Question Time (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

If politicians know the truth
Why do they tell lies? 

If British Rail belongs to the public
Why do I have to pay my fare? 

If this is my country
Which bit is mine? 

If there are mountains of food
Why do people starve? 

If capitalism works
Why do people put up with it? 

If I am free
Why am I a wage slave? 

If this is democracy
Why can't I have my say ? 

If I am a polar bear
Why am I so cold?
                                                    M. J. Tavener

Letters: Non-manual labour (1990)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Non-manual labour

Dear Editors,

I am writing in the hope that you can enlighten me on a point concerning non-manual labour. Unless I have completely misunderstood the dynamics of capitalism, the exploitation of the workers rests on the extraction of surplus value, and the wages system is the mechanism by which this robbery takes place. This is easily observable in, say, mining or steel production. Physical wealth is produced, expropriated and sold. However with unproductive work such as, for example, a typist or a bank clerk, what wealth is being produced? How can someone who is producing no wealth be exploited through the extraction of surplus value? What wealth is being expropriated?

I understand that much non-manual labour is an essential part of production (nursing, planning etc) and that this labour, indirectly, produces wealth. However, doesn't this suggest perhaps the existence of two different types of exploitation? (1) the ‘real’ economy—physical wealth production on which we all depend, and (2) non-manual labour, some of which (like the occupations mentioned above) is essential and some of which (bank clerks, etc) is completely wasted labour. The exploitation of someone in the 'real' economy is easily analysed—the owner's outlay (wages, rent, repairs, etc) can be said to cost x, commodities are sold for y. the difference between x and y being profits.

Can the exploitation of a typist be quantified in this way? A miner pays his own wages, he has produced wealth over and above the value of his wages, does a typist do the same? Who pays for a bank clerk's wages if they don't actually produce any wealth? Is it enough to say that employers are happy to pay unproductive workers because within the context of the money system they do serve a purpose? Are unproductive workers a sort of subsidised workforce, paid for with wealth accumulated through physical wealth production? If so, doesn't that imply a rather more sophisticated understanding of the system amongst employers than blind obedience to the God of profit—if they are prepared to forsake immediate gain by employing workers whom they can’t actually physically exploit for profit, or is it a situation that developed naturally?

T.M.

Glasgow.

Reply:

Production is the transformation of materials that originally came from nature into something that serves some human purpose. This necessarily involves both physical (manual) and mental (non-manual) work. Mining is not just a question of digging. It also involves surveying, planning how to extract the mineral and how bring it to the surface, and the like. This work is just as necessary to production as the physical side. Originally the same person would have done both but, as the division of labour has grown, the manual and mental aspects have come to be performed by different groups of workers. All of them are equally engaged in productive labour, including, we might add. the typists who type out the plans.

Under capitalism it is not just use-values that are produced but commodities, or items produced for sale. This means that a whole series of other operations become necessary which wouldn't exist if production were carried on simply for use: buying, selling, accounting, banking, insurance. Necessary though these activities are under capitalism, they are not productive as they do not enhance the usefulness of the product. This does not mean that the workers involved in them are not exploited. As Marx explained in Chapter 6 of Volume 2 of Capital on "The Costs of Circulation", such workers, just as much as productive workers, are paid less in terms of labour-time than the time they actually work and so perform unpaid labour for their employer. It is this unpaid labour which transfers a part of the surplus value produced in the productive sector to their employer. So an employer of unproductive labour has not abandoned the pursuit of profit. Quite the contrary.

Editors

South Africa

Dear Editor,

P. Lawrence, in his article on South Africa, asserts that “tribal differences also divided the African peoples who in the seventeenth century had migrated south from East Africa (Socialist Standard, April 1990). This claim is also to be found in the more dated official literature such as the South African Department of Information publication Progress through Separate Development (1973) and anyone familiar with Apartheid historiography will readily appreciate its purpose as one of a battery of “myths of origin" that Apartheid ideologists have deployed over the years to legitimate the contemporary distribution of land between "White South Africa" (87 percent) and the "Black Homelands" (13 percent). According to the above publication, "the story of modern South Africa dates back more than 300 years when the forefathers of the various Bantu or black nations of South Africa and the white South African nation, all foreigners to southern Africa, converged in relatively small numbers and from different directions on what was, at the time, a practically empty country except for small roving bands of primitive nomadic Bushmen and Hottentots" (p.12). The present distribution of land between whites and blacks, it is argued, reflects the original pattern of settlement of these two groups and involved "neither colonialism nor conquest".

This bears no relation to the historical reality. For some time now it has been known that the interior of South Africa was populated by iron age Bantu-speaking farmers long before the 17th century (when the Dutch arrived at the Cape) and was continuously occupied since, notwithstanding the Mfecane, or inter-tribal wars in the early 19th century, which supposedly depopulated the interior prior to the Great Trek. According to Shula Marks, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the first wave of Bantu migration arrived south of the Limpopo River “early in the first millenium AD, and not, as had been previously assumed, relatively late in the second" (History Today January 1980). There are, for example, numerous traces of ancient African settlements and mine workings throughout much of so-called White South Africa. Indeed, the archaeological evidence against the thesis of "simultaneous occupation” is now so overwhelming that not even the official propaganda of the South Africa Government bothers any longer to peddle this nonsense (cf. Official Yearbook of South Africa 1983). It is therefore all the more surprising that one should find it being perpetuated in, of all places, the Socialist Standard

Robin Cox, 

Haslemere, Surrey

Reply:

Although we never expressed the view our correspondent has read into the article (we merely stated that there was a migration of Bantu-speaking tribes, in the 17th century, into what is now South Africa, which is true), we naturally defer to the archeological evidence, not that it has any contemporary political relevance. The fact the Bantu-speakers were there first does not justify the claim that the ruling class in South Africa should be drawn from their ranks any more than the Afrikaner nationalist distortion of history justifies their claim that the ruling class should be white. Socialist are not interested in such arguments. We say there should be no ruling class, no states with their frontiers and nationalist mythologies, and no monopoly ownership of land

Editors.

The Case for Equality (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a socialist society all human beings will be equals. Without equality there could be no society which could accurately call itself socialist. So, the class-divided, extremely hierarchical nations such as Russia and China, which have a class of privileged party bureaucrats ruling over the majority of the population who are wage slaves, are clearly not socialist—they are part of the social inequality which characterises capitalism.

What do we mean by social equality? We mean that we seek to create a condition of social organisation in which no person is entitled to be regarded and rewarded as superior to others and no person is to be condemned to the disadvantaged position of being socially inferior. In a society of equality there will be no socially superior or inferior people.

We are not advocating a social situation in which no person is superior to another person in any respect. In a society of human equality one person might be a better violinist than another. The inferior violinist might be a better poet or bricklayer than the superior violinist. The significant point is that such differences of achievement (which are almost certainly conditioned rather than innate) will not lead to social inequality. In a society of equals the better violinist will have no opportunity to live a more confortable life than the violinist whose music sounds awful. The person who is an expert at cutting up human bodies (a surgeon) will have no greater access to pleasant accommodation or decent cigars than the person who is skilled at fixing motor cars (a mechanic). Society needs surgeons and mechanics, violinists and poets.

