Marx on Britain (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

See also Britain as Marx's political model

The Three articles—or rather the two articles and an extract from a third—which we publish here for the first time in English translation, were written by Marx in 1855 for the Neue Oder-Zeitung. After he came to live in Britain in 1849 Marx earned his living as the European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune to which he regularly contributed articles during the ten years 1851 to 1861. In 1855 Lassalle found him an additional job as the London correspondent of the Neue Oder-Zeitung which provided Marx with a supplementary income until the paper ceased publication at the end of the year.

Most of the articles Marx wrote at this time, both for the NYDT and for the NOZ, were about the Crimean War. As Marx mistakenly gave support to the British-French-Turkish side in this war, these articles make very embarrassing reading today. The three articles we have selected for publication, however, are more acceptable since they concern the situation of the working class and the struggle for universal suffrage and a shorter working week. As will be seen, Marx was particularly hostile to the industrial capitalists and to the Manchester School, the Parliamentary and Financial Reformers, the Peace Society and the Radical politicians like Joseph Hume, Richard Cobden and John Bright who expressed their interests.

We have added some footnotes to explain a number of historical references.

THE COMMERCIAL CRISIS

The Economist of London writes of the present commercial and industrial crisis: 

  Whatever may be falling off in the export of other articles, there is none in machinery. The value of 1854 exceeds the value in 1853. Other countries, therefore are now taking into use our machinery. We have no longer any advantage of this kind over them. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and the United States are all now great manufacturing countries; and some of them have advantages over us. We have a race to run and we cannot succeed if we tie our legs. Formerly they were tied for the advantage of the landlords, or the advantage of some classes of manufacturers, and very [illegible] work we made of it, as increasing poor rates and perennial disturbances testified.
  Nations, as well as individuals, look very foolish jumping in sacks, and get many a fall. Having got rid of the restrictions for landlords and the restriction for the master manufacturer, we must now walk in the workman’s manacles. Experience has satisfied every person that the restrictions imposed for the benefit of the master manufacturers injured them; and by and by the factory workers will find out that the restrictions imposed for their benefit will injure them. It is to be hoped, however, that they will find out before the countries before mentioned have made such progress as to supercede England in their own and third markets and have reduced the factory hands to destitution. (Economist, No. 594, 13 January 1855.)

Mr. Wilson, editor of the Economist and office boy at the Treasury of the anointed and oily man called Gladstone, apostle of freedom and careerist in one and the same person, who denies in one column of his journal the need for a State in general and demonstrates in the next the absolute necessity of the Coalition Ministry [1] in particular, this Mr. Wilson begins his homily with a deliberate falsification. The export statistics for 1854 contain in fact two headings for the export of machines. The first refers to railway engines and show in 1853 exports were £443,259 against £525,707 in 1854, which does indeed give an increase of £82,448. But the second, which refers to all other machines used in factories, records £1,368,027 for 1853 as against £1,271,503 in 1854, a reduction of £96,524. For the two headings taken together there is thus a deficit of £14,076. This detail is typical of the Manchester School. They believe that the present time is favourable for the abolition of the restriction existing in favour of factory workers, i.e., the legal restriction on the working time of young people below 18, of women and of children under 12. To achieve so elevated an aim, a few figures can well be falsified.

But, if we believe the Manchester Examiner, the special organ of the Quaker Bright, as well as the reports coming from the industrial regions, foreign markets, those traditional outlets for the surplus of our factories, are creaking under the weight of our overproduction and overspeculation. If we have reached such a congestion of the world market in spite of the opening up of two fabulous new markets, in Australia and California, in spite of the electric telegraph which has transformed the whole of Europe into an immense trading exchange, in spite of the railways and steamships which have infinitely extended communications, and so trade, how much time would the crisis have waited before coming if the employers had been authorised to operate 18 hours a day instead of 11?

The question is too simple for us to need to give the answer. But relatively quicker breaking out of the crisis would not have been the only difference. A whole generation of workers would have lost 50 per cent of their physical strength, intellectual development and ability to live. This same Manchester School, which replies to our scruples “Should this torment torment us, since it increases our pleasure?”[2], weeps and wails, with sentimental lamentations, about the sacrifice of human lives which the war against Russia, every war, costs! In a few days we will hear Mr. Cobden protest in Leeds against this mutual slaughter of Christians. And, in a few weeks, we will hear him in Parliament protest against the restrictions which prevent human lives being consumed too quickly in the factories. But, of all heroic gestures, only one seems justified to him: Herod's massacre of the innocents.

We agree with the Manchester School that the need for a legal limit on the daily working day in no way indicates a high degree of social development. But, in our view, the fault lies not in the laws, but in the state of affairs which makes them necessary.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 20 January 1855.)

[1] Britain was then governed by a Coalition between the Whigs and the “Peelites”, or pro-Free Trade lories, one of whom, Gladstone, was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[2] A line from a poem by Goethe.

DEATH OF HUME

The death of Hume has deprived the House of Commons of its father. His long parliamentary career was the exact barometer of the bourgeois Radical party which was at its height in 1831. A kind of Warwick or maker of MPs in the first years of the reformed House, he was, eight  [1] years later, along with Daniel O’Connell and Feargus O’Connor, one of the authors of the People’s Charter which still today constitutes the political programme of the Chartists and which basically amounts to a demand for universal suffrage and the conditions for putting it into practice in Britain. The split which soon occurred between the workers and the bourgeois agitators found Hume on the side of the latter. At the time of the Russell Ministry, he drew up a “little Charter”, which was adopted as a programme by those called the “parliamentary and financial reformers”.

In place of the six points of the People’s Charter, it only contained three points, replacing the demand for universal suffrage with a demand merely for a wider franchise. Finally, in 1852, Hume announced a new programme, in which he gave up his little Charter and only demanded one point: election by ballot. In short, Hume was the classic representative of the opposition called “independent” which Cobbett characterised excellently and definitively as the “safety valve” of the old system. In his old age he had a veritable mania for putting down motions and then withdrawing them, on a sign from Ministers, just before the doors closed. He employed his talents, as everyone knows, “to save public money”. All the Ministers allowed him to fight against the small expenses so that the big expenses passed all the more completely.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 28 February 1855.)

[1] The Charter was in fact drawn up in 1838, which is six. not eight years after the election of the first Parliament on the basis of the 1832 Reform Act.

CONFLICT BETWEEN WORKERS AND CAPITALISTS

In a previous correspondence we stated “the conflict between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie will begin again at the same time as the conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy reaches its climax”. [1] Tangible proof of this statement was provided at a big meeting held last Friday in the London Tavern. Before giving a report of this meeting, [2] we will say a few words on the skirmishes which have taken place recently, outside and inside Parliament, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Just recently the Manchester factory owners have organised meetings at which they decided to launch a campaign for the abolition of the official Factory Inspectors, on the grounds that these inspectors have not confined themselves to seeing that the legal working day is observed but have had the effrontery to insist that the safety measures laid down by Parliament for avoiding accidents and death to workers from machinery are effectively enforced in the factories. The Factory Inspector for South Lancashire, the famous Leonard Horner, has attracted their particular hostility because in his latest report he strongly called for a safety measure to be legally enforced whose absence, according to the naive admission of one factory owner, naturally a member of the Peace Society, “only cost last year the lives of five workers”.

That is what happened outside Parliament. The House of Commons rejected, on Second Reading, Sir John Halford’s Bill to make illegal “stoppage of wages”. It is thus that are called the deductions made from nominal wages, either because the worker has infringed some regulation laid down by the employer or because, in industries where the modern system has not yet been introduced, he has to pay a rent for the hire of the looms, etc.

This latter is especially the case in Nottingham in the hosiery industry. Sir John Halford showed that in many cases the worker instead of being paid by the contractor is forced to pay him money. So many deductions are made on various pretexts from the nominal wage that in the end the worker has to pay more than is due to him from the capitalist. The worker thus becomes the debtor of his employer who then obliges him to renew his contract on more and more unfavourable terms, to such an extent that he has become, in the full meaning of the word, a real serf, without however, like other serfs, having his material existence guaranteed.

