A Parable by Leo Tolstoy

I see mankind as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures and plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite grass enough for the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are tramping underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence.

I saw the owner of the herd come to them, and when he saw their pitiful condition he was filled with compassion for them and thought of all he could do to improve their condition.

So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And that they called Charity.

Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing up into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast.

Because they were dying off in the cold nights, he put up beautiful well-drained and well-ventilated cowsheds for the cattle.

Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence, he put corks on the horns of the cattle, so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and the old cows over 70 years of age.

In fact, he did everything he could think of to improve the condition of the cattle, and when I asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing, break down the fence, and let the cattle out, he answered: "If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them."

Food For Thought

From the Socialist Party of Canada monthly newsletter:

Once again with feeling - the poverty issue.

The Toronto Star launched an Anti-poverty campaign entitled, "Ask Why" to bring attention to the plight of the working poor in Canada.

It describes the life of a Sri Lankan woman who holds down two cleaning jobs (she was a teacher in her native land and holds a degree in the liberal arts)), and who has to leave her two children with others during the day and the night, and manages to bring home a grand total of $1,150/month.

The apartment rent is currently $850 and in eleven years in Canada she has never been able to afford real furniture but relies on plastic patio chairs. It should be noted the response that followed was tremendous with offers of better jobs, donations and gifts of furniture, a testament to the humane response of the populace, but, I think, even the hardliners would agree that this is no solution.

The Toronto Star is a liberal paper, perhaps just to the Left of Centre, and has along tradition of highlighting the injustices of our economic system. It has high quality reporters with a conscience producing very good and thorough articles. It perhaps could be compared to the Guardian. On page two, it printed articles from the end of the 19th. Century on poverty.

For example, "Families in dire want of food because the husbands and fathers have been unable to obtain work" (1894); "Nineteen thousand undernourished children attend Toronto schools" (1931); "Three hundred jobless sleepnightly along Don river's banks" (1931); "Shameful! Here is a very small boy with very large spectacles! They cover the whole eye and have little discs on each lens to correct an astigmatism. He can see better in a cellar than in the open sunlight because he works 6 hours of the day in almost Cimmerian darkness" (no date).

There are many similar articles. The shocking point is, for all the heartfelt desire that the editor and writers have put into this theme, which has covered two weeks, there is never any connection made to the fact that what the paper attacked in 1894 is still going on today as evidenced by the lead story. We are told facts such as there are 650,000 working poor in Canada, or that 40% of the country's poor have jobs but cannot make enough to make ends meet. One reporter actually cited the following, "Writing in the latest edition of the journal Healthcare Policy, University of British Columbia economist Robert Evans points out that over this period (25 years), most of the economic gains recorded in Canada were appropriated by the super-rich. Between 1976 and 1990, the average per capita income in Canada barely budged. But over the same period, the top 0.01 per cent of earners saw their incomes more than doubled."

The last 25 years! Just who the hell do they think was appropriating the workers' income for the last three hundred years and will continue to do so for the next three hundred unless the workers wake up! The editorials made the usual offerings - raise the minimum wage, raise the tax thresholds for the low earners, more language training for immigrants. Again, no connection to the nature of capitalism.

To me, it's all so very simple - wealth produced is split between wages and profits and because the capitalist class own the whole lot, they take the lion's share - that it seems or the whole world is daft.

For socialism,
John Ayers

For more information on the Socialist Party of Canada, please click on the picture below:

Send Back The Clowns

The October 2006 Socialist Standard is now online.

Das Kapital (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx's Das Kapital by Francis Wheen. Atlantic Books, 2006.

In a series of "Books That Shook The World" which includes Paine's Rights of Man and Darwin's Origin of Species, Wheen's biography of Das Kapital (to give Capital its original German title) is fairly short at 130 pages including index. Wheen has already had a critical and commercial success with his biography of the man himself, Karl Marx (1999) and this work seems likely to do the same.

