When Ideologies Run Out of Ideas (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “establishment” candidates Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush had money and media backing, but their bankrupt ideas doomed their campaigns.

The 2016 US presidential election revealed the splits within the Democratic and the Republican Parties. We witnessed the breakdown of the coalitions that each party had relied upon in past elections. As the political tendencies within both coalitions grew estranged from each other, the conventional ideology and slogans of each party became increasingly hollow and unconvincing. This new reality was revealed over the course of the primaries and the general election, as the ordinary tactics of the ‘establishment’ candidates proved not only ineffective and often completely counterproductive.

Identity crisis

At the outset of the presidential primaries, however, it seemed that only the Republican Party was facing a true identity crisis. The first sign of trouble was that well over a dozen Republican politicians declared their candidacy for the Party’s presidential nomination, reflecting the perceived weakness of the supposed frontrunner Jeb Bush. Moreover, some of these candidates had risen to prominence on the back of the so-called Tea Party movement, which rewarded politicians who aggressively challenged the ‘moderate’ Party leadership.

Yet, despite the breakdown in Party discipline and open criticism of Republican leaders, nearly all of those seeking the nomination imagined, on the basis of past primaries, that a viable candidate would have to pledge loyalty to the sacred principles of the Republican Party, such as Christian values, a belief in small government (i.e., welfare and tax cuts), faith in corporate deregulation and the free market, and blind support for overseas military adventures. Those core principles roughly correspond to some key factions within the Republican coalition: the pious Christian right, the small-government “libertarians” (‘free market’ capitalists), and the hawkish Neocons.

Those factions were already coming into severe conflict with each other years before the 2016 election. For instance, the obsession of the Christian right with issues like abortion or gay marriage, was alienating Republicans (particularly those in urban areas) who were less interested in serving God’s will than in rendering unto Caesar as little as humanly possible. The Libertarians and other true believers in small government were, in turn, vehemently opposed to the massive spending on the military and foreign wars, bringing them into sharp opposition with the Neocons and the foreign-policy establishment. And the Neocons themselves already had one foot planted in the Democratic Party, which had continued under the Obama administration the Bush-era policy of aggressive ‘regime change.’ 

Yet even while the Republican coalition was splitting along such lines, the Republican candidates stuck to the idea that it was necessary to come across as a Bible-thumping, corporation-loving Christian warmonger in order to win the nomination. The one candidate who ignored that outdated common sense was of course Donald Trump, himself a Tweet-wielding, corporation-running, Capitalist a-hole. 

Trump refused to genuflect at the altar of orthodoxy, it can be imagined, simply because it did not suit his brash showbiz persona. Whatever the case, his approach turned out to perfectly suit the public mood. And, with surprising eagerness, the rank-and-file abandoned supposedly cherished Republican beliefs in order to back a two-time divorcee from that ‘den of sin’ New York City who called for economic protectionism and stimulus spending (along with his tax cuts) and declared that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder.

Complacent

The willingness of Republicans to turn their backs on Party dogma in favour of the ‘straight-shooter’ Trump was a sign that the public mood was shifting dramatically. But the Democratic leadership looked on complacently, confident that the Republican primary was unfolding in a way that would benefit Clinton.

In April 2015, Democratic strategist and Clinton confidant Sydney Blumenthal suggested in an email (later released by Wikileaks) that the Clinton campaign should elevate what he called the ‘Pied Piper candidates’ (like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump) ‘so that they are “leaders of the pack and tell the press to take [them] seriously” as a way of moving “established candidates further to the right” and making the “more extreme candidates . . . actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party.’

Under normal circumstances this may have been an astute strategy. But this time around the Democratic leaders were badly misreading the situation in concluding that only a moderate from either party was a viable candidate. The Republican leaders shared that common sense,’ but fortunately for them (in the end) they lacked the tools that the Democrats had to crush an insurgent campaign.

Thanks to the Democrats’ ‘super delegates’ and frontloaded southern primaries, not to mention a Democratic National Committee crawling with Clinton operatives, the nomination of Hillary was all but a foregone conclusion more than a year before the primaries even began.

Even the participation of Bernie Sanders in the primary seemed, at first, to play right into the typical election strategy of the Democrats. His assigned role, like Dennis Kucinich and other ‘radical’ candidates in the past, was to generate just enough interest in the election among youth, trade unionists, and others on the ‘Left’ to prevent them from deserting the Democrats for a third-party candidate. Bernie himself seemed to have no greater ambition initially than to ‘push the Party to the left,’ but to his surprise, no doubt, a powerful movement began to gather around him.

Despite all the careful preparations to keep the rabble from being roused in the election, the split between rank-and-file Democrats and the Party leaders was laid bare over the course of what became a bitter primary battle between Sanders and Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the election campaign was not the cause of the split, but it did make very clear to the public the deep divisions that had been papered over during the Bush and Obama years.

In fact, the fraying of the Democratic coalition was already well underway back in the 1990s under the Bill Clinton administration. The coalition had once centred on the strength of the labor unions, who could mobilize campaign workers and funds to back Democratic candidates. The steady decline of organized labor (accelerated thanks to Clinton-era policies) altered the balance of forces within the Party. Moreover, the Democratic leadership were able to take labor-union support for granted, since organized workers were hardly likely to defect to the rabidly anti-union Republican Party. Another group whose unconditional support was assumed were African Americans, who had been almost uniformly opposed to the Republicans ever since President Nixon implemented his ‘southern strategy’ of appealing to white southern workers.

This election, the Democrats also thought the Hispanic vote was in the bag, thanks to Trump’s vilification of Mexicans and obsession with building a border wall. But Obama has deported well over two million illegal immigrants during his terms in office, breaking the record of George W. Bush, which may account for why Hillary only won just over 60 percent of the Hispanic vote.

In any case, taking the votes of so many of the rank-and-file Party members and supporters for granted was premised on the singular awfulness of the Republican Party — and for a time the strategy seemed to work well enough. But an ideology that is largely negative or defensive offering few positive principles or goal — seems doomed to failure.

And the end did come in November 2016 with the defeat of the ideologically bankrupt Clinton campaign, which had smeared supporters of Trump (and Sanders!) as misogynists and racists, and even dabbled in laughable conspiracy theories suggesting sinister links between Trump and Putin.

Nostalgia

Granted, the central ideas of the Sanders and Trump campaigns were based on a nostalgia for the good old days (that never were) — whether returning the Democratic Party to its role as the supposed party of the working class or bringing ‘greatness’ back to American somehow — but at least their slogans did challenge the status quo and create the impression of having some positive content.

It might seem that the Trump and Sanders insurgencies offer the two parties a way out of their ideological and organizational impasses. But is that the case?

Trump, certainly has taken a broad axe to the rotten planks of the old Republican platform. But his own incipient platform looks to be very shaky. For instance, how is he going to balance tax cuts with expanding the military budget and increasing spending on infrastructure as a stimulus measure? His surprising victory has brought a temporary unity (or truce) among warring factions within the Party, but no fundamental compromise is on the cards.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s supporters hope to win Party leadership from the Clintonites to implement ‘progressive’ policies. Much of their criticism of the Party establishment is on the mark, but they overlook the very basic fact that capitalism is a system of production for profit. This reality shapes policy and leaves only a limited space for the sort of reformist policies the ‘Berniecrats’ are advocating. The supporters of Sanders may be right about a strategy to win voters to the Democratic Party, but the role of the Party is not simply to win elections but to administer capitalism effectively, which is to say, ‘profitably.’ 

It is impossible to predict exactly where the Republican or Democratic Party might be headed, but if either party were to undergo a decisive split it would not be too surprising. Then again, both may very well manage to more peacefully realign themselves along different lines, in altered coalitions.

