Jimmy Savile, Wealth, Power and Sex (2016)

From the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The leak, in January, of the draft report into the activities of Jimmy Savile at the BBC was a reminder of the deeply political character of his activities.

The most obvious sense was that in which the right-wing gutter press sought to attach fault to the entire BBC for the activities of one man, on one branch of its programming, as if the entire organisation were complicit in Savile’s acts of rape and child abuse.

Of course, others have tried to emphasise the connections between Savile and his friendship with Charles Windsor and the Royal Family. In a more narrowly political sense, he was very close to Margaret Thatcher (including staying for New Year at Chequers with her). Indeed, she actually fought to overcome the qualms of civil servants in the honours vetting system to secure Savile’s knighthood. He had himself in the 1970s appeared in Tory Party election broadcasts, and affirmed that he was ‘for the individual’ (the individual in question always, obviously, being himself).

There are strong grounds to believe that he had co-offended with Peter Jaconelli, the oyster-guzzling (he held a world record) Tory Mayor of Scarborough. Some are trying to link this relationship to a wider network of powerful individuals. Campaigners demand to know why the police never caught the pair (and suspect their power and influence protected them, via police corruption).

These connections, though, do not get to the real political character of Savile’s offending. We need to look at the whole of his life. Savile’s father was a small-time crook in Leeds, associated with illicit gambling. Savile seems to have grown up into this world. During the Second World War, he was called up as a ‘Bevan Boy’ to work in the mines, this left him free to remain in the UK, and apparently, engage in black market activities. After the war, he went into the scrap metal business (possibly with his father), and described himself as a ‘company director’, and he was clearly making a lot of money from scrap.

He soon moved into the night club business, and was an innovator for playing gramophone records at cheap entry afternoon dances. Now in his twenties, he was prolifically sexually active, with ready access to young girls and a sheen of glamour hung round him. Reportedly, he would share girls around with his friends, much like the activities we hear recently reported in Oldham and Rochdale. Clearly, he was the leader of the gang, and he could fix it for his friends to get laid, in an exercise in petty power.

He was a participant in the first Tour of Britain bicycle race, though it seems more for the self-promotion than for any sporting spirit. He soon transferred that self-promotion to the theatrical world of professional wrestling. He seems to have set great store by his personal fitness and prowess. He became established as a nightclub manager in Manchester, which doubtless expanded his underworld contacts, and taught him the value of cultivating good relations with the police.

The talent for self-promotion naturally led him into the media, where he found work on television and radio. It was a time when popular culture was rising, and he was part of the wave of ‘outsiders’ being absorbed into the established entertainment structures to give the BBC a ‘common touch’. Throughout the 60s he was a minor celebrity within youth culture, working on Radio 1 and Top of the Pops.

It was in the 1970s that he rose to become a national institution, being the face of public safety adverts (“Clunk click”) and eventually, the famous show, Jim’ll Fixit, which seemed to chime with his role as a fixer more generally. At the heart of the show was the image of a powerful man, with connections, dispensing bounty, in return for nothing but adulation.

He cemented his fame by publicly proclaiming his faith in God, whom he referred to, significantly, as ‘The Boss’ in the book he published on his faith. He was at the front of good, clean, wholesome family values. This was when his charity work took off. He campaigned extensively for Stoke Mandeville hospital, and his bringing of charity to the NHS suited the ideology of the Conservative Party (today it could be called the ‘Big Society’). Savile felt a certain proprietorial air towards the Hospital, and the Department of Health eventually had to disabuse him of the notion that it was ‘His’ hospital, no matter how much money he had raised towards its renovation.

Further, he volunteered in Stoke Mandeville and Leeds General Infirmary. Incredibly (and apparently awed by his celebrity) the authorities at Stoke Mandeville handed over a flat for his use, and he was able to come and go in the Leeds Infirmary at will. Apparently, he would shower his fellow porters with gifts (like microwave ovens) as well as wowing them with his undoubted charm. Nursing staff were apparently aware that he was a ‘sex pest’ but apparently felt unable to deal with him, either through misplaced attitudes to such behaviour, or a feeling that he was too highly connected to senior management.

He seemed to find using institutions to be an effective means of abuse. He ingratiated himself with the management at a girls reform school, Duncroft (which he referred to as a ‘posh borstal’), where he would take girls for a ride in his Rolls Royce, and would trade cigarettes for sex. In the 1980s, somehow, he was appointed to the board of Broadmoor hospital. He would hint darkly that he had connections with the powers that be that swung the appointment for him.

This was part of his methodology throughout, always implying that he had connections, not necessarily with a person’s direct boss, but the very top. The only time he was interviewed by police, he used his charitable work as a shield (with the implicit threat to take away the gifts he had bestowed) and hinted that he had tame police officers working on his side. He also hid behind the myth of the gold digger: that these women were making these claims to try and make money out of him (if only it were so - imagine if all rich men had to actually choose between keeping their wealth, or never having sex again).

The only time in his abusive career he came a cropper was when he was pestering a girl on a P&O Ferry (one he received gratis from the owners of the firm). The ship’s captain put him ashore: there is no higher authority at sea than a captain, and none of Savile’s strategies could avail against him.

Once he had his knighthoods (one from the British Queen and one from the Pope) he used the apparent status as a shield. He was also notoriously litigious. In the 1990s he appeared on a Channel Four show in the Without Walls series, called the Obituary Show, in which he explained his love of libel actions, and suing the press for even hinting that he might be engaged in child sexual abuse.

This, then, is the political aspect of the Savile case: that he was a rich man. That he was a powerful man. That he lived in a hierarchical society, where people felt unable to challenge his aberrant behaviour, and where he could dispense gifts to buy people’s loyalty. He was able to manipulate institutions, and find powerless people, who would be unlikely to be believed if they ever tried to tell the truth. He was unfailingly fawning to those he perceived to be more powerful then himself, and inveigled his way into their shadows to try and use a perceived closeness to his own ends.

We cannot say that in a society of common ownership there will not be sexual predators, abusers and psychopaths. The sheer number of humans and the spread of human behaviours mean there will always be the chance of such people cropping up. What we can say is that in a fiercely egalitarian society, where we recognise that we can only be as free as we help each other to be, people will have the courage to call their fellows to account. Where people don’t fear the sack, fear the boss, just expect the powerful to behave in abuse ways, in such a society the likes of Savile will be much less likely to prosper.

Where there are no bosses (real or imagined) and people feel that the levers of practical power lie in their own hands, his tactics would not work. Where there is no personal wealth to give out (either in petty gifts or as ‘charity’) there will be no need to fawn, and no way that one man can threaten to take his ball away and wreak destruction upon society.

Of course, because Savile worked on his apparent political connections, people will remain paranoid that there is a secret nest of abusers at the heart of our society: that is the reflection of our powerlessness, and based on the real truth that they gain power from secrecy and unaccountability. The fact that other alleged abusers, such as Cyril Smith and Greville Janner,  also used their access to institutions to gratify their lust for power shows not that there is necessarily a secret cabal at the heart of things, but that there is a systematic possibility of this fed by the way society is organised.

As such, we need to free ourselves from the Savile society.

Pik Smeet

The War Game (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

This BBC documentary film, made in 1965, shows the possible effects of nuclear attack, and was banned from television screening. It is currently being used quite widely by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a recruiting film. The effects of the winds and heat of fire-storms, of the displacement of oxygen by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and of radiation itself are portrayed to horrific effect. Mass neurosis and widespread mental debilitation are evident, and those who survive are driven to violent rioting over meagre food supplies. Evacuation and other civil defence provisions are shown as tragically futile, and it is suggested that Britain, with its NATO bases, would be the worst hit area in the world in the event of war. Armed police are shown prowling the streets and supervising the burning of bodies and there is a pervasive chaos of devastation.