Das Kapital was planned to be the first of six volumes, but Marx only saw the first volume through to publication. The second and third volumes, and the volumes entitled Theories of Surplus Value, were all compiled from Marx's notes after his death. Apart from a brief Introduction, Wheen's book is divided into three chapters: gestation, birth and afterlife. There are no notes, bibliography or guide to further reading and although Wheen is mostly content to let Marx speak for himself he does occasionally paraphrase and in one place he is seriously mistaken. Wheen explains that value (socially necessary labour-time) may differ from price and sometimes price may be higher than value, but Wheen adds, "under a socialist system this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers" (p.33). Marx never argued this and the whole thrust of Das Kapital is that value, price and profit can never work for the benefit of the workers. Marx also, incidentally, never argued for redistribution, preferring instead to judge the success or failure of a social system by its ability to produce for human need. Wheen is rightly critical of commentators who read into Das Kapital things which are not there (e.g. increasing "immiseration" or impoverishment of the proletariat), but that has not stopped him falling into the same trap here.

Controversially, Wheen claims that Das Kapital should be thought of as a work of art and this was Marx's stated intention. Das Kapital is usually depicted as a work of science, but Marx seems to have considered art and science to have similar objectives - that is, to see through surface appearances ("the veils of illusion") to reveal the underlying reality. And yet it was the late Louis Althusser who maintained that there was an "epistemological break" in Marx's writing, with the early artistic or philosophical work being only of marginal interest, whereas the later works such as Das Kapital contained his mature and scientific thinking. But as Wheen points out, in Althusser's posthumous memoir he admitted to being "a trickster and deceiver" and only ever studying "a few passages of Marx." Althusser and his work on Marx was a fraud. But even if Althusser was not a con-man, the distinction between an early and a mature Marx does not withstand serious scrutiny.

The alleged impact of Das Kapital on twentieth century politics is well summarised, including the fall of the Russian empire and China's contradictory claim to be "Marxist-Leninist" (Wheen insists that "'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt"). The framework for viewing these and other events, argues Wheen, is to be found in Marx's writing on capital.

For as Wheen puts it:

"Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century."

Lew Higgins

Pathfinders Column: High and Dry (2006)

The Pathfinders column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Water World 1

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it". Thus spoke one Inuit villager, on describing winter temperatures of 9 degress celsius that should have been -30 degrees celsius (Independent on Sunday, 27 August). As the Arctic warms up twice as fast as the rest of the world, and sea ice has shrunk in area by a quarter and in thickness by a half, its inhabitants are discovering that their igloos are heat traps, their water supply needs wells and their workplaces need air-conditioning. Meanwhile Greenland farmers - for they do exist - are starting to grow broccoli, cauliflower and Chinese cabbage, while having to make up, among their thousand words for reindeer, some new words for the salmon which are appearing in their rivers, and the barn owls, hornets and robins which are now adventuring to the far north. What the Inuit think of global warming can be surmised by the number of their houses and snowmobiles that have started falling through the ice, and one can easily see why they think "the world is slowly disintegrating." Meanwhile in Siberia, roads and buildings built on the permafrost are starting to collapse, and the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk has recently suffered a major flood (BBC Online, 12 September).

Greenland is the second biggest ice mass after Antarctica, with glaciers as large as Manhattan and as high as the Empire State Building, and it is now melting at a rate that has alarmed even the alarmists. Evidence from NASA satellites and ground-based researchers concluded in February 2006 that Greenland's glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, which it is quite likely to do by the end of 2100 at this rate, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet) (BBC Online, 11 August). If this happens, New York, New Orleans and half of Florida including Miami, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale will be underwater.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Washington is facing rebellion from state governors all over the country to stop stalling over Kyoto and do something, not least because their own oil and gas companies are already one jump ahead with 'greener' technology and need the relevant legislation to be enacted so they can capitalize on it. Leading the way is Da Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who when not terminating crooks by state execution is so keen to display his green credentials he sided with the Democrats against his own party in order to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act, which aims to cap emissions in California, the world's 12th largest CO2 emitter, by 25 percent by 2020 (BBC Online, 1 September). But even Arnie is unlikely to hold back the Arctic flood, because capitalism just doesn't sit down and listen to reason, as his Republican ex-buddies know perfectly well. The reason they opposed his cosy Californian carbon-capping caper was because they knew perfectly well that unless such a plan was federal, so that nobody could get out of it, all the investment would leak out of the state into neighbouring ones which were not required under their state law to worry so energetically about the problem.

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Water World 2

While the Inuit are fast running out of ice, a third of the world's population are faced with a shortage of any water at all. The situation has arisen twenty years earlier than projections forecasted, according to a report by the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka (New Scientist, 26 August). The report states that while in some places physical shortage of water is to blame, in others it is a question of lack of financial investment. So are they talking billion-dollar pipelines from the water sources to the dry interiors in Africa, Asia and parts of China? Not a bit. The state-of-the-art technology is, wait for it, plastic buckets and bags, lots of big ones, to catch the stuff as it falls out of the sky. Storing roof and road run-off, they argue, could double or triple food production in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. Not only that, but saving water for 'unrainy days' in this way could slow the expansion of rain-fed agriculture into virgin habitats from 60 per cent by 2050 down to 10 per cent.