Fascinating fiasco

In any case, the 2016 election has revealed the current fault lines within those two parties and also taught us (or at least reconfirmed) a number of valuable lessons. It has become clear, for instance, that the ‘faithful’ of each party may not be as blinded by loyalty as their opponents imagine. Ultimately, each party has to gain and maintain the support of its members and of voters on the basis of ideas. Even a campaign backed by the power of money and the media can fall flat without any coherent ideology at its basis.

The obvious case example is the Clinton campaign, which enjoyed a formidable fundraising apparatus and network of media lackeys. But the mixed message of the campaign, reflecting the gap between Clinton’s words and deeds, left her vulnerable to Sanders and vanquished by Trump. The weapons the Clinton campaign wielded ended up harming her more than her opponents by exposing to the public, without much room for doubt, that she was the establishment candidate. The more money Clinton raised from her donors and the more articles published to praise her or attack her opponents, only ended up underscoring that status as the champion of the status quo.

This fascinating fiasco is highly encouraging to a socialist party. One can expect the ruling class to launch ferocious attacks against the socialist movement, starting with the media, once the movement has grown too powerful to ignore. But there is every likelihood that the effort to attack and discredit the socialist rebellion, will only contribute to its strength. It is already rather astounding that in a US presidential election, of all places, a Democratic candidate and his supporters would embrace terms like ‘socialist’ or ‘revolutionary,’ which are ordinarily used to smear a leftwing opponent. We have come a long way from the 1990s, when Democratic politicians lived in fear of being labelled ‘liberals’ by their Republican opponents.

The 2016 election campaign suggests that now is an ideal moment for socialists to boldly attack the thread-bare ideologies of bourgeois political parties and present our alternative to capitalism.

MS

Taking up William Morris (1994)

Book Review from the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883-1890. by William Morris (Thoemmes £16.75).

When the Socialist Party was formed, in June 1904, William Morris, arguably the greatest of British socialists, had died only eight years earlier. It is little wonder, then, that the early issues of the Socialist Standard serialised Morris’s political writings; that in the 1940s quotations from Morris appeared on the Socialist Standard covers; and that the Socialist Party decided to publish Morris's Art Under Plutocracy (under the title Art, Labour and Socialism) with an appreciative introduction. Like Marx himself. Morris is not to be taken up as a political guru, and where he was at odds with our positions we have not failed to say so.

The British Left was slow to take much from Morris, and this was hardly to be surprised at. After all. left-reformism and its statist recipe for social change was entirely at odds with Morris's revolutionary outlook. Leftists and would-be intellectuals chided Morris with being a utopian poet, an idealistic dreamer and an eccentric marginal force, at best to be remembered for his utopian-socialist novel News From Nowhere, but no more.

When Morris was taken up, largely after the publication of the book about him by the Leninist Page Arnot. followed by the first, highly Leninist edition of the biography of Morris by E. P. Thompson (later to be admirably revised and de-Leninised). there was an attempt to claim him as an embryonic statist and reformist: a misreading of the historical record easy enough for those who have never read Morris’s political writings, but surely dishonest on the part of others.

For many years it was. indeed, difficult to read Morris’s political writings, but A. L. Morton’s edited selection of Morris’s Political Writings (mainly the transcripts of speeches, in fact) was a major step forward. The present writer still regards those writings, read and re-read with enthusiasm, as amongst the simplest prose written originally in English (and not for this journal) to state the case for socialism. Now we are fortunate to have Nicholas Salmon’s paperback collection which includes all of Morris’s main articles. The book is a treat to read (including its useful introduction) and is a landmark in the record of the real revolutionary movement in Britain.

In so many ways Morris could have been writing in this journal. For example, in May 1886 he explains that "in a few words our function is to educate the people by criticising all attempts at so-called reforms". Again, in June 1888, explaining the principles of the Socialist League. Morris writes:

"The Socialist League has declared over and over again its sense of the futility of Socialists wasting their time in getting . . . palliative measures passed, which, if desirable to be passed as temporarily useful, will be passed much more readily if they do not mix themselves up in the matter, and which are at least intended by our masters to hinder Socialism and not further it. Over and over again it has deprecated Socialists mixing themselves up in political intrigues; and it believes no useful purpose can be served by their running after the votes of those who do not understand the principles of Socialism."

Morris understood the global nature of capitalism and the folly of trying to establish socialism in one country: "capitalism is international", he explained in an article against the anti-socialist Bradlaugh in August 1887, and therefore "the foe that threatens it, the system which is put forward to take its place, must be international also". Most importantly. Morris refused to confuse socialism with state-run capitalism, declaring in May 1890:

"State Socialism? I don't agree with it; in fact. I think the two words contradict one another, and that it is the business of Socialism to destroy the State and put Free Society in its place.”

Shortly after that the League was taken over by anarchists who assumed foolishly that the state could be destroyed straightaway, rather than as a necessary and immediate consequence of social revolution and the abolition of class rule. Morris then left the League, but continued his efforts (not recorded in this collection) with a good deal of clarity and occasional confusion as to the way ahead.

The purpose of this review is not to claim the bones of William Morris for the Socialist Party. Who knows where Morris might have stood had he lived another decade and been forced to choose between the apparent short-cut to socialism offered by the Labour Party and the uncompromising revolutionism of the SPGB? (After all, Marx's closest collaborator, Engels, went the way of the reformist ILP rather than the smaller Marxist movement at the end of his life.)

No, Morris’s position must stand on what he might have said and done, but we who live now promoting unadulterated socialist principles have much to learn from Morris's writings (the style as well as the content) and could obtain few better books in 1994 than this one. 

Steve Coleman

Abolition of the Wages . . . for Housework Campaign (1994)

Book Review from the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Feminism. By Selma James. Centrepiece. £1.50.

Marx, according to Selma James in this reprint with an update of a talk originally given in 1983, has been useful to the Wages for Housework Campaign. It is difficult to see how though, since Marx campaigned for the abolition not the extension of the wages system.

Actually, what theWages for Housework Campaign is demanding is not that women should be paid a wage for housework, but that all women should be paid a specific Woman’s Benefit by the State. Turning into a single issue reformist group may not have been how James (who had previously been in various radical groups that regarded themselves as Marxist) saw the Campaign developing when she helped set it up in 1972. But this is what has happened, with her and the others rushing around lobbying the UN and governments to bring in this reform.

Not that it will ever be enacted. The State is not going to pay out money to people who, by its criteria, don’t need it even if it did have the enormous sum that would be involved, which it doesn’t and couldn’t get without over-taxing profits. Capitalism doesn’t work like that. It can’t be reformed so as to work in people's interests. Profits always come first and people second.

This being so, the energies of those who are, quite rightly, concerned about the economic dependence of women on men would be much better directed to campaigning for Socialism, where the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" will apply. This will end once and for all women’s economic dependence on men since everyone would have free access, as a matter of individual right and without needing to pay money, to what they required to satisfy their needs.

As Marx might have put it, instead of raising the conservative slogan "Wages for Housework” they should raise the revolutionary one of "Abolition of the Wages Systen".

Adam Buick

Squaring the Circle (1971)

Book Review from the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Society of the Future, by August Bebel. Progress Publishers. Moscow.

To mark their government’s false claim to be in the process of establishing “Communism” in Russia by the 1980s a Russian State publishing house has brought out under this title an edited version of Bebel’s Woman under Socialism.

Bebel speculates on the possibilities of Socialism (which he sees as an international, Stateless, moneyless society based on the common ownership of the means of production) and produces evidence to show that the productive forces were sufficiently developed, even in 1910, to go over to Socialism.

