What has the monarchy done for us? (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

How does a technologically and industrially advanced 21st century nation come to have an unelected head of state that is at the centre of extravagant and expensive medieval-inspired rituals such as coronations and jubilees? Many countries have adopted, in various forms, a constitutional monarchy but none go to such lengths to celebrate monarchical decadence as do the English. It is all the more surprising since it was the English bourgeoisie who were historically the first to cut off a king’s head during their quest for power in the 17th century. Far from being a symbol of Englishness the present queen comes from an ancient line of German princes who, in many of their inbred incarnations, actively opposed English imperialism. We can answer some of these questions historically but how are we to explain the admiration of so many of the working class for this symbol of their slavery?

The Tudor dynasty had adopted (rather half-heartedly) the Reformation and developed a centralised state that made the evolution of the modern nation state possible in the following centuries. When the last of them (Elizabeth I) died the Scottish Stuart dynasty took over with an inbuilt autocratic tendency that was to prove ill-suited to deal with the rise of the ‘middle class’ and their rising hegemony within parliament (House of Commons). The resulting revolution convulsed the country with some quarter of a million casualties (making the French revolution look like a bar brawl) and a republic whose leaders executed the king (Charles I) for treason. This regime was soon to degenerate into a military dictatorship that was thoroughly disliked by the people and a deal was done with Charles II for his return on the understanding he would respect parliamentary power. This again soon degenerated into an attempt at counter revolution led by James II, which proved once and for all to the English bourgeoisie that they could not trust the Stuarts and that their only hope for a truly constitutional monarchy was to call on William of Orange who had proven his credentials in this respect within the Dutch Republic. This proved to be successful in giving the illusion of both historical/royal continuity and also liberating capitalist trade from the threat of monopolistic autocracy.

Subsequent ‘Whig’ historians dedicated themselves to creating a history where the English revolution was relegated to a religious civil war followed quickly by a ‘restoration’ that hardly troubled the calm national continuity of the English class system. This myth became very convenient when the international power of the English ruling class was threatened by the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of the European Napoleonic Empire. The political convulsions of continental Europe were contrasted to the stability of the British system and it is indeed true that the first of the French revolutionaries wanted to create a constitutional monarchy on the English model but the duplicity of their king (just as with Charles I) made this impossible giving the militant Jacobins their chance to create a republic. Another difference between the two revolutions was the relatively quick integration of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes in England. The ruling class was now economically entirely capitalistic but the old families of aristocratic origin retained an air of cultural superiority and the nouveau rich could not help but admire this ancient elitism – when it didn’t conflict with profit making. The other element of aristocratic culture that the English bourgeoisie absolutely adored was the warrior tradition and pageantry. No coal magnate, however rich, could compare with the mythology of Henry V and his victory at Agincourt!

To this day the glamour attached to the aristocracy and the royal family in particular, is used to sell the illusion that the English are a united country which all have a common interest to preserve. As with all hierarchical social structures there is a need to condition those without wealth and power to believe that those who possess it are somehow different and special. Along with the myth of the ‘self-made man’ capitalism needs a symbol of nationalism/militarism and what better symbol than those descended from murderers (warriors) to stand on balconies wearing pantomime military uniforms. For socialists the queen stands for: nationalist tribalism, class privilege, massive unearned wealth, Christian superstition and unelected power. They cannot even preserve the image of an ideal bourgeois family that serves as a model for us all given the continual scandals emanating from what must be one of the most dysfunctional families in existence. Such criticisms are commonplace and feel like an exercise in the proverbial ‘shooting ducks in a barrel’ but somehow these people continue to be admired by many within the working class.

Given the history above and the usefulness of the royal family as propaganda we can see how they are placed at the centre of UK capitalism’s greatest shibboleth – ‘patriotism’. No mainstream politician dares question this tribal loyalty in public just as they would not criticise its royal incarnation. Perhaps to the younger people the royals are merely celebrities but for those of an older generation they represent a perverse feeling of community and continuity despite the reality that it is their existence and the class they represent that continually destroys communities by fuelling the relentless class struggle.

Wez.

Marxism and Leninism in Myanmar (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sympathiser sets out the history of ‘socialism’ in Myanmar.

Myanmar is a ‘Global South’ country with long borders shared with India and China. Before its independence, it was ruled by the colonial British as a province of British India. It was also known as Burma.

The earliest record of Marxism in Myanmar is 1923, long after the death of Marx and Engels. The Second International had already been replaced by the Third International. Most of the writers who represented orthodox Marxism were no longer alive or active. It was a time when most of the most talented scholars of Marxism had lost their influence and Marxism was being dictated by Stalin under the name ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Leon Trotsky also started the left opposition to the Bolshevik government in that year.

The very first localised literature of Marxism in Myanmar was Das Kapital in a misleading translation inspired by nationalism. Since then, ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘communism’ were the kind of keywords that could be seen in some of the publicity released. In 1930, Dr Thein Maung brought back some left-wing books from London to Myanmar. Those were the first books the radical youths in Myanmar encountered about Western communism. They influenced Thakin Nu, who later became the Prime Minister of Burma, and Thakin Soe, who founded both the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and the Red Flag Communist Party; together they founded the ‘Nagani book club’ for distributing left-wing books and articles. Dagon Taya, later a renowned writer, was one of the chairmen of the Rangoon University Student Union and once wrote a slogan on a wall claiming ‘Long Live Soviet Myanmar’ while he was travelling in 1939.

In 1939, a new chapter was opened for ‘Communism’ (‘Marxism-Leninism’) in Myanmar. Aung San (the ‘father of the nation’), Thakin Soe, a handful of Chittagong radicals and some other leftists together founded the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB managed to link with the Third International as soon as it was founded because of the link between the Chittagonian Bengali founders such as H. N. Goshal and the Indian Communist Party. At that time in 1939, the Third International had already become a tool of Russian foreign policy, under the leadership of Stalin, and had successfully sabotaged strikes under the Popular Front government in France and the social struggles of the CNT-FAI in Spain. The CPB was thus also bound to adopt disastrous tactics, including a series of mistakes that even orthodox Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky had described as ‘ultra-left’, ie, the CPB chose not to take part in elections, but instead to wage war against the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League which was the acting government at that time. Later, the CPB didn’t stop with Stalinism; it went further to Maoism which had rejected the class struggle and advocated the alliance of four nationalist classes. It ended up killing its own founders like H. N. Goshal in 1967 during the cultural revolution era.

