The New “Force” in Politics. (1906)

From the February 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

So! We are, it seems, to rejoice in the advent of a new force in English politics. We are to observe “the descent of a bolt out of the blue” and be happy. We are to note that “Labour” no longer sits on the “doorstep” but is inside the House of Commons and will do things. We are even to accept the fact as a sign of victory for—Socialism! Well! This is interesting. Because in our ignorance we thought this sort of  “Labour” force descended from the blue, or, to be more accurate, ascended from the black, very many moons since. We seemed to have recollected even of a “Labour” minister in a Liberal administration before Mr Burns. It is true these old-time “Labour” representatives received the support of the Liberal Party. True also that the Rt. Hon. Thomas Burt was for very good reasons persona grata with Liberalism. But then so also was and is Mr Burns, the chairman of the “Labour” group in the last parliament. And is it not the indisputable fact that with few exceptions, the present “Labour” members were the unofficial candidates of the Liberal Party and were backed by most of the local Liberal associations? Then why should we rejoice?

Weighed in the balance

What if this sort of “Labour” representation has got inside the House of Commons in rather larger force than usual (which we suppose is what our enthusiastic exhorters mean when they have called upon us to be glad)—what then? Have they some greater power behind them by which they will be capable of performing greater deeds than their predecessors? What power? Are they not the nominees of an organisation whose members have not reached the stage of political development wherein they can dissociate their interests from the interests of the capitalist political factions? Are not these “Labour” members’ wages therefore dependent upon the manner in which they approach the measures introduced by the capitalist parties? Can they freely attack these measures and the parties introducing them and be sure that their action will not be misunderstood by those who pay the piper? If so, what becomes of the argument in favour of the strict independence of the LRC candidates on the ground that if they were associated with the Liberal Party (for example) the Tory members of the LRC would break away? If not, are they not obliged to give their support to capitalist legislation (unless, of course, that legislation is so glaringly anti-Labour that even the members of the LRC could appreciate it) for fear the contrary action would be misunderstood? Are they not for the same reason forced to proceed with exceeding circumspection in their endeavours to induce the capitalist government to adopt measures they (the capitalist government) do not desire to adopt?

Found Wanting

Is it not the fact that the majority of these “Labour” representatives are themselves, in everything but name, Liberals, and, not understanding the reason for the position of the working class, cannot act as champions of working-class interests? And is it not undeniable that those who do profess to understand, and who at other times are prepared to call themselves Socialists, have repeatedly obscured their Socialism in order to secure the position (as when they stood for election) and confused the minds of those whose intellectual clarity they are supposed to desire, by associating themselves with the representatives of capitalism for capitalist objects? Then what can be expected from these more than their predecessors? What is the use of their separate party and separate whips? The fact is that nine out of ten of them have been elected in alliance with the Liberals; they are by education and sympathy Liberals; they are paid by an organisation overwhelmingly Liberal, and they may be expected to act, as Crooks and Shackleton and Henderson, and in a slightly modified manner, Hardie, have all along acted Liberal. The man who expects more from them is likely to be disappointed; the man who regards their return as a victory for Socialism simply doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Why the “Labour” men will not do

Our position is that these men, whatever their intentions, are actually retarding the development of the only organisation of the working class that can enter into effective conflict with the forces of capitalism, because they obscure the fact that this conflict exists always in industrial affairs, and do not insist that it must be waged upon the political plane also. By association with capitalist representatives in both political and economic affairs they induce the idea (which capitalism does everything possible to foster) that the hostility does not exist, yet until that fact is grappled with and clearly understood there can be no material improvement in the workers’ condition. It is unfortunate, of course, that the workers do not understand. It makes the task of those who are concerned with the overthrow of capitalism, and the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery, very difficult. The results of their work seem so very slow a-coming. And some of them tire and drop out of the movement, and others—the Irvings and the McNabs of the SDF for example—curse the stupidity of the working class, while others again—the Hyndmans and Quelches and Hardies and the rest—weary of the work, endeavour to secure some immediate consolation by pandering to the ignorance they once may have thought to dispel, and so simply increase the difficulties in the way.

The irreconcilable few

Only the few remain in the forefront of the fight, waging unceasing battle for their class. These are they who, belonging themselves to the working class, have been at pains to obtain information as to the causes of the ignorance of their fellows; who have seen how, for generation after generation they have been oppressed and misled, sent off upon a barren quest by one set of supposed friends, confused by the actions and instruction of another set; now buoyed up with the hope of happiness, now plunged into the apathy of disappointment and despair. Knowing these things the few set out with no delusions upon the score of  the reception their propaganda will receive at the hands of their class, and are not downcast and peevish when the results desired fail to materialise as quickly as they wish.

We of The Socialist Party of Great Britain are of this few. Our mission is simple. We have to proceed with our educational propaganda until the working class have understood the fundamental facts of their position—the facts that because they do not own the means by which they live they are commodities on the market, never bought unless the buyers (the owners of the means of life) can see a profit to  themselves in the transaction, always sold when the opportunity offers because in that only can the necessaries of life be obtained. We have to emphasise the fact that no appreciable change is possible in the working-class condition while they remain commodities, and that the only method by which the alteration can be wrought is by the working class taking the means of life out of the hands of those who at present hold them, and whose private ownership is the cause of the trouble. Before this can occur the workers will have to understand the inevitable opposition of interests between them and the capitalist class, who, because of their ownership of the means of life, are able to exploit them, so that they will not make the mistake of voting into power, as they have always done hitherto, the representatives of the interests of those owning the means of life, because those who dominate political power dominate also the armed forces that keep the working class in subjection.

The justification of hostility

Therefore are we in opposition to all other political parties, holding on irrefutable evidence, that these other parties are confusing what must be clear to working-class minds before a change can be effected. This is our mission, and we shall conduct it with all the energy we have at our command. We know that the row we have to hoe is likely to be a long one. That does not affright us—because we know that were the row twice as long it would have to be hoed. There is no dodging the duty. There are no short cuts. Naturally, however, we wish the work to be covered as soon as possible, and that is why we oppose and expose those gentlemen who, sometimes with the best of intentions, blur the issue that must be kept unblurred, and so prolong our labours.

That is our position. If it contains flaws we shall be glad to hear of them. Meanwhile we regret that the entrance of the “Labour” men into the best club in Europe is not a Socialist victory and cannot be a Labour triumph. Labour only triumphs where Socialism wins. Meanwhile also, those who thought that the entrance of Burns into ministerial position would result in administration to the advantage of the unemployed should note that the Local Government Board has refused to sanction that portion of the loan applied for from Tottenham which was intended to meet the difference between the cost of work performed by a contractor and its cost if executed by the local unemployed. And those who thought that the advent of a new Liberal administration implied a large-hearted and sympathetic Labour policy should observe that sixty men have been sent to prison for five days each, and fifteen to one month each, for taking up collections in the street during unemployed demonstrations.

A. J. M. Gray

Notes of Interrogation. (1906)

From the February 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Durham and Sir James Joicey, both large Colliery owners, sent letters to Mr. Thos. Burt, miners' candidate, wishing him success and enclosing £100 each towards his election expenses. Why?

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Mr. C. D. Hodgson, Liberal, declared he had spent £10,000 in fighting elections. Why? 

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Every responsible member of the capitalist Liberal Party has disposed of all the really awkward questions relating to the condition of the working-class by the easy method of referring to the appointment of Burns to the L.G.B. Why? 

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The "Daily News” says the election was fought not upon what the Liberals may or may not do, but what the Tories have done. Why ? 

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Mr. W. C. Steadman (Sec. Trades Union Parliamentary Committee) and Mr. Isaac Mitchell (Sec. Federated Trade Unions), were strongly supported in their election campaign by these well-known democrats and Labour sympathisers: Lord Carrington (Board of Trade) and Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Office). Why?

