Oxfam — hungry for change? (1985)

From the March 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a rainswept Swansea night as we made our way to the Quaker meeting room. We were going to listen — the two of us — to a talk given by the South Wales campaign organiser for Oxfam. The meeting was being organised by the local Humanists and the subject was Poverty, Famine and Population. We'd been to Humanist meetings before and the regulars recognised us. 'Good'', said the Chairman, "the SPGB. That means a good discussion."

He introduced the speaker, an imposing man of about 50 with thick greying hair, a full beard and a pleasing, intimate manner. He was also, as the chairman informed us, a local Labour councillor. He spoke without notes and a Welsh eloquence. Oxfam, he told us, was a rapidly expanding organisation. It needed to be because the problem it was facing was getting worse not better. It had changed its approach from being a mere money-collector and now, with the slogan "Hungry for Change", was putting a lot more effort and resources into trying to explain to people the causes of world hunger. It was showing, he pointed out. that there was no natural barrier to the world's population being fed. There was evidence, in fact, that the earth could already feed nine times its present population. The idea about the world being overpopulated was not based on the true facts.

Such talk surprised and delighted us both. Oxfam publicity had always seemed calculated to give the impression that there just couldn't be enough to go round, but that nevertheless we had to help the starving as best we could. It had also harped on the "population explosion" and said how essential it was to keep population down. Now it had changed tack and was arguing the same thing that socialists, with little support from anyone, had argued for a long time.

The speaker went on to point out the absurd contradictions of social arrangements by which many millions of the world's people starve each year in the world while large amounts of food are locked away or destroyed because of "overproduction". He told us that a number of EEC food storage warehouses existed in the Swansea area itself but that information about them was hard to come by as the authorities would not give details readily. Even the local press was reluctant to write about them for fear of losing potential advertisers in the food business. He did however have some statistics of stocks of butter and dried milk held locally and they seemed staggering, especially when they were multiplied thousands of times over to get the picture for the whole EEC. He added that other foods such as meat, fruit and vegetables couldn't be readily stored so that thousands of people had the full-time task of destroying such food. They did this every working hour of every day of the year.

Powerful stuff. But the conclusion that followed was less so. The speaker said that we in the "rich countries" had to learn to accept less to help those in the "poor countries". This brought some questions to both our minds. Didn't this contradict what he'd said earlier about the world being potentially self-sufficient many times over? If we could produce a lot more than we needed, why should we have to accept less? And could Britain's three million-odd unemployed and Europe's 30 million living below the poverty line be expected to "accept less"? And what about the majority of us who lived on a wage or salary? We weren't exactly rolling in it either.

The questions came thick and fast. An elderly woman suggested that you couldn't really talk about "overproduction" when millions were starving. This seemed to make sense but the speaker rejected it and said there definitely was overproduction. Another woman asked what concerned people could do to help. He said she could sign the Oxfam petition on the table at the back of the room which was to be presented to Margaret Thatcher when it had a million signatures. Someone else said he was glad that the overpopulation scare had been shown to be false. But then came an unexpected challenge to the speaker. An elderly but energetic-looking man at the front "declared an interest". He introduced himself as a semi-retired academic who was a specialist in population matters. He spent some considerable time listing his qualifications and the various official bodies he'd served and was serving on. Such credentials brought a hush to the audience. The speaker, he said, had drastically underestimated the population problem. It was very serious indeed. He knew this from his own professional work in the field. Oxfam was wrong to quote hopeful statistics about potential food production as they were based not on the reality of things but on the notion that people could somehow be brought to share things out, not to be greedy, and to work for the common good. And people were not like that, were they? The old "human nature" myth again, both us SPGBers were thinking, only this time in academic guise.

The speaker looked distinctly uncomfortable as he listened to the academic. In his reply he struggled a bit, then didn't seem to be doing too badly. But finally, when the questioner came back at him and asked why, if population wasn't a problem, all Third World governments were pursuing policies of population control, he was well and truly stumped.

At this point the chairman pointed to one of us who had his hand up. He was clearly hoping for succour for his speaker, and to a certain extent he got it. The first socialist point made was that academic specialists usually have a stake in their speciality and this can lead them to make exaggerated claims for its importance. So perhaps we should view with at least a little scepticism what the man at the front had said. Whatever he said, however, he could not dispute that the world could feed us all. The speaker had been right about this and the most recent figures produced by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation showed it beyond doubt. But such abundance was only possible on one condition — that of producing food not to be sold on the market for profit but to be eaten. And the same principle applied to all other goods and services. The reason people didn't have food was not that they didn't need it or that it couldn't be produced but that they didn't have money to buy it. The first woman had been right to say there wasn't overproduction — in fact there was probably underproduction in terms of what people really needed. "Greed" wasn't a barrier to production for need either but was simply a symptom of the insecurity provoked in people by the production for profit society existing in all countries of the world. Greed wasn't inevitable. It was a response to conditions and would have no place in a society of abundance where people would have free access to everything that was produced. And if Third World governments were trying to get their populations down, it wasn't because their first priority was to help people but because a slowdown in population growth was necessary to allow production for profit in those countries to develop as smoothly and efficiently as possible. At another moment those governments might adopt different population policies as others (France and Germany for example) had done in the past when it seemed to the advantage of the profit system there to have more people.

The other socialist pointed out that people would not get a clear view of the problem as long as they thought in "national" terms. We had to think in a planetary way and in terms of using the resources of the whole planet sanely and rationally and in the interests of all its inhabitants. But this needed political change which could only come from a consciousness by the majority of people that it was in their interest to organise things differently — on the basis of a frontierless, classless, worldwide society which produced solely for human need not profit.

All this gave the speaker a breathing space and his response seemed to be that he agreed with the socialist arguments. But then, in answer to other questions, he showed that he didn't agree, or at least hadn't fully grasped the implications. He continued to talk about people in Britain having to make do with less and about the need to help and encourage other nations to improve their lot. He appeared not to have taken the point that all the countries of the world were organised on a production for profit basis — and were therefore capitalist — for he insisted on distinguishing between capitalist and "socialist" countries (like Russia). Here, no doubt, we were seeing the lifetime reflexes of a left-wing Labourite coming into play.

We made one final intervention to say that Oxfam. for all its sincere and determined efforts, was still only scraping the surface of the problem and would not begin to solve it unless it started to alert people to the fundamental causes of world hunger. The Chairman said we should not be blaming Oxfam for failing to do what wasn't in its brief. It wasn't in business, he declared, to spread the idea of world social revolution. In a sense he was right of course, but if Oxfam was serious in its concern for causes, then, at the end of the day, it would have to draw political conclusions.

The speaker conceded that there might be something in what we said but then proceeded to show that he was still firmly entrenched in the idea of trying to solve the problem of world hunger within the framework of production for profit. Not for more than a brief moment was he going to allow himself to move outside that framework, and this was why he was such an easy prey to "specialists" like the "academic" whose arguments, if you accepted the logic of production for profit on which they were based, were difficult to fault.

As the two of us walked out into the wet, we talked about the meeting and agreed that even if the speaker hadn't seemed to move very far in our direction, it was an encouraging sign that "respectable" charities such as Oxfam were now coming to see that problems do have a cause. And even if Oxfam still wasn't looking far enough for the cause or wasn't drawing the obvious conclusions from what it found, at least some of the ideas it was now spreading could only be of help to the socialist movement. The world could feed us all, it was saying, and population wasn't outstripping resources. It was good that now not only socialists were saying these things. What would be even better would be if there were more socialists to take them to their logical conclusion.

Howard Moss

Gareth Thomas

People Against Machines in Andalucia (1981)

The Briefing Column from the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

About 1.5 per cent of the farmers of Andalucia—one of the most fertile areas in Europe own over half the land, about 11 million acres. On the other hand, 450,000 smallholders make do with 1 million acres between them.

