Some Lessons from Spain (1937)

From the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the war clouds are fast gathering in Europe, the Spanish Civil War continues its devastating course, taking heavy toll of working-class lives and spreading ruin and misery over Spain.

Although six months have passed since it commenced the murderous attack of Franco and his international cohorts has not yet accomplished its object. While the avowed aim of Franco and his supporters is to keep the old order in Spain as it was the indiscriminate bombing and artillery barrage of towns is fast wiping out the objective evidence of old Spain.

We are accustomed to the sanctimonious reverence of the ruling class for the art treasures of the past but the savage methods of the Franco group shed a dear light on the object that inspires the real reverence of the property owner. Pictures, statuary, fine buildings, cathedrals and all the other irreplaceable relics of the artistic passion of the past weigh as nothing in the balance against the possible loss of revenue to the erstwhile rulers of Spain. And so it has always been and always will be while one set of people see an opportunity of living on the backs of the rest of the population. .

Again and again we are given evidence of the emptiness of the protestations of the property owners and their mouthpieces when an opportunity comes to give effect to their views. When war is called for, or resistance of any kind, by the rulers of society then priest and politician will find reasons why the war should be prosecuted or workers should be prepared to lay down their lives for a State that is not theirs.

Last October Dr. Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking at a Diocesan Conference at Canterbury, urged that complete pacificism was harmful as it left the State at the mercy of violent men. The object of his remarks was to impress upon his audience and the world at large that a defensive war was a just war. As all combatants in war claim that they are on the defensive (witness the last European War, and the statements of all leading European spokesmen now that they all want peace) this is equivalent to supporting any war on behalf of capitalism.

In the course of his remarks the Archbishop is reported as having put forward the following points: —

  The use of force of the sword by the State was the ministry of God for the protection of the people. If that were true of the State in its domestic relations, it was equally true for the State in its international relations. It all depended upon the motive or intention with which it was used.
 If the force of an army were used for national aggression or acquisition or self-assertion it was wrong. If it were used for the defence of the people it was right.

(News Chronicle, 13/10/36.)

In Spain a democratically-elected government has been subject to the onslaught of a rebellious military and land-owning clique who have carried out the attack with extreme brutality and have enlisted in their support native tribesmen as well as thousands of alleged volunteers from aggressive dictatorships. As far as we are aware neither Dr. Lang nor his friends have taken any practical step to see that aid was given to a government that was employed in just that defensive action for which he pleaded. Are we to assume that in reality Dr. Lang was simply giving his blessing to the rearmament projects of the British Government and thus fulfilling his function as a pillar of capitalism? It certainly looks as if this were the case.

The agony of Spain is only a matter of concern for the capitalists of other nations if any of them have interests involved or if there is any prospect of gain by fishing in troubled waters. For the rest it is a matter of minor importance to them that thousands of Spanish workers are losing their lives just because landowners and the Catholic Church want to keep intact their privilege to rob the wealth-producer of the product of his toil.

One of the spokesmen of the Spanish Government recently said that over a million lives had already been lost in the present civil war. It is a sad thought that in spite of the many and bitter lessons during the last hundred years, in which millions of workers’ lives have been sacrificed, the mass of the workers of the world still fail to grasp the fact that capitalism offers nothing to them but toil and misery, and they still turn away from the Socialist message. Yet, in the advanced countries at any rate, the workers produce and distribute the wealth upon which all live. While the capitalists control this wealth they use their position to live in idleness and luxury. The workers can, and some day will, obtain control of the means of production. When they do so they can banish want and economic misery and the bestialities of the struggle between classes. The lesson is a simple one and so easy to learn if only workers will look facts in the face.

Gilmac.

Letter: Is Socialism Possible? (1937)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following letter was received before the abdication of Edward VIII but has been held up owing to pressure on space.

November 8th, 1936.

To the Chairman and Members of the Editorial Committee, The Socialist Standard,

42, Great Dover Street, S.E.l.

Gentlemen,

In your current (November) issue you quote from an article in The Daily Telegraph, of October, 19th, that a snatched victory at the polls would be utterly useless for the purpose of achieving Socialism, because the whole of the forces of capitalism, including the Crown, would successfully repel any such bluff.

With that statement of position you express your agreement, but, unless I am mistaken, within your expression of agreement lies the implication that if a victory at the polls were not a snatched victory, such victory would be quite good enough for the effectuation of Socialism

But is there one solitary Englishman who believes that to be the case ?

Real Socialism never can or will be achieved in this country for the very simple reason that Article 6 of the S.P.G.B.'s Principles of Socialism is no more a practical possibility in this country than it has proved to be in Spain. In fact, the position in this country is worse than it has proved to be in Spain, for to this country’s armed forces can be added the police forces, the aristocracisation of which (commenced under Trenchard) can quite certainly be taken as a deliberate policy of leaving any Socialist government nothing to fight with but words.

Any attempt at implementing the S.P.G.B.’s Principles of Socialism in this country would mean civil war. And can there be any questioning who would win it?

Yours fraternally,

P. P. M.

Reply.

In the November issue we expressed our agreement with a statement made in the Daily Telegraph that the ruling class would be well able to prevent the overthrow of capitalism if it were to be attempted by a group coming into office through a snatched victory at the polls. This has always been the view of the S.P.G.B., and the various Labour and Popular Front Governments, led by men who professed to desire Socialism, have proved our view to be correct. The idea that a Labour Government, elected on a programme of pettifogging reforms and vague promises to introduce the millennium, could seriously menace capitalism is a matter for laughter. Most people recognise this to be true now that they have seen Labour Governments at work. The S.P.G.B. did not have to wait for practical examples to discover this for it arises out of the facts of the situation. In the last resort capitalism continues because capitalist parties (including some which masquerade as anti-capitalist) can go on getting the consent of the electorate for the maintenance of capitalism. That condition will continue until a majority understand Socialism, are agreed on fundamental Socialist principles, and are politically organised in the Socialist Party. Then, and only then, will the cunning appeals for the retention of capitalism fall on deaf ears.