Socialism and Darwinism. (1906)

From the January 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are reproached for being revolutionists, by alleged Darwinians, (who have never studied evolution) as well as by some pseudo Socialists, who pretend to apply Darwinism to social movements. Both sections object to revolution, as unscientific. This objection can only arise from a misunderstanding of evolution, or from a deliberate attempt to switch the working-class off the revolutionary path. Socialism, as expounded by the S.P.G.B, through its official organ and its lecturers, is essentially scientific, never pandering to ignorance or prejudice, or attempting to escape from scientific truths by bowing to unscientific sentiments. This being so, and science being considered from the standpoint of evolution, we must consider the laws of evolution.

“The survival of the fittest,” is the law arising from the fact that all things constantly change. It means that an organism, out of harmony with its surroundings, must either adapt itself to the new conditions, or perish, Let us apply this law to society and see if the position taken up by the Socialist is tenable, bearing constantly in mind that man can consciously act on his environment, and thus help to bring it into harmony with his needs.

To-day capitalist society is composed of two classes, a working class producing all the wealth of society, and, a capitalist class that, as such, produces nothing. The members of the working class own none of the means of living, and are only allowed to use the means owned by the other class, on the condition that a profit is made out of their power to labour by hand or brain, which, being their only possession, they are forced to sell to obtain the necessaries of existence. This system of society has evolved from previous forms in which were other class distinctions. Just as, following the lines laid down by Darwin, we trace the evolution of man from his ape-like ancestors, so, from that stage onward, we trace his social evolution.

The Socialist deals with society, that is with man as a social being. He does not run counter to the laws which govern physiological development; rather does he find the same laws running parallel, both in biology and in sociology.

Take man as he was just a few stages ahead of his fellow animals, He lived in caves and trees; his means of subsistence were the spontaneous products of nature – roots, fruits and nuts, The development of articulate language, and the discovery of the use of fire enabled him to convert fish into an article of food, and caused a revolution in his means of securing an existence. Stationary conglomerations of individuals were transformed into migratory co-operative groups, following the shores of lakes and seas, and the courses of rivers. The numerous dangers that now confronted man, and the more easy acquirement of food by co-operative effort, caused the cementing together of various groups on a co-operative principle, holding wealth, that is, food, etc., in common. Thus the earliest known form of society was what is termed Primitive Communism, that is, a society based upon the common ownership of the means and necessaries of life, with those means used co-operatively for the benefit of all members of the community. This had its reflex in a form of government, crudely democratic, to correspond with the economic basis of that society. Thus, man carried on collectively the struggle for existence.

The next stage was common ownership within the consanguine group, i.e., within a group whose members considered themselves to be descended from a common ancestor, With the growth of chattel slavery, first of all in the Eastern hemisphere, the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture, we can trace the growth of the patriarchal system. This system was a further step from primitive communism, as, while it was still mainly a system of consanguine collectivism, it contained the beginnings of private property – other than purely personal articles, such as ear and nose rings, &c.

In other tribes property was held by the women. This, the matriarchal system, arose from the fact that the earliest known forms of property were the weapons of fighting and hunting and domestic utensils,  and, as the division of labour took place along the line of sex, the women, who had control of the domestic utensils in the first instance, continued to control other property as it came into existence, though the nature of that property had changed. This lasted throughout the earlier forms of society, down to the Greek and Roman civilisations, with the exception of the minority of tribes who had established the patriarchal system.

Even in early society, after the break-up of primitive communism, there were struggles over the ownership or non-ownership of wealth. After the discovery of the art of writing, and the ascendancy of man’s power over Nature, the struggle for existence took the form, not so much of the character of man against Nature, as class against class. Then, after generations of. development of the matriarchal and patriarchal systems, a revolution took place in some parts of Asia and Asia Minor that completely overthrew the form of society based upon a real or fictitious blood-relationship of its members, and established the system of political society based upon territory rather than kinship, the basis of modern civilisation. The various struggles that took place in the old Roman Republic are common knowledge to most students of history. The struggle for political supremacy between the holders of large and small estates, the ownership of chattel slaves, etc., continued till that form of society, a bastard form as it was, was finally overthrown and feudalism became general in Europe. The struggles that took place between the old feudal nobility and the rising merchant class that had developed out of the old guildmasters, the growth of manufacture, &c., with which all historical students are familiar, culminated in the overthrow of feudalism and the establishment of capitalism. The development of machinery and the application of steam thereto, completed the work and put the capita1ist class into supreme power. To-day the struggle proceeds between the capitalist class and the working-class.

Present day capitalist society is, therefore, seen to be the result of evolution, consisting of a series of revolutions, mainly consummated by the force of arms. Sixty years ago, in the Communist Manifesto, the evolutionary theory had been applied to society, even before Darwin’s Origin of Species had appeared. It is pointed out in that manifesto, how the economic factors develope within society until the political and social superstructure of that society prevents their further development. Society then undergoes a revolution in order to harmonise its social and political conditions with its economic foundation.

To-day the production of wealth is a social act, but the wealth is appropriated by individuals; and although man’s power of producing wealth is greater than ever it has been in the world’s history, yet we see the greatest poverty. Each class that controlled the means of living in the past, did so by virtue of controlling the political power and endeavouring to maintain the politica1 and social superstructure best suited to the maintenance of its economic power. Society only entered upon a new stage of progress when the class beneath overthrew the class above and established its own particular social and political forms. To-day the ruling class, the capitalist class, is wholly destitute of the ability to govern society. It performs no useful function; and the biological law, that when an organ or organism becomes useless, it atrophies and finally perishes, will apply here. The ring, combine, and trust have proved the capitalist class to be superfluous, while the chronic poverty of the workers in the midst of plenty, the evil of unemployment, and the thousand-and-one evils that afflict modern society, show it to be unable to control the productive forces. It must, therefore give way to a more vigorous class that shall establish a new system in consonance with the social character of production. That class can only be the working-class.

Professor R, Darwin, in delivering the first portion of his inaugural address to the British Association at Cape Town recently, stated that in applying the evolutionary method to the state, we found that the state would progress until it reached the point when it could no longer properly perform its functions; then a revolution was necessary for that progress to go on and a new state to be established. This from the son of  the man whom these pseudo-scientists and bogus Socialists would use against us! Thus after 60 years of comparative obscurity, the revolutionary scientific principles are acknowledged as correct. So will the revolutionary scientific attitude of The Socialist Party of Great Britain be acknowledged as correct, and rescued from obscurity when those ill-balanced evolutionists and bogus Socialists have been prevented from misleading the workers, and attempting to rob them of the vigour which a clear knowledge of the scientific principles of Socialism imparts,

Socialism, then, is a necessary complement to evolution. He who admits  evolution in Nature generally, but denies it to society, has grasped only half its application and cannot form a correct judgment, He who would deny that revolution is a necessary factor in social evolution, is a dangerous misleader who must be opposed on every occasion. The revolution from capitalism to Socialism can only be accomplished by a conscious act on the part of the working-class. For the workers to clearly understand their position in society and the historic role they are called upon to play, they must be educated along these lines. To educate them in these principles, and organise them on this basis, is the work of the Socialist Party. When the unconditional surrender of the capitalist class shall have been demanded by an educated intelligent proletariat, the hour of revolution will have struck. With the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth by the workers, it will have been demonstrated that the effete and corrupt capitalist class has perished – that the workers have survived. It will have been demonstrated that Socialism means “the survival of the fittest.”