To maximise profits the estate owners have switched from traditionally labour-intensive crops such as sugar beet, cotton, tobacco and olives to crops like wheat and sunflower seeds which can be mechanically harvested. This way they save over £20 million a year in wages. The unemployment rate among farm labourers is 20 per cent and rising. They have no land of their own and receive no unemployment pay if they fail to find work on the farms or in the villages.

One in five farm labourers is illiterate. Their motto—‘The land for him who works it’—is as it was before the civil war. One in four rural houses lacks a bathroom, one in five running water or electricity. The standard of living is one of the lowest in Europe, on a par with Sicily. In the most depressed provinces per capita income is only one third of the lowest European average.

Due to the recession the Andalucian labourer has difficulties finding work in Spain’s industrial cities or in Western Europe. Between 1960 and 1973 two and a half million people (over a third of Andalucia’s present population) left the area to find work in Europe’s industrial centres. This figure included half a million farm labourers. As a result wages began to rise. Many of the large estates, which had existed profitably on cheap labour for more than half a century, turned to mechanisation to stay profitable.

The unemployed view the new machines as their enemies and have repeatedly invaded the estates to stop mechanical harvesters. They have set fire to wheat fields and staged hunger strikes against hunger. The government has tried to create ‘communal employment’ at wages of £6 a day to alleviate some of the anger. If that does not work the Guardia Civil steps in to keep the peace.

Spain is also changing her education system to cater for the needs of a growing industry. From primary schools onwards education in Spain was once mainly private and very expensive. The standard of teaching in the few state schools that existed was very low. The state is now providing more schools and modem industry will of course require more workers with a basic understanding of the three ‘R’s, as well as more advanced knowledge.

Sympathise as we may with the plight of the farm labourers, what is going on in Andalucia is the inescapable development of captalism. Spain after Franco is slowly getting more industrialised. It is almost certain that the workers’ attempt to stop mechanisation will be fruitless.

Torgun Bullen

The Patriotism Game (1987)

From the March 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you heard about the new game they're playing in Westminster? It's called "I'm a bigger patriot than you are". In the blue comer there's the Conservative team led by Maggie "Falklands-factor" Thatcher. In the rose pink comer there's the Labour team led by Neil "I'd-die-for-my-country'' Kinnock. And sitting on the fence as usual there's the Alliance in their new yellow team colours. And the prize? Up to five years of intoxicating power; and for the winning team leader residence at that most desirable of addresses - Ten Downing Street.

The BBC put the ball into play by banning a programme about Zircon, a £500 million spy satellite, whose existence had been kept a secret from Parliament. Alasdair Milne, director-general of the BBC, showed his own patriotic colours by insisting that he had not been got at by the Conservative team coach, Norman Tebbit, but had banned the programme all on his own because it "could represent a breach of national security". However. this bold attempt to enter the patriotism game was not enough to prevent him being declared unfit to play by the BBC chief Duke Hussey.

The Tories picked up the ball that had been tossed in the air by the BBC to loud cheers from all sides and immediately appealed to the referee. House of Commons speaker Bernard Weatherill, who ruled that it was off-side for the Zircon film to be shown to Labour team supporters inside Westminster. But just as Thatcher looked as if she was going to surge ahead in the patriotism stakes, there running right beside her was Kinnock who quickly scored a couple of points for the Labour team by not only accepting the refs decision but also supporting the government's motion to stop his own team members from seeing the film. He recognised that Thatcher was wielding the national security card - always a trump - and said:

If the Government says that this is a serious matter of national security, I must take their word for it until such time as that claim is substantiated or otherwise.

This earned him and other leading lights of the Labour team a bonus point in the form of a secret briefing on "Privy Council" terms with the Foreign Secretary which convinced them that national security was indeed at stake. But just as Labour were beginning to look like seriously patriotic contenders, some renegade Labour team members were in danger of scoring an own goal by arranging a private showing of the banned film in Westminster. But they were met by a picket consisting of the Serjeant-at-Arms' linesmen. With some fancy ducking and weaving the renegades headed for Transport House where they watched the film out of sight of the ref.

Kinnock, recognising that the activities of the Labour renegades could lose him points, launched a new attack himself by claiming that if the government side really cared about national security as much as he did, then they would not only have banned the film, but also prevented publication of an article in the New Statesman giving details about Zircon which had been written by Duncan Campbell (who had made the film). This audacious tackle left even some of his own team reeling in astonishment. After all wasn't the New Statesman a Labour supporters' mag? What was the wily Welshman up to?

The score was looking pretty even when Thatcher raised the spectre of the "enemy within", a favourite move for the Iron Lady when feeling cornered. She said:

Unfortunately, there seem to be people who are more interested in trying to ferret out information of use to our enemies than in preserving the defence interests of this country and thus the freedoms that we all enjoy.

It was a good try but Kinnock had seen it coming and had already dissociated himself from the New Statesman and the unfortunate Campbell.

But this was not the last attack the journalist was going to suffer. Three days later the government raised the stakes by authorising a raid on Campbell's home and the New Statesman's offices by its henchmen at the Special Branch. The Labour renegades led by Robin Cook tried to start a new game - the "We-support-civil-liberties-more-than-you-do" game - and began to look as though they might attract supporters away from the patriotism game. But again the Tory team upped the stakes with another surprise tackle by the Special Branch this time on the offices of BBC Scotland who had made the banned film.

At first they looked as if they might be over-stretching themselves. The BBC claimed that the Special Branch's authorisation to play, issued under Section Nine of the Official Secrets Act, did not permit them to remove anything they took a fancy to. A judge agreed and made the Special Branch give everything back to the BBC. The Special Branch withdrew, regrouped and armed with a new search warrant issued under Section Two of the Official Secrets Act, launched a new attack which resulted in them carrying off the trophies they had been looking for - anything they could get their hands on that had anything at all to do with any of the six Secret Society programmes. Kinnock was caught off balance by this new tactic and looked as if he was in danger of forgetting which game he was playing. Was it the "patriotism" game or "civil liberties"? He said that the raid was "deeply offensive to the standards of freedom" but then went on to say:

The Government was told there had been a security leak about Zircon last June - not October as the Prime Minister said. For seven months they have done nothing useful. Now they have ordered the police to go charging off to Scotland to search through the whole series.
I thought wasting police time was an offence.

Was this a crafty attempt to play both the civil liberties and the patriotism games at the same time? Would he be able to pull it off? Would people notice that he was asking for films to be banned and also condemning police raids on the BBC as infringements of civil liberties? By this time the Alliance also thought that it was safe the enter the fray. David Owen briefly jumped off the fence to give a rallying cry. "The BBC must not take this lying down" he said. Roy Jenkins was more or less obliged to stick his oar in since BBC Scotland is in his constituency and asked: "What is the supreme objective for which the Government is prepared to look as though it were running a second-rate police state infused by illiberalism and incompetence?" But what did this mean? Did he want a first-rate police state infused with liberalism and competence instead? David Steel asked a similar question: "Is the knock on the door in the middle of the night to become part of our society?"

Meanwhile the game was getting to be more and more farcical: hundreds of people queued up to see a bootleg copy of the banned film; every newspaper was carrying as many details as they could about the "not-so-secret" spy satellite; Sir Frank Cooper, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, said that "everybody knows where everybody's satellite is and you can see lists which are published in defence journals of who's launched what, where, what its orbit is. And I think you can probably do this using schoolchildren in Milton Keynes or somewhere". And just to put the boot in completely it turned out that the "subversive" Campbell had had a friendly chat over lunch with Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General. about the film; one of the programmes in the Secret Society series was made with the full cooperation of the Ministry of Defence; and the government really had known about the leak about Zircon and the BBC film for ages without doing anything about it. The Thatcher team tried to win back some lost ground by trying to dissociate themselves from the Special Branch and claimed that they had not authorised the raid on the BBC. So who had? Or had the Special Branch broken away and formed their own independent team?

