Exhibition Review: Bauhaus (2012)

Exhibition Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “To create a new guild of craftsman, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist” – Walter Gropius

It is apt for an exhibition about the Bauhaus, the Modernist architecture and design school to be taking place at the Barbican (till 12 August), that icon of brutalist architecture.

Architect Walter Gropius, inspired by William Morris, established the Bauhaus in Weimar in Germany in 1919 where he aimed to challenge the hierarchy between fine and applied arts, by creating art for the people, fashioning functional artistic products, and creating an aesthetic to counter bourgeois furbelows. Klee wrote it was “a community to which each one of us gave what he had.” The exhibition features paintings such as Kandinsky’s ‘Small worlds’ and Feininger’s ‘expressionist’ ‘Studio window’ and ‘Cathedral’.

The working class in Berlin went on general strike in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and armed struggle ensued. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) government (akin to the Labour Party) brought in Freikorps soldiers to crush the revolutionary uprising, and socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered. A year later, when threatened by the right-wing Kapp putsch, the SPD felt no shame in calling on workers to strike to save them. Gropius designed an ‘expressionist’ Monument to the March Fallen in honour of workers killed in the putsch.

The Bauhaus was part of a cultural renaissance that took place in Weimar Germany which included cinema like ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, the theatre of Brecht, paintings by Grosz, the Frankfurt School of Fromm and Marcuse, Hirschfeld’s struggle for sexual law reform, and Reich’s ‘SexPol’ clinics for the working class.

The Bauhaus exhibition features products from its workshops such as the Wagenfeld table lamp, Brandt tea services, Albers’ tables and Breuer chairs. Gropius drew up designs for the ‘total theatre’ of Brecht-producer Erwin Piscator. The workshops were ultimately making exclusive products for the affluent and not for large-scale manufacture. Gropius had not solved the dilemma that Morris had faced.

In 1928 Marxist architect Hannes Meyer was appointed Bauhaus director and moved away from aesthetics and artistic intuition towards functionality and building theory. He believed buildings should be low-cost and fulfil social needs: “the people’s needs instead of the need for luxury”. Meyer expanded the workshops on a co-operative basis to meet the requirements of industry: his aim, the “harmonious organisation of our society”, and interestingly the Bauhaus made its first profit in 1929. The photography workshop was established; Maholy-Nagy made his trippy film ‘A Light Play’; there was the Warholian Metal Party; and the Bauhaus students moved towards Marxism. Gropius had built workers houses for the Torten-Dessau estate, which Meyer extended by building balcony access apartment houses. Meyer also designed the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau.

Meyer was sacked in 1930 because of the politics and went to Moscow as an architecture professor. Eventually he ended up in Mexico. In the 1930s he was an active participant in the discourse about suppressing the bourgeois concept in architecture.

The Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis who deemed its concept as “degenerate”.

Steve Clayton

Cooking the Books: Overproduction (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian (5 July), “Marxism is on the rise again”. One of the reasons he gives for this is “its analysis of economic crises”. But what is this analysis?

The problem with trying to describe Marx’s own theory is that he never published a final, worked-out version. In Volume 1 of Capital there are some passing references to capitalist production going in cycles “of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation”. Apart from that, all we have are drafts and notes on the subject which Engels, Kautsky and Moscow later published as Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, Theories of Surplus Value and the Grundrisse, but these drafts are not always entirely consistent with each other.

This has led to a number of different Marxist theories. The explanation we have favoured is that crises are caused during the phase of “production at high pressure” by one key industry (it could be any).  This industry, in its anarchic pursuit of profits, comes to overproduce in the market for its products, and this partial overproduction then has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy.   

Others interpret “overproduction”in a different sense, to mean that capitalism has a tendency for total capitalist production to outstrip total market demand. An example can be found in the January-February issue of Lalkar (a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), but it’s a theory put forward by others who don’t share this party’s policy). The present crisis, it claims:

  “is at heart a classic crisis of overproduction, this being the design fault that is built into the capitalist system. As the masses of workers –who make up the bulk of consumers –are, in the interests of profit, paid as little as possible, they are increasingly unable to buy all the increasing mass of commodities that the capitalist enterprises bring to market. This in turn bankrupts the least ‘efficient’ of the capitalist enterprises, causing further job losses and downward pressure on wages caused by an excess of the supply of labour power over the demand for the same. Bankruptcies start to escalate, while economic activity stagnates.”

This is a theory of “underconsumption” rather than of “overproduction”. It ignores the fact that the total capitalist market is not made up just of what workers can afford to buy, not even if capitalist spending on consumer luxuries is added; it also includes what capitalist enterprises re-invest in production, i.e. spend on producer goods.

Lalkar offers the following explanation as to why the present crisis didn’t break out earlier:

  “However, this process can be, and is, retarded by the simple expedient of the capitalists, who would otherwise find it difficult in the circumstances to invest profitably, lending money to workers to enable them to continue as consumers despite their relative poverty.”

This doesn’t make sense. The capitalist class lend the working class money to buy their goods, but how would they make a profit out of doing this? They would only get their money back.

Working-class borrowing did increase in the period up to the present crisis but this wasn’t done deliberately to prevent production spiralling downwards. It was the other way round: because production was expanding, banks and other lenders made loans to workers on the assumption that production would continue to expand and so workers would be able to repay out of their future wages both what they had borrowed and the added interest.

A crisis is not caused by working-class consumption going down but by capitalists cutting back their investment in production.  It is investment, not consumption, that drives the capitalist economy.  This is the essence of Marx’s theory of capitalism, whatever might have been his considered theory of crises had he got round to formulating it.

Hands off Wadiya! (2012)

Film Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dictator. Directed by Larry Charles

  “Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” Arundhati Roy

The Dictator (2012) stars Sacha Baron-Cohen as Admiral General Aladeen, dictator of the fictional country called the Republic of Wadiya. The story is loosely inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s character Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of the fictional country called Tomainia in The Great Dictator (1940).  Baron-Cohen’s character is based on Colonel Gaddafi.

Sacha Baron-Cohen built his career on satirising superficial identity politics and testing the limits of tolerance of those identifying with groups who express offensive opinions. In an early appearance he defended the right to be lazy against a rattled Tony Benn’s fantasy of full employment.

Admiral General Aladeen is described as anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. These are often the main claims made by real-world countries who find support from groups calling themselves socialist. Even in Britain, where most people do not get beyond the position of support for the country they are born in, some calling themselves ‘socialists’ get little further than ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

The Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) has been known to use Marx and Lenin’s support for national liberation movements (a position which Rosa Luxemburg demolished), as the basis of their opposition to wars waged by some countries but not others.