E. J. B. Allen

These be Your Gods, O Israel. (1906)

From the January 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

’Midst the rhetorical and literary boom of drums and clang of cymbals the long expected and suddenly happening resignation of the Tory Government takes place, and the Liberal party marches bravely forward to take up the burden, the troubles, the cares, the anxieties – and the salaries – of office. A great demonstration at Albert Hall where the Prime Minister adumbrates – as the Daily News so well puts it – the programme of the Liberal Party if it is returned to power at the election in January. The People’s advocate – Reynolds – shrieks in triumph at the Radical victory shown in the statement of the programme and denounces, beforehand, as traitors to the people, all those who either vote Tory or abstain from supporting the Liberals. This is what Republicanism appears to lead to. In addition, a clever campaign is being conducted by the Daily News on behalf of “Social Reform” versus “Tariff Reform”, that, while dishing up the ancient, hoary ideas of taxing the land and establishing small holdings, wisely refuses to have any discussion upon its proposals carried on in its columns. Some of their dupes might be enlightened even by one or two letters and that danger must be avoided. In the first article, however, it is clearly laid down that the way to remedy the evils admittedly existing – an admission forced from the Liberal Party by the Tariff Reformers – is by a series of wise and moderate measures in the direction above indicated. In face of these attempts to ensure the return of the Liberals to power in January as friends of the workers a brief survey of their career will be in order.

The names – Conservative and Liberal – were first adopted at the election of 1830. Previous to that the parties were known as Tory and Whig. Originally the Tory Party represented the Landlord class, the remains of the Feudal Barons, while the Whigs represented the new commercial class that had been steadily growing in wealth and power since the 15th century. The civil war of 1642-49 was the big outward evidence of the internal antagonism existing between these two classes, and although the ebb of the tide brought out the Restoration it could not alter or even more than modify the power the commercial class had won as a result of the struggle. Steadily the Whigs grew in power till the time of George III, when another temporary set back, followed by the American and Napoleonic Wars, took place. But it was not to last.

In 1830 the Liberals were returned to power with the largest majority on record, namely, 301, and they were in power in eight out of nine Parliaments up to 1865. The great Reform Bill of 1832 finally placed the political power in the hands of the plutocracy out of those of the aristocracy and completed the work for which the Liberal Party had existed. From this time onward the economic and social divisions between the aristocrats and plutocrats, blue bloods and traders, have been broken down, the last flickers of the struggle taking place over the Factories Acts, and to-day the trader is a peer like Lord Bass, and the aristocrat a trader like Lords Dudley, Penrhyn, Elvastone, etc. Whenever a new swindle is being floated on the Stock Markets, some titled person is asked to lend his name – for a consideration – to go upon the prospectus as a draw to the unwary or those “who love a Lord”. And this reaches high up the scale as well as low down. This combining of economic and social interests has obliterated all the real differences that at one time existed between the Conservatives and Liberals as political parties. Apart from the subsidiary struggle between the official agents of the capitalist class for the spoils of office, the only reason why the two parties are kept in existence is to gull the workers into the belief that they will materially better their conditions by returning to power – at one time, Liberals, at another, Conservatives. The advocates of Liberalism are just now detailing various actions of the Conservatives, when in power, against the workers interests – and they have plenty of material to use. For the moment, we may leave these advocates at their work while we take up the question of the claim of the Liberals to be the “Party of Progress”.

First, let us look at their record in industrial matters concerning the workers. They claim credit for having legalised combination among the workers in 1824. True! they were in office when the Act was passed, but the manner in which Mr Francis Place outside and Mr. Joseph Hume inside the House of Commons planned, intrigued and finally smuggled – there is no other word for it – the Act through Parliament, is unequalled in the annals of that edifice of trickery. In 1825, when the same Liberal Government, having woke up to what had been done, repealed the Act, the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor stated they were unaware it had ever been passed! And we have clever politicians to-day, with not one-tenth of the ability and power of these two men, who imagine that, in circumstances vastly different, they will be able to get measures passed benefiting the workers without the capitalists recognising it!

When Lord Melbourne was returned in 1830, he appointed a Commission to enquire into the standing of the trade unions – then, of course, secret societies. The Commission consisted of W. Nassau Senior, professor of political economy at Oxford and Mr. W. M. Tomlinson, a lawyer. They advocated such terrible measures of repression that the Government did not dare to recommend them to Parliament, but put them in operation in detail. Thus, the Lancashire Miners and the Southwark Shoemakers suffered imprisonment in 1832, the Bermondsey Tanners in 1834, and in the latter year the notorious case of the Dorchester labourers also occurred when six agricultural labourers were sentenced to seven years transportation, and two of them were sold into slavery as soon as they landed in Australia. All the above for merely joining their Trade Unions! During this period a big agitation was going on among the working class against the fearful conditions of employment in the Mills and Factories, which conditions could only be described as hellish. The Liberals opposed strenuously every Factory Act that was brought forward on behalf of Women and Children, to say nothing of men. Cobden, Bright and Gladstone, deservedly the leading lights of canting hypocritical Nonconformity, turned their religion tenets to commercial account by demanding that, in the words of Jesus, the nation should suffer little children to go unto them that they might wring profit out of the hardly formed bones and tender flesh of children.

But all cant was not on their side alone. The philosophic Radicals of the Utilitarian school, while practically Atheists, were just as strong opponents of any restriction being placed upon the hours of labour of women and children, as the snuffling religious humbugs. Mr. Roebuck, for many years “Father of the House of Commons” and a member of this school, wrote to his wife in 1838 the following description of the interior of a cotton mill: –

  “The place was full of women, young, all of them; some of them large with child, and obliged to stand twelve hours each day. Their hours are from five in the morning to seven in the evening, two hours of that being for rest, so that they stand twelve clear hours. The heat was excessive in some of the rooms, the stink pestiferous and in all an atmosphere of cotton flue. I nearly fainted.”

Roebuck stood about six feet high and was well proportioned. Yet in 1844, six years after the above letter was written, he opposed the ten-and-a-half hours Bill and said the description of misery had been exaggerated, “take the women-of-all-work in London, compare them with the labouring girl in the factories and you will find that the condition of the latter is a sort of Paradise”!

Yes! the sort of Paradise in which a strong man nearly fainted upon the occasion of a short visit. And it was this sort of cant that was brought forward by the intellectual and industrial giants of the Liberal Party in opposition to the workers’ demands. The Tories, smarting under their defeat of 1832, supported the agitation for the Factories Acts, which did not directly affect them, and it was during their spell of power from 1841 to 1847 that the Act forbidding the employment of Women and Children in the Mines was passed (1842).

Not only were the Chartists prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the Law by the Liberals, but their treatment of Ernest Jones was particularly inhuman – a sample of the mercy one may expect who runs counter to the interests of the ruling class.

When the great Lock-out of the Building Trades took place in London in 1859-61, characterised by Sidney Webb as the greatest trade union struggle on record, the Liberal Government sent the Sappers to work on the Chelsea Barracks as blacklegs. The same Party opposed F. Harrison’s Bill to Legalise Trade Union Funds, but made up for laxity in this direction by sending the soldiers to Mold in Flintshire when the miners were out on strike in June, 1869, and shooting them down without even the formality of reading the Riot Act.

The Act of 1871 that was supposed to place Trade Unions upon a secure basis, was such a fraud, actually making the position of the worker worse than before, that the agitation was continued till in 1875 the Tories passed the Act that Trade Unions have existed under up to the present time. Still, something was done, as for instance the imprisonment of seven women in South Wales for shouting “Bah” after some blacklegs, and of some South London gas-stokers for merely preparing to strike. (1871.) It was during the same Government’s office that Mr. Plimsoll, who had for some years been carrying on an agitation on behalf of the Merchant Seamen, was thrown out of the House of Commons for calling certain Liberal shipowners “cold-blooded murderers” because they sent men to sea in rotten ships that could never reach their supposed destination, to gain the insurance money. The Load Line Bill – popularly known as the Plimsoll Line – was passed by the Tories in 1875.