Just as a society of equality will include people with different levels of talent and skill in various areas of life and work, so it will be a society of humans who are different from each other. The distinction must be understood between equality and sameness. If the present writer is asked whether he prefers the plays of Chekhov or Pinter he will reply that he enjoys them equally; this does not mean that he regards them as being the same—in fact, the two writers are very different from one another. The two playwrights (in the view of the present writer) are worthy of equal respect. To say that the dedication of a nurse and a firefighter is equal is not to suggest that both types of work are the same. Equality does not imply conformity or uniformity. On the contrary, it implies that our appreciation of our fellow human beings is not governed by a monolithic value structure, but that we have the capacity to respect different abilities without subordinating one to the other. Rather infantile critics of the case for social equality suggest that we are advocating some kind of absolute natural equality. Jerome K. Jerome wrote a rather foolish satire about utopia in which he depicted a society in which everyone had to be the same height and weight. Clearly, social equality will not require the elimination of natural human differences. If one person has natural advantages over another (such as the physical strength of the young over the old and feeble) that will not allow such a person to have social domination over those who are so-called natural inferiors. Natural differences such as gender or skin colour are no basis for social differences; it is only in a society of human inequality that these natural distinctions become parts of a battle for power

The facts of social inequality
Only a fool or a liar would contend that we are now living in a society of human equality. World capitalism has as its first characteristic the unnatural, artificial inequality between class and class. In Britain today the richest 1 per cent of the population own more of the marketable wealth than all of the poorest 80 per cent added together. The richest 10 per cent own between them more than half of all the wealth in Britain. In short, even if the 90 per cent joined together we would still be poorer than the richest 10 per cent. Approximately one in four humans alive today are malnourished because they cannot afford to buy food. In Britain and the USA one in four children live on or below the official poverty line. The most recent World Land Census, carried out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, showed that 2.5 per cent of the people who own land of over 250 acres own between them 75 per cent of all the world's privately owned land.

These are the dry statistics of inequality. The more visible and emotionally comprehensible features of inequality are before us every day. The sight of kids sleeping on the streets on cold nights while estate agents advertise six-bedroom houses for over a million pounds—often as suitable second homes for the useless rich. The queues in the casualty departments of NHS hospitals where the poor must wait for serious injuries to be treated, while round the corner in the private wing there are comfortable lounges for the rich to wait in while they demand the very best in health care, regardless of whether they are ill or not. The mothers who cannot afford to feed their children and keep them warm on £40 a week, while a couple of miles away five-star hotels are serving dinner to parasites at £250 a head. Only the socially blind will deny the existence of social inequality: only the socially brutalised will regard it as a desirable condition of affairs.

Is social equality possible? Some have argued that it is not. and if we are to argue scientifically we must examine and dispose of their claims. We can commence with the most stupid argument against equality; the religious objection. In 1784 George Pitt argued against the doctrine of equality";

  A doctrine, the fallacy of which is proved by the experience of every day. by the concurrence of all history from the earliest times, and above all by the contemplation of all the works of the Creator, the very essence of which appears to be gradation or inequality. (Letter To A Young Nobleman.)

In short, humans are created to be unequal. The Church has pursued this propaganda with vigour: The rich man in his castle, the poor man in his hut. God made them high and lowly . . . Apart from the fact that this nonsense ignores the first 40,000 years of human society (the great majority of our history) in which classes did not exist, its entire reasoning depends upon the completely unproven and utterly unprovable belief that the world was designed by an over-seeing being who decided how it would be organised. The religious defence of inequality is an ideology designed by the defenders of the rich who offer a creationist account of human inequality as a way of keeping the ignorantly—believing inferiors in their place. Lest there be any doubt about this we can turn to the writings of the prominent 18th century Christian and conservative, Edmund Burke, who spelt out the religious purpose in clear terms:

   The great body of people must not find the principle of natural insubordination . . . rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportionate to the endeavour, they must be taught to console themselves with the prospect of divine justice.

The claim that inequality was designed by a god requires a belief in an unprovable. immaterial deity, and then a respect for such a supernatural being who designs poverty and social misery for the majority class in society.

Biology not determinant
Different from the religious case against equality—but not all that different—is the biological theory. The infamous Professor Eysenck states that "biology sets an absolute barrier to egalitarianism"; we are all born with unequal capacities to become intelligent; this intellectual inequality is genetically inherited and determines our status in life: "Clearly, the whole course of development of a child's intellectual abilities is largely laid down genetically" (The Inequality of Man).

This biological determinism replaces genes for gods and contends that we are all born to fit into an intellectual hierarchy and must make the best of what our genes allow us to become. Eysenck and others have attempted to link superior genetic abilities with white skin colour. Others, such as Steven Goldberg in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, have tried to make a case for the biological inferiority of women. The case for biological inequality rests upon some very weak reasoning. Firstly, its conception of "intelligence' is a very narrow one, rooted in the limited history of European and American capitalism. If Professor Eysenck was left to survive in an African desert region we wonder how "intelligent" he would be in relation to the people who were brought up in such an area. The best evidence regarding human behaviour points to the fact that humans learn to be what we are: the extent to which we inherit genetically any mental aspects of our being is negligible. Even if there was some truth in the Eysenck theory, there would be no more reason for a society of human equality to discriminate against less intelligent people than it would be to discriminate against those who are physically disabled.

Davis and Moore have constructed a sociological theory which is simply an updated version of last century's Social Darwinist defence of social inequality:

  Social inequality is . . . an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most important persons. (Some Principles of Stratification).

According to this theory, society offers rewards to the people it needs most. Superiority is a reward for usefulness. If you are socially useless you will become inferior. The fittest will survive and thrive. The only problem with this theory—a pretty major problem for a would-be scientific analysis—is that it bears no relationship to the experience of how capitalist society actually does run. We know very well that under capitalism the useless stockbroker is rewarded (by income) much more than the nurse; the parasitical Royals are rewarded with billions of pounds for waving at people, while workers who grow food are often so poor that they cannot afford to eat properly. The belief that life is one great competition in which the capitalists win because they are the most able is a nice idea if you are a millionaire, but a lot of rot if you consider that most millionaires inherit their fortunes, and that these were obtained in the first place by exploiting the labour skills of others.

Free society of equals

It will not take long for the thoughtful reader to detect that all of the arguments against social equality are unhistorical. The god-myth has no basis in material history and entirely ignores the thousands of years during which humans lived in a condition of what social anthropologists call primitive communism. Were these humans (the majority of those who have lived on the planet) built by god with a design fault? The biological theory relies upon unproven notions of inherited intelligence and defines intelligence in an unhistorical manner. The modern Social Darwinists can see no further than the social order of the capitalist jungle.

There is one further argument against social equality which is sometimes put by capitalism's defenders and which does make sense. It is said that equality can only occur by limiting certain liberties which currently exist. This is quite true. The liberty of the least needy to push in front of the most needy in the queue for food, clothing and shelter will be taken away in a socially equal society. The liberty to destroy food and take land out of cultivation in order to keep prices and profits up will no longer exist. The liberty of humans to compel others to work for them (or starve) will be ended. In short, a socialist system of human equality can only occur once the expropriators have been expropriated—once the capitalist class has been dispossessed of its monopoly of the earth's resources. This threat to the capitalists' liberty to own and control the world is seen by them as something to be resisted at all costs—including the reputations and lives of those who dare to advocate social equality. The capitalist minority use every means of propaganda at their command to distort the case for equality, to defame its advocates and to defend their own privilege in the name of popular liberty and democracy.

