The S.D.F. and West Ham. (1904)

From the November 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

“In the Social-Democratic movement organisation and discipline are absolutely essential to success.”

“Socialists, if once they begin to intrigue with the other factions, destroy their own enthusiasm and rot away the public confidence which they have as yet but partially gained.”

“We want our men elected as Social-Democrats, for the greater glory of Social-Democracy. If they cannot be elected as Social-Democrats, they had much better remain outside. We want our men elected as Social-Democrats, independent of all other factions.”

The above gems from back numbers of the official organ of the S.D.F., make interesting reading to-day.

Our notes in the last issue of the Socialist Standard, concerning the situation in West Ham have aroused considerable interest throughout the country, and we understand that some members of the S.D.F., in endeavouring to answer the question, “Can such things be?” have applied to Bolt Court for light and leading.

To their enquiries they have received a misleading reply, as might be expected from the man who destroyed for ever his reputation for truthfulness in connection with the Lansbury episode. But our readers may be assured that whatever appears in the Socialist Standard will be reliable. We shall tell the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” We believe that ” Honesty is the best policy “—even in electoral matters.

It is claimed on behalf of the S.D.F. that W. Thorne (the man whom the S.D.F. has continually permitted to break its rules by supporting Liberal candidates) is running as the Socialist and Labour candidate for South West Ham. We deny it, and will substantiate our denial.

Thorne has published, through the T.C.P., what purports to be the correspondence between himself and the Secretary of the Labour Representation Committee respecting the endorsement of his candidature by that conglomeration. But Thorne has not published all the correspondence. It is evident from the context that certain letters of Thorne’s are omitted. Thorne knows best why. But note first the preface. He says:

“In consequence of the L.R.C. not agreeing to allow me to run as a Socialist and Labor candidate for South West Ham,” &c.

The publication contains the resolution passed by the Biennial Congress of the Gasworkers’ Union, held at Swansea, in May last, requesting Thorne to comply with the L.R.C. conditions and to run under the common title imposed on all candidates supported by the L.R.C. Thorne has complied.

He is, above all things, honest—”blunderingly honest.”

On Sunday, Sept. 18, a mass meeting in support of Thorne was held at The Greeugate, Plaistow. J. Gilbey, Secretary of West Ham Trades Council, presided, and said that many present would remember that the L.R.C. had decided to run their candidates as Labour only, but the Committee which was running Thorne wanted the public to understand that while Thorne was running under that title, he was still a Socialist, as he had always claimed to be. Thorne followed. He was glad that the position had been explained in respect to himself and the L.R.C. That Committee had decided that all candidates adopted by them should run as Labour candidates, and he had been obliged to toe the line, although he did not care a lot about it. To a certain extent it was a “backing down.” But although he would have to call himself “a Labour candidate,” he would still hold the same principles as before. After this, surely nobody will deny that Thorne, a member of the S.D.F., supposed by their rules to run as “a definitely-avowed Social-Democrat,” is in the field as simply a “‘Labour” candidate.

It is true that H. Quelch, the “Trades Unionist candidate” for Southampton, in speaking after Thorne, disagreed with his view of the situation. He did not consider it a “backing down.” It was merely a step backward in order to take a leap forward (“reculer our mieux sauter.”) There was no disgrace in a man calling himself a “Labour” candidate. Continental Socialists often did so ; called themselves “Labour” parties, and so on, using exactly those excuses which the I.L.P. made years ago in reply to S.D.F. criticism, when they adopted as their object the Socialist principles, but refused to call themselves Socialists.

Again, we re refer our readers to the extracts at the beginning of this article.

On another matter. “S.D.F. Notes,” supplied by the Secretary of that body, last month contained the following :

“The particulars I have received concerning our action in the forthcoming Municipal Elections are as follows :— “

Then appears a list of candidates. Against Baldock’s name is printed “I.L.P.,” so that, apparently, the remainder are “our” (S.D.F.) candidates. Amongst them is J. J. Terrett, for Broadway Ward of West Ham, a thrice-expelled member of the S.D.F. Upon his last expulsion H. W. Lee wrote in Justice:

“If the body had permitted Terrett to continue his vagaries, all organisation and discipline were at an end, and it would have been an encouragement to others to use the S.D.F. as a stepping-stone to public prominence, and then to fling it over when it suited them. Terrett has, to all intents and purposes, ceased to be a Socialist. This is proved by his recent letter to the South Essex Mail, and his conversation with members of the S.D.F. Personal ambition and want of judgment will be his curse.”

Recently Terrett entered upon a wild-cat Parliamentary candidature for North-West Ham, from which he has since withdrawn. He held a meeting at Stratford Town Hall, presided over by Anarchist Leggatt, and on the platform were McAllen, H. Quelch, Martin Judge and Hector Kirby, of the S.D.F., while J. Jones, of the S.D.F., moved the resolution in support of Terrett’s candidature. Now, either these members of the S.D.F. received the sanction of the Executive to support Terrett, in accordance with the rules of that body, or they were permitted by the Executive to break the rules. But in any case, the fact remains that they supported this able but erratic man. who has been, politically, everything by turns and nothing long, who has used the S.D.F. when it suited his own purposes to do so, and denounced them in Stratford Grove when so inclined.

The attitude of the leaders of that body and their official misrepresentations of the position in West Ham and elsewhere, would be ludicrous when considered in connection with the extracts appearing at the head of this article were it not that by such tactics the issue is confused. The S.D.F. no longer deserves the confidence of the workers. It must be exposed at home and abroad.

Jack Kent

Scargillism or socialism? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The June elections to the European Parliament were notable not only in having the lowest turn-out ever in a national election but also for being the first national election in which every elector in Britain had a chance to vote for at least one party using the word “socialist” on the ballot paper. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a chance to vote for real socialism.

Only those in the North East had that chance. Apart from the Socialist Party the other parties calling themselves Socialist stood on anything but a socialist programme. Arthur Scargill’s SLP stood on a patriotic anti-Common Market programme. Tommy Sheridan’s SSP stood for Tommy Sheridan and Scottish separatism (the six words they used on the ballot paper were: “Scottish Socialist Party (Convenor Tommy Sheridan)”. An electoral coalition of Trotskyist groups including Militant and the SWP which contested the West Midlands under the name of “Socialist Alliance”, stood on a programme of minimum reforms such as “No to tuition fees and student loans”, “No to private toll roads”, “£5 an hour minimum wage”, “Oppose the Euro”, with no mention of socialism not even as a long-term goal (and not even as their mistaken definition of it as state-run capitalism).

Scargill’s party stood in all 11 Euroconstituencies in mainland Britain and in all but three of them was the only standard-bearer for the word “socialist”. But what a disgrace to the word his programme was!

The SLP’s main electoral slogan was “VOTE TO GET BRITAIN OUT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION”. Socialists know that it doesn’t make any difference to workers whether or not the British capitalist class are in or out of the European Union. Whether or not they stay in this businessman’s club is their problem, not ours. The problems we face as workers are caused by the class ownership of the means of life and production for profit, not by the trading arrangements of our capitalist masters.

The SLP’s election manifesto, however, did not make such a socialist analysis. Instead, it echoed the analysis made by the UK Independence Party and the BNP that all our problems are due to Britain being in the Common Market—and indeed that those of the capitalists are too, since the SLP manifesto expressed great concern about their trading prospects and about how much of the surplus-value extracted from the workers they have to pay over to Brussels.

According to Scargill’s manifesto:

When Britain joined the European Common Market the people were told that membership would protect British industries and British jobs—but the very opposite is true . . . Membership of the European Union has led to mass unemployment, the closure of steelworks and coal mines, engineering industries and the near-destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base.