The predictable response of most people reading this would be a Homer Simpson-like 'Duh'. You don't need to be an engineering genius to figure out that water butts are a good way of saving water, so why in hell aren't they doing it already, you cannot resist asking? Presumably because in the capitalist scheme of things, poor Africans, Indians and Chinese peasants don't have the price and don't rate the price even of a plastic bucket.

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Water World 3

Socialists always welcome any sincere attempt to solve the world's problems, even if some of these attempts are inevitably misguided. One doesn't in all honesty expect a great contribution to be made by new-age mystics so it is no surprise that when Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie approached the UK government with a scheme to clean up nuclear waste, using a deeply mystical Kabbalah water which they claimed had received extensive testing in a Ukrainian lake, the government didn't show much interest in the Ritchies' esoteric knowledge of Jewish mystical liquids and in fact showed them the door (New Scientist, 26 August). One might expect however that the government official who recounted this story would show the appropriate respect for such eminent celebrities, or at least a cool and precise scientific detachment. Instead, the official described the encounter as follows: "It was like a crank call . . . The scientific mechanisms and principles were just bollocks." Lovely to see scientists descend to plain English occasionally.

Paddy Shannon

Travelling People (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Caroline Moorehead: Human Cargo: a Journey among Refugees. Vintage.

The title says it all really: human beings shunted from one place to another, in response to political events, and treated as objects to be kept at arm's length or sent back as quickly as possible to wherever they came from. There are perhaps 12 million refugees in the world today, and twice that number of internally displaced people (IDPs), who get less attention, and also less financial support when they return to their homes.

Caroline Moorehead visited a number of areas where refugees live (or survive is perhaps a better word) and talked to many people. She starts in Cairo, full of 'lost boys' from other parts of Africa, originally mainly from Sudan but now increasingly from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and elsewhere. Many asylum-seekers from Africa travel first to Italy, to Sicily and to Lampedusa, a small island less than 100 miles from the coast of Tunisia; many drown on the way there.

Between Mexico and California is a fence designed to reduce the flow of Mexican migrants northwards. The border is deliberately kept semi-closed, as the US needs some (but not too much) cheap Mexican labour power. But it is still policed in a draconian manner: for instance, a canal which provides a possible crossing point has been converted on the US side so that it's hard to climb out once you've swum over. Over two thousand people have died trying to cross the border, ten times the number who lost their lives trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.

Meanwhile, Australia has an extremely tough line on asylum, following its earlier racist 'White Australia' policy. Would-be migrants from Indonesia and elsewhere in south-east Asia have a hard time even getting there, following the introduction of Operation Relex, which involves naval vessels and aircraft turning back boats of asylum-seekers. Many of those who actually make it to Australia may be locked up indefinitely, despite having committed no crime.

Some Palestinians who fled their homes when Israel was established in 1948 have spent over fifty years in refugee camps - not many, though, because life in a refugee camp is hard and few can survive that long. Many more in number are the children born in camps, to parents who were themselves born there too.

Often, also, refugees are driven to suicide since their stories of violence back home may not be believed. One young Iranian killed himself in Newcastle in 2003, leaving a note that said, 'You have to kill yourself in this country, to prove that you would be killed in your own country.'

One encouraging aspect of the book is the way that local people, from Sicily to Australia and Newcastle, have rallied to support and help refugees in their midst. It is one thing to rail against those who are allegedly coming to steal jobs or live as scroungers, but it is quite another to encounter the hopelessness and destitution of people who just want somewhere to live without persecution and bring up their family.

Moorehead makes a number of good points: that migration is 'the unfinished business of globalisation', and that nobody wants to be a refugee. 'Why', she asks, 'should something as arbitrary as where one is born determine where one is allowed to live?' The answer, sadly, is that under capitalism, artificial lines on maps divide the world into different camps, which enable those who own the earth to defend their bit of it and to make claims on other bits. A sensible society would have no concept of refugeehood or any of the other states of oppression so movingly described here.