The film was based on the supposition of a “minimal” attack; today the effects of nuclear weaponry would be many times more destructive. (Sigvard Eklund, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates the number of warheads in the world today to be 50,000, with the power of 1,000,000 Hiroshimas.) All the same, the film is essential viewing for anyone who is concerned to get even a vague idea of what the threat of war really amounts to. The War Game also ridicules the attitudes of the clergy, quoting one minister who has said that he trusts nuclear bombs will be used “with wisdom”, and another who defends their use provided that the war they are to be used in is a “just war”.

One important irony in the film’s use as propaganda by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is that it is based in part on the effects suffered at the bombing of Dresden in 1945, when no nuclear weapons were used. The fact is that it is not just nuclear weapons which can be responsible for unspeakable human suffering and universal devastation; “conventional” arms are quite sufficient for the purpose, to say nothing of the horrors of chemical and biological warfare. So that if CND were in some miraculous way able to persuade governments to start dismantling some of their immense nuclear stock, there would still remain all manner of other terrible weaponry. The problem is that these people, however genuinely concerned they may be about the threat of war, have responded by considering the tools with which war is waged, instead of the cause of war itself (of whatever kind) and removing that once and for all.

The cause of war was stated by Joseph Chamberlain nearly a century ago when he said that

All the great offices of state are occupied with commercial affairs. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones

and by W M Hughes, ex-Prime Minister of Australia:

The increasing intensity of competition for economic markets must lead to armed conflict unless an economic settlement is found. This, however, is hardly to be hoped for. Talk about peace in a world armed to the teeth is utterly futile.

So what are these “markets” over which so much blood is spilt? They are simply the areas in which capitalist enterprises, including that monster enterprise, the USSR, try to sell commodities in order to realise a profit. The markets, materials, territories and trade routes fought over in wars all represent profit, which belongs to the property-owning, capital-controlling class in society. The working class have no reason to fight over the property and profit of the various sections of the world’s ruling class.

The cause of war is world capitalism, the profit system, and it is that which will have to be removed. If it is not acceptable to see welfare services cut back while a minor nation like Britain spends more than a million pounds an hour on arms, then we must withdraw our support not just from Conservative politicians, but from all of the representatives of the profit system. And that applies equally to the Labour Party and the USSR patriots of the Communist Party who want nuclear bombs to defend state capitalist Russia.

It should not be forgotten, though, that war is just one particularly destructive aspect of the capitalist system. Capitalism’s converse of “peace” in some ways holds in store just as many horrors.

The expressive faces of despair which feature in The War Game are by no means uncommon in the world today. The problems of starvation or malnourishment are rife in capitalism, and sometimes unemployment is all that the working class can hope for from this system of wage-labour and capital, whether the state of affairs is officially described as “peace” or as “war”.

Clifford Slapper

Party News (1980)

Party News from the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Propaganda tour

A week or so before thousands of workers decided to spend some of their holiday on a trip to London to witness the extravagant 80th birthday celebrations of an aristocratic parasite, four members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain harmonised their holiday with a propaganda tour around the country. While some went to worship a hand-waving grandmother of no noted talent, we were campaigning for the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced, to put the means of life into the hands of the whole community by democratic action.

From London we drove to Bolton. Through South Yorkshire, noticing the number of ‘Factories for Sale’, the insanity of a society which periodically slumps into depression was graphically apparent. Workers thrown onto the slag heap of the unemployed, people hungry and shivering while factories and raw materials are guarded from use because the owners of these means of life would not stand to make a profit at such a time. In Bolton we were encouraged by the branch’s programme of weekly propaganda meetings on assorted topics and their methodical and energetic canvassing campaign. A public meeting on “The Class Struggle” was held that evening in the York Hotel.

The following morning we travelled from Bolton across England to Seaham for a debate with the Liberals, organised by the North-East branch. Recently, letters from members of the SPGB have appeared in virtually every edition of the Sunderland Echo and have stirred up a lively correspondence and interest in socialism. The debate was on the motion “Reform or Revolution?” Andrew Ellis, a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party and their speaker at the debate, put the case for the piecemeal patching up of capitalism. The case for revolution was then put to the large audience with vigour and wit. Zestful contributions from the floor followed, including one from the chairman of the local Conservative Association which challenged the Socialist Party to debate at a later date.

We left Seaham the next morning in time to arrive in Scotland for the regular Saturday afternoon outdoor socialist meetings organised by the Glasgow branch in Exchange Square. A boisterous assembly was addressed by three speakers in all, and the meeting, not being brought to an end when one democrat from the audience tried to heave the speaker off the platform, continued until early evening. Edinburgh branch run regular outdoor meetings at their “Speaker’s Comer”, the Mound, and it was to there that we travelled the next day. With a short break for supper the meeting ran on from 3.00pm to 10.00pm and was addressed by six speakers—and this just within earshot of the hapless caterwaulings of the local Salvation Army, still singing to the skies for a solution to capitalism’s chaos.

Leaving Scotland and journeying southwards our next stop was for a two-and-a-half hour outdoor meeting at St Peter’s Square, Manchester, which began at lunchtime. Comrades from Bolton and Manchester have used this speaking station before and it is now likely that it will soon be a regular socialist meeting site. That evening we had a good attendance at an indoor meeting at the Wheatsheaf public house, addressed by a party speaker on the title "Thatcher and Murray: Partners in Capitalism”.

From Manchester we went to Stoke for a debate with the Communist Party where a note informed us that, although the CP speaker had agreed in writing to debate, his branch had advised him to withdraw on account of the wording of the motion, which had already been changed once to suit them. The Communist Party is renowned neither for its principled consistency (it urged the working class to vote for the Tories when Stalin had concluded a pact with Churchill after 1943), nor its willingness to openly debate its political position against the SPGB. The socialist speaker, however, provided the audience with a comprehensive criticism of the Left and an explanation of socialist principles.

An outdoor afternoon meeting which we held in the Market Square, Derby—our next stop—was temporarily halted by some hooligans who, having jettisoned the speaker from the platform, justified the action with an earthy praise for the Tory Party. A meeting was held that evening in the Garrick Hotel on the question “Is A Third World War Inevitable?” where, after the speaker’s address, a contentious argument with a local Labour councillor—a CND member who learnt nothing from the movements 60’s failure—dominated the discussion. The following morning the speaker was interviewed live by Radio Derby on the subject of War. The fluent and provocative statements made by the party speaker prompted Radio Derby to agree to hold a phone-in programme the next time a public meeting is organised by the SPGB in Derby.

From Derby we made our way homewards, stopping off for a final outdoor meeting at the Martyr’s Memorial, Oxford. A sizeable crowd gradually congregated on this sunny afternoon and a local comrade agreed that future meetings on this site would be useful. Our 1,400 mile tour ended that evening.

Gary Jay

Activity in France

Socialists in France, aided by comrades from Britain, have been carrying out organised socialist propaganda in France since the beginning of this year. Socialisme Mondial, the French-language journal of the Socialist Party of Canada, is now on sale in a number of Paris bookshops as well as in Marseilles, Nancy, Metz, Rheims and Aix-en-Provence. So far three public meetings have been held, the first in Rheims in March, the other two in Paris; one a debate on Mayday with Charles Loriant of the Mouvement Francais pour l’Abondance par le Socialisme Distributif, the other a straightforward presentation of our case by comrade H. Moss in July. The two Paris meetings were very successful both in terms of outsiders present, and of literature sold. It is planned to hold regular meetings in Paris from September onwards. The French comrades have also brought out as a pamphlet a translation of four of Engels’ 1881 articles from the Labour Standard on trade unions and the wages system.

