Propaganda War (1992)

From issue 9 of the World Socialist Review

On second thought: From the Western Socialist (1994)

From issue 11 of the World Socialist Review

The main flaw in the industrial union as a means of emancipation is the fact that a labor union, in order to gain any sort of recognition, must open its doors, even to the point of compulsion, to any and all workers in the industry it seeks to control. If it does not do so it will not be in a position to control anything. If it does its membership must be dominantly made of workers who are not socialists.

Even if the “political arm" were 100 percent socialist, how could they hope to be backed by a union whose membership were predominantly non and anti-socialist? And if it is argued that the socialists of the “political arm” would educate the union members to socialism, this merely knocks De Leon’s theories for another cocked hat. This would certainly demonstrate once more that the political party does not arise from the industrial union.

The truth of the matter is that unions of any kind, whether craft or industrial, arise out of the relations of wage-labor and capital. They can only be used as weapons by the workers in resisting the pressure against their living standards by the capitalist class. They are the means the working class must use under this system to sell labor-power at its value. It may be argued that industrial organization is superior to craft unionization, but even if this is so it only applies in so far as it concerns a capitalist society, for no union could possibly be carried over into socialism. The material conditions for their existence will be absent in a society devoid of economic classes.

“The Socialist Labor Party” HARMO, July-August 1948

Git along, li'l flunky (1993)

From issue 10 of the World Socialist Review

Have you ever found yourself stuck in rush-hour traffic and wondering if the light—much less your life—would ever change? When you think about it, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the driver’s seat, since you’re always being told where to go. The Ross Perots of life literally bank on us acting like their societal chauffeurs or some other kind of admiring flunkies. Always mimicking their dreams and aspirations, trying to follow their lifestyles and goals; never conceiving our own.

In the same hot pursuit of the all-encompassing dollar, a neo-traditional ritual has grown up that runs roughshod over the grand cattle roundups of yesteryear’s golden days on the ranges. It’s euphemistically called morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic. In the cowboy days, otherwise unthinking and unmanageable beasts were herded up and driven long distances to self-destruction in slaughterhouses to make money for the well-to-do barons of old—leaving a hazy cloud of dust in their wake on the stampede to oblivion.

Today the money-making prize meat is much more mobile, intelligent and normally just two-legged! For miles around we herd ourselves on asphalt trails cramming into towering marketplaces of concrete and glass. Like the cattle barons of old, today’s bosses require our simultaneous presence in workplaces to chum out bewildering profits for their benefit—leaving a hazy cloud of smog in our wake as we come and go...

Humanoid cattle

Yesteryear’s slaughter produced a one-shot profit for the cattle barons. Today’s employment produces profit hundreds of times a year from the same humanoid herd member. On a relentless death-march of hypertension, heart failure, cancer, even AIDS; but for a reason no different from the grand slaughters that made America “great.” And at six feet under, evolution stops. All species are the same—dead meat.

Sitting for hours, day in and day out, in nauseating traffic jams isn’t a mass expression of individual free will, nor is it just a coincidence. It is a compulsion of capital that degrades us into high-tech cattle. Unlike cattle, though, we each have an advanced brain with which to think: and thus the ability to break out of this more sophisticated, but nonetheless induced, herd mentality at any point.

Today’s maverick entrepreneur cowboy-types just don’t know what’s on the other end of the rope. When they do find out, they will drop everything and run for cover (as Ross Perot did in his attempt to lasso the public, on getting what was for him a frightening glimpse, when he said, “.. .1 didn’t want to wreck the political process”). When we move en masse, there will be no stopping us. Not only in the driver’s seat, we will decide where we go and when, at our convenience—also, what we will do when we get there: something no cow ever dreamt of! With democratic control of the earth’s resources replacing control by capital, we can all tell the cowboy bosses to get lost so we can go about our business.

W.J. Lawrimore

Obituary: Len Fenton (1917-2006)

Len Fenton and Ann Rab

Obituary from issue number 21 of the World Socialist Review

Last October 26th, the World Socialist Party lost one of its most energetic and committed spokesmen—a "stalwart" in the old sense—Comrade Len Fenton. Surviving the death of his wife Ann Rab by four years, he retired gradually from party functions till his last remaining activity was keeping a monthly log of postal mail received.