We say that a snatched victory at the polls will be useless for Socialism and that much more is required, viz., a politically-organised Socialist majority. Having come into possession of the machinery of government that organised Socialist majority will be able to use the machinery of government, including the armed forces, for the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of Socialism.

To this our correspondent, “P.P.M.,” says no! But he evidently has not stopped to consider what it is the S.P.G.B. advocates, for he proceeds to refer to Spain as if there were some parallel between Spain as it is and England and other countries as they will be before a Socialist electoral victory becomes a possibility. For 34 years the S.P.G.B. has insisted on the need for a Socialist majority united in the Socialist Party. Did this exist in Spain ? So far as we know there was no party in Spain, among a very large number of parties, which advocated Socialism at all. The Spanish population were (and still are) divided into all kinds of antagonistic organisations: Conservative, Fascist, Monarchist, Catholic, Capitalist-Republican, Basque and Catalonian Home Rulers, Syndicalists, Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists, Labourites, etc.

At the last election these numerous warring sections grouped themselves into three, one of which was the "Popular Front,” which got a majority of seats but received rather less than half the total of votes. The “Popular Front” was composed of at least half-a-dozen separate organisations normally at bitter enmity with each other and none of them Socialist. Did they fight the election asking for a mandate for Socialism? Of course they did not. Their leader, Azana, expressly and repeatedly affirmed his opposition to Socialism. They fought the election on a string of reforms and demands such as the release of political prisoners.

In other words, not one of the conditions which Socialists say are essential before capitalism can be overthrown was in existence in Spain. Yet in face of this our correspondent, “P.P.M.,” says that Spain proves us wrong. What it does is prove that "P.P.M.” has not yet grasped what it is Socialists have been telling the working class all these years.

Let us approach the matter from another angle. "P.P.M.” believes that the small British ruling class will be able to get the armed forces to resist the organised, united demand of a majority of the population after the latter have constitutionally obtained possession of the machinery of government. He assumes, in other words, that the workers in the army, navy, police, etc., although coming in the majority of cases from families of Socialists, will back an unconstitutional movement of armed rebellion. This is so extraordinary an assumption, so contrary to experience and reason, that we must ask for the grounds on which “P.P.M.” reaches his conclusion.

Now that Spain has been disposed of we would also ask ”P.P.M.” to give us a single example of a ruling class in an advanced industrialised country being able successfully to resist the unanimous, united demand of a majority of the population.

There is one other aspect of the matter which needs mention. While it is the job of the worker in each country to organise to obtain control of the machinery of government there, the idea of Socialism in Britain alone in the midst of a capitalist world is illusory. Socialists, therefore, accept the necessity for concerted international action.

In conclusion, we would draw attention to the

position occupied by “P.P.M.” of believing that Socialism is impossible, whatever the method used. He writes: ” Real Socialism never can or will be achieved in this country.”

As no sane person can do other than oppose efforts to achieve the impossible, “P.P.M.” writes himself down as an opponent of Socialism.

Editorial Committee

They Hide the Truth (1937)

From the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Facts about Riches and Poverty
There are still many people who believe that we are mistaken when we charge the Press and politicians with deliberate suppression of information affecting the vital interests of the working class. Those who believe this should study the way in which newspapers and statesmen of repute conspire to hide from the workers the extent to which the ownership of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population. Never a week goes by without speeches articles and editorials assuring the workers that wealth is evenly distributed in democratic Britain, and that any inequalities there may be are lessening year by year. The huge fortunes of the Ellermans, Houstons, Nuffields and so on are dismissed as rare exceptions, which, anyway, are supposed to be vanishing because of the death duties levied on them when they pass to the heirs. All of this is a deliberate mockery of the truth. The journalists who write the articles—at least the better-informed ones—know that the truth is far different, but they have their living to get and must obey their proprietors' orders. Behind the journalists are the newspaper proprietors, the big business men and the politicians, who have no excuse for what they do except the excuse that if the workers knew the truth they would soon want to do something about it.

A case in point, just one out of many, is an editorial in the Daily Telegraph (January 16th, 1937) entitled " Britain a Nation of Capitalists." It is based on a familiar piece of camouflage which consists of presenting a huge-seeming figure of "small savings" totalling £3,000 million gathered together in the savings banks and other institutions, and saying that this belongs to the working class. As nothing is said of the far larger sum that belongs to the small number of big property owners there appears on the surface to be justification for the Telegraph's claim that wealth is "diffused through the whole community in quite considerable amounts."

Let us, then, look closely at the figures.

Even if they were accurate they do not mean much. For, as the Telegraph admits, the £3,000 million belongs to 15 million people, equivalent to £200 per head. The interest on £200 at 2½ per cent, (the rate paid in the Post Office Savings Bank) amounts to a mere £5 a year, less than 2s. a week. Yet it is on the strength of this 2s. a week that the Telegraph describes the wage-earners as a "nation of capitalists.” Moreover, the figures are not correct. The sum mentioned does not belong wholly or even mainly to wage-earners. As Mr. Hargreaves Parkinson points out in The Small Investor (Blackie & Son, Ltd., 1930) much of it belongs to relatively wealthy persons, professional men, small business men, etc. Then G. W. Daniels and H. Campion, in The Distribution of National Capital estimate that there are 17 or 17½ million persons aged 25 or over who own less than £100, the total, being well under £1,000 million or less than a third of the Telegraph's inflated figure.

Moreover, even if a larger figure is taken the glaring fact remains that it is only a tiny percentage of the accumulated wealth which belongs to the small minority who are the real owners of Great Britain. As Mr. Parkinson and many other investigators have shown, less than one-quarter of the population own between them nine-tenths of the accumulated wealth. They do not get from their investments a mere 2s. a week, but vast sums enabling them to live in luxury and idleness and yet accumulate fortunes running in some cases into 10 or 20 million pounds. The Telegraph, along with other papers, and along with the capitalist politicians, does not attempt to deny these facts. Instead it ignores them and merely presents part of the picture in a distorted form. The Telegraph writes of the savings of small investors but says nothing about the immensely-greater sum, £13,000 millions to £14,000 millions, owned by the 5,000,000 persons who own over £100. Particularly it does not mention the handful of 10,000 or 11,000 persons aged 25 and over who own £3,200 to £3,500 millions between them. Thus does capitalism lie and suppress in order to maintain itself in face of mass poverty.

