Is there a capitalist class in Russia? (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

To begin with, there is no such thing as a socialist country on the face of the earth. They are all, including Russia, China, Cuba, capitalist. Every country operates the wages system and in every country there are two classes—the majority who have to sell their energies in order to live and another class which buys those energies and pays me wages. In all countries, the state takes part in the process by adopting the role of employer. In England, for example, the state is the employer in the Post Office, the steel industry, the coal mines (made state property comparatively recently by Labour governments which thought — or rather said — they were introducing pieces of socialism). In many industries, however, there is no state ownership. Private capitalists run the bakeries, the clothing trade, the shops (though the state does own some shops—the betting shops known as the Tote). This system is known as the mixed economy and is of course a mixture of capitalism and capitalism rather like a bread sandwich.

In Russia, almost the entire economy is state-owned. Just as a British steel worker is the same kind of wage slave whether he works for the nationalised British Steel Corporation or for the small proportion of the industry in private hands, so it is with a steel worker in Russia. The only difference is that in Russia all workers, for practical purposes, work for the state; it is state capitalism as compared with the “mixed” economy. A distinction without a difference.

But, say those silly people in the Communist Party (and indeed in the entire press), there still remains a difference. In the west there is a capitalist class. We even know them by name. They are called Weinstock, Rockefeller, Thompson. They really do own the industries where the wage-slaves work. Can anyone name a comparable owner in Russia? Therefore there is no capitalist class there. Therefore it is not capitalism

There is of course a facet of truth here, in that individual capitalists do not own the means of life in Russia. The state does. The 64,000 dollar question then becomes: who owns the state? The answer is: A mixed bag of exploiters including the Communist Party high- ups; the top bureaucrats (apparatchiks); the top managers, artists and literateurs (those who write stuff approved by the state machine—the “dissidents” are lucky if they can scrounge enough paper to print their secret publications).

We are then told that in the bourgeois west you can see the capitalists. They are fat and well-fed and wear mink. They have yachts and country homes. But it is precisely the same in Russia. For a small minority, there are black Mercedes limousines, dachas in the country, villas on the Black Sea where it’s nice and warm. And even something that the western capitalists would not dare to claim for themselves: shops and stores where the workers are not even allowed in. Shops where they sell the caviare and the fine clothes. Such things would cause riots in London.

Anyone can go into Harrods or Fortnums and buy a Mars bar or a cup of coffee (and nobody would stop them buying vicuna coats at a thousand quid a time; for some reason the workers don’t seem to do that). Indeed a worker can lounge about at Harrods all day long and not buy a thing. But you have to have a special pass to go into the Harrods of Moscow. And the pass is not for you, chum. It is for the people who own the world.

The Russian workers have to shop in the stores where the cheap and nasty is sold. But the sheer contempt the Russian rulers have for their slaves is shown in ways that would shock western wage-slaves. A socialist propagandist went on a package tour to Russia last November, when the icy winds were blowing into Moscow from the frozen steppes. And he saw that the Russian workers were compelled to stand and freeze in queues outside the low-class stores, morning and evening.

In between they had to get themselves exploited for their pittance. And while scrabbling for their shopping they have the pleasure of seeing the capitalist class riding past in their chauffeur-driven cars to their posh warm stores where other slaves serve their needs.

History’s Carnival, the autobiography of expelled dissident Leonid Plyusch, describes how the children of the upper class have fresh fruit flown in during the winter from the Black Sea region to their opulent kindergartens.

The officer class in the armed forces has privileges which make those of their counterparts here pale into insignificance. They even have special parachutes so that their chances of landing in one piece are better than the workers’ in the ranks—who are expendable. Not long ago, the Russians made a great fuss about reducing the numbers of troops in their colonies like East Germany and the papers contained reports of trainloads of soldiers going eastwards. And when they stopped at the stations it could be seen that certain carriages were nothing better than cattle trucks. It must be so nice for the other ranks to know that they have got a Communist Party dictatorship ruling over them instead of the wicked Tsarist one. Too bad the cattle trucks are the same.

Actually, examples are not needed to show there is a capitalist class in Russia. If the majority of the people own nothing but their mental and physical energies, they have to sell them for a so-called living wage. But the workers produce a lot more wealth than they get back in wages. So where else can that wealth go except to the class that pays the wages—the ruling class, the capitalist class? An analogy is with the mediaeval Church, which was the extremely wealthy owner of the riches wrung from the peasants. Nobody owned the Church in the same way that, say, Isaac Wolfson owns a vast share in GUS but this did not alter the fact that the cardinals and the bishops and the abbots lived off the fat of the land.

It is true that the bishops could not bequeath a couple of churches to their children (they weren't supposed to have any, of course). And Brezhnev can’t leave a Fiat-run car factory in the Urals to his offspring. But if your children have all the best food and the best schools and the influence and contacts that well-placed families can provide it is more than likely that they will take their places as members of the ruling class in their turn. In any event, the vast majority of the population will remain wage slaves.

L. E. Weidberg

Poland 1980! A lesson from the past (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rosa Luxemburg (born in Poland 1871, murdered by German ex-army officers in Berlin 1919), socialist writer and teacher, had this to say on Lenin, Trotsky, democracy and socialism:

The remedy invented by Lenin and Trotsky, the general suppression of Democracy, is worse than the evil it is supposed to cure.  

Without General Elections, without unrestricted freedom of Press and Assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out of every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains the active element. Yes! We can go even further! Such conditions must cause a brutalisation of public life. 

Lenin is completely mistaken in the methods he employs. Decrees, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties: rule by terror, all these things are but palliatives. The only way to rebirth Is the school of public life itself, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by Terror which demoralises.  

The Proletarian Revolution requires no Terror methods to realise its objectives: it hates and despises violence and murder. It does not require this means of combat because it does not fight against individuals, but against institutions. It is not a desperate attempt of a minority to shape the world by force according to its “ideals": but the action of great masses of millions of people, who are called upon to fulfil a historic destiny or mission, and to transform historic necessity into reality.

All quotations from “Rosa Luxemburg” by J. P. Nettl.