Fenton's first contact with the organization was in 1936, during a lunch break on Boston Common, where the party speakers frequently and forcefully argued the case for socialism. He was soon deeply impressed; he joined the party in December 1936 and became an official speaker himself in 1938, joining Comrades Rab and Gloss on the stand at outdoor meetings.

Developing his talent for public speaking of all kinds, Fenton was Boston Local's most effective speaker over a long span of years. From 1947 through the 1970s, he frequently represented the WSP at debates with other organizations and at various colleges and universities in the Boston/Cambridge area.

He recruited several other members of his family into the movement. He served on the Editorial Committee of The Western Socialist (the predecessor of the World Socialist Review) from 1939 until its last issue in 1980. [1]

Although Fenton's forte was as a speaker and debater rather than as a writer, he was very active on the Circulation Committee of the WS, and in 1955 he initiated a campaign to get the journal into libraries, which succeeded in boosting its circulation significantly over the next few years (a period in which many radical journals were losing readership). He was also active on the National Administrative Committee, occasionally serving as National Secretary or Treasurer.

Len combined a lucky gene with financial acumen to rise to the status of "cockroach capitalist," a term applied to members who went into business and did well. This phenomenon has sometimes caused critics to wonder how a party of the working class, committed to abolishing capital and wages, can harbor members of the capitalist class in its ranks. But just a little reflection will show that a socialist revolution aims to abolish the function of capital and the necessity of working for a living; the capitalists themselves only personify their capital.

His business allowed him the opportunity to travel abroad, and from 1965 on he and Ann made several trips to England, where they were hosted by comrades in the SPGB. Often they reciprocated the hospitality when some of these comrades would cross the Atlantic and stop in Boston. They formed lifelong friendships with SPGBers like Gilbert McClatchie (Gilmac), Cyril May, Jim D'Arcy and many others. In that bigger, less connected world, mutual contacts among socialists scattered widely across the globe had an intensity borne of a common sense of purpose.

Len Fenton never lost sight of the big picture. All through his long involvement in the world socialist movement, he maintained a contagious upbeat philosophy. Any success the party has in organizing for socialism will rest partly on the foundations he laid. In that sense, he is with us still. 

[1] In 1939 the Socialist Party of Canada, dodging the wartime censors, asked the WSP to take over its publication for the time being as a joint venture — a relationship that ended after 1968, when the SPC launched an independent journal.

Voice From The Back: Profits And Oily Words (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profits And Oily Words

You have seen advertisements by oil companies that express concern for the environment and claim they fight global warming. It is of course a fraud. “Britain’s leading scientists have challenged the US oil company Exxon-Mobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence.” (Guardian, 20 September) Capitalists are only interested in profits, they don’t give a damn about your children or their children’s future. That is capitalism.

A Toxic Society

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate at least 90,000 people die every year of asbestos related diseases but that didn’t stop the manufacture of the obnoxious material. “Chrysotile asbestos, a known human carcinogen, will remain off a global “watch list” of toxic substances for at least two more years after countries led by Canada blocked consensus in United Nations talks on Friday. … Canada, whose French-speaking Quebec province is a major asbestos producer and exporter, led opposition to its addition to the list, according to environmentalists tracking the talks. Canadian officials say puting chrysotile asbestos on the list would be tantamount to banning international trade in it and threaten jobs.” (Yahoo! News, 13 October) 90,000 deaths a year is a mere inconvenience compared to a couple of bucks for the owning class who make their money from death and disease. That is why we are socialists, also some of us once worked in shipyards, where they used asbestos, and we have difficulty breathing.

Cut Price Killers

“BP, the British oil group, had a “check-book mentality” towards safety and was aware of maintenance backlogs and unsafe equipment at its Texas City refinery years before the fire there in 2005 in which 15 workers died, according to findings from US safety officials. .. Safety was compromised by a succession of budget cuts … The company implemented a 25 per cut on fixed costs between 1998 and 2000 which adversely affected maintenance expenditure at the refinery.” (Times, 31 October) In order to compete inside capitalism firms are constantly trying to cut overheads. In this case leading to the death and injury of many workers. That is how capitalism operates. Nasty aint it?