While it rejected on Second Reading Sir John Halford’s Bill to end this abuse, the House of Commons did not even consider the Bill proposed by Cobbett, the son of the great English pamphleteer. This Bill aimed 1. to replace the 1850 10 ½-hours Act by the 1847 10 hours Act; 2. to make really effective the legal limitation of the working day in the factories by the compulsory stopping of the machines at the end of each legal working day.

(Final part of an article first published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 22 March 1855. The title is ours.)

[1] In an article "The British Constitution" that appeared in the NOZ on 6 March 1855. English translation in Pelican Marx Surveys from Exile, pp. 281-4.

[2] This report was published in the NOZ on 24 March 1855. English translation in Marx-Engels Articles on Britain, pp. 227-30.

Greasy Pole: How Do You Like Your Leaders? (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we were asked again and again, while one Westminster aspirant after another withered from their unnourished ambitions until Labour had only Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith left in contention for their party members’ votes – while the Tories were compelled to accept Theresa May and her deliberate technique of fostering or stifling the careers of her party underlings.

For Labour the conflict was particularly distressful; when Ed Miliband gave up the leadership there was a brood of competing successors – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Tristram Hunt … remember them? And those others, hoping that some rival’s spectacular failure would give them an opening. And the rest? One by one they were ground away until they were conclusively despatched by the simple, predictable process of the overwhelming votes of their party supporters for the hitherto obscure Jeremy Corbyn. Remember him? The locally  popular MP who persistently voted against party instructions while stolidly grappling with the problems his constituency voters passed on to him? Who thereby amassed a formidable, unforeseen growth of simple popularity among the local people which infected the Party membership at large.

That was when David Cameron, deluded by expected success in the EU Referendum, revelled in stirring up his Back Benchers’ hysterical rapture with his corny jibes from the Despatch Box. Take your pick from a library of his feeble sallies. But somewhere among your choice will be the jibe about Ma Corbyn giving advice to Her Majesty’s Loyal Leader of the Opposition to pay more attention to adjusting the hang of his trousers, to smoothing his shirt front and to keeping his hair placidly combed. The Tories hungrily adored it. But it was actually ineffective.

Fife

Consider, to begin with, the matter of the Honourable Jacob William Rees-Mogg, son of a now-deceased life peer and editor of the Times. An offspring of a family who grew rich from the labour of Somerset people in their coalmines and who at school wallowed in the absorptions of Eton College before enriching himself in his City of London company by the name of Somerset Capital Management - the function of which needs little imagination. At the age of 38 Rees-Mogg failed to persuade the voters of the (at that time) obdurately Labour constituency of Central Fife to welcome him as their representative in Westminster by touring the poorer districts in what was said to be a Bentley car, accompanied by a woman who had been his ‘nanny’ during the luxury of his childhood in the family stately home. But there were other, less demanding constituencies and in the 2010 election he won the new North East Somerset constituency with a majority of almost 5000.

The point is that Jacob Rees –Mogg is also noted for being the very opposite of Jeremy Corbyn for his appearance, with his double breasted suit immaculately smooth and controlled, an appropriate tie and shirt and hair. How significant is this in relation to his performance? One of his campaigns as an MP was to legislate so that the county of Somerset should have its own time zone, 15 minutes behind London. He supports zero hours contracts for their ‘flexibility’, disregarding those desperate unemployed workers who have no choice but to conform to this additionally exploitative device. He is against same-sex marriage and in favour of state-financed repatriation of immigrants to return them to their ‘natural homelands’. And, in case it is not by now obvious, he describes himself as ‘a monarchist’. All of which emphasises that it is most urgently obvious that all leaders must be judged on matters other than their appearance.

Riots

And on that basis where does Jeremy Corbyn stand? There is no shortage of promises from him on every relevant problem. But then both of the big parties, as well as the smaller, equally squirreling, groups compete for votes with programmes which at first sight may offer straightforward strategies and foresight to adjust capitalist society into being problem free. This grim fact exists and flourishes despite the evidence conclusively against it. For example on the currently dominating matter of public disorder in reaction to the stress of urban life, Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology at the London School of Economics, who has a dominant reputation in the subject, spoke recently on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 riots: ‘The underlying conditions for those riots still persist… There’s no real sign that things have improved for the lives of the kinds of people who were involved and caught up in the riots. Certainly it’s not implausible that there could be more riots’. (Guardian 6 August). And amid this morbid chaos all those previous, short-lived hopefuls for the Labour Party leadership have been replaced by Owen Smith, the MP for Pontypridd.

Smith was first elected in 2010 and was allocated to a succession of Shadow Ministerships including as Secretary of State for Wales. Previously he had a career which included a spell as Head of Policy and Government Relations for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer – who, he ominously said, were ‘extremely supportive’ of his ambitions for political advancement. With this encouragement, during his first effort to get into Parliament at a by-election in 2006, he came out in support of the Private Financial Initiative in the NHS, with its promise of rich profits for private companies such as Pfizer. He was once a member of the CND, with typical reservations about the Trident programme but he later reversed this into support for that devastating weapon. During his campaign for the Party leadership he called for the constitution to refer specifically to tackling inequality ‘… right at the heart of everything that we do’ and he later announced this as ‘… a British New Deal for every part of Britain’.  In terms of promises to reform the agonies of capitalism there is nothing novel or stimulating about Owen Smith. He is simply the latest in a history of futile, hopeless imposters

So how do we like our leaders? And how do they like us? We endure this social system – pervading, dominant and repressive – where one group possesses all that is essential to human lives. In this our function is to keep relationships operating in that way and, when we are allowed to express our response, to confirm that we support it all at whatever cost to human interests. In this the politicians’ role is to operate a machinery to persuade us that it would be impossible to have it any other way. But in truth we can change it so that the likes of Rees-Mogg, Corbyn, and Owen Smith are part of a bitter history.

Ivan

Remember Belgium! (1930)

Editorial from the May 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1914, hundreds of thousands of workers were duped into enlisting by the appeal to their sympathy on behalf of “poor little Belgium!" It is interesting to learn that confirmation has now been given to the statement that the Allied Governments had themselves prepared for violating Belgian “neutrality.”

Mr. Harold Nicolson has just written a life of his father, Lord Carnock, who as Sir Arthur Nicholson was Permanent Under-secretary at the Foreign Office in the years leading up to the war (“Lord Carnock,” published by Constable, 21/-).

From a review of the book which appeared in the Daily Herald on April 3rd, 1930, we learn that in September, 1911,

“preparations for landing four or six divisions on the Continent have been worked out to the minutest detail"; and in 1913 French military authorities are reported by Sir Arthur Nicolson to be of the view that “it would be far better for France if a conflict were not too long postponed.”

In 1913 Sir Arthur Nicolson wrote to the Minister in Brussels :—

We and France might have to move troops across the Belgian frontier in order to meet the approach of German troops from the other side.

The Herald reviewer says that ‘‘The Minister's reply makes it clear that this action was contemplated before the Germans actually entered Belgium.”

These statements based on Mr. Harold Nicolson's book were promptly confirmed by the Countess of Warwick in an interview which she gave the Daily Herald on April 4th.

She reports a conversation between Lord French and M. Clemenceau which took place in 1910, she being the only other person present, and acting as interpreter. Clemenceau said:—

. . . .  The British landing would be at Dunkirk, and your troops would go through Belgium into Germany.

French was dubious, and raised the question of Belgian neutrality, to which Clemenceau replied:—

Treaties do not matter when it comes to war. 

The Countess of Warwick relates the following further facts :—

 In later conversation Clemenceau stated that while the British pushed through Belgium the French would attack through Lorraine.
 The conversation was private, but I wrote to King Edward, who was my friend, about it. 