These quotations from Rosa Luxemburg should be read alongside the SPGB statement, 'The Class Struggle in Poland - A Socialist Statement', which also appeared in the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The best way to oppose Fascism (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Violence between the extreme Left and Right has been a recurring theme in British politics for nearly fifty years, with some of the most vicious outbreaks occurring in the 1930s. More recently there have been the punch-ups between supporters of the National Front and their leftist counterparts, and although these have died down lately we can expect fresh eruptions in the not too distant future.

In pre-war days the leftists were squaring-up to Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. Then their declared intention was to “smash the fascists” and a so-called United Front was formed to bring this about. They failed and all that the violence achieved was to attract thousands of fresh recruits into the fascist ranks. The Mosleyites continued to march, hold meetings and contest elections until the outbreak of war.

Someone claimed that the lesson of history is that people never learn the lesson of history. Obviously this is untrue (otherwise there could never have been any progress, social or technical) but such a cynical view could be justified if it was based on the antics of the leftists, because they never learn. Now many of the current crop have formed themselves into the Anti Nazi League and are determined to re-stage the same useless battles that were fought long ago.

A glance at history shows that ideas which have some roots in existing social conditions cannot be stamped out by force. For example, in Hitler’s Germany, the Social Democrats and the Communists suffered twelve years of being killed and jailed yet both those organisations re-emerged at the end of the war. Nor has more than sixty years of mass murder and repression eliminated the various nationalist and other dissidents in the USSR. More significantly, despite the killing of millions of fascists, during the 1939-45 war and the vilification of fascism by Hollywood and the rest of the media for over forty years; the growth of fascist organisations and activity in Europe is front page news today.

So the notion that fascism can be destroyed by violence has not a shred of evidence to support it. Everywhere the leftists have tried this tactic it has failed disastrously - what happened to their “street fighters” in pre-war Italy and Germany is proof of this.

Ideas are rooted in the material conditions of life; people are influenced by the economic and historic situation they live in. It is no accident that fascism flourishes whenever capitalism is in one of its periodic slumps. Then fascist demagogues, by blaming problems like unemployment and bad housing on the failure of democracy and the presence of blacks or jews, are more likely to be listened to. Fascism feeds on poverty, insecurity and fear and since these are inseparable from capitalism then fascist ideas will persist as long as capitalism lasts, no matter how many heads are cracked or meetings broken up.

The claim made by the “Anti-Nazis” that they are defending freedom by preventing the National Front and similar organisations from holding meetings is absurd. Free speech can only exist when it is open to all and it cannot be defended by those who in fact abolish it. Not only does political violence not preserve existing democratic rights, it positively weakens them by creating a situation in which the authorities may restrict or ban many forms of political activity. This much is certain: the chances of getting the socialist case across in such an atmosphere of intolerance will be considerably lessened.

The only way to deal with fascists is to demolish their obnoxious, anti-working class ideas at every turn. We would welcome any opportunity to confront them in open debate before an audience of working men and women. We have nothing to fear and everything to gain from this because we are confident of the workers’ ability to understand the socialist case and of our own ability to present it. Of course, this will not sound exciting enough for leftist hot-heads looking for trouble, but whatever the right method of dealing with fascists may be, theirs is absolutely wrong.

Vic Vanni

How to survive Christmas (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is”, wrote George Bernard Shaw, “an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralising subject”—by which time even his stock of disparaging adjectives must have been running low. He was raging against Christmas—that time of year when, in the guise of a celebration of goodwill, workers all over the world are subjected to a massively insulting confidence trick.

For Christmas is a snare-infested time region for the mentally unwary, when they can all too easily be trapped in the delusion that peace on earth and goodwill to all men is simply a matter of charitable intentions, which best flourish in the Christian celebration of the birth of someone called Jesus Christ on December 25 a long time ago. How do we survive so menacing a time, with our intellects still working efficiently, able to look forward realistically to a society of abundance and human fellowship?

Although Christmas is the principle Christian festival it is in fact a lot older than Christianity and was appropriated by the early Christians from their pagan rivals. At the time Christianity was a feeble creed and needed to promote some sort of festival to attract new adherents—rather like the Young Tories laying on dances in a recruitment drive. Their most threatening competitors—the Mithraists— not unreasonably considering their time and place, worshipped the sun which was so vital to their existence and celebrated December 25 as the winter solstice the passing of the shortest day and the awakening of the life-giving sun.

In opposition the Christians fixed on January 6 and it was not until the fourth century that they adopted December 25. By the Middle Ages the Christian takeover of Christmas was complete, along with many heathen rites and symbols like the virgin birth and decoration with seasonable greenery. For some centuries the festival was a twelve day holiday, running until Epiphany, but the Industrial Revolution finished that, for as wage slavery became the dominant mode of exploitation labour time represented riches to the employers and such lavish periods of leisure were outlawed by capitalism’s morality of employment:

“You’ll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.
“If quite convenient, sir.”
“It’s not convenient”, said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used. I'll be bound?”
The clerk smiled faintly.
“And yet”, said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work”.

Dickens’ Christmas Carol is one of the more insidious of snares waiting for us at this time of year, for it propounds the myth that the poverty which Dickens could at times expose so effectively was not an inexorable part of capitalism but something which could be cured by a timely dose of charity:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge”, said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

All that was needed, apparently, was a change of heart to make capitalism, like Scrooge on Christmas Day, wake up warm and benevolent and caring which was, as that famous Victorian miser might have put it, Humbug.

If we need any evidence on this we have only to consider the way in which the leaders of capitalism have applied the Christmas myth to dupe workers into self-destructive acts and attitudes. In wartime, for example, slogans like peace on earth have become part of the propaganda on both sides urging workers to kill and destroy as much as possible of the “enemy”. Here is part of a dose of hypocrisy stammered out by George VI during the last war, on Christmas Day 1942:

. . . the message of Christmas remains eternal and unchanged; it is a message of thankfulness and of hope; of thankfulness to the Almighty for His great mercies; of hope for the return to this earth of peace and goodwill . . . The Queen and I feel most deeply for all of you who have lost or parted from your dear ones, and our hearts go out to you with sorrow, with comfort, but also with pride.

A few years later, when British capitalism under a Labour government was locked in yet another war, in Korea, the king was on the same theme, showing us what he meant by the unchanging message of Christmas:

. . . within the last few months, our countrymen have once again been called upon to lay down their lives on the field of battle. Once more, the sorrow of mourning has come to not a few British homes; in many more there is deep anxiety for husbands, sons or brothers who are facing death, enduring hardship and sickness, far away beyond the sea. To those homes, on this Christmas Day, the thoughts of the Queen and myself turn first . . .