Trotskyist opponents of war, such as the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW), although more critical than Stalinists, are also selective, and support ‘the lesser of two evils’, depending on which countries are waging war. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) claims to come from the unorthodox Trotskyist tradition and does not automatically or uncritically defend all so-called anti-imperialist countries. Smaller groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty claim a ‘Third-Camp’ position and have had a supporter who has been known to fly both an Israeli and Palestinian flag on a demonstration. So all represent a nationalism of sorts, but a nationalism nonetheless. The delusion is that powerful states can be condemned as imperialist but less powerful states murdering workers can be (critically or otherwise) supported as anti-imperialist. When this is couched in anti-interventionist terms, the socialist answer should be to intervene by promoting socialism everywhere, workers have no country.

At the end, even Aladeen’s final speech manages to distinguish between real democracy and a situation where both states are milked for oil by local dictators or by states with more powerful militaries. For this reason it is unlikely to be reviewed widely on the British left.

Where Baron-Cohen’s efforts to include romance and politics in his film fall flat, the more talented Chaplin succeeded in including both and was able to sum up his message of social freedom most eloquently – even better than most groups calling themselves socialist:

  “You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.”

DJW

Proper Gander: Undercover Under the Covers (2012)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

You’ve started to notice the tell-tale signs that your partner might be having an affair – their emotional distance from you, their ‘working late at the office’ excuses, their ruffled appearance when they finally return home. What do you do? Talk with them about your concerns? Question why we live in a society which makes people feel trapped in failing relationships? Or hire a camera crew to follow your partner and secretly film them cavorting with their lover, and then allow all this and the resulting messy confrontation to be broadcast worldwide? The last option seems to have been the most attractive to those appearing on Cheaters (UKTV Really, Sky 248, Freeview 20).

Slimy host Joey Greco guides us through each ‘case’. One half of a couple talks about their suspicions that their partner is being unfaithful, accompanied by twinkly keyboard music for extra poignancy. Then we cut to what Greco’s team of detectives has filmed: shaky undercover footage of the partner’s furtive meetings with their new lover. This is narrated with lines like “agents are on active duty waiting for movement from the target”. The spurned spouse is shown this footage at the same time that their partner has been spied gallivanting elsewhere. Fired up with anger, they are then taken by Greco and his camera crew straight to where their partner is canoodling. If it looks like the ensuing confrontation won’t be as violent as he’s hoping for, Greco stokes the fire with a few smug comments.

The producers of this vile show try to justify themselves by saying “this program is both dedicated to the faithful and presented to the false-hearted to encourage their renewal of temperance and virtue”. ‘Virtue’ isn’t the most obvious word to associate with this show, especially as it has been accused of staging some of its salacious set-ups. If anything, Cheaters would be less repellent if it was faked. At least then, its voyeuristic viewers would only be watching desperate actors rather than desperate people clinging on to whatever relationships they can find. Cheaters represents television sinking to a new low in presenting alienation as entertainment. Scrub your eyes clean after watching.

Mike Foster

Action Replay: The Beautiful Game (2012)

The Action Replay Column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much was made of the political symbolism of the European Football Championships. Germany overwhelmed Greece and was then themselves taken apart by Italy (this is in football, not the eurozone economy). But Spain won, earning claims that they are the greatest team ever.

Back home in Spain, though, all is not well, with the recession hitting even harder than in Britain. Perhaps a quarter of the workforce is unemployed, while the figure rises to a scarcely-credible one-half of those under twenty-five.

Yet for one night, on 1 July after victory in the final, Spanish people were celebrating. ‘We’ll forget all the bad things that are happening. Even if it’s just for one day,’ said a nurse who had just finished her first day’s work in eleven months (BBC News website, 2 July).

Being on the dole gives you plenty of time to celebrate but, of course, less money to enjoy yourself. No doubt there were plenty of hangovers on the morning of 2 July, though there was no change in the unemployment situation. It would be silly to claim that it’s just a matter of bread and circuses, that sporting success helps reconcile workers to their downtrodden position. But it is certainly very handy for the rulers.

However many Spaniards do not need to worry about getting paid or scraping by on benefits. There are a number of billionaires, but by far the richest person in the country is Amancio Ortega, owner of the chain of Zara clothes shops, and worth a cool $37bn. Spain may have ‘taken football to a new level’ but some of the population occupy their very own level of wealth and exploitation,

Week-End School (1936)

Party News from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

A week-end school is being held at "Woodlands" Camp, near Sevenoaks, Kent, on Saturday and Sunday, August 29th and 30th. There are facilities for swimming, sunbathing, outdoor games, discussion, and there will be lectures on Saturday evening and Sunday. Sleeping accommodation is provided in clean, dry, warm huts.

The charge is 7/6 per person, covering accommodation and all meals, from Saturday tea to Sunday tea. For those who bring their own tents the charge is 6/-.

Those who wish to come only on the Sunday may do so.

Nearest station, Otford (two miles from camp). Fare, 4/3 week-end return from Holborn Viaduct or Victoria.

All who wish to attend for the week-end or for Sunday should without delay inform the Central Organiser, "Summer School," at Head Office, 42, Great Dover Street, S.E.l.

Letter: Socialists and War (1936)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Reader’s Queries Answered

To the Editor, Socialist Standard.

Dear Sir,

Although I have read many Socialist Standards, I am still not at all clear regarding your view of war and armaments. Every sane person must be opposed to war. But as to arming. Speaking from where we stand, British Soil, do you advocate complete disarmament and therefore open for any other power to control this land; or while countries all over the world are piling up arms— for defence of course—do you favour some measure of arming by Britain, and if so, to what extent? In a nutshell, I do not care whether it is called arming for defence or offence, do you advocate Britain disarming as things are now on the Continent, or not? Hoping you can help.

Yours truly, 

E. C.

Liverpool

Reply:

Our correspondent's letter, in its first paragraph, contains the statement “every sane person must be opposed to war." This contains only enough of the truth to be very misleading. If we clear up the error in it we shall have gone far to explain the Socialist attitude towards war. The statement, “Every sane person must be opposed to war," contains as much truth as the statement, “Every sane person must be opposed to slums, undernourishment, and excessive work under conditions dangerous to health." Every sane person is opposed to war-horrors and to exploitation as regards himself; but when it comes to protecting the interest of one class by imposing these things on other people then both statements are transparently false. If the capitalist class have to choose between giving up their wealth and privilege and freeing the working class from poverty, inhuman exploitation and degrading conditions of life, the capitalist class, as a whole, plump solidly for retaining the misery of the working class. Threatened by a challenge to their position, they will without hesitation set in motion all the machinery of law and force, prisons, policemen’s batons, concentration camps, bullet, bayonet and aerial bomb against the men and women of their own nation. They will calmly starve a million miners and their families into submission as in 1926. There is almost nothing they will not do.

