These Foolish Things: All capitalists now? (1997)

The Scavenger column from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

All capitalists now?

The controversial Welsh water and electricity company Hyder wants to flush out 50,000 small shareholders because they are too expensive to deal with. The company is spending £150,000 on Project Shrink to persuade the investors to sell their shares. It hopes to save £40,000 a year on printing and distributing annual reports and dealing with dividend payments . . . Other water and electricity companies are understood to be planning to follow Hyder's example and purge share registers of small but expensive shareholders. 

(Financial Mail on Sunday. 23 February.)

Competition? Not likely!

After 18 months of haggling, the giant De Beers organisation is about to reassert its iron grip on the $50 billion world diamond market . . .  For nearly two years Russia has been trying to circumvent De Beers’ near monopoly on the market. Producers in Australia, Angola, and possibly from the nascent Canadian diamond industry are already doing so. But now Russia's President Boris Yeltsin is poised to sign a new agreement to sell the bulk of its diamond production exclusively through De Beers’ Central Selling Organisation. Two-thirds of the world's diamonds reach the market through the controversial cartel . . . De Beers spends $200 million annually reinforcing the image of diamonds around the world. 

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 23 February.)

Of course

When George Soros speaks, the world’s markets listen. This time, though, they may not believe what they hear. Mr Soros is proclaiming that capitalism and its system of speculative trading — the same system that has brought him billions — has supplanted Communism as the principle threat to freedom . . . "I have made a study of the international Financial markets, and yet I now feel that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society." 

(Independent, 17 January.)

Wealth versus ecology

Kuwait, Iran and other oil producing countries are demanding financial compensation from the industrialised world for loss of revenue if any new action is taken to curb global warming.

(Guardian, 20 February.)

Poor health

In an article co-written by Professor Andrew Haines of the Royal Free Hospital. Dr Smith [editor of the British Medical Journal] said wealth was the single most important driver of health world wide, even more important than smoking. The authors said: "We are beginning to understand that, for developed countries, relative poverty — having an income substantially below the mean for that society — is a more important influence on health than absolute poverty (lacking the basic means to live)." They said things are getting worse, not better, with the gap between rich and poor tending to widen between and within countries — with inevitable effects on health. 

(Herald, 21 February.)

Business is war!

Letting your colleagues train with the Reserve Forces doesn't just contribute to the country's defence. It also develops qualities of leadership, motivation and initiative in your staff that are vital in helping to drive business forward . . .THE VOLUNTEER RESERVE FORCES. BRITAIN'S BEST KNOWN BUSINESS SECRET. Issued by the National Employers Liaison Committee on behalf of the Territorial Army and the Volunteer Reserves of the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force.

The Scavenger

Letters: Is socialism against human nature? (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is socialism against human nature?

Dear Editors,

I have been reading the Socialist Standard for a year now and I find myself in not inconsiderable agreement with most of the views expressed in it. I have a question regarding the relation between our ideals and some fashionable trends in science and philosophy nowadays. It's a familiar question, but for me a most important one. So far I have not found a satisfactory answer in the Socialist Standard, but this may be due to my own negligence.

As you know from many publications, neo-Darwinism holds that human beings, just like all other beings, are determined to fight for everything that enhances their own well-being, but not for things that don't. Conservatives and liberals use this idea to defend their economic principles.

On the other hand, we think that a socialist society will only come about as a result of people's determination to take as much as they need, and to contribute as much as they can. But neo-Darwinism says that, generally speaking, people will never be prepared to act in this way. Indeed, it believes that the inclinations of some people (such as the members of the Socialist Party) to act as real socialists must be explained in terms of underlying drives and goals that cohere with neo- Darwinism philosophy. Compare with the thought that altruists arc really egoists in a more sophisticated way.

So it seems that, if neo-Darwinism is right, socialism must be wrong. Or do they not contradict each other? What do you think? It will not be sufficient to answer that current attitudes will change once we will have changed our institutions and our educational system. For neo-Darwinism will counter you by saying that institutional and educational change could not possibly change our genes. If neo-Darwinism is right, do we therefore have to change our own biological constitution in the process to socialism? This is where things become really interesting. Please enlighten me.

Dirk Boecxx, 

London SE23

Reply:

If those you call "neo-Darwinians” hold that humans are prepared to struggle for everything that enhances their own well-being but not for a society where people contribute as much as they can and take according to their needs then they are being inconsistent.

This is because such a society would enhance people's individual well-being. Socialism does not require people to be altruists acting against their own self-interest. Socialism is in people’s self- interest. It is certainly not against it.

What those who claim that there is something in our genes that would prevent humans living in a socialist society are in effect saying is that humans are genetically programmed to behave against their best interest. Which is absurd.

So their argument is logically flawed but it is also factually wrong. There is no evidence that human behaviour is genetically determined. In humans genes don't govern complex social behaviour patterns like greed or, for that matter, generosity; they only govern physical characteristics like hair colour or a prospensity to develop certain diseases.

Human behaviour is distinguished from that of all other animals precisely by its high degree of flexibility and adaptability. In so far as the genetic make-up of the members of the species homo sapiens governs our behaviour it is through allowing it to be flexible.

Further, we are — again, biologically — social animals. We live in societies and could not develop on our own as lone individual or family units as some animals do. For instance, speech and all that this enables us to do that other animals can't — construct cultures and civilisations — is a social product and can only be acquired in and through society.

Both speech and the physical ability to speak could only have evolved through co-operation in an animal group that was capable of practising co-operation. Without this ability to co-operate the human species would never have evolved. Which is why some anthropologists see co-operation rather than the struggle of each against all as being the characteristic human behaviour pattern.

You ask for evidence of all this. Read The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A. White or any book by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Read sensible Darwinians such as Stephen J. Gould. And for a thorough refutation of the view that human behaviour patterns are governed by particular genes read the collective work Not In Our Genes (by Steven Rose. R.C. Lewonkin and Leon J. Kamin).

Finally, when Desmond Morris. Robert Ardrey. Konrad Lorenz and the others were peddling these ideas, the Socialist Standard published a number of articles refuting them. If you—or anyone else—are interested in them copies arc still available.

Editors

Reformist?

Dear Editors,

The article "The Kurdish Question" was excellent (Socialist Standard, January). But how does maximizing "trade union and democratic rights" become a "springboard" for attaining socialism?

I though that was what the World Socialism Movement was for. Otherwise it sounds like capitalist reformist politics to me.

Thomas Alpine, 

Grand Rapids, 

Michigan, USA

Reply:

We have always said that the best framework for the growth of the majority socialist understanding needed before socialism can be established is political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be under capitalism.

We have also always said, following on from this, that socialists in countries where political democracy docs not exist should campaign for this as well as for socialism. This is not reformism because such socialists would not be campaigning for capitalist political democracy as an end in itself with their own reform programme for achieving power nor would we envisage them joining with non-socialists to campaign for this in these countries. What we envisage is socialists — such as any hypothetical Kurdish-speaking socialists in Turkey, Iraq. Iran or Syria — campaigning independently for this at the same time as campaigning for socialism. Certainly they cannot campaign for setting up a Kurdish State and still be regarded as socialists. That's what we’d call capitalist reformist politics.