Another piece of lying propaganda is the constant assertion that workers own large numbers of shares in public companies. Here, again, there is a part-truth in the statement, at least it is true that in most companies there are many shareholders who own only small blocks of shares. On the strength of this it is pretended by the defenders of capitalism that the shareholders are wholly or mainly wage-earners, and conveniently forgotten that even big investors habitually spread their investments over many companies, having only a comparatively small part in each. Even so, any proper examination gives a very different picture. Recently the Economist (December 5th, 1936) published an analysis of the shareholdings of ten big well-known companies, including Imperial Chemicals, Coats, Unilever. The figures show 442,720 shareholders (many of whom may be and are counted several times through having shares in more than one of the ten companies). The total number of shares or units of stock is 155,552,966, which makes the average holding £351 per person at par value. As many of the shares are now worth far above their original price, the present worth of the average is much more than £351, but even so the average holding would not appear very large. The significant part of the inquiry is, however, the further information as to the extent to which a few individuals own very large holdings of shares. A mere 193 shareholders hold between them 36,778,624 shares, that is about a quarter of the whole amount. These 193 shareholders are those who own upwards of 50,000 shares each. It was further found that 41.4 per cent. of the shareholders own less than 100 shares, 67.5 per cent, own less than 200, and 87.7 per cent, less than 500.

This is the true picture of capitalist monopoly—a picture the capitalists take care to hide from the working class. It need hardly be said that Germany, France, the British Dominions, etc., present a similar concentration of wealth. For example, the Journal of Electrical Workers of America (November, 1936) publishes figures brought out in a recent official inquiry concerning the great group of Bell Telephone companies. These companies make it their boast that their shares are widely held and that among the shareholders are large numbers of their own employees. The inquiry shows that there are, indeed, 657,465 shareholders, but the great majority of them own only very small amounts. There are 124,820 shareholders who are employees of the companies but their holding amounts to only 1,423,000 shares —an average of less than a dozen each! By contrast, at the top of the scale there are 957 wealthy individuals who own between them 3,156,803 shares, an average of 3,300 per person!

The lessons to be drawn are simple but important. The capitalists everywhere have an interest in hiding the facts of their own monopolistic ownership behind a screen of half-truths about the small shareholders. The workers have an interest in ending the system of society which rests on this class monopoly. In the meantime they have a duty to themselves in refusing to be deceived by the calculated misrepresentations of the capitalist Press.

Edgar Hardcastle

Snorts of derision (2019)

From the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the papers had a field day with Michael Gove’s scandalous confession (forced by a new tell-all book) that he had done multiple lines of coke while as a journalist writing an article demanding tougher laws to stop the cocaine trade. The sheer Class A hypocrisy of this got right up everybody’s nose, as you would expect, so it seemed like poetic justice that he should be hoist on his own petard. It is truly a shocking thing to discover that politicians say one thing and do another. Who would have guessed?

But soon it emerged that virtually all of the Tory leadership frontrunners had indulged in one or more illicit drugs. Bojo snorted coke, but said he thought it might be icing sugar (imagine having a Prime Minister with his hands on nuclear codes who can’t even tell cocaine from icing sugar). Matt Hancock, Esther McVey, Andrea Leadsom and Dominic Raab all smoked weed although presumably not all at the same orgy. Jeremy Hunt had a cannabis lassi (jeez, what Indian restaurant does he go to and how can we book?). Not to be outdone on the exotic stakes, Rory Stewart smoked opium at an Iranian wedding. Most people would have settled for a slice of cake, Rory.

The fact that to date eight out of ten Tory leadership candidates had done illicit drugs tells you everything you need to know about how the ‘war on drugs’ is really progressing. Nobody, not the press, not the police, not even the Tory bigwigs who have imposed it on the rest of us, takes it seriously anymore.

Of course they all swore they hated the experience and that it was a terrible mistake. But this is surely wrong. Taking a drug is just a lifestyle choice. Taking a drug and then turning into Boris Johnson, now that’s a mistake. But then again, just look at the politicians who (claim they) haven’t taken drugs. Mark Harper anyone? Who he, you ask? Exactly. Sajid Javid? Well, the mesmerizingly handsome Home Secretary will only admit to the odd cigarette, but nobody could be that urbane, charming and charismatic and not be on something. Nigel Farage? He’s enough to make you take drugs.

When rapper Professor Green went to the House of Commons for a BBC documentary and asked former LibDem leader Nick Clegg why politicians never wanted to discuss drugs and legalisation, Clegg responded that the matter wasn’t deemed important enough (LINK). Doubtless the LibDems didn’t think it was important either but, desperate for any stray votes, Clegg happily spoke in favour of legalisation. Now that they’ve had something of a renaissance in the Euroelections owing to being the worst major political party in the UK apart from all the others, they might decide to roll back on that particular commitment.

Nowadays you can hardly walk through any inner-city street in the UK and not smell weed blowing in the wind. This will be all the young people trying to get high and forget how their future is being wrecked before their very eyes. Or else it’s young people doing what it takes to be the next local Tory candidate. Skin up, anyone?

PJS

50 Years Ago: Scotch Mist (2019)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Scotland today it’s true that there is a struggle – as there is in England, Wales Ireland, or the rest of the world for that matter. But the struggle in Scotland is not, as the Scottish National Party would have us believe, the struggle for home rule, self-government, self-determination, or self anything. The struggle in Scotland, as in the rest of the world, is a class struggle: the struggle between the working class and the capitalist or owning class.

The SNP tell us, the workers, that independence from England and the control of our own purse strings will cure all our problems. What they do not seem to realise is that the problems they are going to try to solve are an integral part of the capitalist system, and history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that within this system there is no satisfactory solution to these problems apart from Socialism.

The SNP talk about Scottish culture and the Scottish way of life. But in what way is the life of a Scottish wage slave basically different from that of an English, an American, or for that matter a Russian wage slave? There is no basic difference in the way of life of the world’s working class because we all suffer from the same problems such as poverty and insecurity. Independence from England will not cure the poverty and insecurity of the Scottish workers, because there will still be the wage labour and capital relationship.