The Countess of Warwick then explained why she had kept this secret for so many years. She had intended to publish it in her reminiscences published six months ago, but her publishers refused to include these passages because “it put our country in a bad light.”

She admits that she made no attempt to publish it earlier than 1929.

For years I bottled it up within myself, even at the time when the “poor little Belgium” talk was being used to lure thousands of poor boys to their deaths.

Then, last year, when she was publishing her own book, she “asked one or two friends what they thought, and they said that they thought it would do no harm so long after the war.”

In short, the noble Lady, one of the shining lights of the I.L.P., the Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation, kept her mouth shut when “poor little Belgium talk was being used to lure thousands of poor boys to their deaths,” and only disclosed the secret when she thought “it would do no harm.”

The number of British subjects who lost their lives in the Great War was nearly 1,100,000. In addition, thousands have been blinded, crippled or otherwise mutilated. This the Countess could stand. But she could not bear the thought of putting the "country" in a bad light, and therefore did not let the victims share her knowledge until "it would do no harm,” that is, 15 years too late for it to be of use to them.

We wonder what the Countess of Warwick regards as "harm.”

Editorial: Labour Government's Solution. (1930)

Editorial from the September 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unemployed to emigrate.

 

When the MacDonald Cabinet came into office the Countess of Warwick, who presumably knows what level of intelligence meets the needs of the members of her class, proudly claimed for her political friends, the Labour Ministers, that they are the “party of brains." Far be it from us to dispute her claim. Still less would we deny that they are industrious seekers after knowledge. Have they not during one short year appointed nearly 40 Royal Commissions and Committees of inquiry? Are there not hundreds of members of these committees closely cross-questioning other hundreds of expert witnesses and reading millions and millions of words of evidence? And has not the Premier appointed a very special Economic Advisory Council, composed to a large extent of prominent Liberal and Tory economists and captains of industry? With this great machinery pouring out facts and opinions is it possible that our rulers will miss even a single small grain of useful knowledge? The answer, we regret to say, is that they are not likely to learn anything whatsoever which will prove beneficial to the working class.

The general result of these inquiries could be foretold in advance. The terms of reference of the Commissions and Committees and their composition preclude the barest possibility of a Socialist policy being recommended. Does the anti-Socialist professorial muddler of economic theory abandon his prejudices when he secures appointment to the Economic Advisory Council? Does the company director come there to devise ways and means of abolishing the capitalist system which gives him his power and privilege? Or, are the Liberal Party leaders, with whom the Government is holding private discussions about unemployment, likely to do so.

And if a miracle could take place, and if the capitalist thistle of a committee of inquiry did produce a fig in the shape of a recommendation in favour of Socialism, what would the Labour Government do with it?

What could they do? Elected by the votes of non-Socialists, a minority at that, they must do what their predecessors did—run the capitalist system as best they may and fob off the discontented electors with one excuse after another as long as they can. The expedient of setting up Commissions of Inquiry in order to postpone the awkward admission of failure to carry out Election promises is a time-honoured device of Governments. It is also the rankest dishonesty. When the Labour Government has supplemented its own knowledge with the false theories of all the economists, all the business experts, all the intellectuals, and all the politicians in all the capitalist parties, the truth will still remain that capitalism can only be run on capitalist lines, and will continue to produce poverty, unemployment and insecurity for the workers.

Unemployment is a problem which well illustrates the ignorance and trickery of the Labour Party. The Party in its literature and in the speeches and writings of its leaders has at different times adopted and proclaimed as their own unfailing remedy every nostrum of their Liberal and Tory opponents. For a time we were told that “high wages” in America had solved the unemployment problem, but Mr. William Green, the President of the American Federation of Labor, told the Senate Commerce Committee in April last that for 2¼ years the unemployment among the Federation’s members had never been less than 9 per cent. Last winter it rose to 22 per cent.—one in five out of work! Other Labour leaders told us that agricultural co-operation on Danish lines was the cure; but Denmark has unemployment as severe as our own. They pointed to Rationalisation as the painful operation necessary in order that work might be found for all; yet Germany, that much rationalised nation, has this year had 3 million men and women vainly seeking employment. The Labour leaders were also parties to that most colossal of post-war frauds, the greater production campaign, but now their spokesmen admit that the world is being stifled with over-production. They have preached shorter hours, but Mr. Snowden has just told the industrial employees of the Government that they must wait until times are “more favourable." These and many other useless or harmful schemes have been handed out by the Labour leaders to a credulous electorate. Then last year they tried a dose of J. H. Thomas at £5,000 a year, but the unemployment figures promptly leapt up to more than two millions. Now finally, they are reverting to the old and exploded scheme of migrating the unemployed to other Empire countries.

We recall how the Labour Party cried to heaven when Tories and Liberals told the unemployed to get out of the country and look for work elsewhere. Mr. Tom Shaw, at present Minister for War, was suitably ironical eighteen months ago concerning the "ecstasies" of the Imperialists “about the development of distant parts of the Empire."  . . . (Article in the Morning Post, 18th February, 1929.) The last Conservative Government set up a transfer board to move unemployed miners to imaginery areas where jobs were vacant. How the Labour Party scoffed at the idea of solving unemployment by moving the unemployed from one depressed area to another!

But now the Labour Government, according to the "Daily Herald" of 12th August, is considering a big Empire settlement plan by which the unemployed will be employed on development schemes in the Dominions. Mr. George Lansbury says that he feels “positive that there are tens of thousands of young men in this country who, if they were certain of a proper chance of a decent and self-respecting livelihood in the Dominions, would jump at it." Mr. Lansbury, who is himself in receipt of £2,000 a year for his post in the Government, explained a day or two earlier, that he thought it a most terrible tragedy that these young men “should be able for years of their growing lives to live on a sort of public allowance." (“Daily Herald," 11th August.) It is pertinent to remind Mr. Lansbury that his “sort of public allowance" was given to him because he was going to assist Mr. J. H. Thomas to solve the unemployment problem. His and Thomas’s expensive labours produced nothing, and there are nearly a million more unemployed. The young men are out-of-work because Mr. Lansbury and the Labour Government have utterly failed to find them the promised jobs. But Mr. Lansbury, the £2,000-a-year failure, deplores that they should be getting paltry unemployment pay. His alternative is that they should be found work in the Dominions. The “Daily Herald,” on the following day, unkindly sent this new-old fraudulent remedy into the rubbish heap with the others, by informing us that Australia has its own unemployment of “alarming proportions". “Thirteen per cent. of trade unionists are now out of work, in addition to thousands who do not belong to any unions. Those who know, estimate that there are at least 150,000 unemployed.” (“Daily Herald,” 13th August.) The correspondent of the “Daily Herald,” writing from Australia, added that “there is strong opinion that the stimulation of migration far exceeding the nation’s power of absorption is the principal cause of the present unemployment problem. With the stoppage of this flow of emigrants a return to normal conditions is confidently expected.”

And after Australia, Canada! Two days subsequent to Mr. Lansbury's optimistic views on emigration to the Dominions the “Daily Herald’s” correspondent in Canada announced that a bar had been put up against assisted immigrants owing to the heavy unemployment. Canada only wants immigrants with some capital. (“Daily Herald," 15th August.)

So Mr. Lansbury and the Labour Government have nothing else to offer to the unemployed than to ship them off to the Dominions, in spite of the fact that the Canadian Government and the Australian Labour Government are faced with alarming and continuous unemployment of their own, and firmly declare their determination not to receive Great Britain’s surplus workers.

The Labour Government has no policy except to try to administer capitalism in a way which they hoped would be better than administration of capitalism by Liberals and Tories. In many respects they have actually made the position worse. So little do they know of economic theories and the workings of the capitalist system, so bereft are they of any constructive ideas, that they can do nothing but desperately tread once more the pathways worn by their predecessors in office, pathways which lead to disillusionment for the workers.