Bebel was a Social Democrat and the Russian editor is forced to disown precisely those of his views which we in the Socialist Party of Great Britain endorse, namely, his refusal to distinguish between "Socialism” and “Communism”; his conclusion that the abolition of capitalism necessarily involves the immediate disappearance of the State and of money; and his belief in the “more or less simultaneous triumph of the socialist revolution in all or most capitalist countries”. The Preface where the editor tries to explain away the undeniable fact that Bebel, unlike Lenin but like Marx, understood Socialism to be a moneyless, Stateless world society rather than the kind of national state capitalism that exists in Russia has to be read to be believed.

Our criticisms of Bebel, apart from his role as one of the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party who tried to disguise its reformist practice with revolutionary phrases, would be somewhat different. He here follows Marx and speaks of labour-time vouchers as the substitute for money and some of his ideas on education and sex now seem dated. All the same, this work is a useful addition to the range of old pamphlets now available.

Adam Buick

Spectacle out of focus (1975)

Book Review from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leaving the 20th Century : The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. Translated and edited by Christopher Gray. Free Fall Publications, 80p.

Of the 167 pages in this book, 148 are extracts from Situationist pamphlets and articles. Christopher Gray adds only short linkages: the Situationists’ history and antecedents, their breaking-up, and some brief final comments. Was there more, or is that all?

From inside an exclusive, fanatical group the view is inevitably distorted. Gray was himself a Situationist, and attributes a far greater resonance to the members and activities than they actually had. He uses the word “famous” repeatedly, and in no instance is it applicable. There are unsupported presumptions of a wide influence, and a claim that: “The censorship of the Situationist International has probably been the most blatant case of cultural repression since before the war.” Really?

The aim of the Situationists is said to have been “a new revolutionary critique of society”. More accurately, they tried to make artistic-cum-political doctrines from a collection of phenomena—new technology, the spread of dropping-out, the vogue for condemning “consumer-orientated society”. They added one phrase to the vocabulary of social criticism: “the society of the spectacle” for the mass culture of alienation.

In art and politics, Situationist practice was simply the making of rude or violent gestures against the rest of society. Their centre remained in Paris, and according to Gray they faded out after the student revolts of 1968. One version is that they went underground. However, their name remains as a synonym for intellectualized subversion, and small groups of people in that frame of mind have tried—and no doubt will try again—to revive it. It has been considered, and Gray hints, that Situationists either assisted or egged-on the Angry Brigade; certainly the Angry Brigade communiques incorporated the Situationist language.

Christopher Gray thinks the Situationists “made the same mistake as all left-wing intellectuals: they thought that everyone else was plain thick.” The book has, despite its perfunctoriness, a good deal of interest. The message which comes through clearly is that to try to stand outside society, and try to justify it from a rag-bag of political and sociological half-ideas, means being pernicious or futile or both.

The ending tells it all: the author feels in a mess, divided between the needs for social analysis and for self-analysis. So it was not society at all that the Situationists viewed, but a model made of matchboxes on somebody’s shelf.

Robert Barltrop

A Land Within (2016)

Book Review from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Negroland: A Memoir'. By Margo Jefferson. Granta £12.99.

Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947, and her father was a doctor. Negroland is her term for ‘a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty’. The name includes ‘Negro’ because of this word’s historical importance (in posters relating to runaway slaves, for instance), though she usually refers to herself as black, with ‘African American’ being for official contexts only. This volume is not exactly an autobiography but a series of anecdotes and reflections on life as a (relatively well-off) black woman in the US; Jefferson herself became a writer and journalist.

There is some brief history, such as on black slave-owners, and the segregation of the US Army in the Second World War. There are examples of discrimination from the 1950s, affecting even the inhabitants of ‘Negroland’: Jefferson’s family were given inferior rooms in a hotel, and in their fairly select Chicago neighbourhood her father was stopped by police who asked if he had drugs in his bag (it contained medical equipment).       

One point which emerges more than once is the extent to which ‘race’ is in the eye of the beholder. The author describes herself as being of African, Irish, English and Indian (Native American) descent. Her own skin is ‘cream-brown’, and a shop worker with black-brown skin asks her what her ethnic ancestry is. Many of her relatives could pass as white, and she refers to an uncle who worked as a travelling salesman and then ‘stopped being white’ when he retired.

In the US the fight for ‘black rights’ was dominated by men, and that for ‘women’s rights’ by white women. She quotes one black feminist who argued that black women had spent years copying bad ideas from white women but then decided they wanted nothing to do with the one good idea of feminism. Jefferson will not say which of race, gender and class matters more, since all are ‘basic elements of one’s living’. Note, though, that this is not the Socialist analysis of class but one which sees the inhabitants of ‘Negroland’ as middle or even upper class.

But an insightful and often moving account.

Paul Bennett

Greasy Pole: Rough Ride On Runway Three (2016)

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

Head and shoulders above the rest is how Chris Grayling emerges in many group photographic images of our mistresses and masters in government. He is outstanding  in ways other than a physical presence because, since he first got into Parliament in 2011 as the Honourable Member for Epsom and Ewell, he has held a generosity of ministerial offices including a spell when the Tories were in opposition as a Front Bench Shadow Minister. His record has given him valuable experience of normalising some controversial matters, to the extent that it seemed natural that he should be Secretary of State for Transport when at the end of October it was confirmed that the dispute over the third runway at Heathrow Airport had been settled. Settled, that is, to the extent that it will be laid down together with all the associated horrors of chaotic terminals and jam-packed roads and atmospheric pollution – and engine noise.

Heathrow

It was a matter of going along with a recommendation by the Airports Commission to develop Heathrow rather than Gatwick Airport, which was hoping to be allowed to have a second runway. Grayling stated the case for Heathrow: ‘The step that government is taking today is truly momentous. I am proud that after years of discussion and delay this government is taking decisive action to secure the UK’s place in the global aviation market – securing jobs and business opportunities for the next decade and beyond’. This news was the worst possible for thousands of people – for example those in Harmondsworth, where  some 700 homes, an ancient church and eight Grade Two listed buildings and a graveyard would disappear under the bulldozers, as would the nearby ancient village of Sipson. And to another, crucial objection Grayling had an answer – if that is the correct term – ready: ‘No airport is able to be silent’, he assured the objectors and others and then, before the gasps of outrage had died away,  'but we have studied new supplementary evidence that shows it won’t be quite as noisy as some people seem to think it will be’.

Combative 

These assurances might have been more effective if they had been voiced by someone with a less turbulent and discouraging past than Grayling. He was appointed to his present job last July; in the past he has held nine others of varying responsibility and the most he has survived in any of them was two years. His first experience of office was as Minister for Employment, from 2010 until 2012, when he was responsible for the supposedly constructive work of the Job Centres. He quickly gained a reputation for his combative style including a reduction in costs by making some 100,000 staff at the Job Centres redundant, with a predictable effect on the benefits of out-of-work people who were condemned by him for ‘being habitually unemployed, generation after generation, living in sink council estates’. He carried this assessment style over into his later job as Lord Chancellor and Minister for Justice  when he laid down that prisoners should be encouraged to remodel themselves away from their ‘something for nothing culture’ and he took steps to stop them receiving books from their families and friends. He also encouraged private companies such as Securicor and G4S to play a greater – and more profitable – part in the supervision of prisoners released early on licence. These achievements were responsible for him being dubbed ‘Failing Grayling’ and made it difficult to understand why he had been appointed to some of the more sensitive posts in government.

