Lenin's frequently expressed view that a proletarian state could run State capitalism. "State capitalism under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — this is an absurdity — soft-boiled boots. State capitalism without capitalism is exactly the same sort of nonsense. 'Non-capitalist capitalism' — this is the height of confusion", he wrote in the 'twenties (page 7). History has shown that Bukharin was right and Lenin wrong.

One may also agree with the statement in The Economics of the Transition Period, showing that Marx's economic laws relate purely to capitalist society:

As soon as we take an organised social economy, all the basic "problems" of political economy disappear: problems of value, price, profit and the like.
Here "relations between people" are not expressed as "relations between things", and social economy is regulated not by the blind forces of the market, buy consciously—by a plan.
There can be no place for a science studying "the blind laws of the market" since there will be no market. The end of capitalist commodity society will be the end of political economy. (page 93)

It was above all by his writings that Bukharin established himself as the leading Bolshevik theoretician. In his Economic Theory of the Leisure Class and Historical Materialism he had endeavoured to answer the criticisms of Durkheim, Pareto, Croce, Weber and other anti-Marxists.

From 1934 on, after the death of Lenin and Zinovieff's defeat at the hands of Stalin, the luckless was lumbered with the direction of Comintern; with all its growing insurmountable difficulties. Not merely was he committed to its "general crisis of capitalism" rubbish but, above all, the Leninist "theory" of the subjected nations under imperialism. Both he and Lenin produced works on this subject. Lenin's was largely cribbed from J. A. Hobson, whereas Bukharin (due to his stay in Vienna) was influenced more by Hilferding.

By this fairy-story about "the colonial nations", the Comintern was induced to instigate uprisings and revolts in almost every quarter of the globe. In our time we have seen the "liberators" Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Amin swindle their "liberating" governments of millions. The "exploited" Arab oil-sheiks invest millions in property, ICI, Krupps and Mercedes. The process has reversed, and Lenin's thesis of the domination of colonies by Bankers' Finance Capitalism is about as valid as his nonsense about the State, the workers running State capitalism, and minority dictatorships.

Bukharin now found himself forced into alliance with Stalin, first against Trotsky and then against Zinovieff. From that day on he, like every member of the Politbureau — Kamenev, Zinovieff, Trotsky, Tomsky, Rykov — was doomed, earmarked for destruction by the megalomaniac Stalin who, as Bukharin said:

By political terrorism and by acts of torture on a scale hitherto unheard of, you have forced old party members to make 'depositions' . . . You have a crowd of paid informers at your disposal.

On 2nd March 1938 the final trial of Bukharin, with 19 others, began. They were accused of everything except the spots on the sun. As Bukharin himself wrote. "accusing him of being an enemy of the revolution and a capitalist agent was like discovering that the last Czar devoted his whole life to struggle against Capitalist and Monarchy; to the struggle for a proletarian revolution" (page 371).

And so Nikolai Bukharin, whom this writer remembers well as easily the most genial and lovable of the Russian Bolsheviks; Bukharin with his puckish good humour and unfailing quizzical wit, the least like a "steel-hardened" Bolshevik of them all — was dragged forcibly from the dock, howling imprecations on Stalin's festering head, and died standing up.

In his last letter "To a future generation of party leaders" he wrote:

Know, comrades, that the banner which you will be carrying in the victorious march to Communism is also a drop of my blood.

Such has been the fate of those who have taken part in the minority upheavals of the twentieth century.

Horatio.

* Bloggers Note: Bukharin's "call to the Russian peasants to "enrich themselves"" actually dates from 1925, rather than the above mentioned 1932 in the review.

Radical London (2006)

Book Review from the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reds on the Green: A Short Tour of Clerkenwell Radicalism. by "Fagin" Past Tense Publications, £2.00.

It was water that named Clerkenwell; a village with several wells, one of which, the Clerk’s Well, that gave its name to the area. The River Fleet ran through, from its sources on Hampstead Heath to where it enters the River Thames near Blackfriars Bridge.