Or maybe the Tory team weren't playing the "patriotism" game after all. Maybe it was all a front and what they were really playing was that other Whitehall favourite - "Them and Us". The rules for this are as follows: "They" are a very small team but have a number of things in their favour. They control, directly or indirectly, most of the TV and radio companies, most of the daily newspapers and other sources of "news”. What's more they have access to important information that no-one else can see unless they say so. The object of the game is for us to find out as much as we can about government, politics and the civil service. However, they have a few other tricks up their sleeve should we get too close to finding out anything that they think will show them up to be dishonest, incompetent and undemocratic: the umpires — the courts — are usually on their side so that if they say the magic words “national security" then the judges will say that we can't have the information. Also they can make up the rules as they go along to suit themselves. They can also feed us bits of "news" which show them up in a good light in the hope that this will distract us from what is really going on. And finally, if we get too close to the truth, then they can call up reinforcements in the shape of the police and Special Branch. This doesn't mean we can't win. only that it is difficult. However, we have the advantage of numbers on our side. What we don't have as yet is the determination and clear sense of purpose that are necessary. However, if they continue to behave in the duplicitous and ridiculous manner that they have over the Zircon film, then things might very well become considerably easier.

Janie Percy-Smith

The Age of Sedatives (1954)

From the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 21 years between 1918 and 1939 have been called the Aspirin Age. They were the years of jazz and the flappers’ new morality, of sensation and unemployment, when society first pressed down in earnest upon the accelerator. The years when a world in crises and turmoil turned for comfort to—the little white tablet. A future historian may likewise seek to describe the period since 1945 in terms of the problems and panaceas of the day. He might well consider calling our times the Pheno-barbitone Phase.

“This 20th Century,” said the Medical World of May, 1953, “ is an age of sedation therapy.” About one-tenth of all our prescriptions for drugs are for barbiturates; in addition 10 million aspirin tablets, commonly used as sedatives, are taken in Britain every day. These mountains of drugs are consumed largely in combat with insomnia, which is becoming one of our commonest complaints and as such cannot be disregarded by to-day’s medical investigator. Even the august British Medical Association spent much time at a recent meeting discussing it as a major recognised illness. The day may yet come when a certificate will be signed which gives insomnia as the cause of death. The widely used sedatives have many disadvantages, such as the possibility of raising an annoying skin rash. A more sinister complication is the fatal effect of an overdose, which is sometimes taken whilst the mind is dulled by the drug. We are all familiar with the story of suicide by aspirin, now the Registrar-General reports that barbiturates are responsible for more suicides than any other substance or group of substances. The number of cases of accidental poisoning by these drugs is also increasing.

Sleep is vital

The nature of the apparently elusive thing which we call sleep is uncertain. A popular view sees it as the replacement of expended energy, like the re-charging of a battery. Another opinion, which is gaining support, is that it is a state of inhibition of the senses caused by their over-stimulation during wakefulness. A fair parallel is the donkey which is beaten excessively and so becomes indifferent to the touch of the whip. However, it is a complicated business and best left alone in this article. It is indisputable that sleep is vital to the human being, since it provides the necessary protection from the dangers of exhaustion. Sound sleep is best achieved in the presence of emotional and physical relaxation—any disturbance of it can cause great distress. ,

There are many reasons for sleeplessness, from cold feet to indigestible suppers. But the growth of chronic insomnia and the increase in barbiturate consumption are not to be explained by larger sales of bedtime fish and chips. A Middlesex doctor wrote to the Manchester Guardian of August 5th, 1953 . . . “The root of the trouble which creates the enormous present demand for sleeping draughts . . . is found in men in the increasing strain of their business worries and activities, in their fear of competition, in their apprehension of losing their jobs, in the friction among those working together under high pressure in small offices day after day after arriving there in trains overcrowded to suffocation. I have in 30 years of practice had more than enough occasion to see such cases. . . .  The increasing demand for sedation is a result of the high pressure of modern life and the inability of many people to adapt themselves to it.” That is plain enough, and is a fairly representative opinion.

The Advertisers' Remedies

The cure of sleeplessness presents no problem to the wordy advertiser. “This customer said she suffered from insomnia,” says one advertisement, showing a lady in blissful slumber upon a sharply identifiable mattress. Certain pillows, blankets and bedtime drinks, we are told, have the same desirable effect. Everyone has read the strip cartoon advertisements which suggest that a particular beverage can give us". . .  real, relaxed ” sleep which can “reach down to our subconscious mind” and open the door to success in many a field, from travel-agent to trapeze-artist. (One strip which was rather nearer the mark dealt with the problems of a harassed housewife and mother—her success was managing the kids without flying off the handle.) A subtler approach is offered in America. New York City has the “World's Only Sleep Shop,” a retail establishment which provides for a bottleful of bedtime difficulties. There are firm mattresses and soft mattresses, and some half-firm and half-soft. Dust-free pillows, musical alarm-clocks, anti-snore ear plugs, window silencers and so on. The very latest books about sleep are also on sale, if you should still think that you need them. (In America, incidentally, the yearly consumption of barbiturates reaches the shocking average of 24 tablets for every man, woman and child.) There is one thing which the sleep salesmen never mention. About half of the world’s population sleep—quite soundly—on the earth or a hard mat, with no pillow or one of wood or china and with little or no covering.

The Road to Suicide

This is a world of war and destruction, noise and competition, hydrogen bombs and helicopters, speed and smog, and to live in it we must make unnatural “stop and start” demands on our bodies and nervous systems. These demands are responsible for the rising incidence of nervous disease; each man between the ages of 35 and 65 has to-day as much chance of going at least once into the overcrowded and understaffed mental hospitals as of contracting cancer of the lung, or of being knocked down on the road. And for every patient in the mental hospitals there are thousands outside who are suffering from emotional disorders and who go to their doctor asking for something to calm their nerves or to give them a good night’s rest. The doctor, often himself a victim of modem strain, and with a waiting room probably already overfull, has little time to try to unravel the causes of his patient's trouble. The cure in most cases—a long and thorough rest—is out of the question, for both patient and doctor have a living to earn. So an attempt is made to outwit the symptoms of the illness and the patient leaves the surgery gratefully clutching a prescription for a sleeping draught. Thus a nervous person may start on the road to barbiturate addiction—by far the commonest type of drug addiction—and possibly eventual suicide. For a lengthy use of barbiturates can in itself foster the very conditions—insomnia, depression, anxiety—which it is originally prescribed to cure. For this reason, many doctors try to get away with prescribing a “placebo” which is a “sugar and spice” pill designed to calm the patient in the belief that he is taking an effective drug.

An old, wise man, once said that we always proceed from the simple to the complex and ignore the obvious. The expanding use of sedatives is an example of this. It is an elaborate attempt to shelve a problem which in its bones is quite straightforward. If the tensions of modem capitalism do not relax, the human nervous system will suffer deepening harm. That is the harsh simplicity of the matter. It is worth a little cogitation. Even if it means losing a little more sleep.

Ivan

A message for Cathy (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somewhere in the middle of the Byline broadcast 'Cathy Where Are You Now?' (BBC1, 9 July), which was promoted as a sequel to the twenty-year-old documentary drama 'Cathy Come Home', viewers may have heard a familiar lament to the effect that we all "have a right" to a roof over our heads. Let us state at the outset that if there is one essential need among many others that under the capitalist system we have absolutely no right to it is a home. Were it otherwise none of us would be without one. Cardboard City could exist only as a sick joke in a tuppenny historical satire. That exploiter of human need, the landlord, would have gone the way of the slave-trader and the witch-burner.