Editors

Reallocating resources

Dear Editors,

The Rev. John Papworth who described stealing from a supermarket as a reallocation of resources has done a great service in drawing our attention to the nature of society, and how our concepts of behaviour and morality are related to our material circumstances.

While stealing may be regarded as immoral according to Christian teaching, there is much greater immorality in our economy in that it allocates resources in accordance with profit rather than need. It is understandable that a person with little or no monetary resources is tempted to steal in order satisfy his or her needs.

In a different, alternative kind of society, where people would have the freedom of access to the wealth produced, taking what you want would not be regarded as stealing and would, therefore, not be regarded as immoral.

George Pearson, 

London SW20

Reply:

What would Michael Howard. Jack Straw and all the other defenders of capitalist morality and legality make of the following news item sent us by a reader in Canada?

"STATE OF NEED" SUCCESSFUL AS THEFT DEFENCE IN FRANCE

A court dismissed shoplifting charges against a woman who admitted stealing food to feed her children, based its ruling on a turn-of-the-century law favouring the needy. 

Supermarkets where the theft occurred said they would appeal the decision by a court in Poitiers. 320 kilometres southwest of Paris. 

Annick Grippon, 36, admitted shoplifting meat and sausages on several occasions to feed her three-year-old son and teenage daughter. 

Her lawyer, Philippe Brottier, found a nearly century-old "state of need" defence used by courts to dismiss cases against hungry citizens who stole bread.

(Times Colonist, 2 March)

Militant Dishonesty (1997)

From the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the Labour Party, which for years was infiltrated by Trotskyists pretending to be bona fide members, we in the Socialist Party are the latest victims of Trotskyist dishonesty.

One of the Trotskyists groups, Militant, has decided to call itself “Socialist Party” and to put up candidates for elections under this name, despite the fact that we have been using this name for over 90 years.

This is the name we used on the ballot paper at the last general election (when Militant was campaigning for the laughable objective of “Labour to Power on a Socialist Programme!”), in the 1994 European elections, and in the Littleborough and Saddleworth parliamentary by-election in 1995 as well as in various local council elections and a council by-election in Lambeth last year. It is also the name under which we will be standing 5 candidates (in Glasgow, London, Jarrow, Easington and Livingston) in this year’s general election.

We contest Militant’s right to use this name, on two grounds. First, it is the name we use and one political group cannot simply come along and take the name used by another, long-standing and well-established, political party. This is an elementary democratic principle. To work properly, political democracy depends on people being able to make an informed choice, one condition of which is that different political organisations should be distinguished by separate names. Nobody is likely to confuse our policies and those of a Trotskyist organisation, but when a Trotskyist organisation uses the same name as us there is bound to be some confusion, so undermining the democratic process (not that Trotskyists, as Leninists, will be concerned about that).

Secondly of course, Trotskyists aren’t socialists anyway. But who are Militant and where did they come from?

Who are Militant?
In the 1940s three Trotskyists arrived in Britain: Tony Cliff (from Palestine), Ted Grant (from South Africa) and Gerry Healy (from Ireland). Each was destined to become the guru of one of the three main Trotskyist sects that were to emerge in Britain.

For a while all three worked together as members of the same organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which existed for a few years after the War as an independent Trotskyist party. Then they went their separate ways, except in so far as all three of them joined the Labour Party.

Cliff, who had come to accept the view that Russia was state capitalist, started a paper that later become International Socialism, and a group that is now the SWP. Healy and Grant stuck with the Trotskyist dogma that Russia, even under Stalin, was a “Workers’ State” albeit a “degenerate” one, but they fell out over some obscure question of “tactics”. Healy started a group which eventually became the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party. Grant ran a paper called Socialist Fight which was forever praising the supposed achievements of Russia’s “planned economy” but still managed to attract a following amongst young Labourites on Mersey-side. It later changed its name to Militant.

Until 1968 all three groups pursued the Trotskyist tactic of boring from within the Labour Party known as “entryism”. By far the most successful was Healy who managed to capture the Labour Party’s youth section, the Young Socialists, and their paper Keep Left.

After 1968, and the students’ revolt and general strike in France which convinced them that they no longer needed the Labour Party as an intermediary to “make contact with the working class”, both Healy and Cliff withdrew their followers from the Labour Party and eventually set up their own parties and put up candidates against Labour (Cliff only briefly, Healy with money from Colonel Gaddafi).

Grant, however, decided to hang on inside the Labour Party where he now had a virtual monopoly of the Trotskyist franchise. In one sense this was a shrewd move and in the ’80s he was to be even more successful in infiltrating Labour than Healy had been in the ’60s.

Grant’s group, ostensibly just another pro-Labour paper like Tribune but in reality an undercover vanguard party named the Revolutionary Socialist League organised on strict Bolshevik lines, virtually captured Liverpool Labour Party (Derek Hatton has been their best-known member) and managed to get two of their members, Terry Fields and Dave Nellist, elected as Labour MPs. From the mid-80s the Labour machine counter-attacked. Grant and his followers were booted out of the Labour Party and Fields and Nellist were de-selected.

Militant was now on its own, in what it had up till then regarded as the political wilderness. What to do? Was political life possible outside the Labour Party? Grant himself didn’t think so and was for carrying on with “entryism” and trying to get back into the Labour Party clandestinely. Most of the other leaders regarded this as pointless; they were outside the Labour Party and would have to make the best of a bad job by acting as an independent organisation even if still telling people to vote Labour.

Grant was eventually expelled at the beginning of 1992 and yet another Trotskyist sect was born. Militant changed its (public) name from Militant to Militant Labour. The tactic was adopted of putting up candidates against Labour at local council elections and by-elections, with some success in that one or two were elected councillors, in Glasgow and Liverpool.

When Scargill left the Labour Party last year and set up his “Socialist Labour Party”, to an outsider it might have seemed obvious that Militant Labour and the Scargill Labour Party should join together—after all, both of them had the same policy, militant Labourism—but this was to overlook the fact that Scargill was a Stalinist who was determined that his party should not be infiltrated and perhaps taken over by some Trotskyist group (not that this has prevented some of the lesser Trotskyist sects having a go).

Talks between Scargill and Militant did take place but broke down, so Militant decided to set up a rival Old Labour party of its own. But what name to call it? Apparently, there were three options, Militant Labour Party, Militant Socialist Party and Socialist Party.

The name “Socialist Party” of course wasn’t free as the leaders of Militant were well aware. Being part of it themselves, they are not ignorant of the minority political scene in Britain and have seen us selling the Socialist Standard (“journal of the Socialist Party”) at the same demonstrations and on the same street corners as they sell Militant. Their leaders have been aware of our existence since their foundation and we have engaged them in formal debate and long intervened at their meetings in opposition.

We have used the name 'Socialist Party' for over 90 years.