First mentioned in this brief account of Clerkenwell, is the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, where Wat Tyler and the rebel peasants ransacked the Savoy Palace in the Strand, home of John of Gaunt, then the Fleet Prison, crossed into Clerkenwell and set fire to the Priory of the Order of Saint John. In 1665 refugees from the Plague, and in 1666, from the Great Fire of London, moved northwards from the City to Clerkenwell. By the late 17th century, there had been an influx of craftsmen into the area, including many watchmakers and locksmiths. Clerkenwell soon became a slum in which thousands of poverty-stricken workers scraped an existence. Parts of the area were notorious for beggars, casual labourers and prostitutes. In the 1800s, the police rarely went into the part of Clerkenwell known as the Rookeries.

Clerkenwell Green became famous, or maybe infamous, for meetings and demonstrations. In 1838, when the Tolpuddle Martyrs returned from their transportation to Australia after being pardoned, some of them were welcomed by a large demonstration on the Green. Indeed, it was the heart of the radical political scene in Victorian London, and was the central venue for public meetings, demonstrations and clashes between Chartists and the recently formed Metropolitan Police Force. In November 1867, there were two demonstrations to protest against the death sentence on three Irish Fenians in Manchester, who were later hanged at Strangeways Prison. In 1882, a large cache of Fenian arms were discovered at St John Street, nearby.

The pamphlet Reds on the Green notes that in 1871, there were meetings supporting the Paris Commune, and for the Commune’s duration, a red flag hung from the lamp-post on the Green. In 1884, the Social Democratic Federation held meetings there. By the end of the Victorian era, it was a major centre for regular soap-box speakers, as well as a venue for open-air radical meetings and demonstrations.

The author gives a brief account of a number of radical mavericks, such as Dan Chatterton and the anarchist-communist Guy Aldred, who were born and grew up in Clerkenwell. Mention is made of The House (no. 37 Clerkenwell Green), built in 1738, where William Morris and Eleanor Marx addressed crowds from the balconies of the building, and which, since 1933, has housed the Marx Memorial Library. Mention is also made of. a certain V Lenin and his wife, Krupskaya, who used the offices of SDF’s Twentieth Century Press to edit the paper Iskra in 1902. (It is noted that Lenin established a state-capitalist dictatorship.)

The pamphlet concludes with an Appendix of recommended pubs to visit in Clerkenwell. It is well illustrated and is obtainable from: Past Tense Publications, c/o 56A Info Shop, 56 Crampton Street, London, SE17.

Peter E. Newell

Gissa job (1988)

A Short Story from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

I went for a job interview recently. beforehand I experienced the trepidation that usually accompanies a visit to the dentist. Suitably softened up I was ushered into the Managing Director's office. My razor sharp brain assessed the situation. All my carefully planned stratagems were of no use, designed as they were to suit a one to one confrontation. I was faced not by the interviewer I had been expecting, but with an inquisitorial panel of four.

For a nano-second I imaged the scene as a nineteenth century woodcut. The present: Capital confronts Labour. The worker stands with his head bowed, his hand extended in supplication. Behind him his hungry family huddle together for comfort. Looming before him are four wolves all dressed in frock coats, their fangs bared. The image changes. The future: Socialism confronts Capital. The four capitalists are cowering in a corner surrounded by a multitude of stern workers who have just effected the transformation from production for profit to production for need.

A questioning voice jerks me back to reality. The persons interrogating me are the owning directors of this private medium sized engineering company. Isn't it odd that those who describe themselves as manufacturers are the ones who don't actually make things with their own hands? Family companies like to project an image of caring paternalism. This type of firm works hard at earning itself a reputation for job security rather than high pay.

"We may not pay the highest wages in the area," they say, "but when you work for us you're a name, not just a number." But woe betide you if even a paperclip goes missing from your desk.