Equally bad in the record of the “Party of Progress” in the political and intellectual as well as industrial fields. It is always claimed by the Liberals that they were the extenders of the Franchise and of intellectual liberties all round, but this is only a first-class example of the saying regarding the giving of a lie a start. A hardened old Whig like Justin McCarthy has to admit in his History of Our Own Times that the Reform Bill of 1832 “left the working classes almost altogether out of the franchise . . . It broke down the monopoly which the aristocracy and landed classes had enjoyed, and admitted the middle classes to a share in the law-making power”, and “this was all the more exasperating, because the excitement and agitation and success of the Reform Bill was brought about by working men.” Not only so, but, as stated above, the Liberals were returned to power in eight out of the nine Parliaments from 1830 to 1867, and returned upon the express promise to extend the franchise – only to show how consistently they can break promises. In 1866 Gladstone went out of office rather than accept a £6 franchise, which he said “would give the workers a majority, a thing neither he nor any of his friends ever intended to do.”

The ’cute old trickster, Disraeli, took the opportunity to score a popular triumph against the Liberals by introducing, and finally placing upon the Statute Book, a Bill for the £10 franchise which the bulk of the workers vote under to-day. The Property Qualification and Jewish Disability had been abolished under the same leadership in 1858. When Mr. Forster was piloting the Education Act through the House of Commons in 1871, he gladly accepted the help of the Tories to pass the religious clauses of the Bill, while he and his friends threw out the clauses of the Ballot Act, that provided for the payment of Election Expenses, in the same year.

Later in the ’80’s, when Bradlaugh wished to affirm, instead of taking an oath to a God he did not believe in, the Liberals threw him out of the House of Commons by physical force to show their love of intellectual freedom. Just now they are making all the capital they can out of the South African War, for which, by-the-way, they always voted supplies, but conveniently forget, that in 1882, Gladstone’s Government bombarded Alexandria and shot down the Egyptians, whom Gladstone himself described as “a people rightly struggling to be free”, in the interests of the Bondholders, whilst the worst Coercion Acts against Ireland were passed during this period.

It might be urged that all these facts are ancient history, and do not apply to present Liberals or affairs. Well! let us take the last period when the Liberals were in office, namely, from 1892 to 1895. They were returned upon John Morley’s famous “Newcastle programme”, which contained, among the items – “Old Age Pensions”, “One Man one Vote”, “Miners’ 8 Hours”, “Taxation of Land Values”, “Ending or Mending the House of Lords”, “Home rule”, “Payment of Members and Election Expenses”, etc. – a programme much more definite and “advanced” than that shadowed forth at the Albert Hall, but although in power three years, not one of these items became law. It is said, of course, that the House of Lords stood in the way, but many of the items are Budget matters which the Lords do not control, while it may be noted that Gladstone, appointed more Peers than any other Prime Minister. Moreover, when in 1871 the House of Lords threw out his Army reform Bill he took it to the Crown and had it signed and made Law in spite of them! If, with one Bill, why not with another. When Keir Hardie asked for half-a-day to discuss the Unemployed, the Liberals could not spare the time, yet shortly afterwards they spent half-a-day passing resolutions of sickening adulation to the Duke of York on his marriage. When the Tories brought in an Old Age Pensions Bill the Liberals opposed it and threw it out.

Nemesis, however, dogged their steps, and if they could not pass any of the above “Reforms” into Law, opportunities were given them to show their impartiality when called upon to take action between employer and employed.

In September, 1893, the Miners, working for the Tory, Lord Masham, at Featherstone, were on strike, and during a demonstration the soldiers were marched against them and fired upon them, killing two and wounding several others. Mr. Lowther raised the matter in the House of Commons on the question of who was to bear the expense of the troops being sent to Featherstone. In the course of his reply Mr. H.H. Asquith (Home Secretary) made the following remarks to the “Labour” M.P.’s.

 “Where are the men who made these statements? (that the soldiers had been sent to help the Employers) . . . it is a very easy thing to go about the country speaking to excited audiences where you are safe from refutation or reply; but it is a very different thing . . . to come here to the House of Commons . . . face to face with the Minister you condemn and fight the matter out. These gentlemen know as well as I do, and would admit it if they cleared their minds and tongues of cant, that there is no man in this country who would not have acted as I have done, and who would not have felt it his bounden duty to supply the Local Authorities with such a force as in their judgment was necessary to supplement the local resources at their disposal”. – Hansard, vol, 17, pages 1725-1726).

The above extract effectually disposes of the statements made by Asquith’s friends that he did not send the troops to Featherstone. His own admission should be proof enough to the most hardened Liberal. Note also that not a single “Labour” member, then or since, repudiated Asquith’s statement that anyone one of them would have sent the soldiers to Featherstone if they held office – a splendid piece of evidence as to the position they occupy.

An inquiry commission was appointed and reported in January, 1894. It was pointed out that in this report the rifles used would carry three miles and kill, and it was therefore suggested that weapons of shorter range – say 200 or 300 yards – should be used in civil disputes as innocent persons were liable to be injured.

Mr. John Burns – not the Right Honourable then – said:

  “He could not agree with the point which had been raised as to the alteration of the weapons and ammunition to be used in the cases of civil riot; that would only alter the injury caused; some people might say ‘what about shooting down innocent people?’ They must take their risk of that. If innocent people attended affairs of this sort they did so at their own risk. He did not hold the Home Office responsible in this case”. – (Hansard, vol. 20, pages 1305-1306).

And yet we hear glib queries as to why an Office, that men of wealth and influence would sell their souls – if they had any – to obtain, is given to a working engineer! Let the above answer.

The price of this act – of treachery to the workers, of faithful service to his paymasters – is a seat in the Cabinet and £2,000 a year.

Note, moreover, Burns’ attempt to shift the responsibility of sending the troops to Featherstone off the shoulders of Asquith, after the latter’s own admission of the act.

One point, however, is logically taken by the assassin’s defender. Admit the right of the capitalist to have his wage slaves slaughtered when they revolt against their miserable conditions, and then the slaughtering may just as well be done by long range as by short range guns. Innocent people – three miles away – must take their risk of attending affairs of this sort! But the very admission of this right of the capitalist explains why both Tory and Liberal Press, from the Daily Mail to the Daily News have joined together in a chorus of congratulations to “Honest John” though the adjectival noun is rather early. Burns may be said to have got “on” before, to have got “Honour” of its kind – now, but there is not the slightest possibility of his getting “Honest” either in the near or ultimate future.

During 1894, a Liberal capitalist, Mr. C. H. Wilson, M.P., of the Wilson Steamship Company, Hull, had a strike of dockers occur at his wharves and brought in blacklegs to break the strike. The obliging Home Secretary (Asquith again) sent a gunboat to the scene of action – Hull – to protect the blacklegs and shoot down the dockers if they showed signs of being troublesome.

In 1895 the Liberals were defeated on cordite and have been out of office 10 years, but can any fair-minded person pretend in face of the brief account already given of their career during the 19th Century, that there is the slightest difference between them and the Conservatives as far as the workers are concerned? I think not.

It is for the working class to study and realise that while one section of the community – the capitalist class – own the means of life of the whole community, the remainder of the community are slaves to that section. Whatever label a political party or person may wear – whether Conservative, Liberal, Radical, Reform, Labour or any other – the one question for the working-class is “do they stand for the retention of a system allowing a small section of Society to exploit the other, the working class”? If so, no matter, with what qualification or modification, if any, then they are necessarily and inevitably the enemy of the exploited and must be so branded. Fine promises avail them nothing. In the words of Wendell Phillips, “WE NEVER FORGET”, but keeping the facts clearly in front of our fellow workers’ eyes march steadily to the goal of our Emancipation.