Transfer that from the home to the battlefield—to the arena of international conflict. Threatened by the greed of rival exploiters in foreign countries the capitalist class will drown the world in four years of blood and slaughter. They will destroy human lives by the million, rather than give up their property, their right to exploit the workers, to the capitalists of a rival power.

In short, as far as the capitalists are concerned, they have something to lose which is of the utmost value. They will go to the utmost limit to keep what they have.

What of the workers? They have almost nothing to lose, except their lives and their health, and these they lose in war: not in the outcome of war, but in war itself, whatever the outcome. The working class have no interest at stake which warrants their supporting war. Whatever strength they have to influence the issue of war and peace should be thrown against war, no matter what the circumstances of the particular conflict may be. The question put by war-makers, “Are you in favour of peace at any price?" has no meaning to a worker who understands his class position. The price of losing a war or of surrendering without waging war is not paid by the working class, but by the capitalist class. What difference does it make to the working class whether the British or the German or the American ruling class own the colonial lands and dominate the world’s trade and shipping? Will they be poor, or suffer from unemployment? Indeed they will, for they do already everywhere.

The workers then should throw their weight against war. What does this mean in practice? As the working class have not yet placed themselves in control of the machinery of government, but continue at each election to place the capitalists in control, the latter are in a position to decide when, where and why the armed forces shall be set in motion, and also the amount and nature of the armed forces. The question the capitalists have to consider when deciding whether or not to wage war over any particular international conflict is the probable consequences to themselves. These include the military probabilities, personal danger (from air-raids, etc.), and also the effect war will have on the workers. If the working class, or any large body of them, are hostile to the war the capitalists have to consider how to overcome that hostility and what will be the result if they should fail to do so. To the extent that the workers in any country are alive to their interests and opposed to war the capitalists will be inclined to make some concession to the enemy Government, rather than face war. A majority of workers will, however, never be in favour of peace against capitalist wishes while they (the workers) are prepared to support capitalist government, because they will always be ready to accept capitalist reasons for waging a particular war.

The answer to the specific questions put by our correspondent are therefore as follows: —

The S.P.G.B., having no control over the formation or use of the armed forces now controlled by the capitalist class, cannot affect and has no concern with the purely capitalist question whether the British capitalists should have more armaments to protect their property against the British workers and the foreign capitalist powers.

The S.P.G.B., in line with working-class interests, is not concerned with the outcome of any war between capitalist groups over the right to appropriate the proceeds of the exploitation of the working class.

The S.P.G.B. knows that war means death, maiming and disease to the working class and, knowing that wars between capitalist groups do not involve any working-class interest does not support such wars in any circumstances whatever.

The S.P.G.B. has one object—Socialism—and to attain that object knows that the organised working class must gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces. When such control has been achieved the working class will know how to use the armed forces for so long as it may be necessary to defend Socialism against an insurrectionary minority or an undefeated foreign group of capitalists.

Editorial Committee

Marx: the Man and his Work - Part 1 (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx died on the 14th of March 1883. The work he did lives on. An enormous amount has been written about him as an individual and about his materialist philosophy; less has been written about his work on economics. His theory of surplus-value is still largely ignored. Of those few who have written on this subject, many appear never to have read Marx himself. In fact most pseudo-intellectuals who write or have written about Marx, being in many cases of the type Marx so often castigated as bourgeois reformers, ignore those facets of his work — either not liking or failing to see the importance of them.

Making this small addition to the mass of material on Marx the man is done in no spirit of hero-worship but to place Marx in line with the conditions which produced him. The writer has chosen for the most part the early stages of Marx’s career in order to show a man reacting to the conditions and, as far possible in a short article, the conditions shaping the man.

A Time of Revolution
Karl Heinrich Marx was born at Trier (Trèves) in Germany on 5th May 1818. Both the date and the place of his birth are significant. Not many years before, the armies of republican France had advanced over Europe carrying with them the emotional ideas of liberal democracy, ideas about liberty, equality and fraternity.

The victory of European reaction did not destroy the influence of revolutionary ideas in the backward countries of Europe. Politically and economically, Germany was a backward country, and consisted of thirty-six semi-independent states and principalities in which a feudal aristocracy held power. The whole of Germany was dominated by the extremely reactionary states of Austria and Prussia. Growing industry and commerce had created a capitalist class, but the aristocracy had no intention of giving way to the rising capitalists and were strong supporters of the absolute forms of government then existing throughout the German state.

In these circumstances the capitalists were in revolt and were demanding the setting up of a democratic form of government over a unified Germany, which was to be completely separated from Austria. Conditions thus brought into revolt much of the youth in Germany, and it is not surprising that Marx and others of that period became revolutionaries.

Philosophical Questions
The parents of Karl Marx were able to provide for their children what was by the standards of the time a good education. Karl appears to have shown good intellectual ability at an early age. He was attending Bonn University at the age of 16, and went from there to the Berlin University. Apparently it was the intention of his parents that he should prepare for a legal career. Marx, however, like many young students, was impatient of the ordinary methods of study, and was for some time very undecided. He dabbled in poetry, and toyed with the idea of writing a work on the philosophy of law, and engaged in other forms of literary activity.

At that time the main intellectual influence on the students of Berlin was the philosophy of Hegel, which was used to criticize the existing regime. Marx became one of a band of “Young Hegelians”. He now decided upon an academic career; in 1841 he obtained his doctor’s degree from Jena University for a thesis upon the Natural Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. This thesis was an anticipatory part of a larger work in which Marx intended to deal with the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy as a whole. In the end Marx did not publish his thesis. Its immediate aim was no longer a matter of urgency; political and philosophic affairs of quite another kind did not permit Marx to carry out his original intention.

For a short time Marx was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a paper owned by a group of radical industrialists which operated under great difficulties due to a strict police censorship. As editor Marx was confronted with questions concerning economics and socialism. Due to the kind of academic training he had, he found great difficulty in dealing with such questions. He decided to study these subjects as soon as possible. The possibility arose when the backer of the paper, in an attempt to save it from suppression by the adoption of a milder policy, forced Marx from his position as editor.