What failed to emerge from the broadcast in any other than an incidental sense is that housing, far from constituting an inalienable right, carries no higher status than that of an entitlement conditional upon the would-be purchaser's having enough money to pay for it. Since most of us are dependent on a wage or salary, what we finally own is not a home, which is the property of the money-lender, but a mortgage. Moreover, as with any other commercially-negotiated loan, it has to be paid for—"serviced", as the euphemism has it—and expensively at that. Mrs Thatcher's "property-owning democracy" is, for most of us, a shadow of a thing, productive of nothing more substantial than nagging worry if not illness and, for a desperate minority, even suicide. That this judgement applies as absolutely to those of us who are buying "our" council houses as to any other house-buyers is axiomatic (Mrs Thatcher’s "gift" of a qualified ownership has already been paid for in rent over the years). Erstwhile council tenants can be—and indeed are being—evicted where they default on their new mortgages.

And what, exactly, have these council tenants been offered? A quick trip round the average council estate should disabuse even the most hostile among the self-styled "middle classes" that its occupants, where they are able or willing to buy, are "getting something for nothing". Built on the cheap, many of these mean ghettos have degenerated into underserviced and infested slums, veritable universities of disaffection and crime, where the policeman enjoys a higher profile than the social worker or the health visitor. The sorry truth is that thousands of council tenants, far from being able to buy their all too basic accommodation, stand in arrears of rent and are in no position to clear their debt.

For many—nowadays a majority—who are obliged to resort to the private market, theirs is in many respects an equally depressing plight. While government ministers juggle cynically with their recurrent financial crises (an endemic feature of the capitalist system they so enthusiastically espouse) house-buyers are finding their mortgage repayments increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Let borrowers introduce the term “rights" when they next meet their building society manager in yet another effort to renegotiate their loans. Their reward must be, if not the uncomprehending stare, then the patronising smile of the worldly-wise money merchant whose primary purpose is to safeguard the building society's assets, not to provide shelter for the "impecunious".

Skid Row and Cardboard City

In the case of that increasingly large number of erstwhile "proud home-owners" who are forced onto the street, there remain the hotel room and the shared kitchen and lavatory already discovered by so many single parents—usually abandoned young mothers—and their children. A few statistics provided by the Byline programme help to illustrate this growing scandal. In 1966, homeless families in emergency accommodation numbered 4.400; in 1989, that figure had risen to 38,000. In what was described as an average hotel of thirty-six rooms the occupants shared one kitchen bookable in advance, forcing many to resort to the junk food market or to shift for themselves late at night— too late for the children, who had to make do with a stop-gap meal earlier in the evening.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that so many homeless people are prepared to risk police and local authority harassment by taking to the road in converted vehicles, or living in tented dwellings. Squatting continues to provide some homeless with a roof but relentless official pressure backed by changes in the law have made this option much more difficult. Such makeshift arrangements as vehicle conversion, fixed of mobile, do at least afford a measure of independence, tenuous though that may prove to be. The long-tolerated experiences of traditional travelling people such as the gypsies, for whom harassment of one kind or another has always been a hazard, are visited upon these more recent and, in many cases, involuntary nomads. Authority in its various manifestations has always and everywhere found it difficult, both socially and politically, to come to terms with those who demonstrate a readiness to break free from its magisterial control. Police harassment. often prejudiced in itself, is in reality a response to any uninformed public resentment which may contain more than a hint of jealousy.

The final depth for all too many, however, has to be the cardboard boxes of Skid Row. During a recent Nick Ross phone-in the Housing Minister, Michael Spicer, was heard earnestly reminding us that Cardboard City is populated by the single homeless male—as if, even were it entirely accurate, this dismal fact constituted an extenuating circumstance for government to cling to as it peddles its miserable excuses. We are now informed that the government will commit fifteen million pounds to the task of clearing city pavements of their down-and-outs. That this is cosmetic—mere political opportunism—is searingly obvious. What an advertisement for "popular capitalism" in Britain, one of the world's richest countries (but rich for whom, one wonders?) that visitors to London should have to run the gauntlet of the cardboard squats of the moneyless and jobless as they negotiate the precincts of the concert halls, bridges and underpasses of the capital city. Why. even poor old Mother Theresa confessed to shock. So they'll find a barracks for them and then amend the law to prevent them from returning to be stumbled over. Out of sight, out of mind. Charles Dickens would have relished such material: Spicer's ugly cant would have made his mouth water. So what is to be done?

Providing homes no problem

At this point the 'Cathy' follow-up collapsed into bathetic nonsense of the “nobody should have more than one home” variety. "People who are prepared to work hard should be allowed a loan. Security? Why, the house they promise to build, of course”. ‘‘Bricks and mortar should be released for all who want them". ("Released"? There's a euphemism for "sold", if you please!). Nowhere in the broadcast was it even hinted that, were we all to enjoy, as of right, adequate housing the capitalists, who control the building industry would be bankrupted. Abundance in any commodity spells ruin for the profiteers. Prices would plummet and production cease.

Paradoxically, the planet itself is made of building materials. And in this country alone the necessary skills abound. Thousands of building workers are unemployed. The accumulated experience of centuries could be brought to bear on matters—heating and ventilation, for example—that even the Romans could approach with confidence. It could all happen but for one baleful impediment: under capitalism capitalists must capitalise—or perish. This inescapable requirement applies as surely to state capitalist Russia and China as to the mixed economies of Japan and the USA. The money system serves to facilitate what amounts to a form of rationing in the means of life itself. And the misery this entails is allowed to continue in order that a small minority class of parasitical manipulators should be maintained in the life-style to which it is accustomed.

So the only answer to housing deprivation, as to all other such “problems” under the capitalist system, remains unfettered production to meet need (as opposed to profit). Which means the end of capitalism. All of which leads to one unavoidable conclusion: whereas the world's capitalists understand this perfectly clearly, which is why they make—and have always made— such monstrous and unprincipled efforts to conceal the truth from the rest of us, we, the working class, who produce everything, have hardly begun to. Until we do, the Cathys of this world must remain homeless.

Richard Cooper

Caught in the act: Who's afraid of Labour? (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are few more repulsive sights than local Tory activists exulting in an election victory, especially when this happens in the small hours of the morning when everyone else wants to go home to bed. Thus it was in Ealing, a local election result which the Labour Party could not explain in any way other than their own unpopularity. It seems that, in spite of everything that has happened since to give the Labour council confidence that they would be re-elected, the voters in Ealing had not forgotten the steep increases in rates which Labour imposed. Their misguided outrage at this was titillated by bloodcurdling stories about lavish council expenditure on bizarre lame-duck minorities and the creation of a lot of lucrative non-jobs for the boys and girls in the party. Nevertheless the Labour Party did not expect to lose Ealing; as Bryan Gould said in the stunned aftermath of the Tory victory, they thought they did not deserve to lose there.

If that means anything it is that in Ealing the Labour council had industriously applied itself to shedding the loony-left tag which it acquired in 1986 and had become a model of Kinnockist moderation—appropriately enough since it is the borough where the Labour leader lives in surprisingly modest style for someone who sees himself as a future prime minister. Labour's transformation did not please everyone and there were some well-publicised rows over the economies which the council imposed just before the election, involving councillors who were under the delusion that Labour administrations should act differently from those run by Tories. If the Labour Party did not "deserve" to lose Ealing it could only have been because they had done such a good job of disguising themselves as Tories. After all that effort to obliterate the differences between the two parties how could the voters be so ungrateful as to choose between them?