Jack Fitzgerald

Sting in the Tail: Madness in the Air (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Madness in the air

Capitalism’s private property set-up means that we have to pay for nearly everything we need. About the only thing that is still free is the air we breathe because, so far, our masters haven’t come up with a way of making us pay for it.

But what they can do in certain circumstances is ration the amount we get. The American Consumers’ Union (ACU) reports that airlines are reducing the quantity and quality of air provided for in-flight passengers in order to save money.

On old aircraft the air was completely changed every three minutes, but on modern planes passengers get a mix of fresh and recycled air which can trigger colds, flu, and even serious illnesses. The ACU claims this policy can save airlines £40,000 per plane a year.

Maybe they can’t make us pay for our air yet, but they can ensure that supplying us with the stuff costs them as little as it possibly can.


Bigger and bigger

The end of the Cold War and the resulting widespread cuts in military spending will force the ‘‘defence” industry to contract and consolidate.

Now, in an effort to survive, companies involved in the arms business must either swallow competitors or get out of the business altogether. This process is well underway in America. Industry giants Lockheed and Martin Marietta have just merged. Northrop has gobbled-up Grumman while General Electrical and General Dynamics have been selling-off their aerospace divisions. Only a few companies arc expected to emerge once the dust has settled.

In Europe this consolidation has hardly begun, but it must happen or European capitalism’s share in the world's arms market will decline in the face of stronger American competition.

And so capitalism’s relentless march towards bigger but fewer economic units continues, and even the arms industry’ has no defence against that.


Bought and sold

On BBC1's Business Breakfast news a Government Minister was going on about some people who are “the consumers of a lot of the products”.

This was Eric Forth, Education Minister and rabid free-marketeer, talking about the education industry, and those “consumers” are employers while the “products" are schoolchildren and students.

Forth’s labelling of these youngsters as “products” may have offended some viewers, but it's only his market-mad way of explaining that “a lot” of them will eventually be selling their commodity, labour power, to employers on the labour market in much the same way as other commodities are sold to other consumers in, say, supermarkets.


Capitalist roaders

Now that China is rushing headlong down the once-reviled capitalist road, there are many players in the game of grabbing wealth and power.

According to that same BBC1 news programme, one of the most powerful players is an organisation known by the initials PLA and it is busily expanding into ownership of night-clubs. Karaoke bars and brothels.

In case you haven't already guessed. PLA stands for Peoples Liberation Army, so whatever battling China’s army does these days would appear to be for market share.


Where will it end?

  "A senior medical expert has warned that a cash-strapped health service may decide it is cheaper to kill dying patients than to take care of them ” (The Herald, 24 August).

Doctor Donald Murchison thinks

  "there is little doubt that if market forces were to prevail, you wouldn't put your money into terminal care, you would dispose of them quietly and surreptitiously”.

Has the doc gone a little over the top? Actually, he is a bit behind the times. Eleven years ago Professor Stewart Cameron, a kidney specialist at Guy’s hospital, was publicly threatening to refuse to sign death certificates for patients who were allowed to die because of health cuts. An estimated 2,000 died yearly because they were refused dialysis once they reached a certain age.

So, what the good Doctor fears may happen to the dying has been happening for years to people who are only ill, and not even “quietly and surreptitiously” either.


A macabre tale

As if to emphasis capitalism's callousness, a BBC-TV programme (24 August) revealed that doctors in intensive care units are using computers in helping them to decide which patients should be treated or left to die.

  "David Bihari, director of intensive care at Guy's hospital, London, was featured on the programme using a computer system which flashed up a coffin if it assesses patients as being unlikely to survive beyond 90 days” (Guardian, 25 August).

A hospital spokeswoman denied that the computer was being used for the purpose of saving money, but Doctor Bihari struck an ominous note:

  "The issue for the 1990's is that health resources are limited and the pot is not infinitely deep. We have to identify patients where further treatment is futile. In these cases computer-aided diagnosis can be useful. ”

So the pressure to save money is there, and experience of capitalism’s priorities shows that when it comes to money versus human need then money wins it every time.

Pity the Continent (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

If ever a continent cried out for justice, for help and, more, for Socialism, it is Africa, a land of 30 million square miles, 54 nations, a thousand languages and 642 million people; a land geographically as rich in diversity as it is in fauna and flora; a land organically as rich in oil and coal as it is in gold and diamonds, and yet, paradoxically, the poorest continent on Earth.

For over a hundred years a spectre has haunted Africa — the demon of world capitalism that sees Africa only as a source of profit, cheap commodities, a gullible market for western exports and an easily exploitable population ruled by corrupt leaders.

The age of overt colonialism may have gone, when the European powers raped and carved up Africa, each with vested interests backed up by huge armies, but now there are new colonists who can do ten times as much damage with the flick of a pen — the World Bank and the IMF.

In ten years, loans given by the IMF and the World Bank have tripled Africa’s debt burden to $180 billion — a figure that represents more than Africa’s aggregate net income. Debt repayments currently stand at $11 billion a year — a staggering four rimes more than what Africa spends on health and welfare.

Since the mid-1980s, African governments have repaid the IMF $2 billion than they have received in loans — a system that is so severe that every adult and child in Tanzania and Zambia owe their nations' external debtors twice their yearly earnings.

African governments secure loans unwittingly to the detriment of their respective nations because they believe this is the only way to domestic stability. Most are forced into accepting loans on terms and conditions regarding policies they would not have hitherto adopted: the privatisation of state-owned industries, the introduction of new constitutions and drastic reductions in public expenditure which hit health and education programmes the hardest.

In the past ten years about 30 African nations have come to regret the acceptance of IMF and World Bank advice. Living standards have dropped by two per cent annually, while unemployment has quadrupled to 100 million, with real wages falling by 30 percent. Africa is now worse off than it was 25 years ago. The June issue of New African declared that "the average African has 10 percent less food to eat than twenty years ago”.

The Guardian (20 July) reported how "in myriad cases, bank projects, supposedly targeted at the poorest of Africa’s poor, not only increased inequality and hunger, but exacerbated ethnic conflicts . . . Across Africa, projects funded by the bank have become synonymous with financial mismanagement, environmental degradation, the displacement of vulnerable populations and corruption”.

Eighteen African nations are amongst the world's poorest 20, 30 amongst the world’s poorest 40. Africa with eight times the land area of the USA and twice its population has only one percent of world trade, while American capitalists are top of the world trade league. In 1991, the total GNP for Africa south of the Sahara, excluding South Africa, was $204.7 billion — only slightly higher than that of tiny Belgium with a population of 10 million. Within six years 300 million Africans will be living below the subsistence level.

Myth of overpopulation

Africa has a population of 642 million. Considering Africa is three times the size of China, it has one sixth the Chinese population per square mile. Yet some experts point to African overpopulation as one of its problems. This is pure fallacy. While 50 percent of Africans are undernourished, it is widely known that the continent is capable of sustaining a population several times its present size were Western farming methods applied there.

While millions were dying in the Ethiopian famine eight years ago. the Ethiopian government were exporting thousands of tonnes of lentils to the West. In 1991, Zimbabwe was forced, by the World Bank, to sell one million tonnes of surplus grain to meet debt repayments. A year later a drought hit southern African cutting Zimbabwe’s grain output by 60 percent, with disastrous effects.

If anything, the problem facing Africa is western capitalism. Shortages of food and overpopulation do not even enter the equation. Guy Arnold, writing in New African in September believes "an enormous deception has been practised upon Africa since I960. It is that all the interference by the World Bank, the IMF and the Paris Club has been for Africa’s advantage".

"Africa", Arnold says, “ is not at all interested in such donor prescriptions, but is obliged to accept them because it is heavily in debt and debt is a primary instrument of control."

This is an intrinsic fact of capitalist society: the wealthy control the poor.