Revolutionary Theory
It was during this period, on the 19th of June 1843, that Marx married Jenny von Westphalen who became his support and counsellor up to the end of her life. Shortly afterwards they moved to Paris, where Marx had been offered employment as editor of the Franco-German Year Book. Here it was that he contacted Engels; it was this event which led to the lifelong friendship and collaboration which has left an invaluable legacy to the Socialist movement.

In Paris, Marx was in contact with and took part in the revolutionary movements of the time. He thus became acquainted with the numerous schools of thought existing in the revolutionary movements and made a deep study of economics and social questions. At the time Marx was editing the Rheinische Zeitung he was a radical democrat: it was his studies in Paris which transformed him into a communist, as that word was then understood. With the political change occurred the philosophical one. He became a materialist.

Due to the vindictiveness of the Prussian government, Marx was forced to leave Paris and went to live in Brussels. It was while he was resident in that town, in 1847, he gave a series of lectures on economics to the German Workingmen’s Club. The purpose of these lectures was to show the economic conditions which formed the basis of the class struggle. It is in the lectures, now to be found in the pamphlet Wage-Labour and Capital, that we find the germ of the theory of surplus-value.

1847 was also the year in which Marx published his book The Poverty of Philosophy. This work was levelled at the French Utopian, Proudhon, and in this criticism Marx outlined the fundamentals of scientific Socialism.

The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the “Communist League”, a working-men’s association at first German and later international. Due to the political conditions on the continent before 1848, it was a secret society. At a congress of the League, held in London in November 1847, Marx and Engels were asked to prepare for publication a theoretical and practical party programme, and this was published in 1848 as The Communist Manifesto. It has since been published in many languages. In an edition of 1888 Engels wrote a preface in which he gave in detail the history of the Manifesto. The following quotations are important:

  Yet when it was written we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists in 1847 were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances — in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the "Educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class has become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself communist.

Second:

  And our notion from the very beginning was that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”.

Third:

  The Manifesto being our joint production, I feel bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, forms the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the intellectual history of that epoch.

For the German edition of 1872 Engels wrote as follows:

  However much the state of things may have altered during the last 25 years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of section II. That passage would in many respects be very differently worded today.

Engels made it clear that although much of the Manifesto had become outdated, as shown by his 1888 preface: “But then, the Manifesto has become an historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.”

The first quotation gives an insight to the political situation in the working-class movement of 1847. Engels leaves no doubt as to why it was called the Communist Manifesto. An explanation is provided for those who have become tired and frustrated, an answer to the cynics is to be found, in the second quotation: the establishment of Socialism as the work of the working class. That class is not yet ready to accomplish its historic mission.

The third quotation is important and interesting Here we have Engels telling us that Marx had, as early as 1847, mastered and was able to apply the materialist conception of history. Engels gives us in this statement a concise definition of the materialist conception of history.

Cologne and London

1848 was a year of European revolt. There was an insurrection in Paris and Marx, expelled from Brussels, accepted an invitation from the Parisian government to return to that city. Shortly afterwards the wave of revolt spread to Germany, and Marx and Engels decided to return there.

In Cologne they commenced the paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor. The paper was a radical democratic journal, but in it Marx put forward his view that it was only the workers who could be relied upon in the revolution and that the industrialists who were the leaders of the movement would check it as soon as its full possibilities became clear. Marx’s view of the rôle of the leaders proved correct, and the revolt in Germany collapsed.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and Marx himself arrested and tried for high treason. He was acquitted, but was forced to go to Paris. With the crushing of the revolt there, expulsion again threatened him and he travelled to what was to be his home for the rest of his life, London.

The early years of their life in London were extremely hard for the Marx family. A period of European reaction set in after the revolts of 1848. The Communist League broke up, and Marx had to provide for his family by poorly-paid journalistic work. During this period of extreme poverty Marx continued his social studies, making use of the reading room at the British Museum, which finally led to the publication of Capital.

Bob Ambridge

(To be concluded in the next issue)

Link to  Part 2

Whether or not the firing has ceased . . . (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again war rages in the Middle East. Once again men and women, deluded by the nationalist and religious slogans of their rulers, kill and wound each other. Once again wealth is destroyed and resources wasted. The sight of our fellow workers serving as tank fodder in this way sickens Socialists and our sympathies go to them and their families. We hope for an immediate end to this latest slaughter of our fellow workers in a cause which is not theirs, and re-affirm that only the establishment of world Socialism will abolish war for ever.

October 1973

The Significance of Sakharov (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia today appears a very different country to the confident country of Cold War confrontation. Now we see a Russia which welcomes and invites USA investment and foreign exploitation of hitherto untapped resources.

Russia is not now negotiating from a position of economic strength. The whole world now knows how catastrophically inefficient is Russian agriculture. In spite of tremendous and sustained capital investment, in spite of ruthless elimination of smallholdings and development of giant-scale mechanized agricultural units, in spite of all this Russian agriculture has not been able to deliver the goods. Frequently famine is a feature and there are few years without cause for concern.

It is against this background of inefficient agriculture and inability to exploit the vast resources of Siberia that we examine recent political developments.

Since last winter the KGB have been making a large number of arrests. Their aim was to suppress the Chronicle of Current Events by rounding up all concerned with writing and distributing this underground journal. The Chronicle, first published in 1968 (Human Rights Year), provided information on arrests and persecution of Soviet dissidents. Its publishers also ensured its republication in the West.

We now know something of these courageous people. Most were concerned only with individual rights and freedom of speech. They were mostly patriotic and generally supporters of state capitalism. But now it is not a lone struggle of novelists and poets for personal freedom from the censor. Now the civil rights movement in Russia has acquired a new and powerful impetus from scientists and engineers who have joined forces with the artistic dissidents.

Sakharov, a distinguished nuclear physicist and the father of Russia’s H-bomb, is symbolic of this new tendency. Index, in its list of people sacked from jobs, arrested or sentenced, cites in recent issues many Soviet scientists: cyberneticians, physicists, astronomers, engineers, psychologists, biologists and mathematicians.

Times have changed in Russia. While the struggle for freedom of expression is still fought by poets, novelists and artists generally, it is noteworthy that this struggle is now also being undertaken by those whose former practice it was to “carry their chains with decency”: men who designed Russia’s power stations and nuclear weaponry, for example.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin clique the demand for freedom by this indispensable section of Soviet society is likely to grow. The Russians, for all their determination, have lagged behind the West in technology ― cybernetics in particular. Scientists in Russia need to have access to Western specialist publications, they demand to attend international conferences in order to keep up with Western advances.