Demonstrators  

But Grayling’s store of Arguments for Survival is unusually deep, enabling him to survive when his rivals have given up. When he was dumped with the responsibility for seeing the Third Runway through to establishment it had been in process, from one side to the other, for a very long time. It was another example of politicians who habitually encourage us to trust them for their talent for crisp clear-headed attitudes but are liable to change their collective minds, often diametrically from one embattled side to the other – at times developing nothing better than a state of chaos. Heathrow was opened as ‘London Airport Heathrow’ in 1946, coming out of the purchase in 1930 of 150 acres of land by an aircraft engineer from the vicar of Harmondsworth. Over the years it repeatedly expanded, with a succession of Terminals until in 2001 the then Labour government was persuaded by a campaign to manage the aerospace congestion by building a further runway. In 2003 Alistair Darling, when he was Minister of Transport, produced a White Paper which effectively set the debate going, confirmed by another White Paper in 2005. This set off a widespread, organised protest movement which objected to the proposal on the grounds of aircraft noise, atmospheric pollution and road traffic congestion – on one occasion making its points with a band of intrepid demonstrators on the roof of Parliament. This did not persuade the Labour government with its Prime Minister Gordon Brown to change its policy.

No Ifs No Buts

That had to wait for 2009 and the future Prime Minister of the coalition government David Cameron who made many people feel a lot better with his famous declaration including the phrase that ‘…the third runway at Heathrow is not going ahead no ifs, no buts’ and after the 2010 election the Lib Dem Nick Clegg was encouraged to try to seduce a few votes, along with all those others who had believed him in the matter of student loans, by agreeing that the whole idea of a Third Runway was dead in the airways. And there was the next Tory Prime Minister Theresa May who in January 2009 intervened  like a seasoned objector on the matter of the Labour government plan to approve the terminal: ‘A third runway will result in thousands of additional flights, increased noise and more pollution for thousands of people. The government’s promises on the environmental impact of this are not worth the paper they are written on’.

We are accustomed to the exposure of politicians in a confusion of their impotence. In the case of the third runway the reasons are readily available. Heathrow is effectively owned by a number of investment funds in countries such as Qatar, Singapore, China while the British Chamber of Commerce expects it to bring £30 billion of ‘economic benefits’ to the UK economy between 2020 and 2080. Aircraft fly, people travel, goods are flown back and forward across the world, influenced by profits or loss – by those ‘economic benefits’. The third runway is not judged on its effects on human welfare but on which side of that equation it operates.

Ivan

Editorial: Life After Trump (2016)

Editorial from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most political pundits predicted that Donald Trump would face defeat in the Presidential Elections. Likewise with the European Referendum in June, they were confident that the Remain side would win. On both counts, they were wrong.

In next year's French Presidential elections the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, is expected to make major gains. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland, a far right populist group, may be in a position to challenge the ruling Christian Democrats. The Freedom Party of Austria gained most votes in the first round of the Austrian Presidential elections in April 2016.

Clearly, there is a surge in support for populist parties and politicians across Europe and in the USA who peddle nationalism, xenophobia and racism and pose as champions of the people against the establishment. Widespread disaffection with and mistrust of the mainstream political parties have emerged. It is not too difficult to see why this discontent has come about.

Over the years, due to the deregulation by governments of financial markets, capital has been able to flow more freely around the globe. Thus many relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing and in industry have moved from richer to poorer countries where the labour costs are lower. At the same time, we have witnessed the erosion of trade union power. There has been increased impoverishment in former industrial areas, such as the 'rustbelts' in the USA. Impersonal market forces have penetrated into the everyday lives of working class people resulting in a feeling of powerlessness. Governments of whatever persuasion appear at best set against these forces or at worst conniving with them. Supranational institutions, that embody these impersonal market forces, like the European Union, have become increasingly unpopular.

Concomitant with this process of 'globalisation' has been the rise of immigration of workers to the richer countries. This has fostered unease among workers in the host countries who fear increased competition for jobs and scarce resources. Populists, like Donald Trump, UKIP and the Front National, exploit these anxieties for their electoral gain.

Over this period, there has been a rise in Islamophobia resulting from terrorist attacks such as the September 11 attacks, the London bombings and more recently the attacks in France and Belgium. Populists have not been slow in latching onto this fear of Islamic terrorism. Banning Muslims from entering the US was a central plank of Trump's electoral platform.

There is no doubt that the social and economic effects of the 2008 financial crash have increased the discontent of the working class. While workers have had to endure austerity imposed on them, the rich minority continue to become richer. Governments are seen to be complicit in this increasing inequality.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites and the failure of social democratic parties like the Labour Party to reform capitalism, socialism and communism have been seen by many workers to have failed. Therefore, when workers become angry with the effects of capitalism, many of them turn to right-wing populist parties. Ironically these parties usually champion the same free market capitalism which ultimately lies behind working class discontent. They offer no solution to working class problems, and like the Social Democratic Parties before them, they will inevitably fail in their efforts to transform capitalism should they come to power. Socialism is the only solution to working class problems.

So They Say: Public Eye (1977)

The So They Say column from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Public Eye

A great deal of emphasis is placed nowadays on the way a thing appears; while this is no bad thing in itself, the importance of a “good image” tends to increase as the wares offered become less and less satisfactory. Any salesman, or politician hawking his policies is aware of this. In turn this progression can lead to the “image” representing the opposite of the truth and the State is no newcomer to the trick. Recruiting posters for the armed forces give the impression that most of the applicant’s time will be spent living it up on distant beaches.

Sir Robert Mark, the recently retired Police Commissioner, says that the police force too has found it useful to give certain false impressions which assist it in the work of the State.

The real art of policing a free society or a democracy is to win by appearing to lose. By that I mean, for example, that it would be disastrous in dealing with situations like Grosvenor Square or Red Lion Square if we were to rely on water cannon or teargas or particularly violent methods. I think our technique is more sophisticated. We have a singularly attractive horse, she is the Brigitte Bardot of the 230 horses that we possess and she is trained to simulate death on the word of command in front of a television camera. This is the way to make sure that the police image which the British people like to have is maintained.

London Evening Standard, 15th July 77

Performers and Performance

Many reasons have been put forward to explain what is called "Britain’s poor economic performance.” The odd thing is that almost every one of them seems to have an opposite number: Wages are too high—wages are too low, likewise prices, investment and inflation. To further confuse the issue Mr. Francis Pym, Conservative front-bencher, has added what he sees as the dread cause.

Ceaseless party crossfire was the main cause of Britain’s poor economic performance in recent years.

The Times, 14th July 77

On form to date, it is possible that one of the Labour windbags will soon propose more “crossfire”(?) as a solution. However Mr. Pym seems to have short-circuited this possibility by remarking:

There was more in common now between the millions who voted Conservative, Labour and Liberal than the issues which divided them. Many did not seem to like the choice offered and feared that whichever they chose, they might get an unsatisfactory result.

Mr. Pym may not know much about capitalism’s economics, but when it comes to the choice which voters are faced with, he knows exactly what he is talking about.


Make us an offer

And Mr. Pym is not alone. Stung by Conservative taunts that the Liberals had made their agreement to vote with Labour on purely opportunist lines, Mr. Emlyn Hoosen (Liberal MP) surely disarmed critics in Parliament with his candour:

The present government had behaved very badly for their first two years in office and there was little to choose between the red devils opposite and the deep blue sea on the other side of the House. Their past behaviour had put the leader of the Liberal Party in a dilemma.

The Times, 12th July 77

The dilemma being that the Liberal Party, like a tick bird, has to fly from hippo to hippo to gain sustenance. The notable difference being that the tick bird does serve some useful function.


Hoots

This writer once had a canvasser call who, when asked about the candidate’s particular policy, replied immediately that she didn’t know much about it— the candidate was her son and she was only helping him out. The Scottish National Party canvassers clearly run into similar problems on the doorstep and this provoked someone into writing the SNP Canvasser’s Manual—their equivalent of “How to make friends and influence people.” It gives mock questions, together with sample answers; and techniques on how the SNP canvasser might “convert” the listener. One ploy is to throw yourself into it—think in terms of

The person coming to this door is going to be the most interesting person I’ve ever met . . .
   Never attack something a man says he had admired, it was better to agree and then to add: Pity he’s in the wrong organization.