Africa is a land of plenty and only Socialism could truly release its productive potential to the benefit of its people. For a hundred years the West has carved up Africa, diseased its flesh and drained its life-blood. Reforms and loans will only ever be the sticking plaster over the gunshot wound.

John Bissett

Battering down all Chinese Walls (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last remaining bastions of the doomed "Socialism in One Country" experiment, are finally facing up to the reality of the world capitalist market to which they are, and have always been, inextricably linked.

China’s government has now pretty much given up any pretence that it is operating a non-capitalist economy, with the current slogan "Socialism with a Chinese Face". This involves opening up the economy to international capital while retaining tight control over the apparatus of state repression.

The Chinese have been much bolder in opening up the fenced-off Economic Zones, where multinationals are free to exploit a cowed labour force without the unpleasantness of needing to account for their actions either to an elected government or to a strong union movement — increasingly the case in the other rapidly developing economies of east Asia.

Western multinationals recognise a good business partner when they see one, and the Chinese "Communists" are some of the best around. Nobody on the boards of US constructions companies like Parsons Brinckerhoff or Brown and Root wanted to see Western governments raising awkward questions of human rights on the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and indeed the Clinton administration was quiet as a mouse on the subject.

The rewards are now being reaped. Between the 28 and 30 August, a US trade mission initialled over $5 billions-worth of new business in China in the key power, automotive and communications sectors.

No wonder that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who led the trade mission with the heads of some of America’s biggest corporations, proclaimed himself "exhilarated” by the warmth of his reception from Chinese officials.

And this is a mere taster for the $250 billions-worth of infrastructure projects coming up before the end of the century in China. "We intend to compete in this market and we intend to win", Brown warned his western rivals.

So important are these contracts to the ailing US economy — rivalling in size those in the halcyon days of the Shah's untrammelled spending with US heavy industry — that the "moral”and liberal Bill Clinton has bowed to the inevitable and "delinked" trade and human rights issues.

The key indicator of this was the renewal by his administration of China’s Most Favoured Nation trading status after US corporations argued that the administration's focus on human rights was jeopardising US business interests in China and benefiting competitors in Europe and Asia. US exports to China are growing at four times the rate of exports to the rest of the world, and now provide a living for around 150,000 Americans.

Commerce Secretary Brown says he will resume a “dialogue" on human rights issues this month. The Chinese contemptuously broke them off during a tense visit by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to China earlier this year.

As an interesting footnote, the contracts signed by Brown’s mission include an agreement between TRW in the US, Suman group of Guandong province and Beijing Cable TV Network to supply one million descrambler units for television programmes in Chinese households. We eagerly await the tortured explanations of Chinese state ideologues as to how this actually brings the day of universal access to the means of communications any nearer.

Andy Thomas

Highway-One Revisited (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Meanwhile in neighbouring Vietnam, the state bureaucracy is also well down the road to quietly burying the experiment of “Socialism in One Country". Seventy-five international construction companies arc now bidding for $317 millions-worth of contracts to rebuild Highway One. This road, which links Hanoi in the north with Ho Chi Minh City (ex-Saigon) is a key symbol of the war fought to rid Vietnam forever of American "Imperialism”.

Among the key bidders are US corporations anxious to repair the potholes and craters gouged by their own bombs and mines — and close on their heels the South Koreans, key supporters of the US’s Vietnam war effort. Even the Chinese are having a go, reckoning that this is one area where their technology can compete with the ex-imperialist enemy.

The renewed interest in Vietnam follows its full rehabilitation into the international capitalist system, capped with renewed access to International Monetary Fund and other multilateral agency loans. Naturally there are no humanitarian motives behind this. The flow of international capital into developing economies, set up by the Bretton Woods regime after the last world war, was designed to keep depression at bay in the West by allowing developing countries credit to buy excess production from Western corporations.

In the case of Highway One, international construction companies are now confident that with IMF and World Bank loans pump-priming the Vietnamese economy, traffic volumes will increase sufficiently to yield an acceptable profit from tolls.

And as in China, there are richer pickings to come. The World Bank estimates that Vietnam will need $7 to $10 billion by the year 2000 for infrastructure repair, with at least $2.2 billion allocated to transport.

Andy Thomas

Letter: In Search of Nebulous Reforms (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I should like to draw your attention to — and perhaps spark some debate amongst your readers — what I see as a nihilistic attitude developing amongst some Socialists towards reformism.

An attitude appears to be developing that reforms don’t do any good, are irrelevant to the emergence of real socialism, and are therefore not worth bothering about.

This is obviously nonsense. Of course it's true that any reforms under capitalism are nebulous and could disappear at any moment — indeed in the last fifteen years many of the earlier gains have been eroded or diminished — but it's also true that in many areas, reforms over the last 100 years have alleviated distress and provided better working conditions for many. It is far too glib to suggest that these reforms have been granted to the working class by the ruling class in order to consolidate their own position and for no other reason. If it wasn’t for the work of the activists and reformers in the last 100 years, we would be living in a country not unlike South America in the seventies perhaps.

It's perfectly reasonable for someone like myself to support campaigns such as that against the Criminal Justice Bill whilst at the same time recognising that winning a victory in this battlefield is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems. I’m perfectly capable of holding both positions simultaneously and indeed using the struggle against the Criminal Justice Bill as a vehicle for the propagation of socialist ideas.

Indeed, it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that some reforms such as free health care, education, housing and perhaps ultimately basic foodstuffs (now there would be a genuine common agricultural policy!) and clothing could be enough to give the average man-in-the-street a taste of what full socialism could be like in its entirety, and we might find ourselves flooded with enough supporters to build the common majority we need to bring about full socialism.

In short, my view is that we should stamp on this defeatist tendency to wash our hands of the real world, and start working to change it to a better one. Socialism won't come about by writing pamphlets and passing them amongst ourselves, it will come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front.

Andy Stephenson, 

Newhaven, Sussex

Reply:
Yes, socialism will only come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front — but for socialism not for reforms of capitalism.

You are quite right too that it is obviously nonsense to suggest that reforms haven’t done any good. Of course some have. Health and safety at work legislation (now being watered down, by the way) would be an obvious case in point. But then we have never taken up the position that reforms do not, or cannot, improve things for workers under capitalism.

Our position is that it is not the purpose of a Socialist Party to advocate reforms. Its purpose is to advocate Socialism. That’s why we were set up and that’s why people join us.

Nor would we deny that as a matter of historical fact struggles by workers have got the ruling class to bring in reforms. But we would make three points here.

First, you underestimate the extent to which reforms which lead to a more healthy and better educated working class do benefit the capitalist class and that this has been an equally, if not more important, factor in their introduction.

Second, if workers had struggled for Socialism instead of for these reforms, they would still have got them — and probably more as the capitalist class made concessions to try to ward off their coming expropriation.

Third, there are other ways of improving things under capitalism than reform legislation: trade unions, tenants associations and like organisations in which workers organise themselves collectively to bring direct pressure to bear on those making decisions that affect their lives. We have always said workers should get involved in such organisations and our members, as workers, get involved in them themselves (and are just as capable as you of recognising that winning a victory in these struggles “is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems"). But as a party we don’t. We stick to our specific role of campaigning for Socialism.

Where we would take serious issue with you is when you claim that some reforms are relevant to the emergence of real socialism. We recognise that you are not putting the classic gradualist position that a series of reform measures can lead to Socialism step by step (free housing one year, free transport the next, free heating the year after, till in the end everything is free).

But you are suggesting that we should campaign for what might be called “socialist leaning" reforms. Quite apart from the fact that some of these reforms have been enacted (free education, free libraries, etc. exist while free transport has existed in some places) without having the effect on people's ideas you predict, if we were to campaign for them this would inevitably be to the detriment of our campaigning for Socialism.