Or, as the BNP put it in their manifesto:

Being in the EU makes it illegal for us to protect our own industries, including manufacturing, fishing and farming, from the foreign competition which has destroyed millions of jobs. The BNP says ‘no’ to EU insecurity, and—unlike the pro-free trade UKIP—’yes’ to protecting British jobs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no, it doesn’t, since the implication of the SLP/BNP position is that if British capitalism hadn’t been in the Common Market these closures and job losses could have been avoided. But how? Since they were caused by changes in world market conditions in the form of a world-wide economic slowdown it would have made no difference whether Britain was in or out of the EU. If Britain had not been in they would still have occurred.

The fact is that we are living in a global economy and there is nothing a government of any particular state can do to opt out of the effects of a global economic downturn. No doubt an SLP government—or a BNP government—would have tried to protect “British jobs” by putting up tariff walls to keep out “foreign” imports. But this is to forget that Britain, as part of the global economy, is also necessarily an exporting country; in fact its speciality has been transforming imported materials into manufactured goods for export. Keeping out cheap “foreign” imports would have meant forcing exporters to use more expensive British-made substitutes, so increasing their cost and making them less competitive on already over-supplied world markets. This, quite apart from the retaliatory action other states would be likely to have taken against imports from Britain to their countries. In other words, if such a protectionist policy had been pursued British exports would still have fallen off leading to . . . factory closures and job losses.

A siege economy, whether under Arthur Scargill or John Tyndall, is no way out of the global capitalist crisis. In fact there is no way out for workers other than socialism which, because capitalism is already a global system, has to be world-wide too. This is elementary Socialist thinking, but it’s the last thing you are going to hear from Scargill’s party.

Instead, we are told:

If a country like Norway—not a member of the EU—can have one of the most prosperous economies in the world outside the EU, why not Britain?

But Norway is an openly capitalist country (which didn’t in fact escape from the effects of the world slump), so the SLP evidently believes that the problems workers in Britain face can be solved within the context of capitalism. This mistaken conclusion follows logically from the SLP’s mistaken analysis: if the EU rather than capitalism is the cause of workers’ problems then the solution lies not in getting rid of capitalism but simply in getting out of the EU.

We suspect we know why the SLP chose Norway as its example of a supposed paradise outside the EU. The examples they normally give in their literature—Cuba and North Korea—are rather less attractive vote-pullers.

Although all this is enough to show not only that the SLP is not a socialist party at all but that it is a petty British nationalist party, the various Trotskyist groups were urging workers to vote for them, except in Scotland where they preferred Sheridan’s even pettier Scottish nationalism and in the West Midlands where they stood themselves, but including the North East where a genuine Socialist list was standing. This doesn’t surprise us as they have more in common with Scargill than they have with us and, in any event, we only want those who genuinely understand and want socialism to vote for us. They too are Eurosceptics, though not as extreme as Scargill, the BNP and UKIP in wanting a complete withdrawal. Their slogan of “OPPOSE THE EURO AND MAASTRICHT”, i.e. stay in but keep the pound, puts them rather in the camp of Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt.

The correct socialist position on the euro was put in a letter from one of our members published in the Newcastle Journal on 14 January:

To euro or not to euro, that is the question. Or is it? Does it really make any difference if you pay your bills with euro, dollars or pounds sterling? Would your life change if the money in your pocket no longer had a picture of the richest woman in England? The real truth is the rich will still be rich and the poor still be poor. Joining the euro will benefit the flow of business capital. Why? Because we live in a global economy. The European nations must compete as a trading bloc against their strongest competitors, the American and Far East economies. If this planet with all its vast resources was owned and democratically controlled by the people, money would be obsolete. Socialism means that the farms, factories, railways, etc are run for the benefit of all. Without the insanity of the boom-slump profit system, the Stock Exchanges of the world will become museums and the floor traders can stop running around like headless chickens wearing blazers.

The North East, in fact, was the one region where voters attracted by the mere word “socialist” on the ballot paper did have a choice between the SLP’s position and the genuine Socialist one. Of the 6021 voters in this category, 4511 voted for the SLP and 1510 for us. In other words, 25 percent opted for real socialism rather than Scargill’s British state capitalism. What is interesting is that in those areas where we had been active in putting over the Socialist case, in other elections and in letters to the press, the percentage opting for socialism rather than Scargillism was higher. In Jarrow it was 44 percent and in Easington 35 percent.

This would suggest that where those interested in socialism are given the opportunity to hear the socialist case on a regular basis they can be won over to supporting the real thing and not just the name. Many of the 86,749 people who voted for the SLP will have voted not for, but thankfully despite, its reactionary, non-socialist programme, as a way of showing that they rejected the Labour administration of capitalism and saw “socialism”, however vaguely defined, as the way out.

There is talk of getting all the various parties calling themselves “socialist” together in an electoral pact so as to win seats under proportional representation. We want no part of such an alliance. The SLP, the SSP and the Trotskyist groups may as well know that we will continue to put the case for socialism, against them and the other parties which all support capitalism in one form or another, at election times whenever we can. We shan’t be forming any electoral pacts with them since their objective of reforms now and state capitalism later has nothing in common with ours of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production to satisfy people’s needs not profit.

Adam Buick

All industrial unionists now? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the opening years of this century industrial unionism—the idea that all the workers in the same industry should be in a single union—was raised as a radical demand. Today it is being embraced by the leaders of the existing business unions. How come?

I recently attended a student union meeting about a fast food franchise employing students at ridiculously low wage rates over the night shift. The union “officials” had been optimistic, they felt they could get a result on this one, they felt that it was a strong issue; so, predictably, the meeting was inquorate. It was, at least, the biggest inquorate meeting for some while, but, it was inquorate nonetheless. The usual debates about student apathy began once more.

I was reminded, somewhat, of my old man, confidently telling me that “grass roots democracy is impossible”, and then regaling me with his story about his time as a union rep at ICI. “Out I would come,” he’d say, “after negotiating complex things with the management, and all me mates’d ask was ‘Well, man, did we get the pay rise?.'” As I sat there, surveying the empty wilderness of the meeting hall, I thought, sadly, that he was right.

It’s an unfortunate fact that the officials of most unions believe exactly as he did. Certainly it’s implied in the way they behave. We could take, for example, an interesting piece in the June issue of Labour Research about a growing demand for industrial unionism within the TUC. Industrial unionism, a familiar concept from the radical fringe across the Atlantic (specifically the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] and various “DeLeonist” factions there), is the idea that instead of “craft” or “trade” unions, representing workers of a particular skill/type, we have one union representing everyone in a specific industry (thus a Chemical Workers Union, or a Steel Workers Union), and thus avoid all the infighting and protectionism of one union poaching members from another in the same workplace, or demanding that a specific job be done by a specific union. Real solidarity.

It could be a sign of hope, a cause for inspiration, that workers are setting aside their factional disputes, and deciding to stand solidly together, in common interest against the capitalist foe. Except, it’s not. As it turns out, the call for industrial unions comes from the top of the TUC, General Secretary John Monks himself.

At the inaugural conference of the new banking union UNiFI (how appropriate) Monks described what he would like to see happen to unions in the 21st century. By 2010, he reckons, industrial unionism should be brought about, by merging more unions with a common interest in different sectors. The truth of the matter, however, is not a sudden conversion of union leaders to radical revolutionary unionism (oh, how that would please the Leftists, and how sorely disappoint), but rather is a response to a number of pragmatic concerns facing the union movement.

Competing for members 

The first, it appears, is that the TUC is anxious to avoid disputes being caused by the new union recognition laws instituted by the Labour Party as a reward for union electoral and financial support. According to Labour Research this presents the threat of “a new wave of competition between unions intent on gaining recognition” (emphasis added). To avoid that competition the TUC wants to change its internal structures in order to have the “active prompting of mergers by the TUC to create fewer unions. . . in key sectors like public services, education, transport . . .”

