The B team takes over (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

France’s conservative president, Chirac, called early elections in May and June in the hope of winning five more years in office for his supporters. The voters, however, refused to oblige and elected instead a left-wing government. Chirac remains president but has to cohabit with a government under a “Socialist" Prime Minister and with "Communist” and Green Party ministers.

Needless to say, the new Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, is no more a socialist than Mitterand was. His misnamed "Parti Socialiste” stands for a reformed capitalism not a society of common ownership and production for use not profit. Like the Labour Party in Britain, it is the B team to take over governing capitalism in France when the conservatives are tired or discredited.

Even so, the French PS fought the election on a programme that would have made Gordon Brown’s hair stand on end: increasing the minimum wage, reducing the existing 39-hour week to 35 hours with no loss of pay, 700.000 new jobs in the state and semi-state sector. In other words, unlike New Labour, which has got the message that such a reformist policy won’t work, the PS still believes—at least for vote-catching purposes—that a government can reduce unemployment by spending its way out of a slump.

A disturbing feature of the election was the vote for Le Pen’s Front National. It got 3.8 million votes, or 15 percent of those who voted, its highest ever score in a general election, even though—thanks to France’s two-round election system designed to ensure that MPs are representative of a majority of voters—it only got one seat. Since 38 million people aged 18 or over are eligible to vote in France, this means that one out of every ten French citizens voted for a party led by a fascist and open anti-semite.

As fascism is a reaction to the failure of democratic reformism to make capitalism work in the interests of the majority, where alienated workers mistakenly blame parliamentary democracy or some minority group instead of capitalism for their problems, this is a warning of the further dangers that could like ahead if workers continue to put their hopes in democratic reform of capitalism rather than socialism.

Some commentators have seen the election of the Jospin government as making a single European currency less likely. This is based on the assumption that the new government will honour its election promises and try to spend its way out of the crisis. This would indeed undermine the value of the franc and inaugurate a period of European monetary instability which would make the introduction of a single currency impossible.

The last time a French government tried to spend its way out of a slump was after Mitterand’s election as president in 1981. As we Socialists predicted, it was an utter failure because the capitalist economy is driven by profits, and the prospect of making them, not by government spending, which in the end is a charge on profits.

What happened was that the extra government spending was financed largely by inflating the currency. This undermined the competitiveness of French capitalist industry and led to three devaluations of the franc in an 18-month period. In the end, the austerity policy of the previous government was re-imposed, and tightened. It was one of the most spectacular failures of reformism in recent years.

If the Jospin government does adopt the same policy as in 1981 the commentators will be right. A more likely scenario, however, is the new government explaining that its election promises were only long-term goals, to be achieved within the framework of a united Europe, etc., etc., and carrying on with more or less the same economic policy as the previous government, as Blair and Brown are doing in Britain

Adam Buick

Losing the jewel (1997)

From the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago this month Britain relinquished control over the Indian subcontinent. It was the start of a thirty-year period in which European imperial powers progressively withdrew from direct rule of their overseas possessions.

It had been accepted as far back as 1833 that India would at some stage advance to self-government. The British practice of granting former colonies self-rule and Dominion status encouraged Indian nationalists to believe that India would follow. In the meantime various measures of "Indianisation" such as the Indian Councils Act of 1861 gave the elite some say in the running of Indian affairs.

The Indian National Congress (subsequently abbreviated to Congress), founded in 1885 by an anglicised elite, at first campaigned for examinations for entry into the Indian Civil Service to be held in the sub-continent as well as in Britain.They also pressed to have more elected members on the legislative councils of the central and provincial governments in India. Unrest arose among those who studied but failed to gain the positions to which they aspired in government administration. But it was not until 1906 that Congress started to demand self-rule for India as a means of obtaining more control over Indian affairs, and to gain access to government employment. In common with other independence movements organised resistance to foreign domination in India originated not with the peasant masses (although they were subsequently mobilised to that end) but from classes educated in Western ways.

Westernised elite

British occupation of India, while destroying some native industry, had stimulated the rise of a new class of native industrial and commercial capitalists. The development of communications gave easier access to markets and encouraged the commercial development of cotton, jute and other non-edible cash crops produced for sale. Indians also entered professions such as the law as a means of social advancement. These groups formed the backbone of the nationalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They advocated self-rule for India as a means of progressing their economic class interests. Unable to meet free-trade competition, Indian industrialists sought protection to exploit home market potential behind tariff barriers against British trade. This policy split them away from the landed aristocracy who had allied themselves with British rule in part as a protection against rural unrest and uprisings.

The first world war brought with it far-reaching economic and social change as the European colonial powers utilised their possessions for the raw materials and manpower necessary to wage war. India provided one-and-a-half million troops to defend the interests of British capitalists and their experiences inevitably coloured their outlook. The war had an impact on the price of goods and foodstuffs which rose faster than incomes. Further hardship resulted from the increase of taxation on the peasantry.

At the end of the war the westernised elites began demanding rewards for the sacrifices made. A number of reforms were enacted which provided for direct elections to the legislatures. However the property and education qualifications restricted the electorate to some seven million voters only. i.e. three percent of the population. More importantly Britain retained absolute control over key areas such as finance and the police. This was clearly seen by the Indian nationalists as a sop by the British who hoped to buy off their more radical demands. When it came to the push the British showed how far they were prepared to go if necessary to defend their interests in India. On 13 April 1919 a meeting of protest at British occupation was fired on by British troops. The firing continued for ten minutes and only ceased when the ammunition ran out. The Amritsar massacre left 400 dead and 1.200 injured.

Richer peasants

During the 1920s the nature and composition of Congress changed. It became a mass party with a largely rural base. Membership fees were deliberately kept low to encourage recruitment which proved very successful. One police official reported that the old Congress intelligentsia had been "swamped in a mass of semi-educated persons". In this period Congress policies proved attractive to the richer peasants. These were people who owned ten or more acres of land, and who grew cash crops and employed landless peasants as wage labour. Their interests lay in proposed measures of land reform intended to break up and redistribute the larger land holdings of the aristocracy. It was the alliance of the industrialists and this potential class of agricultural capitalists that made Congress the important force it was. Gandhi's economic ideas did not threaten their interests. His espousal of swadeshi— the use of things from one’s "own" country with neighbours supplying economic wants—emphasised local production. It was a "buy Indian" policy in which foreign goods were boycotted. Imports of British cotton fell by more than half while Indian production and sales were unaffected. He aimed at a revival of the traditional Indian village community—a return to an idealised pre-capitalist past which proved attractive in a society experiencing the disruptive extension of the cash economy and the contraction of previously communally owned land.

Between 1921 and 1941 grain production per head fell by more than a quarter. At the outbreak of the second world war the majority of Indians had less to eat than their forebears. An analysis which blamed British rule, rather than the economic organisation of society, for the poverty and suffering the vast majority experienced won mass support and a willingness to make sacrifices for their beliefs. Under the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi the new-style Congress put into effect a number of campaigns of non-co-operation with the British authorities. Demonstrations, rioting and the burning of symbols of oppression such as police stations took place. The deaths that occurred during this period of unrest caused Gandhi to call off the campaign. Congress renewed its campaign of civil disobedience in March 1930 when Gandhi deliberately invited arrest by publicly breaking the government monopoly of the production of salt. Many Congress members followed his example and in the 1930s 130,000 had served terms of imprisonment. In January 1932 the British government outlawed Congress and imprisoned its leaders following the breakdown of talks. Realising that civil disobedience was merely an annoyance to the British, and that political power could be won through the ballot box, Congress returned to contesting elections.This led to an increase in membership which rose to 4.5 million in 1939, the majority coming from the ranks of rich peasants and small and middle landlords.

