Dot Capitalism (2012)

Book Review from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dot.compradors: Power and Policy in the Development of the Indian Software Industry. by Jyoti Saraswati. Pluto, £17.99.

India is a major centre for software services, the provision of software for specific users (as opposed to general packages such as Microsoft Office); an example would be the system for the London Underground. This book is a useful and informative survey of the Indian software industry’s structure and history.

Four multinational companies dominate Information Technology consultancy, one of them being IBM. In addition to these global ‘Giants’, there are three Indian ‘Majors’. As an illustration of India’s role, about one in three of the employees of the Giants works in India. Partly, of course, it is cheaper to employ highly skilled English-speaking staff in India than in, say, in the US. The Giants also have a habit of poaching staff from the Majors, who spend time and money training them only to find their best workers upping sticks after a few years.

As for why such a profitable and technologically advanced industry should flourish in a developing country such as India, Saraswati rejects simple analyses in terms of just market forces or state intervention. Rather, more complex interactions need to be examined. As long ago as 1962, defeat in the Sino-Indian war revealed the importance of IT, and by 1970 the government had taken steps to set up a computer industry protected from international competition. The Indian hardware industry was unable to survive, but the software industry did pretty well, providing software for computers that did not come with ready-bundled general packages. In the 1980s the US became an enormous market for software services, which, unlike many parts of a business, can be provided by remote delivery. To aid this, the Indian government provided telecommunications infrastructure, augmented with satellite links.

The Indian software industry set up its own business club, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in 1987. But since the local subsidiaries of the global Giants were allowed to join, this eventually came to be controlled by the multinational companies. The Giants are now generally doing better than the Indian Majors, which have themselves begun to establish delivery centres abroad (in China and Mexico, for example), which they hope will be free of the poaching mentioned earlier. It is worth noting that the Chinese government has tried and failed to establish a major software service industry there, so state intervention is not enough by itself.

In case you are wondering about the title, a comprador is, in Saraswati’s definition, ‘An individual of, and in, a developing country who serves Western interests’. The top people in NASSCOM are compradors, he argues. They serve the interests of Western capitalism by, among other things, supporting improved access by the US to Indian markets in return for more visas being issued to Indian IT professionals for short-term work in the US. But clearly the embedding of the Indian software industry in global capitalism goes far beyond that.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Inheritance Tactics (2012)

The Action Replay column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were assured that it was also about what happened after the frantic few weeks of competition: “As well as the physical legacy of the London 2012 Games … new initiatives and programmes are creating sustainable social, economic and sporting legacies at home in the UK and around the world” (http://www.london2012.com/). But there are many reasons for thinking that the Olympics and Paralympics won’t quite be the success the organisers had in mind.

For a start, the Games themselves are unlikely to do more than break even, which makes earlier spats about how to share out the profits look beside the point.

Shops did not do well, either. Sales overall fell during the Games period according to the British Retail Consortium especially in central London where transport and other problems led many people to stay away. Free parking was introduced in the West End for a couple of weekends to try to reverse these trends. Hornby lost £1m on their Olympic-branded toys, after “retailers lost confidence in many categories of London 2012 merchandise”, as the company put it.

Even hotels, theatres and restaurants fared badly as people stayed away from London, fearing overcrowding and inflated prices. Tourism in other parts of Britain suffered too, as tour groups that might have visited London and, say, the Lake District, preferred not to come to Britain at all.

As for the sporting legacy, the vast sums spent on top athletes were not matched by similar largesse for facilities aimed at ‘the public’. Almost two-thirds of adults don’t take part in sport even once a week, and current austerity cuts are reducing sporting facilities even more. George Osborne was booed at the Paralympics as the government sets out to replace the Disability Living Allowance with even stingier payments.

With London mayor Boris Johnson having put himself in charge of future developments at the Olympic Park, no doubt what happens there will be a combination of making a profit and providing a chance for yet more self-publicity.

Paul Bennett

Why We Need Socialism (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists wants to replace the present capitalist system with a new system based on common ownership instead of ownership by the few and with production directly to meet people’s needs instead of production for sale on a market with a view to profits. In such a socialist (or communist) society – the two words mean the same – money would be redundant. It’s not so much that we want to ‘abolish money’ as wanting a change to a society with a system of production and distribution in which money would be redundant and so would disappear.

Capitalism is the system which now dominates the world. No country escapes or can escape from its influence and effects. It is essentially an economic system where the means for producing useful goods and services take the form of ‘capital’, or wealth used to produce more wealth with a view to profit, and where the goods and services produced take the form of ‘exchange value’, they all have a price and have to be  exchanged for money.

The farms, factories, offices and other places where wealth is produced are owned and controlled by rich individuals, capitalist corporations and states. Under the pressure of competition, those in charge of these ‘units of capital’ are driven to seek as much profit as they can, not so much for the personal benefit of the owners (though this does come into it) as to get funds to reinvest in cost-cutting innovations so as to be able to compete with, and out-compete, their rivals. One consequence of this is that more and more capital is accumulated. This in fact is what capitalism is all about: the accumulation of more and more capital out of profits.

So, over time the means of production and their productive power have built up and society has now become able, in theory, to produce enough useful goods and services to meet people’s needs. But the economic mechanism of capitalism does not let this happen. Making profits and re-investing them as more capital always comes first.

It’s an irrational system of ‘production for production’s sake’, of ‘growth for growth’s sake’. There are other antisocial results of capitalism. Such as the recurring economic crises and slumps like the one we’re in now. Such as the wars and preparation for war that occur as capitalist states compete over sources of raw material, trade routes, markets and investment outlets. Such as putting short term cost and profit considerations before protecting the environment and respecting a balance of nature. Above all it does not allow production to be geared to meeting the needs of people for food, clothes, housing, healthcare, education an the other amenities for an enjoyable life.

People’s needs are met but only to an extent – to the extent that they have money to pay for them. There are various ways an individual can get money. They can inherit it (be born with it). They can steal it. They can beg for it. Or they can work for it – which is what most people do.

What sort of society is it where most people have to fend for themselves to get money so they can access what they need to live – and where, even in a developed country like Britain, 10-15 percent can’t keep up and are forced to rely on more or less meagre handouts from the state? This, when, from the point of view of technology, society could produce enough for all, especially if we get rid of capitalism’s artificial scarcity (the need to make a profit holds back producing enough to meet people’s nees) and its organised scarcity (not just of wars and preparation for war, but also all of the resources devoted to the counting and transfer of money).

Socialists say capitalism must go if we’re going to be able to provide a decent living for every man, woman and child on the planet.

What is needed in place of capitalism is for the Earth’s resources to become the common heritage of all. Then, they could be geared to satisfying people’s needs. If productive  resources were commonly owned, then so would what they produced. The issue to be dealt with would be, not how to sell to people what had been produced (how could you when they’re already the joint owners of it?) It’s how to share-out/distribute what’s been produced. In other words, exchange (buying and selling) is replaced by distribution (sharing-out and taking). For this, money is not needed.

Adam Buick

The Monarchy: feudal relic, democratic deficit (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prince Charles’s “spider letters” show that the monarchy is not just a feudal relic but part of the “democratic deficit”.