To the majority of us, who are not capitalists but live by selling our mental and physical energies for wages and salaries, the awful danger of the capitalists losing their liberty to be the top dogs ought not to appear as such an awful threat. On the contrary, the removal of the liberty of the capitalist to be superior is the necessary precondition for the liberty of the wealth producers not to be inferior. The right of the worker not to be a wage slave requires the abolition of the right of anyone to be a capitalist. Freedom and equality have the abolition of class society as their social basis.

The only free society will be one where all human beings, without any distinctions of race or sex or age, have free and equal access to the common wealth of the world. Once goods and services are freely available to all, on the basis of self-defined desires, without the interference of money or markets, humans will be able to say in honesty that we are members of a human family—a family of equals.

Steve Coleman

What's so good about the market? (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everyone seems to be falling in love with the market these days. From all over the political spectrum people are saying that it's the best way of deciding what's produced and how it's distributed. The Communist Party, the Labour Party. Mr Gorbachev. Mrs Thatcher—wherever you look more and more people are saying that the market system is efficient and allows us freedom to decide what to buy, where we live, and where we work. Everyone seems to be a convert to the new religion of competition; even the countries of Eastern Europe are now shifting away from the equally abhorrent state capitalism. Yet the human cost of all this supposed freedom and equality is barely ever mentioned. In reality the "free" market hides the most blatant inequality, oppression and wastefulness behind its mask of equality, freedom and efficiency.

Unequal Shares for All

In theory we all have the freedom to buy a flat in Mayfair or a forest in Scotland—even if we don't speak with a plum in our mouth. But you don't get far without money. And some people tend to have a lot more money than others. For example, it was recently announced on the TV news that the people of Ethiopia stood on the verge of a famine of worse proportions than 1984 when around a million people died. We see pictures of beautiful children dying—robbed of their right to even a life of poverty. Now take the Earl of Cadogan. According to the Sunday Times, he is worth £450 million due to land owned as a result of marriages in the 18th Century. Or what about Alan Sugar? He is judged to have £432 million—rather more than the Korean women and men who produce the computers that bear his company name—Amstrad. What explains the gap between those who struggle and those who become multi-millionaires?

The Great Divide: Class

Class is not about your accent or your school tie: it's about what you own and whether you have to work for your living. Just because Robert Maxwell was once poor, it does not mean that he is somehow still a member of the working class now he may be worth up to £675 million. You needn't be an economist to see that millionaires (and. indeed, billionaires) will have a bit more choice than the poor of Eritrea.

All of this belies the claim that the market is in any way "democratic" and that we have somehow got equal "votes" under it. Some people have many times the influence of others in choosing what they do in the world. How else can we explain the production of luxury yachts alongside the failure of the system to provide adequate food to millions? It doesn't matter how much people are crying out for food and shelter; without purchasing power (money) the needs of the poor will stay unrecognised. Producing food for the penniless will never be a big money earner—it won't sell. And the pressure towards holding wages down to allow firms to be "competitive" will ensure that even many of those in work will be unable to influence significantly what is supplied on the market in order to meet their needs. Some democracy!

As we go to the market place to make money to live, most of us sell only our ability to work by getting a job. Yet others have got a bit more to fall back on. income from their capital. Even if they somehow "deserve" wealth, why should such talented people enjoy continued advantage? If they're so good they could succeed all over again from nothing! And why do some people have millions of pounds? Is it that they are a thousand times better than you or me? Can someone really work a hundred times harder than a nurse or an ambulance driver? Supporters of the market think so. "The market rewards hard work and enterprise," they say. How is this measured? Is a company director s greater wealth worked out with the aid of an "Enterprisometer”? In reality their rewards are legally stolen from the efforts of ordinary women and men. The capitalist's reward— profit—is no more than the unpaid labour of working men and women.

Now, the capitalist press say that everyone is free to set up their own companies and to become capitalists. But we can't all get rich by owning companies—to begin with, who will we all employ (read "exploit") in the companies? And we can't all compete with Murdoch's empire. To become cost-effective in the era of trans-global corporations a company must meet the huge costs of entry which exist in most areas of business. You need the ability to sustain a loss for the initial period—how else could Sky Television have survived?

You also need the power of money to influence customers through marketing and advertising. In Murdoch's case, it has been a bit of a help owning five national papers in Britain to persuade the unconverted to buy satellite TV. In short, you need money (capital) to make money. Despite the Enterprise Culture in Britain, real economic power is not in the hands of a few window cleaners undercutting each other's prices on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Record numbers of small firms went bust last year in Britain and it's no surprise when you realise what they're up against.

Wealth, Waste and Want

Yet it's so much more than a question of unequal shares. The whole rationale of production is skewed by profit. People's real needs are not taken directly into account when firms decide what is to be produced. Even if we had a "share-owning democracy", and everyone had an equal stake in society as Mrs Thatcher tells us we've got. even if we divided all the money out with "fair shares for all", the whole system would still be a roller coaster that is not amenable to rational and democratic control. This is because the market system is geared towards production for profit, stimulated by advertising, marketing and credit. The whole aim of the system would still be production for profit and all that this entails—even if there were not the sickening levels of inequality that we now experience; we would still have wasteful hyping of competing products, banking and built-in obsolescence.

The market system has provided the impetus for technological developments but doesn't allow us to take full advantage of them. In a sane society everyone would benefit from advances in technology. Under capitalism research is duplicated and advances in technology are restricted by the patent system. All in the name of the great god—Competition. The market system is characterised by superficial rationality and efficiency within individual firms, but global insanity when all these unco-ordinated and anti-social decisions are added together and seen in the light of the needs of the whole world population. And under this supposedly efficient system there is also the huge waste of unemployment where people living on a pittance are robbed of a chance even of wage slavery. There can be no democracy when decisions about work organisation and how to provide goods and services are made on the basis of profit. Trying to meet the needs of five billion people through the clumsy workings of the market is like performing microsurgery with boxing gloves on.

Working to Stand Still

In a world where buying and selling dominate. there is a complete disregard for the experience of people in the workplace since the whole emphasis is upon what is produced and whether it can be sold. Wages, health and safety and work satisfaction will always come a poor second best to the need to make a profit. Much welcome discussion about "Green" issues and "quality of life" has managed to avoid one of the main limits upon our real quality of life—the lack of control and creativity that most people experience in their work. Environmentalism has been seen to be largely about buying the right sort of consumer goods. Important though this may be, it leaves aside the fact that the whole reason for capitalist production is not production for need, nor for the satisfaction of the people in the workplace, but production to make a profit on the market.

This is at the very centre of capitalism; and the consequence is that decisions about how goods and services are made are still in the hands of the large corporations. The system cannot gear itself to producing fewer useless goods, producing them in a more satisfactory way for the workers, or democratically deciding how to solve a problem globally.