One Party Rule

On 2 March 1962, a coup d’état took place which heralded the commencement of one-party rule in Myanmar and the army’s political supremacy. The military who attempted the coup called themselves the Union Revolutionary Council (URC) and introduced a programme called ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. The CPB denied the ‘socialist’ credentials of URC, however, the URC shared a lot of similar characteristics with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. The first of these was one-party rule with strong state power and hostility towards opposition. As Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas mentioned in his The New Class, ‘modern Communism is a modern despotism which cannot help but aspire towards totalitarianism’. In terms of Marxism, such one-party totalitarianism has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote once, ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only of the members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all’. Equating one-party totalitarianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat shows a lack of understanding of Marxism. Marx and Engels identified the act of ‘raising the proletariat to a ruling class’ as ‘the conquest of democracy’.

The second characteristic was the act of strengthening the state, which confirms the claim of Milovan Djilas which states: ‘there is no doubt that a national communist bureaucracy aspires to more complete authority for itself’. Thirdly, Ne Win, chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was anti-union just like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Tito. The BSPP faced much opposition from every side including student unions, workers’ unions, political armed groups, and the government-in-exile.

Student Uprising

The best example of this was the ‘7th July Student Uprising’ which was a series of marches, rallies, and protests against stricter campus regulations and the policies of General Ne Win’s BSPP regime. The BSPP responded to the uprising by violently attacking the students, shooting them with machine guns and using explosives to blow up the whole student union building in University of Yangon, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred, and the arrest of more than 6,000 students. The BSPP accused the students of being counter-revolutionary and reactionary because they were protesting against the ‘socialist’ state in the BSPP’s view. After that incident, the BSPP attacked the very existence of the unions.

Furthermore, the BSPP implemented a programme like the ‘war-communism’ of Lenin’s time. The BSPP-led Socialist Economy Construction Committee introduced an economic policy aimed at nationalising all businesses across the board, similar to what Milovan Djilas had described the self-styled Communists (Marxist-Leninists) as doing. According to Djilas, the communists wanted to ban strikes because in their view the working class was already in power and owned the means of production via the state. So if there was a strike of workers or students, it meant workers were striking against themselves. Through this tyrannical self-delusion the BSPP, along with all the communist regimes who claimed to follow Marxism-Leninism, responded violently to workers’ strikes. A few international examples would include the Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolshevik government and the Georgian Mensheviks’ soviet rebellion against the Bolshevik government. The CPB argued that the BSPP didn’t represent the legacy of Marxism-Leninism, yet ironically the CPB claimed to follow Maoism while Mao Zedong himself was on excellent terms with Ne Win and his regime. The role of the CPB was ended by a series of battles with the military as well as internal coups resulting from their own inefficient revolutionary strategies and tactics.

Ultra-nationalism

After 1988, a lot of regimes had come and gone, and Myanmar was on the way back to globalisation from ‘socialism’. From 1988 to 2010, Myanmar was governed by purely repressive regimes with no ideological background. However, after the 2007 Saffron revolution, the military regime had to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of the Buddhist monks, students, workers, and the public. So they tried to create an ideological fantasy based on ultra-nationalism, Buddhist supremacy and crony capitalism. From 2010 to 2021 most of the public were under the illusion of living in a democratic nation while minority ethnic groups were being bombed and killed. The oligarchs managed to accumulate capital which was more than enough for three to five successive generations while working-class people struggled to make ends meet. That was when the public enjoyed the illusion of liberal democracy and was the least revolutionary period, until some students chose to protest with an agenda for educational reforms in 2014. During that decade, the military had successfully radicalised the majority of the Buddhist monks with their self-serving ultra-nationalism and Buddhist supremacy. As Myanmar has a unique culture of monks being important (too important) when it comes to social values, a fraction of the working class also chose to give support to the successors of the military regime, bolstered by irrational fear of minority groups and other religions. Such a political agenda recalls Daniel De Leon’s remark that ‘the capitalist class is interested in keeping the working men divided among themselves’.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) was founded by ex-communists, ex-military officers and left-leaning social democrats in 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘democracy idol’ of Myanmar, forged a de facto alliance with the military to attain governmental status. Since then, not only did the NLD not achieve its goal of kicking the military out of politics but they also failed to protect minority ethnic groups like the Rohingya from genocide. Under the leadership of ‘the lady’ Suu Kyi, the NLD changed its political ideology from social democracy to liberalism. This was not apparent at first, but as soon as they were elected as an acting government, they failed to implement all the social democratic policies. The NLD lost their social democratic connections with the interests of the working class and with the national self-determinism of ethnic groups. Such reactionary behaviour resulted in some far-left and centre-left youths losing their trust in the NLD, and searching for a third alternative either in some social democratic reformist party or a revolutionary socialist party.

Another military coup

In February 2021, the military decided to stage another coup to restore their former golden days and to protect family members who had become oligarchs and cronies. The public at first was hesitant to react with strikes and protests. But the coup sparked enormous protests and dissent which were brutally suppressed by the military, with about 1,500 people dead, either shot in the streets, tortured and murdered in detention, or just disappeared. Even though the military managed to seize power and arrest some influential political leaders like Suu Kyi and Mya Aye, some of the NLD members escaped and formed a National Unity Government (NUG) in exile, in alliance with some ethnic leaders and other small political groups taking the role of consultative council. Even today, the NUG fails to grasp the opportunity to radicalise the public, even for reformist social democratic values. The NUG still acts like a parallel government. Yet third-party alternatives such as the Maoist CPB, Trotskyist organisations and social democratic reformists also failed to radicalise the public for a socialist revolution.

Theo Maung, who describes himself as a libertarian socialist and one of the founders of the Burmese Atheists Association, said that he was expecting a more progressive and secular society from the revolt against the coup. He was confident that people were turning away from authoritarianism and racial and religious discrimination as a result of their struggles against the junta. He pointed out that the CPB managed to recover again after the coup but that the new generation of leftists like him didn’t accept the authoritarian communists. He also said that if there was to be another communist party in Myanmar, he expected a more libertarian-leaning one with little influence from Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. Yoe Thit Aung, an anarchist, also had a view on the revolution: ‘I personally don’t see the revolution as a class struggle but rather a transformation of crony capitalism into corporate capitalism. Traditionally the NLD is a populist and conservative party. NUG is trying their best for more progressive reforms, but they will never go for radical ends’. He thinks that the old bourgeois crony class will be useful as a national bourgeois class in the post-revolutionary period.

To sum up, Myanmar has a lot of experience of Marxism-Leninism (so-called communism) and military dictatorships. It’s unfortunate that Myanmar was never influenced by the internationalist and revolutionary socialism (Marxist) tradition of Georgi Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and others, which represents the Marxism of Marx and Engels in seeking the democratic emancipation of the working class.

Hein Htet Kyaw

‘Ethical Shopping’: A Luxury (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Count your food miles, buy organic, live without plastics, buy local products, support small businesses – we’re told this is how individual consumers can choose to help the environment.

Really? Don’t get us wrong. We’re all in favour of people taking personal responsibility – the voluntary society we want will depend on that very thing.