And, as we pointed out earlier, if we do struggle for Socialism we'll probably get them anyway as a by-product of that struggle. That’s why it is saying that we should struggle for reforms that is defeatist, not the other way round. This is to concede that Socialism is not an urgent necessity, is not the immediate agenda. If you want Socialism, the quickest way to get it is to campaign for it directly. So, if you want Socialism, join the Socialists in that campaign.

Editors

#    #    #    #

If Paddy Small, of Glasgow, would let us know his address (not necessarily for publication) we will gladly consider his letter for publication. We regret we do not publish anonymous letters.

Voice From The Back: Taxing Your Incredulity (2012)

The  Voice From The Back column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Taxing Your Incredulity

A study by HM Revenue and customs found that the extremely rich are using avoidance schemes to reduce their income tax rate to an average of 10 per cent – less than half the average level. The Chancellor personally studied the ‘anonymised’ copies of the tax returns submitted by some of the country’s wealthiest citizens which showed some people are able to avoid paying income tax entirely. “Mr Osborne told the Daily Telegraph: “I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it’s within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don’t think that’s right.” He said, “I’m talking about people right at the top. I’m talking about people with incomes of many millions of pounds a year” (Daily Telegraph, 10 April). For a Chancellor of the Exchequer to be “shocked” and state that he doesn’t “think that’s right” is indeed incredible. Millionaires protecting their property is the very basis of capitalism.

Land of the Free?

Politicians in the USA like to depict America as the epitome of freedom and democracy and sneer at the repressive measures of totalitarian states, but their boasts are ill-founded. “America which is known as the freest country in the world has incarcerated more of its citizens than the rest of the world combined. 7.1 million Americans are either in prison, on probation or under correctional supervision. The numbers continue to climb each year as more prisons are built nationwide” (CNN, 2 April).

Recession? What Recession?

We are supposed to be living in an economic depression but this does not affect large sections of the owning class. More than 200 real estate brokers and lawyers, filed into an Off Broadway theatre last month to discuss a real estate boom. “While the brokers sipped wine and nibbled cheese, a panel of lawyers and a banker reviewed some of the biggest sales made to Russians, including the $188 million spent on properties in Florida and New York by trusts linked to Dmitry Rybolovlev, who made billions from potash fertilizer; the $48 million that a composer, Igor Krutoy, paid for an apartment at the Plaza Hotel; and the $37 million spent by Andrei Vavilov, a former deputy finance minister, on a penthouse at the Time Warner Center. … Over the past four years Russians and other citizens of the former Soviet Union have signed contracts to buy more than $1 billion worth of residential real estate in the United States, according to estimates from lawyers and brokers” (New York Times, 3 April). As the number of billionaires in Russia and Ukraine has more than tripled since 2009, to 104, according to Forbes, it is far from a depression for them.

Poverty and Plenty

Much is made of India’s industrial and commercial progress, with daily reports in the media of the increasing wealth of its millionaires, but this being capitalism there is another side to the story. “In India 93 million people are estimated to be living in slums; fully half the population of the capital, New Delhi, lives in slums, while the figure could be as high as 60 per cent in glittering Mumbai” (Inter Press Service, 4 April). Amidst growing affluence we have a growth in poverty and slums – that is how capitalism works.

Squalor And Splendour

The awful poverty and downright squalor of the Chinese working class is amongst the worst in the world but the affluence of their owning class is equally obvious. “The Chinese economy is booming at a blistering pace. It is driven largely by the Fudai: the superrich who call the superpower home. Many are just in their forties. From building 30-storey towers in just 14 days, to amassing a luxury fleet of sports cars or a private jet – China’s million millionaires and 600 billionaires are helping to change the country’s landscape. And China’s mad rush to urbanisation is only helping these elites get richer and richer” (Al Jazeera, 10 April). That this country of billionaires and poverty can still claim to be communist is surely one of the world’s greatest travesties.

Pathfinders: More Monkey Business (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

More Monkey Business

Following our remarks of last December’s Pathfinders regarding the long-established link between status in a group and levels of stress, immunity levels and heart disease, a new study of macaque monkeys seems to have established in which direction the causal link travels (BBC Online, 10 April). There probably aren’t many people confidently predicting that monkeys with naturally poor immunity, bad hearts and high levels of stress would somehow as a result end up at the bottom of the social pecking order, but so far it hasn’t been possible strictly to rule this out. The new study however appears to do just that. It shows that while an examination of the activity level of immune genes gives a reliable estimate of an individual’s social level, a change in that individual’s social rank will spark off a change in the activity levels of the immune genes, more activity corresponding to higher status. The conclusion, in other words, is that ‘status drives immune health, rather than vice-versa.’

‘Though the findings might seem to suggest that low social rank, or a decrease in social rank, can lead to reduced immune health, the team said it was “encouraging” that the effects can be counteracted by a change in the social environment’. While this is quite easy with monkeys, by changing the order in which they are introduced into a group – later arrivals being lower status – the question of how to do this in human society is politically somewhat more complicated. Since capitalism is essentially a hierarchical pyramid in which roughly 99 percent of humans have relatively low status and therefore by implication poorer health, the conclusion for a socialist is easy. Pro-capitalist reformers will have a struggle to figure out a workable solution, however.

Not that socialism will be an instant panacea for all human ills. A separate study last year revealed that ‘Infant stress in monkeys has life-long consequences’ (BBC Online, 18 August, 2011). Baby rhesus monkeys who had been separated from their mothers at birth continued to show signs of anxiety, depression and anti-social behaviour even three years later, suggesting that early trauma caused irreversible changes in the brain. Similar effects have been found in humans, with childhood stress or maltreatment being linked to a raft of adult health conditions including mental health problems, aggression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. ‘It appears that stress in childhood, for monkeys and humans, can lead to behavioural and health problems that can only be partially repaired in later life’, the article states. From a socialist point of view the conclusion to draw is that the early years of socialism will be a period of withdrawal symptoms and recovery, with some effects caused by capitalism continuing to be long-term.

Golden profits of the sun

At a cleared site near the town of Caderache in France stand concentric rings of gigantic blocks that look like a modern Carnac or Stonehenge. These blocks, so enormous they have to be constructed on site in a purpose-built factory, are in fact electro-magnets, designed to be cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero. Suspended above some of the coldest things in the galaxy will be one of the hottest things in the universe, a plasma ring shaped like a doughnut, a new sun on Earth.

This is ITER, an experimental fusion reactor, likely to be one of the most expensive science projects in history and therefore a joint collaboration of all the great powers, whose siting has been a bone of contention for a decade and whose completion is still decades away. ITER is being built to answer two key questions: how to contain a sun when no known element can withstand the heat, and how to extract a net surplus over the energy required to fire it up. The holy grail of this experiment is relatively clean and abundant energy that can among other things solve water shortage problems with large-scale energy-hungry desalination, but which more to the point cannot be held hostage by foreign powers.

A recent book on future technologies (Abundance – see review on page 22) curiously doesn’t mention fusion at all in its section on energy. Much of the optimistic discussion revolves around collection processes (eg solar) and storage or conversion (eg batteries, hydrogen etc), but without ever considering the problems. Solar energy, for example, is of less use in northern countries and particularly questionable in an age which is debating whether to seed the stratosphere with sulphur in a bid to create global dimming in order to offset greenhouse warming. Solutions involving hydrogen as an energy vector or sodium as a battery component take no account of the cost of producing these hard-to-get elements. Of the methods of generating new energy, biomass is too land-hungry, wind and tide may have unforeseen effects on weather patterns, fossil is too dirty and fission too risky. Every solution brings new problems. Extracting shale gas deposits by hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ is currently causing concerns over polluting water tables, but somewhat worse is the recent discovery that it is destroying the very same underground shale fissures currently being earmarked for carbon capture and storage (New Scientist, 28 March).