Once again the glorious leaders charge forth with presumptuousness, believing they actually are in charge, and that they can do as they say. However, obstacles await them. As the article further notes, “a substantial proportion of merger activity between 1988 and 1995 was purely expansionist, to compensate for declining memberships and finances” (emphasis added). Even where an “industrial” model has been followed, such as in the creation of UNISON (1,248,670 members), caveats remain. Most UNISON members are in local government (750,000), however “substantial numbers of manual workers in local government are organised by the general unions TGWU [881,625 members] and GMB [750,000].” This presents the almost insurmountable problem, acknowledged by the TUC that “some unions currently straddle two or more . . . sectors . . . it would be neither possible, nor desirable, to seek mass transfers of existing members.”

Of course, the leadership of each union has a vested interest in getting members. Members mean money—UNISON made £1 million “surplus” in 1997 and the T&GWU £11.2 millions. The UNISON General Secretary (Rodney Bickerstaffe) took home a salary of £68,840 + £19,129 “benefits”. Labour Research called that a “relatively modest” salary, and, indeed, it is, compared with similar positions in business—which is a fair comparison, because unions today are effectively a business, selling good labour relations. The emphasised sections in the quotes show this: when business is bad, firms merge to reduce running costs and open up markets; similarly, unions are competing for members and have a great deal in terms of money, investment and infrastructure to protect. Again, the leaders of the unions are as much not in charge as our beloved masters in Whitehall, and for the same reason—their plans are subject to the market, a market beyond their control.

Many leftists refuse to recognise this. Preferring to keep their dreams of leadership burning, they think it’s all a matter of the wrong people being in charge (generic Trotskyist quote, to be heard at almost any meeting: “The failure of the revolution in [insert country] in [insert year] was due to the lack of an adequate revolutionary leadership”). If pressure could be brought to bear, or the right people put in charge, then, oh then, the mass will to revolution of the working class can be unleashed.

The unions we deserve 

This is complete nonsense of course. The working class gets the unions, and the leadership, it deserves. Just as, according to Marx, a King is only a King because he is obeyed, so too are union leaders only union leaders because they are followed. To imagine they lead is to imbue them with mystical powers within themselves, and set up a phantasm of leadership that exactly mirror images the same phantasm as our masters believe. So long as the workers themselves are content to deal with such a union system, and its leaders, then such a union system and its leaders will remain, and will have to react to the expectations of the members.

The way to industrial unions, or socialist unions, or whatever, is not through the leadership of the unions. The unions will always reflect the nature of their memberships, and until their membership change, they will not change. So long as workers accept unions as another form of business, giving them insurance, then unions will have to behave like a business offering insurance, competing for members. Unions are neither inherently reactionary, nor inherently revolutionary; they are simply a means to an end for their membership.

The only way to change unions is not through seizing or pressurising the leadership, but through making sure that they have a committed membership, a socialist membership. And that is where the Socialist Party can come in, through making socialists, through that and that alone—making people committed heart and soul to working class interests, democracy and the establishment of socialism. Anything else is just abstractions and formalisms.

My father was, I’m happy to say, refuted by that student union meeting. Among those that did show, a great debate ensued—during the discussion of the sports facilities. People questioned the officials closely and carefully, determined to make sure that they knew what exactly was happening with their valued sports facilities. When folks have a strong emotional and practical commitment, they can make grass roots democracy work. It’s up to us to encourage that commitment.

Pik Smeet

War and capitalism in Africa (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The president of Zambia, Frederick Chibula, recently declared the “dawn of a new era for Africa”. Such comments have become something of a regular occurrence amongst African and international “leaders”, including that messiah of the “new world order” Bill Clinton. The latest round of platitudes coincides with a period of instability and armament amongst the competing representatives of African capitalism.

Despite the signing of accords which appear to declare the desire of capitalist interests to accommodate each other’s interests in Sierra Leone and the Congo, Chibula made his comments at a time of simmering conflicts across Africa including a savage war between Ethiopia and Eritrea and a rampant civil war in Angola. Even in Sierra Leone and the Congo the accords thrashed out seem likely to fail, with international “peace-keeping” forces (the US and western Europe) not being committed as the interests of their ruling classes are not threatened.

Unlike the huge resources deployed to Kosovo where Western leaders wish to “protect” the Kosovo Albanian population from mass slaughter as a pretext for extending their influence in the Balkans at the expense of Serbia, the hypocritical face of capitalism is revealed once more. A blind eye and an arrogant shrug greeted and continues to greet the mass killing in Africa (in the case of the Sierra Leone conflict the British government was in fact implicated in the supply of arms to the conflict in contravention of its own “rules”, as if such things exist in capitalism’s wars).

Ethiopia and Eritrea

It is in the little-mentioned conflict (the press coverage being remarkably little) between the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments that Bill Clinton’s “new leaders of Africa” have revealed the degree to which the politicians of capitalism will sacrifice the lives of working-class men and women in the interests of profits. Originally intended as the leaders of a regional alliance for the US against the “threat” of Islamic Sudan, Presidents Issaias of Eritrea and Meles of Ethiopia descended into a quarrel in May 1998 ostensibly over a small area of barren and mountainous terrain. In reality it was over Eritrea’s new status as a potential African Singapore threatening Ethiopia’s commercial interests (principally coffee) and aims for economic self-sufficiency and protectionism.

Taking advantage of its coastal status and Ethiopian cheap labour and launching its own currency, to counter what it saw as an overvalued Ethiopian currency which hindered it exports, Eritrea began to threaten the interests of Ethiopian capital. Becoming landlocked in 1993, following the overthrow of the dictator Mengistu and Eritrea obtaining independence, Ethiopia perceived a threat to its cheap labour market from the new-independently Eritrea’s processing export industries and cheap Eritrean imports, and thus began to impose tariffs. The territorial boundaries between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which had previously been a matter of little formal control and even convenient administration by local authorities on either side of the borders, began in such circumstances to be marked by claims of encroachment and eventually an act of aggression which sparked off a war which may have already claimed as many as 50,000 lives.

In a country racked by civil war and droughts where the majority of men and women exist in dire poverty, its leaders see their interests served by spending vast sums on armaments and mobilising hundreds of thousands to mass slaughter. The death toll in this conflict between capitalists using working class cannon fodder has been particularly high with a ratio of dead to wounded of one-to-one (the average for most modern wars being one dead to three wounded). According to the Economist (8-14 May) “the death toll is high because the combatants use the weapons of the Korean war, the tactics of the first world war and the medical treatments of the 19th century”.

With war of course comes the massive displacement of populations with, in this instance, many tens of thousands of Eritreans forcibly ejected from Ethiopia. As with all wars the Ethiopia-Eritrea war has competing capitalist interests at its root and the mass slaughter and suffering of its workers as its consequence.

Central and southern regions 

This conflict, however, is only part of a general increase in tension between African governments whose interests are perceived to lie in the increased militarisation of the continent. This was most particularly evident in the central and southern regions. Indeed the wars in the Congo and Angola appear to be threatening to draw these regions into full-scale sub-continental war. Angola has threatened Zambia with invasion over its ruling-class support for the UNITA rebel opposition in Angola, a position also supported by some members of the South African ruling class. The Mugabe regime on the other hand supports intervention on the side of the Angolan government. Tension still runs high over the war in the Congo, with Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad drawn into the conflict in support of President Kabila and Uganda and Rwanda on the side of the anti-Kabila forces. Conflict over the Caprivi Strip between Namibia and Botswana also poses a threat, with the Zimbabwean ruling class supporting the former and the South African ruling class supporting the latter.

The underlying cause of this increase in tension is in the economic crisis facing the two most powerful economies of the region, Zimbabwe and South Africa, in the face of the global economic downturn. The ensuing economic competition between the rival ruling classes has forced the two governments to attempt to form regional alliances. Such action is taking on an increasingly military character with the Zimbabwean government, backed by Namibia, justifying its intervention in the Congo on the grounds of securing markets at the expense of South African multinationals. In another example of capitalist robbers fighting over their ill-gotten gains South Africa, backed by Botswana, asserted its influence over Lesotho to protect the interests of its ruling class following attempts by the Lesothon population to overthrow the existing dictatorial regime.