The Queen Mother

The following resolution was unanimously carried at the Islington branch of the Socialist Party of Great Britain at its meeting on 4 August, 1980. A copy has been sent for publication in the Islington Gazette. We are sure that many Socialist Standard readers will agree with its content:

Islington branch of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, on this eightieth birthday of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, hereby resolves to express its hostility to the existence of the monarchy and the parasitic class it represents. In an age when one third of the world’s population suffers from malnutrition, when millions throughout the world face the indignity of the dole queue, when 53,000 families in Britain alone are homeless, when health facilities are cut back while money is spent on nuclear warheads, for the workers of this country to be ecstatic that an aristocrat has survived to be eighty is distasteful in the extreme. The concern of our party remains with the wealth producers of the world, including those who face old age in poverty and with the threat of hypothermia. Let Kings and Queens be left to the history books; let working people create a better society for ourselves.

The Olympics: sport as warfare (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large number of people are currently assembled in Moscow to take part in, watch, or report on, a festival of international sport which, supposedly, contributes to world peace by bringing people of different countries together in a spirit of friendly competition. The popular mythology has it that even the compilation of medal tables, so as to discover which nation has come “top”, is preferable to other ways of asserting national superiority or increasing national prestige—score, score is apparently better than war, war. In fact, those who gather in Moscow are participating in a gigantic charade—a mixture of hypocrisy, chauvinism and plain dishonesty which mirrors accurately enough the world of which it is a part.

In the first place, there is no way in which the Olympics could possibly contribute to the establishment of peace in the world. A few thousand athletes come together in this way may get to know, and understand rather better, people of differing countries and cultures (the same sort of claim has been made about the Miss World contest!), but it cannot seriously be argued that such contacts will help prevent war. Countries go to war for good (to their rulers) economic and strategic reasons, and are not going to be diverted from such designs by the fact that a few of their citizens have made friends with a few of the “enemy”. Of course, if workers refused to kill each other in defence of their masters’ interests, then wars could not take place, but such a stand implies a degree of socialist consciousness which results from something more than just taking part in the Olympics. To suggest that the Olympics can serve the cause of peace reveals a naive misunderstanding of the causes of war.

On the contrary, the Olympic Games—like international sport in general—are used as a device to inflame nationalist sentiments and to delude workers into thinking that they have some sort of interest in “their” country doing well. It won’t just be Sebastian Coe who wins a medal, it’ll be Britain—or “us”. It is national sides who compete in team sports such as hockey and football, and it is national anthems and flags that are played and raised at medal ceremonies. Jacques Julliard, in an article in Le Nouvet Observateur for December 1979, argues that the true founder of the modern Games was not Baron de Coubertin in 1896 but Adolf Hitler in 1936. It was in Berlin that the nationalist and propaganda value of the Games was first exploited fully. And it is in Hitler's footsteps that the more recent practitioners of the propaganda art are following.

As a consequence of the exploitation of a victory for nationalistic purposes, the production of sporting champions has become a major industry in a number of countries. Russia has specialist schools and institutes for the training of the talented few—and this although half of the country's schools have insufficient equipment for physical education lessons (James Riordan: Soviet Sport). It is commonplace in the West to point out that East European sportspeople, whether described as soldiers, students, or whatever, are not really amateurs but in effect full-time professional athletes. This is fair enough, but it conveniently overlooks the fact that a very similar situation obtains in the West. Athletes are employed by sports goods firms, paid to wear their running shoes, and (in America) given generous college scholarships. The modern world-class athlete, whatever their natural ability, is an expensively-produced and carefully-nurtured product, packaged in a national flag.

And usually filled up with drugs to boot! The anabolic steroids taken by shot-putters and others are the most celebrated, but there are many examples, including—most distasteful of all, perhaps—the drugs taken by girl gymnasts to arrest the advent of puberty. Sports medicine is now a highly-developed science, but nobody really knows the risks being run by the drug-takers, especially the child prodigies who are subjected to drugs from an early age. Although doping is illegal, the rules are easy enough to circumvent: stop taking your steroids a few months before you know you’ll be tested, and you can be confident you won’t be detected. Indeed, even if you are found out, you’ll probably be competing again very soon, anyway.

So the countries that win the most gold medals arc those that have the best-organised and best-financed production line for top-class athletes. Sport at international level has been taken over by the ruling classes of the various nation-states for their own ends.

Which brings us to the boycott. In protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, a number of national Olympic Committees have in response to a boycott campaign orchestrated by President Carter, decided not to send teams to Moscow. At the time of writing, eighty-five countries only had accepted the invitation to attend, out of a possible hundred and thirty or so, the non-acceptors including such successful nations as West Germany and the United States. It is as concerted an exercise in hypocrisy as could be imagined. Just look at some of the countries that are adopting a high and mighty moral stance and not attending. Military dictatorships such as Argentina and Pakistan. Israel, which is occupying parts of neighbouring countries. America, which till five years ago was waging a bloody war in Southeast Asia. China, which just eighteen months ago invaded Vietnam.

Looking back over recent Olympics, there have been few not marked by some particularly nasty illustration of the nature of capitalism. Just before the 1956 Games, Russia invaded Hungary, and Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in the Suez Crisis. Spain (!) and the Netherlands withdrew because of the Hungarian invasion, and Lebanon and Iraq because of Suez. The Mexico City Games of 1968 were preceded by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by a massacre of Mexican students. Although there was a threatened boycott by African countries because of South Africa’s intended participation, nobody refused to attend Games in a country run by a government that had recently murdered some of its citizens. And in 1972 the Olympics went on despite the killing of some Israeli athletes by Palestinian guerrillas.

Even when there were no “spectacular” events of this kind, there were wars and dictatorships the whole time. It is difficult not to agree with Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, who, in a moment of rare perception, said in 1956:

In an imperfect world, if participation in sports is to be stopped every time the politicians violate the laws of humanity, there will never be any international contests (quoted in Richard Espy: The Politics of the Olympic Games).

But of course boycotts aren’t mounted whenever there might be grounds for doing so, only when it suits those who organise them (when they are faced with a forthcoming presidential election, for instance).

It was particularly interesting to observe the humbug that surrounded the attempt by the British government to cajole the UK Olympic Committee into joining the boycott. When sports representatives pointed out that they were being expected to carry the can alone, in that the government was doing precious little else to protest about Afghanistan, Lord Carrington informed them that a trade embargo could not be considered, as it would hurt Britain more than Russia. “We are”, he said, “a trading nation.” It is then hardly surprising to learn that one British sportsman who has refused to go the the Olympics on grounds of “conscience” — is a fencer who is an army captain, in other words a man who is trained to kill (or, more likely, to order others to kill) in defence of the interests of British capitalism. His conscience won’t stop him doing that, presumably.

The deadly serious Olympic “Games”, as part of capitalism, reflect its nature and its values. The gold medals are tainted not just with the blood of Afghans, but with the essential rottenness of all class society.

Paul Bennett

Capitalism: the sick society (1980)

Editorial from the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

To paraphrase the famous words of Marx: The experience of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of tragedies. And for every tragedy there is someone with a proposed palliative—a protester, a reformer, a counsellor—who are often described under the collective sneer of “do-gooder”.

“Do-gooders” come under the lash because they are more than patient reformers; they are busy-bodies, seeking everywhere for trouble to deal with. They excavate society’s misfits and force them, square pegs though they may be, into round holes. They flush out lame dogs and dump them, willing or not, over precipitous stiles. They are all over the place, insisting on the inherent goodness of people, even if they have to probe for it like some surgeon exploring the farthest recesses of an etherised patient’s bowel.

The reformers might argue that they are at least better than the “do-badders”—as if that were all there is to the argument. It can be conceded that “do-gooders” are anxious to involve themselves in social problems, which is preferable to trying to ignore them. They talk about a “caring society” and, although they may be confused about what that means, it can be taken as evidence of their desire for a world which looks after its people.