This, however, did not stop Militant’s leadership recommending “Socialist Party” as the preferred option to a special conference held at the end of last November. According to the report in Militant (6 December), there was some opposition. Although 71.4 percent of delegates voted for, 24.8 percent voted for “Militant Socialist Party” and 3 percent for “Militant Labour”.

So, an element of confusion has been introduced onto the British political scene: there are now two organisations calling themselves Socialist Party and two organisations putting up candidates at elections under this name. This is entirely the fault of a dishonest and cynical move by Militant to try to hijack the name used by an already-existing political organisation.

Naturally, we will oppose this move in every way we can but we are obliged to issue a warning to our sympathisers and others who know us: look twice before buying any pamphlet bearing the name “Socialist Party”; if you find it praising pre-Yeltsin Russia’s “planned economy” or advocating fantastic reforms of capitalism then (obviously) it is not published by us but will be the usual Trotskyist nonsense. If you go to a meeting advertised as by the “Socialist Party” and the speaker advocates a “£6 minimum wage” or “Nationalise the Top 200 Monopolies” or that “the TUC call a General Strike Now” you will know you have been misled; stand up and say that the speaker is a fraud for pretending to be speaking on behalf of the Socialist Party.

Labourism with knobs on
But quite apart from the dishonesty of trying to steal our name, Militant does not stand for socialism It stands for state capitalism as its long-term aim while campaigning in the present for mostly impracticable reforms of capitalism.

There is a twisted logic to their campaigning for impracticable reforms. As followers of Lenin, Trotskyists hold that workers are incapable of directly understanding socialist ideas; at most, they can only acquire a “trade union consciousness” which reflects itself on the political field as support for reformist Labour Party-type politics. In these circumstances to campaign directly for socialism (as we in the real Socialist Party do) would be to cast pearls before swine, mere “abstract propagandism”. Instead, what a “vanguard party” must do is to try to use this workers’ reformist discontent as a battering ram to overthrow the government and seize power for themselves as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in November 1917.

Trotsky recommended that this be done by offering workers reforms (called “transitional demands”) which the vanguard party knows perfectly well can’t be obtained under capitalism, in the expectation that when these reforms are not granted the workers will turn against the government and support a Trotskyist coup d’état.

This of course is pure science-fiction politics that is only likely to come true on the planet Zanussi but (fortunately) not on planet Earth. Imagine what a Trotskyist dictatorship would be like; not too different from a Stalinist one, we would suppose.

In the context of the electoralist tactic that Militant has now adopted, “transitional demands” translate as extravagant election promises of reforms to be achieved under capitalism, bait offered to the mass of worker-electors who are still perceived of as not being able to move beyond a reformist, Labourist consciousness.

At election times, Militant Labour appears as a super-reformist party, promising the same sort of reforms as Labour only bigger and better ones. Thus, if Labour promises a minimum wage of £3 an hour, Militant Labour promises one of £6. If Labour promises to increase spending on education and the health service by 10 percent, Militant Labour promises to increase it by 50 percent. If Labour promises the highest achievable level of employment, Militant promises full employment, and so on. In other words, there is no attempt to combat reformist illusions within the working class (the illusion that capitalism can be reformed to work in their interest); just the opposite in fact, such illusions are encouraged and magnified.

Militant, by accommodating itself to this attitude instead of campaigning to change it, is encouraging workers to believe that their problems can be solved within capitalism if only those they elect as local councillors and MPs were more demanding and more determined.

It is in fact on this basis that Militant’s local councillors have been elected: as militant Labourists, as people who some traditional Labour voters feel will sincerely fight for the reforms that New Labour under Blair has abandoned. “Militant Labour”, the name under which they were elected, was an entirely accurate description as what those who elected them wanted was someone to fight in a more militant way for Labour’s traditional aims.

Militant’s Ideal World
Militant would deny this charge of encouraging reformism—of in fact being militant reformists—by pointing out that they do say that capitalism can never work in the workers’ interests. This is so, but by “capitalism” they only mean competitive, private enterprise capitalism, to which their alternative is planned, state-run capitalism not socialism.

Last year Militant (22 March) carried an article headed “Fighting for our ideal world” which ended:

“Militant Labour demands:

• An end to slave labour schemes;
• £6 per hour minimum wage;
• The right to join a recognised trade union”

Hardly an inspiring ideal (and this was in an article aimed at young people!). Normally, it is true, Militant’s “ideal” is not quite as crass as this but the principle is the same. In 1995, at the time the Labour Party was preparing to ditch Clause 4, Militant brought out a pamphlet called What is Socialism? in which they declared:

  “Militant Labour believes it is possible to achieve a minimum wage, full employment, good education and health services. Homelessness can be a thing of the past. We can end inequality and poverty. “
  “But we would also need an economy which produces more than it does today and produced different things: for example, fewer office blocks and more houses at affordable prices or rents, fewer-weapons and more public transport”.

This ideal world of higher wages and affordable prices is to be achieved by nationalising all “the major companies and financial institutions”.

Such wholesale nationalisation would not be socialism which is based on the common (as opposed to state) ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with goods and services being produced and distributed directly to satisfy people’s needs with the disappearance of wages, prices, pensions, banks, money and all the other products of a buying-and-selling society such as capitalism.

Militant’s “ideal society” turns out to be a state capitalism in which a government, supposedly ruling on behalf of the working class (but in reality controlled by and for the benefit of the leaders of the vanguard party), tries to plan the wages-profits-money system and make it work in the interest of all.

They give Cuba, and previously Russia, as an example of the sort of “planned”, “non-capitalist” economy they have in mind (“Can Cuba Survive!”, Militant, 22 March 1996), not as a perfect example but as a sufficiently successful example to back up their claim that a nationalised, planned economy of the kind they propose can work. But both Cuba and pre-Yeltsin Russia had state-capitalist, not non-capitalist, economies. Neither the Russian nor the Cuban revolution “overthrew capitalism”, as Militant claims. What they did was to change the personnel of the privileged class that was to preside over the accumulation of capital in these countries, from private capitalists and outside imperialists to a Party élite of state bureaucrats. That Militant see the economic system in Cuba and what used to exist in Russia as a model for what should replace capitalism confirms that they too stand for state capitalism.

But state capitalism is no more in the interest of the working class than is private capitalism. It still retains the wages system, under which people have to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer to get the money to buy the things they need to live. But where the wages system exists so does economic exploitation, since workers are always paid as wages less than the value of the work they do; the rest (Marx called it surplus value) is creamed off by their employers, whether a private individual, a company or a state enterprise, and redistributed as the privileged income of shareholders and/or state bureaucrats.

The Trotskyist proposal to nationalise all major industries and financial institutions and turn us all into state employees does not end the wages system; it merely changes who employs us (where, that is, we are not already government employees of one sort or another) and changes those who live off our work from private shareholders to state bureaucrats.

So Trotskyists like Militant are not even on the same wavelength as Socialists. It is not a question of us and them having the same aim but a different method of getting there—us, democratic political action by a democratically-organised and consciously socialist majority; them, a minority-led insurrection without majority socialist understanding. Their aim is quite different from ours. We want socialism and the abolition of the wages system; they want state capitalism with all of us being paid by the state.