This is what happens when a “party of brains” takes on the task of patching up the capitalist system. When the working class wake up to the realities of the situation they will apply their intelligence to a different task, the institution of Socialism. They will seek to understand their own problems instead of elevating the MacDonalds, Thomases and Lansburys into positions of power from which to broadcast pitiful nonsense copied from the programmes of the other parties of capitalism.

Mullahs and oil wells (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following China’s takeover by its so-called Communist Party in 1949, American politicians and commentators embarked on a spree of self-recrimination and examination. How could the enormous Nationalist army, with its American arms and advisers, have been defeated by ill-armed guerrillas? Who, in short, was responsible for “losing China”, and how could it have been “saved”?

A similar debate has been taking place over the last eighteen months concerning another country lost from America’s sphere of influence—Iran. A friendly dictator-emperor, reinforced by a massive army, was sent packing, and is now forced to scuttle from one country to another. Even worse, fifty American diplomats (of whom some no doubt were spies) were held hostage, and still are after an abortive marine attempt to rescue them. Could Iran too have been “saved”, given a little more competence and finesse on the part of President Carter?

One of the reasons for the intense interest that the rulers of other countries show in Iran is of course oil. But it is not the only factor involved. Vast though they are, Iran’s reserves are relatively small when compared with those of countries like Saudi Arabia, and (unless new reserves are discovered) Iran will not be a major exporter of oil much beyond 1990. Western capitalism wants Iranian oil but could certainly get along without it, as it will soon have to do.

The prospects of exports to Iran are also an important factor The massive revenues from oil sales go exclusively to the Iranian state, and a large part of this income is used to pay for imports. Iranian imports have risen spectacularly as a result of the country’s new-found wealth, from four hundred million US dollars in 1958-9 to $18.45 billion in 1975-6. A large part of this figure is made up of arms purchases—Iran under the Shah was for a time America’s best arms customer. Any capitalist class will want a piece of eighteen billion dollars' worth of action, and will inevitably have an interest in maintaining a friendly government in Tehran.

The third reason for Iran’s importance is its strategic value. It borders on Russia and commands the route to the Middle East oilfields. A pro-Moscow government (or, for that matter, a Russian invasion) could blockade the Persian Gulf and drastically reduce the amount of oil reaching Western capitalist nations. On the other hand, a pro-Western regime functions as a regional balance to both Russia and the Arab oil-producing states. In fact, the Shah acted as a kind of policeman for Western interests, supporting the royalists in North Yemen in the nineteenth-sixties, the Sultan of Oman in 1971, and Pakistan against the Baluchi guerrillas in 1973. There was no need for, say. direct American intervention in these cases; an army trained and armed by them was on the spot to defend the status quo.

Thus American policy since the beginning of the Shah's dictatorial rule in 1953 has been to keep in power a friendly ruler. This involved, as we have seen, massive arms sales, the weaponry being used for both internal repression and external intervention. The notorious secret police. SAVAK, was set up in 1957 with a permanent secret US mission attached to it (in light of the American government’s occasional hypocritical ramblings about “human rights", it is salutary to recall its role in establishing this vile SS-like organisation). Even the land reform of the early sixties was a response to American pressure on the Shah to carry out just enough by way of reformist policies to avoid too much rural opposition.

The opposition was restricted by press censorship and the lack of independent trade unions as well as by the ubiquitous agents of SAVAK. Agrarian reform failed to benefit those who actually worked the land (not that it was ever intended to), and the fruits of the oil industry reached only a tiny minority of Iranians. As elsewhere, nationalisation has been of no benefit to the ordinary workers. Apart from the fantastically wealthy and corrupt royal family, and a small capitalist class, Iranians lived lives of poverty and squalor. Their position was made even more unacceptable by knowledge of the rich resources beneath their feet and the manifest affluence of their rulers:

 “As early as 1971 a cautious observer of Iran remarked that, on walking through the streets of the southern, poorer part of Tehran, he encountered 'more expressed hatred than I have ever heard before’ from ’people who watch the cars of the people who are doing well’. The wealth in Iran was being distributed in a manner that was ‘ostentatious’ and 'grotesque’. (Fred Halliday: Iran: Dictatorship and Development, quoting Richard Cottam.)

In the absence of genuine political parties, opposition centred around religious movements (rather as the Catholic Church in Poland is a kind of symbol of anti-government forces).

There are additional reasons why opposition should have come from, and been centred on, the Islamic religion. Sunni Muslims recognise the temporal ruler as the successor of the prophet Mohammed, but this is not the case with the Shi’a branch to which most Iranians belong, The various land reforms of the Shah and his father have deprived the religious leaders or mullahs (of whom there are some 180,000 in Iran) of their lands. They have thereby been forced to rely economically on the “religious tax" paid by their followers, especially the bazaar merchants—and the sums paid over in this way were probably greater than the secular taxes paid to the government. The mullahs constituted a large, influential and financially secure grouping outside the formal state apparatus, and one moreover with a sizable grass roots organisation. The Shah’s new-style oil-based capitalism inevitably led to undermining of the merchants’ position and hence of the mullahs. The result was a clash of interests between the merchants and the Shah as spokesman for the new oil-financed bourgeoisie. The priests are but the ideologists of the merchants, and the seemingly religious dispute masks an economic conflict.

Opposition to the Shah’s regime gradually increased throughout 1977, and by the middle of the following year the Shah was promising “liberalisation" with “free elections”. These carrots failed to quieten things down and martial law had to be declared in September 1978. Opposition still seethed, however, and in January 1979 the Shall left Iran. It was a striking demonstration that even an apparently all-powerful dictator cannot survive for long without the support, or at least the acquiescence, of those he rules over.

The replacement has been the so-called “Islamic republic”, which is effectively run by religious leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Tehran workers are provided with a diet of “bread and circuses", parading outside the US embassy as if American imperialism were the cause of all their problems. Their new rulers are no better than the Shah and, like him, go in for executions and secret trials. Like the Shah, they wage bloody war against nationalist movements in the non-Persian speaking areas of Kurdistan and Khuzestan. And above all, the division of society into two classes remains.

Meanwhile opposition too continues. At the end of April, bomb explosions in Tehran killed four people, those being blamed for this including the Americans, the Iraqis, the Kurds and left-wing guerrillas. The position of Iran’s new rulers is by no means secure. It is unlikely that the Shah will return (other than to face trial), but the Islamic republic will be as unable to solve the country’s economic problems as he was. The dispute between different sections of the Iranian capitalist class will continue, with the new industrial bourgeoisie likely to come out on top eventually. As has happened so often elsewhere, an inter-capitalist dispute has been dressed up in other clothes (religious, nationalist, or whatever), and workers have been deluded into supporting one side or the other.

Our message to workers in Iran is the same as our message to workers everywhere: do not waste your lives and energy by supporting one group of your masters against another—instead, unite as a class against the system that sets up some human beings as masters over others.

Paul Bennett

Cricket 2003 - Survival of the Richest (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ideally, sporting activities are organized to entertain the public and indeed, in which the public participate. But in a profit-driven society, sports becomes an industry in which sportsmen, sportswomen and spectators are tools used by wealthy individuals and groups to make profits. Whereas competitors are hired and even drugged to squeeze out every exploitable energy and talent from them (of course it is officially called “performance enhancing”) the public are allowed to watch games only if they can pay. Many people don't realize this business aspect of sports or they simply overlook it. But this year's Cricket World Cup held in Africa embarrassingly betrayed the high profit considerations in sports.

The fixtures for the tournament were scheduled as far back as October 2001. England was billed to play against Zimbabwe in Harare on 13th February 2003. Now everyone knows that the local, mainly black, capitalists in Zimbabwe are locked in battle with the predominantly white capitalist farmers over land. The Zimbabwean and British governments are deeply involved in this intra-capitalist struggle on the side of the mainly black and predominantly white respectively.

The 13 February match in Harare therefore provided a 'godsent' weapon that the white commercial farmers, through the British government, decided to use against their adversary. So rising up to their role as a paid agent of people in big business, the government of U.K., started the machinations. The culture secretary Tessa Jowell and other Ministers in London urged the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to boycott the match in protest against Mugabe's evil regime.