But further than that the “do- gooders” begin to fall apart at the theories. In many cases they attribute someone’s particular problem to some individual shortcomings or misfortune. There are, for example, still social workers who explain poverty, and the inter-reaction of this upon family relationships, by referring to an insensitive toilet training in infancy. A worker who, having been raised in a slum where only the toughest survive, is quickly aggressive will be pigeon-holed as “anti-social” or “lacking confidence in forming personal relationships” or (most damning of all) “anti-authority”.

Another glaring fallacy is the theory that social ailments can be dealt with in isolation. Bad housing, for example, is not seen as an unavoidable product of capitalism's poverty but as a mass of separate families or persons each of which has a peculiar difficulty and must be treated separately. Mental illness is regarded as arising from one person’s stressful situation when it is truer to say that it is a small fragment in the kaleidoscope of remorseless pressure in the everyday process of trying to exist in capitalist society.

The “do-gooders”, as they trudge their weary way among capitalism’s chaos and dereliction, are blind to the fact which is there in every vagrant’s eye, every city slum, every mental hospital ward. All of these problems are inter-connected; they have a common root and can be eradicated only by attacking that root.

The first matter to be considered by anyone who is concerned with social problems is the nature of society: what is its basis, how does it determine its social relationships, how does it operate? Capitalism is more than an immense collection of individual problems; it is a social system, with the basis of the private ownership of the means of living—the means of producing and distributing wealth.

The owners of the means of life are a privileged class, who employ the rest—the non-owners—in the processes of production and distribution. This privileged class are always alert to preserve and extend their superior position. Assaults against their position are outlawed by capitalism and there is a massive machinery to punish those who try to accumulate wealth outside the system’s legalities. Crime is a problem of property society.

The non-owning class depend upon selling their labour power for a living and their restricted access to wealth expresses their poverty. No member of the ruling class has this problem; none of them suffers from poor housing or involuntary’ malnutrition or vagrancy. Workers’ poverty sours their personal relationships — friendships, marriages, break up under the stress of poverty. Children are rejected and battered by parents who are unable to cope with capitalism’s demands upon them. It is hard for affection to survive in a slum.

It is not surprising that so many workers react to these pressures by trying to escape. Youngsters look for an identity apart from the uniformity of wage slavery in the mob—punks, teddy boys, football hooligans. Or they seek an outlet for their frustrations, or some mark of distinction, in a fantasy of violence. Others retreat into drugs, which can dull the effects of this insecure world and for a while offer an apparently stress-free personality.

Like any attempt to escape from reality, this response is unhelpful. Yet when it is faced, the reality of capitalism is not so hopeless; all that is needed to end this tragic state of things entirely is for the very people who endure it all to cry enough. It needs the working class to resolve to abolish the root cause of their misery and to replace capitalism with socialism, a society based on the common ownership of the means of living and free access to wealth. Socialists have faced this reality and we are confident that only socialism offers hope.

Capitalism kills (1980)

From the May 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers continue to support a system of society that kills deliberately and efficiently, not only in wars, but also by hypothermia in the aged or malnutrition and outright starvation. Capitalism is responsible for so many of the illnesses common to-day, either directly as their cause or because funds are refused for research into their origins and possible cure.

Harry Smith was a salesman, married with a nine year old son, when he died of a coronary at the age of 41. That was in 1951. Recently his son Howard died at the age of 36, leaving a young wife and two children. On the advice of his doctors he had lived carefully; but he did not even attain his father’s age. Medical research had hardly progressed in the intervening 28 years.

Tragedies such as those of the Smith family are part and parcel of capitalism. How long will we allow this inhumanity to continue? The choice is ours — capitalism, coronary and cancer on top of all the other evils workers suffer under the system, or the establishment of socialism a world where all will live in harmony, producing only for use and not for profit.

Such a society will eliminate the stresses and strains which are responsible for many of today’s illnesses, and all the resources necessary for research into and the cure of such illnesses as may still exist will be readily available. Doctors and scientists will no longer be hampered by “cut backs” and the lack of research facilities and everyone will avail themselves of necessary treatment when they need it — not, as so often happens today, months or even years later — sometimes too late to be of help.

These things are readily available now — if you can pay for them! Eric Morecambe and Peter Sellers did not have to wait for their operations. Tennis pro. Arthur Ashe recently had the arteries to his heart replaced and hopes to resume his career in the near future. The only difference between Howard Smith and these people is that they are wealthy and he was not. With enough money he too could have had the best medical care and advice and might be alive today. Are we prepared to put Howard Smith’s children at risk too? How many more lives must needlessly be lost under capitalism before we, the workers, the vast majority who suffer under the system, decide to get rid of it and introduce a sane society - socialism?

G W Featherston

Obituary: Bob Ambridge (1980)

Bob Ambridge speaking in Hyde Park. Undated.

Obituary from the April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

With sadness we have to record the death of Bob Ambridge as the result of a road accident in February at the age of 81. He was one of our staunchest comrades, active in socialist propaganda right to the end. For 53 years he was an exemplary Party member, a tower of strength as speaker, writer, tutor, EC member, Branch secretary, organiser—and anything else that was needed. Bob Ambridge was self-educated, widely read, informed in many fields, frequently staggering friends and opponents by his erudition and depth of knowledge. He was a devastating debunker of all that was pretentious, steady as a rock in Party affairs, he never wavered in his hold of socialist principles.

A Conference without Bob Ambridge was unthinkable: where with ruthless logic he disposed of anything he saw as crackpot nostrums or gimmicks. He was incapable of ‘tactics’ or dissimulation. He said precisely what he thought, always objective, oblivious of personalities and without rancour. He was a model chairman, impartial, a genuine democrat who would listen quietly to acrimonious assaults and then give his firm ruling. He was a tall, upright, handsome man, and behind the outward gruffness lay a shy, warmhearted person with a keen sense of humour. When he ‘retired’ to South Wales 15 years ago, instead of taking a rest, he began a new lease of life with our Swansea comrades. And we, in London, looked forward to Bob Ambridge’s twice yearly conference attendances as a provincial branch delegate. In this new role we were privileged to his wise counsel as recently as October last year.

Bob Ambridge left his mark on the Party. We are all the better for knowing him. To Frances Ambridge we send our sympathy and shared sorrow.

Sharpeville remembered (1980)

From the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 21 1960, at the African township of Sharpeville in the Transvaal, police fired on a large crowd of Africans who, in response to a call by the Pan Africanist Congress, had gathered to demonstrate against the Pass Laws. Sixty-seven people were killed and a further one hundred and eighty-six injured. Three more Africans were killed while attending a similar demonstration at Langa location, near Cape Town.

The PAC had announced on February 14 that it would launch a non-violent campaign against the carrying of pass-books, which they described as “the symbol of white domination”. The plan was that all African men should leave their pass-books at home, march to the nearest police-station and give themselves up. If brought before a magistrate they would make no plea, nor would they accept bail. It was further stated that the campaign would not be called off until the Pass Laws had been abolished and various other conditions had been met, including the promise of a minimum wage of £8.6.8. (£8.34) a week and no victimisation.

Predictably, police witnesses, in their official testimony, denied responsibility for the slaughter at Sharpeville. The familiar excuses were offered and accepted: shots had come from the crowd; sticks and stones had been used; the police were in danger of being overwhelmed. It is revealing to note however, that the senior district surgeon of Johannesburg, Dr Jack Friedman, at the post mortem examination he had conducted on fifty-two of the Africans killed, recorded that 70 per cent of the bullets had entered from the back. Of the police, only twelve were injured, none of them seriously.

In the debates which took place in the House of Assembly on the Sharpeville massacre every effort was made by the government spokesmen to whitewash the actions of the police and to blacken the motives and behaviour of the Africans.