Paul Bennett

Marx, People and Society (1979)

From the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

These days it is fashionable to write long, confusing, dull books about Marx. The qualifications for the job are a commitment to Leninism, a selective bibliography and a capacity for dialectical distortions. The search to discover what went on in Karl Marx's mind has beaten the question of what a Scotsman wears under his kilt as the number one talking point in trendy pubs. To play the game you don't have to be a socialist - but it helps if you learn by heart the required Leninist cliches. Thanks to these modern Marxist scholars we have not just one Marx but many: Hegelian Marx, Young Marx, Mature Marx, not to mention Dead Marx who passed his words of wisdom beyond the grave to Young Lenin. One of the favourite topics of those who treat Marxism as a spectator sport is what they call 'Marx's ontology' (his conception of the nature of Man).

Marx's view of 'human nature' is essentially different from all others because it is historical (seeing people as socially developing beings) and dialectical (seeing humanity and Nature as two parts of the same whole). Marx speaks of 'reality' as being both 'naturally human' and 'humanly natural'. The idealist philosophers had always constructed their own model of the human race and placed it in Nature. It was not coincidental that these models corresponded to the ideals of the ruling class of the day. Thus, capitalist philosophers depict humanity as selfish, lazy aggressive and incapable of co-operation. Unlike the Utopian Socialists, Marx did not construct an ideal being to fit into a preconceived pattern of socialist society. His conception involved two questions, firstly, what are the general characteristics of a natural being, and secondly, what are the specific characteristics of a human being? He divided these human attributes into dialectically interdependent powers and needs.

Marx associates three powers and needs with human life; work, eating and sex. He did not say that people must work or eat or have sex in one way as opposed to another in order to be 'natural', but simply that these activities are in the nature of their being. The attributes of 'Species-Man' are more extensive, for it is these that separate it from the unthinking animals. Marx's concept of human nature, then, is concerned with natual and specific attributes of homo sapiens, not the particular moral predilections of the philosopher.

But he doesn't leave it that. Marx's view was that in private property society, an especially under capitalism, people are alienated from their real selves (or, to borrow a Feuerbachian term, alienated from their human essence). By alienation is meant - not surprisingly - the absence of unalienation, people living in accordance with their species and their nature: Socialist society. This is where the Redbrick intellectuals lose Marx's point entirely. He was not concerned with alienation as some kind of existential void to which 'modern man' is doomed. The existentialist, Hyppolite, has it wrong when he writes that alienation is a 'tension inseparable de l'existence' and is inherent in 'la conscience de soi humaine'. Marx consistently relates alienation in property societies to socialist unalienation:

[Communism is] "the complete return of Man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being - a return become conscious, and accomplished with the entire wealth of previous development."

This will mean:

"the positive transcendence of all alienation - that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, State, etc, to his human, i.e. social, mode of existence." (1844 Manuscripts).

In his only complete outline of his theory of alienation, Marx indicated four relations which cover the whole of human social existence. Firstly, people are said to be alienated from their activity. Marx especially refers to productive activity, for that is the most important form of human creativity:

" . . . labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being: that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not a home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it." (1844 Manuscripts).

Secondly, Marx explains how we are alienated from the product of our labour:

" . . . the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in the double respect; first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour - to be his labour's means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker."1844 Manuscripts).

The third relation of alienation, according to Marx, is that people are alienated from each other because of class divisions and inevitable social conflict:

"Just as [Man] estranges himself from his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own . . . a man alien to labour and standing outside it . . . the capitalist or whatever one choosed to call the master of labour." (1844 Manuscripts).

Finally, men and women are alienated from their species-being:

"In tearing away from the object of his production . . . estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his organic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes Man's species life a means to his physical existence. "(1844 Manuscripts).

There have been those who have questioned whether these early writings of Marx (only published in English in the early 1930's) should be treated as being consistent with his later developed theories, Clearly, any of Marx's writings, taken in isolation and detached from socialist conclusions, can be futile and even misleading. Used by socialists in the battle to free the working class from the world of capitalism, the concept of alienated people - with its dialectical negative, unalienated humanity - is a vital aspect of a coherent Marxist theory. For trendy academics the exercise is about as vital as a fortnight's holiday in Highgate Cemetery.

Steve Coleman

Will Labour Lose? (2006)

From the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present Labour government appears to have run out of steam, but trading one group of career politicians for another is not the answer.