There is no truly independent country in the world, because international capitalism has made sure of this, and our own experience here in Britain, especially since 1964, should have brought it home to us. The past few years should have shown us just how independent Britain is, when foreign ‘bankers’ tell the British government how it must spend money, and how it must not spend money, in order to keep the international capitalist class happy.

(From the Socialist Standard, July 1969)

Cooking the Books: For the few not the many (2019)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article headed ‘Why is the City falling for Comrade McDonnell? (Times, 11 May) Sky News Economics Editor Ed Conway made a shrewd point:

‘Despite promising to govern for the many not the few, some senior Labour insiders have had an epiphany: unless they get the few on board they may struggle to govern at all.’

The Labour Party, under long-time left-wingers Corbyn and McDonnell, may employ the rhetoric of the many against the few, but it has no intention of abolishing the few. In fact, in the event of a Labour government, the few would continue to own and control the means of production in the form of profit-seeking private enterprises. There is not even any intention to turn them from shareholders into government bondholders by a state take-over of ‘the commanding heights of the economy’, as Labour left-wingers used to advocate. These will remain in private capitalist hands.

So, a future Labour government would be governing in the context of a capitalist economy dominated by private enterprises. This was Conway’s point. It means these can’t be ignored. They will continue to be those who decide what is produced, when and where. And their decisions will be motivated by the consideration of what is profitable or not.

Corbyn and McDonnell will have to take this into account. They will have to allow them to continue to make profits and avoid doing anything that might interfere too much with this. If they don’t avoid this, they will provoke an economic downturn as the private owners stage an investment strike, refusing to produce what can’t be sold profitably. That will provoke dissatisfaction amongst the electorate who will kick the government out, at least unless it changes its economic strategy and accepts that profit-making has to come first.

This has happened so often with Labour and similar left-wing governments in other countries that it can almost be said to be one of the economic laws of capitalism: that any government which disrupts profit-making will provoke an economic downturn. Unless Corbyn and McDonnell do what Neil Kinnock once cynically called getting their betrayal in first – by declaring that they won’t harm the profit-making of the few (which is what ‘Comrade McDonnell’ might be doing on his visits to the City) – this will be their fate. In government, it will just be a matter of time before they come to accept this or get booted out.

But this is to jump the gun. In the present state of politics, while Labour might emerge from an election as the largest party in the House of Commons, a Labour majority there seems much less likely. There is more chance of a Labour minority government propped up by the Liberals and/or the Scots Nats. This would mean that any pretence of adopting anti-capitalist measures will be dropped. The SNP want an independent Scottish capitalist state while Vince Cable, the outgoing leader of the Lib Dems, has made his support for capitalism explicit:

‘Capitalism is being questioned in Britain more intensely than for decades. Some want to destroy it. Others believe that it is the only economic system which works, but want to reform it. I am in the latter camp’ (City AM, 14 May).

Corbyn and McDonnell are too, even if they don’t admit it. Reforming capitalism to make it work for the many always fails for the simple reason that, as a profit-making system, it can only work for the few.

Radical politics (2019)

Book Review from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Manifesto. The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. By Bhaskar Sunkara. Verso, 2019.

Sunkara is the founder of Jacobin, the US left-wing magazine, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an offshoot founded by Michael Harrington of the old Socialist Party of America that, when this broke up in 1973, decided to work within the US Democratic Party. His book sets out to explain what he sees as socialism to American readers who up till recently regarded it as a dirty word.

He describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ as opposed to a ‘social democrat’, the difference in his mind being that the latter seek to introduce reforms from above while the former want to see them introduced as a result of mass popular pressure. But this is a distinction without a difference. He is, then, a left-wing social democrat. His rather confusing conception of socialism is an economy of worker-run firms producing for the market with a free health service and a basic income scheme.

Despite this, his book makes a good criticism of capitalism and provides a useful history of those who, in the last century, called themselves socialists, the chapter on the German SPD in particular. It could serve as a basic introduction to the background to the debates about the meaning and best way to achieve socialism that we ourselves engage in.

Of course his point of view is not ours, but that of a social democrat who regards himself as a Marxist. He could be worse. He could have been a Trotskyist or some other member of the Russian Revolution re-enactment society. In fact he recognises that it is not possible to establish socialism unless the conditions for it exist, which they didn’t in Russia, China or the other economically backward countries governed at one time by people claiming to be Marxist:

 ‘The Third World’s experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust socialist democracy requires a self-organized working class.’

He is aware of the criticism we have always made of the Labour Party and its Social Democratic equivalents abroad as, in discussing the failure of the 1929-31 MacDonald Labour government, he quotes both what we said before (‘No matter how able, how sincere, and how sympathetic the Labour men and women may be who undertake to administer capitalism, capitalism will bring their undertaking to disaster’) and after (‘it is not possible for the Labour Party or any other party to administer capitalism in such a way that the workers’ problems can be solved within the framework of the existing system’).

He seems to take this on board as he writes later on that ‘administering a capitalist state requires maintaining business confidence and corporate profits’ and that ‘Social democracy’s dilemma is impossible to resolve: even when nominally anti-capitalist, it is reliant on the continued profitability of private capitalist firms.’ And in his verdict on European Social Democracy:

 ‘Even with the more modest ambition of just humanizing capitalism, no national left government in Europe has been able to carry out its program in at least forty years.’

The one example of success, albeit temporary, he gives is Sweden until the 1970s, where the government and the trade unions reached an agreement with the private capitalists, leaving them to pursue profits in return for them handing over a part of these to be used for welfare and other reforms. With the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s, however, this collapsed.

He still thinks the best way to replace capitalism is via the election of a Social Democrat government, backed by a mass movement which, when the government comes up against the economic constraints of the profit system, can pressure it not to retreat (as all such governments have done) but to go on to break with capitalism. As he puts it, ‘we will probably only be driven down the path to socialism by practical necessity, by the day-to-day struggles to preserve and expand reforms.’ This is the old, discredited theory that socialist consciousness will emerge from the pursuit of reforms.