However the British government could not authoritatively order the ECB not to honour the match because the ECB is also a capitalist organization thirsty for profits. Thus the issue disgracefully degenerated into another battle between two of the British government's masters, the Zimbabwean commercial farmers and the capitalists in the cricket business.

The ECB was ferociously determined to go ahead with the match in view of the millions of pounds they would lose in fines and profits. They defended their intention to play with a capitalistically logical argument that there were no trade and sports sanctions against Zimbabwe and that if over 300 British companies were trading in Zimbabwe, the why couldn't the ECB also pursue its profit-oriented interests there?

It is not our concern which of the capitalists won the day. What concerns us as an exploited class of players and spectators is whether our miserable living conditions would change whether the match was played or not. Of course we would still remain a plundered class. Boycotts, sanctions, strikes, etc. present no solutions to the serious problems of war, famine and disease. Sometimes they are even counter-productive, as is is currently the case in Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his colleagues in the privileged class are not in any meaningful way affected by the sanctions. It is rather the poor who feel the pinch. Is it not a mockery that even though Mugabe is under a travel ban, French capitalists through the French government managed to get him to Paris in February for the Franco-African Summit where business and profits were discussed?

A genuine way to liberate the world from all its problems is to get it off this profit-oriented view of affairs. It is only then that cricket players and fans can cease to be used as a source of money for a tiny majority, and the sport returned to the domain of leisure activity in which ones enjoyment of sport, whether as a participant or spectator, is not dictated by the amount of money in their pockets.

Suhuyini

Cooking the Books: Negative Interest? (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘NatWest has become the first bank to warn business customers it may charge negative interest rates on money held in current accounts’, reported the Daily Telegraph (25 July). But how can there be negative interest rates? Why would anyone lend money for a period only to get less back at the end of it?

Interest is the price of borrowing money and is governed by supply and demand, more by demand in fact. The rate of interest (or, rather, rates as there are different ones depending on the risk of non-repayment) reflects the state of the economy. When business is slack, due to a lack of enough profitable investment opportunities, the rate is low because supply, as from companies not reinvesting profits, is more than what other companies want to borrow. In times of recovery and boom, when profit prospects are seen to be good,  it is the other way round. Demand exceeds supply and the rate tends to rise.

Governments and their central banks try to control the economy by varying the rate of interest up or down with a view to decreasing or increasing bank lending. The only rate they can directly control is the rate at which the central bank will lend money to banks as ‘the lender of last resort’, or Bank Rate.

After the Great Crash of 2008 the Bank of England tried to revive the economy by reducing the bank rate to 0.5 percent, a record low that lasted until this August when it was reduced to 0.25 percent. It is this that has raised the spectre of the banks paying negative interest. Banks are financial intermediaries whose income (their profits as well as money to cover their operating costs) comes from borrowing money at one rate of interest and re-lending at a higher rate.

An ultra-low, even more a zero or negative (as already in Japan and the Eurozone) , bank rate creates a problem for banks as there are only two ways that they can maintain the spread between the rate at which they borrow and the rate at which they re-lend, and so their profits. They can increase the rate they charge borrowers or reduce below zero the rate they pay depositors. As the Bank of England put it when it cut the bank rate in August:

‘[A]s interest rates are close to zero, it is likely to be difficult for some banks and building societies to reduce deposit rates much further, which in turn might limit their ability to cut their lending rates.’

To avoid this, at the Bank set aside £100 billion for a ‘Term Funding Scheme’ under which banks can borrow money from at 0.25 percent provided they increase their lending by the same amount that they borrow, explaining:

‘[T]he TFS provides participants with a cost effective source of funding to support additional lending to the real economy, providing insurance against the risk that conditions tighten in bank funding markets.’

Note, in passing, the matter of fact assumption that banks need funding to make loans. No nonsense here about their supposed ability to create money to lend out of thin air.

This policy is just pushing on a piece of string. It’s not the supply side that’s the problem but the lack of demand from businesses, who don’t see enough profitable investment opportunities at the moment to use up the supply. Until they do, the economy won’t fully recover from the slump, however much the government fiddles about with the bank rate.

Obituary: Eileen Smith (2011)

Obituary from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 24 April Eileen Smith spent the day at Ealing hospital, where a series of tests showed that she was suffering from cancer in her lungs and brain. Blind and frail, she could not care for herself alone so a place was found for her at a local nursing home where she died on 8 August.

Eileen joined the party – the old Ealing branch – in 1952. She was one of seven from the same family. Not cut out to be a speaker, she contributed to the Socialist Standard, for a while. She was branch secretary and a member of the Propaganda Committee. She showed an unusual talent for selling the Standard at outdoor meetings and on the doorstep – which helped the branch reach their sales target for the month. Clear and emphatic as a socialist, she was particularly passionate in denouncing the delusions of religion. She worked as a primary school teacher. She was also a Samaritan volunteer.

Many members of that branch are dead and others are scattered – but we remain united in our memories of her as a stalwart contributor to our work for socialism.

The Party sends its condolences to her sons, one of whom is a Party member.

RC

"War can solve no working class problem" (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and War

Anything which in the slightest way encourages the workers to retain the blighting and poisoning belief in nationalism and so-called national interests, perpetuates the dangerous illusion of class harmony and plays always into the hands of the capitalist class. Only class-conscious socialists can speak across the frontiers of the capitalist nations to the working class of the world and they can do so only because they are entirely free from the taint of so-called national interests which can be none other than capitalist interests.

War can solve no working class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interests of sections of the capitalist class. It elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and of annihilating each other. It elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully, and inaugurates training courses on a vast scale to produce efficiency. Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason is the final solution in all problems. Many of those who have been subjected to the atmosphere of war remain addicted to violence when war has come to a temporary end.

Socialism is completely opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be neither privilege nor property to cause enmity. No coercion will be needed because each will gain from co-operating harmoniously with his fellows. But it is a new social system that demands understanding of its implications from those who seek to establish it. One important implication is that coercion does not solve problems but only breeds fresh ones, and war is an attempt to coerce. Above all war is one of the means employed by the ruling class to maintain their privileged position at the expense of the subject class. With the establishment of Socialism war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.

From “The Socialist Party and War "

Scum (1980)

Party News from the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leaflet published by Islington Branch for distribution to cinema audiences at the film. “Scum

“SCUM"—THE NEED FOR A POLITICAL RESPONSE

The film you have just watched depicts the institutionalised brutality which is an inseparable part of the British state machine. The original version was banned as a television play by the 'authorities of the BBC because it was thought to be too one-sided to be shown to a mass audience. If the BBC employed similar editorial standards in the Nine o’clock News we might treat their claim to neutrality as having some meaning. In fact, it is the conscious intention of the media to “entertain” us with the likes of Starsky and Hutch and Porridge rather than let us see progammes which will set us thinking about the kind of society' in which we live.

Having come out of the cinema, aware of what goes on in the name of justice and order, you may conclude that something has to be done. Willie Whitelaw and the Short Sharp Shock Brigade believe that something should be done: they say that those who step out of line should meet with even worse forms of punishment. They justify, in the name of Discipline, the incarceration of inarticulate people who express their anger in acts of violence, mentally retarded people who fall foul of the law and can’t be accommodated in overcrowded psychiatric institutions, people found in the possession of cannabis in what is supposed to be a free society. Such offenders are locked up, humiliated and depersonalised for having the audacity to be born into a society which cannot provide for their human needs. Those who advocate law and order really mean violence in the defence of the.present order; they mean the legal retention of the status quo in which 10 per cent of the population own approximately 90 per cent of accumulated wealth.