Even in a police state as tightly controlled as South Africa's, any attempt to cover up an event as horrific as Sharpeville was bound to fail. News of the massacre made the headlines all over the world. The event was variously interpreted, some commentators going so far as to assert that revolution was just around the corner. Although there were — and are — many apologists for the behaviour of the South African authorities support for racism and police brutality isn’t confined to South Africa — there was a widespread feeling of shock and horror. Even many in the business world contrived to put up a passable imitation of outrage—as well they might; for Sharpeville promised to be much more than the mere disciplining of a handful of recalcitrant blacks. At stake was the continued ability of the South African ruling class to divide, rule and profit from one of the great cheap-labour markets of the world.

South Africa is effectively a slave state. Its mainly black workforce is divided along racial lines. In order to maintain control over their enormous reservoir of dirt-cheap labour the South African ruling class has underpinned its position by ensuring, through the granting of extensive and exclusive privileges, that white workers are persuaded that they have no interest in identifying with their dark-skinned fellows. For example: where black workers are deliberately under-educated, or not educated at all, white workers are granted free access to all levels of state education; subject, of course, to the competitive rigours of the examination system. White workers may freely organise in trade unions which black workers may not join. Blacks, under the policy of apartheid (separate development) have no permanent right of settlement outside specially designated areas the so-called ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’. Whites are free to live where they please. A corollary of all these circumstances is the massive job discrimination which exists throughout South Africa.

It is not as if the South African capitalists have any greater love or respect for their white employees than they have for their black or brown ones, despite the fact that all white South Africans are encouraged to believe that the blacks, whom they slightingly refer to as the ‘Bantu’, are essentially less than human. (Can this account for the behaviour of one Dominee J. J. du Toit, of the Nederduitse Hervormde Kerk reported in the Guardian, 17.1.80—who refused to conduct the funeral service, in Germiston, of a white employer because two truckloads of his former black employees turned up to help bury him?) It is rather that they exploit an opportunity to capitalise on the prejudice, jealousy and greed which they have themselves assiduously fomented among the working class as a whole. It is a heightened illustration of what Karl Marx correctly identified as a ‘false consciousness of class’;—heightened because it includes the particularly vicious concept of racial superiority. (Of course, it repays capitalists everywhere, and not only in South Africa, to play off one group of workers against another using wage levels, religion, colour, language or whatever, in order to do so. The method may be examined even closer at hand among our own coloured brothers and sisters whose isolation currently serves the miserable purposes of such as the National Front; or Enoch Powell; or Thatcher).

Sharpeville, then, represented a threat — not to the capitalist system as it was—and is—operating throughout the world, but to the peculiar and highly lucrative manner in which it was operating in South Africa. A police massacre of unarmed, protesting, black near-slaves is hardly calculated to bathe either South African or international capitalism in a very flattering light. In short, the whole affair was acutely embarrassing. But that was not all. If world opinion were allowed to get out of hand then it could begin to endanger the continued amassing of the huge profits hitherto enjoyed by some of the world’s largest corporations and banking interests.

They need not have worried. An initial tactical suspension of the Pass Laws by the South African Government led to even greater repression, with the—by then—re-introduced Pass Laws being more forcibly upheld than before. The black Africans’ right of assembly was withdrawn and the police were armed with even more punitive powers. (Following mass protests and strikes the police had resorted to indiscriminate brutality on a scale and of a type which shocked even many white bystanders.) A state of emergency was declared. The leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress were gaoled and their organisations proscribed, mass arrests were made of opponents of Government racial policy. South African and world capitalism rode out the storm.

As time passed Sharpeville slipped into the shadows and for the capitalists it was business as usual. Who today can truthfully say that the seventy black workers who died at the hands of South Africa’s police thugs brought about any noticeable change of policy in that country except for a determination on the part of the white ruling class to tighten the screws of oppression? Far more than that seventy have died since: hangings, shootings, mysterious ‘suicides’ by ‘suspects’ who ‘leaped’ from high windows during police ‘interrogation’. Some, like Steve Biko, were kicked and beaten to death for no better reason than that they were black and politically articulate. Then there were the Soweto riots, resulting in yet another crop of police killings. Hundreds languish in prisons such as Robben Island, convicted on trumped- up charges which the South African judiciary and police, lackeys that they are, have ensured need no proper substantiation.

What message, then, should workers draw from these and other similar happenings around the world? Firstly: it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that, appalling though such disasters as Sharpeville are, they are nevertheless manifestations of a condition which all the world’s workers share: the capitalistic exploitation of their labour power in exchange for wages. If this can be achieved voluntarily then so much the better. If it cannot then our masters can resort to the methods described above. This would be true even were the present white regime in South Africa to be overthrown and replaced by black rule: black governments throughout Africa bear witness to the validity of this assertion. Doubters will shortly be in a position to test it anew against events taking place in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia on South Africa’s borders. At the time of writing, that country—ostensibly preparing for elections—is demonstrating all the signs of a plunge into a civil war even more ferocious than it has suffered hitherto. What is certain is that whoever emerges ‘victorious’ will proceed with as much dispatch as possible to take over capitalism where the last lot left off. (In reassuring Rhodesian whites of their future position, the so called Marxist Robert Mugabe was reported by the BBC on 27 January as saying that if his party came to power they would have to inherit a capitalist economy and any reforms would be built on that basis.) It will make not a scrap of difference whether the troops who hold the ring are South African, British, Cuban, or whatever: black and white workers alike will merely find themselves saddled with a new set of exploiters. The demands that are made of them will not have changed. And it is certain that unless and until workers are prepared to understand this then any protest they may make can in the end be no more effective than that which led to the bloodletting at Sharpeville.

Richard Cooper

Editorial: Where we stand (1980)

Editorial from the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands solely for socialism—a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. The object and declaration of principles of the Socialist Party were laid down in 1904 when a group of revolutionary socialists broke away from the Social Democratic Federation, a party which paid lip service to the idea of socialism, but saw fit to campaign for a programme of reforms of capitalism ‘in the meantime’. From the start the SPGB recognised the fundamental distinction between reformism and revolution: the former professes to eradicate specific symptoms of capitalism; the latter aims to wipe out the disease. The SPGB has never gone to the working class with a programme of reforms. Our message has always been clear: the capitalist system will never run in the interest of the working class; only socialism can solve the problems of capitalism. The seventy-five years, in which the SPGB has constantly stated this theme, are themselves testimony to the futility of trying to reform the present system. After three quarters of a century of welfare reforms workers still have to go out and sell themselves on the labour market for a wage or salary in order to live.

All this time after those few men and women left the reformist road and established a socialist party, capitalism still commands the support of the mass of the working class. Millions have died for want of food, millions have been slaughtered in wars, millions have suffered in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist purges, Tory, Liberal, Labour, Social-Democrat, Christian-Dcmocrat, Communist and Fascist governments have been elected by workers to preside over this inhumane mess. None has made any fundamental difference. Dictatorship or political democracy, rich nation or poor nation, Christian or Moslem country, the vast majority of workers have willingly given the capitalist class the go-ahead. The SPGB has stood alone in condemning capitalism and proposing a workable political alternative.

In 1917 the myth was created of a working class revolution for socialism in a land where the working class was only a small minority of the overwhelmingly peasant population, where capitalism was still emerging and where socialist ideas hardly existed. The Leninism of the Russian Revolution and subsequent revolutions of its kind has done much to distort the workers’ ideas of socialism. It still remains, that socialism is an impossibility unless the majority of the working class is socialist. It is the SPGB which has correctly analysed the state capitalist regimes which pose as socialism.

The organs of capitalist propaganda, from the churches to the schools to the mass media, have told workers that they are naturally lazy, selfish, aggressive and unco-operative. Workers are told that owing to this natural inability they must accept political leadership by men of wealth and wisdom. Despite the collective intelligence of the church, the aristocracy and the politicians society is still in a hopeless mess. Could it be that, unlike sheep, human beings need critical thought and not leadership in order to make the world a fit place to live in? The SPGB has consistently argued that the working class is quite capable of understanding socialist ideas without leaders and of organising a co-operative society-without government.