But these incitements to personal sacrifice are a gigantic act of misdirection. The powers-that-be love talking about your personal responsibility for the state of the planet, because it’s better than owning up to their collective responsibility for ruining it.

They are responsible for a wasteful system that creates obscene wealth and luxury for the 1 percent while many of us end up struggling just to get by. And they have the cheek to tell us to cut back on our personal consumption!

So be responsible, by all means. But just remember, capitalism never will be.

Now ask yourself these questions:

1. Why is it that most of what we ever buy – food, clothes, electricals, etc., is mass produced?

It’s because of economies of scale, which reduce production costs, so mass-produced stuff comes to dominate the market because it’s always cheaper.

2. Does this stuff have to come from so far away?

The companies that make the stuff are always trying to undercut each other to grab more market share. This has tended to push production out to wherever in the world wages are cheapest, resulting in long, complex supply chains and wasteful global transportation. These two factors have wiped out most local production over the decades, so we have little choice when we shop.

But there’s another factor that restricts our ability to choose. Our wage levels generally are determined by how much we have to spend to keep us in a condition that allows us to keep working. And it’s the prices of the global, mass-produced stuff (battery eggs, not free-range; prosecco, not champagne) that enter into that calculation.

So while some may be able to shop ‘ethically’, it’s a luxury many of us simply can’t afford.

Capitalism – a vampire horror story! (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the capitalist money system, the rich 1 percent are like demented vampires, sucking the life out of the planet until there’s nothing left. The solution isn’t garlic and crosses, it’s social revolution.

In world socialism, there is no money system. There are no rich people. There are no poor people. There are no bosses. There is no war. All decisions are shared. All responsibilities and resources are communal.

This is Earth under new management. Everyone’s.

You could learn to drive a bus or a train, fix plumbing, develop an AI application, plough a field, teach a child, chair a steering group, study marine ecosystems, cure a disease, brew beer, rehearse a play. Your time is your own, to use as you think best. Help society thrive, and discover a job satisfaction that money can’t buy.

Technology has made this society actionable right now, but the vampires are not going to give up their feeding habits. So the 99 percent need to act. Together we need to use the democratic machinery to take control away from the 1 percent and their political glove puppets, and abolish their self-serving property laws. Then we can start restoring this planet to health and sanity.

It won’t be Utopia. No society is perfect. But collective and democratic cooperation will always find better solutions than crazed vampires ever can.

Freedom (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Do you see freedom as having to get into a car every day and drive into traffic, into smog, to go into some contrived glass office building that doesn’t produce anything, and push paper around for 40, 50 hours a week? Is that freedom?

Is it the freedom to be able to walk into a store, if you have money, and buy the food that you need to survive, or is more freedom attached to the idea of not having to purchase anything, and having the necessities of life provided through structure. So instead of having to earn a living in high stress your entire existence, you can actually live your life.”

Peter Joseph

Q&A: The cost of living crisis (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the cost of living?

The amount of money needed to cover expenses such as food, clothing, housing, heating, travel and entertainment to live at the standard that the average household can afford. As the income of the average household comes mainly from selling their ability to work to an employer, the cost of living is in effect the cost of maintaining and recreating the working skills of an average wage-earner household; the cost of living as a worker.

How is the cost of living measured?

By the total price of a basket of goods and services that households typically buy. In Britain this is calculated each month. The contents of the basket are slightly changed each year to reflect changes in buying habits. The result is not expressed as a figure in pounds and pence but as an index, against a given year, the base year, fixed as 100. In Britain the base year for this ‘Consumer Prices Index’ is 2015. In April 2022 it was 119; which means it has increased by 19 percent or at about 2.5 percent a year since 2015.

Is an increase in the Consumer Prices Index a measure of inflation?

That’s the official view but it’s actually only a measure of the average rise in consumer prices. To equate this with ‘inflation’ is misleading as it obscures the original meaning of the term and the fact that there are other reasons why the index can go up. Inflation, as the word itself suggests, is increasing (‘inflating’) the money supply beyond what the economy requires for its transactions. If this happens there is a general rise in prices, all prices rising as a result of the depreciation of the money tokens issued by the government or its central bank. If the economy requires, say, 1 million units of money and the government issues 1.1 million units, then the price level, as measured by the index, would go up by 10 percent. But this is not the only reason why the Consumer Prices Index can go up.

What is another reason?

The price of one of the goods or services in the basket going up because of a supply side problem. If paying demand exceeds supply this will push up the price of the good concerned. This would lead to an increase in the Consumer Prices Index (or CPIH if housing costs are included) but wouldn’t be inflation in the original meaning of the term. In the 12 months to April 2022 the index went up by 7.8 percent, which is a considerable acceleration of the average over the preceding 7 years. In their press release explaining this increase, the Office for National Statistics noted:

‘The largest upward contributions to the annual CPIH inflation rate in April 2022 came from housing and household services (2.76 percentage points, principally from electricity, gas and other fuels, and owner occupiers’ housing costs) and transport (1.47 percentage points, principally from motor fuels and second-hand cars)’ (bit.ly/3GWXRz7).

The index went up, in other words, mainly as a result of the continuing rise in the energy element in the basket, though the prices of some other goods and services went up too due to continuing supply chain problems caused by the pandemic restrictions. The index didn’t go up by that amount due to the Bank of England inflating the money supply.

Can the index go down?

Yes, it sometimes does slightly fall in the summer months reflecting the lower prices then of fresh fruit and vegetables. In fact, because of increasing productivity in the production of material goods, you would expect that the index would tend to fall over the course of time rather than rise as it has done. That it doesn’t is due to deliberate government policy. If prices were continually falling this would tend to encourage people to put off buying some item in the hope that its price will fall. To encourage firms to produce and people not to wait to buy, the government has mandated the Bank of England to keep the rise in the Consumer Prices Index to 2 percent a year.

How does the Bank do this?

By inflating the money supply. This means it can be said that, in theory, at least 2 percentage points in the yearly rise in the index are due to inflation in the original sense of the term and that at the moment anything substantially above this is likely to be attributable to other factors such as supply problems for particular goods or services. When, earlier this year, the index began to move towards an increase of 5 percent a year the Bank was not that worried, arguing that it would only be temporary and that within a year or so the index would fall back to what it had been. Now, with the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia, they are not so optimistic and are predicting that the index will go even higher, even to double digits, and that this will last longer.

A real cost of living crisis, then?

Yes, consumer prices, especially of energy, have risen to a level at which the average household cannot afford to live at their previous standard of comfort. A fall in people’s standard of living is worse for the already worst off.

What can we do about it?