We live in a free and democratic society, with a fearless free media who hold the possessors of power to account, bringing the spotlight of truth to bear upon their activities. Yet, what’s this? The BBC apologising and cowering like a whipped dog because one of its journalists revealed that the reigning Monarch had queried with Ministers why Abu Hamza had not been deported. That is, a BBC reporter reporting on the functions of government and the institutions of state. Precisely what a reporter should be doing in an open and democratic society. Except, what the reporter had revealed was precisely the absence of democracy at the heart of government.

This comes alongside the twin running battles the Guardian is having with the government through the information commissioner. They want the government to reveal the rules by which Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles are given the right to veto parts of acts of parliament that concern their interests. They also want the government to reveal details of letters sent by Prince Charles, lobbying government ministers and trying to influence policy. The government, apparently with palace backing, are fighting tooth and claw to stop these documents being revealed.

What is at stake is effectively monarchical interference in both executive and legislative functions of state: promoting policies to ministers and then editing bills going before parliament. These are permanent, unremovable, unelected people having key and decisive influence over the laws that we have to live under. Importantly, their veto extends to commercial matters, involving the vast holdings of the Crown and the Duchy of Cornwall. That is, they have the personal right to write the laws that give them an advantage over commercial rivals.

As the Guardian notes: “In the past two parliamentary sessions Charles has been asked to consent to at least 12 draft bills on everything from wreck removals to co-operative societies. Between 2007 and 2009 he was consulted on bills relating to coroners, economic development and construction, marine and coastal access, housing and regeneration, energy and planning. In Charles’s case, the little-known power stems from his role as the head of the £700m Duchy of Cornwall estate, which provides his £17m-a-year private income.” (LINK)

Such legislative power also extends to changing employment law with regards to the Royal households. So it is not just the principle of Royal interference in the law, it is also the practice that can have dramatic real-world effects for those finding themselves employed by the sovereign.

As the judges ruling in the case of the release of Prince Charles’ letters, such matters are covered by constitutional convention. That is, there is no law covering them (and so they are not directly subject to judicial oversight). In the case of Charles’ ‘Black Spider Memos’ (so-called because of his handwriting), the government was claiming they were subject to immunity from freedom of information laws because they were part of his training to be a future Monarch, and so he must be able to correspond with ministers and learn how government works (and presumably, have access to privileged information unavailable to mere voters).

This is an extension of the constitutional convention of confidentiality surrounding the relationship of the Monarch to their ministers. As the judges explained, by convention the Monarch is entitled “to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.” (LINK) (This is accompanied by its twin convention that the Monarch must act on the advice of their ministers. So, in the weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her Prime Minister, we can infer that she is not merely apprised of current events, but consulted and asked for her opinion (and given an opportunity to freely give her encouragement and warnings). The principle of confidentiality surrounding these conventions is that the Monarchy is supposed to defer to parliamentary sovereignty, and be politically neutral. If, though, Elizabeth is giving opinions and warnings (and vetoes) then, practically, she is not being neutral. The cloak of silence merely covers up her political positions and actions. She is merely seen to be neutral. Convention protects her from controversy.

So, when Frank Gardner revealed on the Today Programme that Elizabeth Windsor had been asking her Home Secretary why Abu Hamza could not be arrested, he was revealing a dark secret at the heart of government, the secret of the reality of royal interference. The BBC apology was instant, abject and craven. It was so important to swiftly redraw the curtains because the cornerstone of this arrangement is what in international affairs is called ‘soft-power’.

One constitutional scholar defines conventions as existing:“if (i) there are precedents underpinning it, (ii) the parties to the relevant practice consider themselves to be bound by it and (iii) there is a reason for the existence of the convention” (LINK).Whilst either side of the convention may breech it, an act which is technically unconstitutional, there is no way to enforce such rules through the courts. Note that this applies to both sides. The Monarch retains the implicit capacity to cause governmental mayhem by beginning to more vigorously exert or stretch their veto capacity. Further, the Royal Family continue to retain considerable public sympathy, and it would be a hard battle for any government to publicly fall out with the Crown. A wise politician avoids unnecessary battles, and so both sides negotiate around the existence of the nuclear option (and possible mutual destruction). Through such means the Monarch, being able to excise clauses of bills affecting them, exercises a power US presidents can only dream of: the line item veto. It effectively makes Elizabeth a legislator.

In his play, The Apple Cart, Bernard Shaw explored this residual Royal power (the play’s title suggests the precarious balance of power between Crown and executive). Although his King Magnus, has been seen as in line with Shaw’s attraction to the idea of the strong leader, the play does explore this mutual relationship between the power of the elected state and the aesthetic appeal of Monarchy (what some constitutional scholars call the ‘dignified part’ of the state). He notes that for the professional politicians, the Monarchy provides an alibi and a distraction, belying their inability to compete with the real, effective power of capital. The centre of that play is the long dormant general right of Monarchs to withhold Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament. This power has not actually been used since Queen Anne, but it remains like a constitutional shark lurking beneath the waters. No Monarch could use it without bringing the whole constitutional house of cards down, but what Prime Minister would want to be in the position of facing that crisis?

Real politicians like to promote and thus bask in (and share) the popularity of the Royal Family as well as some of their unaccountable prerogative powers. The continued existence, influence and organised light-fingeredness of Elizabeth and Charles Windsor is their small price to pay. The rich pageant of the dignified parts of state provide depth and meaning to their tiny roles in a pitiless bureaucracy hemmed in by the real power of property.

The good news is for conspiracy theorists: there really is a vast, organised conspiracy at the heart of the state. The sad reality, though, is its name is government. Secrecy is the essence of warfare, and the government is an ongoing armed campaign against the vast majority of people. Should the professional politicians ever need a large-scale distraction to mobilise support, there is no doubt they would happily throw the Windsors under a bus.

**Stop Press**

On 16th October Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General used his veto under the Freedom of Information Act to block publication of Charles Windsor’s letters. He said: “Much of the correspondence does indeed reflect the Prince of Wales’s most deeply held personal views and beliefs. The letters in this case are in many cases particularly frank. They also contain remarks about public affairs which would in my view, if revealed, have had a material effect upon the willingness of the government to engage in correspondence with the Prince of Wales, and would potentially have undermined his position of political neutrality.” The Guardian is understood to be considering taking the case to the High Court. His decision speaks volumes.

Pik Smeet

An Open Letter to the Miners (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow workers, you are now involved in a great industrial conflict with your exploiters, the state. Like the teachers, nurses and railway workers, your union is confronted with a government which bows to the god of profit as it tramples on the needs and aspirations of those who produce all of society‘s goods and services. But you don’t have be a miner to appreciate our message since all those who depend on a wage salary or dole cheque in order to survive suffer, in varying degrees, the effects of the same callous social system.

This letter is not addressed to your leaders, although we hope that Arthur Scargill and his fellow elected officials will take the time to read it and respond. The socialist message is directed primarily at you, the workers who are not interviewed on television or driven from one picket line to the next in chauffeur-driven cars. You are the men who dig the coal and run the mines in from top to bottom; who belong to class which produces wealth but does not posses it. We address you for two reasons: firstly, because it is only by spreading ideas to the majority that we will ever achieve real social change – leaders can’t do it for us; and secondly, because socialists know that only when workers raise their political sights will they achieve a society capable of satisfying human needs.