Sunkara quotes Michael Harrington (who wrote a passable book on Socialism himself) as saying that socialists had to ‘walk a perilous tightrope’ between being ‘true to the socialist vision of a new society’ and ‘bringing ‘that vision into contact with the actual movement fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread’. True, socialists are on such a tightrope and cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of workers under capitalism. However, history, specifically that of the political perspective Sunkara wants to revive, shows that to pursue reforms leads to falling off into the bog of reformism and forgetting all about socialism.

Adam Buick

Editorial: Half a century of shame (2003)

Editorial from the March 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, it’s fifty years since that other Great Dictator himself – Josef Stalin – finally departed this mortal coil. Fifty years on from the death of a man who probably did as much as anyone else in human history to sully the name of socialism. Today, few outside of Arthur Scargill’s mis-named Socialist Labour Party and their friends in the near-moribund Stalin Society have anything but contempt for one of the greatest destroyers of working class hopes (and lives) this century.

Stalin presided over a ruthless dictatorship over the proletariat which was the model followed by a host of other unsavoury regimes which believed that the only way to achieve a socialist society was to oppress the very class – the only class – capable of bringing it about. Their vision of this socialist society was, in any case, distorted virtually beyond recognition, where Marx’s dictum “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” was replaced with “from each according to their ability, to each according to their (supposed) work” and where the Party bureaucrats drove round in limousines and accessed shops only they could access while the rest of the population lived miserable lives of poverty.

It is difficult to think that a sane person could hanker back to the type of regime that Stalin helped develop in Russia and which was replicated across most of Eastern Europe and parts of Africa, East Asia and the Caribbean. And yet, thousands of people – even in a country like the UK – still do. Not that most of them would call themselves followers of Josef Stalin though – far from it. Unlike Scargill and his ilk, these are people who profess to abhor Stalinism and all that it led to: the fear, the intolerance, the labour camps and the murders. But they are people who still agree with most of what Stalin stood for, because even though they might be latter-day supporters of Stalin’s great rival in the Russian Communist Party, Leon Trotsky, they are united in their fervour for the politics of the man who mentored them both: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

The bureaucratic Russian police state which terrorised its political opponents (including genuine socialists) did not originate with Stalin, nor did it die with him. Neither was the idea that socialism was really state-run capitalism when operated under the dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party one of Stalin’s contributions. These ideas were Lenin’s and they were adopted by Stalin and Trotsky alike.

Today, many political parties exist which still extol the virtues of Lenin and Trotsky while supposedly denouncing Stalin and all his works. And yet they undoubtedly agree with 95 percent of his politics, including most of the bits others (rightly) find abhorrent. Groups like the Socialist Workers Party, Militant (now masquerading under a nom-de-plume), the Alliance for Workers Liberty and others all believe that the working class must be led to socialism (read state controlled capitalism) by a dedicated band of revolutionaries (them) who will then proceed to set up a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in time-honoured fashion.

We must point out that their politics stands in clear distinction to the honest, open and democratic political tradition of the Socialist Party. This is a political tradition which insists that the working class of wage and salary earners must themselves – organised democratically – bring about socialism: a society without class division, the wages system, a state or national frontiers.

Whatever our political opponents may say about us, we have a proud tradition of standing by our principles and of conveying a consistent analysis of capitalism and of how it can be democratically transformed into socialism. As all reminders of the Soviet Union’s murky existence demonstrate, our opponents on the political Left meanwhile have a past to hide from and a future that is merely a promise to repeat yesterday’s nightmares. In refusing to learn the lessons of the Russian debacle they have tarnished the words “socialism” and “communism” to describe the society that can replace capitalism. For these reasons, their protestations of innocence this month will ring hollow to all those with a decent knowledge of history and a political conscience to match.

Editorial: The new reality (2003)

Editorial from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war is now over. Inevitably, given the technological superiority of the US armed forces and their complete control of the air, the US – with token support from Britain – won. Their trained killers were able to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi soldiers and, if they got in the way, Iraqi civilians too, including women and children. Their warplanes not only rained down bombs on defenceless Iraqi soldiers – a repeat of the fire-bombing of the defeated and retreating Iraqi army in 1991 – but also on perfectly usable and empty office buildings. And they allowed the looting of hospitals and of museums containing items that were the cultural heritage of all humanity.

But this, the supporters of the war said in their defence, is inevitable in a war. And they are right. War does bring nothing but death and destruction to ordinary people. This for a cause that is never theirs. This was blindingly obvious in this war with the issue at stake being control of the world’s second biggest reserves of oil and of a country in which the US could establish military bases in strategic reach of both the Middle East and Caspian Sea oilfields. At the same time the US was able to demonstrate to potential rivals, such as France, Germany, Russia and China, that it is the Alpha Male in the world capitalist jungle and that this is the “new reality” they would be advised to take account of.

The US propaganda machine, echoed by the Bush and Blair Broadcasting Corporation and other media outlets, are proclaiming that the Iraqi people have been “liberated” and are now “free”. Certainly the Saddam regime, a brutal state-capitalist dictatorship, has been overthrown, but what is going to replace it? In the first instance, a military dictatorship under a retired US general. In time, when the occupying forces are satisfied that it is safe to do so, power will be transferred to a puppet regime of their choosing. This will be no easy task, but that’s their problem.

The emergence of even a capitalist political democracy in Iraq seems improbable. More likely is the rule of hereditary warlords in the North and of Islamic fundamentalists in the South. But that will be acceptable to the US as long as it ensures stability. The fig-leaf that this was a war to establish “democracy” in Iraq will then be seen to have been just that.

The Iraqi people – the workers in the towns, the peasants in the countryside – will merely have exchanged one set of rulers for another. Having seen what happens when a state machine collapses – workers help themselves to some of the products that were ultimately produced by their labour – the priority of any new regime is going to be holding “the masses” down, ensuring that they accept their poverty and deprivation, without kicking too much against the pricks. At the same time, the new regime will be required to make the assets of the overthrown state-capitalist regime available for looting by Western, mainly US, corporation and contractors.