Don’t expect the government to do much. Unfortunately, there is not much that those dependent on state benefits can do except take whatever extra the state has decided to hand out. Those dependent on an income from working for an employer can – and should — struggle, through their trade union, to get a higher price for what they sell. Given current labour market conditions they should be able to get this, even if it will just be stopping things from getting worse. The media will blame them for causing ‘inflation’ but even the government’s own statisticians admit that the Consumer Prices Index has shot up for supply reasons and not because of ‘greedy workers’. In any event, wages have always been linked to the cost of living, as this means the cost of living of a wage-worker. So if this goes up it’s normal that wages should too; otherwise we won’t be getting the full price of what we are selling. But the struggle to keep wages up with the cost of living, necessary as it is, is a never-ending struggle which will last as long as the wages system does.

Why is there a cost of living anyway?

Good question. Why should we have to pay to live? It’s only because the means of life are monopolised by a tiny minority who live off profits and which obliges us to work for wages, out of which we have to buy what we need to live. If the means of life – the productive resources of society – were owned in common by society as a whole, then we could produce what we needed and people would have free access to what they need to live and enjoy life. There would be no cost of living and no perpetual struggle to try to keep up with it.

Cooking the Books: No such thing as free shorter hours (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Times (6 June) reported that ‘more than 3,000 workers will begin a four-day week today with no loss of pay as part of a trial involving 70 companies’. The companies concerned ‘are testing the effect of offering 100 per cent of a job’s pay in exchange for 80 per cent of the time and a commitment to keep up 100 per cent of output.’

The six-month trial has been organised by the UK branch of 4 Day Week Global which promotes a four-day week as a business strategy calculated to increase productivity and the ‘wellbeing’ of the workers which will also increase productivity:

‘Adopting a four-day work week is a business improvement strategy centered on working smarter rather than longer, and investing in the wellbeing of the most important asset to any business – your people (…) The four-day work week has been proven to deliver increased productivity in businesses all over the world in a broad range of industries’ (www.4dayweek.com/why-pilot).

Many, perhaps most, people would like to work only four days a week and have a three-day weekend. However, they might not necessarily like the conditions in the experiment to ‘keep up 100 per cent of output’.

What this involves is easy to work out. If you are on £26,000 a year take-home pay, your weekly pay will be £500. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the rate of exploitation is 100 percent, then you produce output worth £1,000 in a week (your pay plus an equivalent amount of surplus value – that’s why you are a business’s ‘most important asset’). When you work a 5-day 7-hour week (35 hours) you produce £28.58 worth of output in a day. With a 4-day 7-hour week (28 hours) this goes up to £37.72. An increase of 25 percent.

Having to work 25 percent harder means that you will use up the energy represented by your labour-power quicker and so will need more rest to restore it, ready to commence the next week’s harder labour. You are going to need that extra day.

One of those taking part in the experiment, Kirsty Wainwright, the general manager of a fish and chip shop in Norfolk, was reported as saying: ‘Having that extra rest and not feeling exhausted means I can be more productive at work too.’

She has got it the wrong way around. It is having to be more productive at work that means she will require the extra rest, and she is being overoptimistic if she expects that she is not going to be more exhausted at the end of each of the days that she works than she is now. She will be because she will have had to use up more of her energy per day than previously.

Maybe she and the others will consider that working harder to get more time away from employed work is a price worth paying. Historically, workers have accepted this deal, as when the working week was reduced from 6 to 5½ and then to the 5 days it mostly is now. So maybe they will too if the 4-day week catches on.

Under capitalism the ideal for workers would be to work fewer days without having to work harder during them. But no employer will accept that as it would reduce their profit. Under capitalism working harder will always be the price for working fewer hours. Employers are not philanthropists.

Reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. By Doug Greene, Zero Books, 2021. £15.99

This is a political biography of Michael Harrington (1928-1989) who was the best known ‘socialist’ in the US after the death in 1968 of Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Harrington was first associated with the Catholic Worker Movement but then became a ‘Shachtmanite’, an offshoot from Trotskyism based on the ideas of Max Shachtman whose difference with Trotsky was over ‘The Nature of the USSR’. Trotsky maintained that it was basically a ‘workers’ state’. Shachtman could see that this was an untenable position and argued that Russia was best described as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, a new class society ruled by a new ruling class exploiting the workers. To begin with, he had held that Russia was more progressive than capitalism, but later that it was the other way round and he became a staunch ‘anti-communist’.

Taking this position, in 1958 Shachtman, Harrington and the others joined the Socialist Party of America. This was the nearest equivalent in the US of the Labour Party in Britain and held the same ideas as, at the time, that party did (except that it paid more lip-service to Marx’s ideas, in fact to ideas in general) – that the state capitalism that it called ‘socialism’ would come about gradually as the outcome of a series of nationalisations and social reforms introduced democratically; basically, reformists who wanted to humanise capitalism.

Not getting anywhere as a separate party, in 1973 Harrington and the others (Shachtman had died in 1972) decided to enter the Democratic Party and work to get it to adopt and enact progressive policies. Their political descendants today are the ‘Democratic Socialists of America’ which has recruited tens of thousands of members and succeeded in getting some of its members elected (as Democrats) to the House of Representatives, the most well-known of whom is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene argues that, despite this posthumous relative success, Harrington’s entry into the Democratic Party with a view to ‘realigning’ it was a mistaken strategy; as the Democrats were a capitalist party beholden to capitalist interests, it led to Harrington and his group becoming its tail-end, working to ensure the election of Democratic Presidents and other officials to run the political side of American capitalism. On this point Greene is right. He also argues, again correctly, that capitalism cannot be gradually reformed so as to work in the interest of the working class.

However, he writes as a member of one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism (a group called ‘Left Voice’). To be fair, he has confined his alternative strategy to get to state capitalism to an appendix in which he criticises Harrington’s ‘Democratic Marxism.’ This was a wise move on his (or his editor’s) part as his ‘vision’ of an insurrection and his defence of the idea that even under Stalin Russia was some sort of ‘workers’ state’ would have led to his criticism of Harrington’s gradualist reformism being taken less seriously.

Adam Buick

Careerist and reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Starmer Project. By Oliver Eagleton. Verso. 2022. £12.99

Just as we’ve become used over the years to all those tedious historiographies of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Union that claimed it would have been alright if wasn’t for a particular bunch of malcontents and traitors who somehow ruined it all, so today we have the Corbynistas. And in particular, here we have Oliver Eagleton (son of Terry) to tell us that Sir Keir Starmer is the new political antichrist and that he is never to be forgiven for undermining The Messiah, aka Saint Jeremy Corbyn. Furthermore, in this craven mission the swine apparently enlisted John McDonnell and a whole list of other Judas-like characters.

There is some useful research and journalism in this book (Eagleton writes for The Guardian periodically). But it is all filtered through such a thick distorting prism that you are left almost feeling sorry for Starmer, political careerist and reformist though he is.