Probably most people who watch Scum will not be of the “hang ‘em and flog ’em” mentality. They will be concerned and distressed by what they see. They will be outraged by the brutality which is being tolerated. They will be moved by a sense of hostility to authoritarianism and disregard for human dignity. These feelings are understandable, but liberal sentiments have never solved the problems facing us all. Some may look towards legislative reform to solve the problem—but that, at best can only lead to ‘improved’ borstals, not the abolition of the crime and punishment system itself. But it is clear from the film that it is not how you lock people up, but that you lock them up which is the inhumane act. Some may criticise the borstal system on moral grounds, claiming that it is un-Christian and that if only those in power knew what was happening they would put a stop to it. In fact, the penal system is quite in line with the cruelty and imposed discipline of Christianity, as was shown in the film by the Christian borstal governor. Neither is it true that those in power would be willing to eradicate the conditions and attitudes portrayed in the film. Their main concern is that the working class should stay in line and produce profits for them; if a few of us step out of line we can expect no sympathy from the mighty rulers who depend upon our consent for their power.

Prison and borstal are part of the entire inhibiting structure of the capitalist system. Prisons and borstals exist all over the world, including the so-called socialist countries, because capitalism prevails worldwide. Where there is capitalism there are two classes: those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth and the majority who produce but do not own the wealth. The legal system—laws, police, courts, prisons, borstals, armies—exist to protect the position of the minority against the majority. As long as this system lasts, so will the violence of the state. The only positive political response is for the majority us to gain control of the state machine for the purpose of abolishing the capitalist system. The only response to the crimes of the state is democratic political revolution. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands without compromise for Socialist Revolution.

We want a society without laws, without police, without prisons and borstals. We want a society of rational human co-operation. We want a society of common ownership and democratic control of the world around us. Don’t just walk away from Scum feeling indignant and powerless. Put your indignation to a positive use by joining with us in the work of building support for the principles of Socialism.

Islington Branch

The Cloak of Religion (1930)

From the July 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the eyes of the class that is supreme in society, religion is for the people, as Napoleon once pointed out, but not for the rulers. It is something to stupefy or drive into a frenzy the mass of the people, as the needs of the governing class demand.

Since the days of the native medicine man religion has been a prop and a handmaiden to each ruling class, and a priestly group has evolved parallel with the growth of government. So much has this been so that each social revolution of the past has had a religious glamour cast over it and has involved modifications of the creeds of the defeated rulers.

Apart from its philosophic unsoundness, the success and the curse of religion has been its propagation of the myth of another world.

When the oppressed are weary from the hopeless struggle for existence, and might be moved to rise and throw off the yoke of oppression, the deadening hand of religion stretches out to them, bids them to be of good cheer and be patient, all will be well in the hereafter, where “all good people” will live in a heavenly rose garden. Many rise to the bait, as it is so comforting to think that this vale of tears is but a path to paradise. And so places of worship have arisen, palatial, beautiful and impregnated with incense; their pulpits have resounded with the mocking cry, “Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” The promise has meant a good deal to those who looked for no rest on this side of the tomb, and has helped to blind them to the possibilities of rest in their real life.

Religion has not been a giver of rest but a scourge to drive the masses on to toil unresistingly. The demonstrations of scientists that religion is, on the one hand, an attempt of the ignorant to explain natural forces —of whose workings they are ignorant, and, on the other hand, a weapon in the hands of a ruling class to help to keep the workers in subjection—have made little progress in the workers’ minds in the past, because knowledge has been the privilege of the rulers and their henchmen, and the masses have lacked time and opportunity to learn.

In the later Middle Ages the ruling class in their own circle ignored the precepts they preached and permitted a considerable amount of scepticism in the writings of the professional groups, cynically conscious of the fact that it would never reach the understanding of the "lower orders.”

Of late years a change has gradually come, and from two directions; both of which are due to the profit-making root of present society—and are beyond the power of capitalism to cope with.

One cause is the mighty machine industry of to-day, which has demonstrated to workers, without the need of books, the natural source of supernatural phenomena, and, at the same time, the power of human capacity to harness the forces of nature. The oil engine, wireless, and the aeroplane have been among the remarkable educators of the average man during recent years.

The other cause is the cheap and wholesale production of literature which brings within reach of all, often in a very handy form, the very latest results of scientific investigation in all fields of thought, and also lays bare the method of scientific research.

Books are articles of commerce, like other commodities, and money invested in printing yields just the same kind of profit as money invested in oil production or any other ware. Consequently, newspapers print scientific reports and works of a scientific nature are written because the sale of newspapers and books is profitable. Workers read and learn, and their growing wisdom is reflected in a gradually clearer understanding of the world and their particular place in it.

Thus the blind scramble after profit leads the capitalist to dig the grave of his system, and, as the hold of superstitions weakens, the worker loses his reverence and respect for the things that; he has been taught to regard as the eternal institutions of divine wisdom. Religion, like a cloak, is thrown off when it is worn threadbare. In similar fashion, the system whose evils it has been used to cover is subjected to scientific examination, and failing to provide for the needs of the majority is displaced by one that does so.

Gilmac.

Proper Gander: Back To The Future (2016)

The TV Review column from the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pick any recent decade, and an argument could be made that it was pivotal in shaping the trends of our current (oddly nameless) decade. The 60s saw the erosion of many repressive attitudes, the 90s brought us the internet and mobile phones on a wide scale, and the 00s gave us a financial crisis and reality TV. In The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook (BBC 2), the historian makes the case for the decade of legwarmers and Rubik’s cubes. Sandbrook likes to use these kinds of symbols to highlight significant social developments. At various times he invokes Delia Smith, the Austin Metro and a Chesterfield vs Mansfield football match as representing the spirit of the time. But his argument isn’t as shallow as this might suggest.

For him, Delia Smith’s straightforward recipes symbolise how working couples had less time to cook, the Austin Metro was a patriotic attempt at revitalising British industry, and rivalry between supporters of Chesterfield and Mansfield’s football teams was based on whether each town’s miners went on strike. He wants us to re-evaluate some of our assumptions about what and who pushed society’s changes, especially during the 80s’ first half.

Sandbrook says that Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as the driving force behind the economic, social and political changes during the decade has been overstated. He argues that she embraced, rather than caused, the trends which were shaping society, such as the rise of consumerism and fall of traditional heavy industries. With or without her influence, many British industries were in a long-term decline due to wider market forces. The communities which relied on mining, in particular, ‘faced unemployment and disintegration’ due to their decline, and Thatcher was ‘a very convenient scapegoat’. The manufacturers she championed, such as the producers of the Austin Metro car and BBC Micro computer were hoped to be the businesses of the future, although both brands ended up overtaken by imported competitors.

The more successful industries during the 80s didn’t just produce commodities, but also commodified our identities. According to Sandbrook, consumerism isn’t really about the stuff we buy, but more about how our purchases relate to our image. During (and since) the 80s, taste was something which defined our personalities, whether we’re sloanes choosing jackets for the office in Next or New Romantics buying a Duran Duran LP. Previously, our identities were formed more by where we worked, especially in the politicised and unionised heavy industries. One symbol of this shift among countless others is the opening of the Merry Hill shopping centre near Dudley, built after the nearby Round Oak Steel Works closed.

Sandbrook says that ‘the real authors of change were us’, rather than Thatcher. As markets shifted, we focused on spending more on ourselves, and our homes. One symptom of this was the rise in popularity of video recorders. According to Mary Whitehouse and the mainstream media, much of the time we were using them to watch ‘video nasties’. The moral panic over gory films brought out deeper social anxieties about the intrusion of the big, bad changing world into our lives. Other tensions, such as the Brixton race riots and appearance of AIDS, exposed anxieties about Britain’s changing demographics.

For Sandbrook, these kinds of ‘identity politics’ were also central to the 1984 Miners’ Strike. He argues that the popular impression of the strike being the flashpoint in ongoing rivalries between the left and right wings of politics is misleading. He argues that the real conflict was within the miners, between those loyal to the unions and those who wanted to maintain their income by working. Sandbrook’s analysis is that the real faultline of the Miners’ Strike was between ‘collective loyalty and individual aspiration’. Changes in employment patterns are more fundamental than the ideologies of the political parties and unions.