The Times, 6th July 77

The SNP however have been caught with their kilts down as Labour and Conservative MPS, none of whom is short on hypocrisy, make hay with this sort of pandering technique and SNP have pulped the unsold copies in embarrassment It seems a pity to add to their discomfort, but one piece of advice contained in the manual struck us as particularly unnecessary:

It might be valuable for the canvasser to explain his own reasons for joining the party. But do not talk about seeing the light or make it sound like a new religion.

If nothing else the SNP have added A new dimension to their much loved phrase—Scottish oil.

Alan D'Arcy

PLO in retreat (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even capitalism’s grotesqueries do not usually run to civil war in the absence of a nation-state, but that is precisely what has been happening in the Lebanon. The Palestinians, uprooted and dispersed at the lime of the formation of Israel in 1948, are engaging in fierce inter-factional fighting. Even before the latest events, it was the case that more Palestinian guerrillas had been killed by the armies of their supposed allies, the other Arab states, than by Israel; but now. Palestinian is killing Palestinian.

In June 1982. Israel launched a full scale invasion of Lebanon, supposedly in retaliation for the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to Britain. Soon there were over 100,000 Israeli troops in Lebanon and the capital, Beirut, was bombed and besieged. About half a million Palestinians live in the Lebanon, many of them since 1948 in the more-or-less permanent settlements known as refugee camps. In August that year, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) began to evacuate its headquarters in Beirut. The following month, the Israeli army acquiesced as Phalangist Lebanese militia massacred upwards of two thousand men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila camps.

Dissent within the PLO ranks has greatly increased since the withdrawal from Beirut. Syrian-backed opponents of PLO chief Yasser Arafat have been attacking troops loyal to him. The Beirut defeat weakened Arafat's position, as did his willingness to talk to King Hussein of Jordan over an American peace initiative in September last year. The manoeuvring of Hafez Assad, the Syrian President, led to Arafat being expelled from Damascus (where he had gone after abandoning Beirut) last summer and going to the Northern Lebanon coastal city of Tripoli. There he and his supporters have been bombarded by dissident PLO men and the Syrians, who have forty thousand troops in the Lebanon. The rebels — led by men such as Ahmad Jibril and Abu Mousa — accuse Arafat and his clique of being corrupt. building large houses and even harbours and helicopter pads for their own use from PLO funds (Guardian 23 November 1983). At the time of writing, the PLO seem likely to be forced to evacuate Tripoli, perhaps under a United Nations flag, though it is not clear where they will be able to go.

Lebanon is a former French, earlier Turkish, colony. It became "independent" in 1943, but has remained embroiled in the murderous power politics of the Middle East. Its internal politics are dominated by two coalition groups: the Lebanese National Movement (L.NM) is a reformist grouping which supports the PLO and its main rival is the Lebanese Front, dominated by the Phalangist party (founded in 1936 and named after the Phalange of Franco’s Spain). The Phalange opposes the PLO, has collaborated with Israel and supports the expulsion of all Palestinians from Lebanon. Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalangist militia and president-elect of Lebanon when assassinated in September 1982. had gone on record as saying that in the Middle East there was one people too many, the Palestinians. No apologist for Zionism could have been blunter. These were the ideas that motivated the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

The Machiavellian tactics of Syria and President Assad lie behind much of the present turmoil and the possible escalation into war with the American part of the ludicrously-misnamed multinational "peace-keeping” force. Despite brave words about retaliation for encroachment of its airspace, Syria has done nothing in response to Israeli and French air-raids on parts of Lebanon it controls. Syria's Russian-supplied armed forces are operating only against the PLO. Ironically, it is the Palestinian cause that Assad claims to be espousing, and whose chief spokesman he intends to be. A country with scant supplies of oil, Syria can only become powerful by conquest and/or influence. The plan for a Greater Syria encompasses Jordan and Palestine as part of Syria: control over that part of Lebanon not in Israeli hands is a first step on this road. Assad has retained dictatorial power in Syria for thirteen years; in 1982 he killed over twenty thousand Muslim fundamentalist opponents of his regime. In 1976, during an earlier civil war there, Syria invaded Lebanon in order to contain the Palestinians and the Lebanese National Movement, and supported the Phalange — all in the name of Arab nationalism and the Palestinian "revolution".

The expansionist role of Israel in all this must also be remembered. Some Israeli military leaders have made no secret of their strategic aims: the Lebanon to be cleared of foreign forces and re-established as a christian-dominated state, the West Bank and Gaza annexed to Israel, the PLO destroyed and Jordan converted into the Palestinian state. The even less rational wings of Zionism claim that, as large parts of Lebanon belonged in Biblical times to Asher, one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, so they should belong to Israel today! This kind of nonsense — hankering after past glories that only benefitted the ruling class anyway — seems as prevalent in the Middle East as in most parts of the world.

Meanwhile Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories continues. Palestinians on the West Bank have been dispossessed of their homes in favour of Israeli settlers. They must carry identity cards and are subject to military orders which, for instance, prohibit such subversive acts as the planting of fruit trees. One Palestinian is quoted as saying:

 For the moment, the Israelis have divided us into two categories, the educated, who cause trouble by talking about social and political rights, and the labourers, whom they need. They would like to expel the first and keep the second. (Time 21 November 1983).

The Palestinians are seen by Israel as at best, a source of cheap labour.

There are those who see the PLO and the Lebanese National Movement as representing something more than just a nationalist organisation. For instance, one member of the Palestine National Council writes:

Israel's war against Lebanon was . . .  intended to destroy the first successful alliance between the Palestinians and a nationally committed Arab movement as well as the first liberated national zone where the alliance could have developed a prototype of a liberated Arab national polity.
(Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. in Race & Class, Spring 1983)

The claim, then, is that a PLO/LNM alliance would pave the way for "national liberation" throughout the Arab world, which would involve the removal of such despots as Assad and Hussein. This would explain why both Israel and Syria are opposed to such a development. But such claims are nonsense. A "democratic secular" Palestine would be a capitalist Palestine. forced to exploit its workers just as Palestinian oppresses Palestinian in intra-PLO feuds today. All leadership must be overthrown, Arafat and Jibril as well as Assad and Shamir.

Like the Zionists, the Palestinians have embraced a dangerous myth about the past; in their case, the myth that pre-1948 Palestine was some kind of paradise. It was no such thing: most Palestinians struggled along on tiny plots of land, under the weight of massive debts, exploited by a class of landlords. Palestine did not belong to the Palestinians, any more than modern Israel belongs to working class Israelis. They have yet to realise it, but the workers of the entire Middle East — within whatever irrelevant national boundaries they now live — have an identity of interest, that 

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Dreaming of Ending Poverty (2016)

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

‘Ending poverty need not be a utopian dream’, was the headline of an article by Philip Collins in the Times (2 September), subheaded ‘Thomas More’s vision of a perfect society may be outlandish but it reminds us that Britain can change for the better.’

This year is the 500^th anniversary of the publication of More’s Utopia in Latin. An English translation appeared  in 1551. More did imagine a regimented society with for instance, as Collins pointed out, everyone having to dress the same. But it is not this aspect that has interested socialists. It’s his imaging a society without private property where there is planned production to meet needs and whose members have free access to what they need ‘without money, without exchaunge, without any gage, pawne, or pledge.’

Collins (who was Blair’s speechwriter) is an open supporter of capitalism and thinks that a society based on minority ownership of the means of life and production for profit can end poverty. By ‘poverty’ he means a lack of enough means of consumption.  As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts it, ‘poverty means not being able to heat your home, pay your rent, or buy essentials for your children.’ 