Rosa Luxemburg’s comment has been proved correct:

  Lenin and Trotsky have replaced the representative bodies set up by general popular elections by the Soviets as the sole true representation of the whole toiling masses. But with the suppression of political life throughout the whole country, the vitality of the Soviets themselves is bound to be gradually paralysed. Without general elections, unlimited freedom of the Press and of association, and free struggle of opinions, life in every public institution slowly dies, it becomes a fiction of life, where only bureaucracy remains the active element. That is a law nobody can avoid.
  Public life gradually goes to sleep; a few dozen party leaders with inexhaustible energy and limitless idealism direct and rule; amongst them, in fact, a dozen remarkable brains are leading, and an elite of the working class is summoned from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders, to vote unanimously the resolutions submitted to them, in the last resort a clique government ― a dictatorship it is true, but not the dictatorship of the proletariat: the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, i.e., a dictatorship in the bourgeois meaning of the word, in the Jacobin sense.”
(Quoted by Daniel Norman in “Marx and Soviet Reality” from Luxemburg’s pamphlet “The Russian Revolution”.)

Not only does the Russian worker bear the burden of a top-heavy bureaucracy, but also he is terrorised by the KGB, direct descendant of the dreaded Tsarist Okhrana, of which Lenin wrote in 1903: “the shameful Russian inquisition . . . will not disappear until freedom of assembly, of speech and of the press is introduced” (quoted by Daniel Norman, op. cit.). History shows him to have been right: for just a few months in 1917 Russia lived without a secret police and had freedom of speech and assembly. The Bolsheviks soon put paid to all that. The Cheka was launched on its bloody career by Lenin and Trotsky in December of that year, a mere month after the Revolution. Bolshevism begat the Cheka, the Cheka begat GPU, the GPU begat NKVD, the NKVD begat KGB ― what a vile brood !

Most of the dissidents seek reforms within the system. We do not share their viewpoint but we welcome the prospect of the Russian working class seeking conditions of political democracy. We do not however delude ourselves into regarding this as an end in itself: rather, it is the necessary means, the soil in which the seed will germinate.

With every failed grain harvest, with every new Western computer advance, the glaring shortcomings of Russian state capitalism are becoming more obvious. The ruling clique even have become aware of its inefficiency. This situation is one which may well lead to Russians coming towards the world Socialist movement. Capitalism’s grave is being marked out, in Russia as elsewhere.

For a Socialist analysis of Russia get our pamphlet Russia 1917-67. Send 8p to: The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

Marx: the Man and his Work - Part 2 (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

Marx and the 1st International

Marx associated himself with working-class organizations although they were not Socialist in character. In his day as today, very few workers had a Socialist policy.

The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) was founded at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on 28th September 1864. It was not the work of one individual, and it was not “a small body with a large head”. It was neither “an insignificant shadow” nor “a terrible menace”, as it was described by various sections of the press of the period. The First International was a transitional form of the working-class struggle for better conditions, and it was as necessary as it was transitional.

In the capitalist mode of production, an embodied contradiction both produces and destroys modern states. It intensifies all national antagonisms to the utmost and at the same time it creates all nations in its own image. So long as the capitalist mode of production exists these contradictions are insoluble, and therefore the brotherhood of man about which we have heard from the apologists for capitalism has had no existence. While large-scale industry preaches freedom and peace between nations, it also has turned the world into an armed camp as never before in history. However, with the disappearance of capitalist production its contradiction will vanish also.

Early in the history of the working-class movement a tendency towards internationalism made itself felt. This is a vital condition for the very existence of the workers’ struggle for emancipation. The workers possess no magic wand in this respect any more than in any other — there is no level and easy path. The modern working class has to fight its battles under conditions created by historical development. It cannot overcome these conditions by any short cut but can triumph over them only by understanding, in the sense that to understand is to overcome.

This understanding was made more difficult owing to the circumstances of Marx’s time. The beginnings of the working-class movement coincided with, crossed and recrossed, the beginnings of a number of national states which were founded as a result of the capitalist mode of production. By drawing lessons from the struggles of the different sections of the International with their capitalist governments, Marx hoped to win various groups to his point of view and mould them into an international Socialist party. On the General Council of the International, and at its international conferences, he worked hard to realize his hopes.

Marx’s chief rôle in the First International began after it was organized. He soon became the guiding spirit of it. To him fell the task of presenting the inaugural address. It must be admitted that this address contained many compromises and concessions. Marx himself in a letter to Engels, dated 4th November 1864, in which he deals with the formation of the International, states:

  I was obliged to insert two phrases about “duty” and “right” into the Preamble to the Statutes, ditto “truth, morality and justice”, but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.

The address opens by recording the fact that in the years from 1848 to 1864 the poverty of the working class did not diminish, although this period had been one of unparalleled industrial development and commercial growth. It proves its point by comparing the statistics published in the official Blue Book concerning the poverty of the English working class with the official figures used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, in a Budget speech to show “the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” which had taken place in the same period but had been “entirely confined to the classes of property”. The address exposed this contradiction of English conditions because England was the leading country of European trade and industry, but it pointed out that similar conditions existed on a somewhat smaller scale in, making allowances for local differences, all the continental countries where large-scale industry was beginning to develop.

All over the world this “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” was “entirely confined to the classes of property”, with the one exception perhaps that a small section of the workers as in England were receiving somewhat higher wages, though even this improvement was cancelled out by the general increase in prices.

   Everywhere the great mass of the working class sank into ever deeper misery to the same extent as the upper class rose in the social scale. In all the countries of Europe it is now an irrefutable fact, undeniable for every unprejudiced enquirer and denied only by those who have an interest in awakening deceptive hopes in others, that neither the perfection of machinery nor the application of science to industry and agriculture, neither the resources and artifices of communication, neither the conquests of new markets nor free trade, or all these things combined can succeed in abolishing the misery of the working class, and that on the contrary, every new development of the creative power of labour is calculated on the false bases of existing conditions to intensify the social antagonisms and aggravate the social conflict. During this intoxicating period economic progress, starvation raised itself almost to the level of a social institution in the capital of the British Empire. The period is characterised in the annals of history by accelerated return, the extended compass and the deadly effects of the social pest known as industrial and commercial crises.