In other words, even if we had some other name such as a World Socialist Party they would still have no justification for calling themselves “Socialist Party”. If they had been honest (but that’s science-fiction politics again) they would have changed their name to SCP or State Capitalist Party or, if that was felt to be too explicit, simply to “Trotskyist Party”.

Adam Buick

11 — 11 — 11: 101 years since the end of World War I

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

Exactly 101 years ago today the Armistice that ended World War I was signed and came into force. It was signed between 5 and 6 am but did not come into force until 11 am. Fighting continued in many places right up to the last minute: nearly 11,000 men were killed or wounded on that last morning of the war.

As the Armistice had already been signed, why could it not have come into force earlier – say, at 7 am? Or, even if it was not yet time to lay down arms, could commanding officers not have avoided offensive action?

Some did. One British general, acting on his own initiative, ended the war in his sector early in the morning. Prime minister David Lloyd George was annoyed when he heard of it and deprived the general of his pension. The prime minister was planning to announce the Armistice in the House of Commons later in the morning – few Members of Parliament are ‘early birds’ – and wanted the dramatic effect of the guns falling silent just as he was speaking. Lining up three elevens – ‘at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ – also had a rhetorical appeal. It still has. Surely that was worth a few thousand casualties?

Another ‘softie’ was Major General William Haan, commander of the 32nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), who received a field telephone call from his subordinate in command of the 63rd Brigade asking permission to attack in order to straighten out a dent on his front. Haan retorted that he did not intend to throw away men’s lives on the war’s last morning to tidy up a map. 

Other commanders were made of tougher stuff. Major General Charles P. Summerall ordered V Corps to force a crossing of the Meuse River that last morning at the cost of over 1,100 dead and wounded. One of his men, Henry Gunther, was the last soldier killed in action in World War One. He died at one minute before 11 am while charging astonished German troops. He had been despondent over a recent reduction in rank and was apparently trying to redeem his reputation.

The 167th Field Artillery Brigade of the 92nd Division of the AEF, consisting of black men, was ordered to launch its final charge at 10.30 am. 

Many artillery units continued to fire on German targets to avoid having to haul away their spare ammunition. Another good reason, eh? 

In fact, the war could easily have been ended not a few hours but three days earlier, when a German delegation, headed by Matthias Erzberger of the Catholic Center Party, drove through Allied lines in order to negotiate an armistice. The delegation was escorted to the Compiègne Forest near Paris where, in a railroad dining car converted into a conference room, they were met by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies. Foch presented the Allies’ terms and told Erzberger that he had 72 hours to obtain the consent of his government or the war would go on. ‘For God’s sake, Monsieur le Marechal,’ Erzberger pleaded, ‘do not wait for those 72 hours. Stop the hostilities this very day.’ His appeal fell on deaf ears. 

Foch had good reason to be confident that the Allies’ terms, harsh as they were, would be accepted. Six weeks earlier, on September 29, the German Supreme Army Command had informed the Kaiser and the Imperial Chancellor that the military situation facing Germany was hopeless. Then, on the night of October 29-30, sailors at the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven, unwilling to be sacrificed in a final naval offensive, had mutinied and their revolt had quickly spread to other ports. The army too was starting to disintegrate under the impact of mass desertions. It was now politically as well as economically and militarily impossible for Germany to sustain further hostilities.

What socialists said about World War 1 at the time

Leaflet by Karl Liebknecht, May 1915:

The main enemy of every people is in their own country!

Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy, written in prison in the spring of 1915 and first published at Zurich in February 1916, illegally distributed in Germany:

  Gone is the euphoria… In the prosaic atmosphere of pale day there sounds a different chorus – the hoarse cries of the vulture and the hyenas of the battlefield. Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, cocoa powder, coffee-substitute – COD, immediate delivery! Hand grenades, lathes, cartridge pouches, marriage bureaus for widows of the fallen, leather belts, jobbers for war orders – serious offers only! The cannon fodder loaded onto trains in August and September is moldering in the killing fields of Belgium, the Vosges, and Masurian Lakes where the profits are springing up like weeds. It’s a question of getting the harvest into the barn quickly. Across the ocean stretch thousands of greedy hands to snatch it up. 

  Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds… 

  Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form…

Friedrich Engels once said:  ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

Eugene Victor Debs, The Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech, June 16, 1918

  Sam Johnson declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people… 

The working class, who fight all the battles, the working class, who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class, who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why; 
Yours but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation…
You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain… 

They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches…

Sources

On the last day of the war: here

General background here

On the sailors’ revolts see the first part of Gabriel Kuhn (translator), All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918-1919 (2012)

Stefan

How Will You Vote? (1909)

From the November 13th, 1909 issue of The Western Clarion

How will you vote, fellow-worker?
   Have you given the matter a thought?
Will you prove befooled when the last votes polled,
   By bribe or promise bought? 

Will you vote for the same old parties
  By whom you’re bought and sold?
Will you bow once more, as you’ve oft before,
  To the cursed rule of Gold? 

Will you vote to be saddled and bridled
  And rode by a grafting crew?
Will you say that what was your father's lot
   Is good enough for you? 

Will you vote to be human cattle?
   For your babes to be the same?
Will you throw away your vote today

  To their wrong and your shame? 

Will you vote again for the master class,
  For their right to rule and rob?
Will you vote that the best you can hope for the rest
  Of life is (perhaps) a Job? 

A job that is merely lent to you,
  At your master's will to lose;
Thraldom for'you and your children, too,
   Is this the lot you'll choose? 

Will you vote for a life uncertain.

   Which constant cares annoy?
To suffer need, to sweat and bleed,
   That Idlers may enjoy? 

Or will you vote for a grand new right?
   The right to be really free,
The right to produce for the workers' use,
   The right to security. 

Will you vote for the Socialist demand?—
   THE WORLD FOR THOSE WHO WORK;
The means of wealth and comfort and health,
   And "naught for those who shirk.” 

Think of these things well, brother,
   And it will come to pass
That your vote will be a vote. to be free,
   A vote for the working class!

Wilfrid Gribble

Blogger's Note:

As well as being a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, Gribble was a founder member of the Workers' Socialist Party of United States in Detroit in 1916. (He was the WSPUS' first organiser.) He was one of the Canadian-based socialists who migrated south at the outbreak of World War 1, finding work in the burgeoning car industry.

The People's Democracy: Old nonsense from a new quarter (1970)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the problems confronting the Socialist movement in its efforts to bring an understanding of Socialism to the working class is the number of organisations that spread confusion about the meaning of Socialism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, apart from the N.I. Labour Party, whose particular brand of “socialism” is the difference between a Development Commission and a Development Corporation —embellished, of course, with love of the Queen and the Constitution—and even, for a period, nebulous support of the infamous Special Powers Act—and the Communist Party whose conception of “socialism” is reflected in petty demands for reform and admiration for the brutal totalitarianism of their adopted state-capitalist motherland, we have a number of peculiar “socialist” and “socialist” organisations.