Capitalism has set worker against worker. In time of war it whips up wild nationalist sentiments, deceptively trying to associate the interest of property less workers with that of the owning minority. When capitalism goes through its periodic crises scapegoat minority groups are singled out to be blamed for the problems. Capitalism breeds racial hatred. Through the institution of its family, the present system creates social differentiation between male and female workers. All of these things—nationalism, racism and sexism make the task of socialist unity much harder. The SPGB is unique in insisting upon the unity of interest existing between workers of all countries, colours, ages and sexes.

In every area of political debate the Socialist Party of Great Britain takes a principled position in favour of the interest of the working class. For three quarters of a century our principles have been maintained without compromise. What has happened during that time has not led us to believe that we are wrong. But correctness is not enough. Socialist ideas can only be put in force when the majority of workers understand and want socialism, not just at election time, but all the time.

Women in Parliament (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty years ago, in December 1919, the House of Commons saw its first woman MP, Viscountess Astor. She was not the first woman to be elected, having been preceded in November 1918 by another woman of wealth and title and supporter of capitalism, the Countess Markievicz who had been elected as Sinn Fein MP for a Dublin constituency. (Southern Ireland was at that time still part of the United Kingdom with MPs at Westminster). The Sinn Fein party however was boycotting Parliament so Markievicz never took her seat.

Lady Astor was elected as Conservative MP for the Sutton division of Plymouth. She was an American and was already wealthy before her marriage to Viscount Astor. Astor was the MP for Plymouth, but on the death of his father in 1919 he entered the House of Lords and Lady Astor replaced him as MP, occupying the seat until 1945. She had long been an advocate of women’s suffrage and (along with an obsession about the “evils of alcohol”) took a prominent part in Parliament and outside in the campaigns for equal pay and for legislation affecting the employment of women and children.

Women had been given the vote in 1918, but with qualifying age of 30, against 21 for men. The qualifying ages were brought into line in 1928 (reduced to 18 in 1969.) It was claimed by Lady Astor and the women’s suffrage organisations that the entry of women into the House of Commons would bring about a fundamental change in legislation, with corresponding improvement in wages and working conditions not only for women but generally. As, since 1928 women voters have exceeded men voters by about 2 million, the campaigners confidently expected to see a big increase in the number of women MPs. In this they were disappointed and only a tiny minority of MPs are women. The number reached 29 in 1964 and is now 18.

In an article in the Guardian (30 October) Shirley Williams, who lost her seat as Labour MP at the recent general election, made it clear that she still holds the view that Parliament would be a very different place if there were more women MPs, irrespective of party. But she has to admit that, once women voters preponderated, the male members took up the so-called “women’s issues”—after all it was votes they were after.

Many Acts of Parliament have been passed affecting these issues, including the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act, both of which came into force in December 1979.

How much in fact have these Acts altered the operation of capitalism to the benefit of those for whom they were intended?

In the first place the advocates of such legislation overlook that the employers, whether private companies or nationalised boards, are in business to make a profit and with this in mind will always pay as wages as little as they can. Secondly, employers will seek legal ways round the Acts, or will ignore them. In the 1930s it was estimated that half the agricultural workers were being paid less than the minimum rates that were supposed to apply: they preferred to accept lower pay rather than be unemployed and perhaps be evicted from their tied cottages.

In their pay, women’s average weekly takings were increasing relative to men’s in the years before the Equal Pay Act, possibly reflecting the larger numbers of women workers who were organising in trade unions. Women’s pay has continued to increase since 1975, but according to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth the position in 1978 was that women workers as a whole received only 59 per cent of the pay of men, this reflecting the fact that a larger proportion of women are in the lower-paid occupations.

Over the same period women workers have been increasingly hit by unemployment. In the years 1973-75 the number of unemployed women was 22 per cent of the number of unemployed men. Since 1975 the figure has risen each year and in 1978 was 37 per cent.

In short capitalism has largely nullified the intentions of those who thought to change women’s position by legislation. Women workers, like males are exploited as members of the working class. Their problems call for working class action not the remedy of Lady Astor and the women’s organisations based on the simplistic belief that having women MPs would change the scene. In 1919, replacing a male supporter of capitalism in Plymouth by his wife, another supporter of capitalism, made no difference to capitalism or the politics of the working class; and the same applies to Shirley Williams’ plea for more women MPs now.

Before women had the vote male workers, who formed a big majority of the electorate, chose to return to Parliament Tory, Labour and Liberal MPs committed to the continuation of capitalism. Since women got the vote they have continued to follow the same barren policy.

Edgar Hardcastle

Discovering capitalism (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be an exaggeration to say that we owe the Industrial Revolution to the stink of bad offal. Yet the fact is that when Portuguese ships were sent to explore the coast of Africa, it was partly in the hope of discovering an easterly route to the Indies, and so destroy the Muslim monopoly of the spice trade. Spices were essential to the meat-eating classes, in an age of famines and epidemics when refrigerators, deep freezes and canning were unknown.

Henry the Navigator’s crusading zeal to join forces with Prester John coincided with his country’s economic needs. Portugal possessed few resources, and the strength of the Islamic stranglehold on Mediterranean trade, with the high prices extorted for goods passing through Venice or Egypt, was too great. In 1415 Portugal invaded Morocco, an adventure which finally failed, and Henry began to organise those expeditions south which by 1430 brought corn from Madeira and the Azores. By 1443 regular cargoes of African slaves came to Lisbon, enabling sugar plantations to be developed. By the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had reached India and Brazil, and Columbus had found the Caribbean islands.

Religious and political motives combined with the economic needs of the European mercantile class to override the authority of Ptolemy’s world map. They overcame, too, the contemporary belief that near the Equator the heat would frizzle a man like pork crackling and ships would be stuck fast in hot seas thickened to the consistency of treacle.

Yet these voyages would not have happened if various technical problems had not been solved. By the fourteenth century, the use of the magnetic compass made it possible for ships to travel out of sight of land even in dull weather. Henry's shipwrights developed caravels, which combined the speed before the wind of Atlantic square-rigged vessels with the manoeuvrability of Mediterranean lateen-rigged craft. His captains joined the ‘log, lead and look-out’ navigating technique of the Atlantic seamen with a Mediterranean skill in using charts and compasses. Navigation was also assisted by the growing use of astronomical instruments like astrolabes, in use in the 1480s and later replaced by quadrants.

As they reached down south of the Equator, Henry’s captains reported that they could no longer see the Pole Star. This caused his ‘think-tank’ to devise a new method of establishing latitude from the sun’s altitude at noon. Astronomy benefit ted from the navigators' demand for accurate tables. During the seventeenth century, navigation became an art, with quadrants, sextants, telescopes and bulky almanacs, complete with correction tables for the dip of the horizon, refraction, and lunar and solar parallax. The Butterfield quadrant of the seventeenth century was accurate to one-tenth of a degree. Instrument making depended in its turn not just on the needs of astronomers and navigators but on other developments in optics, glassmaking. lense-making and metallurgy.

Another result of the increase in geographical knowledge was the development of map-making. Fifteenth century seamen used charts on which compass-roses and criss-cross rhumb lines indicated bearings. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ortelius, Mercator and other Dutch cartographers developed maps, charts, globes and atlases to an extent never known before. In 1477 the first engraved (printed) maps were being produced — among them the ancient Ptolemy world map of c.150 AD, destined to be outdated within twenty years by the discovery of the sea route to India. By the end of the sixteenth century, Mercator had discovered how to project an accurate picture of the nearly spherical earth onto a two-dimensional map.