The unchanging message of Christmas is the unchanging message of capitalism—that workers all over the world must suffer in the interests of the parasitic minority who are their masters. The festival of Christmas did not prevent World War One, or Two, or Korea, or Vietnam and, if and when it happens, it will not prevent the nuclear World War Three (although we may on that occasion be spared some unctuous royal hypocrisy from the depths of a bunker at Sandringham). Indeed, when the troops of both sides came out of the trenches on Christmas Day in 1914 to practise a bit of goodwill the authorities acted ruthlessly to prevent such fraternity ever happening again. Properly for capitalism, Christmas was ordered to be celebrated with some loss of life.

It is part of the confidence trick, to represent such times as war as abnormal and to pretend that capitalism could be like one long Christmas Day if only all those foreigners, or strikers, or criminals, would stop causing difficulties. So the myth persists of the benefits of the traditional Christmas sparkling snow on the ground and the bare trees while indoors at home all is warm and secure as the united family tuck into the turkey beside the glittering tree.

The sober truth is that industrialised capitalism ensures that chemical pollutants more commonly float adown the winter air than snow. Home is at best one of a disciplined rank of semis being bought on some ulcerous mortgage (except for the millions who exist in slums and the thousands who, Christmas or not, are actually homeless). The family under capitalism is typical of any property relationship-bonded by the most brittle ties and operating under the inhuman pressures of wage slavery. Most of those cosy symbols, incidentally, are anything but “traditionally” English; the turkey is an Aztec bird, the tree originated in Germany and so on.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

And then there are the presents. How frantically, since the summer, have we been urged to spend as much as possible on them. As the great day draws near the shops become ever more crammed with heaps of trash all of which, we are wheedled, makes the ideal gift. Forests of patterned paper is consumed in wrapping the things and in the tens of millions of cards which fly to and fro with the message: have a good time these next few days —it’s one of your few chances to relax, live a little and be nice to your fellow human beings.

All of this takes place accompanied by the symphony from a few million cash registers. Buying Christmas presents becomes like a contagious disease, with the fever reaching its height on Christmas Eve when the working class become positively delirious in their anxiety to spend, spend and spend. A few days later they are back at work with Christmas often a sour memory; shoddy toys lie broken and forgotten, the gift wrapped after shave now perfumes desperate bodies in the rush hour crush to work, there is a scrape of cold pudding on a plate somewhere, a few dregs remaining from that lake of booze on which a week’s wages was blued. Reality returns in the factory, the mine, the office, driving the ’bus through the city. It is a good time for the bankers and, perhaps, the pawn brokers; their patron saint is none other than St. Nicholas.

So how do we best survive it all? Well there is nothing wrong in wanting to relax and enjoy yourself, in helping yourself to some better quality food than you are likely to eat at other times, in offering friendship to other people. Peace on earth can do none of us any harm and goodwill to everyone makes us all feel a lot better. So how do we survive the reality of Christmas the myths, the hypocrisy, the pressures?

First of all, by seeing it for the confidence trick that it is. So when the boss, in a traditional reversal of roles, serves us at the firm’s Christmas dinner, we are not deceived; we know it might well be his or her job to discipline us for being late as soon as the holiday is over, or to sack us if the company’s accounts say that we don’t make a profit. Then we should be thinking about how we can convert the hypocrisy of Christmas into a stable reality, how we can establish a society of peace and freedom and plenty—a society whose people care for each other as part of their own existence in co-operation and not just as a guilt-stricken, bibulous interlude once a year.

So the Socialist Standard does not wish its readers a Merry Christmas. Instead we send them greetings for their survival of a hazardous experience and the fraternal hope that they will learn, from their survival, that the world does not have to be as it is.

Ivan

Working without jobs (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

From 'Radio Times' (12.9.80)

I thought the speakers in The Collapse of Work (13 August Radio 4) tended to confuse rather than clarify. 'Work’ is the expenditure of muscular and mental energy: ‘employment’ is the result of a buying and selling transaction in which muscular and mental energy is sold to an employer in return for wages.

To suggest that employment is necessary to get satisfaction from life is a gross misrepresentation of its nature. The majority of us have to do monotonous, repetitive. unsatisfying jobs for most of our lives in order to receive the means whereby to live, and the work involved is not motivated by a need to satisfy a basic instinct, or to serve society. It is an undesirable aspect of our lives which is imposed on us by the structure of society. ‘Work' on the other hand, is a basic need in man’s make-up and he doesn’t need the incentive of wages to do it.

Only by a fundamental restructuring of society, by the abolition of the class structure based on the private (or State) ownership of the means of production, and with it the wages system, can we look forward to a society free of unemployment problems.

George Pearson

London SW20

Prisons are iniquitous (1980)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

If we are to believe the present analysis of prison conditions in this country we would be led to the conclusion that a crisis has come about. For example Peter Jenkins, in an article in the Guardian (21 May 1980) stated that:

the crisis in the prisons goes deeper than the overpopulation of rotting Victorian gaols. The Prison Service has lost its purpose and imprisonment itself a good deal of its previous moral rationalisation and the result is that there is no longer any means of justifying prison conditions in Britain; they are, quite simply, uncivilised and inhumane.

Jenkins seems to suggest that the prison system could once have been defended on a moral and rational basis but that somehow something has gone adrift. What can be emphasised is that prison conditions are appalling and that those people who are the victims of those conditions, especially if serving life sentences, do, according to Home Office Research Study 51 Life Sentence Prisoners, become increasingly introverted, obsessed with the past and institutionalised. Mental breakdown is not uncommon nor is the use of drugs as a means of keeping the prison population calm.