There is the political ignoramous Gerry Fitt and his personal political circus, ever ready to jump on on any bandwagon of prejudice or ignorance to milk a few working class votes. His party, the “Socialist” Republican Party, is a mere anti-Unionist group that pays lip service to the more vulgar ideas of the late James Connolly—insofar as those ideas are compatible with the prejudices of their Catholic supporters; indeed, they fearlessly avoid mention of any of Connolly’s statements attacking religion and its “sacred” institutions.

These organisations render considerable service to capitalism; they help to maintain the fog of working class ignorance on which capitalism depends for its continued existence and in that they confuse the workers as to the nature of the alternative which Socialism proposes.

The tragedy is that many of the sincere and enthusiastic workers who subscribe to the fallacious reasoning of these “socialist” organisations get so involved in their complex political fetishes, and its attendant vocabulary, that they become bitter opponents of Socialism — except as it relates to their ideas of “knocking the system” or promoting their pet reform.

In Northern Ireland we are now seeing the growing claims to Socialism of the Peoples Democracy and especially in a recent pamphlet Struggle in the North by one of the leaders of that organisation, Mike Farrell.

The Peoples Democracy is an organisation made up of all types of anti- Unionist, anti-establishment elements. Generally, they are young workers and students at varying levels of discontent with various facets of the system. Particularly, they are the political hot-gospelers of the different “leftist” creeds earnestly endeavouring to inject their various, and conflicting, ideas into the movement. The ideological umbrella of the movement is “action now” and the objective is a contradiction in terms known as a “Socialist Workers’ Republic”.

If we admitted to a degree of comparison in the forces that confuse the working class in its nebulous groping towards Socialism we should undoubtedly acknowledge that the PD is head and shoulders above the Labour parties, the ‘communists’ and the Fitt circus in their partial understanding of the situation and, indeed, we do recognise the courage and earnestness of purpose which the PD has shown in its opposition to the bigots and patriots at both ends of the Northern Ireland political spectrum.

Until a short time ago, when the organisation adopted the practice of having a card-carrying membership (at a disputed “suggested” fee of four shillings—later revoked), it was a loosely knit body. In these circumstances it was difficult to indict PD on the statements made by those claiming membership of that organisation with whom we have come in contact. The re-telling of faction struggles may be precocious and the revolutionary romantics may be for amusement only. We consider it fair, however, to discuss PD within the context of Farrell’s pamphlet which is an official PD publication. The pamphlet tells, accurately enough, the facts of the recent violence in Northern Ireland and advances the case for PD.

If we allow for the imposed brevity of a short pamphlet, Farrell’s analysis of the economic background to Partition and the use of religious bigotry as an instrument of policy by the political handmaidens of capitalism in Northern Ireland in 1912 and after — in their anxiety to preserve direct access to the British market—is correct in its essentials.

Perhaps his republicanism defeats a more penetrating analysis of the motives of the Southern capitalists and their political servants in side-tracking the working class of southern Ireland into a patriotic struggle. He simply tells us that "The Home Rulers were anxious to put tariffs on British imports coming into Ireland to facilitate the development of Irish industry”. He does not tell us that Sinn Fein were similarly anxious about the affairs of the rising native capitalists—a concern expressed thus by one of their leaders Griffith:

  No possibility would be left as far as (Sinn Fein) were concerned for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and the home trader (The Sinn Fein Policy, 1917)

Nor does Mr. Farrell remind us that the “Irish industry” concerned was the concrete preserve of the southern capitalist class who owed nothing to their Northern counterparts in the matter of viciousness and contempt for the working class.

As in all national struggles, the working class were being used by the economically dominant class to win victories for their masters. True, the workers did not see the struggle in that light, indeed a few may, like Mr. Farrell and the PD, have subscribed to indefinite concepts of an equalitarian society, but because they lacked understanding of the nature of capitalism and the only alternative to that system, Socialism, they were easy prey for the chauvinistic smokescreen of those whose real purpose was their stake in the exploitation of the working class in southern Ireland.

Mr. Farrell agrees that the basis of discrimination is the economic system, capitalism. If this is so, and the World Socialist Party has continually advanced this view, if capitalism causes discrimination, is it not futile to lead the working class into a struggle against discrimination on the assumption that it can be ended within capitalism? Is it not dangerous folly to lead the workers into such a struggle, which inevitably means taking sides and creating the climate for fratricidal strife within the working class?

On the whole question of discrimination, however, Farrell is on shifting ground. Rightly he tells us that the privileges allegedly enjoyed by the Protestant workers are largely illusionary and the few examples that he gives devastates argument to the contrary. This is the line of approach which the WSP has continually put on the question of discrimination. Later, however, we find the pamphlet rebuking those “moderates” who ". . . fail to understand that by REMOVING discrimination in jobs and housing they are removing a buffer which has shielded the Protestant workers from the worst effects of the economic situation" (our emphasis). The error is repeated when we are told that the apparatus of discrimination is being dismantled—despite the fact that what Farrell admits to be its cause, the economic system, remains!

Long before October 1968 the WSP was arguing that discrimination in Northern Ireland was on class and not religious lines. We pointed out that Catholic members of the capitalist class had no problems in the matter of jobs and houses and that they enjoyed the same multiple voting rights as their Protestant counterparts. Protestant members of the working class, on the other hand, faced the same problems as their Catholic class brethren. True, some political flunkeys in the lower echelon of Unionism were ‘rewarded’ with a house or job which, because they were members of the working class they needed—the fact that their need, by some odious order of capitalist priorities, was less pressing than someone else is simply an indictment of the class system that makes such priorities necessary. The very limited extent of such “privilege” is amply demonstrated by Farrell’s striking examples of squalor and misery in the most vociferously “loyal” of all the Protestant areas. Thus, in the exclusively Protestant Shankill Road area of Belfast 96 per cent of the “homes” have no hot water, bath or wash-hand basin and have only an outside toilet. In the 83 per cent Protestant Ballymena Rural Council area 55 per cent of the houses have no toilet of any kind and 47 per cent no running water. We would venture to suggest that if similar statistics are available for other Protestant areas, such as Sandy Row and Ballymacarret, they would be equally evident of misery and squalor.

Of course Unionist leaders, while publicly disavowing the practice, quietly nourish the notion among their Protestant supporters that they enjoy real privileges and when bodies like the Civil Rights Association and the PD approach the question on the same premise they merely help to concretise the fiction and, hence, the fears of Protestant members of the working class. Inevitably the struggle “against discrimination” becomes a sectarian-orientated clash between Catholic and Protestant workers on the relative claims of each for jobs and housing. So, in fact, the CRA and the PD, insofar as they equated religion to class, played the Unionist Party’s game and gave vicious teeth to the tiger of Unionist bigotry.

Farrell advances Lenin’s failed “imperialist” thesis and wrongly ascribes the plight of the workers in Ireland to British imperialism rather than capitalism.