For example, the market will never get round to planning and producing a truly safe and comfortable public transport system. The vested interests of oil and automobile corporations ensure that it is biased towards producing and promoting private cars. As an afterthought we're asked to use lead-free petrol to limit the havoc caused by everyone pursuing their "individuality" as we sit in ever-increasing traffic queues of mass-produced cars. And Cecil Parkinson still sees more roads as the solution!

Under the market, the answer is always "more” rather than a sane alternative. “Make a fast buck" and "Leave the competition standing," we're told. All this obscures the fact that we need more than ever to collectively decide how to deal with the increasingly global problems that we all face. It's no game: life and death decisions are being decided behind our backs by the harsh workings of the market. We have been played a huge confidence trick. Beneath the talk of efficiency and equality the market is out of control. We need to abandon this crazy system which dominates our lives and organise to bring about a wholly new society; on which has never  even been tried—socialism. But that's another story . . .

Ken Aldred

Peace (!) (1919)

Editorial from the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peace, we are told, has now been made. On 28th June, 1919, the representatives of the Allied powers and Germany signed a “Peace treaty”, officially terminating the “Great War”, which it had claimed would “end all war” and “make the world safe for democracy”.

To achieve the great result millions of the working class lie in war graves, millions are maimed, crippled, or disfigured for life, millions more, with constitutions shattered, are wondering what the future holds for them.

Alongside this enormous waste of human life and limb, the destruction of wealth that has taken place seems trivial. Yet here the quantities are staggering. Numberless houses, factories and works, numerous mines, roads, railways and canals, thousands of ships with their cargoes, millions of tons of munitions, and extensive crops, forests, and the like, have been destroyed in this welter of war. And even now we are not at the end of the waste and destruction, for Mr. Bonar Law, speaking at a “Victory Loan” meeting, stated that there were still 23 other wars in progress.

But the “Great War” has ended. And almost immediately, in every country throughout the capitalist world, strikes and struggles between masters and workers blaze up. In the countries of the conquerors and the conquered alike, in neutral States and border zones, over-riding all the artificial divisions of territory and race, the antagonism between the working class and the master class gains greater prominence, with fiercer fights, than ever before. These fights, necessary for immediate purposes as many of them are, provide no solution for the fundamental problem facing the working class.

To the capitalist class a solution is impossible. They cannot abolish the antagonism except by abolishing themselves.

The “League of Nations”, claimed by its supporters to be the greatest safeguard of future peace that has resulted from the war, is cynically exposed by the military treaties between England, France, and America, to be a combination of the stronger Powers to enforce methods and conditions suitable to their own interests upon the weaker nations.

What other arrangements or undertakings have been made we do not at present know, but the refusal of China, one of the Allies, to sign the “Peace” Treaty is significant. One reason for China’s action that has leaked out is the practical handing over of Chinese territory – the Shantung Peninsular, to Japan. As this action threatens to at least restrain, if not to shut out, American trade in that part of China, because of the important seaports on the Shantung coast, it is raising a pretty quarrel between America and Japan, whose trade rivalry is already intense.

Such portions of the “Peace” Treaty with Germany as have been published further support our case. Large areas are to be taken from Germany and handed over to France, Belgium, Poland, and Denmark. In some cases a plebiscite of the inhabitants of certain areas may be taken later on, but this is entirely within the discretion of the “League”, who may withhold such plebiscite if they wish. It is, of course, quite an accident that so many of these areas contain rich coal and ore deposits. In addition the Allies are to enjoy the “most favoured nation” treatment in commerce, to have unrestricted freedom of transit for their goods, and no Tariff discrimination for five years. While children are starving in Germany over 100,000 milch cows are to be taken by the Allies.

In the Socialist Standard for September 1914, in our Manifesto on the War, we stated:

  “The Capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the questions of the control of trade routes and the world’s markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political ignorance and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters’ quarrel.”

Alone of all parties in this country we took our stand upon the Socialist position. So-called Socialist parties that supported the war then, are now in many cases pretending to be opposed to such wars and are urging the workers to demonstrate and strike against British soldiers being used against Russian workers. Too ignorant or cowardly in those days to stand for the interests of the working class, they now try to achieve a popularity and reputation by urging soldiers to refuse to fire on Russian workers, while they applauded or were silent when the same soldiers were shooting down German, Austrian, or Hungarian soldiers.

Nay, even when these soldiers were used against workers at home–in Dublin, Hull, Tonypandy, and Glasgow–they accepted the right claimed by the capitalists to use such forces for their own interests, without any call for a strike.

In the manifesto mentioned above we said:

  “The machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers. These armed forces, therefore, will only be set in motion to further the interests of the class who control them – the master class.”

As far as Russia is concerned, there are signs that “intervention” is nearing its end – not because of the demonstrations (those called for 21st July were a ghastly failure), but because of a division of interests in the capitalist camp.

While the British and French capitalists who have invested large amounts of capital in developing Russian industry, desire intervention for the purpose of seizing control of the productive forces, either for themselves or in combination with the Russian master class, the other capitalists are quietly but effectively protesting against the scheme. Those who manufacture at home and seek markets abroad, note with anxiety how Japan and America are preparing to take hold of the Russian market. According to some reports, German merchants are already trading in Russia. On the other hand the Bolshevik Government has repeatedly announced its readiness to make “economic” and “industrial” concessions to foreign capitalists in exchange for seeds, machinery, and tools. The acceptance of these “concessions” can have but one result–the running of the main industries of Russia on capitalist lines.

The backward economic conditions of Russia compel the Bolsheviks to make these offers that are in flat contradiction to their theories, and they can no more resist successfully the force of these circumstances than they could avoid signing the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Hence that section of the capitalist class who wish to open trade with Russia favour the withdrawal of Allied support of all kinds from Kotchak and Dennikin, and the making of a commercial agreement with the Bolshevik Government. Their need for haste is increased by the open campaign of jingoism that arose again after the Armistice and which has been epitomised by Sir Douglas Haig when receiving the Freedom of the City of London on the 12th June, 1919. Speaking of his experience of the war he said:

  “My message to you, and through you to the Empire, is to urge you, now that the war has given you at once the reason and the opportunity to do so, to set up forthwith the organisation of a strong citizen Army on Territorial lines–an organisation which shall ensure that every able-bodied citizen shall come forward when the next crisis comes, not as a willing, patriotic, but militarily ignorant volunteer, but as a trained man.” (Daily News, 13.6.1919).

Here, even before the “Peace” treaty was signed, was the exposure of the foul lies of the capitalist class that this war was “to end all war”.

While competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets, and control of raw material exists, the cause of war remains. The amalgamation of some of these groups into “leagues” or “associations”, while it may put off the evil day for a while, only makes the struggle the greater when it does arise. But even if the whole of the greater capitalists of the world were to unite for the control of the globe, there would still remain the greatest of all wars to be fought out – the Class War for the freedom of Mankind.

During the “Great War” the capitalist class on both sides broke down many of the old national and racial barriers that still existed between various sections of slaves under their control. Black chattel slaves fought alongside yellow contract workers. Irish Home Rulers stood by jingo Englishmen, French Syndicalists by Japanese Imperialists.