There are four chapters that logically flow one after the other to mirror Starmer’s career: The Lawyer, The Politician, The Candidate and The Leader. Because it suits his purposes, Eagleton rather downplays Starmer’s early time in the 1980s in and around a Pabloite Trotskyist sect, though his time as Director of Public Prosecutions sees him seemingly held personally responsible for almost literally every legal decision at the time that Eagleton dislikes. You strongly suspect the truth lies somewhere in between that narrative and the one of the pious, upright human-rights lawyer that Starmer still likes to project.

But either way, this misses the point – as does much of the book. Eagleton lists the key features of what he calls ‘The Starmer Project’ thus:

‘1) a ‘values-led non-antagonistic election strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers’ (p.186).

But using this same categorisation, what was the leftist Corbyn project this replaced and was – in part – a reaction against? Arguably:

1) a ‘values-led’ but utopian and incoherent election strategy, doomed to predictable defeat and recrimination; 2) an unsparing crackdown on those elements in the Labour Party who knew how to win elections (ie, by telling the working class what it wants to hear); 3) a quasi-Leninist disposition, combining active or tacit support for repression abroad with intervention at home; and 4) a return to state capitalist economic precepts, overseen by Trotskyist and Stalinist leftovers.

Eagleton – like Corbyn and many on the Labour Left – has a yearning against injustice that is commendable. However, he misunderstands the party he supports. The Labour Party exists to win elections (without power it is nothing) and to then enact mild reforms that can ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalist society – or at least try to. Starmer stands foursquare in this tradition; the Corbyn mirage was that you could somehow more radically transform capitalism with its profit motive and market economy through leftist sloganeering combined with a Biblical proportions wish-list of largely unrealistic promises. This is not something that has ever worked – anywhere, in any country.

Some of what Eagleton says about Starmer hits home, but it is so skewed and partial at times it is not entirely reliable. Indeed, the abiding impression is that the book rather deceives by selection, and is significantly the worse for it.

Dave Perrin

Proper Gander: A Bite From The Apple (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who better to warn us about the dangers of technology and corporate culture than Apple Inc? The recent American drama serial Severance, released through Apple TV+, was an offbeat and engaging thriller set in an office with a unique approach to managing its human resources. Echoing Black Mirror’s template, the series imagines a piece of technology which sounds like it could be invented and embedded within a few years and explains how it’ll lead to a scary alienated dystopia.

The premise is that staff working for the mysterious Lumon Industries have voluntarily undergone a procedure called ‘severance’. This involves a microchip being inserted into their brain, making them an ‘appendage of the machine’ in a more literal way than Marx meant. The chip separates their persona at work from their persona outside, meaning that when they’re in the office they can’t remember anything of their home life and vice versa. Communication between the workplace persona – the ‘Innie’ – and their ‘Outie’ self at home, such as through smuggled notes, is prevented by ‘code detectors’ when they enter and leave the office.

The severance procedure is supposed to put a definite dividing line in Lumon’s staff’s ‘work-life balance’, a phrase which meant ‘how much employment encroaches on our lives’ until the pandemic disrupted everything and a ‘work-life balance’ became a luxury for many. You can tell Severance had been drafted out before Covid hit; working from home isn’t an option for the characters in the drama, and wouldn’t fit in with the premise. Perhaps as a result, the story isn’t set in any particular time; the severance technology is futuristic, while the cars and computers are styled to look like they’re from the last century.

The severance procedure is an exaggeration of how in real life we often find that the ‘version’ of ourselves at work is a bit different from that outside. When we start our shift, our personalities shift to slot in with the culture where we work, with its written and unwritten rules and norms. Many workplaces, especially sleek offices like Lumon’s HQ, feel impersonal and artificial, and difficult to be at ease in. The drama highlights this with the forced fun of the parties thrown for Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement division as a reward for reaching their targets. The story centres on the four members of this team, and the sinister management who ensure that they stay focused on their work. Most of the characters’ conversations, whether in work or outside, are stilted and uncertain, and the only character with any joy is the non-Lumon employee and author of a tacky self-help book which sounds inspirational compared with the oppression of office life.

The work carried out by the Macrodata Refinement team makes little sense, involving sitting at their desks grouping together numbers on their screens according to how ‘scary’ they are. In real workplaces, we’re often put in positions where we have to accept routines we don’t understand and which seem to be there just to prop up a system. Moreover, being a tiny cog in a big machine usually means not having much ability to affect the procedures we follow. In Lumon Industries, the purpose given to the apparently purposeless work is to follow the vision of its founder, a more old-fashioned figure than the real world’s tech luminaries with a messiah complex.

Naturally, the Macrodata Refinement team members each start to question their employment. Political resistance to the severance procedure is mentioned, but the drama’s emphasis is on how it makes them feel uneasy, especially alongside Lumon’s suspicious ways of operating. Annoyingly, the series ends just as an important plot point has been reached and without answering questions about Lumon’s motives, so we’ll have to wait for season two to see how the scenario pans out.

While Black Mirror is the most obvious influence on Severance, it is also part of a long-running trend in science fiction exploring fears of having our personalities moulded by a power-hungry elite. In the 1972 book and 1975 film The Stepford Wives, the women of the well-to-do town of Stepford are replaced by obedient replicas to serve their husbands, a clever critique of conservative attitudes to women’s roles. This came in the wake of the classic 1954 book / 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens who are surreptitiously substituting bland duplicates for people, interpreted as a metaphor for concerns about ‘communism’ infiltrating America. Its 1978 remake effectively reinterpreted the threat of being turned into an automaton as an extension of how society alienates us. In these stories, surrendering your personality is involuntary, whereas in Severance, it’s chosen as a career move, albeit without realising all the nasty implications. In this way, the series is reminiscent of the 1988 movie They Live, where the ruling class (aliens, again) hide the truth and manipulate apparently content people to conform to the status quo, using subliminal messages in the media rather than implanted microchips. Another antecedent is the impressive 1967 TV serial The Prisoner, also set in a stylised, isolated place with its own strange rules and rituals to protect a secretive system. A message behind all these stories, including Severance, is that conforming to what’s in the interests of those in power is dehumanising, even if this doesn’t come with microchips.

Mike Foster

Voice From The Back: Deep sea diving (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Deep sea diving 

 . . . has always been a hazardous job, but now industrial pollution of the sea bed is making it silently deadly. The Western Australian published a two-page feature last October about three experienced divers working for the Texan company Oceaneering under contract to Hyundai Heavy Industry 40 metres down in the South China Sea. As soon as they left the diving bell foul smells invaded their air supply. They were told to ignore it. They felt dizzy, the fillings fell out of their teeth. Then their teeth began to fall out. After repeated complaints, their diving bell, itself letting in the lethal volatile chemicals, was moved, still pressurised, to another site for two weeks while the toxic area was dredged, when they were taken back again, but it was little better. One man was close to death when they were finally brought up after a month. Even the laboratory technicians who tested samples of the mud became ill. HHI then hired Chinese divers who were poisoned one after another. The Australians are still fighting for adequate compensation. The Chinese will probably get nothing. The only thing that finally matters in capitalism is money.