Farrell pledges PD to support of the struggle for an Irish "Socialist Workers' Republic” without in any way indicating what is meant by “Socialist”. It could be that closer scrutiny of the meaning of the term is deliberately avoided in order to facilitate unity among the factions and potential factions within PD or, equally likely, it could be the misuse of the term to indicate national state capitalism. Whatever Farrell means by Socialist—and he insists that only “genuine Socialists” can win the Protestant workers—he appears to feel that the Catholic workers are closer to it than the Protestants. For example, in the struggle leading up to its achievement, he tells us:

  There is another way. Pressure must be maintained to make sure the reforms are implemented, but as they are, Catholic workers will realise that they are largely hollow and don’t solve the problems of unemployment and homeless families. At the same time Protestant workers must have it explained to them that the reason for the shortage is not the Catholics but the economic system (our emphasis)

Farrell tells us that there is “no point in trying to trick the Protestants” but surely the above not only exposes his notions on the relative proximity of Catholic and Protestant workers to what he deems to be Socialism but, also, that PD’s programme of immediate reforms are calculated to trick workers of all denominations and none. On the one hand, PD brings workers out on the streets in support of reforms; now they tell us the Catholics will “realise” these reforms are “hollow” and don’t affect their basic problems and Protestants will have it “explained” that the real problem is the economic system. Oh, the perils of “leadership”!

No reform could be more hollow than the solution of our problem proposed by the PD and Farrell and blessed by the holy name of the patron saint of Irish reformers, James Connolly. As we have noted, that solution is an Irish “Socialist” Workers’ Republic.

Capitalism is a world wide system in which the social labour of the world’s workers is harnessed to the profit-making activities of the capitalists through the medium of the wages-money system.

Socialism, the only alternative to capitalism, is a world-wide system which will avail of the wealth-producing techniques of social labour in order to produce the wealth required in a system of social distribution in terms of "from each in accordance with his mental or physical ability; to each in accordance with his needs”. Since social class is determined by the relationship in which people stand to the means of wealth production, and since in Socialism, all will stand in the same relation to these means, classes, including the working class, must obviously disappear—hence the expression “Socialist Workers’ Republic” is, as we say, a contradiction in terms. The sort of contradiction, indeed, that results from a lack of understanding not only of Socialism but of capitalism too.

It is not possible for one country alone to leap forward into Socialism in a capitalist world. Even if we follow the fanciful thinking of PD to the extent of allowing their hypothesis that the “Irish people” could organise “Irish” industry in the “National” interest, even if we don’t press the point that wage- labour and capital are two sides of the same relation, the absurdity of the proposition becomes immediately obvious. The “Socialist Workers’ Republic” would have to carry on production of commodities (wealth produced for sale and profit); that would require the import of raw materials from the capitalist world and would require the export of its produce to pay for such imports. Obviously, therefore, the mood of capitalism would have more control over its republicans.

Richard Montague

Saturdays evenings at No. 52 (1970)

Party News from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cause of conflict (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ask that ubiquitous, approachable fellow the Man in the Street about the reasons for war and the chances are that his reply will be one of many variations on the same theme.

He will probably say that wars are caused by greed, or belligerence, or power-lust, or simply by mistakes. The common theme is that wars are fought for ideological reasons and that with better people, or better ideas, or better leaders, they need not happen.

This does no more than lead us to the next question: what is responsible for the people, the ideas, the leaders, the mistakes?

The 1914-18 war, for example, can hardly be called a surprise or a mistake because Europe had been preparing for it, openly and directly, for about forty years, and under all sorts of leaders.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Germany was an expanding competitor to the established powers of Europe, who had already grabbed most of the markets and raw material sources known in the world.

Germany could expand in only one way — by force. That was the background to the arms race and the militarism of the early 20th century and to the great war which followed. The war of 1939-45 was a continuation of this same process, with the Nazis expressing the frenzied ambitions of the German ruling class.

The “peace” conferences after 1945 did not settle any disputes; they merely adjudicated and compromised between a multitude of opposing interests and so carved up the world that the stage was set—as it was in Indo-China and Korea—for the wars of the future.

There could really have been no other result. The world today—capitalist society—is based on the class ownership of the means of producing wealth. The world is divided into states and power blocs, the ruling classes of which are forced to dispute over access to markets, raw material fields, communications, etc.

That is why so many world powers stand guard over the oil of the Middle East, why the Suez Canal was once so sensitive a spot in world affairs, why the Russians and Chinese fought over the industry and communications around Vladivostock.

As long as capitalism lasts there will be a conflict of interests; in other words, war is caused by capitalism and cannot be avoided under that social system.

The tragedy of this is that the Man In the Street has no reason to go to war; his interests are not involved. Yet he is the one who does the fighting.

He does this because he can see no alternative, which brings us back to his replies to our original question. In fact, Socialism will abolish war because it will bring a community of interests; it will be a society without frontiers, without nations, without classes, without conflict.

The issue at Pinkville (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever the incident at My Lai might have been, there is more to it than simply the question of whether it happened, and if it did who was responsible, and how many were killed as a result. More, even, than the Vietnam war itself; the massacre has caused the very concept of war—its motives, its morality, its justifications—to be questioned.

This is not the first time such questioning has happened, as anyone who knows about the murder of Dresden is aware. But at least it is hopeful, that the questioning takes place; if the Pinkvilles of capitalism were let pass without anyone trying to find the reasons why, the outlook for human society would be dark indeed.

The massacre is yet to be judicially proven but meanwhile the advance trial which is taking place in the newspapers, radio and television has allowed ample statement of both sides’ cases. The prosecution say that the killings were wholly unjustified, that if the men who are alleged to have actually fired the shots did so under orders, they should have disobeyed. This side says that soldiers should always show a proper restraint when they are in action, sparing as far as they can any wounded, or civilians, or prisoners they come across. These arguments are powered by strong emotions. It is difficult to imagine how even the most debauched war lover could justify what is said to have happened at Pinkville, and in the other incidents in Vietnam like the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese girl by an American patrol on Hill 192, in the same way as it was difficult to imagine any justification for Lidice.

The defence, which is by no means weak, disputes the story of a cold-blooded mass killing but perhaps betrays its own lack of confidence by pointing out that the fighting conditions in Vietnam are especially stressful, with the Americans having little quick means of distinguishing Vietcong soldiers from non-combatants. (A similar argument was used to excuse British soldiers’ trigger-happiness in Ireland about fifty years ago). Then the defence cites the provocation suffered by the platoon— the loss of a popular member in a booby trap, the sniper fire which greeted their approach to My Lai. Finally, there are the atrocities and murders by the Vietcong which, even when they have been sifted through all the usual modifying allowances, have clearly been ferocious.

In truth supporters of the war, whichever side they are on, fall in behind prosecution or defence according to their own allegiances. That is why, over Pinkville, it is the Vietcong supporters who are raging about the morality of war while the hawks in America try to avoid the issue. When the Vietcong atrocities are under the searchlight, the positions are reversed.