We start from the assumption that your struggle against the state exploiters is part of the class war endemic to capitalism. As socialists, we recognise that the task before all workers is not to win this or that skirmish or gain a few concessions which the capitalist class can well afford; our objective in the class war is to win it. Back in 1905 this was the advice given by the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the railway workers – and it is bit as applicable today as it then:

  What the workers on the railways and in every other branch of industry have to recognise is that the utility of combination, economic and political, lies in the strength it gives to fight. What they have to understand is that they can only fight to the betterment of their own position at the expense and to the disadvantage of the class that employs them. What they have to appreciate if they object to being robbed of any part of the wealth they produce, is that they will not only have to place the capitalist class in the category of irreconcilable enemies, not only will they have to fight them as such always but they will have to beat them out of existence absolutely, before they can enter into the enjoyment of the full fruit of their labour
  . . . The workers on railways and elsewhere will have to understand that it is the possession of the land and tools of production and distribution that gives the capitalist his power. They will have to understand that the only way to break that power is to force him to relinquish his hold upon the means by which all the people live. And then they will … be prepared to work with us for the capture of the political machinery of the country as the necessary preliminary to the capture of all the machinery of wealth production.”. (Socialist Standard, May 1905)

In other words, no answer short of social revolution will do if the problems of the working class are to be abolished from the face of the earth.

Media prostitutes

Unfortunately, what the majority of workers know about the miners’ strike they have received from the media. In this strike, as ever, the whores of Fleet Street have used their limited imaginative talents to defend the position of their bosses: attacks on individuals are the familiar substitute for analysis of the issues involved. On television we are bombarded with images of picket-line violence. But why did the violence start? And why need workers picket in the first place? In answer to these questions there is hardly a whisper. Of course, insofar as the reports of workers persecuting those who disagree with them are not false or exaggerated, socialists condemn unreservedly the anti-working class intimidation of fellow miners. No useful purpose will be achieved by imposing the will of one group on another; persuasion is the key to united strength. One thing is for sure: the media will not be made widely available to you to state your case and call for support from fellow workers. The so-called free press is no more than a propaganda tool of the exploiting class.

The issues at stake

The strike was called because of NCB plans to close down a number of pits and make thousands of miners unemployed. The extent of the proposed cuts has been a matter of contention between the NCB and the NUM but, even in the unlikely event that MacGregor is telling the truth, the result will be longer dole queues and the devastation of a number of old mining communities. It is in response to these facts that miners have gone on strike. The NUM, in accordance with its conference policy, is demanding that no pits be closed. In examining that demand, we need to know why the NCB had made its proposals.

Clearly, the intention to destroy large areas of the coal industry is not a result of what is popularly called Thatcherism. Neither is it a whim of Ian MacGregor’s. The object of production under the present social system – capitalism – is not primarily to create wealth, but to make profits. The government has decided that there is not enough money to be made by exploiting miners in the old way and that they need to trim your jobs and communities to fit in with the demands of the market. Remember: the government does not run capitalism; it is the economic laws of the system which force the government to dance to the market’s tune. In demanding that pits be kept open, even though the government does not regard them as profitable enough, the NUM is effectively demanding that capitalism be run for the benefit of the workers. Of course, society should be run for the wealth producers, but under capitalism that can never happen.

The state capitalist non-alternative

It used to be believed by many workers – including plenty of miners – that the way to make capitalism run in the workers’ interest would be to take the means of wealth production and distribution from the private capitalists and place them in the hands of the state. It was argued that the government would run the mines for the miners and not the ruling class. As long ago as 1912, when nationalisation of the mines was being advocated by certain reformists, the South Wales miners’ Unofficial Reform Committee pointed out that

 Nationalisation of the mines . . . simply makes a National Trust, with all the force of the Government behind it, whose one concern will be to see that the industry is run in such a way as to pay the interest on the bonds with which the coal-owners are paid out, and to extract as much more profit as possible in order to relieve the taxation of other landlords and capitalists.” (The Miners’ Next Step)

On that point the Unofficial Committee was quite right. Nationalisation has amounted to nothing more than state-run exploitation of miners. If workers are to learn one lesson from the strike it must be that nationalisation is no answer. Of course, there are those smooth-tongued Labour opportunists who claim that if only the state was controlled by a Labour government it would all be different. Have they forgotten that Labour did run the state when the firemen, the NUPE workers and the dockers were out on strike? Have they forgotten that it was the Wilson government which initiated The Plan For Coal, which was based entirely on the assumption that the coal industry must make a profit? Fellow worker, as a member of the NUM, you are paying part of your wage into a political fund to send Labour administrators of capitalism to parliament. Is it not time that all union support for this anti-working class party was ended?

The international struggle

As all trade unionists learn through struggle, unity is strength. But unity is not just achieved on a national basis – capitalism is a worldwide social order and workers of all lands have a common interest in joining together against the common foe. One of the reasons the NCB can sit back and smile is that they are importing cheap Polish coal. In fact, coal imports from Poland over the last three months were five times higher than for the same period in 1983. The bosses are trying to break the strike by using workers from another part of the world, and in the bargain are buying cheaper coal because Polish miners receive lower wages.

Scargill has appealed to Jaruzelski, the unelected leader of the Polish police state, to stop coal imports to Britain. Jaruzelski, who needs the money to pay off Poland’s huge bank debts, has ignored Scargill’s plea. But why is Scargill appealing to the head of a state-capitalist dictatorship in the first place? Because the workers there have no independent unions to support the British miners’ struggle. When the Polish miners were organised in their own union, Solidarity, Scargill’s comment (published in the WRP’s newspaper, Newsline) was that they should stay in the government-controlled Unions. So, Solidarity has been smashed, the Polish workers are effectively non-unionised, the price of Polish miners’ labour-power is cheap and British coal importers are rubbing their greedy little hands.

The view that there is communism or socialism in Poland, Russia or any other nation must be rejected. Instead of workers in the so-called socialist countries fitting in with the needs of their state bosses, the struggle of workers must be international. Real unity means that if workers in Britain come out on strike we can bring with us the effective support of workers around the world. There can be no room for nationalist notions, including the policy of import controls, if we are to fight and win against the international ruling class.

The power of democracy

How dare the unelected editors of Fleet Street preach to the miners about democracy. And as for the NCB: who elected MacGregor to receive his fat salary for doing the dirty work of the profit system? A fact which is undeniable is that the vast majority of miners have supported the strike. As was mentioned in the Socialist Standard two months ago, we do not notice the media or the government insisting that, in the interests of democracy, all union members be balloted before a strike ends. Nonetheless, a combination of workers is only as strong as the understanding and commitment of those involved. Leaving the decisions to leaders – even to apparently militant ones – is no substitute for the democratic involvement by all members in all important union decisions. As the Unofficial Committee realised in 1912, leadership results in organisational weakness:

 Sheep cannot be said to have solidarity. In obedience to a shepherd, they will go up or down, backwards or forwards as they are driven by him and his dog. But they have no solidarity, for that means unity and loyalty. Unity and loyalty, not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked for by all. (The Miners’ Next Step)

Conscious unity — let the bosses try to defeat that!

Fair-deal capitalism

What are the miners asking for? Insofar as the trade union fight is for wage defence, better working conditions, higher redundancy payments and keeping as many jobs as possible, hard negotiation backed up by democratic, militant trade unionism can achieve results. But let’s not kid ourselves –even if the NUM achieves what it seeks, the result will only have held back the capitalist butchery, not defeated the butchers. According to the SWP leaflet, Why You Should Support The Miners, “The first reason why we should support the miners is that they are fighting for jobs”. And what is a job, fellow worker, but wage slavery? Fighting to be exploited – to be dependent on a wage at the end of the week – having to sell your labour-power to the highest parasitical bidder. Is that really the most that workers can ask for?