Congress split over support for Britain on the outbreak of war in 1939, the supporters of Gandhi instigating a "Quit India" campaign which radicalised the independence movement and led to another banning and jailing of 60,000 members. The subsequent revolt in the countryside took 80 battalions of British troops to put down and involved beatings, torture, burning of property and collective fines.

Muslim businessmen

As a divisive measure the British had in 1905 encouraged the formation of the Muslim League made up of aspiring Muslim businessmen fearful that the majority Hindu population might swamp them and their interests. The League now offered support and co-operation to the British, as a means of advancing their interests, and furthering their particularist demands. It became clear that the main question was how to grant independence without dividing the country along religious lines. It was a question that failed to be resolved. Negotiations became deadlocked and both Hindu and Muslim factions used the hiatus in proceedings to whip up the fear and hatred which had for years simmered beneath the surface of Indian life.

Coming to power in 1945 the British Labour Party had no policy worked out regarding the Empire, a subject which had not been mentioned in their election manifesto. Indeed at their 1943 Annual Conference a resolution had been passed which declared that colonial peoples were not ready for self-government. As a result they acted pragmatically in response to circumstances. In India Wavell. the Viceroy, commented on the psychological effects of revolts in French Indo-China (Vietnam) and in Indonesia which had produced a situation "more dangerous than at any time in the past ninety years". Influential public opinion in Britain was also changing and according to the Times (18 September 1945) "the entire practice of the rule of one race by another" was now "discredited".

By 1945 British economic interests in India were considerably less than they had been. In 1900 British goods represented 69 percent of Indian imports but in 1945 the figure was less than 20 percent. In 1870 India had sent 53 percent of its exports to Britain while in 1945 only 28 percent of its exports were. Although still of some importance to the British economy India did not play as important role as, for example, Malaya which was a dollar-earner useful in the support of sterling. During the inter-war depression the value of exports to India had fallen by half, foreign penetration and import substitution contributing to the decline. On balance it was no longer worth the cost of attempting to further delay the granting of independence—better to pull out as gracefully as possible and try and maintain links with a new leadership which still had some sympathy and respect for things British.

Change of exploiters

Independence solved none of the problems resulting from exploitation. Indian governments were wedded to the same set of priorities and subject to the same constraints as any other capitalist government. Poverty in the midst of a potential for plenty remains a running sore, exploitation and massive disparities of wealth continue to exist, war with Pakistan claimed the lives of those with no class interest in the outcome, environmental degradation continues virtually unabated.

Improvements in agriculture (mainly due to the "Green Revolution” which benefited the richer farmers who could finance the necessary inputs) means that India is “self-sufficient" in food production. It also means that India has suffered the "problem" of plenty since independence. In 1968 for example there was a massive pile up of wheat in Punjab and Haryana provinces where 200,000 tonnes of wheat worth Rs 180m lay rotting in the open for lack of adequate storage facilities (Far Eastern Economic Review, 27 June 1968.) In 1974 the province of West Bengal suffered the worst famine since 1943—this time the cause was "not outright lack of food, but that the poor have no money to buy it” (Observer 13 October 1974). The larger farmers, hoping to profit by high prices, refused to pay landless labourers in kind. It was said that the cash wages paid to some 20 million "are so low that they cannot afford to buy rice at current prices" (Times, 18 October 1974).

Great Britain's period of rule in India can be seen as a period of arrested economic development, but the subsequent period of "Five Year Plans" for economic self-sufficiency have only been partially successful. Projected growth rates failed to materialise. Business and industry now account for one-third of national income compared to 5 percent in 1947. Of the 70 percent still engaged in agriculture, half suffer from poverty and malnutrition and many have been subjected to harassment and evictions to make way for commercial agriculture. The number of landless labourers increased from 17 percent in 1961 to 26 percent of the population (37 percent of the rural labour force) in 1971 when Mrs Gandhi was campaigning on the slogan "get rid of poverty". Reforms intended to put a ceiling on the size of land-holdings have been subject to legal challenge and evasion by subterfuge and have proved ineffective.

It can be seen in retrospect that independence for the vast majority of the people of India has simply meant the exchange of one set of exploiters for another. As we pointed out in this journal and elsewhere in the years prior to 1947, independence would solve no peasant or working-class problems, only the establishment of Socialism could do that. In 1935 we wrote "Now is the time for those in India who really desire Socialism to strike a blow for it by preparing the way for the genuine Socialist Party of India, which has yet to be formed" (Socialist Standard, February 1935). Such a party now exists, and we welcome our comrades in India and join with them in the work that needs to be done before the system that exploits us all can be brought to an end.

Gwynn Thomas

Why no cinema? (1997)

Theatre Review from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend asked me recently if I ever went to the cinema. And she went on to suggest that although it was interesting to read about plays—especially plays that seem to have some significance to socialists—the fact remained that many more people go to the cinema than the theatre and that, in consequence, many more readers of the Socialist Standard would be interested in reading about films than are currently interested in reading about plays.

My friend might be right. Readers of the Socialist Standard may attend the cinema more frequently than the theatre, if only because there are many more opportunities to see films than plays. But I have a difficulty. Whilst I may have more chance of seeing a film rather than a play, most of the films available seem not worth seeing.

As a young man I was an early member of the National Film Theatre. I remember visits to the old cinema, under Waterloo Bridge, watching films by Eisenstein (including Battleship Potemkin), Marcel Carne (such as Le Jour Se Leve) and D.W. Griffith (Intolerance and Birth of a Nation), etc. And in all the major cities there were specialist cinemas where you could see non-English-speaking films: films by Vittorio de Sica (like the unforgettable Bicycle Thieves), Luis Bunuel (the savage, surrealist The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), and the early films by members of the French "new-wave” (including Jean-Luc Godard). There were even impressive and enlightening British and American films, like Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives and, a particular favourite of mine, Marty.

I’ve spent many happy and enlightening hours in the cinema. Last year, just for the hell of it, I took an Open University course on “Cinema and Society. Britain in the 1950s and 1960s", which allowed me to re-visit many of those wonderful films of, particularly the early 1960s. Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, A Kind of Loving and A Taste of Honey, films that were light years away from the previous anaethetised products of the British Film industry, to say nothing of the Hollywood dream factory.

But the changes that had occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in part stimulated by the spectacular events that had already taken place in the theatre, soon went into reverse, and by the mid-1970s the British film industry was largely a production base for American-financed films. It is instructive to ask the questions "What happened to the British cinema industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s?“ and "Why, at least at the extreme, has the theatre not capitulated to the same kind of pressures?” in what must be, necessarily, a simple analysis, there are perhaps two major reasons.

First, other than in the West End of London, theatres are to a considerable extent run by organisation which operate not unlike charities. Many are supported by public donation and public subsidy, and because of this their programmes can, in part, be determined by reference to artistic merit, public relevance and the like. In contrast cinemas are exposed to the pressures of the market. What matters is "bums on seats", not the merit of the films being shown. And marketing devices and the deliberate “dumbing-down" of popular taste, used so successfully in selling tabloid newspapers, can be employed to persuade audiences to make regular visits to the cinema.