Das Kapital Vol.III summarised 

Only a fool thinks price and value are the same. Silk Road, Chinese Fortune Cookie.

Forcing homeless people 

. . . off the streets may prove harder than the government thinks. Chris Holmes, director of Shelter, says present hostel places are 99.8 percent full the year round and Shelterline, the housing advice phone service gets 100 calls a day from single people desperate for somewhere to stay that night. There are over 600 a night sleeping on the streets of London, 2,400 people a year.

The Scottish Socialist Party

. . . is campaigning for a new bus shelter in Fort William, protesting about water rates in Inverness and complaining about the condition of a school in Easter Ross. This “socialism” has brought them “phenomenal growth” according to their Highland regional organiser, Steve Arnott. He doesn’t explain what bus shelters have got to do with socialism.

The American family farm 

. . . is almost extinct. In the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration 85,064 were taken over for $3.5 trillion. In the seven Clinton years, 166,310 corporate mergers, worth $9.8 trillion, have almost completed the job. Farms are no longer viable alone. They are only a small part of a vertical agricultural monolith in which the money is mostly made in processing and sales—not growing crops. Food retailers over the last ten years have returned 18 percent on investments, food manufacturers, 17.2 percent, agricultural banks 10.8 percent and farmers only 2.38 percent.

Half the population of Britain 

. . . have less than £750 in savings and investments, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. About one in ten have no savings at all.

Another Tony Blair promise 

. . . has fizzled out. The reform of company law to make “stakeholders” replace shareholders as the controllers of companies, taking into account the interests of customers, workers and environmental interests, has been thrown out by the officials responsible for reviewing the Victorian statutes. In a report which will surprise nobody who has any understanding of the capitalist system, they have reiterated the supremacy of shareholders. They do suggest, however, that directors should be aware of wider social responsibilities. So that’s all right then.

Clare Short is foolish 

. . . enough to believe that getting a ministerial job in a Labour government enables a concerned person to achieve improvements for the poor, the homeless, the starving. She told the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle last year facts like:

• A fifth of the world’s population own 86 percent of its wealth.
• If the world’s richest 200 people gave up one percent of their wealth per year, it would pay for free primary education for every child on earth.
• As it is, 1.3 billion people have to live on 60p a day.
• The tiles in Bill Gates’s kitchen cost £450 each—twice the average annual income in Africa’s poor countries.

Clare Short hasn’t realised, what the delegates to the WTO meeting know only too well—that capitalism can work in no other way. The poor are poor because the rich are rich.

Editorial: Against capitalism? (2000)

Editorial from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let’s assume you’re not just here for the crack, and you’re worried about the state of the planet and what capitalism is doing to it. So what do you want to do about it?

– Burn down a bank, maybe? 

You could do, but there’re a lot of banks, and even if you burned them all, they’d just build them again.

– Kick a copper, perhaps? 

Maybe, but they can kick harder than you can, every time.

– Start a revolution then?

Well, now you’re talking. But what kind of revolution? That is the question . . .

For a revolution to be any good, you have to be for something, besides being against big capitalism (WTO, IMF, World Bank, GATT etc) as if somehow “small” national capitalism is a completely different thing, and perfectly nice. It’s not. They’re the same. Let’s have a definition.

Capitalism is: commodity production for sale on a market.

Instead of that you could have: co-operative production for use and free distribution on the basis of need. this would involve: no markets, no money, no commodities, no private property, no rich class and poor class. No Third World and First World, no profit-led profligacy of any description, and amazingly, no ecological destruction, no famine, virtually no crime, and no war.

Think that’s unlikely? It isn’t. Capitalism has taken us as far as it can go, but there’s a lot further we can go without it. It doesn’t matter whether you call it. It is feasible and desirable. And given that ten Nobel scientists have recently cited 2012 as the point of no-return for environmental destruction, the word “urgent” springs to mind too.

Interested? Then contact us at spgb@worldsocialism.org

Why should we have to pay for things? (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the bogey word “socialist” gets you annoyed, please give us a chance to explain why, though we are called the Socialist Party, we are not supporters of what other “socialists” call for.

Has socialism been tried already? No! In dictionaries it’s “common ownership of the means of production and distribution”. That is, manufacturing, utilities, transport, fuel, etc owned by the people. But at no time, in no country, has a population directly owned and controlled these productive assets. Private and/or state owners have always possessed and run these, and consequently—surprise, surprise—they’ve benefited most.

Does ownership of these assets really matter? Yes! Increasing cancers and illnesses due to pollution and unsafe food; no or inadequate essential services due to profit-making and cost cutting; excessive or dislikeable work; burglaries; homelessness; robberies; ageism; no free time; inequality; unemployment; racism; wars; mortgages, bills, rent, taxes etc. With genuine socialism, all those worries would end—not just get a little better. Take cash troubles. If we all owned tomorrow what a few do today, money would then be obsolete. Directly owning those vital assets means we would also own all the food, goods and services that these provide. And as one of the new collective owners, you’d then have a right to these as required. So, real socialism would bring free access to whatever you need.

Free access would not mean people grabbing everything in sight, because the whole purpose of working would have then changed from today’s provision of goods and services for sale (causing artificial shortages and exclusion for the non-wealthy), to provision of goods and services purely to meet needs.

No more money might seem bizarre—even frightening—but what’s money for? It’s for buying things others own, and those owning what people need most (capitalists) benefit most. We are led to see money as offering freedom from worries, when in reality, it deliberately and barbarically maintains them. By making money essential for life, asset owners can then compel those able to work to become their employees (governments help out by imposing very low and hard to get unemployment benefits, and “educating” children to accept money and wages etc). Workers must then buy what they actually produced in the first place. Even working hard, they can’t earn enough to quit for good, because if they could, capitalists would then be unable to use them to make profits. Money is basically just one part of a big scam to control and exploit the majority.

Obviously, cash is needed while this scam goes on, but if we want a far more agreeable, healthier, plentiful free-access society, we only have to take care over who we support and how we vote. Most people certainly would gain. Even those now with reassuring incomes and savings would benefit from this new system—not experience worse lives as a result of millions of others obtaining better ones. However, after a lifetime hooked on must-have money, we know this radical change to cashless co-operation can be hard to take in. But if you can calmly weigh up the facts, then we can show why socialism would be much better.