Clearer than ever before stands out the great fact that there is no hope for real peace in the world until these various sections of workers recognise the common fundamental character of their slavery and set to work to remove it, thus ending the enslavement of the human race by the establishment of Socialism.

As in September 1914, so now we say:

“Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.”

Executive Committee,

Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Peace—Competition—War. (1919)

From the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the Press was gushing and frothing over the spectacular peace-signing business (30.6.19) the "Daily News" published an editorial on the matter, and also several articles by those they designate "Great Men." The articles in question are best summed up as a conglomeration of contradictory vapourings.

In its editorial the "Daily News" sends up a hymn of thanksgiving that "the world has won its freedom," and then goes on to make the following curious remarks:

  "We are friends to-day with France, and our sincerest prayer is that that friendship will never be broken. . . . . She is again the most formidable figure on the Continent. She, almost alone, stands erect and triumphant over the ruins of Empires.  We rejoice in her miraculous recovery ; but we should be fools to blind ourselves to the implications." (Italics mine.)

These sound pacific words ! What is the nature of the implications to which we must not blind ourselves? Of course the nature is the old capitalist nature. The crushing of Germany has strengthened the commercial power of France—one of the competitors in the rush for the world's markets.

The article goes on further to enlighten us :

  "And is there anyone who looks to Japan and the Far East without large and vague apprehensions ? Or Westward across the Atlantic without wondering what the future has in store there and realising, however dimly, that if the United States is compelled to forsake its historic pacifism for militarism it is sea power which will be its capital concern."

Undoubtedly the above shows that the present peace is to be a lasting one ! The subscribers to this view have evidently studied the relativity of all things, and the meaning they attach to "lasting" is a day or two—or rather its a lasting peace until the next great war !

The idea of setting up America with her gigantic naval programme as a pacifist nation, is truly comical. In the last twenty-five years America has been at war with Spain, the Phillipines, China, and Germany, to say nothing of the murderous slaughter of American working men in the various strikes. At the moment of writing it is announced that America contemplates the construction of two liners larger than anything afloat, and so constructed that they are easily convertible into commerce protectors.

The Peace Treaty receives anything but a glowing reference from the "Daily News." "It does not aim at abolishing militarism ; it aims at abolishing Prussia," is their tribute to the efforts of Lloyd George & Co.

After mourning over the defects of the Peace Treaty the article hails the "League of Nations" as the new deliverer and the promise of a glorious future. It then proceeds to knock the bottom out of the League with the following remarks:

   "There are grave defects in this momentous document. The provision that unanimity is required for action is the most disquieting of these defects."

And we might tack on this the fact that, so far, the League consists mainly of England, France, and America, and excludes the Central Powers; also that the nations composing the League are laying themselves out for more efficient predatory forces than ever, as witness America's mighty warships, Britain's gigantic airships and flying machines, and the recent big armament combine, Explosives, Ltd.

Things certainly look promising !

From the other articles, in the same paper, already alluded to I will extract some of the wisdom of the "Great Men."

Sir Walter Runciman writes :

  "Now that peace is signed, the first necessity for the British Empire and for the whole world is to get trade going everywhere. . . . Only by a full stream of trade can the flow of food and goods between all peoples wipe out hunger, misery, and unemployment, and possibly anarchy."

Capital lying idle is unfruitful, but capital employed in trade brings in rich returns, hence the anxiety of the profit seekers to get on with the business. That a full stream of trade will will wipe out hunger, etc., is the usual delusive humbug of the employing class. Just prior to the war trade was booming everywhere. Statistics showed relatively higher returns than ever before, and yet the lackeys of the master class (Lloyd George among them) admitted that there was greater poverty and misery existing than any previous records showed. For years the number of inmates in the lunatic asylums, and the number of homeless on the streets of London, had been growing. With the improvement in productive processes and machinery, and the increase in the number of women in industry, brought about by the war, we have far worse times ahead when trade booms again.

Another writer, Dr. Clifford, says:

 "The seed of new wars are sown with a prodigal hand. . . . An economic struggle is to follow the military, and an international trade rivalry is arranged to block the way to international co-operation and reconciliation."

As he correctly states, the seeds of new wars are already sown—the seeds of war exist in the very marrow of capitalism. The economic laws governing capitalism drive different sections into trade conflict, and it becomes a question of the eclipse of a particular section or a trial of arms.

The seeds of new wars are not hard to discover. While England has been deeply involved in war, America has been restoring her shipbuilding industries, which were previously decaying, and now ranges herself against England as a powerful competitor in the shipbuilding and carrying trades.

At the recent coal enquiry competent witnesses expressed the fear that in the future America and France would be serious competitors in the iron and steel trades.

For some years Japan and America have been in a state of doubtful friendship in their competition for the Chinese trade. Latterly China has been developing rapidly, and may soon be able to supply a great part of her own needs, and also compete abroad. We may witness the spectacle of Japan and America at each other's throats over the Chinese market, and either or both at the throat of China to force her to accept their goods.

Japan is becoming yearly a more serious competitor in European markets, and "cheap German muck" may yet give place to "cheap Japanese muck."

In a note relating to a conversation with a "well-known authority in the City," headed "Japan ready to sell," in the "Daily News" (9.7.19.) the following appears :

   "Japan is manufacturing all the fancy goods, the cheap crockery, the toilet and clothes brushes, and the thousand-and-one little knick-knacks that used to come from Germany and Austria. . . . The Japanese are making just those goods which we formerly imported from enemy countries on account of their cheapness."

A writer in the "Penny Magazine" during the last two months also points out that Japan, India, and America are steadily encroaching upon England's cotton trade. Modern inventions have deprived Lancashire of the advantage she formerly possessed in her humid atmosphere. As the other countries possess the raw material (and Lancashire does not) and can produce the necessary atmosphere artificially, Lancashire is going downhill and may be crushed out of the trade eventually.

That "our staunch ally," Japan (who is pinching our trade!) has learnt from the experience of the leading nations, and is developing her industries and piling up her wealth strictly in accordance with capitalist tradition, is borne out by the New York special correspondent of the "Daily News" (16.7.19.) in the following quotation relating to Korea :

"The regular use of torture, the establishment of compulsory prostitution, the promotion of the opium traffic, the suppression of free speech, the repeated flogging of women, the massacre of scores of unarmed people at a time when no disturbance was proceeding, and many other atrocities indicate that Japan should spare no effort to dismiss officials responsible and completely change her attitude towards this problem.
Already Japan is confronted with the Chinese boycott, which tends to substitute American for Japanese trade. Her Korean policy must inevitably determine her position in the Far East, and beyond all question the cruelties practised in Korea have caused indignation here."

If Japan continues to forge ahead it can easily be seen that she may soon become an "enemy country" so far as the other leading capitalist nations are concerned. The recent disclosure by President Wilson of the secret treaty between Japan, Germany, and Russia, if true, shows that Japan is well up to her rivals in the unscrupulous scramble for markets.

In spite of the ringing of the joy bells of peace England is still at war in India and Russia.

India, as well as pinching our trade, is developing in other directions. She is the world's greatest producer of hides, and the only producer of jute, while her export of manganese and tungsten materially affects the manufacture of steel in Europe. Such a prize must be retained at all costs.