An astute observer once said "governments are not elected . . . they are dismissed". According to this view, after a party has had a period in power the electorate consciously aims to get rid of it by voting for a rival party in a decision regarded as the "lesser of two evils". And it is undoubtedly true that every government - regardless of political banner - has always ended by alienating the electorate that once supported it. Many voters believe politicians are dishonest or have become cynical about elections, reasoning that "60-seconds of democracy" is small recompense for five years of neglect and policies that rarely express their preferences. If elections are so meaningless, some reflect, then there can be little point in voting - a sentiment borne out by low electoral turnout.

Despite being unable to find lasting solutions to workers' problems, political parties must always try to combat voter disillusionment. Behaving like chameleons, they must search for ways to improve their image, reinvigorate old policies and give the appearance that this time things will be different, this time the electorate will be given exactly what it wants. Before the 1997 general election the Labour Party successfully engineered its own metamorphosis, re-branding policies and redefining its agenda. The commitment to nationalisation enshrined in the 1918 Party constitution was abolished and Trade Union influence over policy - always more mythical than real - was publicly abandoned. Its image, thus transformed, seemed revitalised and business, media and the electorate acclaimed the party that now called itself New Labour.

But nine years after the Labour Party was enthusiastically swept into government, the same electorate cannot wait to dismiss them. Reviewing the May local elections results the Electoral Reform Society concluded the Labour government faces "wipe-out" in the next general election and "predicts that Labour stand to lose 149 of its present 355 MPs bringing its commons strength down to 206 - even worse than 1983". Ministers have responded with conciliatory messages that Labour will listen more closely in future and, in the words of John Prescott, "renew itself after nine years in government".(Observer, 28 May)

In the third week of June this year, Labour's tattered image took another knock when an Ipsos Mori poll revealed that one in four Labour supporters wants their party to lose the next election. The poll deduced that "the leadership is becoming increasingly divorced from its own grass roots, 23 per cent agree Labour should be kicked out of power". Supporters wanted the party to experience "a period out of office to rethink what they stand for and what their vision is for the future". A majority of those polled expects the next general election to end with either a hung parliament or a Tory majority, believing a re-launched Conservative Party to be more in touch with what ordinary people think. In the wake of hospital cutbacks, Home Office scandals and the 'peerages for cash' fiasco, Hazel Blears conceded, "the voters are angry that we have taken our eye off the ball". (Observer, 18 June).

At the end of June, Labour Party fortunes went from bad to worse. In the double election in Blaenau Gwent - where Parliamentary and Welsh Assembly by-elections were held simultaneously - an embittered electorate took revenge by voting down both Labour Party candidates. The elections were prompted by the death of Peter Law, who had defected from Labour and succeeded in overturning a 19,000 Labour majority in 2005. Until it was lost, Blaenau Gwent, whose past MPs include Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot, was regarded as Labour's safest seat. Defeat in the Assembly election denied Labour of the majority it hoped to regain in the Welsh Assembly.

The wave of disillusionment is not just confined to Labour voters, however, with disaffection spreading inside the Labour Party itself. Labour Party membership has declined dramatically since 1997 and is now below the 200,000 mark - the lowest level since Ramsay MacDonald split the party in the 1930s. The membership has grown weary of being implicated in what the media call a "conspiracy of lies," and resentful of arrogant leadership. A YouGov poll presented to the Compass conference on 17 June found that only 25 percent of Labour Party members believe they influence Party policy, while three-quarters felt policy had been hijacked by rich donors whose influence has grown as membership has shrunk. The Labour Party, desperately short of funds and like many of the electorate struggling with debt - estimated at 27 million pounds -, must either depend on millionaires or turn to state funding, a move not popular with the public.

Aware of growing hostility, many senior members are distancing themselves from Prime Minister Blair by announcing that the Labour Party under Brown's leadership will revitalise itself and re-brand unpalatable policies. "The trouble with the current approach is that we will go out of power for 15 years," grumbled Michael Willis, speaking to the Compass conference. Like many, he blames Iraq and Blair's presidential style for the electorate's resentment. (Guardian, 19 June). Every effort is being made to show 'clear water' between Labour under Blair and what Labour might be like under Brown. "Too many traditional Labour supporters felt the government had taken their goodwill for granted and said government was getting more difficult," said Ed Balls, Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Brown's political allies promise greater Party equality, reducing dominance of Whitehall and "restoring progressive politics." (Guardian, 19 June)

But if forecasters can be believed it now seems likely, irrespective of who actually leads the Party, that Labour will lose the next general election. Yet does it really matter which party forms the next government?