The address then went on to look at the defeat of the working-class movement in 1850, and came to the conclusion that this period had its compensating characteristics. Two facts were stressed, first of all the legal enactment of the ten-hour day with its effects on the English working class. The struggle for the legal limitation of the working day had been a direct intervention in the conflict between the blind forces of the law of supply and demand, which summed up capitalist-class political economy, and production regulated by social welfare as represented by the working class.

  And therefore the Ten-Hour Bill was not only a great practical success, but also a victory of a principle; for the first time the political economy of the bourgeoisie was defeated by the political economy of the working class.

After a reference to the co-operative movement of the period, and the revival of the working-class movements in England, France, Germany and Italy and their efforts to reorganize politically, the address continues:

  They possess an element of success — numbers. But numbers are weighty in the scales only when they are united in an organization and led towards a conscious aim.

Past experience had shown that to ignore the fraternity which should exist between the workers of different countries and spur them on to stand together in all the struggles for their emancipation, always resulted in a general failure of all their unrelated efforts. This consideration had moved the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall to found the International Workingmen’s Association. The address concluded with the words: “Workers of the world, unite!”

The provisional rules, for which Marx was responsible, may be summed up as follows. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for the establishment of new class privileges, but the abolition of class rule altogether. The economic subjection of the worker to those who have appropriated the tools of labour, i.e. the source of life, results in servitude in all its forms: social misery, intellectual atrophy and political dependence. The economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great aim for which all political movement must serve as a means.

The conference of the International held at The Hague in 1872 concluded with a public meeting at which Marx in the course of his speech said:

  One day the working class must hold political power in its hands in order to establish a new organization of labour. It must overthrow the old political system which maintains the old institutions in being, unless it wishes, like the old Christians, who despised and neglected such action, to renounce “the Kingdom of the World”.

We now know that the First International was bound to collapse, due to the conditions which gave rise to it and the conflicts which arose within it. Marx from this period concentrated on his literary work. He suffered several personal losses. In December 1881 his wife died, and this was followed by the death of his eldest daughter. Engels tells us he never recovered from these losses, and they aggravated a condition of poor health from which he suffered for some time. On the fourteenth of March 1883 he died quietly in his chair.

Bob Ambridge

So They Say: Good God, said God (1973)

The So They Say Column from the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good God, said God

If ideas were worn like garments, most upholders of capitalism would make their speeches in the nude. As soon as the Arab-Israeli war began, both sides claimed heavenly justification and support. The Times (8th October) reported that Dr. Abdel Halim Mahmoud, the leader of Egypt’s biggest Muslim religious institution, called the conflict a holy war and said:

  The enemies of God have committed aggression on Muslim lands and desecrated our sanctuaries. It has become the duty of every Muslim to make every sacrifice to liberate Muslim territories from Zionist aggressors.

In Tel Aviv Brigadier-General Mordechai Piron, chaplain to the Israel armed forces, said “Snap”:

  Israel is fighting a sacred war against a cruel foe . . . The whole House of Israel has its eyes on you with heavy prayers and blessings for your success in repelling the enemy. The Lord will give you strength.

Perhaps God would appreciate a gift of Pelican psychiatry books, to find out what you do about schizophrenia.

Percentage from Peking

Those who believed in China’s march towards Socialism are still reeling from the news of China’s application for membership of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: in order to be able to raise big loans abroad. In The Observer on 30th September, John Davis made the dose more bitter still by advising investors to go for Chinese government bonds. These have been in default (i.e. paying no interest) for many years, and so can — or could before 30th September — be bought cheaply. However, the IMF and the World Bank would almost certainly make a condition that the debts on the bonds be settled. Says Davis:

  The sum needed to wipe the slate clean for the Chinese is peanuts in the context of the sort of money China will want to raise in the future. In fact, it need not be more than the price of a few Concordes.

A nice “killing” for those who can afford it. Where will the money come from, and the interest on the loans China hopes to raise? From the surplus-value created by exploited workers in this “new utopia”.

A Roof over your Head

Architects and town planners from the Comecon countries recently had a conference in Bratislava about “one of the worst headaches of all East European leaderships — the problems of housing in towns” (Guardian, 26th September). The plight of workers in these countries generally is no different from that of those elsewhere. The promises are just as familiar:

  Poland, with a housing situation reckoned to be among the worst in Europe, now has a programme introduced by Mr. Gierek’s regime to provide every family with its own accommodation by 1990.

In Bulgaria, almost 50 per cent, of households share their accommodation with others.

What is interesting is that attempts to solve the problem revolve round finance as much as buildings: subsidies, schemes in which flats revert to the State at the end of the "owners’ ” lifetimes. So the housing problem in “Communist” countries is that of all the capitalist world — simply an aspect of working-class poverty.

My Dad can Fight Yours, too

A prize for the funniest item of the month should go to Norman Atkinson MP. On 26th September he wrote to The Times protesting against an apparent slight on the Labour Party’s Marxism. His letter said:

  For these reasons the Labour Party became — and still remains — a Marxist party . . .  all the leading Labour Party names you mention from Harold Wilson to Roy Jenkins accept the Labour Party’s Marxist constitution — and I assume are proud to do so. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the SDF, the ILP, GDH and Margaret Cole, the Fabians, and Arthur Henderson . . .  all would have agreed that it was their own Marxist scholarship which had the greatest influence during the early formative years of the Labour Party.

In the nineteen-fifties Morgan Phillips, the Labour Party secretary, claimed its derivation to be not from Marx but from Methodism. In fact, what almost all those Atkinson mentions have in common is their denial of the class struggle to which, as he says, “Marxist understanding is geared”. But has he “Marxist understanding”? He says "classless society is not possible without the common ownership of the means of production and exchange”. How do people exchange what they own in common? Marx would have writhed.

Achievements of Reform

Norman Atkinson’s letter also asks: “How two families can enjoy equal rights when one has an income 100 times greater than the other.” A sensible question, but the wrong one. It should be: How can one family have an income 100 times greater than another after government by the "Marxists” he names ?

On 27th September the Guardian had a review by Michael Meacher of new books on income distribution. Citing Wealth, Income and Inequality (ed. A. B. Atkinson, Penguin Education) the reviewer says:

  Historically, from 1801 when paupers and vagrants, the bottom 23 per cent of the population, had each a mere £20 per year income, while peers, the top 0.01 per cent, had annual incomes 400 times as great, the picture scarcely changed till the mid-twentieth century. Even since the Second World War, though the share of post-tax incomes held by the highest paid 1 per cent fell from 6½ per cent to 5 per cent between 1949-67, the share of the lowest-paid 30 per cent . . . also fell from 14½ per cent to 12 per cent.