This is a consequence, for some, of poverty in the means of production as these are owned and controlled by a minority only of society. Such poverty is the basis of capitalism and so is never going to be ended as long as capitalism lasts. But what about poverty in the means of consumption? Most people in Britain are able to heat their home, pay for their housing and buy essentials for their children and so are not poor in that sense. They get enough to keep themselves fit for work, raise children to replace them, and save something for their old age. But some, over 10 percent of the population, do not

How does Collins think this can be ended? He follows the Rowntree Foundation which has elaborated a plan to ‘solve’ poverty. Under this, by 2030 ‘no one is ever destitute; less than one in ten of the population are in poverty at any one time; and nobody is in poverty for more than two years.’ This doesn’t sound like ending poverty, more like accepting that ‘the poor ye shall always have’ and trying to palliate it.

In any event, their plan is based on there being steady long-term economic growth, which capitalism is incapable of delivering. This, because under it production goes through a series of ever-recurring boom/slump cycles, during the slump phase of which poverty increases. The plan also assumes that more money will be allocated to pay more effective benefits whereas this would eat into profits and, in a period of slump, as there has been since 2009, governments are obliged to cut back on benefits to relieve the burden of taxation on profits.

Despite what Collins claims, abolishing poverty under capitalism is an unrealistic dream. Ensuring that everybody, literally everybody, gets decent food, clothing, housing, education and the other things needed for an enjoyable life is only possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production because society, freed from vested interests and production for profit, would then be in a position to use modern technology to produce what is needed to do this. As More pointed out, ‘seying they be all thereof parteners equallie, therefore can no man there be poore or nedie.’

Editorial: Corbyn - Set up to Fail (2016)

Editorial from the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the Labour Party Conference in September, Jeremy Corbyn successfully saw off his challenger, Owen Smith, and will be leading the Party into the next General Election with promises to build half a million council homes, nationalise the railways and invest in the Green economy. Will a Corbyn-led government be able to live up to its promises?

The history of previous Labour governments does not augur well. Like Jeremy Corbyn, they made bold pledges, but faced with the reality of the capitalist system, they had to backpedal or go into reverse and implement anti-working class policies that would have made the Tories proud.

Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of the 1929-31 Labour government, cut unemployment benefit and public sector pay in response to the Great Depression. Clement Attlee's 1945-51 government did establish the NHS and introduced some reforms that were beneficial to workers, but it also sent in troops to break the dockers' strike of 1949 and developed the UK's first nuclear weapons. Its nationalisation of the coal and steel industries was not the victory for the working class as some imagine, as these industries, like their counterparts in the private sector, have to operate at a profit, and this, at times, involved pay disputes, redundancies and strike action.

In response to a balance of payments crisis, Harold Wilson's government of 1964-1970 introduced an incomes policy to limit workers wages, and re-introduced prescription charges in the NHS. It opposed the seamen's strike of 1966 and, although stopping short of sending troops, it supported the American war effort in Vietnam. It also gave its backing to the Nigerian government, in its civil war against the Biafran people, which resulted in mass starvation.

The Labour government of 1974-1979, in response to the recession of 1974-75, initiated a programme of public expenditure cuts and, in order to combat inflation, introduced an income policy restricting workers’ pay, which resulted in the winter of discontent in 1979. It also employed troops to break the firefighters' strike in 1978.

Then came along New Labour in 1997, which also promised a bright future after the Tory years. It introduced the Private Finance Initiative bill, which introduced private capital into the public services, and participated in the invasion of Iraq.

The Labour Party was formed in 1906 not with the aim of abolishing capitalism but with that of reforming it in favour of working class people. But capitalism can only work in one way -- to accumulate wealth in the interests of those who own and control the means of production at the expense of those who have to work to create this wealth. Labour governments can implement some reforms, but cannot change fundamentally the way capitalism works.

When workers are presented with our case for abolishing capitalism and establishing a world society of common ownership without wages, money or nation states, they usually dismiss this as utopian and argue that it is more realistic to elect a reforming Labour government. However, we say that it is the policy of the Labour Party to reform capitalism that is utopian, and that our vision of socialism is the only realistic option.

John Ruskin, 1819-1900: A Socialist Perspective (2000)

John Ruskin

From the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Ruskin, primarily remembered today as an art and architectural critic, was hugely influential amongst the labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His influence was acknowledged by William Morris, and a poll of the Independent Labour Party, in the first decade of the twentieth century placed Ruskin as the most important figure of influence in the membership.

Ruskin is far less read today than then, and, indeed, many on the left of capitalism are no longer comfortable with many of his views, particularly on issues of race and imperialism (Ruskin was one of few figures to support the savage suppression of the Jamaican Insurrection in 1865). Nonetheless, a good deal has been written about Ruskin this year, the centenary of his death. Exhibitions across the country are also running, including an exhibition "Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites" at the Tate in London. This particular exhibition in fact reveals a good deal about the more bizarre side to Ruskin's views on art. Primarily (especially in his early years) the view that good artistic taste was a moral quality as art was the interpretation of divine truth. Representations that were "true to nature", such as J.M.W. Turner's were great, and those that were not were inferior works.

Obviously any reasoning contemporary of his, let alone socialists in the twenty-first century, would see such views as the nonsense they are. The religious obsession of many of Ruskin's contemporaries, however, meant that he rapidly became a respected figure and critic.

So why was Ruskin of interest to the later labour movement and some early socialist pioneers?

The answer, and the reason for Ruskin's subsequent decline as a respectable Victorian art critic, lay in the application of his views to the arena of political economy.

Between 1843 and 1860 Ruskin produced his multi-volume examination of art history, Modern Painters. But he became increasingly diverted by the ugliness of industrialisation, urbanisation, and poverty of a developing capitalist Europe, which seemed contrary to his moral and aesthetic religious view of the world. In the late 1850s, Ruskin's thoughts began to turn from the nonsensical religious analysis of art to an examination of the conditions under which art was produced. He contrasted the works of gothic beauty in Stones of Venice (1851-3) with the squalid uniformity and imitation of industrial British architecture. The relation of labourer to his work in industrial capitalist society meant that production was totally separated from the workers' creative faculties and art had become bastardised displays in private galleries for the appreciation of a privileged few. Ruskin's conclusion that artistic and social decline were due to political and economic conditions produced works that was of interest to later critics of capitalism; most notably the political reformists that emerged from the labour movement in the late nineteenth century, but also early socialists like William Morris.

Ruskin, by around 1860 and the publication of his essays on political economy, Unto This Last, had reached the conclusion that the test of production and consumption was in its impact on human life and happiness. This was opposed starkly to the capitalist society in which he lived, of production for profit and subsequent overproduction amidst a grossly unequal society where the hardest poverty existed next to luxury and opulence. Though a very long way from any sort of socialist conclusions, Ruskin sought, against his inherited Tory political inclinations, to redefine the classical political economy of the era (not fundamentally different from the current orthodoxies). This laissez-faire, free trade political economy was, for Ruskin, a far too narrow reading of human nature, with the motive of human existence being reduced to the lowest terms of private gain and universal, supposedly "enlightened" selfishness. Despite the limited nature of these conclusions from a socialist perspective, they provoked an outcry from Ruskin's contemporary ex-admirers who were alarmed at his straying beyond art in the application of his aesthetic and ethical values. A society which denied production for profit in favour of production for the benefit of humankind, would clearly not enable the privilege of a few to continue. Ruskin, however, never concluded that capitalist ownership of the means of production (whose political economy Ruskin thought was its ideological expression) was the defining feature of the existing condition of production. Instead, he concluded that the relinquishing of paternal responsibilities of industrial capitalists, no longer with a close pastoral tie to its labour force, was the problem (and here lies a possible link to later state capitalists and reformists who wanted the state to fill this role).