Gangster Talk

The recent electoral losses of the Republican Party in the USA have led to the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quitting his post. His political demise led to newspapers running articles on him. Here are a couple of his past statements that were quoted. “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war” and “You get a lot more with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone.” (Times, 9 November) It is significant that this last statement of Runsfeld was a quote from the gangster Al Capone. We can understand why a US Defence Secretary would have admired a murderous gangster chief, after all they both lived in a capitalist society based on violence.

Bull In A China Shop

The media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been making strenous efforts to break in to the Chinese market, but in 1993 he made a mess of it by stating, “Advances in the technology of telecommunications are an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.” The Chinese took this threat seriously and imposed strict rules on satellite dishes thus depriving Murdoch’s Star TV of the huge Chinese's potential audience. “The following year Star removed BBC World Television from its Chinese service, in a move that was regarded by many as a sop to the Chinese government.” (Observer, 12 November) Last month Murdoch was in China trying to sweet talk his way in with government officials. When it comes to making money democratic views take a back seat with capitalists like Murdoch. What is suppression of political ideas, imprisonment, torture and death compared with more money to a billionaire? Very little it seems.

An American Myth

Supporters of the profit system often site the USA as a good example of how democratic capitalism really is. They give us the old homily about “log cabin to White House” although today it should probably be “trailer park to White House”. It is of course a complete fallacy as the following item about the recent mid-term election illustrates. “This election proved that it pays to spend big(ger). The average House winner burned through about $1 million on the stump – and the candidate who spent the most won in 93% of House races. The most expensive victory was, oddly, one of the Dems’ safe bets: New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who won a second term with 67% of the vote – and $35.9 million.” (Time, 20 November) Forget the myths, for a lot of Americans it is “trailer park to trailer park”.

The Stern gag – capitalist policies for capitalism’s problems (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production . . . in our whole contemporary social order”

You could be forgiven for thinking the above quotation came from a modern-day ecologist or environmentalist, commenting on impending global ecological catastrophe and drawing upon the myriad reports currently in existence, written by concerned scientists, that portend cataclysmic changes to our life-styles if we don’t stop abusing our natural environment immediately. The quote is in fact 131 years old and is taken from Dialectics of Nature, written by Frederick Engels (1875).

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset. Socialists have been warning about the effects of capitalism’s penny-pinching production methods and how they impact on the wider environment for well over a hundred years, and it is often with despair that we reiterate Engels’ message from the later 19th century, more so now that state-of-the-art technology exists that provides hard evidence as to the exact effects of capitalist production.

Global disaster

It was, therefore, not with any great sigh of relief, or with shock and disbelief, that socialists received the findings of the much-trumpeted Stern report on climate change and indeed the government’s reaction to it. It does make for grim reading, suggesting that time is running out to really address the environment question previous opportunities having been pathetically squandered at the Hague and Kyoto Summits and that the possibility of preventing a global disaster is “already almost out of reach”.

The 700-page report, commissioned by the Treasury and carried out by the former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, argues that environmental problems will be “difficult or impossible to reverse” unless something is done now. It paints a disturbing picture of the future of the planet if overall global temperatures rise by just two degrees Centigrade. It suggests that four billion people could face water shortages, that sixty million Africans would be exposed to malaria and that forty percent of the world’s species would face extinction.

Two-hundred million more people, it goes on, could be exposed to hunger and that figure could rise to 550 million if the temperature rose one extra degree because of a knock-on 34 percent drop in crop yields across Africa and the Middle East. Australia’s arable land would become simply too hot to sustain cereal crops. Another couple of degrees rise in temperature would, according to the report, see the ice glaciers of the Himalayas melt, depriving 300 million Chinese of a water supply. Rising sea levels would inundate half the world’s major cities, creating more homelessness, and increased ocean acidity would result in a serious decline in fish stocks.

The report further informs us that “changes in weather patterns could drive down the output of the world’s economies by an amount equivalent to up to £6 trillion a year by 2050, almost the entire output of the EU.” But all is not lost, believe Chancellor Gordon Brown and Environment Secretary David Miliband. They point to the ‘positive message’ arising from the report; this being that the world has the means to avoid the awaiting cataclysm. Money can be thrown at the problem – the earth-shattering sum of one per cent of Global GDP should suffice; a figure, incidentally, which is dwarfed by global military spending.