A side-light on the intervention of England in Russia is given in by Sir A. Steel-Maitland when addressing business men interested in Russian trade. He said:

"In the next 20 years the part of the world where trade expansion was likely to be quickest was in Central and South-Eastern Russia, and the enormous belt of country east of the Urals. British traders now had a good chance of establishing themselves there." —"Daily News," 12.7.19.

In "The World's Work" during the war Mr. R. C. Martens (of Martens & Co., a large American commercial concern) contributed an article and a series of maps relating to the resources of European and Asiatic Russia. In the course of the article he made the following remarks :

"The war has caused American manufactures to double at least. Most other countries have also expanded their manufacturing capacities with the result that the world's manufacturing capacity is at least three times as great as it was before the war. . . . Will the industrial nations not have to look for markets for their surplus in lands where there is greatest natural wealth ? If so, Russia will assuredly be the greatest commercial field in the world at the end of this war."

And he closes the article with this significant remark:

  "The opportunity is waiting."

No wonder England and the "great democracy of the West" are taking such a fatherly and bloodthirsty interest in Russian affairs.

The "Daily Chronicle" for August 6th adds its quota to the mass of evidence supporting our contention. Under the heading "Tariff War Breaks Out in Europe" our contemporary reports:

  ". . the introduction into Italy of hats, caps, gloves, and umbrellas is wholly forbidden. So, too are threads, textiles, and all semi-manufactured goods, whether in wool, linen, cotton, hemp, or jute.
The same applies to agricultural machinery and to . all parts thereof.  . .

BOHEMIA'S COUNTER TARIFF.

. . Already Bohemia has retaliated on the shutting out of her glass wares by imposing a steep tariff of 300 kronen on Italian wines."

The report then goes on to declare that there is every prospect of Sweden, who had made the promised supply of paper pulp dependent upon the admission into Italy of certain cheap paper goods, retaliating by stopping the paper pulp supply. Truly, we are a happy family in these days of universal peace !

As the military war waned the trade war took its place and rages with greater violence every day. The inevitable result will be another recourse to the battlefield.

So that the last doubt may be dispelled from the minds of readers as to the everlasting nature of the "peace" I will conclude with another quotation from the "Daily News" (12.7.19.)

  "Sir Douglas Haig and Admiral Sir Roger Keyes received the freedom of the city (Aberdeen) to-day, and also honorary degrees of the University. Sir Douglas, in reply, urged that every growing lad should be taught the use of the rifle, so that when the next great trial came, "as one day it surely will," we should be found a nation in arms, ready and prepared to meet it."

As the Socialist Party has all along pointed out. the wars of civilised countries, since the birth of the capitalist system, have been caused through the struggles between sections of the world's capitalist class for the trade routes, raw materials, markets, and the like. As long as there is commodity production, buying and selling, with the consequent competition among buyers and sellers and the enslavement of the producing class, wars are of the very essence of things. Lasting peace can only arrive when the private ownership of the means of living has been abolished and common ownership has emerged from the ruins—in other words, wars and all the other evils that are a consequence of capitalism can only disappear when capitalism gives place to Socialism.

Gilmac.

The Making of a Socialist. (1919)

From the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Someone has said that fools learn from experience, and wise men from observation and reflection. If this be correct, it is to be feared that the dictum of Carlyle as to most people on these islands being found in the former category has a good deal of truth in it. Certainly, with regard to political and economic phenomena, the great majority of working-class men and women—even those who have a tendency towards independent thinking—seem to require something obvious and hammer-like to be forced on them in a quite personal way before they are able to visualise and focus the true political and economic situation and their place relative to it.

For instance, the loss of a dearly-loved relation or friend in war will be necessary before they can bring themselves to attempt fathom the cause and object of war; the disaster of unemployment must overtake them before they can understand the part unemployment plays in the present social system ; the continuous scraping to make ends meet must be brought forcibly home to them before they can realise that the amount of the meagre wage they receive is based upon their cost of subsistence; the superciliousness or brutality to them personally by someone "drest in a little brief authority" must touch their self-esteem before the fact of their degradation as members of the "lower" class, as social slaves, can germinate in their brains.

In some way or other their self-interest must suffer before they can realise that politics is anything but a game played by followers of different schools of thought for their own amusment, or that economics is anything but a dry and pedantic subject, fit only for professional pedagogues and a few fanatics.

It is, of course, not surprising that such an attitude of mind shomld predominate. The early training of working-class men and women, both in the school and the home, the noxious doctrines innoculated later on from the pulpit, platform, and Press, all do their part in forming the working class into what the capitalists desire that they should become, that is, in the sphere of politics, adherents to, and supporters of, one or other of the orthodox political parties, and in the sphere of economics, hard-working, docile, and respectable wage slaves.

So complete and successful is the slave-morality engendered by the agents of the capitalists, and accepted without question by most of the contemporary generation of working-class men and women, that the younger and growing generation finds it almost impossible, without some particularly violent reaction, to fight against the stream of capitalist ethics, and become instead opponents of capitalism ; to become, indeed—at least in theory—what is, from the capitalist standpoint, immoral, irreligious, and unethical.

Even when this negative attitude of direct and bitter opposition to the capitalist system has been attained, it is practically useless inasfar as it remains purely negative. A consciousness of the further development of society must be born; the knowledge that, following the inevitable downfall of the capitalist system—based as that system is on the production of wealth for profit—must come, in the ordinary course of evolution, a system based on production for use—the system known as Socialism— such knowledge must grow and fructify, otherwise the negative attitude of antagonism to capitalism is injurious to the individual, either soon ending in sterility, or developing into an idée fixe, with the unfortunate results of anarchy and chaos of intellect which such "fixed ideas" usually generate.

There is another fact to be taken into consideration. The mental process by which the opponent of capitalism becomes a Socialist is often retarded by his wanderings after fallacious ideals. He is sometimes caught in the toils of the reformist parties, is mentally fleeced and plundered by one or other of the pseudo-Socialist organisations, and it is only after many false starts and much perturbation and disillusionment that by means of a process of deduction he eventually arrives at what the force of circumstances and the logical sequence of events urge and finally compel him to become, that is, a class-conscious proletarian, with a historical sense of his place in nature and society, and a definite philosophical standpoint from which all phenomena can be judged and commended or condemned as the case may be—in short, a Socialist.

We have now arrived at the point where the Socialist, having evaded, or escaped from, the quicksands of pseudo-Socialism, has clearly realised the fact of his new theory of life, and has began to take his part in the work of propaganda, which is so vital to the early and successful inauguration of the Socialist Commonwealth. There still remains, however, the need for unrelaxing vigilence in all that he thinks, or says, or does. While capitalism lasts the Socialist, who must of necessity live and work under the present system, is obliged, however much it goes against the grain, to accept, for all practical purposes, the morality of a system with which he finds himself totally at variance. Hence the paradox, that the Socialist, even while he is doing his utmost to overthrow a system which he hates, must at the same time act, to a very great extent, at any rate, in accordance with, and adhere to, the conventions of that system.