But this is not the end of the story. Iraq could well be only the first of such wars to overthrow regimes considered to threaten the vital economic interest of the US. That’s the “new reality”, though the US government will be hoping that the fate of the Saddam regime will be an object lesson to any other state that might be tempted to challenge US interests and that the threat of war will suffice to make them back down.

In any event, the world is going to continue to be a dangerous place. That capitalism continues to be a war-prone society has been proved yet again. So has the urgent need for world socialism so that wars, the threat of war and preparation for war can become things of the past. It’s the only way to lasting world peace.

Editorial: Racism is bunk (2003)

Editorial from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists stand for a system of society based upon the principle of each individual having access to what they need, as a pre-condition of social activity. That is, securing for each human being the clothes, food and housing they need, as well as the cultural and social goods of life, should be the first priority of any sane society. Of course, each person getting what they need means that different people will get different things. People are, of course, born with different needs, so it is not a question of everybody getting the same.

Some people share genetically inherited features which are passed on through human reproduction. Genetic features, though, can be mixed and changed by the same process – there is no essential correlation between, say, skin colour and some disease. Merely, there is a chance that the genes for these two separate features will be passed on from parent to child. Just as there is no specific correlation between skin colour and facial features, or eye colour and hair colour. That these features seem to belong together is an effect of the fact that each parent passes on half their genetic characteristics to their off-spring, and that historically people of similar appearance (and roughly common descent) have tended to breed with one another in similar climates.

The fact of the matter is that we are all members of the same republic of genes, all related very closely to one another no matter what part of the globe we hail from. We are the surviving descendants of some less than 20,000 early humanoids. We share a common genetic trait, traceable back through the ages to just one female, many thousands of years ago.

It’s also a fact that we developed as a species to be dependent upon one another for our needs; but also able to communicate and co-operate with one another to meet those needs. Yet, today, we live in a society in which the needs of a great many people go unmet. It’s clear to Socialists that the ideas surrounding race and racialism are bunkum, un-supported by the scientific facts. We can point to the history of the development of capitalism, to show how the misapprehensions surrounding race developed along with the needs of capital to expand and control the globe, and to build loyal armies in pursuit of such conquest. Yet, they continue to do harm and deny our common humanity in the modern world.

But why do such mistaken ideas continue to exist in the world today, in the face of the evidence of the facts? We would point to the mutually re-enforcing tendencies of today’s modern world. On the one hand is the continued existence of poverty fed by ignorance, which nurtures the desire for people to cling onto what little they have, instilling in them a fear of a threat from apparent strangers. On the other, capital’s drives for efficiency, the need to cut out anything that interferes with or reduces the profit-making capacity of the industrial machine, which means that worker’s whose needs cause costs (such as dealing with language and cultural differences) are squeezed out in a “one size fits all” approach.

What socialists propose is a different world. Wherein everyone could have more than enough of the things they require, so they need no longer fear to lose it; where meeting and exploring our different needs becomes a past-time and an end in itself; where without conflicts of power and dominance – because we co-operate voluntarily and democratically – there is no limitation set on, nor distortion of, our endeavour to understand what it means to be a part of the human race. In short, socialism will allow us to be treated as unique individuals, rather than as a bureaucratically allocated “race” on an equal opportunities monitoring form.

Which way forward? (2003)

Editorial from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thanks in large measure to proportional representation, the Scottish Parliament now has 6 (out of 129) MSPs from a left-of-Labour party, Tommy Sheridan’s “Scottish Socialist Party”. The SSP is a direct descendant of Militant and so has a Trotskyist past, and in fact includes the members in Scotland of Militant, the SWP and other such groups.

Many in England who don’t like the profit system look to the SSP as a model, hoping that the “Socialist Alliance” will be able to repeat its success south of the border. However, without proportional representation, they are not making much headway, trailing far behind the BNP as a party of populist protest (the BNP would be a major beneficiary of PR in England, just as the National Front was in France).

So, in England, a rival idea is being canvassed: that of refounding the – or a – Labour Party, as a group of trade-union sponsored MPs pressing for reforms of capitalism in the interest of trade unionists and workers generally.

Yet others, believe it or not, entertain the illusion that, after Blair goes, it will be possible to recapture the Labour Party and turn it back into a party committed to redistributing power and wealth to working people that they believe it once was.

What all three options share is a reformist approach: that what is important is to get people elected to parliament and local councils to pass measures aimed at improving the lot of wage and salary workers within the profit system.

There’s nothing wrong with contesting elections, but if Socialists are going to do this it should be done on a sound basis: getting elected on a straight socialist programme of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit, with a view to using parliament or the council chamber as a platform from which to spread socialist ideas (while still a minority) and to usher in socialism (when a majority, acting on instructions from a mass democratically-organised and socialist-minded movement outside).

But what is being proposed is quite different: getting elected with non-socialist votes on a programme of attractive-sounding reforms to capitalism. It was on this basis (tinged with a divisive Scottish nationalism: they appear to believe in “socialism in one province”) that the SSP’s MSPs were elected, promising a local income tax, free school meals, a £7.32-an-hour minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, which are reforms of capitalism not socialism. (In fact, neither the SSP, nor the Socialist Alliance, nor the Old Labourites have any clear idea of what socialism means; they hardly ever mention the word and, when they do, it turns out they mean state capitalism – nationalisation, or the wages system under state management.)

It is not as if the workers’ movement hasn’t been here before. This was what the Labour Party in Britain set out to do. On the Continent it was the policy of parties which, on the face of it, were far more radical than Labour in that they claimed to be Marxist and based on the class struggle. In practice, however, they were just as reformist as the Labour Party, and failed just as miserably.

The danger is that the same mistake is going to be made again. While some trade union leaders and activists want to re-found a Labour Party, others such as the SWP see the “Socialist Alliance” as a revival of the left and centre of pre-WWI continental “Marxist” Social Democracy – as an embryonic leftwing party calling itself Marxist but pursuing reforms to capitalism.