Whiff of profits

Responding to the report, Miliband sounded quite optimistic. Interviewed by the Independent (30 October), he said: “The second half of his message is that the technology does exist, the financing, public and private, does exist, and the international mechanisms also exist to get to grips with this problem – so I don’t think it’s a catastrophe that he puts forward. It’s a challenging message.”

What we are offered are capitalist remedies, and to make it all the more attractive there are profits to be had – well, the master class has to have some damned incentive before they act. As the Independent reported: “Combating climate change could become one of the world’s biggest growth industries, generating around $250bn of business globally by 2050.” Providing, that is, that we still have a planet worth saving in 50 years time.

Environmental disaster and the best capitalist politicians can think up is to tempt the master class with the whiff of profits to come if they agree to mend their ways! Indeed, the report is punctuated with terms such as “cost-effective” and “profitability”. Well, Stern is after all a leading world economist so his thoughts are naturally with his associates in big business. The very people who have disregarded the effects of their production methods on the natural environment for hundreds of years are now being asked to show it some mercy! Global environmental catastrophe can be halted by throwing money at the problem!

The simple fact is that businesses will not take the risk of falling behind in the struggle for profits and nor will any government enforce policy that will result in a drop in the profits of its respective capitalist class. This is exactly what President Bush cited when he pulled the USA out of the Kyoto Agreement. He is no doubt aware that the USA consumes more than one quarter of global oil production and is accountable for one quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, while being home to only 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, but his remit is not to protect the environment, nor the millions who would suffer as a direct result of environmental chaos. His job is protecting US interests all over the world, interests which are inseparable from profits.

Capitalist businesses survive by forcing out their competition, by cutting costs and sidestepping policies that hinder their expansion. They seek new outlets for their wares, to sell more and more, because this is the law of capitalism, and it is a law antagonistic to ecological concerns. It is the crazed law of capitalism that compels the big oil producers to pay teams of scientists to prepare reports that refute the findings of environmentalists who forewarn of the dire effects of current production methods.

The market economy demands that businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests. Pleasing shareholders takes far more priority than ecological considerations. The upshot is that productive processes are distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by anarchic market forces which compel decision-makers, whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste. They may well be loath to contaminate ecosystems, but the alternative is closure should they invest in costlier eco-friendlier production methods. Little wonder then that nature’s balances are upset today, and that we face problems such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, acidic oceans and the like.

All Greens now

The Greens have long insisted that things could be put right with a change of government policy, which is exactly what Labour now proposes. The problem, they believe, can be rectified by governments forcing through laws and imposing green taxes on air travel, motoring and high emission vehicles – to protect the environment. Even the Conservatives, with their new infantile eco-logo, and the Liberals have jumped on board the green bandwagon. Shadow chancellor George Osborne promises a whole swathe of green taxes. All are seemingly convinced the problem facing the environment is an economic one insofar as the world’s governments can spend their way out of environmental catastrophe.

Governments, to be sure, exist to run the political side of the profit system and, no matter how well intentioned, do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They do not control the market-driven profit system it controls them and shapes their policies. Which government is going to tell its oil companies to produce less oil, when these same oil producers are under constant pressure to pump more out of the ground and as cheaply as possible? Within three years annual car sales are set to hit 60 million per year, 10 million up on 2004. Which government will dare threaten these car sales with its eco-policies? At the very best their eco-policies can only slow down the speed of environmental decay, not halt it in its tracks at some future date.

Socialists are no different from others in desiring an environment in which the safety of all animal and plant species is ensured. Where we differ from our political opponents is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well-entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

It has long been our case that human needs can be satisfied without recourse to production methods that adversely effect the natural environment, which is exactly why we advocate the establishment of a system of society in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit. We are not talking about nationalisation or any other tinkering with the present system, but rather its entire abolition and replacement with a global system in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled; a society in which each production process takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment.

One does not need a mastery of Earth sciences to envisage types of farming that preserve and enhance the natural fertility of the soil, the systematic recycling of materials obtained from non-renewable energy sources while developing alternative sources that continually renew themselves (i.e. solar energy and wind power); industrial processes that avoid releasing poisonous chemicals or radioactivity into the biosphere; the manufacture of solid goods made to last, not planned to break down after a period of time.