For this reason, he tells us it’s a myth that Thatcher won the 1983 general election because of the Falklands War, as voters were really thinking more about jobs and the economy. Her cause was helped by latching on to trends like entrepreneurialism and individualism, and by being media-savvy. Thatcher’s government wanted to use the then-new Breakfast Television for propaganda purposes, as shown in a hitherto-secret memo.

In contrast, the Labour Party of the time was held back from electoral success by not concentrating enough on society’s changes. Grainy footage shows the 1980 Labour Party conference sharing a venue with Mike Yarwood and the Nolans. While the acts might have changed, the performances are similar again today, with conflicts between left-wing tendencies and those wanting to appeal to the centre ground (within the Labour Party, that is, not the Nolans).

Sandbrook’s main point is that the impact of market forces on us was what changed society during the early 1980s. The industries which traditionally lent themselves to collective action through unions were replaced by the industries which promoted the individualistic consumer. His perceptive argument puts economics in a rightfully prominent place, without relying on dry financial statistics. And any documentary with a soundtrack of Tears For Fears and The Human League is worth a watch.

Mike Foster

Socialist understanding is the key (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

It cannot be stressed enough, that without a widespread and clear idea among workers of what a socialist society entails, it will he unattainable. The reason is simple. The very nature of socialism—a moneyless, wageless world of unrestricted access to the goods and services provided by voluntary cooperative effort—necessitates understanding. There is absolutely no way in which such a sweeping fundamental transformation of social relationships could be thrust upon an unwilling, unknowing majority by some minority, however enlightened or well meaning.

In the first place such a minority would not have the power to do this against the might of the state, which is at present directed towards securing the continuation and the smooth and orderly functioning of capitalism in one form or another. The point to note though is that the state is able to do this because of the active or passive consent of the overwhelming majority. Being imbued with a capitalist ideology this majority continues to elect capitalist parties to power or, in places like Russia, to acquiesce in state capitalist dictatorship. Only by supplanting this capitalist ideology with a socialist outlook can majority support be gained to accomplish the necessary act of capturing state power to ensure that it cannot be used against the socialist transformation of society.

Secondly and most importantly, even if it were possible for a socialist minority to capture power, the majority would still need to participate in the complex process of modem socialised production, which has given rise to the possibility of socialism and which socialism will inherit. In socialism individuals would not be compelled to cooperate through the economic coercion of a wages system or the political tyranny of a state. It would not be socialism otherwise. How then could individuals be persuaded to participate in running a socialist society?

The answer is that people would have to want to do this in the first place out of “enlightened self interest”, in basic harmony with the interests of society as a whole and recognised as such. This means that people would have to know why socialism was in their own best interest and for that they would need to know what socialism was.

But given that for socialism to work people would have to cooperate it seems reasonable to suppose that the self-interest which drove them to establish socialism would compel them to participate in the required manner. Cooperative behaviour would spring from the realisation of self interest made one with social interests by the conversion of the means of production into the common property of all.

In practical terms this means people will need to know that with free access to the abundance of wealth modern industry could so easily provide (a potential imprisoned within the structure of the capitalist market economy) there will be no need to take more than they require which would, indeed, bring about social chaos.

Furthermore, to satisfy their needs in socialism they themselves will have to produce the things they require. They will assume a sense of creative responsibility; they will sited the slave mentality that craves the direction of leaders, a mentality that is reinforced by the insidious notion perpetrated by the left, of a “vanguard party” to lead the workers. That such a reactionary notion can have no place in the socialist revolution (though it certainly did in the case of capitalist revolutions such as the Bolshevik bourgeois revolution of 1917 which still provides inspiration for many leftists) was pointed out by Frederick Engels:

The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. (1895 Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France)

Having argued that majority understanding of socialism is indispensable to its establishment let us see how this may be brought about. One suggestion put forward by those who pay lip service to socialism is that it can be achieved through “raising consciousness" by a more rigorous prosecution of the day to day struggles of the workers.

The absurdity of this notion is apparent when we take a look at the very people who propound it—organisations like the “Socialist Workers Party” These are the people who presumably have had their “consciousness raised” and who therefore know how it is done—yet where are the indications that they know what socialism means? Certainly there is nothing in their literature in between the endless procession of pictures of banner bearing demos and inch-high expletives about “stuffing” this or “smashing” that. If anything it is more concerned with striking postures than conveying understanding, with sensationalism rather than socialism, moralism rather than Marxism.

Romantic militants

What these romantic militants want is not socialism but more of the same struggle, whereby they supposedly had their “consciousness raised", on the pretext that it leads somewhere. As they don’t want socialism they cannot possibly want to do away with capitalism. True the occasional reference is made to “smashing capitalism” but “capitalism" in this context is just a vague pigeonhole within which to deposit blame for social problems without need for further explanation. The correct analysis of the root cause of those social problems (capitalism) and their solution (socialism) are mutually interdependent. You cannot have one without the other and the left have neither.

If they did understand what capitalism was about, the left would not waste their time advancing daft ideas about “advocating policies beneficial to working people" (Socialist Worker 21.4.79) within a system which cannot possibly be run in the interests of "working people". Instead of dissipating their energies grappling with all the manifest absurdities and injustices thrown up by capitalism, they would concentrate on exposing that system as the cause of poverty, strife, pollution, racism. It is not possible to agitate for reforms which can only work to perpetuate the system, and at the same time claim to want to abolish it. By advocating reforms, the left imply the problems concerned are capable of solution within capitalism—a direct contradiction of the socialist view. The sterile prospect the left hold out is of struggle for its own sake, a vicious circle, for all they have "learnt from struggle" is that they must struggle in order to learn from it.

But let there be no misunderstanding on this score. The need to struggle in the industrial field is created by the antagonistic class interests inherent in capitalism. Nevertheless the purpose of a socialist cannot be to prolong this struggle but to bring it to a speedy end through political action. Our concern is not whether workers “learn from struggle" but what they learn and what use they put this knowledge to in the political field, where the decisive act in the emancipation of the working class will occur. Encouraging a hopelessly optimistic faith in the efficacy of industrial struggle cannot aid an understanding of capitalism. To the extent that it is shattered against the enduring reality of capitalism's economic laws, the outcome is more often than not one of despair, disillusionment and distrust for those who foster such a faith. Trade union activity is essentially defensive and limited as is explained in Marx's Value, Price and Profit.

The argument that “socialist understanding" develops out of class struggle is true enough. However the left then behave as if class struggle was something they conceived in their minds and they therefore feel obliged to go out into the world and initiate it. The idea of class struggle derives from the demonstrable fact that it exists irrespective of the knowledge or wishes of its participants. It exists because of the way society is at present organised into two classes whose interests are antagonistic. The need, then, is not to initiate it but to clarify it.

How then do socialists propose to bring about the understanding necessary for socialism? From what has been said we can identify at least two principles that define the work of a socialist party and are readily apparent in the way the Socialist Party of Great Britain conducts its propaganda. The first is total opposition to reformism because of its fundamental incompatibility with revolution. The second is to clarify, to directly transmit or embody in propaganda, what is meant by socialism. This should not be done in isolation but rather as an integral part of a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the world we live in. Analysis without a solution would be as sterile as a solution without the supporting analysis.

Shared experience

An understanding of socialism will not come by the spontaneous and automatic blossoming of this knowledge in the bosoms of millions of isolated workers. Feudal peasants could not effect a revolution in their own interests because the material conditions of their existence tended to "atomise” them, whereas capitalism, by bringing workers together in production, compelling them to organise and combine in trade unions, has willy-nilly brought into existence its own grave-digger. Mass socialist consciousness will develop out of the common experiences of workers and the interaction of ideas drawn from those experiences and through unity on the basis of socialist knowledge.

This means the growth of socialist parties around the world, armed with the strength that comes from unity, able to meet and vanquish the divisive ideology of capitalism by clearing away the smokescreen it creates between the worker and the recognition of his real real interests.