There was a striking contrast between the Elizabethan maps of which Raleigh wrote: “The fictions (or let them be called conjectures) painted in Maps doe serve only to mis-lead such discoverers as rashly believe them.” (his expedition produced, ironically, just such a map of the River Orinoco in South America, complete with Amazons, cannibals, men with heads beneath their shoulders, and tigers!), and the view taken in the eighteenth century when Dalrymple declared: “Geography is a science of facts. . .  Surveys and Astronomical Observations only can give Precision.”

The development of printing and engraving techniques enabled the discoveries of the explorers, combined with the observations and theories of sixteenth century astronomers, to be widely disseminated, which revolutionised the intellectual climate. Facts undermined the authority of Herodotus, Aristotle and Ptolemy, and threatened even religion. The world which produced Newton and Halley was a very different one from that which produced Erasmus.

Yet the old ideas stubbornly held their ground. Ptolemy’s map showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, a notion which lasted until the end of the fifteenth century. He also suggested that there was a vast southern continent: this Terra Australis Incognita was duly drawn on everyone’s map of the world. Mercator believed (1569) in “a continent so great that, with the southern parts of Asia and the new India or America, it should be a weight equal to the other lands” and Herodotus’ theory of symmetry persisted into the mid-eighteenth century, when Dalrymple wrote that a southern continent was “wanting on the South of the Equator to counterpoize the land on the North and to maintain the equilibrium of the earth's motion”.

Columbus, overestimating the width of Asia and therefore underestimating the westward distance from Spain to Asia’s east coast, believed he could quickly reach Asia by sailing west. This mistake was as fruitful as was Dalrymple’s argument in promoting Cook's new discoveries. In both cases, the new discoveries were not at all those expected.

It has been said that ’great men are beginners'. The ships’ captains who sailed to Africa’s Gold Coast in the fifteenth century began the slave trade. Sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations developed in the New World. On Barbados the first settlers were dispossessed by subtle and greedy planters in the seventeenth century. Monoculture took over in Europe’s colonies: sugar and tobacco in the Caribbean, rubber in the Congo, coffee in Brazil, opium, jute and tea in India. The oceans of the world teemed with capitalist shipping: slavers from Bristol and Liverpool (they could be smelt a mile off), sugar, cotton, tobacco, tin, gold, silver, rubber, guano, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, jute and copra — these are only some of the goods brought to swell Europe’s capital. The labour employed on plantations was not usually free labour. Cotton and sugar cane plantations were mainly slave-based, though some convicted or indentured labour was also employed. ‘Blackbirding’ raids on Pacific islands like the New Hebrides to provide ‘contract labour’ for Queensland sugar plantations went on right through the Victorian era.

The effect of capitalism on relatively backward peoples was to destroy their cultures (Benin in West Africa sunk into a Dark Age of catastrophic wars and human sacrifices), to decimate or annihilate their populations by disease, forced labour and often by deliberate genocide and to reduce agricultural villages or tribal communities into debt-ridden peons, share-croppers and indentured labourers on massive plantations.

Even in the twentieth century, indentured or contract labour, hardly distinguishable from slavery, was producing cocoa on San Thome; the ‘labourers’ were still being shipped from Angola in the fifties (John Gunther. Inside Africa, 1955). In the Belgian Congo, “the monstrous assembly line which spewed out the rubber was very simply worked. The only machinery required was a supply of guns, knives and whips. Labour presented no problem.” (Rene MacColl, Roger Casement). Torture, mutilation, murder and terror were as common on the Putumayo in Brazil as in the Congo. The same can be said of eighteenth century Jamaica, which Dr. Johnson described as “a place of great wealth, a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves”.

These are only some of the horrors produced by the capitalist system. The early discoverers bartered and plundered. The Merchant Venturers used profits from early ventures to accumulate greater capital. Expanding colonial trade helped develop Europe's big ports, shipping and industry. The growth of the cotton plantations assisted the development of the factory system. The world market in commodities expanded at an increasing rate from the sixteenth century onwards.

The discoveries also led to a development of scientific techniques and instruments. By the eighteenth century naturalists travelled with Cook on his expeditions, Linnaeus was able to classify many botanical species, and in the nineteenth century a sea-going naturalist, Charles Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. A hundred years ago, the Challenger, on a three-year voyage, took five hundred deep bearings with a hemp line several miles long; each sounding took a day. In 1926-7 a German research ship took 67,000 soundings while under way at twenty-minute intervals. Now Glomar Challenger and Explorer can drill deep into the earth’s crust at the bottom of the oceans - a measure of the tremendous growth of human knowledge and technology under capitalism.

The history of exploration and discovery provides numerous illustrations of the extent to which many interrelated factors - ideas, outstanding individuals, technology, economic needs — contribute to developing our knowledge and how we use nature. Knowledge is a social product; not abstract pure science but something sought and accumulated in a given social, political and economic context, only to be obtained in certain historical circumstances. “Men make their own history”, wrote Marx, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

Charmian Skelton

Picketing and the law (1979)

From the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right to strike was only secured in 1875 when the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act legalised the act of picketing as long as it was ‘peaceful’ and did not constitute a ‘conspiracy’. There is considerable legal controversy about what picketing actually is but, essentially, it is the necessary effort made by workers to prevent other workers from aiding the employer with whom they are in dispute, either by taking over their jobs or by supplying the employer with goods needed to maintain efficient production. It is a correct and necessary tactic without which the strike weapon would be sterile. Any efforts by the government or the judges to weaken the right to picket peacefully is a direct attack upon the right to strike. Workers should be opposed to them.

Conspiracy

The Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act was no sooner passed than it was used by the courts to prevent picketing. This was done by employers bringing civil actions against workers for what was considered to be a ‘malicious interference with the freedom of contract’. In short, while the 1875 Act permitted peaceful picketing it did not preclude employers from prosecuting strikers for conspiring —an important and mysterious word in labour law—to damage their employer’s interest. The 1890s, mistakenly portrayed by some historians as the golden decade of New Union militancy after the success of the 1889 dockers’ strike, was a period of vicious employers’ backlash against the right to picket.

Pickets were prosecuted and found guilty of criminal intimidation. But it was left to the police to determine what was meant by intimidation. Communicating that there was a strike was considered legal, but attempting to put an argument to a fellow worker was classed as intimidating behaviour. In 1891, the Queen’s Bench decision in the case of Curran v. Treleavan slightly improved things by laying down that pickets could only be guilty of intimidation if the action threatened would, if executed, have been a criminal offence. In other words, a picket could be found guilty of intimidation for threatening a delivery man with a punch on the nose if he crossed the picket line, but not for simply speaking to him which had been viewed by the courts as intimidation before 1891.

In 1895 it was decided by the courts in the case of Trollope v. The London Building Trades Federation that it was a ‘conspiracy to injure’ for a union to publish a black-list of non-union firms. Needless to say, blacklists against employees seen to be ‘trouble-makers’ have never been opposed by the law. The most important case of the 1890s was that of Lyons v. Wilkins in 1899. Although Lyons, a leather goods manufacturer, was unable to prove that Wilkins, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Fancy Leather Workers, had provoked his members to use threats or violence while picketing, he was found guilty of ‘maliciously inducing or conspiring to induce, persons not to enter the employment of the plaintiff. So, the court had come down firmly on the right of employers to employ free, or non-union labour. It was in this case at the Court of Appeal that one of the judges, Lindley, declared that

You cannot make a strike effective without doing more than what is lawful.

The culmination of this anti-union period was in 1901 when the court accepted the action by the Taff Vale Railway company against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants which had organised picketing against the former during a bitter strike. The union was fined £23,000 to cover damages to the company and costs. The Taff Vale judgement paved the way for the legal crushing of trade unions simply for engaging in effective action.