Once the Earth’s natural and industrial resources have been wrested from the master class and become the common heritage of all humanity, then production can be geared to meeting needs in an ecologically acceptable way, instead of making profits without consideration for the environment. This the only basis on which we can meet our needs whilst respecting the laws of nature and to at last begin to reverse the degradation of the environment caused by the profit system. The only effective strategy for achieving a free and democratic society and, moreover, one that is in harmony with nature, is to build up a movement which has the achievement of such a society as its objective.

John Bissett

Whose thoughts are you thinking? (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Dawkins, the biologist, has become something of a celebrity through his outspoken advocacy of atheism as in his new book “The God Delusion”. But his approach to religion is still an idealist one.

The Dawkins approach to the question of religion is, like religion itself, an idealist one: religion is false, rationally unsustainable; morally enfeebling and a basis for hatred and division. Presumably Dawkins sees the death or meaningful diminution of religion by means of secularist persuasion just as religion hopes to resist secularisation by what it sees as ethical persuasion.

Dawkins looks into the biological evolution of homo sapiens for the origin and growth of the multiplicity of religious faiths. He is speculative rather than dogmatic on the issue but much more convincing when showing how the stringency of faith-based social morality has been softened over time by an intellectual response to the social development of society. He recognises this but, unlike Marx and Engels on the question of religion, simply reports it as a phenomenon under the label of moral Zeitgeist.

Unlike Dawkins, the pioneers of scientific socialism sought to show religion as a reflex of the social organisation of society. Marx, in the Introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s of Philosophy of Right, wrote:

“This state, this society, produces religion, a reversed world consciousness, because they are a reversed world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction. The struggle against religion is therefore immediately the fight against the other world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” (original italics)

It wasn’t simply a question of religion being false, or brutal or divisive; it was a weapon of the ruling class, a bulwark in the way of the emancipation of the working class, a hurdle to be overcome in the progress to socialism nor could it be overcome while the conditions that nourished it continued to exist. Thus, the socialist sees religion as an integral part of the class struggle while the secularist sees it simply as a harmful, false premise on which to base a system of moral rectitude. As far as capitalism’s subject class is concerned, whether those who govern it or those who exploit it reject or accept faith is irrelevant; the morality of capitalism is not governed either by humanistic or religious considerations but by the constraints and compulsions of the marketplace.

Inculcating religion

Dawkins deals well, even poignantly, with the religious indoctrination of children pointing, for example, to the absurd practice of labelling young children with the faith identity of their parents or guardians. Even very young children, as young as three or four are referred to as, for example, ‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’ or ‘Muslim’ children because society accepts the legitimacy of parents or guardians or clerics or teachers hijacking the innocence of children for the inculcation of beliefs more likely to be resisted if they were offered initially to an older person. Dawkins rightly calls it child abuse with ramifications sometimes even more devastating than the sexual abuse of children.

Obviously socialists agree that the indoctrination of children is a contemptible invasion of the rights of a child but, grave as it is, it is less socially heinous than the ruthless inculcation of the appalling precepts and values of capitalism – accompanied usually by the notion of a ubiquitous Divine Policeman – to which both children and adults of all ages are remorselessly exposed.

Science and the system

Indoctrination makes a nonsense of the claim that we live in a democracy. Democracy is about choice and choice is based on information and knowledge. But nowhere in the world of capitalism are the people offered the slightest hint that there could be a way of running our society that might free us from the appalling problems that are built-in, inevitable aspects of global capitalism. Instead we have intense conditioning and thought control to the extent were we look on the utterly absurd, like war and world hunger, as natural and as inevitable as the seasons.

Capitalism and its institutions rape our consciousness and rob us of the ability to think independently. Every situation must be reasoned within the paradigm of a world in which we are beholden to a class of owners not only for our daily bread but for every aspect of our life-functions from the cradle to the grave and unless our needs are consistent with the profit needs of the owning class they will not be met.