Capitalism is a splintered society; divided not just by sectional ownership of the means of production but by the economic rivalry of independent states striving to exercise authority over given geographical areas. Conventional political parties endorse the framework of capitalism and compete to win control over the state and to administer the economic system within its boundaries, which necessarily means perpetuating the wages system and the persistent hardship for wage and salary earners. The policies propounded by these parties are similar because they are manifestations of the same political imperative - a continuation of capitalism - and are distinguishable only to the extent that they propose different organisation methods to administer the same economic system.

Voters vote governments out because they appear incompetent, incapable of finding solutions to the daily problems that confronts wage and salary earners. But government can never solve these problems because their permanent solution lies only in the abolition of capitalism and the wages system. Economic laws that politicians are powerless to change and leave little room for manoeuvre determine what politicians do and how they must react. It is not the deceitfulness of politicians that is the problem but rather the economic structure of society.

But it is not just political parties that refuse to think outside the framework of capitalism. Most wage and salary earners rarely question the structure of society and passively support the system that always works against them. In misguided expressions of defiance that flow from frustration and lack of understanding, voters repeatedly swap Labour governments for Conservative, or Conservative governments for Labour - as they have on seven separate occasions since the second world war - in the hope that it will somehow make a difference. They are always disappointed by the outcome. Mandating a political party to administer capitalism means that workers surrender political power to their class enemy and condone the continuation of their own exploitation, their insecurity and their poverty - a lesson that workers seem unable to grasp as the same mistake is slavishly repeated over and over again.

But while trading one group of careerist politicians for another can never be the answer, changing society's economic structure is the only answer.

Capitalism exists only because workers allow it to exist. Changing the structure of society, however, is not as simple as changing political allegiance to a party. Capitalism is based firmly on a principle of leadership, where a minority in secret makes decisions and the excluded majority is told what they should do and how they should think. Changing the world's economic structure by converting the means of production from class ownership to common ownership requires that workers individually understand what they want and actively combine to change their condition. Socialism cannot be delivered by leaders and is achievable only by the concerted action of a politically conscious mass movement without direction or leaders, for only then will the majority become the decision-makers.

The task may be daunting but must begin somewhere. Workers would do well to start by considering whether capitalism - under any political party - is really the future they want.

Steve Trott

The role of the soviets in Russia's bourgeois revolution: the point of view of Julius Martov

This article originally appeared in the French political journal, Economies et societes, cahiers de l'ISMEA, Paris, serie S, Number 18, April-May 1976 issue. It is appearing on the internet for the first time.

The basic principle defended by Marx throughout his forty years of socialist activity can be summed up in the clause of the General Rules of the First International that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves". This is a rejection of the view that socialism can be introduced for the working class or that the working class can be led to socialism by some enlightened minority.

Those who set themselves up as leaders of the working class fall into two groups. First, there are the parliamentary reformists who tell the workers: "vote for us and we will introduce socialism for you". And then there are the various "vanguards" who see themselves leading the workers in a violent assault on the capitalist state. Both groups, despite being bitter antagonists, share a common standpoint: a denial that the majority of workers are capable of understanding and of organising themselves, without leaders, in order to achieve it.

But to deny this is to in effect deny that socialism can be established. For socialism, as a fully democratic society based on the common ownership of the means of production(1), demands, in order to function, the voluntary co-operation and conscious participation of the immense majority of the population. It is a society which simply cannot be established by a minority, however enlightened, determined or benevolent. Leaders, whether reformist parliamentarians or insurrectionist vanguards, cannot establish socialism; all they can and have established is some form of state capitalism.

During and after the first world war a number of working class thinkers and militants (such as Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek) came to recognise that the traditional Social Democratic policy of seeking to win a parliamentary majority on an electoral programme of reforms of capitalism could never lead to socialism but only to state capitalism. They re-asserted that only the working class, socialist-minded and democratically-organised, could establish socialism. However, under the impact of the events of November 1917 in Russia, they imagined that the form of working class organisation to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism has been found in the workers' "soviets" or councils that had come into being after the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917.

It is understandable, and perhaps excusable, that in the early days of the "soviet regime" people outside of Russia should have been mistaken about its nature. War-time censorship and the lies of the capitalist press, together with the exaggerations of some of its supporters, meant that little accurate information about what was happening in Russia was available. On the face of it, in November 1917 the Congress of Soviets, a body of working class delegates from all over Russia, had deposed the capitalist Provisional Government and itself taken control of governmental power; capitalist rule had been overthrown and a socialist regime established - at least this is what appeared to have happened.