Imprisonment has existed as a form of punishment since the thirteenth century but it is not until the eighteenth that we begin to find prisons which approximate to the present-day set-up. Before the eighteenth century prisons had been used for keeping people who were awaiting trial or a place where someone could be housed while awaiting his punishment. There were also debtors prisons. With the decline of transportation, due to the refusal of colonies to be the dumping ground for British offenders, we see the development of penal establishments. Between 1840 and 1860 sixty new prisons were built to supplement local gaols. These local gaols had been run for private profit, although supposedly under the control of the local authority. New prisons were of single cell design and this was to become the pattern. Single-cellular confinement had been introduced because it was felt to be a stricter form of punishment. In 1823 a parliamentary committee allowed candles to be used in all cells and also called for educational opportunities. Jeremy Bentham had also argued for education in prisons and had spoken of a need for prisons to be like schools in which offenders could be instructed in useful branches of basic learning. He had also argued that offenders should be taught some basic trade whereby they could earn their livelihood on release. Elizabeth Fry, working at Newgate from 1916, had attempted to provide some form of employment and religious instruction for women, although only for those who were temperate, clean and capable of decent conversation. She had also provided schooling for the children of inmates.

In 1865 cellular confinement was made the rule after the style of Pentonville built in 1842. The Caernarvon Committee urged that conditions should be made terrible for the inmate and proposed ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’. Education which had taken place in Pentonville and Millbank was stopped. From 1877 prisons came under the authority of the Home Secretary and made subject to public finance. Hard labour and solitary confinement were continued.

In 1898 the remission of sentences was introduced. Some corporal punishment was abolished as were the treadmill and the crank. In 1907 the Probation of Offenders Act was passed and 1908 saw the Prevention of Crime Act which introduced borstal training for the 16-21 age group. Borstal training included formal education and gymnastics. Juvenile courts were introduced in 1908 and these dealt with offenders under the age of 16. In 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act was introduced which made an attempt to cut down the number of offenders in prison who were psychologically disturbed. The Criminal Administration Act (1914) attempted to reduce the number of debtors in prison by allowing time for fines to be paid. This policy has been continued by the Money Payments Act (1935) and the Criminal Justices Act (1967). The 1948 Criminal Justice Act cut out penal servitude, hard labour and corporal punishment and also introduced Detention Centres and Attendance Centres.

As can be seen the major intention of most of the acts of the twentieth century has been to cut down the number of offenders within the prison system. There has also been a growing emphasis on the need for reform, training and treatment of convicted prisoners to instil in them the will to lead "a good and useful life” on discharge.

At this point it is perhaps as well to ask who are the offenders and what crimes have they committed. This is best judged by reference to the type of offence recorded by the police in England and Wales as shown in the table below:

What should be emphasised is that the majority of prisoners serve short-term sentences. Although attempts have been made to cut down the numbers of prisoners who are debtors, yet there is a sizeable prison population made up of those who have defaulted in payment of fines and those who have failed to comply with money orders.

Since the period 1964-66, in which there was a series of dramatic escapes, prisoners have been categorised in accordance with security. The guidelines were laid down by the Mountbatten Report (1966). Category A prisoners are said to be those whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public, police or state security while category B represents those who need less secure conditions but to whom escape must be made difficult.

Category C includes those who are not to be trusted in open conditions but who do not have the ability or resources to make a determined escape attempt. Finally category D represents those who can be trusted in open prisons.

Education is now common in prisons and a Home Office Policy Statement on Education in Prisons (1969) argued that:

the purpose of education in prisons is really the same as its purpose outside, namely, to help a person to have some understanding of himself, of his fellow men and of the world in which he lives and works; to acquire a skill, trade, or profession, and to pursue it successfully; to use time in ways which arc useful, acceptable and satisfying; and generally to illumine his personality.

In that sense the purpose of education is social indoctrination but again if that is the purpose of prison education then the failure rate is enormous. Much of the prison population is made up of people who are unable to cope with modern industrial life and to them prison represents a form of relief. What must be emphasised is that the crimes that are committed are related to the way in which society is structured. Laws are not based on some eternal moral code of behaviour but exist as an apparatus whereby the structure of society is maintained. Within contemporary capitalist society the basis upon which that structure is built is a consequence of the economic relations that exist within society. This is the point that Engels argued in Anti-Duhring:

the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained.

 The law preserves the rights of private property and for this reason the vast majority of crimes are crimes against property. Ultimately the function of the law is the preservation of the class ownership of the means of production and distribution and, by necessity, this includes all products associated with that production. To say that the prison system has lost its moral rationale is to misunderstand the conditions that have given rise to the system.

The prison represents a form of coercion. Its purpose is to affect human behaviour. For the most part prisoners are those who have broken the property laws and rights of capitalism and they are punished as a warning to others who might also feel inclined to reject those laws. By the same token the punishment of the offender is also expected to involve some form of socialisation so that the offender will return to society as a ‘reformed character’ ready to embrace the property laws against which he had previously acted. What those property laws signify is a means by which the vast majority of the population are denied access to the potential that society is capable of producing. To say of the prison system that it treats the offenders badly is to miss the point. The existence of the prison system is a constant reminder to the working class of its subservient role within society. The prison is a weapon for the maintenance of the iniquitous system of social relations of capitalism, in which the majority are denied access to the wealth they themselves have created.

Philip Bentley

A master's best friend (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

This cartoon accompanied the 'Why you should join The Socialist Party' article. More details on the cartoonist, R. Storm Petersen, can be found at the following link.

Why you should join The Socialist Party (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the years the word socialism has been used to describe the aims and principles of many different organisations and the policies of numerous governments and regimes. Nowadays, in most people’s minds, socialism is associated with the Labour Party and the small organisations on its left-wing or with countries like Russia. China and Cuba.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always been completely opposed to all the above forms of ‘socialism’ and, alone of all political organisations, has always clearly stated what it means by socialism and how it can be achieved. Throughout its 76 years of existence it has defined socialism as a world-wide democratic moneyless society based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution in which everyone will have free access to all goods and services according to their self-determined needs. It has maintained that socialism can only be established by people consciously casting their vote in favour of candidates mandated to abolish the present social arrangements and replace them with new, fundamentally different ones. However, before our definition of socialism and the way it is to be achieved can be meaningfully understood, we must explain the views of the Socialist Party on the present system of society and state why we consider that this system has to be abolished.

Present-day society 

We call the present system of society capitalism. And by capitalism we mean a society based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution—a society of buying and selling. This exists all over the world, in Russia, China, Cuba as well as in the West. It has not always existed and will not exist for ever. It is not an evil conspiracy but a type of social order which has been necessary for human progress. It has developed science and technology to an undreamed-of degree, united the world in communications and educated more people than ever before to a high degree of knowledge and adaptability.