Richard Dawkins sings the praises of science and in a general sense socialists join in the chorus. But science, possibly more than most other disciplines, is a prisoner of capitalism. The scientists have to beg at the table of the system for funding to pursue their projects; their sponsors are usually largely mammoth capitalist enterprises bent on discerning means of further enriching their directors and shareholders or capitalist governments dedicated to the overall concerns of national capitalism.

Just like the rest of us, the scientist is a prisoner of the crazy logic of the system and just  like the rest of us if his or her dedicated function does not hold promise of profit for those who directly or indirectly employ them, irrespective of the potential social benefits of their work, it will be denied funding.

The first phase in the struggle to end the political and economic exploitation of our class is to learn to question the thoughts we inherit from well-intentioned parents and teachers; to challenge the strictures of the priests, parsons, rabbis and mullahs and to question why in a world of potential abundance, where a parasite class of non-productive money shufflers and profit-takers are rich beyond measure, and the working class that produces all real wealth endure mere want or dire poverty.

Richard Montague

Letter: Zionism (2006)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zionism

Dear Editors,

I agree with Howard Moss that the aim should be for articles to give the socialist perspective (Letters, November Socialist Standard). However it is not so unusual for articles to outline some aspect of history or current events and only give reference to the socialist aim in the concluding comments. As socialists we wish to be as well informed as possible. I found Susan Nathan’s book The Other Side of Israel (now available in paperback) both moving and informative.

My concern is that the article (intended as a review) may not fairly represent the book as it only refers to some aspects of its content. For example it does not mention the author’s background. Her father was born in South Africa, the son of Jewish refugees from Lithuania. She is thoroughly aware of Jewish history, including the discrimination suffered by her great-grandfather in Lithuania, and had first hand experience of apartheid in South Africa. The book does not claim that conditions in Israel are identical to those that formerly existed in South Africa – the “petty elements” are absent. As stated in the article the term ‘apartheid’ is applied in a specific sense and its use is only emotive if you do not agree that Israeli Arabs are treated as second class citizens.

Pat Deutz

Letter: Structured party (2006)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Structured party

Dear Editors,

I am a bona fide socialist and I will never be anything else. I am totally opposed to inequality, exploitation, oppression, poverty, hunger, war and everything associated with capitalism. However I do find fault with your outlook. I can’t see how we can challenge capitalism without being organised in a structured socialist party with an elected leadership. I believe that the leadership should have no special privileges , but to vigorously pursue party policy which would be decided at conference.

You criticise Lenin and Trotsky in your ideas, but I think the Bolsheviks’, with Lenin and Trotsky, was the most correct that the Russian revolution could have been in organising socialism in that era. So I would like you to educate me by explaining a better way of achieving socialism.

C. Dobson, 

Wigan

Reply:

We do stand for a “structured socialist party” but on quite different lines from Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Starting from the view that, left to themselves, the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness, they stood for organising as a vanguard party to lead the workers. They also said that this party should be organised on a top-down basis with a “leadership” which, while perhaps formally elected, had the power to make policy and order other members what to do. Such a structure may have been necessary to overthrow Tsarism but not to establish socialism – which they didn’t anyway, only a form of state capitalism.

We say that the socialist political party should be organised on a quite different basis: the power to make policy should lie with the membership through delegate conferences and referendums; there should be no party leadership, only an executive or administrative committee charged with arranging for the policies decided by the membership to be implemented. We also say, contrary to Lenin, that workers can advance beyond trade unionism and can understand socialism. When a sufficient majority of them have, and have organised themselves democratically, ready to take over and run society, they can send mandated delegates to parliament to take control of political power and use it to end capitalism and coordinate the change-over to socialism – Editors.

Early days of globalisation (2006)

Book Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational by Nick Robins (Pluto Press)

I often gauge how much I have enjoyed a book by the amount of highlighting and marginal notes I make in pencil. This book, like many on my shelves, will horrify those who prize pristine, unmarked first editions.

On 31 December 1600 a precursor of the modern transnational corporation came into existence. Its pioneering techniques in the field of trade and commerce, and downright murder and corruption, preceded by centuries the noxious business practices that we associate with today’s all-powerful corporations, many of whom have a higher turn over than small countries.