To make any sense in this confusion, it is necessary to recognise that there is a morality of war—a morality which quite simply justifies everything. A socially organised effort to kill and destroy cannot be gentle or humane. Once war is accepted then it follows that a Dresden, a Hiroshima, a Lidice, a Pinkville must also be accepted. Modern war has no non-combatants; the morale and well-being of the civilian population are as legitimate as targets as any military installation. Battle is a terrifying experience, in which human beings—those nice, clean-cut boys next door — are required to act like wild beasts. There can be no frontiers beyond which they are expected instead to act like sane, humane people.

Of more importance is the fact that support for war cannot be separated from support for capitalism. In a social system which has a basic affiliation to dispute, violence cannot be avoided. War, then, cannot be separated for whatever cause. Capitalism is a society of violence and the guilt for whatever happened at Pinkville extend a long, long way beyond a few soldiers.

Can you think? (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inside capitalism lie the seeds of its own destruction — the working class, developing the consciousness which one day it will use to win political control, and large-scale highly productive industry and intensive agriculture, capable of providing for the needs of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. Because world capitalism is not ruled by a homogeneous, unified class but by many sectional interests forced into competition, these individual capitalists and individual states are compelled inescapably and sometimes reluctantly to develop the old, and introduce new, productive techniques (but also to inhibit their use by trying to ensure that only that which can be sold at a profit is produced) and to educate the working class to a correspondingly high technological level (but also to try to prevent it coming into contact with truly scientific ideas about the society which it now organises and maintains without the help of these parasitical owners).

Ideas such as: man has no instincts, either noble or savage. All his social behaviour is learned and socially conditioned.

The working class own almost nothing except their physical and mental energies. Certainly they have no country and so patriots (except the dead ones) suffer from delusions.

No god has ever been proved to have intervened in the affairs of man — but make-believe gods have been invoked to keep the serf at his plough, the king on his throne, the Ulster Unionist Party in office and the pope in his luxury palace.

Members of all ethnic groups — be they black, red, yellow, white or brown — have potentially the same intelligence. That these potentials are not realised is due to historical circumstances and environmental factors and not to biological differences.

Neither Russia nor any of its satellites, allies or former ‘fraternal states’ is controlled by the working class. Capitalists rule there and exploit wage slaves. Wherever wages are paid in exchange for labour-power a profit is being made, or the deal would not take place.

So-called overpopulation is only a problem because the prevailing social system cannot afford to feed the hungry.

For example, the Indian sub-continent, highly fertile in most parts as it is, with contemporary methods of agriculture could provide food enough to feed the whole world, not just Indians.

The race for the moon, like all other military-political-strategic ventures would be a long way from the top of the list of priorities in a sane and rational socialist world without money, prices and profits, where all goods would be free and all work would be entirely voluntary, where human beings would not be capital investments being kept as oiled and efficient soft machines by their weekly wage packets, but would be priceless co-participants in the conquest of human needs through the democratically controlled harnessing of science, industry and agriculture, the motive being freedom from want, freedom and time to pursue pleasing and satisfying activities instead of the monotonous and physically destroying enslavement to the hard machine in the service of their master—profit.

A hallucination? A dream world divorced from the objective realities? Do you still succumb to the human nature/original sin myth that is central to the apologetic ideology of capitalism, which justifies coercion, oppression, repression, moral codes (‘Thou Shalt Not’), exploitation, war, periodic crises, poverty and the existence of a class which produces nothing but consumes the best? Or do you still subscribe to the even hoarier view that resources are scarce and always will be scarce because they always have been scarce? How long is it since you took your head out of the sand and had a breather? The atmosphere will very soon be thick with socialist ideas. Not solely because of the efforts of our Party’s small membership but because others besides us are rational people faced with the general problems of the working class. If we have come to these conclusions from examining the world in which we live and the agents of change contained within it, then so can they. So can you.

Ideas spring out of the economic structure of society. They spell out Socialism a mile high. Freedom and plenty will not be the result of heaven-sent providence but of human effort, as everything in history has been. 

Michael Bradley

Immigration fallacies (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is an unfortunate fact that many workers in the Midlands and the South East of England are colour prejudiced. But this does explain why both Labour and the Tories are prepared to pander to racialism in order to get votes. Everybody knows about the campaign some Tories waged in the 1964 election. Widespread criticism caused the Tories to tone down their racialism but Labour learnt a lessen too: they made sure that before the next election they strengthened the Commonwealth Immigrants Act whose obvious purpose is to keep out as many so-called coloured immigrants as possible.

Most workers are opposed to immigration on practical grounds: they mistakenly believe that it is a threat to the living standards they have achieved by trade union and political action. Very few go for the fancy frills of racialism, the dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense peddled by outfits like the National Front and the Union Movement. Of course a number of Tories too have attacked “race-mixing” on theoretical grounds: Enoch Powell and Duncan Sandys, exploiter of the Ghanian gold miners.

We are living in a capitalist society where a privileged class owns the means for producing wealth so that the rest of us have to work for them. We are called, appropriately enough, the working class. Capitalism is international (including state capitalist Russia) and so is the working class. As far as Socialists are concerned, all workers the world over are brothers. While the economic system is world-wide, for political purposes the world is divided by frontiers into artificial national states. As Socialists we don’t accept that these frontiers have any relevance. We don’t recognise them. Nor do most workers in search of jobs. For it stands to reason if you have no property and depend for a living on working you must go, if you can, where the jobs are. Since the war many jobs have been going in North America and Western Europe. So to these parts have come workers and impoverished peasants from the rest of the world. To the Common Market have come people from North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. To Britain have come people from India and the West Indies. Surely the point that these post-war migrations bring out is that capitalism is an international system and that the world is one economic unit.

The racialists claim that this migration to Britain has caused problems in housing, education, and the health services. Without denying that throwing people of different customs together in the economic jungle of capitalism can cause inconveniences, it is quite untrue that immigration can be said to be the cause of bad housing, cheap education and inadequate medical services. These problems existed long before the migrants came. They are problems for the working class everywhere and all the time. Besides, since the war more have left Britain for overseas than have come here. Immigrants are in the same position as the rest of us: propertyless, having to find an employer to live. They, too, are members of the working class.

In a Union Movement pamphlet Robert Row repeats a common argument of the racialists that is accepted by many workers. Migration, he says, has caused over-crowding in our big cities “with its attendant evils of taking houses which should be inhabited by the British who built them”. This is nonsense. Houses, even palaces and mansions, are all built by the working class but under capitalism workers are only allowed to live in the sort of house or they can afford. This charge of taking “British houses” might make sense if immigrants took the best. Yet all the evidence suggests that immigrants have to put up with the worst housing. The best houses go, of course, to the rich who get their money from exploiting workers, black and white.

Capitalism is the cause of working class problems. Under capitalism, how we live is restricted by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque. And the economic laws of capitalism ensure that we don’t get much more as the price of our energies than enough to keep us in efficient working order. This will be our lot as long as capitalism lasts. We will have to put up with, not the best that is available in housing, education, food and clothing, but with the cheap and second-rate.

These are problems that affect all workers, irrespective of so-called race or colour or nationality, whether they live in America, Britain, South Africa or India. They are problems which can only be solved by the joint action of workers everywhere to convert the means of production from the class property of a few into the common property of the whole community, through the establishment of Socialism with production solely for use, not profit.