It would be interesting to hear Atkinson explain how “a Marxist party” dedicated to “the founding of classless society” — and in power up to 1970 — let this happen. Certainly, how can families “enjoy equal rights” ?

Life in the Old Dog

The main problem for the Polish manager Kazimierz Gorski is whether to bring Marx into the side following his recent recovery from a leg injury.

(Guardian sports page, 10th October)

Perhaps that is what Harold Wilson and Norman Atkinson are worried over too.

Robert Barltrop

Muddled Ideas about Inflation (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chief reason why inflation is so widely misunderstood is that it is hidden in a fog of erroneous ideas put forward partly in ignorance and partly because the employers and the Government have an interest in obscuring it. A recent addition to confusion is an article “Why Money is Shrinking” by John Palmer, business editor of the Guardian, which appeared in Socialist Worker (4th August 1973), the journal of the “International Socialists.”

It dismissed the real explanation in a single paragraph which contained the following:

  But Enoch Powell says it is all the fault of the government printing too much money. This is an illusion even shared by some on the left.

No attempt was made to examine and refute the case carefully argued by Marx to show that if an inconvertible paper currency is issued in excess it will have the effect of correspondingly sending up prices. (Capital Vol. I. Allen & Unwin edition: Chapter on Money, or the Circulation of Commodities, particularly pages 108-9.) Indeed, the writer appears not to have heard of Marx and what Marx wrote on this and other questions dealt with in the article.

Marx was not alone in recognizing the direct relationship between an excess note issue and the price level, though he differed from other economists in basing his exposition on a logical application of his labour theory of value. When it was a question of explaining the price rise in, for example, the great German inflation of the nineteen-twenties, most economists had no difficulty in relating cause and effect, the cause being that the German government met its expenditure by printing notes; but faced with a situation in which an indirect method is employed, many of them cannot see the connection.

F. W. Paish in Benham’s Economics (Pitman 1967, p. 465) is one economist who sees that it is a difference of method with no real difference as to results.

  In some circumstances it [the Government] might simply print more notes and use them to pay for its expenditure. Nowadays, in a country such as Great Britain, the Government would borrow from the banks, printing more notes to enable the banks to maintain their cash reserves.

When the banks have lent to the government by buying government securities and thus have run down their cash they replenish it by calling in short-term loans, and the Bank of England in effect makes good the deficiency in the money market by printing more notes against government securities presented to it.

The article in the Socialist Worker (presented in the form of question and answer) deals with such topical matters as whether wage increases cause price increases, and whether wages should be related to the retail price index — all of it marked by contradiction and confusion. It' rejects the myth “spread by the Tories” that “inflation is caused by wages”, then lets it in again by a back door:

  But surely wages must have some effect on prices? Of course they do. Quite simply, business raises its prices when increases in costs threaten its profit margins.

(No mention of the fact that the myth of wage increases causing price increases is not a Tory monopoly but has been shared by the Labour Party, the party IS tells the workers to vote for.)

Here again the writer of the article makes no attempt to meet the case argued by Marx in Value, Price and Profit: that since the capitalist always puts his prices up to as much as the market will bear, he cannot at will put them still higher because his costs (including wages) have gone up. We are asked by John Palmer to accept a mythical capitalist who works to a kind of “ideal” or “reasonable” profit margin which he will try to maintain but not exceed—promptly contradicted elsewhere in the article where we are told that “the banks, for instance, are reporting 60, 75 and even 90 per cent increases in profit and some property sharks’ profits . . . up 300 per cent”.

We are also told that prices go up because the bosses push them up, but “no one likes that, not even the ruling class”. Are we to suppose that the bosses and the ruling class are different people?

The writer discusses whether the workers ought to go for so-called “threshold agreements” which would relate wages to the rise of the retail price index. Instead of giving the simple answer, that the workers should always try to get wages as high as circumstances permit, he gives as a reason that the retail price index underestimates the real rise of prices — implying that if it were statistically accurate the workers should accept such agreements. His reason for believing the index to be faulty is that it “includes the cost of Ted Heath’s yacht, Lord Lambton’s champagne”. If it did, this would surely be a reason for supposing that the index overstated the rise of the workers’ costs. Actually of course it doesn’t include the cost of Heath’s yacht and Lambton’s champagne. It isn’t based on “costs” at all but simply on percentage variations of prices. As the Department of Employment insists, it isn’t what is meant by a cost-of-living index at all: that is to say, it is not based on the total cost of a given standard of living.

If John Palmer does not understand the retail price index he also is not very good at arithmetic. He tells us that a 50 per cent. rise of prices is the same as a 50 per cent. fall in the purchasing power of money. On this faulty arithmetic the 100 per cent, rise of prices in the past few years would mean a 100 per cent fall in the value of money, meaning that money has no purchasing power at all. The correct figure for a 50 per cent. rise of prices is a 33⅓ per cent fall in the value of money.

Edgar Hardcastle

Not Sociology — SOCIALISM! (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen sixty-seven, the year of the centenary of the publication of the first volume of Capital, was in some ways an embarrassing time. Suddenly, the derided minority who had struggled to win recognition for this work as the only effective analysis of capitalism were overwhelmed with friends of a doubtful kind. There was the Marx exhibition at the British Museum; the press treatment which, with the predictable exception of the Daily Telegraph, was reasoned and fair; there was the accolade of publication bestowed upon him by profit-conscious Penguin Books. Socialists welcomed this publicity but we were uneasy about the abrupt change of attitude. What did it all mean?

To appreciate the size of the change it is necessary to look back a little, at the ignoring of Marx, at the rejection and the deliberate distortion of his ideas and what he stood for. Greatest of these was the association of him with the Russian revolution and what came out of it. When the Cold War was at its most intense, it was almost impossible to find any assessment of Marx which read as if the writer had got past the first sentence of any of his works. Whatever exploit the Russian ruling class were involved in — their secret police, their show trials, the Berlin Wall — all were tagged with the name Marxist, implying that Marx would have approved and even supplied the theoretical justification for such crimes.

Then there was the misrepresentation of his ideas, the selective quotes which made him the discredited prophet of doom who foresaw the working class progressively dying of hunger and exposure while capitalism got on with cosseting them with cars, washing machines, televisions. Economists who daily ground out their narcoleptic commentaries on the futile gyrations of capitalism’s commercial machine busily put about the notion that Marx was a dull writer, a guaranteed cure for insomnia. There was a market for books which were a sort of compendium of this rubbish, books which purported to examine the Marx family life and which wrote him down as a demanding, irascible, petulant boor of a man. A Tory Cabinet Minister explained it all to an adoring audience by telling them that Marx suffered from boils on his bottom.