Second, whereas each production of a play is an unique event, so that playgoers can spend many happy hours discussing the relative merits of particular productions of Hamlet, The Death of a Salesman, etc., films are available in multiple copies.This means that the same product can be made available at a variety of selling points (cinemas), which the possibility of realising greater profit margins by increasing the number of retail outlets (cinemas). The film industry is therefore more amenable to the application of capitalist modes of production than is the production of plays. It is thus not a coincidence that those who distribute and show films—usually the same commercial organisations—can determine the kind of product (the films) that are made. In this there is an obvious similarity between the management of, say, the distributive food industry and the management of the British film industry. The behaviour of Sainsbury and Tesco is paralleled by that of the Odeon and ABC cinema chains. Supermarkets and cinema chains act as corporate monopolies and as such they reduce choice. And just as independent grocers and "corner shops" are disappearing, so too are local specialist cinema houses. As a recent (7 August) correspondent to the Guardian complained: "In recent years, at least three popular and conveniently located independents have closed, the Parkway and Plaza in Camden and the Lumiere in the West End."

So it is perhaps not surprising that whilst I rarely visit the cinema—because what is shown is for the most part an insulting irrelevance, a cultural diet which seeks to imprison and brainwash—I think it is still possible to find theatre which stimulates and enlightens.

Michael Gill

Pathfinders: Lights Out, Action… (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

As UK readers will recall, people in the north-west of England had an interesting time of it just before Christmas courtesy of Storm Desmond. It was quite something to see the local town centre under water, and those not actually flooded out of their houses still had the unique experience of spending two or three winter nights without heating or power. With nothing but a candle for company when it gets dark at 4pm you quickly realise just how interminably long a December night lasts. There'll be a regional baby boom next September, in all probability.

One might have thought that heating and lights would be uppermost in people's minds, and certainly it wasn't fun for those all-electric households which had only bread and cold water for dinner. But one can manage on the whole fairly well without basic amenities, so long as it's not permanent. What one can't manage without – and this is not obvious until you experience it – is information.

People were in the dark in more ways than one. No power meant no TV, no radio, no internet, and no mobile phones. It's hard to overstate, in our hyper-connected world, just how disorienting this is. It was as if a black shell of silence had descended on the area, shutting out all noise from outside. Hungry for news, or perhaps rediscovering the importance of human contact, people left their houses and poured into the city centre to find out whatever there was to find out. Every food shop was closed, and anywhere you might conceivably purchase a candle, but Claire's Accessories was incongruously open for business and so was Ann Summers. The town authorities seemed not to have quite grasped what was going on, and it did not occur to anyone to set up a central news point. On being asked for information, the duty officer in the well-lit counter booth at the central police station smiled innocently and said 'What about?'

An early rumour was that the nuclear power station had gone down. In an information vacuum every Chinese whisper is amplified to a shout of alarm. There was a rumour (rich irony) that the water was to be cut off. The bridges were closed (why?) and many roads out of town (why?). Continuing her whimsical attempt to be helpful the station duty officer enquired 'Did you want to go somewhere?'

Police officers on the street, drafted in from other counties, seemed uniformly uninformed. One directed people to walk miles to an out-of-town supermarket which was closed. Asked if he would use his radio to check what food services might be functioning, another officer simply laughed. Police radios are only for important things, apparently.

Showing more presence of mind than the constabulary, staff from the local flooded Sainsbury's began doling out free bread and a queue formed across the large car park, redolent of Soviet Russia. Similar queues grew around the few functioning public telephone boxes, anachronistic installations nobody had even noticed the day before. 

It wasn't the end of the world, and people knew it, because M&S still had its Christmas lights on. There was good humour and bonhomie, and a complete lack of the sort of panic which those in charge like to pretend populations are prone to. There were jokes too. These were terrorist floods, people said. Isis have been stuffing toilet rolls into the storm drains to block them up. It's a conspiracy by the carpet firms. It's a Tory plan to turn the North-West into a London reservoir ready for the next summer drought.

But it was sobering, all the same, to realise how fragile modern society is and how we can be so easily disconnected from it, and how upon disconnection that same social reality so quickly comes to look like the dreamed 'reality' in the film The Matrix. A few nights of blacked out streets, where even the street and traffic lights don't work, is not enough time for social order to disintegrate (though there was a spike in burglaries), but it is enough time to reflect on the blinding meaninglessness of reality TV, X Factor shows, Facebook and a million other things we think are real and important and interesting.

It wasn't the end of the world, but one couldn't escape a feeling that the end of the world, if it ever came, would look something like this. People would pour out of their dark, cold houses, their phones dead and useless, suffering an almost existential crisis of ignorance, while authority figures stood around vaguely, pretending to be in charge but not much the wiser. The end of the world would not be caused by a mere power cut. But it would certainly start with one.

The acid test of a society is how it copes when things go wrong. Socialists are not inclined to be melodramatic, but we do think about the big questions, like what kind of social structures humans would need to survive into the far future. We're certainly not alone in the conviction that capitalism is spectacularly not equipped to ensure that.

It's not just the chaotic casino economics. A key problem with property-owning societies is that they form rigid vertical hierarchies whose only purpose is to preserve the status quo, and this is an intrinsic weakness because it makes those societies non-adaptive. The people trapped in them are also non-adaptive. They are not encouraged to cope in adversity, they're encouraged to be weak, to be clueless and defenceless and over-specialised, because this is what protects the hierarchy. They are trained from infant school to rely on authority, to do all that is ordered and nothing that is prohibited. All the glare and dazzle of the information society, with its 24/7 news channels and its movies and its myth-making, obscures the essential fact that the majority of people are perpetually in the dark, out in the cold and disconnected from power. For capitalism to be perpetually strong, we must be perpetually weak. This is all good for capitalism but it is a survival flaw for humans. A flaw like this killed the dinosaurs. A meteorite caused havoc and shut out the sun, but what really killed them was their inability to adapt.

This is what the authoritarian Leninist Left doesn't understand, any better than the proto-fascist right-wing. That's why socialists talk about the future society as a 'horizontal hierarchy', an organisational structure which allows a maximum diversity of skills without the coercive weight of vertical stratification. It's not just a lofty obsession with egalitarianism. Such a society, unrestricted by the steel bonds of social rank and position, would be mobile and adaptive, able to respond to changing circumstances, able to survive long term, and probably a damn sight better organised when the lights go out.

Paddy Shannon

China in world capitalism (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It will take more than a few racist remarks by the Duke of Edinburgh to put a damper on the Queen's visit to China. A spokesman for the Chinese ruling class tactfully claimed to know nothing of the Duke's clanger, signal ling that the real purpose of the visit was not a journalists' jamboree but talks about sales and business. British trade with China shows a sizeable surplus in Britain's favour, but is still only a small proportion of China's trade with the United States or West Germany. Just as the British capitalist class see a potentially massive market in a billion Chinese consumers. so their Chinese counterparts rely on exports to finance their high-technology imports. As the Chinese economy becomes more industrialised, so it becomes more integrated into, and dependent on, the world capitalist economy.

It is generally known that there are many "joint ventures" in China, jointly owned by overseas companies and the Chinese government. With its low rents, cheap labour power and lack of independent trade unions, China is an attractive manufacturing base for multi-national companies. Chinese-owned industry is pretty competitive in its own right in some areas and is winning ship building orders against tight competition, for instance. Already Chinese electronic goods are undercutting other low-cost producers; as was noted in the financial pages of the Guardian (16 October 1986):

Go into a Tottenham Court Road computer dealer and ask for the cheapest cassette loader. Chances are it will be made not in Taiwan or Hong Kong, but in China.