But capitalism has not fully applied its advances for the benefit of the majority of the population, and it cannot. It has not united the world politically — wars go on all the time and the threat of a Big War which would wipe us all out remains ever present. It has not used the knowledge and expertise it has created to ensure useful, dignified and happy productive activity. It has put a curse on work; for most people work is equated with what is most unpleasant in life.

What capitalism has done is to create a potential abundance of wealth capable of satisfying human wants on a vast, almost unimaginable, scale but without being able to realise that potential. This is because the capitalist economic system is geared not to distributing wealth freely but to rationing it by means of the market and the wages system. It reacts crazily to the threat of abundance, as can be seen from the enormous problem posed by millions of tons of ‘surplus' food in a world where at least 10 per cent of the population is starving.

Exploitation

And even in those economically advanced countries of the world (like Britain, France, Germany, Sweden USA) which wars have not directly affected for some time and in which the most abject forms of poverty have all but disappeared, capitalism operates, as it has always operated everywhere, by exploiting the majority of the population.

Yes, the majority of people are exploited. And by this we do not mean that they earn starvation wages or live in 19th-century conditions or that employers make “too much” profit. We simply mean that people are a source of wealth which is taken from them; that they produce a greater amount of wealth than they receive. This may seem fairly obvious but it is not difficult for most people, aided by the news media, to see the world as a place in which benign employers or caring governments somehow ‘give’ workers employment. The fact is that the world’s wealth is produced but not owned by that large majority who, in order to live, are obliged to sell their labour power to an employer for a wage or salary. And despite vastly improved conditions of life for that majority over the years, their percentage ownership of the wealth they produce is actually lower than it was in the nineteenth century. In other words wealth is less evenly distributed now than it was 100 years ago. In this country in 1976 (according to the government-appointed Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth) 80 per cent of the population owned only 22 per cent of the wealth and 10 per cent of the population owned 61 per cent of the wealth.

The working class

This large majority of people who own a small minority of the wealth we refer to as the working class. To many people ‘working class’ is defined by occupation or education or even by such things as accent or table manners. These may be useful classifications for some purposes but in fact the working class is composed of those who do not own enough to live off their possessions and therefore have to sell their energies in order to live. The working class is a class of wage slaves and as such includes office workers, doctors, dentists, teachers, as well as manual workers.

Its interests are diametrically opposed to those of the other class in society, the employing or capitalist class, comprising those who own enough to live off their possessions without needing to sell themselves to an employer. Capitalists gain where workers lose and vice versa: the lower the wages the higher the profits, the higher the wages the lower the profits.

We have no personal grudge against capitalists either as individuals or as a class. We simply point out that with all the goodwill in the world their interests cannot be but opposed to those of the people they employ. To put it quite plainly the society we live in is a class-divided society and no number of appeals to ‘common sense’, the ‘national interest’ or ‘fairness’ can change this.

Class struggle and the unions

As long as we have class-divided society we will have class struggle taking in particular the form of go-slows, works-to-rule and strikes. Such action is unpleasant but unavoidable if workers are to defend their living standards and occasionally raise them. Workers do not ask for it and socialists take no pleasure in it. It must be added however that strikes, although necessary for working-class defence, are a severely limited weapon, as the general level of wages is negotiable only within very narrow limits. And it must be stressed above all that trade unions in themselves do nothing to threaten the continued existence of capitalism. On the contrary, as bargaining organisations between employee and employer, they play an essential part in its operation.

Reforms

Apart from the continual battle between employee and employer over pay and working conditions, capitalism produces a host of other problems, big and small, which it cannot solve. Among the bigger ones are war, unemployment, bad housing, shoddy goods, anxiety, loneliness, boring work, all of which add up to a society of strife and dissatisfaction and a generally insecure and frustrated existence for the majority. Suggestions for improving things come continually from the political parties involved in running the system. The reforms they advocate are often called ‘innovatory’, ‘dynamic’ or even ‘revolutionary’. But once on the statute book they rarely benefit the working class to anything like the extent claimed and, on close examination, can usually be seen to be designed for the smoother, more efficient management of capitalism and its profit machine. A prime example of this is the Labour Party’s post-war ‘show-pieces’, nationalisation (often mistaken for socialism), which has been of no tangible benefit to the working class, and the National Health Service which was, and still' is, a shoddy, back-to-work service designed to keep workers in efficient order for the task of creating profits for their employers.

Well-meaning individuals often say that you can favour socialism in the long term but still campaign for reforms in the meantime. We say that this is merely putting off the day and channelling energies that could be usefully employed in bringing socialism nearer into activities whose results are uncertain and which anyway are more likely to help bolster capitalism than get rid of it. In any case it is not the function of a socialist organisation to campaign for reforms or seek support on the basis of reforms.

So far it has been comparatively easy for the dissatisfaction of workers to be channelled in a reformist rather than a socialist direction. What most people want is a quiet, secure life for themselves and their families, but capitalism does not allow them this. They are constantly denied it by wars, crises, job reorganisation, government economics, day-to-day violence and all the perpetual agitation and change of the dynamic competitive system that is capitalism. They react apathetically to all this because they are used to decisions being made for them, arbitrarily, by ‘higher authority’ and feel powerless to do anything themselves. They may take refuge in television, drugs, working for charities, feverish pursuit of ‘success’, and delude themselves and others into thinking they are ‘happy’ in this. Yet things will not get better and, ultimately, they will have to tackle the problem at its source and take collective action to establish socialism.

 

Socialism comes from capitalism 

What makes us think they will ever do this? Well there is certainly no guarantee, but certain long-term trends in capitalism do make it increasingly likely. Capitalism has already created a large, organised, highly trained working class which carries out by itself all essential productive, administrative and educative activity throughout the world and which is inexorably driven because of its subordinate social position and its conditions of work, to challenge the status quo. Capitalism has also produced, and carries on producing, the material conditions necessary for the establishment and the practical organisation of a united world-wide society rapid world-wide communications and a potential abundance of goods and services. Furthermore many of the problems of modern capitalism (pollution, threat of nuclear war, terrorism) are world problems which can only be approached on a world scale and which therefore spread among workers a consciousness of the need for global solutions.