Socialists had grown wearily familiar with the need to hack away the undergrowth of this nonsense before we could begin to get over the idea that Marx’s works are essential to anyone who wants to understand society — how it came to be as it is and how it must be in the future. That is why we were uneasy at all those new friends and when we saw how acceptable he had suddenly become.

In fact, it had never been possible for Marx’s opponents to ignore him. The difficulty had been to persuade them to criticize what he wrote rather than what somebody else wrote that somebody else wrote that Lenin wrote that Marx wrote. It was rather like the party game when a phrase is whispered into an ear at one end of the line and comes out completely different at the other end. Now, it seemed, Marx’s critics had suddenly decided that as they couldn’t beat him he would have to join them. But on what terms, and what contribution were they asking from Marx?

Part of the explanation is in the post-war upheaval in education, which is responsible for more members of the working class being subjected to the hothouse treatment in universities. Students are paid to learn and to think — even about Marx. At the same time capitalism has seen the need to invest more resources into what can only be called people management. Industrial psychologists are a vital part of any intensive production unit. No company of any size can operate without its trouble-shooting personnel men. None would dream of trying to sell its goods without the help of advertizing agencies. Outside the workplace, the harsher effects of working class poverty are supposed to be deadened by the Social Work departments of local authorities.

These are all fields of operation for the sociologist, which has meant that the study of sociology has had its share of the great education boom. Sociologists might end up earning their living helping to compose ads for baked beans, but to do that they need to spend some years studying rather wider concepts of social affairs. This is where they run up against Marx, whose analyses uncovered the laws of motion of society and laid bare the workings of capitalism.

But at the same time as Marx became more acceptable there is an attempt to make him more respectable, to emasculate him, to shear off the revolutionary conclusions of his analyses and to treat him as just another contributor to the theories of sociology. Prominent among those who attempt this is T. B. Bottomore, whose book Karl Marx — Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy was first published in 1956 and came out as a Pelican in 1967. Bottomore appears to be fascinated by Marx:

  In fact Capital is, among other things, one of the earliest, and still one of the most valuable, works of social history conceived in a sociological manner, i.e. as the history of social institutions.

but elsewhere (Sociology — a Guide to Problems and Literature — 1962) it is clear that he goes along with the vulgar misinterpretation which associates Marx with the overthrow of almost any government:

  . . . in China and Cuba, the whole social structure is being refashioned under the influence of Marxist thought . . .

So it is unsurprising, that he can put Marx on a par with men more properly described as sociologists, with the more limited scope and application to capitalism’s needs which the description implies.

To expand on this point, let us look at the uses which Bottomore thinks a sociologist can put his knowledge to:

  . . . dealing successfully and humanely with the complex problems arising from revolutionary advances in technology and sustaining an elaborate network of social services.

Or perhaps they will be attracted by the current advertisements for sociology graduates to become lecturers at the Civil Service College, where they will have to teach subjects with the chilling names of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behaviour.

These are the very stuff of sociology. A politician looking for more votes may well employ them to work out a more winning — in other words a more deceptive — line for the voters. A government looking into the resiting of industry or the development of communications will use them, to plot and to manipulate the movement of working-class population. In the advertising world the sociologists work upon strange gradations of workers, into herds which they tag with letters and numbers to denote their wage level, or describe confusingly as upper middle class, lower middle class, upper-lower middle class . . . Bottomore quotes one reviewer’s opinion of sociology (which even then has to be in sociological language): “. . . slick, bureaucratized, establishment-supported, computer-supported, computer-based, and status-quo orientated.” The reviewer meant to say that sociology fits in perfectly with, and is indeed a necessary part of, the capitalist machinery of exploitation.

The same cannot be said for Marxism. The analysis of society which it supplies is not there for its own sake; neither is it there to deal with the trivia of capitalism nor to make the wheels of exploitation run more smoothly. Marx did not examine history only to discover how and why human society works and changes as it does. He did not examine capitalism only to conclude that it is here. He followed it all through to the unavoidable end and emerged as a committed and active socialist, working for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a social system based upon common ownership. What could be more explicit than this, one of countless similar passages in his works:

  The essential condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes . . . The working class in the course of its development will substitute for the old order of civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be political power, properly speaking, since political power is simply the official form of the antagonism in civil society. (The Poverty of Philosophy).

And what could more clearly label Marx as a man who saw the need for political action to end capitalism than this, the final words of the Communist Manifesto:

  Let the ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!

The works of Marx are an essential tool to a revolutionary party, to be used for the overthrow of the social system whose exploitation and ugliness Marx examined so effectively. A small part of that ugliness can be seen in the discipline of sociology — the study of human environment, reaction and movement in order to manipulate it for the benefit of the ruling class, to tighten the chains about the workers. Marx simply cannot be associated with that. We should not be deceived by our new friends; they have not been able to beat Marx but neither can they pretend that he has joined them.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Out-of-work Graduates (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like the mass of the working class the products of the higher education must come into the labour market and compete in the merciless struggle that our present social system begets.

  “During the next few months some thousands of young men from Oxford and Cambridge will be looking for work in an inhospitable world. ‘The truth is that there is less and less room in modern life for a liberal education’, said a former undergraduate (who had somehow found a job since coming down last summer) sadly to a Daily News representative yesterday. The most fortunate of these young men — that is, those who have not absolutely got to earn a living at once — will drift to the Bar, with comparatively little prospect of briefs. The less fortunate will become schoolmasters, most of them with neither aptitude nor enthusiasm for their work. And there will still be a lot left over.”

(Daily News 28.6.73)

Perhaps, and more than likely, some unlucky ones will join the ever-growing army of the workers. The capitalists themselves will see that the quantity and quality of so-called educated workers is forthcoming for the purpose of their own profit, and, like the rest of the working class, their supply exceeding the masters’ requirements, their price upon the labour market (salary or wages) consequently falls.

We, too, seek to educate the workers, not as trained machines, producing and distributing wealth for the enjoyment and leisure of others, but to understand their usefulness and importance, using that knowledge to establish society upon a basis that will allow them to enjoy the results of their usefulness in increasing physical and mental comfort.

(From an article by Mac in the Socialist Standard, November 1923)