This might just be a tactic – another ploy by a vanguard to attract a following. But it’s a bad tactic that can only encourage illusions about what can be achieved under capitalism. It glosses over the fact that capitalism is not a system that can be humanised or reformed or transformed into something better. It is a profit system subject to economic laws which can only work in one way: as a system of profit-making and accumulation of capital in the interest of a tiny minority of profit-takers.

The failure in the course of the 20th century of every single Labour or Social Democratic government, in all of the countries of Europe, to make any progress towards socialism has demonstrated the soundness of the position taken up by the “impossibilists” at the turn of that century: that it is impossible to reform capitalism so as to make it work in the interest of working people. And that, therefore, it is futile and time-wasting and a diversion to try.

What those who want a better society should be doing – should have done – is to campaign to change people’s minds, to get them to realise that they are living in an exploitative, class-divided society and that the only way out is to end capitalism and replace it by a new and different system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production to satisfy people’s needs, and distribution on the basis of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Once a majority have come to this realisation, they will know what to do: organise themselves into a socialist party to democratically win political control and use it to bring about a socialist society. That’s what socialist politics should be about.

The Problems Facing Humanity (2003)

Editorial from the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The problems facing humanity? Where to start? In fact, where to finish? The list is endless. With the millions of children under five who die each year from starvation or starvation-related diseases – unnecessarily, since enough food exists in the world to keep them alive and when farmers in Europe and America are being paid to take their land out of agricultural production? Or with the millions of others in the world who live in appalling housing and sanitary conditions while resources are wasted on the development of the most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction? Or with the millions of people in this country who live in conditions which even the government classifies as unfit or who are actually homeless, while at the same time there are unemployed building workers and huge stockpiles of bricks and other building materials? Or with the problems of health care, pollution, crime and financial insecurity that affect all of us to one degree or another?

Socialists contend that all these problems are inter-related in that they have a common root cause – in the fact that today production is carried on not to meet people’s needs but to make a profit.

If we lived in a world where production was geared to meeting people’s needs then we would go on producing food as long as there was anybody would needed it. Nobody would starve. Nobody would go without enough decent food to eat. Similarly, nobody would go without adequate health care or housing. How could they where the main aim of production would be to satisfy people’s needs, beginning with their basic needs?

But we are not living in a world that is geared to satisfying people’s needs. We are living in a world where production does not take place unless those who own and control productive resources think they can make a financial profit out of selling what is produced. The basic economic law today is “no profit, no production”. If something can’t be sold at a profit, then it won’t be produced. That’s what production for the market means. If you don’t have any money, then you don’t count as far as the economic system is concerned. That’s why millions of people go without enough food in the world today. They need food but because they’ve no money, they don’t constitute a market; or, as the economists put it cynically, their demand is not “effective”.

That’s how the profit system works. It puts the profits of the few before the needs of the many. We Socialists say that this is the only way it can work and that it is therefore a waste of time and energy to try to reform it, to try to make it work in the interests of the majority. This just can’t be done. It’s impossible. The profit system can only work as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits. “Profits first, People second” is an iron law of the system which can’t be altered. So, the choice is clear: either you accept the logic of the system and go along with it or you work to end the system altogether.

Keeping the system and trying to make it work against its logic is not a viable option. Such reformism has been tried over the years and has failed. What we advocate is the replacement of the profit system by socialism. Real socialism, that is, which has nothing to do with Labour administration of capitalism and even less with the state-capitalist dictatorships which failed so miserably in Russia and East Europe.

Socialism is the opposite of capitalism in that it means the application of the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, whereas capitalism only distributes goods and services to people according to their ability (and non-ability) to pay for them.

Common ownership, democratic control, production for use, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is what socialism means and it alone provides the framework within which the problems currently facing humanity – world poverty and hunger, global pollution, etc, etc, etc – can be solved. But it can only come into being democratically, when a majority of people want and understand it. So the urgent task of the minority of Socialists who exists today is to help make more Socialists so as to become the majority. Which is what the Socialist Party is all about.

The case against capitalism (2003)

Editorial from the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world is in a mess. The big question is why? Various explanations have been put forward. It is said that wars happen because human beings are naturally aggressive. Hunger has been blamed on overpopulation, while the waste of the world’s resources is attributed to people being greedy.

Socialists reject all these explanations. In our view, the reason wars take place, the reason millions die of hunger, the reason the world’s resources are plundered, is that we are living under an economic system that is geared to making profits rather than to satisfying people’s needs. These problems are caused by the existence and the operation of the Profit System. They are an inevitable consequence of that system and cannot be eradicated as long as it remains in being.

Wars arise out of a conflict of economic interest between the two sides resulting from their pursuit of profits. All wars since capitalism came into existence about five hundred years ago have been fought over control of one or more of the following: sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets, and investment outlets – or control of strategic areas to protect or control any of these.

The standard non-socialist explanation for world hunger is that there are too many people. In other words, that not enough food can be produced to feed the world’s present population. This is just not true. Enough food (in terms of calories and proteins) is already being produced which, if evenly divided, could eliminate hunger and starvation tomorrow. In short, the problem is one of distribution or, rather, of maldistribution.

But there is no need to take food from those getting more than their basic needs to ensure that everyone’s such needs are met. World food production can be increased well above its present level. In expert circles if you reckon that world food production could be doubled, then you are regarded as a conservative. Most estimates by the various experts who have examined this question say it could be increased by three or four times rather than simply doubled.

So why isn’t this done? The answer is that we live under an economic system geared to making profits rather than satisfying needs. Once again, it is the Profit System that is to blame. Under capitalism production is for sale on a market. A market is composed of people able and willing to pay for some product. Some people think this is a brilliant system. They overlook the other side of the coin: if only those who can pay have their needs met, those who can’t pay don’t have theirs met. If you’ve got no money, or not enough money, you’re not part of the market, and production ignores you.

That’s why people starve today. Not because enough food could not be produced.

Pollution, too, arises because of the Profit System. This system involves competition between firms to sell their products and make a profit. The main weapon used by the combatants in this battle of competition is price. The firm that can keep its price down by keeping its costs of production down can sell the most. So the pressure under capitalism is to keep financial costs down: to use the cheapest materials, to adopt the cheapest methods of production, irrespective of the effect on the environment.