How to get socialism 

Because socialism will be a fully democratic society in which the majority will get its way, with full rights of dissent for minorities, it follows that it can only be set up democratically. That is to say socialism cannot be handed to a majority of people by an elite which thinks it knows what is good for them. The result of minority revolution could only be minority rule under capitalism as in Russia, China and so on. And being a majority concept socialism excludes the idea of violence. The street fights and barricades vision of revolution so typical of today’s romantic Left is pure nineteenth-century. Today no barricades could possibly stand up to the might of the modern state and, in any case, there is no need, for in the economically advanced countries of the world, where workers are most numerous and highly trained, capitalism has been forced to give them certain elementary political rights, in particular the vote. So when a majority decide they want socialism they can organise themselves as a leaderless democratic political party (just as socialists at present have organised themselves in The Socialist Party) and use the ballot box to send their delegates to parliament with a mandate for abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism.

Sceptics often ask: ‘Will the capitalist class allow this to happen?’ Our reply is: ‘What can they do against a politically conscious majority from all sections (police, army included) of the working class?

What socialism will be like 

What will socialism be like once established? Well we obviously cannot provide a blueprint as the precise details of its organisation will be democratically decided by the majority who in the future will establish that society and live in it. But we can make certain general statements about its nature.

We can say that it will mean the end of buying and selling, the end of money and the wages system.

We can say that, with the disappearance of such factors as cost and competition, it will mean people planning production democratically according to their wants and taking what they need to consume from the abundance of resources made available by modern technology.

We can say that it will mean voluntary cooperation, work as pleasure not toil, and all men and women as social equals.

We can say that it will mean complete democracy in all departments of life with freedom to choose one’s activities and occupations without being pushed around by decisions from above or by any kind of arbitrary authority.

We can say that socialism will be world-wide—it cannot be anything else; ‘British Socialism’ is a contradiction in terms and anyway the world is now so closely united in terms of communications, fashions and the rapid flow of ideas that if people in one place were ready for socialism the rest of the world could not be far behind.

Howard Moss

Why didn’t I think of that? (1980)

Quote from the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The people of Mozambique still, apparently, maintain that monkeys refuse to speak for fear that, if they do, they will be put to work”, from Modern History of Europe (Eugen Weber)

Political Notes: Tut, Tut (1980)

The Political Notes column from the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tut, Tut

“The Unions Are Angry” was a headline in the Guardian (15.10.80). Well, we all feel angry at times when things are going badly. The anger in this case was directed against ICI, the largest industrial concern in the country, who had announced they were going to lay off another 4,500 workers in their fibres division. This is of course very sad news for the workers concerned and their families. But what good does it do for the unions to be angry? No doubt King Canute was angry when the waves refused to obey his orders, but who cared? In the present case, the report tells us that ICI had lost £100 million in this division in the last five years and had actually lost a further £38 million in the last six months. No firm can carry on in the face of such figures without courting bankruptcy. And just in case anyone imagines that this problem is peculiar to the workers and management in this country, the report also mentioned that another country — Italy — which is very advanced in textiles, is losing in its fibres industry the trifling sum of half a million lire every minute. It is likely that synthetic fibres have produced synthetic anger among union leaders. They should know by now that not even genuine anger can make a scrap of difference to the normal workings of capitalism in one of its periodic crises.

What does he mean?

The words of political pundits are often as meaningless as those of the Oracle of Delphi. No doubt that helps to veil their ignorance. Here is Peter Jenkins of the Guardian (29.10.80): “The mix of the economy ought not to be an important question. A variety of mixes have succeeded in post-war Europe ranging from the dirigiste (but non-socialist) French version to the market (but social democratic) German model.” It seems to us that the spread of this “range” is from the same to the same. Just your ordinary capitalism. And what does our pundit mean by “succeeded”? Who succeeds? The million unemployed in West Germany? The million and a half in France? Still, he has managed to stumble across one spot of truth that French capitalism is non-socialist. It may even be dirigiste, only I neither know nor care what that is supposed to mean.

French lesson

Last month on French television, Michel Rocard of the French “Socialist” Party, so-called, announced that he would be contesting the presidency. Rocard, mayor of Conflans St. Honore, was educated at the elite National School of Administration.. Mitterand, his party leader, will also stand, but the cautious political manoeuvring between them is typical of the sordid power struggles of capitalism’s leaders, even if these men have the audacity to call themselves socialists. Mitterand made one statement suggesting he would not stand, and another suggesting he would. Rocard appealed for patriot votes by accusing Giscard d’Estaing’s policy of renouncing the great role France has played in history. “If he can get enough Gaullists, plus some disgruntled Communists, plus the Ecologists”, the Guardian (21.10.80) explained, “he might win”. Rocard claims to want to “get rid of the deep inequality that spoils and dishonours our society”, and he is therefore bidding for one of the most flagrantly privileged, almost regal offices that capitalism has to offer the politicians who ride roughshod on the backs of the working class. In contrast, socialists have consciously decided what they want and how to get it, and are able to organise democratically, without leaders, to that end. These confused clowns can keep their hypocritical circus acts.

Potential abundance

“Farmers have been paid between 2p and 5p a pound since the summer for fruit and vegetables which have been officially destroyed . . . The produce destroyed represents only a small part of a British food “mountain” which is growing fast as the EEC faces record crops and poor demand. The Home-grown Cereals Authority said yesterday that it expected the British share or the Community grain “mountain” to rise from less than 300,000 tonnes to 750,000 tonnes. . . Of the 12,204 tonnes of fish taken off the market this year, most has been ground into fish meal to be fed to farm animals, the rest has been used in petfood. Britain’s official food “mountain” in in tonnes: barley, 246.695; butter, 26,380; beef, 20,287; oilseed rape, 3,527; wheat, 3,152; milk powder, 2,383; rye, 300. Source: Stocks now held by the intervention board.” (The Times 10.10.80.)

As capitalism staggers on from crisis to crisis these “surpluses” are the natural result of the system of producing food to be sold in the world market at a profit. Roughly one third of the world’s population is malnourished, with millions starving to death. It is not profitable to satisfy demand which is not supported by money; the “demand” referred to in the quotation above is potent demand, from people who can “afford” food. Somebody starving to death might want food, but that does not count as demand in a system which operates on the basis of the profits of those who monopolise the food resources of the world. The alternative is a society where those resources will be commonly owned and used directly to satisfy all human needs and wants without the restrictive barrier of the monetary, profit system which can only ever work to the benefit of a minority.