In 1906 the legal position was remedied and, with two notable exceptions, has remained in accordance with the 1906 Trades Disputes act to this day. That Act granted immunity to trades unions from action in respect of employment contracts and granted the legal right to picket:

It shall be lawful for one or more persons, acting on their own behalf, or on behalf of a trade union or of an individual employer or firm in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute, to attend at or near a house or place where a person resides or works or carries on business or happens to be, if they so attend merely for the purpose of peacefully obtaining or communicating information, or of peacefully persuading any person to work or abstain from working.

Despite government efforts in 1927 and 1974 to alter this, the current law regarding picketing remains the same as in 1906. Now, after the strikes of last winter, the new Conservative government has pledged itself to revise legislation on picketing. Any attempt by the government to restrict the right to picket will be resisted by many trade unionists. The reaction will not be unanimous, as it was not in the case of the Taff Vale judgement. Then, Richard Bell argued that

I have all along held views . . . as to the conduct and action of some of the rank and file and the younger bloods of the trades unions . . . Rules, executive committees and responsible officials have been ignored .

He went on to almost welcome Taff Vale as

a useful influence in solidifying the forces of trade unionism and in subjecting them to wholesome discipline. (Railway Review, 2 August, 1901)

Legal restrictions which give greater power to the leaders of the trades unions are likely to be supported by a number of them. But even if a majority of trade unionists do resist the Act, the state’s power is far greater than that of the unions. To criticise the state for betraying the industrial interests of workers is like blaming the Mafia for failing to wipe out crime. The state is the instrument of the capitalist class and it will always play their tune.

Temporary improvements

Just as one wing of capitalism wants picketing law made restrictive, so the other wants it made more lenient. Workers are asked to put their faith in Labour politicians to win legislative improvements on behalf of the unions. Such reform will not solve the problems faced by the working class. Temporary improvements can be won by reforms but, in comparison with the immediately attainable political conquest of political power by the working class, such reforms are not worth fighting for. After the Taff Vale judgement, millions of workers put their faith in Labour politicians to represent their interests in Parliament. Their reward has been the 1945 government which set the troops against the striking dockers, the 1966 government which published the blueprint for the Industrial Relations Act in In Place of Strife and the 1974 government which set the police on to the pickets at Grunwick and showed contempt for the low paid in the recent strikes. If Labour are supposed to be defending trades unions in Parliament, how would they behave if they were attacking them? The Fabian Research pamphlet, The Picket and the Law, after proposing a number of legislative reforms, makes the pitiful admission that

. . . none of the proposals will involve a revolutionary change in the legal framework of either industrial relations or civil rights.

So, as with all reformist struggles, much energy will be expended and no change will be made to the system which is the root of all oppression. This is the most serious charge against the trades unions: they can never bring about basic changes in the lives of their members because they are industrial-defensive and not political-offensive bodies. They arc simply the carriers of the begging bowl for the working class. The journey from trade union to socialist consciousness by the majority of the working class will be one from faith in leadership to faith in themselves, from bargaining with the employers and the state to owning and controlling the means of wealth production and distribution, from catching the crumbs to possessing the loaf.

Let the revolution, not reform, be the way of expressing working class solidarity. This government is wretched and anti-working class and pro-employer and so will be the next one and all others. Labour or Conservative, they are our enemies because they are compelled to act against our interest by the nature of the profit system which they uphold. The solution to repressive laws is not better government but no government.

Steve Coleman

Political Notebook: Hard work and happy families (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's tough being a capitalist these days. What with inflation and profit squeezes, not to mention petrol shortages, it’s almost like being a worker. After all, do we not share the same problems? Are we not one big happy family? Maggie Thatcher and the Tories would try to make us believe that. She wants us to work together for the good of the ‘nation’. She says that we are all in the same boat, rich and poor. Maggie has even discovered a new aspect of human nature — everybody wants to leave some wealth to their children. That is why she wants to sell off council houses, so that the slums that belong to the local authority can be handed over to the poverty-stricken people who have to live in them. Then, no doubt feeling suitably grateful, workers can work even harder for the rest of their lives under the wonderful illusion that they are leaving something to their children. No doubt the grateful workers will vote Tory as well. So you can look forward to receiving the mortgage in your parents’ will, as well as the clapped-out motor car.

Now according to the philosophy of Maggie, it’s all a question of hard work. Those that work harder get on and get the best rewards. Like a director of the insurance group, Alexander Howden, for example. Mr. I.R. Postgate was recently given a pay rise of £1,884. No, not per year, per week. His gross salary in 1978 rose from £45,000 per annum to £143.000 per annum (The Guardian, 4.4.79.). Funnily enough, the report forgot to mention the productivity deal that goes with this 100 per ccnt-plus increase. No doubt Postgatc will be able to increase proportionately the number of inter-company memoranda, not to mention swings with the golf club.

SELL IT

Then again, according to Maggie’s right hand (or should it be -wing?), Keith Joseph, it’s all a question of initiative. For example, it you want to get on, find something that people want and sell it. It’s dead easy. One obvious way is to rake round the attic and sell some of your old junk, even bits of paper will do. Look at Lord Cobham. He sold some old paper described as family archives for £164,000 (Daily Telegraph, 13.12.78). That’s real enterprise. Mind you, it is hard work. At the end of the Sotheby sale, poor Lord C. was described as looking ‘tired and upset’. Why don’t you sell your archives too and become rich? There’s that picture of Grannie that has been lying around for ages; or what about you and the kids at Margate in ’73?

Still, not everyone has got an attic, but what about the cellar? Sell off your old bottles for example. The Duke of Northumberland sold off his spare plonk — 18 bottles of South African sherry (1791 or 1809 the year is so important) for £3,305 (The Guardian, 23.5.79). And of course, a corkscrew to go with them; one sold for £350 and one for £170. So what about those old cans of beer . . . 

Another obvious thing to sell if you need a bit extra to make the family budget go round is an old castle or two. Lord Brooke, for example, sold Warwick Castle to Madame Tussaud’s for one-and-a-half million pounds. Mind you, can’t please all the people all the time. The Farl of Warwick, Lord Brooke’s dad (described as a tax exile living in Paris, though his home is in Rome - confusing, isn’t it?) said of his son, “He’s a clot . . .  he could have got four times that sum.” (News of the World, 8.10.78).

ONE WORLD

Still, 1 am sure she’s a good mum. Her child won’t suffer from such extravagances. Nor will any other children. After all, Maggie says we live in a caring society where all children are well looked after, just like Annie’s little one. The fact that the number of children living in families with incomes below the Supplementary Benefit level has risen between 1974 and 1977 from 260,000 to 500,000 (The Guardian, 27.3.79) is quite irrelevant. The Child Poverty Action Group reported in March this year a ‘seemingly inexorable’ rise in the number of families with children living below the official poverty line. All scroungers, Maggie? Living off the state. Sir Keith? Refusing to work. Jim Prior? Well no; 400,000 out of the 500,000 are in families where the breadwinner is in full time employment. But the CPAG has the answer. They wanted the Chancellor to raise the child Supplementary Benefit allowance from £4 to £4.85 per week. Just think of all the bottles of South African 1791 the parents could buy with that.

BUMPER CROPS

Anyway, even the poorest families could probably give their child an apple occasionally. After all, that 85 pence would probably cover three or four pounds of apples at today’s prices. This year there is going to be a surplus of over half a million tons of apples in the EEC. Wonderful! All those poor families will be given a few apples instead of that extra money. It could even save the increased burden of Supplementary Benefits, Geoffrey Howe is no doubt thinking. But what actually will they do with the spare apples? Obvious dump them. (The Guardian, 10.3.79). Why? To keep prices up. Who does that benefit? The producers. Are they the same as the consumers? No - one buys, the other sells. The buyers, if they are poor, can’t afford the apples; the producers only want to sell if they make sufficient profit. So it isn’t one happy family after all, is it, Maggie?

Ronnie Warrington