Karl Marx – who gets an even worse write-up in the Daily Express than Arthur Scargill and therefore must be talking some sense – recognised that trade union action was necessary, but that it would not make capitalism a fit system in which I live. As he put it:

 Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (Value, Price and Profit)

As Marxists, we fight not for jobs but for emancipation from a system which turns useful work into wage slavery.

There will never be fair-deal capitalism. Workers can fight strikes from now until Prince William gets a job and there will still be a class-divided society, with the wealth-producing majority living in an economically inferior condition. Kinnock , if elected, would be no better than Thatcher, and Scargill’s rhetoric will, in the end do no more to shake the system than did Gormley’s in 1974. The fact to face up to is that there is a bigger battle to be won.

Capitalism the enemy

Your real enemy is the present system, which produces commodities to sell on the market with a view to profit. Have you ever sat down and thought about what sort of a society it is in which thousands of old workers face the prospect of dying from hypothermia next winter because they cannot afford to buy fuel? Last winter and the winter before that tens of thousand of workers perished in the cold; the market could not see them because it is blind to those without the money to attract its attention. It is sickening, is it not, that economic experts are worrying about how to cut coal production while members our own class are too poor to switch heater?

Capitalism, with its hideous contradiction of mass poverty amid the potential for plenty, is your real enemy. It persecutes you at every level, advertising itself as a world of plenty and then rewarding the wealth producers with deprivation. For too long workers have suffered under this rotten set-up, when the means are at hand to create a society of production for need in which we can all give according to in abilities and take according to our self-determined needs.

What can you do?

Socialism is more than simply a great idea; it is an obtainable alternative to the chaos of the system which puts profit before use. So, what can you do about achieving it? Well, you’ve made a start by reading this letter. If you like what it says, why not pass it on to your friends, workmates and relatives? If you agree with the socialist outlook, so might they. If you want to know more, go along to your local branch and discuss the case for socialism. The Socialist Party is very active throughout the country and we can assure you of a warm reception. If you want more socialist literature, please contact our Head Office.

At the time of writing it is not certain how the miners’ strike will end. Of one thing you and all other workers can be sure: when capital and wage labour are in open conflict, the Socialist Party takes the side of the robbed against the robbers. For it is only through the conscious solidarity of workers, that the system of legalised robbery will be compelled to make way for the reign of united humanity.

Steve Coleman

Letter: Blind faith in the broad church (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrades,

I am writing to you with regard to your opinions of the bankruptcy of the Labour Party as an organisation for radical change, and in particular of the articles "Crisis of the Left" (July) and “Labour in Pain” (August).

The choice before Labour is three-fold: Wilsonian pragmatism, with frontal attacks on working people, the welfare state and unions, all to retain power; revisionist radicalism, primarily attempting to reconcile Labour voters with socialism, not impose it on them; and fundamentalism, not diluting or changing our policies one bit. We have to be realistic in listening to voters' hopes, radical in articulating an alternative system to capitalism’s horrors, and resolute in meaning what we say and making people realise that we will not be blown off by capital, as in 1931, 1948. 1967 and 1976. A little bit of socialism time and time again is better than nothing, and is surely worthwhile in helping radical politics.

May I remind you that in the 1983 general election. Labour on a left reformist programme got 8½ million votes, the SPGB 85 votes, a slight difference. If the dirigisme socialism of Labour, blunted and mellowed by internal contradictions and compromises, is too extreme for voters, they aren't going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party. Are they? Why not pause and think here; what makes you so sure that eventually the workers will turn to full-blooded socialism?

Ken Coates, in his excellent Socialists and the Labour Party (1973) asks many important questions to revolutionaries which have not been answered by you or theorists such as Miliband, Panitch and David Coates. In Coates' pamphlet, he states the obvious truism that any revolutionary mass party must duplicate “the best features of the old Labour Party . . ." This is for the reason that such a party must draw heavily on former Labour activists, who are at the moment consciously influencing Labour in a socialist direction. The revolutionary left misses the fact that Labour is a living, changing organism, not a monolithic block, and is very susceptible to rank and file activism.

Coates also commented:

Since the collapse of the Independent Labour Party, there has been no group of socialists capable of maintaining a full-scale political presence outside the Labour Party . . . (by which) . . . I mean the ability to secure the election of at least a handful of members of Parliament. . .

So far the history of modern British socialism has involved any group existing outside or independently of Labour and, thus the trade union movement, withering away; no matter whether it was a new revolutionary group as with the Socialist League, SPGB, CPGB. IMG or SWP. or a breakaway from the party—the SDF, ILP. National Labour (the MacDonaldites). Democratic Labour (the Tavernites) and the Scottish Labour Party. Labour, despite the disaster of the last election and its recent record of government, is the only credible representative of the progressive working class. The lessons of the 1880s, 1930s and 1960s, periods of radicalism, must be that the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party.

In “Labour in Pain” (August), you hit on a number of important points about the internal contradictions of the party and hypocrisies of the “Broad Church". Nationalisation of the top 25 companies as the IWC and Labour Conference want, or top 200 as Militant wants, is, as you say, irrelevant. Labour’s paranoid pursuit of public ownership has more to do with Gaitskell’s and Wilson’s opposition to it, than its merits. We have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers. They remain wage slaves, no matter their income or material affluence, with no power over the factors of production which decide their lives. State control merely replaces the entrepreneur with the bureaucrat, the capitalist system for the servile state. Workers self-management, or to extend it beyond a narrow industrial front into all walks of life— citizens power, can alter the present undemocratic situation. Citizens power must be built on the ideas of guild socialism and the analysis of human nature and the stale provided by group theory. This must involve seeing the state as an obstacle to radical change, no matter how enlightened those in charge, and limiting its functions and roles. However, it has to be noted, sadly, that guild socialism has been neglected and forgotten about, seen as a throwback to the Medieval age with no pertinence to the industrial age.

The SPGB constitution says it stands for "the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth . . Does this glib phrase “common ownership" mean central planning and state control or "Stalinism plus parliamentary democracy or decentralisation and citizens power over capital? We have a right to know.

The SPGB does, on the other hand, say regularly, and in "Why we are hostile” (November), that all working-class people are "enslaved" and must be "emancipated", not by enlightened Fabian elitists, but the workers themselves. This is fundamentally true. R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (1921) said:

The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs.

Workers initiatives, take-overs and local plans, rather than centrally decided blueprints, is the only sure way of avoiding the servile state.

You say that only people who are fully in agreement with the SPGB can join. Your inability to lower the SPGB from its high, puritanical and principled pedestal of fundamental, sacrosanct ideas is sad. Socialist parties desperately need a coherent. dynamic ideological anchor to prevent policies appearing as just a "shopping list" with no underlying philosophy, and to resist the claims of capital. Principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies. You seem to miss this.

The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement. Labour, for all its faults, is socialist, though as you say in November, most Labourites "belong to a party which they imagine will one day exist . . ." However, if we keep trying, we socialists in and out of Labour can discard the stale heritage of labourism and state socialism. While Marx is still invaluable to analyse modern capitalism, particularly in the surplus theory of value and class critique of production, he cannot be dogmatically interpreted.

Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists. The SPGB should engage in an active, open and free debate with other socialists in the Labour, CPGB and other parties about the failure so far, future and road to British socialism, possibly in the Socialist Society. Any debate must be two-way, with no closed minds. We can learn from one another, sharing our experiences of capitalism and socialist action. You can give us some of your critiques and theories of capitalism, if we can give some, dare I suggest it, flexibility. Remember, together the left has enormous potential to win electoral support and change society. Divided, it has nothing. Despite our numerous differences, which are sincere and cannot be glossed over, we are on the same side—the mosaic of the socialist movement, facing a common enemy, not Thatcher or the Conservatives. but capitalism.

Gerry Hassan 

Dundee

Reply:

The Socialist Party is most willing to engage in "active, open and free debate" with those who call themselves socialists. Repeated efforts have been made to encourage the defenders of Left reformism to take the public platform and debate but, contrary to the impression given in the last paragraph of Mr. Hassan's letter, it is the dogmatism of the traditional left which has prevented them from accepting open debate with the Socialist Party. For example, the leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, was asked recently to debate with us in his own borough and replied that there would be no point in such as event as the Labour Party is bigger than the Socialist Party; our Islington branch has written two lengthy letters to The Militant Tendency, challenging them to debate, but they replied in writing that public disagreement “between socialists” would be embarrassing. So, we would advise our correspondent to write to the Leftist parties and groups urging them to make contact with the Socialist Party; they will meet no dogmatic resistance to discuss ideas from us.

We are reminded that the Labour Party won 8½ million votes in the 1983 general election on the basis of a "reformist programme". What is a reformist programme, be it “left” or "right", but a plan to make capitalism run more efficiently from the point of view of the majority of people in society? That 8½ million workers were conned into believing that a Labour government could do this indicates two things: firstly, there are still plenty of deluded workers around: secondly, there are less workers being taken in by the Labour Party now than has been the case in electoral terms for half a century. The validity of Labour’s ideas is not to be judged by the number of votes they received (on that basis, we would be forced to conclude that the Tories and the Alliance are, between them, substantially more “correct" than Labour), but the extent to which they can be realistically applied as a means of solving social problems. Eight and a half million people voted for Labour’s commitment to the NATO military gang, to the continuation of the wages system, to the acceptance that there must still be poor people for whom the state will have to care. They were voting for capitalism. Our correspondent points to the 85 votes received by the socialist candidate and draws the conclusion that if most voters found Labour's programme "too extreme, they aren’t going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party". The reason workers did not vote Labour is that they have tried it before and it is no more than another way of voting Tory. Workers did not vote for socialism because they have yet to be convinced that it is in their interests: if there had been no Labour confusion-mongers in Islington South during the last election, making promises to workers which could not be kept, there would have been more votes for socialism. The "workers will turn to full-blooded socialism” when they have had enough of capitalism and are ready to opt for a different way of organising society.

The labour illusion is well summed up by Mr. Hassan when he writes that "A little bit of socialism, time and time again is better than nothing . . .”. Socialism — a system based upon common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use — is the direct opposite of the capitalist system. It is no more possible to have "a little bit of socialism" within a world based on minority class monopoly of the means of wealth production and distribution than it would be to be a little bit pregnant. What the Labour Party’s "little bit” amounts to is a programme to reform capitalism and, as our correspondent rightly points out, these efforts have repeatedly been “blown off by capital". We are told that it is necessary to make people realise that capital will not interfere with Labour’s aims in future, but the Marxist critique of reformism is precisely that such hopes are illusory: if Labour is elected to run capitalism, as it sets out to be, it cannot but bow to the needs of profitability.

Calling in expert witness Coates damages rather than helps the case of our correspondent. What are "the best features of the old Labour Party"? Does he mean their support for two world wars or their racist immigration legislation or their strikebreaking record? Or does he mean their record of reformist promises, such as the promise of full employment made in Labour and the New Social Order or Bevan’s promise that there would be no housing problem in Britain after the Attlee government had served its term? If. by "the best features", they mean Keir Hardie’s statement in the Manifesto of the English Socialists that socialism will entail the abolition of the wages system, then we in the Socialist Party are duplicating the best features, whereas Coates and the rest of the Labourites have ignored the socialist tradition.

After the evidence from the star witness. it is a shame that our correspondent once again returns to the old dogmatic chant that history must go on repeating itself. Evidence points the other way: Labour’s traditional support is crumbling (maybe temporarily, hopefully for good) and workers are looking at alternatives. If “the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party", and if, after seven Labour governments, capitalism is still here, where is the evidence that the road is anything but a dead-end?

We are pleased to note that Mr. Hassan accepts the criticisms made by socialists of Labour and Militant's nationalisation (state capitalist) policies. Indeed, we do "have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers” — as the miners will testify. It is a pity that our correspondent's clear recognition that state capitalism is not socialism is not applied to the equally non-socialist theory of "guild socialism", as advocated by reformists like G D H Cole in the distant past. The fallacy of “workers’ control” is based on the failure to recognise that where there is a working class — where wage labour exists as a social relationship to capital — the only result can be exploitative. "Guild socialism" presented a naive plan to decentralise and democratise capitalist exploitation. If it has been "neglected and forgotten about”, as our correspondent states, working-class knowledge will be none the poorer.

We are asked whether our Object implies central planning, Stalinism, or decentralised power over capital. It means none of those things. It would be ludicrous to envisage world socialism as a society run by a bureaucracy on a central plan: clearly, common ownership will require a democracy organised by the majority. We do not advocate Stalinism, and socialism means more than parliamentary democracy: our Object commits us to working for democratic control, that is, the making of decisions about society by its citizens on the basis of full information, as for control over capital, we can only reiterate that there will be no wage labour-capital relationship in socialist society and therefore citizens will no more have power over capital than they will over the banks, the police force or the torture chambers: these social features will not exist.

We are not proposing, then, any "centrally decided blueprints", but will leave it to the workers who establish socialism (who we hope will include us) to make the plans. We agree that most plans can be made locally but, under capitalism, "workers’ initiatives, take-overs and local plans" are constantly inhibited by the fetters of the profit system.

Mr. Hassan's comments about principles invite the Socialist Party to fall into the political pit which the Labour Party is stuck in. We are told that only allowing workers to join who agree with us is "puritanical" and "sad”. We say that letting racists, nationalists, religious cranks. Leninists, pro-NATO supporters, careerists and "Wilsonian pragmatists” into the Broad Church is not just sad. but pathetic; not principled, but disgustingly opportunist.

We are told that “principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies". We have a policy (which is neither short nor long-term, but as long as it takes us to achieve) which is to abolish capitalism and establish a world free of class division, exploitation, property relationships, poverty, war and wage slavery. Those aims are urgent and we are not going to be deterred in struggling resolutely for them by those who tell us to unite with the crumb-collectors of the Left.

How nice to be told that "The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement". We have been waiting eighty years to meet the other part, but have no illusions that we will find it in the Labour Party or any of the other organisations which seek to re-arrange capitalism. Indeed. “Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists" and that is why those who still hold on to the pathetic belief that Neil Kinnock and his fellow reformists will eradicate the nasty bits of capitalism ought to abandon the Labour Party and join a party which defines socialism with clarity, fights for the new system with enthusiasm and remains uncompromisingly hostile to the apologists for capitalist politics.