Lunching in the City

The Ealing result was ominous for the Labour Party because the council there had done what the party nationally is doing. Ever since their defeat in 1987 Labour has been trying to make itself as similar to the Tories as it reasonably can. At its conferences Kinnock still addresses the delegates as "comrades" but his preoccupation is to persuade the voters that Labour is a party whose claim to their support is based on their promise to run capitalism more efficiently than the Tories have managed to.

In the forefront of this tendency is the man who hopes to be Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer and who, to prepare himself for this, has been industriously lunching his way around the City of London. John Smith is a very caricature of sober restraint; even his voice, with its austere Scottish rasp, promises a hard-headed prudence. He gives no hope to the most naive of Labour supporters that his visits to the City are to give notice, over the claret, to the bankers and stockbrokers that with a Labour government and its policies of common ownership their days are numbered. What he is actually doing is reassuring them that when he is installed at the Treasury their interests will be his first concern; “The first and overriding priority of a Labour government will be to put the economy right, so we may have to ask for patience from people" was how he put it on TV recently.

The "people" he had in mind were not the investors who infest the City but those on a rather lower income, who misguidedly think that a Labour government's priority will be to spend money on their welfare. They have no excuse for this, for Smith has held consistently to his line. Last October he warned that as Chancellor he may need . . . to postpone some of our social ambitions ." In April in New York he was soothing Wall Street with the assurance that “. . .  there will be no dash for growth under the next Labour government" and last month he was repeating the same doleful message given out by every Labour Chancellor, that if the unions press for "excessive" wage rises they will be causing unemployment.

And how does the City react to the presence in their midst of this dangerous radical from across the border, eating their food, drinking their wine and talking their language that profits come first? Well, they are by no means alarmed or even uncomfortable. The Economist reported that City analysts are widely reassured that a Labour government would be no worse (for them, that is) than the Tories. The Investors Chronicle, which does not exist to promote the cause of social revolution, concluded that Labour's economic policy ". . . contains nothing to which the City objects violently on principle .

Undeserved reputation

In fact it is difficult to understand the belief that a Labour government will always include a reckless and incompetent Chancellor, especially when we remember that recent Conservative holders of that office have included Anthony Barber. Derek Heathcoat Amory, Selwyn Lloyd, Reginald Maudling and Nigel Lawson. When we compare these with Labour Chancellors like Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell, James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey and consider how their anti-working class policies protected the interests of the capitalists we can only wonder why the City does not immediately and unreservedly welcome a Labour government. Can it be that the Square Mile is populated by people so exceedingly ungrateful that they would not recognise a profit-protective Chancellor if one was served up on—well, on their lunch plates?

Consider too what has happened in the past—the efforts of Labour ministers to convince the British capitalist class that they had nothing to fear from a Labour government and how this message was received. In 1965 George Brown said in the Director, the magazine of the Institute of Directors, that "businessmen have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour government than they had before” In 1969 Frank Kearton. who was then chairman of Courtaulds. told the Institute of Public Relations that "some of the (Labour] government s measures will stand industry in good stead in the seventies'. More recently, in 1987 Lord Donaghue. head of research at stockbrokers Kleinwort Benson, had this to say about the result of the general election which was expected that year: " . . . the

reality is that all parties in this country support a mixed economy and none has policies so radical as to be damaging to long-term investment prospects". The noble lord's research had obviously not unearthed the presence of the Socialist Party and its policies, but let that pass.

New faces

So there is nothing new in Labour s present reshaping of its policies and its image, trying to smooth out those inconvenient doctrinaire lumps of nationalisation and "soak the rich" hysteria which were meaningless but which upset the City when all the Labour leaders wanted was to have friendly lunches with them while they got down to the serious business of organising the maximum exploitation of the working class. What is new is the faces; a new generation of Labour leaders has risen since Thatcher first marched triumphantly into Number Ten and they are letting it be known on which side of the class barricade they stand. On those terms John Smith is a comforting figure and workers who are nervous about how rich, how competitive and how secure are the class who exploit them may vote for him to compose the budget of British capitalism while he tells the workers how their greed and indolence are ruining the profitability of the British economy.

Smith now promises to do the kind of balancing act which former Labour Chancellors found impossible, in spite of their promises before they got into power. He says he will energise British industry into prosperity, encouraging steady expansion while controlling any tendency to a boom in which pay claims may become too powerful. At the same time he will prudently invest in education, health care, social services and our general welfare. He makes it sound very easy and reassuring, except to those who remember what happened to the same promises made by other Labour Chancellors.

History gives no support to John Smith nor to those who are dazzled into supporting him. It is not a matter of incompetence; many of the abject, discredited failures competently tried to do the impossible—to make capitalism behave as if it were a benign and controllable social system. John Smith will not be pondering these facts as he chews his way through his lunches, for they would not stimulate the appetite of an office-hungry politician.

Ivan

He joined the wrong army (1957)

From the May 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

No medals, glory, and a brilliant army career for poor George Christopher Grice (26), of Acton—be joined the wrong army. He was once a member of the Irish Republican Army, and for harbouring some ammunition in his room he was recently sentenced at Middlesex Sessions to twelve months' incarceration in one of Her Majesty’s prisons (Manchester Guardian, 15/3/57).

This unfortunate erstwhile (irregular) soldier was obviously unaware of the benefits of being a member of the (Regular) British Army, whose manifold attractions are amply depicted in a splendid full-page advertisement in the Manchester Guardian, (26/2/57). A list of these attractions (including a good salary and prospects, plenty of travel, and opportunities for sport—blood sports, no doubt) are suitably embellished by an enormous picture of an exploding atom bomb to stress the peaceful nature of army life. Had Mr. Grice seen this advert his future career might have taken a more profitable turn: for instance, the advert, assures us that if he were exceptional (doubtful, we fear, in view of his inability to conceal a paltry collection of bullets successfully) there would be nothing between him and a Field Marshal’s baton. Furthermore, as a subaltern in his first regimental duty, be would "probably be in charge of 40 men and some thousands of pounds worth of equipment." This makes the grenade and the box containing 26 rounds of .32 ammunition that were found in his room look pretty small-time.

But Mr. Grice does not seem to have been a very steel-hearted soldier—he left the I.RA in January, 1955, because, according to the Manchester Guardian, "he did not agree with the violent side of I.R.A. activities." Mr. Cassell (the prosecuting counsel) was quick to comment on this pacifist (and if we may say so, typically Irish) attitude to army life by asking Mr. Grice, “There is no point in having an army unless it is going to fight, is there?" Perhaps Mr. Cassell had also missed the army advert (It is headed PLAY A LEADING PART IN KEEPING WORLD PEACE) which states that if you join the Regular Army “you are declaring that you are prepared actively to help maintain peace." In other words, the army will ensure peace even if it has to use the H-bomb in the process. Clear? Pursuing this peaceful theme, the advert declares that the armed forces of the Western nations form "a weighty stabilising influence in a world disturbed by -isms and -ologies" (capitalism and theology, for instance?), and if you join the British Army "you work for the continued existence of the British way of life." We would add that with explosives such as are depicted in the advert., you would also contribute notably to the British way of death.

Mr. Grice’s unfortunate choice of armies was further highlighted by the chairman of the magistrates who presided over his trial. Had he joined the British Army, Mr. Grice would have had access to all kinds of beautiful weapons (the advert mentions guided missiles); but he chose a less well organised outfit, whose relations with the British Government, moreover, are strained to say the least. Hence the chairman told Mr. Grice “bullets are for killing, and the one thing we have got to ensure in this country is that bullets are not obtained. People are dying daily because misguided young men like you collect bullets I and let them off." In case any reader gets the impression that the chairman’s statement is a piece of strong pacifist propaganda, we would hazard that it is mainly directed against people in those organisations which oppose the British state machine (the Cypriot "terrorists," Mau Mau, for example): For, under different circumstances, did not the British government arrange for arms and ammunition to be parachuted to the Maquis and other resistance groups during the late war to encourage their guerrilla struggles against enemy forces? It all depends on which side you’re on, and poor Mr. Grice backed a loser.