It will be seen, therefore, that there is always a necessity for alertness, for a steadfastness of purpose, in the cause of Socialism, to militate against any possible undermining of the Socialist's principles. The Socialist, like any other member of the working class, has to live and work under capitalist conditions and has to conform, in the main, to the conventional morality of capitalism. But he must, at the same time, use every effort and take every opportunity to hasten the downfall of what has, in effect, become an obsolete social system, and to help inaugurate the next stage in the development of society.

One of the reasons of defection from the principles of Socialism is to be found in the inability of certain superficial minds to build up, as it were, brick by brick, a philosophical structure, from whose topmost tower every hill and undulation of the workings of modern society can be surveyed. Unless the Socialist possesses a definite and unassailable point of view, it is really a misnomer to speak of him as a Socialist at all. He is simply one of those mental ineffectives who are always to be found attaching themselves to any unpopular cause and who, having no rock-bottomed principles, are easily swayed by any stronger personality with whom they happen to come in contact. If that stronger personality should be a direct or indirect agent of the capitalists, the result, of course, is the deviation from the Socialist cause to any passing craze, such as Woman's Suffrage, or Nationalisation, or something of that description. To such people capitalist environment is too strong to enable the somewhat vague and nebulous ideas they possess relating to Socialism to stand any chance of developing on right lines.

To the Socialist, to the man, that is, who has realised his position in nature and society, and who has built up for himself a philosophy of life in accordance with that realisation, the questions that would have vexed and distracted him in the non-Socialist days have become simplified to an enormous degree. Whether it be in the ordinary routine of every-day affairs, or in the realms of literature, art, or science, his whole activities will be examined in the light of their value to Socialism; the facts appertaining to the present social system will be arraigned and judged at the bar of the Socialist philosophy, and the results used in the most effective way in criticising capitalism and advocating the establishment of the new order of society. 

It is hoped that the foregoing will give some idea as to the making of Socialists, which, of course, is one of the main objects of the Socialist Party. The road to Socialism is a hard road, and perhaps this account of what is largely a personal experience may lend some assistance to those younger future comrades who are now groping more or less blindly toward the beacon—seen only by them at present as a faint and far-off glimmer—of the Socialist Commonwealth.

F. J. Webb 

Slavery. (1919)

From the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the average working man hears the word "slavery" a picture usually flashes across his mind of a black man working with a gang on a plantation in some far-distant land, with the cruel whip of the overseer continually applied to his dusky back to urge him on to greater efforts. Perhaps our "free" worker recalls having seen in childhood, the magic lantern pictures that tell the story of the famous "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Then he shrugs his shoulders and thanks God he was not born a nigger.

Slavery in various forms has existed from the remote past—since the origin of private property (during barbaric times). Has slavery ceased with the growth of the great "democratic" States of to-day? To answer this question it is necessary to enquire a little closer as to what slavery really is.

A slave is one who is compelled to work the whole or part of his time for another. The chattel-slave gives up all his time, the bondslave a part.

Thus the Romans put foreigners captured in war to work in mines, in their houses, and on their lands. The pious pilgrim fathers of North America bought negroes for rum, and sold them to the Southern planters.

Although the Roman slave and the negro slave were acquired bodily and for life, they were not taken for the good of their health, nor out of charity ; they were taken to work for their respective masters, and their lives were only of worth to the masters as long as they could work, as the fearful annals of slavery show only too clearly.

The era of purchasing a slave bodily as a chattel, or binding him for definite a period, as a serf, has passed away, but has the era of slavery passed also ?

We are told by politicians of various shades of opinion that in the past people were wicked and enslaved their fellow beings, but that now things are very different—we are a free people. The writer of these lines, who is one of the "free" people, has a weakness for sunny slopes, shady trees, and cool, country breezes these warm days, but so soon as he commences to make plans for a trip to Arcadia his freedom has a disagreeable habit of vanishing. If he goes away (that is if he can raise the wind!) he will lose his job, for employers won't allow workmen to play fast and loose with their jobs. There is always somebody outside the gate whom hunger will drive to forego holidays in order to keep the job.

If we can't get jobs we must starve, and if we are caught starving we are likely to be jailed for not having "visible means of subsistence"—this appears to be rather a curious form of freedom !

All around us are vast factories, and workshops of various descriptions, in which we—who are called the working class—work. We are given a job at the will of somebody else, and sacked at his will. We depend for our existence on obtaining work, as we possess nothing with which to obtain the necessaries of life, and consequently depend upon the sale of our working power. We are, therefore, in a state of dependence upon those who give us work.

Those who give us work are the owners of the vast works already alluded to. We are the slaves of the employing class.

Through owning all the means of production the employers compel us to work under the conditions they lay down, and we must abide by these conditions or starve. The only way we can escape capitalism is by getting off the earth.

Our form of slavery, wage-slavery, is in some respects worse than previous forms. The buyer of a chattel slave generally found it to his advantage to feed and house the slave well: a well-fed slave was capable of working harder, and lived longer, than an ill-fed one. He was property, the same as a horse, and his death meant a fresh outlay to buy another. In the case of the wage-slave it is different. His power to work is purchased in many cases from hour to hour, in some instances from week to week, but in comparatively few cases for longer periods. If he is ill or dies it does not matter to the employer, as he has only bought certain amounts of labour power, which he never pays for until it has been expended in his factory, field, mine, workshop, office, or the like. Therefore he loses nothing by the death of his wage thrall, and the labour power of other men will do just as well to continue the work. There are always plenty to fill vacant jobs, as discharged and demobilised soldiers are learning to their cost.

Philantrophists and labour leaders put before you various propositions as means to ameliorate your lot, but very little examination will show you that anything short of the overthrow of capitalism leaves you as you are—a wage slave.

So long as capitalism lasts the laws governing it will last. Under capitalism the workers' labour power is bought and sold on the market the same as any other commodity, and is therefore amenable to commodity laws. It is a matter of experience that there is always an over supply of workers, and consequently wages on an average rule at the lowest cost of subsistence —i.e., the lowest on which a worker can live, reproduce his kind, and do the particular class of work required.

No reforms can touch this position—the laws of capitalism nullify reforms.

We are slaves and will remain slaves as long as we allow the employing class to rob us of the products of our toil.

We, the working class, produce all the wealth of the world, but the capitalist or employing class own it, through their ownership of the powers of production. Therefore to obtain our freedom we must overthrow capitalism, i.e., modern private ownership, and substitute common ownership.

Capitalism only exists with your consent. You give this consent at election time by voting the capitalists into power. Withhold your consent, i.e., vote yourselves into power, and capitalism will give place to Socialism.

So long as you vote for capitalism you are unfit for Socialism—you are not class-conscious.

Confusionist bodies of various kinds may increase their following in various ways by compounding in various ways, but they cannot gain the support of class-conscious working men —fit subjects for Socialism. In other words, they do not get an inch nearer the ultimate goal by holding up the promise of immediate but delusive gains. Only the confused will support the confusionist.

The capitalist keeps his privileged position by controlling the machinery of government, which he uses to keep us in subjection. This is the citadel we must attack, and carry, to usher in the Socialist Commonwealth, and thereby abolish human slavery for ever. 

Gilmac.