Already several such parties exist around the world but our effectiveness is limited. The spread of socialist knowledge will add to our effectiveness so that eventually we shall be able to break through the vicious circle that tends to keep us small simply because we are small. Indeed it is precisely because we are small that there is a greater significance in joining us now, rather than when we are numbered by tens of thousands.

Unlike the labour Party we do not solicit any support other than that of genuine socialists. It may keep us small but it has kept us socialist. That is the reason for what might on the face of it seem to some as an almost perverse and quixotic form of behaviour in resolutely refusing to place popularity before principles. That is why we screen applicants for membership just to ensure that they basically understand what we are about. This ties in with our opposition to the principle of leadership: leaders, in order to lead, have first to be accepted by those whom they wish to lead and that means getting support for the wrong reasons, pandering, and thus being ensnared by, the reformist aspirations of the majority. "The movement . . . will be shaped by the people it has tried to assimilate and not the people by the movement”. (On Spontaneity and organisation. M. Bookchin).

A favoured tactic of the left is that you should do the opposite of what you say you want, which means getting support for the wrong reasons. What this abandonment of principles is supposed to bring about is the gradual acceptance of your point of view by inviting people—urging them, in fact — to ram their heads firmly against a brick wall with consequences of which you were presumably aware. Thus you say, if you are in the SWP, “vote Labour" to workers and, sensing their reluctance, add a little incentive such as "W'ell at least they are not as bad as the Tories”. One can only wonder at the strange mental process whereby hatred for the brick wall is to be converted into faith in the conman who spurred you on to rush headlong into it.

Socialists see no merit at all in having working class heads rammed against brick walls. What we need is a class conscious working class, not a concussed one. It is the power of knowledge that is the weapon the working class must forge; for example, knowing the severe limitations within which trade unions work is not a weakness or an admission of defeat but a source of strength allowing workers to struggle to greatest effect within those limitations. Likewise socialist understanding is the most effective means to combat racism, nationalism and sexism. As a systematic attack upon the ideological props of capitalism, it is not only the key to the future but also a guide to practical struggle and the transformation of the social outlook.

Robin Cox

Letter From Europe: A Shorter Working Week? (1980)

The Letter From Europe column from the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March last year one of the French trade union confederations, the CFDT, organised a forum of European trade union leaders in Paris to launch its campaign for a "general reduction of the working week to 35 hours in order to create jobs". Albert Mercier, one of its national Secretaries, was reported as saying that "work-sharing through a reduction in working time was clearly one of the keys to solving the current employment problems" (European Communities Trade Union Information, No. 3/1979).

The reasoning behind this proposal — which is popular among trade unionists in countries besides France —is that if the hours of work available were shared more evenly, instead of some people being unemployed while others work long hours then everybody would benefit: the unemployed would find a job while the employed would have more free time.

But this is to assume that capitalism is a system that has the aim of providing people with an income from work, whereas in fact its sole aim is making profits. And it is precisely because capitalism is going through a period of reduced profitability that unemployment is now so high. When, as now, firms cannot sell profitably as many of their products as before then they cut back production —and so the number of workers they employ. Some firms have been so badly hit by the crisis that they have simply closed down or gone bankrupt, once again throwing workers onto the streets. This is all quite normal under capitalism since it is the only way in which it is able to function.

But unemployment not only rises and falls as the capitalist industrial cycle goes through its normal phases of crisis, slump, recovery, boom, crisis, slump, recovery and so on. There is also a permanent pool of unemployed, even in times of boom. This is because, without such a pool, the workers' bargaining position would improve to such an extent that the wage increases they could then extract from their employers would eat too much into profit margins. When the pool of unemployed workers in a particular country falls too low — as it did in Britain in the 1950s — then the employers resort to importing surplus labour power from abroad, from the mass of unemployed who are vegetating in the undeveloped parts of the world. It is this that explains the presence in France of so many North Africans, in Germany of so many Turks and in Britain of so many West Indians and people from the Indian subcontinent.

So capitalism needs a certain level of unemployment in order to function as the profit-making system it is. Unemployment is thus inevitable under capitalism and nothing can be done by governments or trade unions to prevent it. In the course of time, as the current slump gives way first to a recovery and then to a boom (as sooner or later it will), the present high level of unemployment will fall. But this will not be due to any government intervention or trade union action. It will be because profit levels have been restored as a result of the conditions created by the slump itself; in other words, once again, because economic laws of capitalism are functioning in their normal way.

A shorter working week will therefore not in any way lessen unemployment—if anything, from a strictly economic point of view it is more likely to have the opposite effect since, to the extent that it increases labour costs, it will encourage employers to introduce labour-saving machinery. This is not to say that workers should not be struggling, through their trade unions, for a shorter working week. It is simply that the case for shorter hours does not rest on the possible effects, either way, on employment.

The struggle for a shorter working week is a part of the trade union struggle to ensure that workers are paid the full value of their labour power (not the same thing, of course, as the full value of what they produce). The value of a worker's labour power is determined, like the value of all other commodities, by the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce and reproduce it: by the food, clothing housing and so on that workers must consume in order to maintain themselves in a fit state to work at their particular job.

Under capitalism workers are subject as Marx put it, to the "never-ceasing encroachments of capital". One of these downward pressures exerted by employers is precisely to try to make workers work more intensely —through .speed-up, new machinery, time-and-motion and other measures aimed at increasing "efficiency". But, as we have just seen, unless this increased intensity of labour is compensated, either by a wage increase or by shorter hours or both, then it is the equivalent of paying workers less than the value of their labour power. Marx in fact noted:

". . . the immoderate lengthening of the working day produced by machinery in the hands of capital leads later on to a reaction on the part of the society, which is threatened in the very sources of its life; and, from there, to a normal working day whose length is fixed by law. On the foundation laid by the latter, something we have already met with, namely the intensification of labour, develops into a phenomenon of decisive importance" (Capital, Pelican edition, p. 533).

He based this observation on the experience of the Ten Hours Act of 1847, as amended in 1850, which introduced a 60-hour week (5 days of 10½  hours and 7½  on Saturday!). The capitalists had bitterly opposed this Act and predicted that it would ruin industry. In fact, however, this did not happen. As Marx explained, the capitalists compensated for the shorter hours by making their workers work harder:

"Capital's tendency, as soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, is to compensate for this by systematically raising the intensity of labour, and converting every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means for soaking up labour-power (p. 542).

Marx then commented:

"There cannot be the slightest doubt that this process must soon lead once again to a critical point at which a further reduction in the hours of labour will be inevitable."

In other words, as with trade union action generally, the workers have here to run fast just to stand still. The first effective reduction in working hours in 1850 was followed by an intensification of labour; this led to the workers demanding and eventually obtaining a further reduction in hours, followed by a further intensification, a further reduction . . . until today most people have a normal working week of between 35 hours (in some offices in Britain) and 40 hours (the legal basic working week in France).

The trade unions are right to demand shorter hours, but are wrong in suggesting that this is a way of reducing unemployment. They are, in other words, right but for the wrong reason. From a trade union viewpoint this is not all that serious since what counts is the result (shorter hours so as to ensure that workers continue to be paid wages equal to the value of their labour power). But from a socialist viewpoint, it is important to be theoretically sound. To suggest that shorter hours could reduce unemployment is to encourage reformist illusions; is to sustain workers in their mistaken belief that capitalism can somehow be made to work in their interest, whereas just to ensure that they are paid the value of what they have to sell — just to try to maintain their living standards — workers have to keep on running fast.

But this defensive struggle, though necessary, should not be all that workers do. To adapt a phrase, instead of the conservative, defensive slogan of "a normal working day for a normal day's work", they ought to raise the revolutionary slogan of "the abolition of the wages system". Once the wages system has been abolished through the conversion of the means of production into the common property of society, then the "never-ceasing encroachments of capital" will cease and free men and women of socialist society will organise the necessary work of wealth-production to suit their convenience.

Adam Buick

Luxemburg