In seeking to redefine classical political economy Ruskin attacked its language and terms like "money", "price", "value", "wealth", and so on. Ruskin defined the term "riches" and identified social and political power as depending on economic inequality:

"Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket."

Ruskin, however, failed to realise the class basis of the "force" and "default" of the guinea in the ownership and non-ownership of productive resources; failing to see a definite difference in interests between those who own property and derive privilege and those who, by their non-ownership of productive resources, are forced to sell their labour power for less than the value of what they produce.

If riches (being the power of the privileged in an unequal society) grew with inequality, wealth did not. "Wealth" defined by Ruskin was not more money or property, but that which contributes to the common benefit of humanity. Great wealth, as opposed to riches, by Ruskin's definition, was therefore incompatible with the deprivation of body and mind of capitalist labour. Ruskin's declared object was:

"to leave this one great fact clearly stated: THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers, of love, of joy, and of admiration".

Socialists would not disagree with this statement necessarily. Clearly, human production should be for the common wealth and for human needs. But Ruskin's belief that this could be achieved by a "noble" class of philanthropic industrialists is misguided in the extreme and a failure whose lesson his "followers" in the later reformist labour movement did not learn. But it is all too easy to see the appeal of this lazy idealism; that people had just forgotten their responsibilities; that the condition of the working majority was naturally one of subservience to benevolent masters. It simply avoids rational reasoning and substitutes it with a sentimental appeal to a past that was every bit as exploitative of the majority as the present (this sort of attitude is present today, particularly in the ranks of the capitalist left, about the post-World War II "golden age"). The twentieth century saw a whole host of reformists, headed by the Labour Party, just like this, trying to provide paternal support for an exploited working majority, robbed blind but expected to be grateful for a state handout when capitalism cannot even provide (profitable) work in a society and economy with potentially boundless useful work to be done.

A further, but equally flawed, aspect of Ruskin's thought and influence was his appeal to nature and the simple pastoral life; clearly an attractive proposition for many workers in appalling living conditions. But the choice is not industrial or pastoral society, but between the democratic control of commonly-owned productive resources and production for profit for the benefit and privilege of the five percent of the population who presently control these resources.

So why the appeal to early socialists such as William Morris?

Here the answer lies in the rejection of much of Ruskin's thought, most obviously much of his religious confusions and more dubious aspects of his political economy, and the acceptance of his aesthetic ideal; that things should be produced beautifully if they can and that art and labour should not be separate concepts. While Ruskin expected this within a pastoral capitalism, William Morris realised that this was only possible when workers controlled their own productive process (see esp. Art, Labour and Socialism) through the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. A conclusion as relevant in 2000 as it was on Ruskin's death in 1900.

Colin Skelly

The Curse of Xawara (1998)

From the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The tragedy being enacted in Northern Brazil appears to be moving towards its last act. It is a tragedy that has been enacted throughout the history of private property.

The fate of indigenous people invaded by a more economically developed society makes a sorrowful catalogue of human misery. The Native Americans slaughtered in the United States in the last century, the butchery of the Aborigines in Australia and now the destruction of the Yanomami people in Brazil.

It has been estimated that there were over 100,000 Yanomami roaming the watershed of the Rio Branco and Orinoco rivers in the Northern Amazon basis when the Spanish colonises reached the New World. It is reckoned that they have lived in these tropical rain forests for something like 40,000 years but it is now though that only 22,000 of them survive, 9,400 in Brazil and the rest in Venezuela.

Unlike many other tribal groups, the Yanomami have managed to resist integration with modern capitalism. Portuguese exploiters, who attracted indigenous people into their settlements and into slavery, failed to lure the Yanomami from their traditional communal culture. Likewise, early missionaries failed to convert them to their guilt-ridden religious opium. The Yanomami preferred inhaling the Yakuna (a hallucinogenic tree extract) and practising their traditional rites and ceremonies. Modern anthropologists consider them to be one of the last remaining societies on earth that still live in kinship groups and inhabit "malocas" (communal huts). They exist on a staple diet of cassava gathered from their manioc plantations and game from the jungle, such as monkeys and turtles. They live the semi-nomadic life that once was the norm for all of humankind. They are a living example of humanity's communal past. Tragically, they appear doomed. Modern capitalism will probably see to that.

Many of them were killed in the 1970s when the Brazilian military government, in an attempt to open up the amazon to gold speculators and cattle barons, built the first highway through the Yanomami's terrain. The road was never finished but thousands of the Yanomami were. They were killed by the infections, such as Yellow Fever, brought by the road builders. The 1990s were to see an increase in the encroachment of capitalism in their way of life. Their reservation of 9,000 square kilometres was reduced to 2,000 and the government allowed another 256 square kilometres of their land to be exploited for gold mining in 1990. Little attention is paid to "human rights" when capital becomes involved. Some 45,000 gold miners have poured into their land, polluting their rivers with mercury, blowing up villages, and shooting children (they call them "monkeys") out of the trees for sport.

The recent forest fires have devastated even more of their forests. Many of these fires were started deliberately to clear land for cattle. The Yanomami must have to forest to live, without it they must die. There are laws in Brazil that debar the exploitation of the shrinking rain forest area that the Yanomami inhabit, but these are largely ignored by a government desperate to advance the development of capitalism in Brazil.

These last remnants of a former stage of human society have at present little chance of survival. Neldo Campos, the state governor, voiced the insatiable voice of modern capitalism when he said; "There is too much land for the Indians, and the devastating economy of the state will make it inevitable that hungry colonisers will want to move in on the indigenous reserves."

The Yanomami language is a linguistically isolated one with many dialects, making anthropologists believe that they once occupied a much larger area than at present. Their word for disease and epidemics is "Xawara" which they see as an evil spirit that lives in the bottom of the world. They have the same word for gold. They see the "nabebe" (white men") as having an insane desire to bring disease and gold from the bottom of the world.

The working class of the so-called "civilised" world must establish World Socialism very soon, otherwise, the men, women and children of the Yanomami people have little hope of survival. After all, as workers, we also suffer from the curse of Xawara.

Richard Donnelly

The Heroic Tragedy: Civil War and Social Revolution in Spain (2016)

From the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Back the revolutionary general strike the very instant anyone [i.e. the military] revolts. We, the people of Catalonia, let us be on a war footing and ready to act. Be valiant. Arm yourselves and do battle. Long Live the CNT! Long Live Libertarian Communism! Launch the revolutionary general strike against fascism.' - CNT statement of 19 July 1936

Eighty years ago this summer, Spain saw an attempted military coup being temporarily defeated by ordinary people in many parts of the country. This was the beginning of what was to be a three year long civil war, resulting in half a million deaths, and followed by the four decade dictatorship of General Franco. This article will aim to describe some of the key features of the conflict, paying close attention to the ‘social revolution’ in Catalonia and Aragon which is of most relevance to socialists.

To understand the outbreak of the civil war it is first necessary to understand some of the background to the conflict. Spain in the early twentieth century was a predominately agrarian society; large scale industrialisation had only taken place in the north of the country and in Catalonia, around Barcelona. In the countryside an entrenched land owning class, of which the church was a significant section, had been resistant to agrarian economic reform, rural workers were locked into a state of poverty, often forced to work for long hours for little more than subsistence wages. Decades of agitation and self education had given birth to a strong and militant anarchist and syndicalist movement. Spain had become the only country where the anarchist ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and others had given rise to a social movement of significant numbers. By the time of the 1930’s the major workers unions where the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) and the UGT (General Workers’Union). Despite ideological differences and occasional conflict there was often cooperation between the two organisations. The CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist organisation that shunned parliamentary elections and advocated industrial direct action as a means of overcoming capitalism. From the late twenties onwards, the FAI (Anarchist Federation of Iberia) had gained influence within the CNT. The FAI pushed for a programme of insurrectional ‘revolutionary gymnastics’with the intent of immediately bringing about anarchism through violent confrontation with the state. These policies clashed with those of the more orthodox syndicalists within the CNT who saw the social revolution as only being possible after a longer period of working class self-education and self-organisation. The UGT was affiliated to the labourist social-democratic PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) and pursued a line that was more in favour of winning legal concessions from the government.