Fraternal greetings

During the debate on democracy in the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool, there were certain people—called “fraternal observers”—given passes to watch the proceedings. Now these observers were doing their fraternal observing of a debate on democracy while a strike was taking place in Poland against the corrupt, totalitarian government of the Communist Party. Whose representatives were the “fraternal observers”? Not a single voice was raised in the Conference suggesting there might be something wrong in giving special invitations to these people. No doubt the leaders of the Labour Party (as of the equally obnoxious TUC) will expect similar red-carpet treatment in Warsaw in due course. From the oppressors of the working class.

Turkey: Background to a Failed Coup (2016)

From the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

A personal view of the recent attempted coup in Turkey based on talking to people there.

Writing three weeks after the attempted coup d’etat on 15 July 2016 in Turkey, my initial reaction was one of complete rejection of its validity – it had to be a ‘false-flag’ because, based on early reports, the Turkish armed forces are quite simply not that inept!

As the days passed reports and information emerged that explained why the coup had failed so quickly and dramatically. It was clear that many in the higher echelons of the armed services and MIT (state intelligence service) were not aware of the plotting and would not have supported the plotters if they had been.

Young conscripts when faced with orders to shoot on crowds of civilians protesting against the coup refused, laid down their weapons and surrendered to the people or police. The mistreatment and even murder of these conscripts by the crowds and the failure of the police to prevent it were in many ways astonishing.

A sergeant shot himself dead rather than obey an illegal order to fire on a crowd.

A junior officer, when he realised what was happening, shot dead a brigadier who was a senior commander on the ground for the coup plotters.

Thousands of people answered the call from the president via social media and the mosques’ loudspeakers to fill the streets and stop the coup. Tanks were stopped by people laying down in front of them or by having socks stuffed in the exhaust pipes. Even so, hundreds were gunned down or died in the bombing by helicopter gunships and F16 fighter aircraft.

Perhaps the single most telling reason for the failure of the coup is to be found in the actions of the Russians. Relations between Turkey and Russia nose-dived after Turkish aircraft shot down a Russian plane over Syria (eventually even NATO agreed that the Russian aircraft had not crossed into Turkish airspace). Erdoğan’s bombast and refusal to apologise led to crippling sanctions that have deeply damaged the Turkish economy. Such was the damage that eventually Erdoğan swallowed his pride, admitted responsibility, apologised and agreed to pay the Russian government and families of the dead crew compensation.

Russia’s advanced electronic warfare and surveillance post at the Hmeimim Air Base in NW Syria intercepted communications between helicopters that indicated that a coup was about to be launched against the government of Turkey. That information was channelled to President Putin via the FSB (formerly KGB) who authorised that it be passed to MIT (Turkish Intelligence Service). Russia’s action has been ignored by Western media but has been openly acknowledged by the Turkish government. The head of MIT, Hakan Fidan, a staunch Erdoğan loyalist, immediately met with the chiefs of the armed services and an order grounding all aircraft and forbidding any movement of troops or armour followed.

The coup plotters, realising that they were exposed and would face a long jail sentence whether they surrendered or not, decided to bring their plans forward by six hours and execute the coup. Russia’s timely warning enabled those opposed to any coup time to prepare. The president was evacuated from his holiday hotel and rushed to an aircraft just forty minutes before renegade troops backed by helicopters attacked the hotel. His plane was escorted by two fighter aircraft from Dalaman in the South West to Istanbul on the advice of the General Staff as Ankara was too dangerous. En route two putschist F16s locked their weapon  systems on to Erdoğan’s plane but for whatever reason failed to fire.

Who was behind the coup?

I doubt that there is a single Turk who does not believe that the US was behind the coup attempt. Why? They will tell you . . .

•           History! It is hard to find a coup anywhere in the world that the US was not behind. All previous coup d’etats in Turkey were backed by the US.

•           Silence from the US as they awaited the outcome of the coup. Russia and Iran, for example, condemned it immediately.

•           The refusal of the US to extradite Fethullah Gülen from his self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania to face charges of conspiracy and sedition. Gülen is seen as a tool of the CIA, his application to reside in the US was backed by three senior CIA officials.

Many Turks believe that either the US government, or the CIA acting as a rogue element, whilst happy to keep the AKP government in place wants rid of Erdoğan whom they see as erratic and unreliable.

Fethullah Gülen is central to much of what has happened in Turkey since the AK Party came to power. The Gülen Movement is known as Hizmet which means Service and it can be divided into two distinct parts.

The part that is seen and openly supported by millions around the world promotes tolerance, openness, moderate Islam, acceptance of differences, education, etc., transparency in all things. It operates thousands of schools and colleges in many countries. It raises billions of dollars annually from its business operations, donations, gifts, legacies and tithing – it is immensely wealthy.

The part that you do not see functions in a very different way and has very different objectives. Turkey has been the target of Gülen for many years. In a leaked video of one of his sermons, which is still available on YouTube, he can be seen and heard saying the following: ‘You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres. You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the constitutional institutions in Turkey’.

As the Gülenists patiently infiltrated all the components of the Turkish state from the army to the judiciary to the police to the education system to the general bureaucracy they were able to facilitate the rise of their own into the highest posts. After the video came to light many accused Gülen of infiltrating the state with an illegal organisation. Soon after Gülen fled to the US Hanefi Avcı , who was a police commissioner at the time, stated: ‘People spoke about the presence of Gülen’s followers inside the police force, but there was no apparent criminal activity. Only after 2006 did certain police officers start to show deeper allegiances to the movement than to the state’.

When the AK Party came to power in the 2002 general election it allied itself with Gülen and together they set about drawing down the power and influence of the secular military. The sensational Ergenekon (Deep State) and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) investigations purported to expose what the military were up to. There followed a series of show trials of the officer corps on trumped-up charges. Many spent up to three years or more in prison without trial. As the secular Kemalist officers were weeded out the Gülenists filled their boots. The military was devastated and deeply wounded. Throughout other elements of the state the same process was going on.

As the AK Party government established its writ throughout much of the country the ambitions of then Prime Minister Erdoğan began to dominate. He no longer desired the ‘guidance’ of Gülen and the two fell out very publicly.