The questions emanating from the quartet are designed to ascertain my suitability to contribute to, and increase, the company profits. These buggers may know nothing of Marx's Labour Theory of Value, but they know what they want. With a working life in front of them they question every action and decision of the past twenty years. If the end result is a feeling of humiliation, rejection and failure as a human being because some other wage-slave was preferred, it's because that's the way the system designed us to feel. Capitalism isn't some abstraction that is best left to the politicians and the bosses to run. Those who own the means of production and distribution have power over your life.

What is unusual, as Sherlock Holmes might have remarked, is that the vast majority of the working class, those forced to sell their labour power in order to live, see nothing unusual in the labour/capitalist relationship. However these self-same workers would agree with Marx that,

The exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person on order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live.
He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another  . . .  what he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace; resolve themselves for him into a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. And the worker who labours for eight hours — does he consider this eight hour labour as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. (Wage Labour and Capital).

Apologists of capitalism might argue that the market system offers me as much freedom of choice as it does the employer. After all, selling your labour power is a two way contract, freely entered into between buyer, the employer, and seller, the worker. And if your abilities and skills are market orientated, then you will have no problem in finding a capitalist eager to purchase the commodity on offer — your working abilities.

Members of the working class who think that a company car and the opportunity to work themselves into an early grave constitute happiness are deluding themselves. No matter how attractive the wrapping, BUPA, Luncheon Vouchers and a gold watch after twenty-five years of producing surplus value; the result remains wage-slavery. As was clear when I went for that interview  . . . 

Dave Coggan

Dance of the Dialectic (2004)

Book Review from the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dance of the Dialectic. By Bertell Ollman. University of Illinois Press, 2003

For Socrates it was teasing out the threads of an argument by asking questions. In Hegel's philosophy it was the development of the idea through history. With Marx and Engels, however, there is some dispute as to what their version of the dialectic means, or even if they were both talking about the same thing. This apparent confusion is compounded by Plekhanov's term “dialectical materialism”, a phrase not used by Marx or Engels, yet this was designated the official philosophy of state capitalist Russia in the years after the Bolshevik revolution.

Ollman is in no doubt that Marx and Engels were talking about different aspects of the same thing. For Ollman, their dialectic has two main features. Firstly, it is a philosophy of internal relations. Capitalism is a system constituted by its social relations of production, and a change to one relationship will have consequences for the whole system. This philosophical viewpoint tries to understand that process. Secondly, it is a method of abstraction. The key social relationships of capitalism (e.g. value, commodity, class) depend upon, but are not reducible to, material objects. They can only be comprehended as abstractions but they are nonetheless real and can affect our lives profoundly when they mean that profit-making takes priority over human needs. To some it may seem that this explanation is very different from how the dialectic is often understood. According to Ollman:

“Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world”.

Ollman goes into considerable detail in what is likely to be the standard work on this subject for many years to come.

Lew Higgins

'Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro' (2012)

Film Review from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

London Labour Film Festival Gala - 'Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro' September 2012

The TUC-sponsored London Labour Film Festival gala-film was the French film Les neiges du Kilimandjaro (2011). The film is directed by Robert Guediguian, and stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin as Michel, a CGT trade union official in the Marseilles shipyard.

The film opens in the shipyard, and the struggle between capital and labour sees the union 'choosing' by lot those who will be made redundant. Later Christophe, one of those made redundant, insinuates to Michel there have been many union compromises with management and ‘back handers’. For decades the CGT was allied with the Communist Party, and the ossified 'Stalinist' reformism of both undermined the events of 1968. The CGT was more recently involved in strike action in 2005 over the privatisation of the Marseilles maritime ferry service.

Michel mentions the 1972 “Common Programme” which was optimistically seen as the 'union of the left', forming the basis for the Mitterrand Presidential victory in 1981, and reforms to capitalism such as Keynesian economic measures. Michel has achieved a 'good' standard of living due to the benefits of 'reformism'. He speaks highly to Christophe of the fruits of 'reformism', and in one scene Michel and his wife discuss that they are now “petty bourgeois”. During capitalism's periodic crises, the workers’ wages decrease so that Christophe, the young worker who is made redundant with no severance payments, commits a robbery for purely economic need; the proceeds are used to buy food, pay the rent, and look after his younger brothers.