Recent regulations have given joint ventures more autonomy and freedom to hire and fire workers, though they have not gone as far as many of the bosses of the companies wanted.

What is not so well-known is that China has set up over a hundred ventures of its own in other countries. For instance, there are joint fishing companies in Senegal and Sierra Leone. One Chinese corporation has purchased an area of woodland in the United States, the timber from which is exported to China. A joint venture to mine iron ore in Australia is under discussion.

China never has been fully isolated from world capitalism, and certainly is not nowadays. Any "bamboo curtain" which insulated China from the outside world has long since rotted away. So when China massively increases its exports of cotton (as has happened over the last year), the result is that the world market price for cotton falls by fifty percent - disrupting small third-world economies which rely on cotton exports. When China plans a new nuclear power station at Daya Bay, it inevitably affects the inhabitants of Hong Kong, who live a mere thirty miles away. When the world price of oil drops and Western oil companies find that the wells they drill in the South China Sea are dry, they begin to turn their attention to other potential oilfields and China has to hold its oil exports steady rather than increase them. When China s fourth largest export earner (behind textiles, oil and clothing) is armaments. ordinary people elsewhere in the world are butchered by them.

The Chinese rulers depend on overseas equipment and expertise to modernise their own industry and agriculture. The Daya Bay nuclear plant is being built by a French company. and its “conventional" section by GEC. Pilkington's are helping to set up a new glass factory in Shanghai, while even a duck farm in Guangzhou Province (producing over a million ducks a year) was established and stocked by a company from Lincolnshire. The export drive is intended to pay for all this. Hong Kong is a convenient captive market for exports, especially of food, hence the Chinese government's treaty with Britain over the future of Hong Kong, designed to ensure that it remains stable and able to continue importing from China.

As a major competitor on the international trading scene, China has applied to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade This may involve having to reduce some of its more severe import restrictions but will give it a voice in the inner councils of the body that attempts to regulate world trade. Already China has objected to a proposed textile protocol which is seen as too constraining and likely to limit China's flax exports. At the same time, the Chinese government is discussing with the Chicago Board of Trade the possibility of participating in the futures market (that is. speculating on the future prices of grain, textiles and so on in order to make money).

Capitalism, with its imperative demand for profits, causes those who own the world to search ceaselessly for the cheapest and most reliable sources of raw materials and labour power and for the largest and most profitable markets. Divided into economic units called sometimes companies and sometimes countries, the owning class compete against each other for the right to exploit the working class. Decisions as to where to locate a particular factory or where to buy a particular material are made from the view point of economic gain, just as are decisions to close factories or to wage wars. As the Chinese rulers flex their muscles and play an ever more active role in this power game, the global nature of capitalism becomes ever clearer and so does the need for the global solution of socialism.

Paul Bennett

Film: Juliet of the Spirits (1966)

Film Review from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Juliet of the Spirits, directed by Federico Fellini 

We have scarcely settled in our seats when we are transported into a magic garden. The lush vegetation parts and we gaze on to what appears to be a house of the type to be seen in every very posh area, but which on later reflection we realise to be a very pale imitation of an ancient feudal manorial castle set in its own grounds. As if to emphasise this point, the next scene is set inside the “battlements" and we see the lady of the house surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting attending to her toilette. Great emphasis is given these early scenes and we are left in no doubt of the deliberate play on the analogy between the feudal ruling elements and our latter day parasites.

What are we discussing? Frederico Fellini’s latest film Juliet of the Spirits. Fellini, who has made such films as La Strada, La Dolce Vita and “8½’ must command the attention of those wishing to take a very close and keen look at the world they are living in. For this is precisely what Fellini has done. His skill lies not just in his techniques of film making, but more precisely on his penetrative insight into human behaviour and its background of the modern day capitalist world with its money grabbing ambience of privilege and deprivation, wealth and poverty, power and impotence.

In particular, Fellini sets his films in Italy, and he conveys with Goyaesque flashes of insight the upper crust of Italian capitalist society, with its pimps, gigolos, sycophants and hangers-on of every type and description, their idle chatter, their endless quest for amusement and diversion to still the boredom of useless and inactive lives, their constant almost diseased preoccupation with their bodily needs and desires, sex rating only second to food. But Fellini makes clear the universal application of his searing indictment (and this has occurred in all his latest films) by the introduction of the same brand of parasitical element from other countries all over the world, each with their own characteristic “national" qualities with particular reference to France, England and the U.S.A.

Is there a particular socialist appraisal of this man’s work? There can be no doubt that there is. Underlying all the situations and characters appearing in Fellini's films, is the class divided society of capitalism which is universal in the world today, and in which virtually every human being in the world is involved in one way or another. Fellini does not search in the heavens or in some mysterious recess of the human psyche to explain why people talk and behave as they do. He searches, and finds ample cause for investigation in, their immediate environs, that is in their economic and social background.

Guilietta, the central figure in Juliet of the Spirits, and of the flimsy plot on which Fellini hangs his work, is a middle-aged woman married to a wealthy man whose source of wealth is indeterminate but substantial. He brings home with him one evening a coterie of friends, a motley crowd who obviously represent a spectrum of the upper crust and their parvenus. Their behaviour, talk and manners would be more suited to the circus floor, not to be too unkind to the undoubted talents of circus artists. Throughout the film this crew or their indistinguishable next-door neighbours flit across the screen in one scene or another and in situation after situation, as if Fellini is determined that we shall not be allowed to forget the follies and foibles of our so-called betters.

Our hero husband is no longer sexually interested in his wife, and he has attached himself to more attractive mettle, but presumably he must keep in line with bourgeois family morality, so he dissembles as best he can to his wife. She, simple soul that she is, having had a stern religious upbringing, takes a little time to cotton on. On the urgent advice of her sister, a lesser innocent, she puts the matter into the hands of a detective agency. The meeting at the detective’s office is a brilliant microcosm of every solicitor’s and lawyer’s office where the sordid facts are covered over with sugared words, double-entendres and hypocritical pretensions. The bill, with its lengthy logistics, is never presented . . .  till the end. Although she is a woman fully acclimatised to the corruption and double faced morality of her class, our heroine sits through it all apparently mute and unbelieving.

All in all, the character and behaviour of our heroine seems to be at odds with her class background. This in possibly the weak point of the film. The spirits mentioned in the title of the film are those which Guilietta finds herself subjectively tormented by. Whether this is just a useful peg on which Fellini hangs some brilliant scenes, or whether they have other subtle purposes, is difficult to determine. In any event, we are continuously led back to the real world around us and all the film’s characters never cease to be palpable and tangible. In other words, Fellini, the arch realist, is having a little game. Poetic licence, no doubt. Those who have seen La Dolce Vita may be disappointed. There is not the fierce clarity and relentless exposure of every aspect of our society, high and low.

In his earlier films, the Socialist could draw his conclusions clearly. Now it is no longer so. Perhaps Fellini has mixed too much among the higher circles which he describes with such devastating accuracy. Has he forgotten the wider world that he depicted, for example, with such compassion in La Strada?

Max Judd

Selling an image (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The sheer scale of advertising is intended to create the impression of an abundance and is aimed at convincing workers—as consumers—that organised, orderly buying and selling is the only method available for distributing products on a fair and equal basis. Advertising, as an industry, is not just in the business of purely selling commodities for it also specialises in reinforcing the values and dominant ideas of class society. But although the myth makers are ultimately involved in conditioning us to accept and conform to the market and exchange relationships of the wages system they must first establish a common identity of interests between buyer and seller. The advertising moguls persist in aiming for the unattainable, for they only survive by portraying an idealised world in which everybody can obtain an extra large slice of the wealth which the workers alone produce —but somehow always mysteriously evades them.