Would free access to what we need mean harder work? No! Ending capitalism also ends its unemployment, so millions of people unwanted because employers can’t profit from exploiting their abilities could then participate. With no private asset rights to protect, or money, millions more, soldiers, solicitors, bureaucrats etc and those just tinkering with cash in retailing, banking, insurance etc, would all then be freed to contribute something of real value. What’s more, many repetitive jobs could be done by automation, which won’t happen today unless it’s “cost-effective”. For these reasons, real socialism would bring a far shorter working week, and jobs that people enjoy—and are never again forced to do for money, or by governments.

Instead of getting money—which for most is too little and never makes up for all the harm and misery that capitalism causes—those who work, the sick and elderly would all have: entirely free food, appliances, housing, health care, car, rail and bus travel, electricity, water, gas, phones, TV etc, as required; far more spare time; fast progress due to no financial restraints; a safe, unpolluted, stress-free environment. And much more.

Today, work is for profits, but this means employees aren’t paid the true value of their labour. Someone working six days may have done enough after two or three to cover their wages, but is kept at it so shareholders can sponge off profits, and owners can retain a viable firm. Even a “good” boss must exploit workers to buy better equipment, premises, advertising etc to remain competitive. So, to some extent, all employees are cheated.

Exploitation of workers is unavoidable with capitalism, as without it, the system won’t work. This in-built abuse happens here now, just as it did in a supposedly “socialist” Russia. In reality, old Soviet Russia was capitalist too. It had employers (the state), money, wages, profits, inequality, leaders etc. None of these would exist if genuine socialism was established—a fact elitist “left-wingers” choose to ignore even today.

No point in tinkering

It’s the 21st century, yet these groups and individuals still absurdly claim to be “socialist” while calling for “Full employment”, “Strong trade unions”, “Higher top-earner taxes” and “Nationalisation”. What they are therefore supporting is capitalism continuing, since waged work, labour bargaining, taxation and full-blown state ownership of productive assets are all features of a capitalist system. Even replacing private bosses with state bosses changes nothing, as work will still be profit-driven. These would-be reformers may hope to change market capitalism into something better, but they’ll never succeed. The Labour Party has proved this. They, too, set out wanting to gradually reform capitalism until we achieved socialism. But in the end, it was unchangeable capitalism which reformed Labour—into yet another “New” Tory party.

These naive let’s-make-it-nicer fiddlers are quick to claim that capitalism can help those suffering if more money is taken off the rich, or if it’s governed “properly”. Now this may sound good, but it’s just tosh that ignores the only way capitalism can operate: exploiting assets in the most profitable way. If firms are made to pay higher wages, more tax for state services and welfare, use the very best food ingredients etc, then companies can’t compete in a global market. As profits suffer, businesses go broke. Investment shifts overseas. The economy fails. Public services collapse. Unemployment and poverty rise. Even more people suffer, and the government of the day probably get booted out of office. So, no matter who governs, capitalism can never be run to benefit a suffering majority, as majority exploitation is its unavoidable fundamental purpose—for the chief benefit of a grasping minority.

Due to this fundamental bias, the Socialist Party do not seek to govern—only to enable voters to both obtain direct ownership of productive assets, and elect themselves to power, by voting for real socialism (once established, having served its purpose, the party will then cease to exist). We say that together, we are capable of running our own lives. That we should all be able to decide (e.g., through occasional electronic referenda) how assets are used—not just a privileged few, aided by egocentric two-faced puppet politicians.

Today’s rat race requires a me-first, devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to get by or “succeed”. This also happens to strengthen and delight capitalists, because it causes disunity, a lack of faith in one another and pessimism about ever achieving a real change. Are the fat cats right to feel jubilant and invincible? Has distrust and dog-eat-dog living left you crushed or cynical about human co-operation for shared gain? Is your choice merely to go on paying, until the very end? Whose future and benefit—yours or theirs?

Max Hess

A Mayday from the sinking ship (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mayday as a cultural event seems to be dying. It has become increasingly dissociated from the cultural horizon of the vast majority of the working class—becoming a mere preserve of enthusiasts and the official Labour movement.

Mayday has fallen into the hands of the Labour hierarchy and its trade-unionist minions, and has become a celebration of their organisations: a day for Labourite triumph and self-congratulation, to the extent that this year’s TUC’s main celebration, in an act of superlative lick-spittlery, kow-tows to the awful taste of their political masters in being held at the Millennium Dome.

The reason why Mayday has become dissociated from relevance and meaning to most working class lives is that the bodies associated with it, and with the whole way of life it typifies, have become divorced from the lived and meaningful experience of most workers. Like, alas, so many divorces, this one too is the result of an affair—a bitter and tragic business that has led merely to disappointment.

The state and the unions came together in the dark days of the last World War. Their collaboration produced production agreements and no-strike clauses, coupled with an increased say for unions in the running of industry. The result of this collaboration was to produce what is known as “the post-war consensus” in which Tory and Labour governments took it in turns to manage the corporate state, bringing business and unions together in formal institutions. So great, in fact, was this desire for unions and state to work together that Churchill’s government after 1951 actually appointed more trade unionists to state positions than Attlee’s had. The full consummation, though, of the corporatist state came under the Harold Wilson government, in the form of the National Economic Development Council, in which the unions, government and the CBI took part. The unions were gradually seduced by the prospect of having more of an institutionalised say in how capitalism was administered.

Empty illusions

As with, sadly, too many seductions, it was based on illusions and empty promises. Capitalism can only ever be run in the interest of the masters. In repeated endeavours to save their rocky relationship, the corporate collaborators entered into repeated incomes policies and agreements. In return for helping to organise the working class for the capitalists’ needs, union leaders were given some rewards, legal protection from union’s being sued, and legal enforcement of closed shops—so the unions could increase their head-counts and incomes. Up until then the state had been largely content to leave shop floor industrial relations to the respective parties, but the corporatist period began a serious increase of state involvement.

The involvement of the state increased the power of the leaders of the unions, and strengthened their position. However, when economic conditions dictated and conflict sharpened between employers workers, they found it harder to keep their members in order and their relationship to the employers began to sour. The unions clung ever closer to the state, determined to save that friendship, and tied their fortunes to the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act (1974), and later to the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act (1978) which guaranteed the right of workers to join a union and engage in union activities.

The increased conflict with employers began under the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments which took steps to discipline the workers and which led to the Winter of Discontent. The advent of the Thatcher government provided the means by which to bring the unions to further heel. This turn, though, was not unique, and not solely down to the wickedness and enmity of Tories. Union organisations all over the advanced capitalist world began to suffer from the late 70s on, as endemic unemployment weakened the workers’ negotiating position.

State control

The Tories’ first strike was to increase state involvement in the internal affairs of unions. The Employment Act (1980) was intended to “provide for payments out of public funds towards unions’ expenditure in respect of ballots”, whilst at the same time repealing the 1974 Act’s protection of the closed shop. This proved to be only the first of a number of salami tactic assaults upon the unions, which gradually, and almost irrevocably tied them in to state power.