This book presents as a meticulous account of perhaps the most powerful corporation that ever lived, tracing how it came into existence, how it operated, its inner structure, the role of its own armies in its rise to supremacy, its part in the Bengal Famine when 10 million died as a result of the Company’s market manipulation, its militaristic role in the Opium Wars, its part in the Indian Mutiny and the Boston Tea Party and how, for the last twenty years of its existence, it ruled India as an agent of the British Empire. When it comes to downright exploitation, corruption, slaughter and sheer negligence and indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps no company that ever existed comes near the East India Company in its ruthless pursuit of profit, whilst refashioning the world commercial order in the interests of privilege and power for hundreds of years to come.

In its time the company had many critics, most notably Edmund Burke, “the real champion of India’s identity”, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Burke fought long and hard to impeach the Company’s Governor General Warren Hastings for the devastation wrought on India in its endless search for profit.

Commencing his opening speech at Westminster Hall in February 1788, Burke said:

“I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate . . . I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation and conditions of life.”

Despite Burke’s opening four day tirade against Hastings – one of the longest opening speeches in history – during which women were carried out fainting, at which the Speaker was “rendered speechless” and at which spectators were willing to pay ú50 for a seat, despite an ensuing trial that lasted from February 1787 to April 1795, Hastings was acquitted.

Considering the Company’s operations for the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1853, Marx noted five characteristics: 

“ . . . a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable system, of justice and law..”

Satirising the Company’s administrative system, he commented how there existed “no government by which so much is written and so little done.” Marx furthermore viewed the company as a tool of British capitalism plc in India, observing how “the aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy wanted to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it”.

The Second Opium War was, in Marx’s view, attributable to the Company’s operations in the East and its insistence that it had the right to swamp China with drugs in the name of profit, regardless of the addiction-induced misery its trade created or how the Chinese authorities felt. He wrote:

“While openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to, lie at the bottom of its ’freedom’”.

In eight carefully researched chapters, Robins traces the Company’s operations from its inception as a trader in spices to its role in running the Indian sub-continent on behalf of the British crown, withholding, one imagines, very little regardless how gruesome, and there indeed are some stomach-churning passages.

In the final chapter, his analysis masterly done, Robins, contemplating the state of corporate play today, reflects how the Company’s legacy reveals the importance of taking on the mega-corporations who presently rampage across the planet unhindered, and this, for socialists, is the book’s one failing.

Robins’ remedy for curbing corporate power is simple:

“First of all, its market power and political influence must be limited . . Next, stringent rules are needed to ensure that management and investors do not use the corporation as a tool for their short-term interests . . And, finally, clear and forcible systems of justice have to be in place to hold the corporation to account for damage to society and the environment.”

Thus, a brilliant attack on unchecked power in the pursuit of profit is marred by the simple request that the capitalist class behaves and shows a little more respect when carrying out its obscene business, and that the executive arm of capitalism – government – hurries to the rescue of society and the natural environment. Smiley-faced capitalism is, for Robins, the only remedy. Warren Hastings laughs in his grave.

All said, if you’re into the study of corporate power gone mad, read this.

John Bissett

Not socialism (2006)

Book Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crisis of Socialism by Randhir Singh. Amit Atwal. 2006. 1087 pages. £29.99.

In Europe most Leninists are probably Trotskyists. In Asia they would seem to be Maoists. Randhir Singh falls into this category, arguing that although Stalin made mistakes and what he called socialism wasn’t socialism, Russia finally became a fully-fledged new class society ruled by a state bourgeoisie only in 1964, when Brezhnev took over from Khrushchev. Russia went capitalist in 1991. Since then China has gone that way too. Only Cuba and North Korea have not yet gone capitalist, and only Cuba is on the road to socialism. That’s what this book argues but we doubt that many people will have the patience to read through 1000 pages portraying Lenin, as like Marx, an advocate of the democratic self-emancipation of the working class, interspersed with favourable comments on Mao and Stalin.