But no matter what form the images may take, the reality of everyday life unequivocally states that capitalism only operates under the economic restrictions of artificial scarcity, and consequently an abundance for all is an illusion. Accordingly the advertising world are deceiving themselves and us, for their portrayal of working class life styles rarely correspond to the reality of poverty. Obviously such a false projection can only be maintained on condition that it contains some element of truth. And undoubtedly a few of the members of the working class do, from time to time, manage to gain entrance to the capitalist class — the reverse is also true for sometimes a few of their members are chucked out to join the rest of us. By its very nature capitalism can only accommodate a certain number of parasites, and it is just not possible for everyone to become blood-suckers, or the blood bank of exploited labour would soon run dry.

Marketing and advertising agencies have become more sophisticated in the use of persuasion techniques, employing psychologists, statisticians, market researchers and con-merchants. The psychologists concentrate on colour and perception, manipulating us with their images. The statisticians must ensure a particular product is aligned with the varied consumer demands of the market. The market researchers, on the other hand, are concerned with packaging and polishing by separating workers into convenient compartments where our likes and dislikes, plus our ability to pay for the necessities of life, are duly listed. The con-merchant's job is the hardest of the lot for they are the ones who think going to work on an egg, or eating a "Mars a day" will not only make you work harder but make you happier in the bargain as well. This sophistication and the grading of workers into different economic categories, with each distinct entity holding its own supposedly unique set of values, explains why Tesco doesn't advertise in The Sunday Times colour supplement and Country Life.

Depending on whether or not you receive the messages of class society via the Ideal Home Exhibition or the local street market so you will find the working class is being fed a different image of its class position. Put simply: the advertising world wish the working class confined to stereotype groupings where the differences in sex. roles and occupations all conform to whatever profit maximisation demands. Sales will fall if the commercials say to their stereotype house wives they are irresponsible, unhealthy and disorganised by not using Fairy Liquid. But this is exactly what such adverts suggest by directly implying that "every Fairy Liquid housewife" is responsible, healthy and organised.

To envisage capitalism simply as a system purely concerned with the buying and selling of commodities without taking into account the effects it has on our lifestyle and how we conduct our day to day living is dangerous and damaging to us mentally and physically, for by necessity the system itself needs the workers as a class to remain docile and passive and subsequently a subject class ever ready to internalise and create false impressions of themselves and how the profit system exploits their ignorance. Because the majority of workers are disinclined to enquire into the nature of their subjection they see no conflict of interest between the exploiters and exploited and consequently fail to detect they are being conditioned into believing that there is no alternative to capitalism. There is a way out of the mindless treadmill — even capitalism can't put a price tag on socialism — for socialists don't sell their ideas. We give them away free of charge at every propaganda meeting. Besides which socialists have found by long experience it is sufficient to advertise the realities of capitalism rather than indulge in crude propaganda methods of deception, manipulation and distortion. Indeed the conscious political action needed to obtain socialism is not for sale precisely because its emergence will depend on the majority realising that only a fundamental change in how society produces and distributes wealth will put an end to buying and selling, prices, profits, wages, markets and poverty.

Gravedigger

Letter: Workers’ Resistance (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I would be grateful if you could clarify, for the benefit of myself and others, the Party's position on the function of Trade Unions within capitalism.

Although I would accept that workers have to organise collectively to protect themselves against the physical and mental de-humanisation effect of the profit system. I would argue that benefits gained within such organisations arc largely short-term. Supporting their actions, therefore (especially in their present state led by such apologists for capitalism as Norman Willis), treads the thin line between the encouragement of the futile reformism of, say, the Labour Party, especially since the two have strong political connections.

Following on from this, I would be interested to hear your views on other forms of workers' resistance outside that of Union membership, such as over-manning, theft, go-slows, deliberate inefficiency and industrial sabotage - surely these are just as important as collective unionisation because they too produce cuts in surplus value (albeit. short-term) used to make profit for their bosses.

Keep up the good work.

Julian Prior

Pirbright. Surrey

REPLY

The Socialist Party's position on trade unions is based on Clause 2 of our Declaration of Principles: "There is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess". We therefore support actions of the unions against the employers when they are for objects that are in the interests of the working class. Such, for example, as an action to raise wages or to resist a reduction, for shorter hours or to improve working conditions. Inter-union disputes, actions by unions against the employment of immigrant workers, or support given to the political parties which perpetuate capitalism are not in the interests of the working class We have always emphasised that though union organisation is valuable to the workers, its effectiveness is strictly limited and it cannot end the exploitation of the working class. Unions cannot prevent unemployment.

How valuable it is can be seen from the big increases of wages following the rapid growth and improved organisation of the unions in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, when unions were mostly small and weak, Karl Marx thought that a continued fall of workers' living standards was inevitable in face of the development of the division of labour and the introduction of labour-saving machinery. As it turned out, the average real wages of British workers rose between 1855 and 1890 by over fifty per cent. Frederick Engels in 1892, looking back over the previous forty years, commented on the improved conditions of factory workers and "the remarkable improvement" obtained by workers in the big trade unions.

Our correspondent's statement that "benefits gained within such organisations are largely short-term", is quite untrue. The improvements in the 19th century, mainly through the greater effectiveness of the unions, have never been lost; this in spite of some periods of falling real wages (as during the 1914 war, and between 1920 and 1925 when prices were falling but wages fell more severely). Long-term, the slow rise of average real wages has continued, and the big reduction of hours of work and extension of paid holidays have been permanent gains. There can be no doubt whatever that if union organisation did not exist wages would be lower than now, and working conditions worse.

The value, and the limitations, of trade union organisation are well illustrated from manufacturing industry as a whole. For the years 1948 to 1978 official figures were published of the number of workers employed each year, their total pay, and the amount of the employers' profits. Their average take-home pay, after deducting PAYE and after allowing for the rise of prices, rose by at least fifty per cent. And it was not a question of the workers' total pay having fallen in relation to their output. On the contrary, the profits of the companies, measured against wages, fell by nearly a half.

But the total number of workers employed in manufacture fell, from its peak of 8,500,000 in 1955. by more than a million. Since 1978 it has fallen by another two million, largely the result of successful foreign competition which put large numbers of British manufacturing firms out of business, or compelled them to reduce output and cut staff. Our correspondent's reference to "overmanning" presumably refers to such loss of jobs and union resistance to it. The unions can sometimes delay the loss of jobs but they can't prevent it.

"Go-slow" tactics are sometimes used by the unions. They are less effective than an all-out strike and if the employers choose to do so, they can end the go-slow by a lock-out. "Deliberate inefficiency" by an individual will result in his losing his job. Unions do not go in for "theft" and "industrial sabotage". If individuals do so they render themselves liable to prosecution. That is their affair, though such actions are hardly likely to be popular with their fellow workers. More importantly, what is the purpose of it? The employers' profits would certainly be reduced and. in extreme cases, the sabotage could bring work to a halt or even put the employer out of business. But can our correspondent tell us in what way the whole exercise could possibly be of any benefit to the working class?