Editors

Peace and plenty (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wherever you look in the world today you will see suffering. Last year 15 million children died for lack of money to buy food. Poverty and insecurity face the great majority of the human race. Yet about one in twenty people escape this misery. They belong to an exclusive international club which is more accurately defined as the capitalist class. It is not an easy club to join: and its members are able to enjoy their wealth and power and privilege by persuading the rest of us to remain their obedient servants.

These people are the owners of all the companies, land, oil wells, finance houses. They make their profit by employing us as workers to create wealth for them in the processes of production and distribution. They pay us wages or salaries which can never provide more than second-rate, insecure living standards, and leave nothing to save or accumulate while they continually re-invest the wealth we create to accumulate more and more for themselves. This class division between employers and workers is the cause of an unceasing struggle over wages, hours, working conditions, living conditions. This is the class struggle.

But there is also a perpetual struggle among the capitalists themselves. The competition between companies for profits, leading to the conflict between nation states for colonies, markets, raw materials — like oil. copper and uranium and control of trade routes — like Suez or the Gulf of Oman — or territory — like Palestine or Afghanistan — military bases — like Cyprus or Gibraltar — all these keep war going all the time at one or more places in the world. They cause the deaths of millions of us in struggles where we have nothing to gain. As workers we have no stake in the power or property of any nation.

For this reason, nationalisation is of no value to workers. If any state nationalises an industry, this only means that it is now owned by the whole capitalist class of that nation — but not the workers. The state is now the employer and exploiter — with all the forces of law and order at its disposal. Nationalisation on a large scale has often been called socialism. It has nothing to do with socialism — it is state capitalism, such as exists in Russia.

Socialism means producing wealth solely and directly for free use by all. All the resources and machinery for producing wealth will be taken into the hands of the community as a whole, and work will be organised through voluntary co-operation, not the economic force of the wages system. Society's principle will be: "from each according to ability, to each according to need".

In a socialist world there will be no war because its cause will have been removed. The ownership of society’s means of living by a privileged minority will be ended. The governments and states by which they legalise and enforce their ownership and control will be abolished. The armed nations into which they formed themselves and us, with their frontiers, passports, tariffs and fortifications, will cease to have any use: and people will cease to think of themselves as Britons, Germans, Italians, Israelis. Palestinians. Iranians. Russians or Americans. They will live and work and travel where they wish.

Marx said, "the workers have no country". "Workers of the world, unite". And we ask you to unite with us in the socialist movement for the emancipation of humanity from the chains of capitalism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain alone stands opposed to the Labour Party and all other parties which seek to reform the profit system — and so protect and keep it. We work to spread information among workers about the way capitalism operates, and the way in which the majority can remove it by establishing a socialist world of production for need.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and Free Discussion (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may perhaps be of some use to point out to those who are following methods that kill free discussion, that they are following in the path of their predecessors in Italy and Germany, and provoking the ogre they fear. The starting-point of the Fascist career in Italy was the seizure of the Italian factories by the workers and the propaganda of violence by the Communists. Germany tells a similar tale. It may be added that the country that gave them the lesson was Russia, and one of the principal defenders of Russian violence Trotsky — is now wandering about seeking an asylum — a victim of the methods he advocated.

It is only by free and open discussion that the workers can grasp the essentials of their present condition of servitude and the way to abolish it. Until they have this knowledge it matters little which of the capitalist parties they support.

While we are on the subject of “freedom of speech" we cannot help being surprised to find what curious, not to say, suspicious friends, this “freedom" has. We see among them the numerous organs of capitalism, which steadfastly decline to allow the publication in their columns of a statement of the Socialist case.

(From an editorial, Reason or Violence, Socialist Standard July 1934.)

The Great White Elephant (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Advertising In Modern Life

When they talk of the marvels of modern times and the loftier race that welfare reforms have brought to being, it is interesting to browse through the ads. in the papers and the television channel. Here, dress-suited prigs sit amid fake period furniture eulogizing cheap tinned soup; pasty youths sip their tonics and slick their hair in hopes of catching the boss's eye; fagged-out, rushed and noise-ridden people by the score swallow pellets and powders by the ton for the noise and rush to continue. Here, in fact, is as great an indictment as could be made of civilization in the mid-twentieth century.

Pure and simple, advertizing is salesmanship: convince the man and he buys your goods. In 1788, toothpaste makers were claiming that their stuff would "faften fuch as are loofe, keep fuch as are already decayed from becoming worfe, prevent the Tooth ach, perfectly cure the Scurvy in the Gums . . .  likewife render the Breath delicately fweet, and remedy all thofe diforders that are the confequence of fcorbutic Gums and bad Teeth." Sixty years ago the most popular soap powder was boosted as "possessing high detergent properties in a concentrated and effective form. Cleanses without injury to skin, fabric or texture."

It has long ceased to be as simple as that Then—years ago, a hundred and seventy years ago—you take it or leave it. Now, to leave it is impossible (except for the blind and the recluse). The advertizing man is no longer a huckster seeking new additions, one by one, to the satisfied buyers of Bloop. His aim is whole social groups, even whole generations, for whom life without Bloop would hurt or be shameful He is sociologist, psychologist, con-man, poet and maker of dreams, with nowhere private and nothing inviolate to him—not the innermost thought nor the smallest room.

There are a hundred means to this assault on social consciousness. Appealing to snobbery and prestige: it is smart to drink this, superior to smoke those. Linking prestige with pride in home or person: clean your home the modern way—and surely you don't still shave with the old soap-and-brush method? Evoking authority with tit-bits of pseudo-science, or vague references to clinical knowledge: the hair is a tube with roots, the intestines are twenty-six feet long, doctors and nurses know all about Blobbo.

The cornerstones of most advertising, however, are Fantasy and Fear. The strip-drawn advertisements for cosmetics, beauty soaps, beverages, and the rest, are explicit, deliberate fantasies of romance or success. In the best-known of them all the strips are peopled by an entire mythology of seemingly real characters: masterful executives, paragon wives and paternal fathers and, of course, the family doctor, benign and wise, sitting back recommending the hot drink that will send Henry bounding up the ladder of success. Or there is the fantasy in prose and a single picture, setting forth a desirable world with which buying some product will somehow put one in touch. Drink Crossbread's, and you commune with Old England, oak beams and dray horses; or Washington's, to be in spirit among the big-thighed footballers and six-hitting batsmen; open an account at the Lowland and enter the semi-detached realm of bowler hats and deference, chequebooks and U-conversations with the Manager.

And there are the sexual fantasies, the dreams of allure, enticement and capture. First shy glances drawn by white soap, first embraces made inoffensive by pink soap; erotic spells cast by shampoos, face creams and cheap perfumes with expensive names (Nuit dans l'Ecurie, one-and-three). Dreamiest, most voluptuous of all are the corset and underwear advertisements, with their Vie Parisienne pictures and their lyrical lore

“The line forms . . . in at your waist,
With a gentle lift of pride up there.
Dance Time, new summer guile . . .
With padded undercups,
And low-hugging Lastex round your back. . . ."

It is wrong to suppose, however, that the sales depend only on those who can share these fantasies. Equally, they set standards for the rest. For every girl who daydreams enslaving Fred by Gluggo, another girl fears the consequences of not using it The advertisements, in fact, make the consequences clear; before the happy ending to the strip a wise friend takes Jean aside and tells her why Fred avoids her.