In such circumstances an ominous regional arms race is beginning to take place, with South Africa announcing at the end of 1998 a re-armament programme worth 20 billion rands. Botswana, South Africa’s main regional ally, has also been conducting a re-armament programme including the construction of a US-assisted military airbase. Zimbabwe, under the pretext of the conflict in the Congo, has also been spending billions of dollars on re-arming with its most recent purchase being over $1 billion-worth of Russian military equipment. A similar massive re-armament has taken place in Angola as a consequence of the intensifying civil war. It seems that the increasing trade war taking place between the capitalists of southern Africa may result in yet another war in which the workers fights for the interests of capital.

In the era of the “New World Order” capitalism once again proves itself to be an uncontrollable and destructive system of society. A system which accords the majority slave status and then expects them to die for their masters’ interests. The only solution to war and to the miseries of capitalism in Africa, as in the rest of the world, is for the working class to organise for common ownership and democratic control, a society where the root cause of war in the economic and strategic rivalry of a minority owning class is removed and the production and distribution of wealth is conducted in the interests of the whole community—Socialism. It is time the working class struggled for its own interests.

Colin Skelly

Population: Feeding the Six Billionth (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the year 1800, there were one billion humans alive. Seventy years ago, the world had two billion human inhabitants. Thirty years ago, that figure had doubled to four billion. On October 12 of this year, at 1.24 am New York Time, the UN Secretary General will announce to the world that the six billionth human has been born.

By all accounts, the six billionth baby will be born into a life of poverty and misery. While the population trend in the industrialised world is stability or declining numbers—with Europe’s population, for instance, expected to drop by 25 percent in the next 50 years—97 out of every 100 children born live in the developing world.

At present, the increase in the world’s population stands at some 78 million per year. By the year 2050, Earth is expected to have 8.9 billion human inhabitants, with the UN forecasting that the global population will level off at about 11 billion round about 2120.

Come this October, we can no doubt expect a glut of newspaper articles highlighting Kofi Annan’s statement, many in the Malthusian tradition, arguing that population cannot grow beyond the means of subsistence and that we can expect increased rivalry for scarce resources, civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order. We can expect to be reminded that we cannot grow the food for increased future generations and that the world’s fresh water supplies are dwindling.

Firstly, under capitalism rivalry for resources, scarce or in abundance, has always been the norm. Secondly, it is important to point out that what scarcity there is—whether it be food or water—is artificially brought about.

It is no state secret that food is not primarily produced to eat. It is produced for the market and with a view to make profits. The 1.3 billion humans in the underdeveloped world who go without food on any given day do not constitute a market because they cannot purchase what they need. Hence, we find governments ordering land to be taken out of production because the surplus cannot be sold at a profit. We find governments the world over ordering the destruction of mountains of food to keep prices high. We are informed of the dwindling supplies of fresh water, but the technology has existed for quite some time to enable us to convert sea water into fresh water for irrigation and domestic use.

The paradox that there is hunger and thirst in the midst of plenty was hinted at as far back as 50 years ago when the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation was formed. Its first Director General, Lord Boyd-Orr, observed in the Times of 22nd July 1949 how:

There was no difficulty about producing enough food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed and consumed in the countries that needed it?

The problem becomes not one of feeding the world’s growing population, but of organising production and distribution on a rational basis. While we can expect the Malthusian prophets of doom to remind us that every new child means an extra mouth to feed, they will neglect to add that it also means an extra pair of hands, an extra brain, capable of contributing to the common good .

Socialists ask whether the present social system will allow these hands and this brain to be used wisely, to produce the extra wealth needed for a growing population. So long as the market system prevails the answer is no. Capitalism is not only a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Countless millions of workers are to be found in the armed forces, many more in the security and law and order business, with many times that number employed in the field of commerce and finance.

And its not as though there is a problem with there being enough workers to produce what we need. It has been estimated that within 25 years, just 2 percent of the world’s population will be able to produce everything needed—and this takes into account the insane and artificial constraints imposed by the profit system.

Present and projected increases in the global population only pose a problem under the conditions imposed by capitalist society—the laws of profit first and can’t pay, can’t have. Socialist society will see an end to the “planned and subsidised under-production” that President Kennedy observed almost 40 years ago. It will see an end to scarcity and a removing of the artificial barriers that presently curb production. Socialist society will ensure that the resources of the Earth are used in a manner that ensures every man, woman and child is adequately fed, clothed and sheltered—something capitalism has never been capable of overseeing.

John Bissett

Caught in the deep (1999)

TV Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bizarre though it may seem, English cricket—and the televising of English cricket—so accurately reflects the wider economic and cultural changes of British society in recent years that it is simply uncanny. For those who care to remember, leisurely games of cricket on the village green were central to John Major’s vision of a society at ease with itself, along with warm beer and old ladies cycling to church on Sunday mornings. And while Major’s vision was overtly anachronistic, cricket has always tended to embody much that is considered to be distinctively “British”: the old Gentlemen versus Players class distinction, the quiet civility of the English tea, the resolute application and grit of the undefeated all-day batsman, and—more often than not—the stiff upper lip of those in extreme adversity. Of course, the game has changed over the years along with wider society and few would disagree that it has become harsher, nastier and more competitive. English cricketers have been, if we are to be charitable, poor at acclimatising to the new conditions. Today there is something of the metaphoric frightened rabbit about them as they are repeatedly showered under a hail of West Indian bouncers, spun out of their senses by passing magicians from the sub-continent and battered by the explosive and inflammatory verbals of the Australians.

Cricket in England had always been an essentially timeless phenomenon—like the “season”, Wimbledon, Last Night of the Proms and much else. That TV coverage of cricket reflected this is fairly obvious. Few could have died of excitement at the sound of John Arlott and Jim Laker coaxing England towards a draw on a dank Tuesday afternoon at Old Trafford. High drama it certainly wasn’t, though perhaps one of the finest accolades given to them by a critic was that they at least made five days of sitting in an armchair watching the grass grow seem like a veritable pleasure, and indeed for a few million every summer it was. But now the BBC have lost the Test Match coverage franchise for the first time—along with so much else too—and things are not quite the same. The greying, sedate affair hosted by the BBC has left the field of play, retired hurt, to be replaced by something altogether more brash.

A loud appeal

Channel 4’s cricket coverage has certainly blown away a few of the old cobwebs. Indeed, just as the new technology of capitalism constantly serves to revolutionise that system from within, so at last (though more prosaically) has TV cricket coverage been revolutionised by elements of that same technology so as to accurately reflect the dynamic of society as a whole. From the “speedster” and the close up action replay through to the “snick-o-meter”, Channel 4 is knocking on the door of the twenty first century, bringing to sports lovers the aids to comprehension and the sheer excitement that befits a technologically advanced civilisation. And yet there is a downside, as there always is in the market economy.

While the technological advancements of civilisation open up whole new vistas, so at the same time does society itself become less “civilised”. Not only does Channel 4’s coverage come with a good deal of the brashness we have come to associate with so much else of the fast-food culture we inhabit, but it extends to breaking point public tolerance of commercially-orientated TV. The advertisements that have crept into cricket and other sports over recent years, from the advertising hoardings at the grounds and the sponsoring of competitions and then teams, to the painted advertisements on the pitch itself, have now been supplemented by particularly insidious versions of the ubiquitous TV commercial.

As each session of play in a Test Match lasts for at least two hours, usually without formal interruption of any sort, the advertisers had a headache reconciling the needs of the game and of the viewer on the one hand with the dictates of the market and profit on the other. Their solution has been to run a 20 second-or-so commercial every few overs of play, completely untelegraphed to the audience. There is no programme theme music, no couple of seconds of silence as the programme “card” comes up by way of warning—in fact, there is no warning at all. It is effectively a bizarre, elongated version of subliminal advertising. It is immensely irritating and not surprisingly, has been almost uniformly condemned. Yet, ironically, without the increasingly bizarre adverts for cars and bottled lagers which now infest the screen during cricket coverage, there would probably be no improved coverage of the type Channel 4 have been able to provide.