The military declaration of 1936, which bought the beginning of the civil war, was not the first time that Spain had faced dictatorship. The dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera came about in 1923 when the government resigned in the face of a similar pronunciamiento from the Army. Following a bloodless coup, Primo de Rivera stayed in power until 1931, when the support of the military and the wealthy classes was lost. Subsequent elections gave victory to anti-monarchist parties, causing the King to abdicate and flee the country, thus bringing into being the Second Republic of Spain.

The coming of the Second Republic saw a sudden rise in working class activity as workers looked to it as a means to finally solve their economic and social problems. Rural and urban workers, even in areas not previously known for their radicalism, began to demand improvements to working conditions, public meetings became commonplace and the church, seen by many to be defending the privileged and the wealthy, often became a target for grievances. The increase in working class militancy, and particularly attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, enraged certain sections of the ruling class. In the election of 1933 a confederation of Catholic parties, the CEDA, operating on a quasi-fascist platform, won the largest amount of seats but not enough of a majority to form a government. Despite this, power was offered to the second largest party, the Radical Republican Party. The Radicals co-operated with the CEDA and in 1934 they ceded, giving three ministerial positions to the CEDA.

In protest against the CEDA entering the government the PSOE declared a general strike on 5th October 1934. In most parts of the country the strike was rapidly defeated as the government declared a state of martial law and the army took over the running of essential services. In Barcelona the regional government declared an independent state of Catalonia. A blood bath was avoided, when a request to arm the workers was refused, and when the military general in charge of re-establishing the authority of the Madrid central government ordered his troops to be ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ towards any provocations. The only place the strike held on for any amount of time was in the northern mining area of Asturias where, unlike in other areas, the strike had the backing of all the workers organisations. There the situation rapidly became insurrectional. An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 armed miners took part in an uprising. Civil Guard posts and public buildings were attacked and several towns being successfully occupied. Comunismo libertario was declared with revolutionary committees taking on the social responsibilities of government, the use of money was restricted and ration vouchers were distributed to families. In response the government sent General Franco and the Moroccan Army of Africa, as well as the navy and airforce, to quell the disturbance. Retribution was brutal, around 2000 miners were killed and a further 20,000 to 30,000 imprisoned. Moorish troops unleashed a wave of looting, rape and summary executions on the surrounding mining villages. The Asturian uprising showed a pattern of events that would be repeated on a larger scale two years later, as the civil war took its course.

The military rebellion

In 1936 a leftist popular front, supported for the first time by the votes of the anarcho-syndicalists, won the election. The victory was partly due to the promise to release the thousands of prisoners who were still being held following the uprisings of ‘34 and to also reverse and improve on wage reductions imposed by the previous government. Determined to put a stop to the growth of working class militancy, anti-religiosity and regional separatism that had accompanied the coming of the republic, a conspiracy of officers in the military sought to reimpose what they saw as being the true will of the nation. A coup was organised to take place in July 1936. The generals hoped that they would achieve a rapid victory. However, this was not to be. In the event, beginning on the 18 July, significant elements in the military and security forces remained loyal to the Republic. The whole of the Navy remained loyal, just over half of the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard –a rural paramilitary police force) as did over 70 percent of the Guardias de Asalto (Assault Guards –an urban paramilitary police force set up during the time of the republic).

On hearing of the military rising the government, in the beginning in denial about the seriousness of the situation, was at first unwilling to arm the workers organisations. So initially through their own initiatives, by raiding gun-shops, digging up weapons stored since the Asturias uprising or by being provided weapons by loyal Assault Guards, ordinary workers began to come out against the rising. In Madrid a crowd stormed the Montanna barracks. In Barcelona factory sirens sounded to warn of the rising and an immediate general strike came into effect. Thousands of people took to the streets, setting up barricades to hinder the incursions of the military. Where the workers movement was strong, and opposition was organised quickly, the rising was defeated. In areas which failed to offer resistance, the rising was successful and the military rebels (henceforth referred to as the ‘Nationalists’) began serving out a brutal repression of the workers organisations and anyone who was seen as being loyal to the republic. Spain was split into two zones, as noted by Raymond Carr ‘those who happened to be in a zone that was hostile to their beliefs had to conform, escape, or risk imprisonment or shooting. Loyalty was often a matter of locality.’Though, where given the choice, the working classes generally supported the Republic and the upper classes, the Nationalists.

The working class in the saddle

The effect of arming the unions meant that the workers organisations were in control. In Barcelona, the CNT was offered full control of the Generalitat (Catalonian regional government) but refused to take it, partly because they did not want to set up a ‘workers’ dictatorship’, and partly because they were not sure how to deal with the situation. Instead they took a place on the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, which was in effect a sub-committee of the regional government. This committee was later dissolved and the CNT took a minority position within the Generalitat. While the CNT held power in the factories and workplaces, a vast swathe of governmental state power, including the administration of military affairs and the overseeing of justice, was left with the Generalitat. This would later be used as a level to prise power away from the syndicalists.

In Barcelona, Catalonia, Aragon and the surrounding areas the CNT enacted their anarcho-syndicalist ideology and set about collectivising large sections of industry, though it was in the countryside that the most far reaching attempts at realising ‘libertarian communism’ where attempted. Following the upheavals, most large landowners in republican controlled areas had fled. With the landowning class absent, rural workers began spontaneously commandeering and collectivising land. Collectivisation meant that access to equipment, resources and labour could be pooled, leading to and increase in output and productivity and an improvement in living conditions. Within the collectives attempts at achieving an equitable distribution of goods and services were conducted in a various different ways. Some, a minority, practised a system of free access where people could simply take what they needed from the communal store. Others printed their own forms of currency or ration cards. As time went on the normal state of affairs gravitated towards that of being paid a fixed ‘family wage’ where collective members where entitled to certain quantities of various household items. To say that money was abolished is to push too far, ‘money’ does not necessarily mean only state minted currency but whatever can serve as a general measure of value and means of exchange. Whilst some agricultural collectives did not pay their workers in state currency, it was still used as a means of accounting between units. Despite the collectivisations the basic economic unit was still that of separate and competing enterprises.

“Anarchists abandoned the idea of a substitute for national money. The agrarian collectives decided to abolish money, only to adopt other systems of exchange…. The difficulties created by local money and the lack of a unified currency soon became evident. Very soon the collectivists of Aragon saw the advantages of a kind of national bank”–Frank Mintz

In Catalonia and Aragon nearly 70 percent of the workforce was involved in the collectives. Across the whole of the Republican territory there were almost 800,000 involved on the land and just over one million in industry.

Industrial collectivisation was not as deep or far reaching as the efforts in the countryside. In the first days of the revolution workers simply seized abandoned factories and restarted production. Workers in a collectivised enterprise would organise themselves into committees, and the committees would be federated regionally. The basic unit of organisation was the factory committee. The requisitions where retrospectively made legal in late October 1936. This was partly in an effort for the central government to regain control of industry. Part of the legislation meant that each factory council had a designated ‘controller’ that was responsible to the government. The vast majority of industry in Catalonia was organised in this way. While the workers certainly had more control over their working conditions than in a privately or state owned enterprise, the industrial situation could best be described as kind of trade-union controlled capitalism; production was still being conducted for the purpose of exchange, both within the Republic and with the outside world.

(to be continued and concluded next month)

Darren Poynton