As regards the TUC, its affiliated unions (and of course the larger number of. mostly, small unions not affiliated) take their own decisions about the claims they make on employers and the actions they take to support their claims. What limited power the TUC has (for example, to intervene in inter-union disputes and to require affiliated unions to inform the TUC about strike decisions) are only those the affiliated unions collectively choose to concede to the General Council.

Our basic criticism of the unions is the one made by Marx. That they limit their aims to what Marx called the "reactionary" policy of seeking a "fair day's pay for a fair day's work" Marx went on to say that the workers should adopt the revolutionary policy of seeking "the abolition of the wages-system". Only when the working class comes to adopt the Socialist Party's aim of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism, and taking the essential organised political action for that purpose, will the exploitation of the working class cease.

Editors.

Editorial: Do They Take Us For Fools? (1997)

Editorial from the November 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown got carried away at this year's Labour Party Conference. The Labour government’s aim, he orated, is a return to full employment. Before the election he had resisted all attempts to have such a commitment put into Labour's election manifesto, preferring some such vague and ultimately meaningless phrase as “the highest possible level of employment”.

In 1944 William Beveridge, the father of the Welfare State, defined full employment as 97 percent employment; the remaining 3 percent “would consist of a shifting body of short-term unemployed who could be maintained without hardship by unemployment insurance. There would be no long-term unemployment and there would always be more vacant jobs than idle men” (Full Employment in a Free Society).

As it happens, such levels were attained in the 1950s and 1960s, though you’ve got to be over 50 now to remember those days. The followers of Keynes believed that this was the result of their policy of state intervention to maintain demand. But this was an illusion: the adoption of Keynesian budgetary techniques just happened to coincide with a world market boom. When that boom came to an end in the early 1970s, and Keynesianism was put to the test, increased state spending was unable to keep the boom going.

Keynesianism died in Britain not at the hands of Thatcher but under Callaghan and his Chancellor Healey. As Callaghan was forced to admit at the 1976 Labour Conference: “We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy.’’

This is now the conventional wisdom, accepted just as much by Labour as by the Tories. Only the Lib Dems occasionally advocate increased state spending, only to be slapped down by Labour for being financially irresponsible.

So how does Gordon Brown expect full employment to be achieved? Since he rejects increased state spending, he is left with relying on what Beveridge called “the unplanned market economy” automatically self-adjusting itself to bring this about. Adam Smith called it the “invisible hand" and it is a measure of the extent to which Labour has abandoned all its earlier illusions that it now expects the workings of capitalism in its private enterprise version to deliver full employment, if only sometime before the middle of the next century.

An Inevitable Accident (1986)

Book Review from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Worst Accident in the World - Observer staff (Pan Books. £2.95)

Nobody expects a team of writers from the Observer to turn out a Marxian treatise and this book is written on the assumptions necessary to capitalist society, crucially that productive activity should be assessed by reference to its profitability. Given that, it is by a long way superior to most of the quickie books which are rushed out to catch the market in the immediate aftermath of a newsworthy event. For this is a well written, informative account of what happened at Chernobyl on that awful day last April, with some historical background and a journalist's account of the chemical processes and their effects. Its theme is that the world's nuclear dream is at an end and that the future lies with new, safer technologies.

When it became apparent to the rest of the world that something had gone seriously wrong at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl there was a gleeful stampede among the media here and in America to exaggerate what was in any event a horrifying incident. One report said that two thousand people had been killed at once; another predicted ten thousand deaths in the immediate future, another talked about 15.000 radioactive corpses being bulldozed into a mass grave. There had to be a backlash to this clumsy attempt to prove that Russian nuclear technology was shoddily dangerous and inevitably the question was asked: if Chernobyl, why not Sizewell, Dungeness, Dounreay? Was is safe to allow any nuclear power stations, anywhere, at any time?

This question forced the western media into the spurious line that only Russian nuclear plants were unsafe, that only the Kremlin would have been so cynically callous as to try to hide the truth about the explosion and so deny thousands of people the chance to take precautions against the lethal plume escaping from the stricken station.

The facts are a lot less favourable to the western powers. In October 1957 a fire took hold in the reactor at Windscale and raged out of control for 42 hours. The scientists and engineers were powerless and there was the beginning of a melt-down. Finally, in blind panic they doused the thing in a tidal wave of water, although they were not sure that this would not cause an even greater catastrophe. The sale of local milk was banned over a huge area and two million litres of it were poured away. All of this was obscured in as thick a shroud of official secrecy as the authorities could get away with. In 1976 two leaks of radioactivity were found at Windscale — one had been spewing out for four years and another huge one for seven years.

In the USA, in October 1966 there was an unexplained melt of the fuel in a reactor just outside Detroit. Nobody knew what to do to stop it and when it did stop nobody knew why this had happened. A relieved, but nonchalant engineer admitted that "We almost lost Detroit". In March 1979 there was a similar emergency in the plant at Three Mile Island, which came within an hour of a full melt-down Again, nobody knew how to control the problem and it was by "sheer luck" that a full melt-down was avoided. Between 1969 and 1979 there were 169 incidents in the USA, each one of which could have led to a melt-down.

This remarkable history spotlights the fact that nuclear energy is fraught with peril which will not disperse under the verbal massage of the industry's officials. We have had these assurances before, telling us that the designers have learned their lessons and that another "accident" has been designed out of credibility. In fact, Windscale continues to be a threat, thirty years after that first fire and people who live under its menace, even as far away as the Isle of Man, have become irritably accustomed to being cautious about what they eat. what sort of milk they drink and so on. Chernobyl happened nearly thirty years after a terrible incident at Kyshtym, in Siberia, which made it necessary for the Russian government to evacuate and abandon hundreds of square kilometres of land which now lie empty and sterile, the road through bearing warning notices to vehicles not to stop, to keep their windows closed and to drive as fast as possible.

The future is no more reassuring. The new-defunct Greater London Council (which the nuclear lobby would probably consider to be not unbiased) estimated that a disaster at far-off Sizewell would produce some 2.400 fatal cancers in London, would lead to the evacuation of 3½ million people from the capital and lay waste to 240 square miles of London. One expert has predicted. from existing evidence, that we must expect a Chernobyl every ten years, spewing out wastes which will remain malignant for hundreds of thousands of years.

This all sounds incredible, and incredibly stupid, except that by the logic of capitalist society it is all very believable, all very sensible. Nuclear powers have invested enormous amounts of capital and ability into producing their bombs and their reactors, from the first plant at Hanford in Washington State to the modern showplace at Chernobyl. After the war, when the specious justifications for Hiroshima and Nagasaki no longer applied, the Labour government in Britain (who had promised us peace, international harmony and socialism, although not necessarily in that order) took a secret decision to manufacture a British bomb Only six ministers knew about this; the cabinet were not told, neither was parliament and neither, of course, were the voters. The project was given the highest priority, by Attlee's personal command. It was a disgraceful, but typical, episode, motivated entirely by a desire to re-establish the British capitalist class as a leading power in world capitalism.

But the bomb was not universally loved, as the ruling class and the Labour government wanted it to be. Doubts were expressed about the morality of a weapon of such fearful and enduring destructiveness The prospect of producing electricity through nuclear reaction was held out as a beguiling counter to these objections. The first plants got onto the drawing board under a haze of maniacal optimism which spoke of humanity overawing the most basic forces of nature, to produce electricity so cheap that it would be impossible to meter it. In 1965 a Labour minister of power hailed the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor as "the greatest breakthrough of all time" (although he did not go so far as to compare it with sliced bread) which was a measure of the deception in which the whole business was steeped.