There may be more important examples of the irrationality of capitalism and of how the market system is unable to properly use the technology it has helped develop so as to meet human needs, but few illustrate it so graphically as the changes undergone by cricket coverage, and exemplified by Channel 4. Cricket is now a more compelling TV sport than it ever has been, except that it is ceaselessly undermined with adverts which seek to distract and intrude rather than genuinely inform. Just as the market gives with one hand, so it takes back with another because the rational planning of human services will always be a secondary consideration quite some way behind the making of profits.

One final thought: does the cricket “third umpire”—called upon to make adjudications with the help of a TV monitor and replays—have to sit through some near-subliminal rubbish while he tries to make a decision over a marginal run out? Somehow we think not. And is he doesn’t have to, then why the hell should we?

Dave Perrin

Lost Musicals and “Get Lost” Musicals (1999)

Theatre Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

110 In the Shade, Fortune Theatre, London

I have to admit that I like musicals, and especially old musicals of the kind that were common from the nineteen-twenties and thirties until the seventies. True many were arch, whilst others were coy and over-sentimental. But when they worked it was usually because they had wit and charm and, in the years following the end of the Second World War, because they were increasingly grounded in the lives of ordinary people. Their books were written by the likes of Guy Bolton, George Kaufman, Moss Hart and Wolf Mankowitz; with words and music from, for example, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Frank Loesser and Howard Goodall.

Today’s musicals, by comparison, affect to be populist operas. Words are at a premium, the intention being to write an “all-through” score, as in Les Miserables. Character and story lines frequently fall victim of the desire to produce knock-out “special effects”, like the arrival of the helicopter in Miss Saigon. Story lines are pretentious and amoral (Aspects of Love), extravagant and fanciful (Phantom of the Opera) and naïve and childlike (Beauty and the Beast). Audiences are stunned by sound and spectacle. Humanity and reality lose out to noise and stage technology.

The effect is frequently chilling. I recall seeing Les Miserables at the Barbican—astonishingly it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. All around me people were clapping and cheering—some had even leapt onto their seats the better to give expression to their feelings. And for what? A great novel had been shredded before our eyes and repackaged as an indifferent quasi-opera. History had been re-written, and events in mid-nineteenth-century France turned into the kind of fiction that I remember as a child associating with the adventures of Flash Gordon at the local cinema on a Saturday morning. Yet people were cheering. How could this be? I felt a huge sense of isolation. It was as though I was a prisoner on another, alien planet.

Contemporary musicals form part of the ideological apparatus of capitalism. Their function is first and foremost to make money for their backers by projecting messages which are consistent with the status quo. To do this they employ lavish sets and imposing numbers of people and special effects in order to tell bizarre tales (Starlight Express) and other unlikely fictions, in a manner which, as one critic puts it, “stuns you into submission”. Their size makes them expensive, and in order to recoup their costs they have to continue to pull in the punters literally for years. This means that they have to be pre-packaged and sold. Like Star Wars Episode 1 which is reputed to have carried a pre-showing budget of several millions of pounds in the UK, any significant new musical is going to be hyped for weeks and months before it opens. This makes the critic’s job more difficult. An honest opinion is difficult if the pre-production gloss has led you to expect a masterpiece, and if the newspaper in which you write is owned by someone who has invested in the show. But once the public has been persuaded, often regardless of the merits or otherwise of the piece that the show is worth seeing, once a show has survived six months or so in the West End and the coach companies are arranging trips from the far-flung corners of the country, then producers can be pretty certain of getting their money back and more; much, much more.

How nice then to report that for those living near to London it is possible to see musicals predicated, in part, on a different basis. For a couple of years now my partner and I have been attending occasional performances of “The Lost Musicals” on Sunday afternoons in May, July and September. Organised by a charitable trust and managed by a man whose enthusiasm for musicals is as obvious as his indifference to the money-making, in nine years they have managed to offer 160 performances of over 40 different shows which haven’t been seen for 30-50 years or so, using 600 actors who have given their services free.

Recently we saw 110 In The Shade, a warm folksy tale based on Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker. Never mind that the actors were reading their parts against a black back-cloth, and singing with the support of only a single pianist, this was a wonderful experience. There was more honesty, warmth, wit and wisdom in this unpretentious show than in all of the lavish musicals on offer in the West End. The best musicals manage to conjure from story, character, music and dance, something close to occasional moments of ecstasy. Perhaps understandably then there was something of the ecstatic in the audience’s response.

Michael Gill

Party activity during the summer months (1999)

Party News from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party members were active leafleting various events, including the Durham Miners’ Gala and the Tolpuddle Martyrs memorial. We reproduce below the texts of the leaflets distributed in July at the two events.

Message for the 1999 Durham Miners’ Gala.

The Durham Miners’ Gala is an integral part of the working-class tradition and history in the North East in general, and County Durham in particular. Although there is now only one working colliery in the North East coalfield, the gala’s pre-eminence as a working-class gathering remains. The crowds may have diminished from its heyday but other things have not changed. The continued attendance of those state-capitalists in socialist clothing, the Labour Party, is still galling.

 Offering much, but delivering nothing. They claim to be socialists but are indistinguishable from the Tories, Liberals and the rest.

 Labour, it should be remembered, between 1964-69 closed 233 pits around the country, and have never been backward in coming forward when it comes to using the full weight of the state against the working class.

 Using troops and the police to break strikes is merely one example. Ask yourself this: for all of the hundreds of billions of pounds-worth of coal which has been extracted from North East mines, with the concomitant cost in terms of tens of thousands of workers still suffering, what has been the reward?

Have miners lived lives of fulfilment, free from stress and anxiety? Free from worry over our and our children’s futures? The answer must be an unequivocal NO!

The wealth represented by coal has been pillaged by a tiny few, for their enrichment. The private coal owners at first, then on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole through state-capitalist nationalisation in latter years and now back to private owners today.

 In all of these periods, even during the spell of nationalisation (which was state capitalism, not socialism) the reward has been poverty, degradation and insecurity. The people who worked and died, and are still dying, to extract the coal, have had scant reward for their toil. The people who have suffered, and who still suffer, react to this by continuing to allow the tricksters of the left to con them.

Blair and his cronies are only the latest edition.

 The solution however is quite simple! It is a solution which is shown quite plainly on the banner of Murton pit itself, reproduced on the front of this leaflet: “Production for use, not profit”

 This is precisely what the Socialist Party advocates and has done since 1904. Socialism: nothing more, nothing less. The common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing the things we need to live. Where we all have equal access to the means of life.

A demand echoed by the above slogan. Only we, as a united working class, can bring this about and if you would like to know more about these ideas, why not get in touch: our address is contained in this leaflet.

Message for the 1999 Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally.

Tolpuddle Martyrs If gathering together to remember the Tolpuddle Martyrs means anything then it is surely not simply a question of just remembering but of also trying to change things for the better. This is precisely what those six Dorset farm labourers were trying to do 165 years ago.

 There will be many messages put forward today. The trade union and Labour Party leaders will tell us how far we have come since 1834. How much things have changed for the better, how fortunate we are to have a Labour government and how if we are patient and leave it to them things will improve still further.

 Our message is different. Much has changed since the nineteenth century and in some respects things have improved. These improvements have been brought about by people organising themselves and not by leaders.

 However the fundamental problems that faced people around 1834, such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment and so on are still with us today.

 If these problems are considered in the light of the wealth that is created today in comparison with over 150 years ago and if we look at things on a world-wide scale then we have made little headway.

 There is still an enormous growing gap between rich and poor. We still face these problems because one fundamental thing has not changed, namely, the nature of the society we live in. As in the last century we live in a social system where the prime motivation for producing goods and services for profit.