But perhaps there are drawbacks to joining any army. As Mr. Cassell said, there is no point in having an army unless it’s going to fight, and Mr. Grice’s father said in the witness-box: “I put down this lad’s downfall to the war, when I was away."

Amid this welter of contradictions, the Socialist message stands out clearly. Grice and millions of other young men of the working-class throughout the world are wasting their time and causing themselves untold suffering by supporting their various capitalist groups however attractively the different military needs are cloaked in propaganda to pander to nationalist prejudices. We urge the Grices of the world to give earnest consideration to the case for Socialism the only hope for world peace and the future of mankind.

Michael La Touche

Chatham House and spies (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the Times (16 September), a spy working for the East German intelligence agency Staatssicherheitdienst (Stasi), operating under the code-name Eckart, infiltrated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, generally known as Chatham House, for at least six years during the 1980s. He allegedly supplied the Stasi's foreign intelligence division, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung (HVA), through East Germany's London embassy, with reports stolen from Chatham House on Royal Navy manoeuvres, NATO management problems, British government evaluation of the Falklands conflict and, what may appear surprising at first, the Social Democratic Party, which had just been formed by the "Gang of Four", splitting the Labour Party. Also on 10 March 1983, Eckart sent a Chatham House report "on the Trotskyists in the United Kingdom" to his controllers in the HVA.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs conducts research projects which, over many years, have influenced British government policy-making. It has been a think-tank where the "great and the good" of British capitalism have briefed academics, civil servants and selected journalists; where they considered, under "Chatham House rules", that their remarks and statements would not be identified. From 1945 to around 1975 particularly, Chatham House became "almost the club of the foreign policy establishment", where ambassadors and diplomats "could get prior intelligence of what advice government ministers were being given". It also set up an American link through the Chatham House Foundation. John Dickie, in his Inside the Foreign Office, comments:

"Outside Parliament there are several prestigious institutions where seminars, lectures, and discussion groups produce ideas and proposals which carry considerable weight among opinion-formers . . . Senior members of the Foreign Office often attend lectures and discussion groups.""By far the most influential of all the outside organizations is the Royal Institute of international Affairs. Chatham House, as it is known from its location, was founded in 1920 to bring together people from government, politics, industry, finance, the academic world and the media, from Britain and many other countries, to examine and develop the ideas which shape policy."

Ten years ago, the Institute's research project income was around £1m, of which £50,000 a year came from the Foreign Office. In 1991, it had a membership of almost 3,500 of whom 26, including the Foreign Office, were major corporate members paying an annual subscription of £3,000. Corporate membership is also held by 230 other companies and organisations.

The "Great and the Good"

Just after the end of the Second World War, Denis Healey, the then International Secretary of the Labour Party and, in his own words a "Cold War warrior", joined the Chatham House Council, and remained an active member until he became a government minister in 1964. Said Healey in his autobiography, The Time of My Life:

"It became a major source of my education in world affairs, since it enabled me to meet people with a knowledge and experience far removed from what was available to me in my work for the Labour Party."

During the latter part of the last century, a number of prominent politicians, including Presidents Havel of Czechoslovakia and Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, addressed invited audiences at Chatham House, as did Presidents Reagan and Clinton from the United States. When Margaret Thatcher first became leader of the Conservative party when in Opposition, she tended to accept the views, and writings, of Brian Crozier and his right-wing Institute for the Study of Conflict, as well as other right-wingers such as Airey Neave, Norris McWhirter and Robert Moss. But by 1984, when she had been Prime Minister for five years, and when Sir Charles Powell became her Private Secretary for Overseas Affairs, their influence had waned somewhat; and he "gave her digests of lectures delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs. She lapped up everything he sent her on defence and the maintenance of a balance of arms". (John Dickie). Nevertheless, Chatham House seems to have had less influence on government during Thatcher's Premiership than with previous governments.

Brian Crozier worked for the Institute for "eleven active years" between 1954 and 1965, of which four had been under the directorship of the Hon Christopher Montague Woodhouse who, in 1953, had been MI6 head of station in Teheran responsible for the MI6/CIA coup d'etat which overthrew the Mossadeq government in Iran. In 1965, Crozier's South-East Asia in Turmoil was published which, according to the author in his Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941-1991, "became required reading for all personnel of the South-East Asia Organisation (SEATO)". But its publication, and his controversies with Kenneth Younger, a former Labour Minister of State and the then Director of Chatham House, marked his "definitive break with the liberal Establishment" and his resignation from the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

One of the most important, and influential, researchers associated with the Institute during this period was Andrew Shonfield. Issued under the auspices of the Institute in 1965, was his Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power; he was assisted by a number of researchers from Chatham House and by its Research Committee.

In his first chapter, "The Signs of Change", he asks:

"What was it that converted capitalism from the cataclysmic failure which it appeared to be in the 1930s into the great engine of prosperity of the postwar Western world?"

He argued that "the performance of capitalism since the end of the Second World War has been so unexpectedly dazzling". In the early post-war period we were inclined to dismiss the high rates of economic growth in Western Europe as evidence of reconstruction which was bound to end, wrote Shonfield. Then there was the Korean war boom in 1951, followed by a recession a year after. Things seemed to be moving back into a familiar pattern. However, the second part of the 1950s produced a further sharp increase in Western European output. For Shonfield, except for minor variations, capitalism in Western Europe, but not in the United States, was a story largely of success up to 1965. What he and his Chatham House "experts" would have said about European, American and world capitalism thirty-five years later, however, may have been a different story.

During the last decade, Chatham House has had a staff of around 35 academics, including researchers from China, Germany, Japan and Korea.

Social Democratic Party

As we now know, the Royal Institute of International Affairs was not the only organisation interested in the formation and policies of the British Social Democratic Party, in 1981, and the following years. The East German intelligence agency, the Stasi, as was the Soviet Union's KGB. According to Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB/MI6 double agent, writing in KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (together with Christopher Andrew), the KGB resident chief in the early 1980s, Arkadi Guk, "devised a conspiracy theory to explain . . . the founding and initial success of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). It had been created, Guk argued, with the help of the CIA and the US embassy in order to split the Labour Party and keep the Conservatives in power". But was this in fact just a conspiracy theory?

By 1980, the Labour Party, then in opposition, had become unilateralist, was strongly influenced by CND and wanted British capitalism to be independent of both the United States and the Soviet Union. This did not suit a pro-Atlanticist faction in the leadership of the Labour Party, led by such people as Roy Jenkins, who had become a Commissioner of the European Community in Brussels, Shirley Williams, William Rogers and David Owen, the "Gang of Four". They were pro-Common Market, pro-NATO and opposed to unilateral disarmament. They were supported by a number of lesser-known, and somewhat shadowy figures, such as Douglas Eden, Stephen Haseler, Brian Walden, Robert Maclennan, William Goodhart, Alan Lee Williams—and Joseph and Roy Godson.

Douglas Eden, an American, and Stephen Haseler, whose wife was American, were co-founders of the Social Democratic Alliance. Haseler was an academic, and a member of the Washington-based think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, who helped set up the London Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies. Both Eden and Haseler had been associated with Brian Crozier's National Association for Freedom. Crozier claimed to have assisted the Social Democratic Alliance "on a small scale", but did not, he wrote (in his Free Agent), mention his "CIA and SIS (MI6) connections".