Our £1,000 Fund (1919)

Party News from the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

We give below a further list of subscriptions and other additions to our fund. It will be noticed that the vast .bulk of the increase since our last list was published consists of the fruits of the Sixpenny Collection, and Branch-donations. The amount given as ordinary direct individual contributions, as also the increment from collecting sheets, have fallen to a very low level, and there is only one way to draw any comfort from the contemplation of them. That is to remember that no less an authority than J. Christ has declared that “The poor shall inherit the earth." - (From that point of view the state of our fund is reassuring! But

The State and Chernobyl (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now four years since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on April 26, 1986. Information about its consequences is now becoming available in spite of attempts by the Russian government to prevent knowledge leaking out into the public domain. Glasnost may be Gorbachev’s policy in most things but not where Chernobyl was concerned. The scale of the disaster is far greater than has been supposed till now.

A significant feature of this disaster is that it was partly caused, and to a large extent made worse, by state secrecy. For instance, it was the state’s obsessional secrecy on all matters nuclear which meant that the reactor’s operators were not allowed to know that withdrawal of all the control rods could cause an explosion. All they were told was that this was “forbidden” (New Scientist, 11 November 1989).

Similarly, it was a military secret that a previous graphite fire had occurred, in 1958, at Kyshtym in the Urals. Not only did the Chernobyl management and engineers know nothing of this (except what had leaked back to them from the West), but again according to the New Scientist “those who had dealt with it were not called to Chernobyl until three weeks after the accident”. During those weeks a lot of harm was done. Fruitless attempts to dowse the fire were unsuccessful, only resulting in contamination of the watertable. Meanwhile radioactive material continued to escape into the atmosphere.

Political considerations led Gorbachev, in his TV statement about Chernobyl 18 days after the accident, to allege that the western media had lied and exaggerated the scale and nature of the disaster with their claims that there would be “thousands of casualties” (quoted in Frederick Polil’s novel, Chernobyl, 1987). This was part of the cover-up agreed to by the politbureau and recently exposed by Gorbachev’s opponent, Boris Yeltsin.

This cover-up involved misleading the people at risk so that many of these within Russia believed themselves to be safe. Chernobyl is in the north of the Ukraine, very close to the southern border of Byelorussia and not far from the border, to the east, with Russia proper. The plume of radioactive particles drifted north and east, and seriously contaminated a large part of Byelorussia and adjacent provinces of Russia.

“They were not told. They had to guess…”

The original disaster was bad enough. What made it worse was misinformation, the attempt to pretend that the only areas at risk were within a neat, circular, 18 mile (30 km) “exclusion zone”. The result of this official policy was that people have still not been evacuated from many seriously contaminated areas. In the week after the disaster, official policy decreed that “communities were left to rot in ignorance…”. Over the border, in Russia proper, people “were very frightened. They were not told. They had to guess …. Nobody knew what was happening. Burly peasants were collapsing in the fields” (Sunday Times, 29 April 1990).

The cover-up meant that the May Day parades were ordered to proceed, in Kiev and Minsk, as though everything was normal. Thousands of schoolchildren were thus exposed to radioactive open air. It also meant a delay even in evacuating Pripyat, the nearest town to Chernobyl. It is now thought that 4 million people are living with radiation, including 34,000 in areas very seriously contaminated. Yury Cherbak, a Ukrainian Green politician, claims that 85 villages in Byelorussia, 19 in the Ukraine and 14 in Russia should be urgently evacuated (The Independent on Sunday, 22 April 1990). In these unevacuated areas, where people are still growing food crops, not only are they eating the contaminated food they grow but, according to the Sunday Times again, “Soviet trade officials collected it and distributed it in Moscow, Kazakhstan and elsewhere”.

Now, four years later, the consequences of Chernobyl are becoming apparent. Children are suffering from leukaemia or cancer of the thyroid. There are a number of babies born with serious congenital abnormalities, a disaster similar to but worse than that caused by thalidomide in Britain or Agent Orange in Vietnam. In Byelorussia, over 2 million people are at risk, one-fifth of the population. Yet in the capital city, Minsk, there are no ultrasonic scanners (essential for diagnosis and treatment of leukaemia) or intensive care units. Medicines, even for pain relief, are in short supply. The authorities have decreed, harshly, that no treatment at all, not even for pain relief, be given to terminal cases. In the West, leukaemia cases have an 85 percent chance of survival. There, they only have a 15 percent chance.

Acute food shortages mean that children are not getting a proper diet. They die of quite common illnesses, with their immune system weakened by radiation. Experts claim that “it is not ‘Chernobyl Aids’ that kills them, it is the lack of proper food” (Sunday Times).

The state showed its “concern” in February 1988 by decreeing the sort of information which should be made available to the media. The increased incidence of anaemia, hypertension and hyperplasia of the thyroid was hushed up as a result of “official policy”, and there was to be no mention of any “loss of physical capacity for work or professional skills” (New Scientist, 28 October 1989). Who was the state trying to protect?

Delay and Disinformation

The role of the state in this disaster has been to make things worse: the delay in issuing warnings, the misinformation as to which areas were at risk, the suppression of information on the deaths and diseases related to or caused by Chernobyl, the refusal to allow scientists to do research, the publication of underestimates of the amount of radiation released, the refusal to arrange for evacuation from areas known to be contaminated, the despatch of contaminated foodstuff from these regions to uncontaminated regions, the lack of provision of decent medical facilities, the secrecy surrounding the lessons learnt earlier at Kyshtym – the state and its officials bear a heavy load of responsibility for this massive catastrophe and its (too-often avoidable) tragic consequences.

Probably this is the worst environmental disaster the world has yet seen. Large areas of land are uninhabitable yet in many of these people are still living – living a nightmare. In one village, in a single year, 30 babies were born with serious deformities.

The danger to humanity, and to the planet, of continuing to allow capitalist priorities – production of cheap, rather than safe, energy – and capitalist political structures – such as rule by a Party hierarchy, determined to control the information released to the population under its rule – this is the lesson of Chernobyl. The land is poisoned with pollution, the forest trees produce abnormal mutated growths, and the watertable is polluted. On the farms cows give birth to deformed calves, in the villages young women dread giving birth to monsters. Children are not allowed out of doors except to go to and from school.

Genetic mutation is a high price to pay for the government’s mistakes, for cheap electricity for export to Poland and Rumania, and for plutonium for the military, a by-product of the Chernobyl reactor. It is a price being paid partly because the world has trusted technical experts too much. There were experts in the Ukraine who claimed that Chernobyl’s four reactors were totally safe. After the accident Britain’s best-known expert on nuclear power, Lord Marshall, asserted that the risk from radiation inside the exclusion zone (less than 20 miles away from Chernobyl itself) was “no worse than smoking a couple of cigarettes a year” (Observer, 4 May 1986).

The likes of Lord Marshall have been making reassuring noises in the Soviet Union and doing their best to prevent doctors and scientists revealing the truth about Chernobyl’s legacy, Gorbachev’s glasnost did not apply in this special case. So long as society’s class divisions mean the necessity for the continued existence of states and national governments, and so long as production is for profit not for use, the danger of continuing to use such extremely risky technology will be too great – the victims are already too many.

Charmian Skelton