So here, then, is the indictment against the Profit System: that it causes wars and preparations for war; that it causes world hunger and famine; that it causes waste and pollution. If found guilty of these charges – and socialists contend that the evidence overwhelmingly points to this verdict – then there is only one sentence: the capitalist profit system must be abolished lock, stock and barrel, and replaced by a new and different system geared to meeting needs instead of to making profits.

We are saying that capitalism cannot be patched up, or reformed, or made to work in any other way than it actually does. Capitalism is a profit-making system that can only work by putting profits before needs and, as a consequence, causing wars, hunger and pollution. That’s its nature. So there is no point in trying to reform it. That’s just a waste of time that only prolongs the agony. All efforts should be concentrated on getting rid of the Profit System.

Editorial: Total recall and true lies (2003)

Editorial from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

So second-rate film actor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected Governor of California. A sad reflection of the abysmally low level of political understanding of that section of the California electorate who voted for someone, apparently on the basis of his screen image as an “action man”, in the belief that he would be able to solve the problems generated by capitalism in the same way that he always triumphs in his films. It might be thought that they would have learned their lesson after the failure of Hollywood screen cowboy, Ronald Reagan, to live up to his movie image. Apparently not.

But it is not so much this that we want to comment on as the right of recall. This – where voters have the right to recall from office someone they have elected, for not carrying out their wishes – is a key democratic principle. We don’t suppose there will be State Governors in Socialism but there will certainly be elected assemblies and perhaps some elected officials; in the socialist conception of democracy, such elected people should be subject to recall if, in the opinion of a majority of those who elected them, they have failed to carry out the mandate conferred on them. For, in socialism, all elected persons will be delegates chosen by the community to carry out some task on their behalf. It is therefore only normal that, if they fail to carry out this task properly, the people who elected them should have the power to revoke their mandate, i. e. to recall them and mandate someone else in their place.

Such a conception of democracy is alien to what has come to pass as “democracy” under capitalism. The right of recall exists in the constitution of the State of California and of a number of other US States only because at one time bourgeois democrats in America were more radical than they are today. But capitalism corrupts everything it touches and has been able to distort this basic democratic principle to fit into its conception of politics, where democracy is not a question of the community mandating delegates to carry out some task on its behalf – if only because as a class-divided society there is no community under capitalism – but that of choosing between two or more rival elites, a competition between rival gangs of professional politicians.

This reduces politics to choosing every few years which leader or leadership team is going to administer the political side of capitalism. Voters are not citizens participating in the self-administration of their common affairs, but are essentially only an audience whose role is limited – like that of the crowds in the Coliseum in Ancient Rome – to giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down to some outgoing leadership team seeking re-election.

This is not democracy, and it doesn’t work either in that the leaders never live up to their promises. Not necessarily because they are liars or tricksters or self-seekers (though many of them are of course) but because capitalism, despite their promises, just cannot be made to run without causing insoluble problems for the great majority of people, i.e for those who, with their dependants, rely to live on the wage or salary they are paid for the sale of their mental and physical energies.

They – we – make up the vast majority of the electorate but have not yet learned to use the vote in an intelligent way – not to elect capitalist politicians to govern capitalism in the only way it can be, as a system that has to put profits before people, but to send delegates into all elected assemblies mandated to put an end to capitalism. Of course, in keeping with the socialist conception of democracy as a participatory democracy, this assumes that people outside the elected bodies have also mobilised themselves and are ready to play their part in establishing socialism.

Last month’s recall election in California was not really an exercise in democracy, but rather a variation on the futile exercise of kicking out one leader and replacing them with another. But leaders can’t do anything for us. Changing leaders changes nothing. Only we can change things, by taking matters into our own hands and, as just stated, organising to send mandated socialist delegates to elected bodies instead of falling for the empty promises of capitalist politicians.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will fail to solve the problems wage and salary workers in California face just as much as the less charismatic ex-Governor Gray Davis did and all other politicians everywhere always do and always will. What is required is not a change of leaders but a change of society. Let’s terminate capitalism.

Editorial: Chairing UK plc (2019)

Editorial from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the end of this month Britain will have a new Prime Minister – either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt – but does it matter?

In Britain the Prime Minister is the head of the government, the executive arm of the state. The state, we are told, represents the people. In reality, however, as Marx and Engels identified, ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. In other words, the state and its executive, the government, do not represent the interest of everyone but only of the few who own and control the means of production. The Prime Minister is the chair of the executive committee charged with this.

The person who fills this role does not have to be a capitalist. In fact this has rarely been the case. In the nineteenth century the capitalists were content to let aristocrats fill this and the other posts on their executive committee. Nowadays, both the chair and the other members are filled by people, many from the working class, who have chosen to make a career out of being a politician.

In the end it doesn’t matter who the members of the ‘committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ are. What matters is that they have to manage these common affairs and that this involves, besides arbitrating between sectional interests, putting conditions for profit-making before everything else.

There is a political constraint too. In Britain the government has to command a majority in the House of Commons for its policy. Where this is not the case, as now over UK plc’s membership of the EU, there is a problem.

Until the introduction of the 2011 Fixed Term Parliament Act, the Prime Minister was able to call a general election. Now this rests in the hands of MPs and, at the moment, there are not many Tory MPs who want one for fear of being tossed off the greasy pole. They are disguising this as a fear that an election today could result in a ‘Marxist’ becoming Prime Minister.

The depiction of Corbyn as a Marxist is absurd – he’s mainly just an old-fashioned Labour reformist – but, even if he were one, this would make no difference. As chair of a committee charged with managing the common affairs of the capitalist class, he would be constrained by economic circumstances to give priority to profit-making, despite this not being his intention. But he would at least have a better understanding of his predicament: elected on a promise to improve things for the many he would eventually have to put the profits of the few first.

So, no, it does not matter who is the Prime Minister as it is not governments who control how capitalism operates but the operation of the capitalist economy which limits what governments can do, obliging them to put profits first. Whoever chairs the committee managing the common affairs of the capitalist class merely presides over the meetings at which the formal decisions to do this are taken. Why should we get worked up over who it is?