Haseler was a close friend of Roy Godson, who was also closely associated with President Reagan's CIA chief, Bill Casey. His father, Joseph godson, was for many years the labor attaché at the United States embassy in London. After retirement, he set up with money from NATO the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding. He was involved with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which partly funded Shirley Williams's sojourn in America. Joseph Godson was associated with another founder-member of the SDP, Alan Lee Williams MP, a former Labour defence expert who was also treasurer, from 1972 to 1979, of the English Speaking Union, and chair of Godson's Trade Union Press Service. Of Joseph Godson, Eric Hammond, then general secretary of the Electrical, Electronic, Tele-communication & Plumbing Union (EETPU), commented in his book, Maverick: "I could never prove it, of course, but Joe always seemed to me to be some kind of spook". He was.

The draft constitution of the SDP was written up, in the United States, by Robert Maclennan and William Goodhart.

And the Trotskyists?

At first sight, it would seem strange that Chatham House, the East Germany Stasi, or anyone else would be interested in British Trotskyists. Yet the Security Service (MI5) has monitored, and has heavily infiltrated Trotskyist organisations in this country, since 1943. (See The Security Service 1908-1945: The Official History, compiled by John Curry, Public Record Office.)

During the 1970s and 80s, the Workers Revolutionary Party was probably the best known Trotskyist organisation in Britain, mainly because of the activities of, and funding by, actress Vanessa Redgrave, and her actor brother, Corin. There was also the Militant Tendency. Militant, first as the so-called Revolutionary Socialist League, had been steadfastly infiltrating the Labour Party since the early 1950s. Entryism was the name of the game.

Although denying that Militant was, in fact, a separate party within the British Labour Party, Peter Taaffe, who ultimately ousted the veteran Militant leader, Ted Grant, has somewhat laboriously chronicled Militant's activities within the Labour Party, in his book, The Rise of Militant: Militant's 30 Years.

By 1976, the "organised supporters" (Taaffe-speak for members) within the Labour Party had reached 1,000. Andy Bevan had become National Youth Officer. In 1978, Militant called for a return of a Labour government and the "defeat of the Tory enemy". But at the 1979 election, Thatcher and the Tories were elected. In 1980 there were riots in Bristol; and in 1981, there were similar riots in Brixton and in Toxteth, in Liverpool. Militant was in the thick of it, playing a "positive role" according to Peter Taaffe. Ever-opportunist, Militant called for the disbanding of the Special Patrol Group and the abolition of the House of Lords. Militant also pledged its support for "the basic socialist [actually state-capitalist] aim of the Labour Party embodied in Clause IV, Part 4 of the constitution". They demanded not the abolition of the wages system but a "living wage for all", whatever that was supposed to be.

In November 1982, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided to bring proceedings for the expulsion of five members of Militant's editorial board. After a court case which resulted in Militant's favour, they were later expelled from the Labour Party. Ultimately, most of Militant's leading members were expelled from the Labour Party as Trotskyists, while at the same time, and later, numbers of former members of the SDP were re-admitted to the Labour Party.

What the researchers of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or the Stasi spy in Chatham House, made of all this is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, Chatham House exists to provide members of Britain's political and economic élite with information that they feel will be of particular use to them.

Peter E. Newell

Pathfinders: Coprophilia (2017)

The Pathfinders column from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Which of these news stories is true: The Queen threatened to abdicate if the Brexit vote won; the Pope supported Donald Trump for president; Hillary Clinton sold guns to ISIS; the Pope called fake news purveyors 'coprophages' (shit-eaters)?

Just the last one is true. And you can't blame the Pope for swearing in Greek. Actor Denzel Washington was also incandescent with rage after a fake news story identifying him as a Trump supporter went viral. Fake news is big news since the US presidential elections were riddled with it, not least because many of the hoax items (aka blatant lies) seemed to stem from the Trump camp itself. When a quasi-secret meeting of senior Facebook executives suggested that Facebook, also riddled with fake news, had influenced public perceptions to the extent of altering the outcome of the elections, CEO Mark Zuckerberg ridiculed the idea, only to change his mind a few days later and agree to new measures to start flagging suspect stories. When confronted with the same question regarding Google's inadvertent promotion of fake news influencing the election result, its CEO responded simply "Sure", and agreed immediately to work on ways to block them.

The nub of the matter is that where once you could tell a satire from a genuine story if only because the satirists did not have the means to make their products look authentic, now anyone can create a genuine-looking website. If you are tempted to cite a news story from the National Report, Boston Tribune, Denver Guardian, Empire Herald, News Buzz Daily or United Media Publishing, you have been conned because they are all fake news sites, and there are hundreds more.

Journalists aren't immune either. In a rush to get stories out, or to follow the day's fastest bandwagons, journalists often publish first and check later, thus contributing to the fake virology. A study of US TV stations revealed that up to a third of their news reports contained unchecked information culled from social media sources which turned out to be false ('The rise and rise of fake news', BBC Online, 6 November) .

So, what's the deal with fake news? Money, in a word. There are towns in Macedonia and other poor countries where fake news generation is the main industry and source of employment (Wired Online, 8 December). The BBC article above cites a prominent shit-eater talking about the advertising revenue derived from so-called click-bait designed to pander to prejudices: "We've had stories that have made $10,000. We're constantly trying to tune into feelings that we think that people already have or want to have. Recently we did a story about Hillary Clinton being fed the answers prior to the debate. It was all fake - but that sort of headline gets into the right wing bubble and they run with it." An independent researcher agrees: "There's a lot of confirmation bias. A lot of people want proof that their world view is the accurate and appropriate one."              

But not just any people, conservatives in particular. One faker claims to have helped get Trump elected: "My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time… His followers don’t fact-check anything – they’ll post everything, believe anything" (New Scientist, 7 December). Another complained that liberals are harder to dupe: "We've tried to do [fake news with] liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out" (Washington Post, 7 December). A recent UCLA study has indeed concluded that conservatives are more likely to believe fake news if it is in the form of a threat which rings true in their world view (http://tinyurl.com/hyvrpnr).

It's not just about the money. Wired Magazine points out that the past 30 years has seen a complete capsizing of news media. Where once a few big news broadcasters churned out a bland and monotonous news agenda designed not to appeal but to avoid offence, now in the 'post-truth era' a plethora of small agencies are actively hunting audiences by targeting passionately-held niche opinions. Moreover the power to propagate stories has passed from news editors to readers, and one study suggests that anger is the key motivating factor in spreading stories - the more angry the reader is about a story, the more likely they will share it. "Reasonableness gets you no points," says one former Facebook VP (Wired, 14 February).

So on this argument the people most likely to share fake news are angry right-wingers with no great interest in objective reality. Not surprisingly, some commentators fear that democracy is suffocating in a steam of rage-fuelled stupidity. It's as if someone has turned the gas stove up, and now everybody's boiling. No wonder politics seems to be going through a phase change. The lukewarm centrism of the past few decades is fast giving way to aggressive and polarised extremes that must seem unprecedented to anyone under the age of 40.

Would it therefore be perverse to suggest that fake news is a good thing? After all there is a sense in which most of the news is fake anyway, if one considers how 'real' stories about the number of infant deaths from preventable disease or hunger, or the number of people living on the street or in tents, virtually never appear in the news, which is instead obsessed with celeb gossip and party political trivia.

The capitalist class as a whole used to control workers by withholding information wherever possible. Now there's too much information and misinformation, and workers will either sink or learn to swim. In all the fakery this one fact must stand out as obvious, even to the most fact-averse conservative.

If you had to 'sell' the idea of capitalism to people on a socialist planet they'd laugh at you. There'd be nothing in it for them except misery and slavery. Most people don't support capitalism because they think it is perfect or even particularly pleasant. They support it because they think they've got no choice, and they think that because they are hypnotised by its bogus ideology, its bogus values and its bogus leaders. Capitalism is adaptive and very clever at whitewashing itself. Our hope is that, in a new climate of radical scepticism which even conservatives can't be immune to, perhaps the whitewash won't wash for much longer.