Adam Buick

Obituary: Len Feinzig (2006)

Obituary from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Len Feinzig (also known in the party as Lenny Fenton) died in October. Born in 1917, he joined the World Socialist Party of the US in 1936 and was an active member of Boston Local until there was no more local to be active in. He was part of the core group who continued monthly meetings to mail out the Socialist Standards and keep the bare bones of a socialist movement alive during the 1980s. After the renaissance that the WSP began to experience in 1987, he continued to take part in every activity except those requiring computer skills. Lenny’s greatest contribution to the organization was as a speaker, both on the soapbox and indoors. He was arguably the best debater in the WSP, frequently impressing large audiences in debates with groups from Harvard, MIT and Brandies. He also spoke on Local Boston’s radio program during the late 1960s and early 70s. He visited Britain on a number of occasions, the last time being 2003. Comrade Feinting served for many years on both the NAC and the Editorial Committee of the Western Socialist, the journal of the American and Canadian parties. He also made it his personal project to increase the circulation of the Western Socialist dramatically during the 1950s (not at all an easy task in that period of history!) by instituting a successful nation-wide Library Campaign. His life was long and productive. He will be long remembered.

Obituary: Bill Ross (2006)

Obituary from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow branch are sad to report the death of our comrade Bill Ross. Bill came across the Socialist Party at an outdoor meeting at the Mound in Edinburgh in the summer of 1965. Within months he had joined Glasgow branch. He was a larger than life figure who had left school at 15 years of age and had been a merchant seaman for many years. When he came in contact with the party he had graduated from Drama College and was already appearing on stage at the Edinburgh Festival. Within a short time Bill was himself speaking for the party both indoors and outdoors including a spell in London when he was working there. Later on when he found the stage too precarious an occupation he worked for many years for the Glasgow Parks Department where he was very active in trade union affairs. Bill was a voracious reader and was especially interested in scientific subjects. He was a good example of the self-taught worker, although having had a very basic academic career he had a wide knowledge of astro-physics and evolution, often giving branch talks on such subjects. He was a warm, friendly human being with a good sense of humour and his speciality was in taking popular songs and re-writing parodies. Thus The Lady is a Tramp became That’s Why the Worker is a Slave and the words of Who Wants to be a Millionaire became – “Have you heard of the SPGB. We want a world without poverty. Well, did you ever. What a swell party this is.” This is a sad time for all his Glasgow comrades but especially so for his wife and beloved comrade Terry. He will be greatly missed.

RD

50 Years Ago: Hungary and Suez – Hope Amidst Tragedy (2006)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The governments of Israel, Britain, France and Russia, when they resorted to war in October 1956 in pursuit of their own separate objectives, have at the same time struck a decisive blow to achieve something they never sought and are hardly aware of. Their tanks and bombers in a few days of destruction have helped to shatter the most hampering illusion of our generation, an illusion that has held back multitudes from taking the first stop towards a real understanding of the problems facing the human race.

This illusion was the belief, held with equal fervour by democrats and Communists, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that there are “two worlds,” essentially different in arms and conduct.

On the one side the democrats and Labourites of the Western world believed that they and their rulers are guided by a superior moral code, are inherently against brutality, are committed to “law not war,” and to United Nations, are incapable of naked aggression to further their interests.

On the other side were the Communists and their followers, who believed with equal sincerity that Russia, by virtue of being a “Socialist” country, is free from and superior to the sordid imperialism and colonialism of the West, and utterly incapable of opposing the aspirations of ordinary workers.

Now the foundations of both beliefs have been smashed into fragments. Sincere men and women in both camps are horrified and heartbroken to discover in one revealing flash that the men they revered and the men they reviled behave in exactly the same criminal way; that the Edens and the Kruschevs are blood brothers after all, worshippers of the same capitalist god of violence and war. The sickening dismay of those who trusted Eden, “the friend of United Nations,” is only equalled by that of Communists who see Russian tanks smashing down Hungarian workers. For both groups the one thing that could not happen has happened.

(From front page article by ‘H.’, Socialist Standard, December 1956)

Socialist Sonnet No. 174: The Unmasking of Tyranny (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog 

The Unmasking of Tyranny

 The tyrant feels secure in his redoubt

Amidst his cabinet of sycophants,

Where all his cold calculations and rants

Are applauded. He has the power to flout

Even pretences of democracy.

None oppose him who’re generously treated,

The few who do are swiftly deleted,

Or at least they’re detained indefinitely.

Yet aquifers of resentment and fear,

Build pressure, underground initially,

While the surface seems superficially

Stable, a violent rupture’s always near.

The brute once felled, might circumstance recruit

Not a liberator, but another brute?

 D. A.