Michel's hero is the pre-WWI reformist social democrat politician Jean Jaurès whose picture is on his work locker and he refers to him several times in the film. Jaurès advocated 'popular front' alliances with the progressive middle class. When WWI threatened in 1914 he tried to implement the Second International anti-war policy but was assassinated. Mitterrand placed a red rose on Jaurès' tomb in 1981.

Jaurès's reformism was opposed by Jules Guesde's 'Marxist' party whose manifesto had been drawn up by Marx and Engels. In 1905 Guesde's party and Jaurès’s party united under pressure from the Second International and Guesde soon got bogged down in reformism. In 1914 he joined the French government of “National Unity” although in 1907 he had declared war was the “result of the capitalist regime”. Had he not been assassinated no doubt Jaurès would have too.

Michel is imbued with an 'Idealist, reformist, social democratic' philosophy and the sense of 'justice' shared by Jaurès. Marxists see 'justice' as a concept originating in class society but Jaurès believed that the Idea of 'justice' causes the movement of history. Paul Lafargue critiqued Jaurès and 'justice' in his 1895 lecture Idealism and Materialism in the Conception of History: “Man never would have emerged from the primitive communist environment in which the idea of Justice does not exist”. Michel believes his conduct is guided by 'justice' but Lafargue sees that “the idea of Justice will vanish like a bad dream when common property shall have taken the place of private property”.

Steve Clayton

Glasgow Street Scene (1943)

From the October 1943 issue of The Western Socialist

[The following are extracts from a personal letter from the organizer, Glasgow Branch, Socialist Party of Great Britain, describing a street meeting recently held at Glasgow.]

Picture one thousand people at the corner of Blythswood and Sauchiehall Streets. There was a large sprinkling of American soldiers and N. C. O's. Two looked like generals . . . they looked as if they were going to shout "Fall in," at any minute. They were amazed at the crowd and their troops (they came when the meeting was well on). In a few minutes they, too, were just members of the audience  . . .

Now to some of the questions after Tony (Comrade Tony Turner) had exposed the war, he pleted into American capitalism and, of course, all capitalists.

Turner knew the Americans were going to have a go and that's what he was angling for.

An American officer asked this question: "I agree with what you say but is it not possible that you may sell yourself to a Government and smother your ideas."

Here is Tony's answer: "Yes. I may sell myself, but I am not trying to sell myself to you. I am trying to sell an idea, etc. etc. Are you satisfied with the answer?"

"Yes," says the officer.

"Do you wish a supplementary question?" says Tony.

"Yes. Have you ever been in America?"

Tony repeats the question and says, "The answer is a brief one — NO! Now what is the implication?" 

"Well. I don't think that you are entitled to claim a superior knowledge of America when you've never been there."

Tricky Tony hesitated for about one minute (long time at a meeting), pretending to be lost. All of a sudden he pointed to the officer and said, "Brother, I take a long shot. I know more about America than you do, and you have just come from there. To test this I will begin by an examination of the Constitution, important events in American history, the domestic scene, statistics relating to wealth production and distribution, etc. etc." Tony did all this and more. The officer remained silent for the rest of the meeting.

He handled drunks in a masterly fashion. One of the beer-sodden hooligan type got the spanking of his life. Tony pointed to him and said, "Look at the poor little fellow — his wee belly full of beer and he wants to fight. Should you see him tomorrow morning, he will make a mad gallop to the factory and start saluting, saying, "Yes sir! Yes sir! Three bags full." And Tony kept saluting as he was saying this.

He tanned the Scottish Nationalists, the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party.

Three husky CPers were crushed like mice before his devastating attack and exposure. How the people laughed when he said, regarding the present friendship of Stalin and Winston, "Churchill's song today is: 'You made me love you and I didn't want to do it, Joe'."