Not that these are necessarily insurmountable obstacles. From a socialist perspective a judicious mix of small-scale energy production, collection and conversion systems may do very well, especially given the new parameters of an environmentally friendlier social system. But such DIY technologies may not necessarily be the most profitable solution for capitalism. Anybody can fit a few solar panels, run a compost generator or hoist a windmill, but it takes states and multinationals to build nuclear fusion plants. The power, for the ruling class, resides in being able to fence off what people need and supply it at a premium price, while depriving people of alternatives. Fusion potentially offers that chance for fat profits.

This raises a question for socialists. Often this column goes along with the straightforward assumption that what capitalism invents, leaving aside its obnoxious military research, socialism can usually find a use for. But would socialism really want or need to run hundreds of mini-suns, at a huge ongoing cost in maintenance and risk, to say nothing of the gamma-riddled waste which, though not comparable to fission, would still be considerable? Caderache is an attempt at a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem, but even if it succeeds, whether fusion technology would be considered necessary to socialism is not by any means a given, and will be one of the things socialists will have to think hard about.

Paddy Shannon

Letters: Barmy Lammy (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barmy Lammy

Dear Editors

In the March Greasy Pole – Baby David Speaks – Ivan wrote a witty and perceptive account about the August Riots and Tottenham’s MP David Lammy.

Lammy is a typical reformist Labour professional politician. It is bewildering that Lammy links the riotous behaviour to legal restraints on parents smacking children. It is quite obvious the anti-social behaviour by young people is caused by poverty and alienation endemic in the capitalist system (1 million 16 to 24 year olds unemployed also 50 percent of young black men are unemployed) and also harassment by the guardians of the state and private property, the police. I would like to add that as a Socialist I do not condemn the young people who ‘looted’ goods like Apple I-Phones and expensive trainers from shops last August. These are the branded goods/commodities that are fetishised in the capitalist consumer society and young people were only desiring the same commodities that the affluent can afford. Young people are surrounded daily by images of get rich quick, cutting corners, quasi- legal means of making money like in the banking sector and their “looting” is chicken feed compared to the financial looting/terrorism of the financial capitalist class.

Steve Clayton,

London SW8.

Sinking wages

Dear Editors

The crew members of the Titanic were employed by the ship and not by White Star Line. This meant their pay stopped when the ship sank. If they died and a next of kin had not been named on the ship’s articles (employment contract) any pay earned would be retained by White Star Line.

Fred Moore, 

Canterbury.

Economic power?

Dear Editors

Thank you for the Lloyd George commentary in the March edition of Socialist Standard. It is certainly important to get our historical lessons straight. I had thought that the upheaval in Russia, and the subsequent rebellious state of the interventionist force of England, France and the United States, would have had some influence on Lloyd George’s attitude when he reputedly referred to the army as “disaffected”. Indeed, I had heard that there was even strong sympathy for the Bolsheviks and that some British troops declared themselves the “Yorkshire Soviet.” If this is true, it tends to demonstrate that at a time of extreme stress of the capitalist system state control of the engines of oppression can falter in their commitment to act as instruments of class rule. Perhaps this is what rattled your “windbag”. But he was as “innocent” of the power of industrial unionism as the union leaders were ignorant.

Aside from that, I found in my collection of dusty pamphlets a small item called Craft Unionism versus Industrial Unionism, by F.S. Budgen and L. Cotton. They wrote for the SLPGB, and in the1934 edition of their pamphlet they had some relevant commentary to offer in a chapter entitled “The Wage War of 1921 and the Triple Alliance Fiasco.” The thrust of their argument was that the reason the “Alliance” folded was precisely because the prevailing structure of unionism at the time was based upon archaic craft divisions that divided workers rather than uniting them. “Intrigue and treachery of the trade union leaders characterize ‘Black Friday’”, they wrote, but did not explain it. “By the masses it wields, and the political atmosphere it can create by setting them in motion, trade unionism is potentially capable of challenging capitalist rule in the workshops and the State, but it is entirely incapable of backing up that challenge with any effective action. All of their class instincts awakened by the approach of such a situation, the capitalists entrench themselves behind their ownership of the tools and their possession of State power; and trade unionism, having totally unfitted the working class to assume control of the productive machinery, and having rendered them morally and physically incapable of facing the power of the State, has only the choice between a forlorn hope or surrender at discretion. In their own interests the trade union leaders capitulated.”

Union-wise, things haven’t changed much but should.

Bernard Bortnick, 

Texas

Reply:

The old pamphlet you dug out exaggerates the power of workers’ unions vis-à-vis the state. In the end, any government can, if it so chooses, see off any challenge to its authority by unions, whether these are organised on a craft or an industry basis. This is because they control the state machine and because workers can’t hold out for more than a few weeks. In this particular case the leaders of the unions in the Triple Alliance backed down because they realised this and because they did not want to overthrow the government. Neither did their members. The lessons to draw from this failure are (1) the imperative need to first gain control of political power before trying to change the basis of society from class to common ownership, and (2) the equally imperative need for the majority of workers to want to do this and to be organised politically as well as industrially – Editors.

Cooking the Books: Banking Demystified Again (2012)

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

If we keep banging on in this column about banks only being able to lend money they have, it’s because the opposite view – that they can make loans out of thin air – is so widespread amongst critics of capitalism.

Here are two examples taken from leaflets posted on a wall near the Occupy camp at St. Paul’s. One called for “an end to creating money out of thin air on computer screens and charging interest on it.”  The other claimed that “Money” is created as borrower debt to banks. Most of today’s so-called ‘money’ is actually bank credit, just numbers in a bank account. “These numbers are created simply by borrowers promising to pay these numbers back to the bank!”

And here are two counter-examples. Last year The Times (21 November) reported on the situation in the Inner Mongolian city of Ordos in China:

  “Money made from the region’s huge coal reserves or land compensation has made many residents rich, people who, instinctively, have looked for ways to invest that money as real interest rates from bank savings have slipped into negative territory. By way of loan sharks and other methods of underground financing, that money has been churned back into property investment and more building.”

What you had there was people with money to lend and others who wanted to borrow money. Because the official banking system was unable to satisfy this, an ‘underground lending market’ developed. Even if those who acted as intermediaries between the lenders and the borrowers were shady individuals and gangs, they were acting as banks everywhere do: borrowing money at one rate of interest and lending it at a higher rate, making a profit out of the difference after their expenses had been settled.

If banking could create loans out of thin air you can be sure that the underground bankers of Ordos would have done this as, with no interest to pay the people lending them the money to re-lend, it would have been much more profitable. The only reason they didn’t was because they couldn’t. Nobody, whether above board or shady, acting as a bank can conjure up money to lend from nowhere. They have to have the money before they can make a loan.

The second example is that of the high-class pawnbroker Borro which last year proclaimed in an advertisement in the London Evening Standard (13 December):

  “Borro provides short-term loans from £1,000 to £1 million against valuables, including Jewellery, Luxury Watches, Fine Art & Antiques, Gold and Prestige Cars. Their service is discreet and flexible with no credit checks. Money can be provided within 24 hours.”

One of the claims of those who say that ‘money is debt’ is that money is created by a bank as a counterpart to the IOU signed by the borrower by simply keying in some numbers into a computer. But if banks can create money to lend simply on the basis of an IOU signed by the borrower, why can’t pawnbrokers? But they can’t. They must have the money first. The Times (28 December) revealed the source of the money Borro lends: “Loan funding has come from Kreos Capital, which also backs Wonga, the payday loans company whose high interest rates provoked controversy recently.”

Banks are no different in this respect. They, too, have to get “loan funding”, whether from those who deposit their savings with them or from what they themselves have borrowed on the money market or from their own resources.