In reality, the plants were massively more expensive, and more difficult to build than had been expected and when they were in operation they were plagued with breakdowns. Dungeness, in Kent— an AGR station — was estimated to cost £89 million and to be completed in 1970. Its first electricity was fed into the grid in 1983. at a building cost of £600 million. And when it finally comes on stream, a nuclear power station is selling its wares in a highly competitive market. At present, the power market is typically unstable, under the influence of falling prices for oil and for coal. By the standards of the capitalist market (but not by those of the "consumers", thousands of whom cannot afford to heat their homes in winter) there is now something of an over-production of electricity; the French industry, which drove through a programme of nuclear power stations with ruthless efficiency. is desperately seeking an export market for its "surplus ".

The mania of optimism stifled much of the opposition to nuclear power and a sizeable export trade in stations has been built up over the years. Plants have been sold to such countries as Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan and India (which is a world leader in nuclear pollution - one of the reactors there has exposed over 300 of its workers to levels above the international safety limits). Much of the world reaction to Chernobyl was concerned with the stability of the export trade before human interests. There was pressure from the British industry on the Italian not to close the Magnox plant at Latina, just south of Rome, for fear that this would encourage the campaign to close Magnox reactors in Britain. The French government deliberately tried to conceal the news of Chernobyl, as they have suppressed news about incidents in their own nuclear plants, to protect the industry A similar disregard for human safety caused the EEC to exclude East Germany from its ban on the import of foodstuffs from the countries affected by the Chernobyl fall-out; West Germany was concerned about the effect of such a ban on their trade with their supposedly ideological rival.

In the light of all this, it is hardly appropriate to describe Chernobyl as an accident, any more than it would be an accident if a car with no brakes and with defective steering came to grief on a journey down a steep, winding mountain road. Capitalism applies nuclear energy, as it does everything, with the motive of production for sale and profit. The drive for profit can reach the proportions of an all demanding. all-consuming, all-distorting hysteria, to the point at which the decision-makers begin to lose touch with even capitalist realities and become energised by their own ballyhoo. In this situation, human interests have a very low priority and when the inevitable disaster happens there is a ready supply of cynicism and deception as unguent for our fears.

Whatever criticisms we may have of this book, it is not composed as an unguent. Within its limited scope — its acceptance of the capitalist basis of profitability — it makes a strong case against nuclear power plants. Its conclusion — that the days of the nuclear industry are numbered — may be correct but if so it will not be because of any human factors but because yet another bubble of capitalist deception has burst.

Ivan

Obituary: Andrew Thomson (1997)

Obituary from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with great sadness that Glasgow branch report the death of Andrew Thomson.

Andrew joined the Party in 1944. He was a vehicle builder in the Springburn railway workshops. Around that time there were five or six Party members working there; indeed at one time they used to hold outdoor public meetings during their lunch break.

Andy was one of those members who are the backbone of nay branch. At many branch meetings when an outdoor meeting in Glasgow or Edinburgh was reported and the literature sales seemed high, some member would say by way of explanation, “Oh, aye. The pamphlet sales were good, but that was because Andy was selling them.” His straightforward, open approach to enquirers or even opponents of socialism was disarming and powerful. The socialist movement is built on the decent, reliable and honest virtues of workers like Andy Thomson.

The branch extends its deepest sympathy to his wife Emily, herself a member. Her loss must be heartbreaking. Glasgow branch have had many members with great abilities as speakers, debaters, literature sellers and organisers. It is doubtful if we have ever had a member that inspired such real affection as we all felt towards Andy. He was in many respects one of the best of us and the loss of his cheerful, comradely presence will be felt by all of us who had the privilege to know him as a comrade and a friend.

GLASGOW BRANCH

If I ruled the world . . . (1986)

A Short Story from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well, what if you did? Just supposing you alone ruled it? You’re a decent, sociable sort of person who woke up one day to discover you were the absolute governor of the Earth. Alright, it's daft. It's no dafter than some of  the ideas people produce in the grim attempt to defend this system, but it's a bit silly all the a same.

Only think about it. Think of the power. Think of what you could achieve. It would probably make your head swim.

Some people have these fantasies. It 's not always wild megalomania. Sometimes it's simply frustration. They look around at all the fragmented and petty pressure-groups that offer sincerity instead of strategy and they feel frustrated. Nukes. Whales. Blood sports. CND. Vivisection. Health. Housing. Ecology. Feminism. Endless just causes. Endlessly lost. Who wouldn't despair sometimes? It's no wonder people fantasise.

And they get to thinking: suppose I was in total charge What I could achieve! My head's swimming. 

Not that any of us are going to be Universal Despot of course. But some are so in love with the idea of having leaders that they do the next worst thing: they vote for one. So let 's assume you are Leader and see where it gets us.

First of all you have to consolidate. With the best will in the world it's no use being Supreme Sovereign if you haven't got supreme power. So the programme of reforms will have to be shelved for the moment.

What you need is support. You need to offer to your would-be supporters something you're not going to offer to anyone else. But what could that be? This isn't the nineteenth century. In 1986 there is the capacity to feed the world four times over. There's plenty of energy and still plenty of raw materials. There are plenty of houses standing empty, and bricks to build plenty more. The fact is, right now there isn't really anything you can offer which doesn't already exist in abundance. With the best will in the world, you have to create meaningful privilege somehow or you won't last the lunch-hour.

The socialist version of this fantasy stops here. You can be World Leader if you like and pin medals on yourself but you can't gather a single supporter because you have nothing they can't get just as easily somewhere else. You will be humoured by sensible socialists as you strut impotently in your Napoleon hat. You'll be the harmless village idiot.

Being a world ruler has far more standing however when there is a scarcity of things people need. Like food. Or houses. Now you've got something to offer your supporters - not the things themselves simply, but a virtual monopoly of the means to produce them. Your first act as benevolent (because we've giving you the benefit of the doubt) dictator has to be to create or maintain a small, privileged class. That means depriving the rest. With the best will in the world, that's the only basis for power.

It can be a very small class at that. All that matters is that they keep the rest down. So they have to have the important monopolies of life, the mines and the land and the factories. not just badges that say "BOSS" and light up in the dark. And they have to keep armies of course, in case the rest don't like this. And they have to force the rest to work producing things so that life goes on. But they have to steal all this produce otherwise the rest won't stay down. In the face of such problems of control, the reform measures have to be deferred a while longer . . .

It's quite easy to achieve all this when you happen to be in sole charge of scarce resources. It would seem like a logical impossibility to impose scarcity on a world of abundance, and yet you must if you believe leaders are necessary and conquering power is the answer. Just how do you or someone else stay on top as World Leader for even a week?

The capitalist version of this fantasy doesn't stop here. It goes on and on. You know what the answers are. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity. Money is the trick. Money is the basis of scarcity, of power and of enslavement. You must have the money system if you are going to keep power and force through your enlightened reforms on whales, foxes and decent houses. But in the process look where you've ended up.

Simply by choosing to impose good ideas by force you have become a vicious tyrant And there's more. You have effectively recreated the system which causes the very problems you wanted to solve. Oh yes. the system causes them. Whales die for profit, don't they? Nukes are made for wars which are caused by competition for profit, aren't they? Women and blacks are conditioned as cheap labour and the robbed and cheated are kept cleverly divided among themselves for the sake of the system. Thanks to you, the despot or the supporter.