 What has changed is that more than ever we live in a global economy dominated by giant corporations. Many of these corporations have more economic power than some countries.

 We are not pleading with the heads of corporations that dominate the world today to behave a little kinder. We are not asking politicians to attempt to control the corporations. We are not saying let us run this system because we can run it more humanely.

 The present system is operating the only way it can, profits first, human needs second and the politicians have as much chance of controlling it as a two-year-old has of stopping a runaway horse.

Our message is that we need a complete change. At present, the instruments needed to produce and distribute the things we need, are owned by a minority, around 5 percent of the population.

 Our alternative is a system of common ownership and democratic control. Goods and services could then be produced directly for use thus ending the situation where production is geared to the profit motive.

This change cannot be handed down by leaders but will be brought about by a majority acting democratically and fully conscious of what they are doing. Since this society can only function on a global scale, the movement that brings it about will have to be organised on a world-wide basis.

If you are here today because you feel a fundamental change in the way society is organised is needed then you owe it to yourself to find out more about the only political movement which seeks FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE.

50 Years Ago: Another Fake Goes West (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exit the Revolutionary Communist Party

In July of this year the English Trotzkyists, the Revolutionary Communist Party, brought out a Special Number of their paper, the Socialist Appeal, consisting of a small four-page leaflet. If there were ever any doubts about the reformist character of the R.C.P., this four-page leaflet disposes of them for ever!

The front page of the leaflet contains nothing but the following, in large type:-

“DECLARATION

“On the Dissolution of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the entry of its members into the Labour Party.”

The second page informs us that after several months of discussion a Special National Conference was held in London, June 4th, 5th and 6th. and that the only items on the Agenda for this Conference were:-

“The current political situation in Britain: what forms the class struggle would take in the next period, and how best the energies and activities of its members could be utilised to further the cause of Socialism.”

We are told that:-

“After a two-days debate, this fully representative Conference decided, by a substantial majority, to dissolve the organisation and call upon the members of the Party to enter the Labour Party—to which the majority already pay the Trade Union political levy—as individual members. Within the Labour Party they would carry on the fight for the overthrow of the capitalist system and for a Socialist Britain.”

The last sentence is an exposure of mental bankruptcy; after originating as a challenge to the nationalism of the Stalinites the R.C.P. falls for the “Socialism in One Country” idea.

(From an article by “Gilmac”, Socialist Standard, September 1949)

Obituary: Patrick Maratty (1999)

Obituary from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Wednesday 21 July my brother Patrick Maratty, who over the years has written many letters to the Sunderland Echo under the pseudonym “anti-capitalist” and was a member of the Socialist Party, died in hospital after years of neglect by the health and social services.

Patrick loved snooker and wanted his son Matty to be a champion player. He believed that the only way Matty could become a “professional” as he called it was to act like one: this meant practising eight hours a day. He spent much of his life teaching his son how to play the game and anyone who knows Matty knows that he lives up to his dad’s expectations.

The other passion in Pat’s life was socialism. He believed that the major cause of social problems was capitalism and that the working class throughout the world should organise democratically and politically for a society based upon common ownership. He scorned religious beliefs as false, dangerous, divisive and a major contributory factor to many horrendous acts throughout history. I know he hasn’t gone to heaven, hell or purgatory but he will have found peace. I loved him and will miss him.

Vince Maratty

Voice From The Back: Unnatural causes (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unnatural causes

In Ethiopia, people suffer from the natural disaster of drought. But Oxfam also works with poor people to help them combat a disaster more destructive than any natural calamity: poverty. Take Bangladesh: the world was shocked by the catastrophic cyclone and floods in 1991, in which 140,000 died. Yet the same number of children are killed by poverty in Bangladesh every 2 months. The main killers are common diseases, often spread by dirty water, like diarrhoea. Worldwide, a mother watches her child die of diarrhoea every 8 seconds. Oxfam begging letter, June.

At the class divide

There is, for example, a house price boom going on—at least for those living in the advantaged parts of the country. The half a million pound house is becoming a commonplace and a million pounds is no longer rare; more extraordinarily still, prices are rising by 20 or 30 percent a year. To buy such a house demands a mortgage of a quarter a million or more, and that in turn, even with today’s interest rates, implies monthly repayments of around £2,000 a month. But for a growing number of households, where both partners work, such repayments can be paid relatively easily. It may mean both are working for 50 or 60 hours a week and the parenting of their children, even the caring of their pets, is being subcontracted; but the mortgage can be paid. Observer, 6 June.

They own them all

Eighty-two percent of corporate stock in America is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of families. But over half those shares, the controlling stake, is owned by the richest one percent alone. The membership of this One Per Cent Club has expertly diversified portfolios and trusts. They own GM and Ford, Monsanto and its “competitor” Dow Chemical. Ergo, they don’t care which horse wins the race because they own the whole race track. So what does the Wealthy One Per Cent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they are squeezing from the bottom. Observer, 6 June.

Trust 

The Prime Minister yesterday urged employers and unions to end the “often meaningless ritual” of the annual pay round when he launched a £5 million fund to promote partnership at work. He made the call as part of the Government’s plan to reduce the causes of regular conflict between employers and the unions in a speech at a Trades Union Congress conference in London aimed at promoting partnership. Mr Blair said the unions must resist reverting to the “bad old days” of the “them and us” climate of the 1970s and work at being more committed to business. The £5 million will be used to train managers and trade union officials to work together more effectively and to build trust between unions and businesses. Metro, 25 May.

Exploitation must increase 

Businesses in many European countries are outraged at a rising tide of social legislation and working directives, which they claim stifle enterprise and competitiveness, threaten jobs and cost billions. They support the view held by many UK businesses that without more flexibility, enterprises will go bust. At the head of their hate list are the Social Chapter, which includes trade union rights, the Working Time Directive limiting employees’ working hours, and a mass of environmental regulations. Financial Mail on Sunday, 6 June.

Better than opium? 

Our national lottery’s licence is up for grabs and the only question is: will Camelot win it again? The lottery’s sole problem is that we in Britain are currently spending only £100m a week on it, so they are launching a new game next week to tempt us to blow a little more . . . Last year one independent, British, world-class academic revealed that more than 100,000 children in their early teens were seriously hooked on gambling. Those findings, based on publicly-funded research, were so worrying that the government tried to suppress them. Guardian, 3 June.

What starvation?

Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler is expected to propose doubling the proportion of arable land to be left uncultivated by farmers next year. Experts predict that he will propose a set-aside rate of at least 10 percent in the 1999 season. Commission officials say the current level of 5 percent has failed to prevent soaring cereal production, causing a sharp drop in EU market prices and forcing the institution to buy in large amounts of surplus wheat and barley at the guaranteed price of 119 ecu per tonne. “Surplus stocks stand at about 15 million tonnes at present. We estimate that if this rate of 5 percent is carried over into next year, they will rise to 25 million tonne,” said one official. European Voice, 4/10 June.

Transplant organs for sale? (1999)

From the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even Margaret Thatcher balked at the sale of kidneys but now it is being discussed as a serious possibility.

When BBC2’s Newsnight programme broke the story about Northern General Hospital in Sheffield accepting a stipulation from a donor’s relatives that his organs could only be used if they “didn’t go to a coloured”, the debate that raged afterwards concentrated on whether racist pre-conditions should be tolerated given the severe shortage of transplant organs. And whether medical staff accepting such ifs and buts might be breaching the Race Discrimination Act. Did anyone in the media realise this issue was not fundamentally about ethics or legality, but class?

What is it that suppresses natural altruism in people to the point that this may necessitate compelling organ donations through a new involuntary arrangement? What causes next of kin to see donor organs as exclusive property to grant or withhold, rather than collective property from which anyone may benefit? And what makes those who do behave unselfishly towards others get called “losers” and “saddos”? Might it be a materialistic, dog-eat-dog, I’m-all-right-Jack mentality necessary for survival and “success” under capitalism?