Literature sales were £4-13 — a record; collection £3. Turner was publicly thanked by members of the audience for his brilliant address. Tony got a smashing write-up in the (Glasgow) Evening Times by a special correspondent . . . I will try to get you a copy and send it on.

Angus McPhail

Soviet Class Struggle (1969)

Book Review from the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia, 1957-65 by Mary McAuley, OUP, 48s.

Like most books based on doctoral theses Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia makes for rather dry reading. The masses of tedious details can be exasperating, but at the same time they do throw some light on the class struggle in Russia and the forms it assumes.

Mary McAuley spent eighteen months at the Labour Law Department of Leningrad University and this allowed her to study closely labour relations at a number of factories in the area. Particularly interesting are her accounts of some of the indignities which individual Russian workers, like workers throughout the world, find themselves subjected to. At the Karl Marx factory, for example, the shop superintendent cuts a worker's premium by 5 per cent for going to wash before time, and at a different plant the same penalty is imposed on another because — having been given a day's warning — she fails to report for work on a Sunday.

More amusing are the antics of various commentators who dismiss labour disputes in the Soviet Union as simply the result of such factors as "remnants of capitalist consciousness in individuals". The very frequency with which they repeat these empty formulae hints at the scale of the struggles to improve their wages and working conditions which workers throughout Russia must be engaged in.

John Crump

Emptiness of New Labour economics . . . (2000)

Book Review from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Political Economy of New Labour. By Colin Hay, Manchester University Press.

If economics is the dismal science, then political science must be its poor cousin. Colin Hay's book is another in that long line of critical studies of the Labour Party from leftist commentators wishing they could run capitalism better in the fervent belief that the politicians have the power to effect real changes.

Hay's solidly cultural materialist analysis of Labour's political development since the 1980s begins with a look at the cult of novelty within the Labour Party, and the way in which the signifier "New" has been used to create a distance from an unspecified past to an equally indistinct present political position. Hay then backs up this analysis with an elegant description of the "hotelling" model of voter preference and political competition: i.e. that political parties, much like high street retailers, will tend to try and converge on the same best pitch for securing votes.

Hay then describes how Labour has been trying to catch up with the significant changes to the political apparatus wrought by the Tory party during their period of office. Hay proposes that Labour has surrendered to their perceptions of the new voter consensus, and that New Labour is the product of "preference accommodation" as opposed to "preference shaping" on their part, i.e., that they adapt to voters' views rather than trying to change them. Hay ascribes this as being in part an undue attachment to finance capital, as opposed to industrial capital.

Hay delineates what he perceives as being the main problem for British capitalism—the persistent under-investment of capital within the British economy. He then poses a wish list of reforms: the creation of regional government to promote investment and changes to pension fund laws (including possible regional pension funds) in order to allow them to invest more in British manufacturing. His aim is explicitly to make capitalism work—he even approvingly cites Engels's definition of the state as an idealised capitalist as being the state of affairs that should pertain.

Although successful, to some extent, at analysing what has happened to the Labour movement on an empirical level, Hay does not demonstrate why Labour has chosen to follow preference accommodation rather than shaping. He does not analyse the movements within the party, nor the structures of dependency and power that sustain them. Nor, for that matter, does he analyse the perceptions within the capitalist class that have led to them seeking to pursue one particular economic consensus over another. In other words, aside from his airy reforms, Hay does not look at the operation of economic conditions as a driving force for political ideas. In his support for capitalism, and his wish to make it better, he overlooks that capitalism is the ultimate limiting factor on political attempts to save it.

Pik Smeet

See also:

Money, Markets and the State: Social Democratic Economic Policies since 1918. By Ton Notermans. Cambridge University Press.

'If I Had a Go' (1949)

A Short Story from the May 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ever I stood before the microphone and was asked by Wilfred Pickles what two thing I disliked most, without hesitation I would say Poverty and War. Furthermore, if I was asked what one thing I would like to do before I died, I would reply that I would like to play a part, if only a small part, to help to establish a new social order, in which the whole earth and the fulness thereof would become means to the comfort and happiness of all. Likewise the aforesaid means of wealth production and distribution would be democratically controlled by and on behalf of the whole community, regardless of their sex or colour.