That is where good intentions and poor thinking will lead any revolution which tries to impose or coerce or obligate. It is the lesson of the Russian revolution, of Iran, of Cuba, of Zimbabwe. It will be the lesson of Nicaragua even without the Contras and the Philippines even with free elections. It must be a lesson learnt right now by anyone who thinks minority rule is a solution. The Socialist Workers' Party thinks that. The Communist Party thinks that. Militant thinks that. They do not understand socialism any more than the Labour Party.

Socialism can only be voluntary. It is the co-operation of the majority in a climate of abundance. The abundance exists now Only the money system stands in the way. Co-operation exists everywhere and always has. Only we re conned and cajoled into thinking we're incapable of it. There is no need for bottles and barricades. No-one has to kill or maim to get socialism. If they try they'll just make life worse for us all. All that is needed is for people to agree that capitalism is unnecessary and undesirable. The power is in our hands. We are the workers who run society. Without us nothing moves, nothing functions, nothing gets made. If we refuse en masse to support a system of poverty, wars, states, prisons and money-scarcity, it cannot continue to operate. What else does being a worker mean?

The next time you are tempted to fantasise, think instead what we could achieve if we combined together without leaders. But don't be tempted to think that socialism is an idle day-dream. It can be a reality. It can be established immediately. It is the sole alternative to chaos, and the only real way to achieve equality and freedom. And that is a thought to make your head swim.

Paddy Shannon

CND - Out of touch with reality (1963)

From the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

When India's Prime Minister Mr. Nehru decided to prepare by all possible means for what he said might be a war against China lasting for years, he admitted that under pressure of events he and the Indian government had abandoned their long-held policy. He said that for years they had been “out of touch with reality,” and the Chinese invasion had shocked them all out of “the artificial atmosphere of our creation.” For years Nehru had been chiding other governments for their reliance on arms and the waging of war—now he was calling on the Indian workers to emulate the action of the British Government in 1940 of building up armaments after the evacuation of Dunkirk. He appealed to the American and British governments, hitherto the objects of his rebukes, to supply arms to India.

It was not only Nehru who suffered a shock to his beliefs, but also CND, for to them Nehru’s line had been a favourite example of the kind of policy governments ought to pursue. CND like Nehru has been out of touch with reality. To them armaments (including nuclear weapons) and wars, are simply the result of the governments having wrong policies: so what could be easier than for the British Government to give up its reliance on nuclear weapons and its association with governments having nuclear weapons, and set an example, which other governments would follow, of peaceful co-existence. Now CND has seen, not the Western governments following the example supposed to have been set by Nehru, but Nehru following the example of the governments which CND said were wrong. He is appealing for help to governments which have nuclear weapons. It is worth noting exactly how unrealistic CND was.

The following is taken from the CND leaflet Why We Are Marching, issued at Easter, 1962, for the Aldermaston march:

Millions of thinking people reject the government's Defence policy. Behind that looms the vast and immoral folly of the H-Bomb. That is why we are marching from Aldermaston where Britain’s H-Bombs are made, to London where our government makes decisions which spell life and death for us all.
We want Britain to give a lead: by renouncing nuclear tests, weapons, bases and policies. By aligning herself with the uncommitted nations in pressing for disarmament. By using the resources freed to fight world hunger, disease and poverty.

Now CND sees the chief uncommitted government, Nehru’s, preparing the country for war and turning resources away from civilian uses to the production ol armaments and the organising of armies. Steel plants are turning over to the production of armoured plates for tanks; fertiliser factories are changing over to the production of strategic goods; motor plants are turning out jeeps; warships are being built and the air force expanded. The Bombay correspondent of the Financial Times (11/12/62) reports:

India’s Third Five-Year Plan is being geared to meet the needs of the country's defence. A “war conplexion” has already been given to the Ministry of Steel and heavy industries. Producers in both public and private sectors have been asked to go ahead with the requirements of the Defence Ministry.

Thus does capitalist reality catch up with well-meant illusions. Capitalism is by nature expansionist and predatory, no matter that particular governments call their capitalism “socialism” (India and China both fall into this category). Privilege and profit for the ruling class is the aim, and the armed forces to hold and extend markets and control of sources of raw materials, are the means. Armed force is a capitalist necessity both to protect the propertied class against their own dispossessed and for use against rival capitalist interests.

While the dramatic somersault of India's government highlights the unreality of CND the reality has been there for them to see all along. The Indian government was ’’uncommitted" in the sense of choosing not to join up with the American or Russian power blocs, but that was all: in every other respect it behaved like all the other governments. About a third of the central government expenditure has been on the armed forces ever since India got rid of British rule. The amount has been growing more or less steadily year by year. In 1960-1 it reached about £225 million—now it will rise still more. And, such is the contradictory nature of capitalism, that thousands of desperately poor among the unemployed will get work they otherwise could not find.

The moral of this is clear. War is not in the interest of the working class anywhere, but the remedy is not the unreality of asking capitalism to behave differently but the Socialist policy of getting rid of capitalism which causes war.

Edgar Hardcastle

Cooking the Books: Osborne, Mao, Same Struggle (2016)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a good idea to twit George Osborne about his new-found love for the dictatorship in China to make the point that, when it comes to finding markets and investment outlets, ideology doesn’t matter. What does instead is the material, economic interest of the capitalist class, and that Osborne, as one of their governmental representatives, served this interest on his recent visit to China, despite it being a dictatorship and, to boot, one that (falsely) claims to be socialist.

But, in his response to Osborne’s 25 November Autumn Statement, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, fluffed it by choosing to quote from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and offering ‘Comrade Osborne’ a copy. What was he thinking of? He must have known that this would have been misinterpreted by a hostile media to paint him as a supporter of Mao, as one ‘Marxist’ quoting another. Of course neither Mao nor McDonnell are Marxists, and if anything McDonnell has been more of a fellow traveller of Trotskyism than Maoism.

The passage he quoted wasn’t very appropriate either. It was something Mao said in 1949, just after his party had won the civil war in China and assumed power there, about the need to learn how to run industries from those who had been running them under the previous regime (echoing what Lenin had said just after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia), ending with the trite punchline ‘we must not pretend to know what we do not know.’

Actually, the Little Red Book does contain some more appropriate sayings that could have been applied to the Tory government’s Five Year Austerity Plan. One section is headed ‘Building Our County Through Diligence and Frugality’.

In 1955 Mao said:

‘Diligence and frugality should be practiced in running factories and shops and all state-owned, co-operative and other enterprises. The principle of diligence and frugality should be observed in everything. This principle of economy is one of the basic principles of socialist economics. China is a big country, but she is still very poor. It will take several decades to make China prosperous. Even then we will still have to observe the principle of diligence and frugality. ‘

And again in 1957:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practice strict economy and combat waste, i.e., the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality.’

In those days there would have been billboards and compulsory workplace meetings shouting ‘Build Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality’, i.e. work hard and live on as little as possible. Maybe ‘frugality’ wasn’t the best translation of whatever the Chinese word was. A more appropriate one might have been …. ‘austerity’.

Hard work and austerity was what the workers and peasants of China got under Mao as their consumption was held down to build up state capitalist China’s industrial and military might. Since Mao’s death in 1976 China has evolved towards a more conventional kind of capitalism, with private capitalist firms, billionaires, a stock exchange and all the rest, but still under the dictatorship of the so-called ‘Communist’ Party. Not that that’s a problem for Osborne when it comes to doing trade and investment deals. Nor would it be for McDonnell if ever he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour governments too have known all about how to look after the interests of British Capitalism plc.