In the eighteen Tory years a total of eight Acts (almost as many as in the rest of the century) were passed with regard to regulating unions. The course of this tactic was clear, the eventual “juridification” of industrial relations—increasingly bringing the courts in to organise industrial relations, with the continual threat to the funds and structures of the union hierarchs. The Employment Act (1982) removed unions’ immunities given by the 1974 Act, so that their strikes could be challenged in the courts (section 15). It made contracts requiring employers to deal only with unionised businesses unenforceable in law, making it more difficult for unions to support one another’s struggles. Further, in all the cases where the unions were actionable in the civil courts, the 1982 Act required a responsible officer to sanction all union activity, clearly forcing union leadership to choose between protecting union funds, or backing members’ actions.

As state protection through contract law was removed, so too was the state used offensively, to interfere with the internal workings of unions. The Employment Act (1984) laid down procedures for organising union ballots, requiring a secret postal ballot by “marking paper” (as opposed to a show of hands); laying down a legal duty to have union officers elected; and spelling out the exact legal duties for how unions must keep their accounts and keep lists of members. This legal enforcement of “democracy” was precisely the opposite of that: it meant that the members of a union no longer had any power to shape or build the rules of their union as they wished, and that, effectively, the internal organisation of the unions became a state matter.

The assault on the internal democracy and independence of the unions was continued in the Employment Act (1988) wherein—in the double-speak of the Act—it was prohibited to “unjustifiably discipline” (i.e. expel from branch, fine, etc.) any member of a union. The Act defined unjustifiably disciplining, as such occasions where a member was guilty of “failure to participate in or support a strike or industrial action”, even where such action had been properly and democratically voted upon. Such members, of course, were free under this and previous Acts, to take their union to court if the union failed to follow those procedures properly.

In 1992 these union laws were codified into the Trade Unions and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act (TUCRA), which became the effectively mandatory trade union rule book. New unions need no longer bother drafting their rules, that Act supplies them ready made. The great Neo-Liberal Conservative government, bane of state interference, privatiser by principle, was responsible for the de facto nationalisation of the unions.Though they are subject to strict state and judicial control, they are still referred to in law as “independent unions”. The divorce was nearly complete, and the unions no longer resembled anything remotely like autonomous self-creation/organisation of the working class.

Same old story 

Yet the officers of these unions remained true to their darling state—and lo, they were rewarded in 1997 by the election of a Labour government. This, far from releasing the unions, has merely extended the principle of state-co-opted unionism, though with throwing some new bones to the union officials. The main bone given them was compulsory union recognition, so that instead of the workers needing to organise themselves to demonstrate their collective existence to an employer, unions only needed to fulfil certain (cumbersome) bureaucratic requirements to add to their head count. Of course, all of this must be conducted under the continuedly strict judicial control. Further, the government introduced the minimum wage, wherein the state steps in to fulfil the role of the working class in unions of setting their own wages.

The process has been one of ideological assault on the idea of unionism. The Tories persistently presented their assault upon unions, with all its contradictions, as being a battle for individual rights. Individuals were given the right not to join unions, to not be “unjustifiably disciplined”, to use the courts to influence the unions. The requirement for unions to have to officially defend, or renounce actions of their members means that unions are prevented from articulating their message in the public space. The damage this has done can most clearly be seen in the fate of the Liverpool dockers, where the strike was crushed by silence as the union leadership stood by. The government cannot stop industrial action occurring, but what it can stop is the ideas spreading, and stop people spreading consciousness of unionism.

The process is one of continual removal of the working class from any real control over their own economic lives, alienating institutions they created into state domination. As such people become increasingly alienated from the cultural manifestations of workerdom, enabling Labour and their union lackeys to make Mayday their day. However, all need not be lost. Remembering that 364 days a year belong to their employers, workers can take steps towards wrenching Mayday from the grasp of alienated union officialdom, and making Mayday our day.

Pik Smeet

Banks – Who needs them? (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are few places in the world more pointless than a bank. There are few compelled to toil more uselessly than bank employees. In every respect, the function of banks is to facilitate a form of exchange in which nothing is produced and much can be lost. A world without banks would be a wholly better place.

Under capitalism banks are temples to the secular god of Money. These temples have no time for obsolete rituals of prayer and worship, the fool’s dances of a bygone age. In the bank capitalism does its business, in much the same way as a dog in the park does its business, and with remarkably similar effects. People in banks spend their time doing bizarre activities which seem to emanate from quasi-religious commandments. They fill in endless pieces of paper. They count pieces of paper and then recount them to be sure. The high priests sit behind unbreakable glass windows and the unclean feed them with more pieces of paper. There are machines built into walls which, upon revelation of secret numbers, pour out more pieces of paper. Upon these papers are written not one word of intelligible prose, less still poetry. These scribes of the bank are not working on writing dissertations, new equations or even their random thoughts. No, they fill in prescribed codes and figures and in return are given other papers, equally without content, which they guard with their lives.

Some enter the bank as wage slaves, there to count, shuffle and recount for a living. It is work so tedious that now they are training computers to do it so that the bank staff can be liberated to the dole queues. Some enter with grand schemes. These usually involve borrowing, a relationship which calls for much paper-filling, nail-biting and human degradation. Others enter with lost hope. They come to claim what they know is not theirs. They ask to have access to that which the bank machine will not give. They are full of excuses, promises and submission without depth to the petty gods of the counter. But they leave more often than not as dejected and poor as when they arrived. Banks are not there to listen to the cries of the needy.

Unlike the wretched churches of yesteryear, banks charge you for using them. The machine charges for pressing its buttons and the clerks now charge to answer questions about what has happened to your money. Of course, they will not answer very profound questions about where your money has been invested, the rate of profit and how it arises. But even a question about how much of your money they’ve got costs money these days. They even charge money to write you a letter telling you that you have no money. If they owned the pavements they would probably charge you for walking past.

Ah, the wonders of the internet! Now we can do our banking by computer. Bank employees can be sent to get jobs as walking puppets in the Dome while you key in your personal details and . . . clickety click: you’re broke, buster.

Of course, it’s not the sewers that are smelly and unclean, it’s the crap. It’s the same with banks. There’s no harm in banks as buildings. Put a snooker table down the middle and turn the counters into bars and they could be quite jolly. Money is what stinks. Banks stink of money and money stinks of property—yours-mine-not yours. And because we live in a yours-mine-not yours society where few things are yours or mine, but most belong to a small minority who own and control the world, the stench of money prevails.

So, we need to abolish money before we can get rid of banks. But to get rid of money we need an end to property. And you can’t abolish property relations until you abolish capitalism. Good idea. Let’s abolish capitalism and live in a moneyless, propertyless world without bloody banks.

Steve Coleman