Then waxing rather eloquent, I would inform my astonished audience, that under the new social order there would be no landowners, no property owners, no rent books, no title deeds. As for their rent books, the ration books, identity cards and their bank books, etc., they could cast them into the bonfire. Then Armies, Navies, Air Forces and Police Forces would not be required, as the causes of war and private property had been abolished. There would be no Secret Service, no espionage, no counter espionage, no Gestapo, no Ogpu, no M.I.5, no F.B.I., or any other form of Secret Police. There would be no Frontier Posts, no Customs, no Excise. This would gladden the hearts of my listeners,—there would be no Entertainment Tax, no Purchase Tax nor Income Tax. There would be no Millionaires, Dollar Millionaires, Sterling Millionaires, or Russian Rouble Millionaires. Neither would there be required a dog licence, a car licence, or a wireless licence. I would then ask my listeners if their wireless sets were now playing better.

Then the audience would gaze and wonder when I informed them that there would be no Popes, Cardinals, Bishops or Priests. No Deans of the Red Variety, nor Deans of the Dean Inge Variety. And the audience would gasp when I informed them that there would be no longer be required a Home Office, a Foreign Office, a War Office, no Board of Trade, no Import Boards, no Coal Boards. Finally I would inform them that when they thoroughly understood the real causes of their poverty, squalor and war, they would make a rapid decision that would speedily end the Social System which is the cause of those evils. They would no longer be content with half a loaf, but would take possession of all the bakeries of the world

. They would also take possession of all the textile machines and all the millions of yards of cloth, make good, beautiful clothes and wear them, no money or price being required. Also they would take possession of all the stone, clay, concrete and steel and make strong, beautiful houses and live in them, again no money, no price, no rent book, no mortgage or building society.

They would require no Leader, no Messiah and no Saviour. They the Working Class would have to transform Society themselves. When they commenced to do these things, it would usher in a New Social Order and it would be known throughout the world as Socialism.

Then Wilfred Pickles would say, "Barney, give him the money."

Nat Posner 

The "Cruelty" of Capitalism (1929)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the February Socialist Standard (see page 94, column 2) our contributor, A. Kohn, pointed out that Socialists do not object to capitalism as a "mistake" or a "monstrosity," but "recognise its place in social evolution as a pre-condition for the coming of Socialism." A correspondent, "Humanitas," writes to protest that a system of society which is based on gross inequality of wealth with the resulting "tragic consequences of life" must be regarded as "a mistake and a social monstrosity."

"Humanitas" continues as follows: —

Such stark injustice  . . . . condemns any system, whether it leads to Socialism or any other state. In the name of logic and scientifically-grounded philosophy how can social injustice and (implicitly) the cruelty that initiated and continues it be justified or excused on any grounds?

In the first place. "Humanitas" has misunderstood our contributor's point. The statement was not a "justification" for capitalism, but a mere statement of fact. It is a fact that capitalism has made Socialism possible, but the Socialist does not "justify" capitalism on that ground. The reason for the existence of capitalism was that if offered the means of bettering the conditions of life of society as a whole. Capitalism is developing in Russia, for instance, because as a literal fact it offers a higher standard of living to the Russian workers and peasants than is, with Russia's low development of industry, obtainable otherwise. To talk about capitalism being "initiated and continued" by "cruelty" is a mere empty phrase. Capitalism was initiated by persons who—both capitalists and wage-earners—stood to gain thereby. It is continued by capitalists and wage-earners in this country because both, the former correctly and the latter incorrectly, think that they still cannot do better than continue it. The Socialist points out that the functions formerly performed by the capitalist class (functions which made it worth while for society to accept the existence of a property-owning class) are no longer performed by them. The capitalist system can now, with advantage to the majority, be dispensed with.

Ed. Comm.