PJS

Obituary: Gary Slapper (2017)

Obituary from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to report the death of Gary Slapper, a member of long standing who first joined the Party in 1980. Gary was part of a large group of new young members who entered the Party around this time, many centred on his own branch in Islington, which became a particularly vibrant and energetic one throughout the 1980s. Gary played a very full part in expanding the branch to the extent that from small beginnings it became the biggest in the Party. He was a regular speaker and debater for the Party at this time and also regularly spoke on the outdoor platform at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

In addition, he was a writer, contributing many fine articles to the Socialist Standard over the years under his pen-name of Gary Jay. A number of these focused on aspects of popular culture, often reflecting Gary’s deep interests in phenomena such as ‘new wave’ music.

Over time, Gary also pursued a very successful academic career – after a spell at Staffordshire University he became Professor and Head of Law at the Open University, before latterly becoming Director of New York University in London. Many readers will be aware that for years Gary was also a specialist law columnist for The Times, writing articles focusing on unusual and quirky legal cases, and which were illustrations of his good humour and keen eye for the absurd. He also wrote several well-regarded books in the field.

Gary’s death at the age of 58 was sudden and unexpected, and a tragic loss. He was a genuinely popular figure and a highly congenial man who will be missed greatly. The Party extends its condolences – including to his siblings Clifford and Maxine, both Party members.

Keeping the peace (1983)

From the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

While politicians around the world, supposedly models of sanity and clear-headedness, organise arsenals of immense destructive capacity and busily equip institutionalised murder brigades, women at Greenham Common Peace Camp are demonstrating against the use of a particular variety of nuclear weapon. The authorities frowned on them, and had them arrested and imprisoned. Their crime, as they quietly made their limited protest in the shadows of the aggressive might of the state, was refusing to be bound over to keep the peace.

The only way that many of the hideous contradictions of our society can be explained away is by the use of a distorting double-think. The language we are taught encourages us to hold contradictory views about an issue. The word “scrounger” for instance, is reserved for members of the working class on the dole, rather than applied to the socially parasitic wealth owning class. In Orwell’s novel about totalitarian capitalism, Nineteen Eighty- Four, the slogan which stares at the proletariat from buildings and posters is "Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom”. This sort of doublethink is nurtured by a system based on contradictions. We are told that bombs are made to keep the peace, that we must butcher people en masse in a war to “protect our civilisation”. Military spending now totals close to £1,000,000,000 a day while UNICEF, trying hard to help children living in especially bad poverty, had a total income of £171 million in 1981. That is the equivalent of 4 hours 10 minutes’ military spending (World Military and Social Expenditures 1982). The money spent does not matter; it is the priority of resources in the profit-system which is telling. The number of people estimated to have starved to death last year was over 30,000,000, or a catastrophe on the scale of Hiroshima every other day. While people are dying in desperate need of food the productive powers of society are used not to satisfy this hunger but to produce the equivalent of 4 tonnes of TNT for every human being.

Why does our society put such a priority on the production of the means of destruction? In order to answer this, we need to understand why war is a part of the pattern of social behaviour under capitalism. Wars are not fought because we have weapons. We have weapons because wars are fought. The notion that wars are fought because we are naturally belligerent has been refuted by the now almost universal need for conscription. People must have regimental discipline and bellicose aggression battered into them. It is not there naturally. As the working class becomes more literate and politically aware, the reasons proffered to justify each successive war have changed. We are well past the stage where wars were fought simply at the behest of the monarch, although there is a throwback from this in the idea of fighting for Queen and Country. The idea of fighting "a war to end wars” has lost considerable credibility since the war-torn years after 1918. They told us that World War 1939-1945 was fought so that the ruling class in Britain could protect democracy and oppose Hitler's tyranny, but the ruling class have always been opposed to the idea of democracy if it meant them having to relinquish their power and privilege. Recently declassified wartime Foreign Office communications show that certain elements in the ruling class in Britain had a sympathetic approval of what Hitler intended for the Jews.

Wars are precipitated in modern property society because of the rival economic interests of sections of the wealth owning class around the world. They are fought over trade routes like the Dardanelles, Suez and more recently the Hormuz Straits. They are fought over raw materials and resources, like the American army's battle in Vietnam and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and over markets. Competing groups of capitalists, ranged behind their respective executive committees in the form of state machines, vie with each other for the domination of areas where their goods can be sold. The real causes of a war are never mentioned by the official channels. In the Falklands war no one in the news media made much fuss about the quarrels as to which companies (English or American or Argentinian) were to eventually take control over the prospective millions of barrels of oil in the ocean basin around the islands. No one seemed to invite the shareholders of Charrington-Coalite, who own over half the land and half of the sheep, to go and fight for their company.

Any plan to end the threat of war must take into account that so long as we have a society divided into classes and nations, so long as we allow the anarchic method of production for profit with its periodic crises then for so long will there be wars and the constant threat of them. It is reasonable to expect that members of the capitalist class across the world will want to wield the most advanced and lethal weapons which are available.

The profit system operates on the basis of a minority ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. In Britain, for instance, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population own and control more of the accumulated wealth than all the wealth which could be collectively pooled by the poorest 80 per cent of us. (Final Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth 1980) The top 13 per cent of the population own 90 per cent of the land and over 50 per cent of the housing. These figures are roughly the same world-wide, including the state-capitalist nations like the Russian Empire and Poland, where small minorities live in luxury off the backs of the majority who are workers.

Production of wealth is carried out only if a profit can be expected by those who own the work places and equipment and materials. That is why food is not produced and transported to the millions who are starving. That is why luxury office blocks are being built for businesses while there are in Britain alone over 50,000 registered homeless families. That is why there are prices on goods and services that we have to pay, even though it is we who are making the goods and providing the services. It is in this social and historical setting, a world divided into two classes and many nations, where rival economic interests are pitted against each other in a relentless drive to dominate areas of exploitation, that the problem of modern warfare arises.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has fairly limited objectives. It does not stand for an end of the need for wars. We recently read about the case of Gunner Jeffrey Clare who was dismissed from his artillery regiment in Germany for being an active CND member. (Guardian 24, September 1982) CND are spending some of their funds on legal advice to try and claim compensation for his dismissal and actually boasted of having 20 members in the armed forces. Among those paid up members of CND who were in the military services were "three sailors from the destroyer HMS Sheffield, whose membership cards went to the bottom of the South Atlantic when she was sunk by an exocet missile.” (Guardian, 24 September 1982)

Similarly, religious opposition to particular weapons is equally limited and inconsequential. A recent Church of England working party report came to the conclusion that a nuclear war would be really horrific and so not permissible by god (the supreme arbiter of ways in which workers can kill each other) but that the church would have to give its blessing to any war which was waged "as a last resort . . . for a just cause, without a direct attack on non-combatants. . . and only after a formal declaration" (The Church and The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience). The machine gun, napalm and bacteriological weapons then have been given the divine thumbs up, so long as the war is “just" and so long as it is played fairly. Christian generals are therefore reminded to provide an adequate formal declaration before they blow a city to smithereens.

Wars are fought for the interests of the wealth owning class. But it is we workers who are persuaded every time to do their dirty work for them, to fight their battles. Our antagonistic interests are fallaciously portrayed as being united, under the flag of nationalism; "We are all one nation, rich and poor”. And this lie is told to workers in all countries. This idea of nationalism is more powerful and influential than the most powerful nuclear weapon, as all it takes is a change in the prevailing ideas about the need for classes and war, and nations and then bombs can be dismantled and tanks melted down. The privilege of the wealth owning minority, bombs and nations are only in existence because certain ideas presently prevail. Change the ideas and the whole madness comes tumbling down.

Gary Jay