The source of people developing a hatred for other human beings with merely a darker skin colour is also found in the competitive market. Those desperate to find a reason for, and an escape from its poverty, unemployment, housing problems, inadequate welfare benefits etc, can readily blame any group that they are led to think of as being different and outsiders. Such thinking will generally be toned down or encouraged—depending on whether the economy is doing well or badly—to fit in with the capitalist class’s needs to increase available labour and boost workforce competitiveness or to divide society and divert blame. But sometimes as in this case racist thoughts can rebound on the ruling class.

A kidney transplant costs around £10,000 just once, whereas haemodialysis costs the state (funded by businesses) £25,000 every year per patient. If “different” ethnic groups start attaching conditions to donations, other non-racial provisos will creep in; administration will become more difficult and expensive; would-be donors will be put off, and fewer transplant operations will result. And with organs already in increasingly short supply, both the pressure on government to act and the financial burden on capital could only get worse. But any New Labour solution is bound to involve hypocrisy.

Already, Frank Dobson has blustered “I haven’t been an opponent of apartheid all my adult life to see it being introduced in the NHS. It never occurred to me that a rule would be necessary to keep racism out of blood transfusions and donations.” Maybe the Health secretary will explain later why his new rule, while not allowing people to choose who gets hearts, lungs and kidneys according to colour, will allow any capitalist to choose the best food, goods and services according to money. Preventing discrimination against the differently coloured with desperate clinical needs, but permitting discrimination against the poor with desperate social needs exposes the iniquity of a private property society and its requisite two-faced laws. Dobson won’t have costly racism in health care, but “apartheid” in access to enjoyable work, the best food, decent housing, utility services . . . That, too, has “never occurred” to him—and probably never will.

Class ownership of vital assets is behind divisions in society, but because those who govern capitalism have no intention of tackling this root cause of racism, its political servants now instead merely put on a concerned act, conduct sham enquiries and plan to tinker with its laws to avoid the controlled majority behaving too much like the dominant asset-owning minority.

But why are so many people in dire need of organ transplants in the first place? How much smaller would be their number if those in various industries (chemicals, oil, tobacco, pharmaceuticals etc) had not poisoned and polluted our bodies for profit for decades?

Some media writers actually suggested that if the poor were encouraged by payments to sell organs to hospitals while still alive, then both they and those in desperate need of transplants would benefit.

The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee asked:

Why shouldn’t the NHS buy organs for its patients? . . . ask the tough question—if it’s OK for us to let millions of people die around the world with hardly a thought about it, why isn’t it OK for some of those people to choose to sell a kidney in order to improve their families’ chances of survival? The medical risk of donating a kidney is relatively low while the cash reward would be enough to change a family’s condition beyond all recognition . . . If the world cannot give them the means to survive, why should they be denied the right to sell the only thing they have of great value? (9 July).

In Toynbee’s mind, the “means to survive” is money, while in reality such means are industries, utilities, natural resources etc which, if directly and collectively owned by us all—and not a privileged ruling minority—would bring about an end to all those millions of deaths from deprivation.

And if she thought harder, Toynbee would realise that poor people selling bits of themselves would not escape the gutter, as the capitalist market that she tolerates—and regularly cashes in on with reformist let’s-tinker-with-it-this-way and that-way articles—will always find buyers at the most competitive prices. And with billions world-wide possessing sod all, that’s what organ purchasers will be able to pay then as the going rate.

Legally, we don’t even own our bodies. According to the Medical Ethics and Law Department at Imperial College (Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4, 11 July), the seventeenth century philosopher John Locke established the principle on which the law still operates. They pointed out “we don’t own our bodies because didn’t create our bodies. Locke said God did”. Consequently, “we can own things that we have created through our labour . . . that we have property in our person, but definitely not in our bodies”. This is doubly daft, since not only did some supreme being never make us, but we manifestly do not have full property rights in what we create through our labour, otherwise exploitation by employers for profit would be impossible.

However, such exploitation will end—together with all today’s others social miseries—when we perform a transplant operation on capitalists at the ballot box, and shift organs of production from their persons to ours.

Max Hess

Letter: The Balkan War (1999)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Balkan War

Dear Editors,

Surely you can do better than that in your comments on the Balkan war?

That war was and is an ethnic one pure and simple. For ten years now Serbs, Croats and Bosnians have indulged in a war of racial hatred. Kosova was Milosevic’s last straw and he played it out to the last.

It was time that the rest of Europe woke up, even though they took a dozy attitude to the events in Africa. Somebody had to say enough is enough, and it was right to turn on the Serbs and halt their genocidal attitude to the Kosovo Albanians.

The Belgrade Serbs cocked a deaf ear to Kosovo and indulged in “pop” concert patriotism, something the Brits missed out on in their hatred of the Irish.

If you wanted to relate political beliefs to anything out there, why not indulge yourselves in sussing out that bastard “Jackson”, the drunken badly-spoken military man of the infamous paratroopers, who are always brought out along with the Ghurkas when there is dirty work to be done.

Bill Connor, 

Heywood, Lancs

Reply:

You’re quite wrong. For there to be a race war there would have to be races. But races (and “ethnic group” is just another, equally unscientific, word for “race”) don’t exist. There is only one race—the human race. Even by the sloppy definition, based on superficial visible anatomical differences, used by those who perpetuate the myth of “race” it is clear that the people in former Yugoslavia would all be members of the same race. Or can you tell the difference between an “Albanian” and a “Serb” just by looking at them?

What’s at work in former Yugoslavia is nationalism, which is a political doctrine that preaches that people with a common history or language or religion form a separate “nation” from all other people and have the right to have their own political state to defend their common interest. Socialists have always rejected this doctrine, not just because it isn’t true (people who have a common history or speak the same language do not have a common interest; they are divided into classes, and a worker who speaks a particular language has a common interest with workers speaking other languages but not with a capitalist who speaks the same one) but also because of its practical consequences.

Without the ideology of nationalism, capitalist states would be unstable since, being based on minority class rule, they need a minimum allegiance from those they rule over. Nationalism serves to achieve this by teaching the ruled to be loyal to “their” so-called “nation-state”. In states where a sizeable minority of the population do not fit into the definition of that state’s “nation”—because, for instance, they speak a different language, especially if this is the language of another state—then there is at least a potential problem, to which the final solution is so-called ethnic cleansing. The establishment of independent states in eastern Europe following the break-up of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires in the First World War led to massive transfers of populations between the new states, precisely because the borders of those states did not correspond to the distribution of the population by “nationality” as defined by language. The same thing is happening again today with the break-up of Yugoslavia since the collapse of state-capitalism in 1989-90.

So-called ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia is the consequence of the creation of new capitalist states in the area and the attempts of their new or would-be ruling classes to consolidate their rule. The Serbian ruling class under Milosevic wanted to clear Kosovo of Albanian-speakers to get rid of a “disloyal” minority within Serbia that was becoming ungovernable. Similarly, the KLA is now trying to clear Kosovo of Serbian-speakers because they know that they will never be able to get them to be loyal to the independent state they hope to set up.

Ordinary Serbian-speakers and ordinary Albanian-speakers have the same interest, in getting on with their lives while capitalism lasts and ultimately in establishing socialism. What interest can they have in burning down each other’s houses—and worse? Clearly, they are being manipulated by rival nationalist politicians seeking to consolidate new capitalist states.- Editors

Devolution makes no difference (1999)

From the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The inexorable process of globalisation has increasingly made redundant the question of “national sovereignty”. Yet regional nationalists imagine they can buck the trend without even being against capitalism.

The growth of multinational corporations, some with a turnover exceeding the GDP of most states, has dramatically transformed the role of government as the locus of economic decision-making. Many of the most important decisions are now made, not by politicians, but in the boardrooms of these multinationals. Indeed, this renders increasingly problematic the very notion of a “British capitalist class”; in practice, ownership of “British” capital has become progressively dispersed across the globe, a process facilitated by transnational mergers and buy-outs.