When Gülenists inside the system, almost certainly acting on Gülen’s instruction, leaked evidence of massive corruption within the government and Erdoğan’s family the rift became total and a war of attrition began. The generals and senior officers of the armed forces were pardoned and released with an apology from Erdoğan and an explanation that it was the corrupt elements of Hizmet that had infiltrated the judiciary that were to blame for the huge miscarriage of justice. Many were reinstated because Erdoğan now needed different ‘friends’ within the system.

Purges of the Gülenists have been ongoing for some time and no doubt many of them saw the coup as a last-ditch chance to retain influence. Many outside of the Hizmet organisation believe that had the coup succeeded Gülen would have returned to Turkey rather like Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979.

Hizmet Structure

The structure of that element of the Hizmet organisation that functioned secretly within the state apparatus is interesting. Most organisations are hierarchical – they are ‘up-down’. The secret, deep-state Hizmet structure is best described as horizontal. A member of Hizmet will know only one other person. This person is his abi or older brother and his instructions are to be followed through without question. Secrecy is paramount to protect the organisation and the people within it. So, within the military for example, one can find the interesting example of a senior non-commissioned officer issuing instructions to a general and those instructions being carried out to the letter. This level of secrecy contributed to some of the disarray during the coup attempt. If there is no ‘abi’ to pass on changes of plan then chaos can reign. Add to that the ineptitude of the putschist use of the Whatsapp social media application and you have a recipe for failure. That said, the coup attempt came within a forty minute ace of succeeding. Without the Russians passing on the information they had intercepted Erdoğan would likely have been killed or captured.

State of Emergency

Following the failed coup great swathes of the armed services and the bureaucracy are being purged. All government employees have had their passports cancelled and are forbidden to leave the country. Within the judiciary anyone who voted against Erdoğan’s ‘reforms’ of that element of state structure has been automatically fingered as a Gülenist and suspended until investigated and proven innocent. All private universities, colleges and schools have been closed or taken under state supervision whilst their affiliations are examined. Any member of the bureaucracy whose bank records show they have made donations or gifts to the Hizmet or its various subsidiary organisations has been suspended pending investigation. Many of those who have made donations will have been fulfilling their obligations as Muslims unaware of the links to Hizmet and will be innocent of any ‘disloyalty’. They could also very well be AK Party supporters.

Although tens of thousands have been detained or suspended there is a steady flow of those who have been investigated and released or reinstated.

The Future – is Erdoğan Weaker or Stronger?

There are no crystal balls and Turkey is a very complicated and fractured society at present. What has united people across the board is their opposition to the coup attempt. Erdoğan was as bombastic and belligerent as ever immediately after the event. His position has mellowed considerably since he no doubt realises that he is hated by half the country’s population, all of his so-called NATO allies and most of the populations of the neighbouring states. He has withdrawn all of the thousands of libel actions against those who have ‘insulted the president’ (with the exception of the largely Kurdish HD Party – a tactical failure that he may live to regret). He has started a process of rapprochement with two of the main opposition parties but again his obsessive hatred of all things Kurdish has clouded his judgement and he has excluded the HDP. He has stepped back from reintroduction of the death penalty. He has drawn back from his plans for forcing through constitutional change and an executive presidency. He is heading to Russia for private talks with Putin. There are now friendly overtures towards Iran. The prime minister has said that Turkey wants to mend fences and normalise relations with Assad and Syria – Erdoğan has not contradicted this. If, or more likely when, this happens it will nail the lid on the coffin of the US’ project to Balkanise the Middle East and secure Kuwaiti gas pipelines to Europe which would have undermined Russia. As a result of his recent toning down I think that Erdoğan believes he is in a weaker position, at least in the short term.

Within a fairly short time frame it is possible that Turkey might leave NATO and, together with Iran, accept a Russian invitation to join the Eurasia Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The officer corps that is rising within the armed forces after the abortive coup is most definitely not Atlanticist like the Gülenist-CIA faction. They believe that Turkey’s future lies not in the EU-NATO-Western alliance but eastwards within Eurasia. This is a vision of the future that I believe Erdoğan shares.

Turkey has applied for Gülen’s extradition (again) and has presented the evidence that they have accumulated. If the US fails to comply then it will confirm the Turkish government’s view that the US/CIA/Gülen was indeed behind the coup. If they do extradite him then it will show that his ‘sell by date’ has passed and the NATO Gladio Operation in Turkey is at an end.

In closing it has to be said that Turks of every political persuasion seem optimistic about the future. ‘Things will be much better in Turkey now’ is a constant refrain. There are some who believe that Erdoğan will face charges in court for his corrupt and illegal practices within three years. Turks are amazingly optimistic people! That this coup attempt and Erdoğan’s counter-coup would lead to such an optimistic outcome was hard to understand. There is a feeling that ‘democracy’ and the people have triumphed. People believe that Erdoğan realises that he was saved not by those who support him but by those who support democracy. He was saved because of the people who laid down in front of tanks or paid with their lives for resisting on the streets as bullets flew. He was saved because an army sergeant killed himself before he would fire on his countrymen and women. He was saved by the young who used Facebook and Facetime to inform their fellow citizens of the coup threat (perhaps now he will reconsider his opposition to – and constant attacks on – social media). He was saved by the Chief of the General Staff who was kidnapped by his Gülenist ADC and, when invited to speak with his ‘older brother’ Fethullah Gülen, flatly refused. Above all, he was saved by Russia and President Putin who saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between Turkey and the West, and in doing so relieve some of the unrelenting pressure by NATO at Russia’s borders.

For the majority of the population life remains ‘normal’, on the surface nothing much has changed. Behind the scenes much is changing and as the country moves forward more will follow. In the West the media has distorted, exaggerated and lied about what has happened and is happening. Erdoğan is authoritarian and autocratic and his political involvement is contrary to the existing constitution, according to which power should really lie with the prime minister and cabinet. That said he is not a dictator and he is the first directly elected president of Turkey. If, as seems likely, his erstwhile friends and allies in the various western alliances are indeed found to have been involved or even neutral to the events leading up to his attempted overthrow then the break up and realignment that will surely follow will be monumental and game-changing. US Secretary of State Kerry is due in Turkey shortly, his welcome is likely to be very cool!

(Name supplied but withheld)