This is one kind of fear played up by the ads.; fear of social or matrimonial failure. It hardly needs building- up, in a world of perpetual insecurity where most people know only too web that jobs and sweethearts are easily lost. There is fear of disgrace (someone isn’t using Pungo —see the offending noses wrinkle); fear of general inadequacy, of being talked about for remediable failings. This is the secret of the great soap-powder campaigns of recent years. In terms of competition, one may wonder how much is achieved by persuading housewives to change from Diz to Duz, particularly when both are produced by the same firm; but that isn't the real point The effect of seven years' competitive insistence that each soap powder washes whiter, adds brightness, is whitest of all, is whiter and brighter than white itself, has been to make whiteness a social value, something which no woman dare neglect for fear of censure and shame.

The strongest theme of all is fear of harm or deprivation to loved ones. Somebody's mum isn't using Gippo; somebody's baby girl has to ask if the jakes has been made safe for her with Fizz. The wake-up beverages play heavily on this, too; tiredness threatens a man's income just when his daughter has won her scholarship or his widowed mother looks to him for help. It is wrong to sneer at this kind of fear and say people shouldn’t be taken in by it. Nobody wants to be lonely or unpopular, still less to have his children deprived of companionship or opportunity. The advertisers find their material in natural, sensible feelings which are whipped into fears because our world is an insecure and frustrating place.

In a buying-and-selling society, the realm of advertising is unlimited. It goes far beyond the hoardings, the advertisement pages and the television commercials. Thus, in any woman's magazine, where half the space is taken up by advertisements, much of the remainder goes the same way:  fashion pages, beauty articles, stories grounded in the same dream-world as the adverts. The same applies for most magazines and papers. Holiday guides, technical pieces, the Christmas spirit; even the chit-chat about a personality may be, indirectly, advertisement of what he sells.

What are the effects of all this ? There is, of course, the known influence of advertisers on the Press. Large-circulation papers draw about half their revenue from advertisements, the smaller-circulation ones about two-thirds; half a page in the Daily Express costs £3,000. It would be surprising if newspapers did not defer to their advertisers' interests. Mainly the influence is indirect, a standing deterrent to certain kinds of criticism: "A newspaper that receives a large revenue from company prospectuses may have an unconscious bias in favour of our present financial system; and the paper carrying frequent advertisements of patent medicines may, without any conscious deviation from rectitude, give too little weight to the medical profession's views on such goods. A famous editor has, indeed, written unashamedly of 'such needless folly as putting the report of a fatal motor smash alongside of a motor advertisement'.” (“The Newspapers," Oxford Pamphlets on Home Affairs, 1944.)

Occasionally, more direct pressure has been brought to bear. An ex-editor of the Daily Herald stated that his paper’s policy during the Munich crisis was modified on account of the advertisers. In 1938, a British Medical Association advertisement, headed “Is All Milk Safe?” had to be modified to avoid prejudice to the milk industry’s campaign. In his American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard gives several instances of coercion by advertisers in the U.SA Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think (as some people seem to do) that newspapers would be substantially different without this influence; after all, the newspapers support capitalism and the advertisers are the capitalists.

The social effects of advertising go much further. Implicit in all of it is the commercialising of every human relationship: people are valued in terms of their possessions and buying habits, the dentifrice they use, the gleam of their shirts. In this world, as E. S. Turner remarks in his amusing Shocking History of Advertising, “loyalty means always buying the same hair oil. . . . A bride is not a young woman on the edge of a great adventure; she is a conditioned consumer, who, by buying the right cosmetics and the right brassiere has captured her man.'' A generation ago, How to Win Friends and Influence People was the salesman's obsession; now, it is the customer's.

Half-a-dozen minor revolutions in social consciousness—none of them making anyone better off—have been effected or assisted by advertising. The whiteness-phobia, the speed-craze, the conception of beauty and, newest of these, the odour-phobia. In recent times the deodorant business has extended its target from bad breath and strong perspiration to skin smells, cooking smells, “sudden smells" and vegetable smells. It seems on the cards, in fact, that in a few years all natural smells will have been outlawed and abolished, and nothing will be left except the scents of disinfectant and furniture polish. What is worth mentioning about the odour-ads. is that they are easily the lowest, nastiest and most objectionable of all advertisements at the moment (and that, by the way, is really saying something): where, one wonders, are the good taste and culture of which the capitalist class—and, no doubt, the artists and copywriters, too—has always claimed so much ?

The supreme social myth to-day, and the one which runs through all advertising of the last ten years is that of "standards of living.” Most symbolic of it, currently, is the cigarette advertisement which says "I'm raising my living standard" — by changing to a slightly dearer brand; though this writer's favourite is the television commercial where the woman spreads a margarine-and-paste tea for her family, standing in a five-hundred-pound kitchen. Perhaps the most explicit of all is the American advertisement (quoted by Colin McIver in The Anatomy of Advertising), which says

"I know my husband loves me.
"As surely as I know the sky is blue, that dreams come true, that to-day is my birthday . . .  that surely do I know my husband loves me.
"The soft gleam of our very own Gorham Sterling tells me he is thinking of me at wife, mother, hostess—dreaming and planning for our future together."

Modern advertising is the folklore (nursery rhymes and all—hear the children sing the ad.-men's jingles) of the "standards of living” age. It would be funny if it were not so tragic. While the success of a marriage is judged in Gorham-Sterling terms, the collapse of marriage is a major social problem; while people in to-day's hire-purchase paradise see themselves as far, far better off than ever before there are far, far more social difficulties than ever before. For all that has to be said about advertisements, the real criticism is of the society whose values and failures they reflect. Is there any substantial difference between the German general who said "Guns before butter ” and the rest of the world which puts commercial before human needs?

The only sensible way to organise society is for the satisfaction of human needs—that is, on the basis of ownership by everybody of the means of life and access for everybody to everything there is. No advertisements, of course, in such a world; only then, in fact, would the fine, rich wood of humanity flourish free from the dark, parasitic trees of commercialism.

Robert Barltrop

An Appeal For Donations (1958)

Party News from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

During recent mouths the income of the Party has been below expenditure end in attempt is now being made to rectify the position.

Almost every item of the Party’s expenditure has increased, postage, stationery, rates. Hall hire, advertising, printing, and numerous other items have increased in cost. If we continue to spend at the present level with no appreciable increase in income, a serious position will arise in 1958.

Whilst there will be an increase in revenue from the increased price of the Socialist Standard, we shall not benefit from this for some months.

It is evident that we require monies for all activities, including indoor propaganda, Provincial propaganda tours, new pamphlets, advertising, and Parliamentary activity. As our sole income is from members and subscribers, it is again to you that we address our appeal for funds.

The present political situation and the innumerable problems of Capitalism have thrown a heavier responsibility on the Party. We must therefore always be in a position to maintain and enlarge our Organisation. Lack of funds severely hamper us, so please give what you can.

We are all looking forward to the time when appeals will be unnecessary; at the moment, however, they are very necessary. Donations should be sent to E. Lake, at 52, Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

That £75,000 "Pie in the Sky" (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

"And that inverted bowl we call the sky,  

Whereunder, crawling, coopt—we live and die, 

Lift not your hands to it for help, 

For it rolls impontently on, as thou or I.”

Of all the "carrots” that have been dangled before the credulous eyes of the working class (as a loophole for the individual escapologist from wage-slavery) the £75,000 Treble Chance Pools craze certainly takes the proverbial "biscuit.”