Colour prejudice is just an idea (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who ever gets involved in arguments with racists sooner or later runs up against their assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that their prejudices are based on an eternal, natural law. The assumption which follows this is that racism has an existence independent from other social factors and that, unlike other ideas, it came into being regardless of whatever else was happening in the world and will, therefore, remain regardless of whatever else happens. The importance of examining this theory is not so much to assess the value of the racists’ assumption but also to look at an example of the forces which operate for changes in society and in its ideas.

Let us begin with the simple statement that the Negro, who has suffered centuries of oppression in America, did not choose to go there in the first place. He was taken there—mostly by force. This transportation began at a time when manufacture was developing in North West Europe and a plantation economy taking root in the West Indies and the American South. The first Negroes were brought from Africa in 1510, to work the gold mines of what was then Hispaniolia. By the beginning of the 17th. century there were settlements all along the east coast of America, from Massachusetts to the West Indies.

These settlements represented one corner of a triangular trade, which supplied raw materials to another corner which was European industry. The third corner was Africa, where the Negro slaves were to be found. The sides of this triangle were the voyages between the corners— first the carriage of manufactures from Europe to be exchanged for African slaves who had been captured in tribal wars and raids; then carrying the slaves across to America to be traded for raw materials; and finally bringing the materials to Europe, to feed the appetites of the manufacturers there. At first the Negroes were treated in the same way as white indentured servants and were allowed to buy their freedom; they were not subjected to any race prejudice. It was the demands of the plantations, with crops depending on regular, disciplined tilling, which brought the pressure for outright slavery. Virginia, the first American colony to import Negroes, legalised slavery in 1617.

The side of the triangle representing the carriage of slaves from Africa to America was called the “middle voyage’’ and it was here that great cruelty was imposed and suffering endured — and vast profits made. It is possible now only to estimate the numbers who underwent the horrors of the middle voyage but a cautious figure would be 15 million, with a death rate of about 20 per cent. The central fact of this trade was that the slaves were not regarded as being any more sensitive than inanimate cargo. Thus they had to be packed into the holds of the slave ships as tightly as possible—one writer describes them as lying “like spoons”—and there could be no second thoughts about jettisoning them if disease broke out aboard, or if the ship ran into heavy weather. Those who survived the crossing were cleaned and oiled and polished for the auction.

Many great fortunes were made from the triangular trade. In 1789, the total trade of France amounted to £17 million of which San Domingo, with its slave economy, was responsible for £11 million. The bourgeoisie of Bordeaux and Marseilles, and the merchant capitalists of Manchester and Liverpool, owed most of their wealth—their big, comfortable houses, their carriages, their women—to the slave trade and all that it meant in human suffering and degradation.

There was of course a contradiction in the erection of an entire, and very important, economy on slavery at a time when the countries which were responsible for it were themselves developing the commodity production of capitalism, which needed free labour power. An attempt was made to resolve this contradiction by the simple expedient of classifying the Negro as an inherently inferior being. Thus American slavery could be distinguished from earlier forms, which were in harmony with the prevailing mode of wealth production, by its conscious dehumanising of the slave. Negro families were broken up either during or after the middle voyage ; the slaves were forbidden any education in reading or writing and they had no legal existence other than as the property of someone else. In 1857 the Dred Scott decision, which caused such an uproar, merely gave formal confirmation to something which had existed in fact for a very long time.

By that time the theories of racism, having taken something like three centuries of the slave trade to form themselves, began to emerge. Before then, the climate of opinion was such that the slave was regarded as outside the pale of humanity—without law, morals or religion. As each wretched shipment came in, religious divines rejoiced at all those souls saved from the moral depredations of paganism and idolatry. (At first any slaves who accepted conversion to Christianity automatically won their freedom. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Church had decided that there was after all nothing inconsistent in the converted Negro remaining a slave—and of course the slave owners agreed.) Dr. Cartwright, a professor at the University of Louisiana, diagnosed the slaves’ lack of interest in their work, and their tendency to run away, as mental diseases with impressive names—dyaesthesia and drapetomanie—for which the only cure was a whipping.

And not only the pro-slavers were affected. In 1765 Granville Sharp, who was later an abolitionist, intervened to save the life of a slave who had been flogged almost to death. At the time Sharp did not regard this incident as anything more than an act of private charity—certainly not as a condemnation of slavery. It is not surprising, that the whole thing eventually became rationalised into a theory, or perhaps a series of theories. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the “Teutonic Origin” theory—the idea that all worthwhile cultural achievements were the work of the peoples of North West Europe—took root, fostered by intellectual leaders like Bishop Stubbs of Oxford.

What this means is that any measures which, say, the American government now takes on civil rights must run up against opinions and prejudices which have become entrenched over centuries. These opinions have been responsible for some pretty dreadful episodes; for example the Tuskegee Institute documented 1,797 lynchings of Southern Negroes which took place between 1900 and 1964. This figure takes no account of the undocumented killings—the quiet murders with the body dumped in the river or the swamp and few people beyond the victim’s family marking their disappearance. More recently, between 1964 and 1967 over forty Negroes and whites have been murdered or lynched in Mississippi alone, without any effective action being taken against those responsible, although often their identity is general knowledge.

In addition, widespread, persistent segregation exists, in spite of the many Bills which have been passed to outlaw it. Sometimes this segregation is open, as it is in the schools of the Deep South, eight out of nine of which are still segregated. Sometimes it is a more subtle, de facto segregation, in which the whites simply move out of a district and leave it, with its schools, to the Negroes. The effect of this in Washington, D.C. is that in nearly all district schools black pupils are in a majority of over 95 per cent.

Herding any depressed group into a particular section of a city brings its own problems and tensions. In the case of the Negroes in America, these are accentuated when coloured workers from the South, thrown out of work by the increased use of mechanised farming methods and pesticides, migrate into that section. This produces the classic immigration situation, of desperate people pouring into an area already run down, an area of crumbling buildings which house rats and lice along with the people and where rack renters and other exploiters can take rich pickings.

There is a short, evocative word to describe these areas. Ghettoes. Officially, their names are, for example, Watts in Los Angeles and Harlem in New York. It is no cause for surprise, that they are breeding grounds for all manner of social disorders; in Harlem in 1964 the juvenile delinquency rate was twice that for the city as a whole, the proportion of drug addicts about ten times, the incidence of venereal disease in the under-21s six times.

Yet the very existence of the ghettoes, and the ways in which the Negroes protest—by riots, burnings, Black Power cells—are all taken by the racists as evidence to boost their conviction that Negroes are sub-human and therefore deserve nothing better than confinement in more ghettoes, and subjection to more prejudice and fiercer suppression. This racism is self-perpetuating, feeds upon its own appetite—and all in the conviction that it is an eternal and immutable truth.

And that really is the key to it. Contrary to what the racists think, racism as much as any other idea is a product of the prevailing economic conditions in society. Which means that, like other ideas which in their day were just as reactionary, just as powerful, it must change, and die, as conditions outside it require.

Ivan