Likewise, the proliferation of trading links between different states has effectively blurred the lines of demarcation between nominally separate national economies. It would be more realistic now to speak of there being a single global economy. Even so, many locally-based businesses are indirectly tied into this economy as subcontractors to multinationals. Not only that, the ever-deepening nexus of international linkages means they cannot escape recessionary perturbations emanating from elsewhere when these impact upon the local economy. At the same time, the limited leeway of governments to ameliorate such localised effects has been correspondingly reduced.

What applies at the national level applies even more so at the regional or subnational. While Wales and Scotland have been given a measure of devolution of power from Westminster, in other parts of the country the struggle to achieve this is still ongoing. This is particularly so in the case of Cornwall. Situated in the far south-west of Britain, Cornwall is likewise part of its “Celtic fringe” with a strong sense of its own identity.

There are a number of organisations which can be loosely described as “Cornish nationalist”. At one extreme are the hard-liners who advocate full independence, some of whom, according to a recent BBC documentary (11 February), have links with paramilitary contacts; the so-called “Cornish Liberation Army”. Evidence of paramilitary activity is scant, the most significant instance of which in recent years occurred in the St Austell areas in the early 1980s. At the other extreme are the more numerically important “soft” nationalists typified by the recently formed “Cornish Solidarity” organisation. Its goal is basically a better deal for Cornwall through greater local autonomy. Soft nationalism extends also to the main UK-based political parties, like the Liberal Democrats, who for historical reasons have long been the dominant political force in Cornwall.

There are other variations amongst the nationalists. Some focus mainly on the Cornish as a supposed ethnic group; others are more inclusive, welcoming anyone into their ranks who live in, and “care about”, Cornwall. Since probably a majority of residents in Cornwall are of non-Cornish extraction—according to one estimate, nearly 70 percent—this would appear to be the more judicious approach to adopt. Nevertheless, it does rather vitiate the notion of Cornwall as a distinct “cultural region”. But this is the lynchpin of the approach of Mebyon Kernow, the largest Cornish nationalist party. In their recent election document, Cornwall 2000—the Way Ahead, they make the following statement:

Cornwall is recognised as a cultural region yet ignored as an economic region. There is a lack of harmony between culture and economics here, but the answer to this imbalance is simple. Base the economic on the cultural region.

Last tin mine

There is little doubt that as an “economic region” Cornwall fares badly. In an article in the Guardian (20 April), the Camborne-Redruth area in particular was portrayed as a scene of post-industrial dereliction “worse than Albania” following the closure there of South Crofty, Europe’s last remaining tin mine. That was surely a gross exaggeration. Nevertheless, with a per capita GDP of only 72.2 percent of the UK average, Cornwall is the poorest county in England, notwithstanding its picture postcard image.

According to Mebyon Kernow, “social deprivation, low wages and high unemployment in Cornwall are in direct proportion to our distance from the decision-making centre in London”. This conveniently overlooks the fact that, in terms of absolute numbers, the greatest concentration of poverty in the UK is actually to be found in London itself, notably in the boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets situated within a few miles of Westminster and Whitehall and which have a combined population exceeding that of Cornwall.

Certainly, Cornwall’s remoteness from the major population centres like London has contributed to its relative poverty, but not for the reason Mebyon Kernow suggests. Rather, it has to do with the spatial economics of capitalism itself: the difficulty of gaining access to the large markets “up country” and, associated with this, the inability to capitalise on economies of scale. This is one reason why Cornish wages are so low, to compensate for the additional transportation costs of their employers.

Blaming Cornwall’s plight on the bias of Westminster politicians amounts to a kind of conspiracy theory with little foundation in fact. The government’s proposal to set up a seven-county South-West regional development agency based in Bristol is typically seen by nationalists as yet another example of it ignoring the needs of Cornwall for the sake of administrative convenience. Among the nationalists’ list of demands is the establishment of a Cornish Development Agency—as if, in Cornish hands, things would improve. Tell that to Cornish workers who are exploited just as ruthlessly by their Cornish bosses as by their up-country cousins. But even if a Development Agency were to materialise, with the best will in the world it would not significantly affect the basic economic realities the region faces.

Furthermore, as everywhere else, more and more of the vital decisions affecting the local economy have little to do with Westminster. Thus, the decision last year to close the symbolically important South Crofty mine was taken by its Canadian owners in the context of a precipitous fall in the world price of tin and cheaper production methods abroad.

The case of South Crofty highlights the importance of inward investment to the Cornish economy. By the same token, it exposes the futility of treating it as though it were a self-contained “region”. To look at the world in these terms is to succumb to the myopia of the development planner, too intent upon empire-building to see the larger picture. Capitalism simply does not operate in this way. Most of the big UK chains have outlets throughout Cornwall. Some of the largest concerns are not even based in Britain. SWEB, for example, the main supplier of electricity, is owned by an American company; English China Clays was recently taken over by a French firm.

That said, a striking feature of Cornish economy is the extent of small and medium-sized firms; over 90 percent of firms have a workforce of less than 25. This is partly attributable to the peculiar economic profile of Cornwall and its heavy reliance on tourism, fishing and farming. Even its traditional mining industry has historically tended towards fragmentation.

At its height, in the mid-19th century, the predominant mode of payment was the tribute system rather than conventional wage labour. Small gangs of labourers would contract with landowners to mine the ore, sharing out the proceeds from its sale amongst themselves. It has been argued that the tribute system, coupled with the quietistic influence of Methodism, have been largely responsible for the relative absence of class consciousness among Cornish miners. This impeded the growth of a traditional “Labour movement” in Cornwall while the weak hold of the big landowners on smallholders curbed the influence of Toryism, allowing a unique Cornish style of politics to emerge in the 19th century—a petty-bourgeois cocktail of liberalism and non-conformism.

Maverick millionaire

The economic background likewise helps to explain the marked hostility in Cornwall toward Europe. Many traditional industries have been adversely affected by EU regulations, such as the imposition of quotas on the Cornish fishing fleet, leading to its partial de-commissioning. Similarly, the proposal to join the single currency, insofar as this will deleteriously impact upon small businesses, will particularly hit Cornwall, given the predominance of small-scale enterprises.

It is not surprising under the circumstances that anti-European political parties, like the UKIP, fared so well in the recent European elections in Cornwall. For many years, anti-European sentiments have been regularly aired in the form of full-page weekly advertisement in all the main Cornish papers. The author of this frankly xenophobic rubbish, vacillating confusedly between Cornish and British nationalism, is a maverick millionaire, Mike Robertson (writing under the pseudonym, “Tripehound”) and founder of the home-grown Trago Mills chain.

Such confusion is typical of the nationalists in general: on the one hand, pushing for greater economic assistance for Cornwall from Westminster, on the other, seeking to weaken its links with Westminster. It’s a case of wanting to have your nationalist cake and eat it. This confusion is manifest too with respect to Europe. One of the main aims of the nationalist movement has been to get Objective One Status for Cornwall thereby attracting European grants of up to £500 million over several years. Only those regions with a GDP of less than 75 percent of the EU average could qualify for such funding but until recently, Cornwall was, for statistical purposes, lumped together with its wealthier neighbour, Devon, and thus denied funding. With this obstacle having recently been removed, Cornwall has now finally achieved this aim.

Whether this will make any impact on the extent of poverty in Cornwall is doubtful; more likely it will only exacerbate the degree of social polarisation and hasten the disintegration of what remains of a distinctive Cornish culture, now pitifully parodied by the ubiquitous theme park. That, after all, is the natural tendency of capitalist development.

As Cornwall inexorably succumbs to the imperatives of a McDonald’s culture, its nationalists would do well to reflect. For by striving to promote capitalist development, they have inadvertently assisted this outcome, poisoning, so to speak, the very ground in which their own cultural pretensions are rooted.

Robin Cox