Look in any G.P.O. any Friday during the football season and the sight of the queues of budding entrepreneurs for emancipation, feverishly filling in coupons and buying endless postal drafts, is enough to gladden the heart of any government bondholder, let alone the Pools firm’s shareholders.

The giddy idea is to forecast eight draws in one column from about 54 matches—despite the odds against same being in the region of several millions to one.

Capitalism is certainly the gambling system par excellence—from the glittering casinos of Monte Carlo and the Riviera (to say nothing of the fashionable English, Continental and American race meetings) where patrons— drawn from the parasitical "elite” of the international capitalist class—"relieve” their ennui frittering away some of the "filthy lucre” filched from the international working class via the medium of the wages robbery system.

On the other hand, the small-town back-alley dog tracks or the slot-machine craze of Las Vegas, where the lure of the "Almighty Dollar” is too much for working class flesh and blood—writhing under a frustrating poverty-ridden system of society—to withstand.

Certainly a few may hit the "Jack Pot” and deliver themselves from bondage, but, for the vast majority, defeat is inevitable and the slough of despair under capitalism is a "bottomless pit.”

"Let Not Ambition Mock Their Useful Toil”
By and large, trying to emulate a Lipton or a Nuffield or to "Win the Pools” is merely a form of procrastination on the part of those who produce the wealth of the world and in whose hands lies the future welfare of society as a whole.

Instead of being "led up the garden path” by the "success” propagandists of capitalism or by the social bait of a chimerical £75,000 and allowing their life span to "slip through their fingers” struggling in comer shops, offices, mills, mines and factories, trying to get a foot on the proverbial "bottom rung’’—the workers of the world should "support” their own "horse,” which is entered in the "race” for their emancipation—the Socialist Party— which has a "ton” in hand of the “opposition” and with their class conscious support can achieve the Socialist Revolution.

As it is, the years roll on and capitalism is still our unwelcome companion, spreading the diseases of Nationalism, Commerce and Religion, together with the eternal "success” phantasy ad nauseum to ourselves and our children. Confusion enough when it comes to educating them for their real social responsibility—the organsation and achievement of Socialism. Be that as it may, the world organisation for Socialism, with 53 years' "spade” work behind it and equal to the task which lies ahead, will not be found wanting when the mighty organism of the world-wide working class shakes off its political confusion and sallies forth to claim its social heritage— a place in the Socialist “sun.”

Finally, and using Thoreau’s words—"As in the long run man only hits what he aims at, he better aim high" — let us make our “target” nothing short of revolutionary scientific Socialism, from which we can all reap a richer and socially more satisfying “harvest” than any improbable parasitical "successful entrepreneur” existence within the profit system.

G. R. Russell

Party News Briefs (1958)

Party News from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hemel Hempstead.—Will all those members and sympathisers who live in the Hemel Hempstead area and who are interested in the formation of a group in the area, please communicate with: B. N. West, 44, Adeyfield Gardens, Hemel Hempstead.

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Propaganda.—At the termination of the Speakers' Classes, which have been held by the Propaganda Committee at Conway Hall, six of the twelve members are taking the Speakers' Test and, if successful, will add to the number of official Party speakers to the list and so enable the Propaganda Committee to extend their programme in 1958. The class was most successful and it is to be hoped that arrangements can be made in-the near future to run another series.

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Film at Head Office.—Although no meetings were held during the last three Sundays in December they will recommence this month, the first being held on January 5th. 

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Why the B.B.C. does not understand.—On 10th December the Overseas Department of the B.B.C. telephoned the S.P.G.B. and asked to speak to Mr. Gaitskell. When they were told that we are the Socialist Party, and Mr. Gaitskell has nothing to do with us, the clerk who was making the call was astonished. She did not know there is a Socialist Party that is not the Labour Party. If the B.B.C. had not refused for 20 years or more to let the S.P.G.B. put the Socialist case on the air, perhaps the B.B.C. staff would have known that there is a Socialist Party.

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Lewisham Branch.—We would like to draw attention to the notice of meetings organised by Lewisham Branch, published in another column. The meetings are held fortnightly on Monday evenings. It is hoped that members will attend and bring along sympathisers and make this venture a success.

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Islington Branch have taken over the arrangements for the Tower Hill lunch hour meetings each Thursday. Despite inclement weather, these meetings are being well attended and members who are in the vicinity should try to get along and support the meetings.

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“Socialist Standard.”—Each January a particular reference is made to the Annual Subscription form for the Standard. A form appears in this issue and it is to be hoped that readers will use this and ensure a regular delivery each month.

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Tottenham Branch Secretary writes that Comrade T. H. Fowler died in October last. Comrade Fowler was 80 years of age and joined the Party in 1913, regularly attending propaganda meetings and selling literature. He was always a willing helper in the canteen at Party Conferences and socials. Until earlier this year he was an enthusiastic worker. It is with regret that we learn of his death and extend sympathy to his relatives.

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Extract from letter from Comrade H. Wheatley, Nottingham :—

“My trade-union, the A.U.B.T.W. makes Free-card presentations on 50 years' membership, and myself being included this year, I screwed up pluck to seek permission to face an audience for the first time: a vote of thanks from the recipients really, a very few words; then used the Union-cards of 50 years ago and to-day as emblems of a deeper and broader outlook, hoping that also applied to each individual member; but 50 years was slow progress with results that still left them, fighting old battles repeatedly, pointed out the need to understand the present system, and then realising the identical interests of ALL workers, they must eventually see no reason for division

After much revision and cutting, I got through two closely packed pages of urging to look to the future (yes, I had to write it—managed better that way) and drew quite an embarrassing applause. Our leaflets were spread over a spare table, and on count just over 25 each were picked up.

Seeing I had avoided naming the "Party," I think it speaks volumes for our clear case, that an official should state he soon knew just where I was leading—The S.P.G.B.

The more hopeful side is the 30 or so of working Trade Unionists—and their wives—who probably never heard their position put this way before. An effort to follow up by a S.P.G.B. speaker to address their branch met with the usual coldness—they can’t get them in—just pay their dues and depart. This still in mind for further pressure."

Phyllis Howard

Letter: Are workers worse off? (1931)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. W. Jennings (Harringay) quotes from Marx's "Capital" the following passage (page 661, Glashier edition): -

 Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

Mr. Jenning's asserts, without evidence, that the workers are getting better off and that "they do take a greater share of the wealth produced." On the strength of this he writes: "Perhaps, after all, Marx was not infallible.”

Marx was not infallible, but Mr. Jennings has yet to show Marx wrong on the point at issue. If Mr. Jennings had looked further into Marx’s writings, he would have seen that Marx made it perfectly clear that he was referring to the worker’s position relative to that of the capitalist. Thus, on page 631 of the Glaisher edition he dealt with the increase in the workers’ purchasing power and added :—

  But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage-worker.

Secondly, a moment’s reflection should have shown Mr. Jennings that the workers can, as Marx explained, receive a larger amount of the necessaries of life without receiving “a greater share of the wealth produced.”

Editorial Committee

The Workers' Socialist Party (U.S.A.). (1931)

Party News from the February 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers in the U.S.A. are invited to communicate with the Workers' Socialist Party of the United States, at 315, East 14th Street, New York City.

The Workers' Socialist Party are our agents in the U.S.A., and the "Socialist Standard" is obtainable from them at the above address.