But those who had some knowledge of Marx's theory of social development ought to have quickly had some doubts. Without denying that capitalist political rule had been overthrown or that power had passed into the hands of people calling themselves socialists, they could have questioned whether the outcome could be socialism. Quite apart from the fact that socialism could only have been established as a world system, neither the economic nor the political conditions for a socialist revolution existed in Russia in 1917. Russia was an industrially backward country, with an overwhelmingly peasant population engaged in individual, rather than socialised, production. The workers and peasants of Russia certainly were discontented, but wanted "Peace, Bread and Land" (as the slogans put it) rather than socialism properly-understood.

To be fair, those who supported the Bolshevik coup d'etat because they believed it to have been a soviet or workers' council revolution did eventually - by about 1921 - come to recognise the real nature of the Bolshevik regime as a minority dictatorship forced by economic circumstances to continue the development of capitalism in Russia. But these "Left Communists" (or "Council Communists" as some of them later called themselves) still continued to believe in workers' councils as the form of working class organisation for establishing socialism.

One man, however, was not taken in by "sovietism": Julius Martov. Martov was one of the second generation of Russian Social Democrats who, at the turn of the century, worked to build up the Social Democratic movement inside Russia. With Plekhanov, Lenin and others he was one of the editors of the journal Iskra which had been launched in 1900 to counter the nebulous theories of "economism". When, however, the Iskra group, together with the rest of Russian Social Democracy, split over the organisation question Martov was amongst the minority (or "Mensheviks", from the Russian word for minority) who opposed Lenin's proposal for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries which was supported by a majority (or "Bolsheviks"). Martov favoured the traditional Social Democratic idea of a mass, open - and, let it be admitted, reformist - workers' party. Unlike most Mensheviks, however, Martov was an opponent of the first world war, being a member of the small group of "Internationalists" who took up a working-class position on this issue. He was a respected writer (even by Lenin) on Marx and socialist theory and, indeed, it was because of his criticism of the Bolshevik regime from a Marxian point of view that he was forced into exile in 1922, where he died a year later.

Some of the articles he wrote in the period 1919-23 were published in English translation in 1939 under the title The State and the Socialist Revolution (2). Reading these articles it is easy to see why he was such an embarrassment to the Bolshevik government. Not for one moment was he taken in by their claims that the "soviet regime" represented the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as envisaged by Marx (3). For him, it was a cover for the dictatorship, albeit revolutionary, of the Bolshevik Party.

It is instructive to see why the Bolsheviks were, for a few years, advocates of workers' councils. The "constitutional' basis for their seizure of power in November 1917 had been a decision of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to depose the Provisional Government of Kerensky and set up instead a "Provisional Workers and Peasants Government". Thus the Bolsheviks popularised the slogan, in the rest of Europe as well as in Russia, of "all power to the soviets" (i.e., workers' councils). After they had dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 they were forced, in order to justify this action, to step up their propaganda in favour of the soviets as an alternative to parliament. The election of a Constituent Assembly, which would decide the future constitution of Russia, had long been a demand of all Russian revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks. Elections, even though held after the Bolsheviks take-over of power, gave the Bolsheviks only a quarter of the seats, a majority going to the peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries. Lenin gave a number of reasons why the Assembly had had to be dissolved such as out-of-date electoral lists and a split in the Social Revolutionary party between the presentation of candidates and the election. But all these could have been remedied by fresh elections. This the Bolsheviks wished to avoid since they were fully aware that the result would be more or less the same. They determined to hold on to power, while still wishing to be regarded as democrats. Hence Lenin proclaimed that the soviet system was a higher form of democracy than the "bourgeois" parliamentary system.

Martov knew this to be hypocrisy. Lenin favoured the soviet rather than the parliamentary system because he knew that he could get a majority under the former but not the latter - a sure sign, we may add, that the soviet system was not more representative or democratic than the election of a central assembly by universal, direct, equal and secret ballot.

The reason for this was that the soviets - the soviets as they really existed in revolutionary Russia as opposed to the ideal workers' councils of Left Communist theory - as loose makeshift bodies were easily manipulable by a well-organised group such as were the professional revolutionaries of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin's leadership. Indeed it could be said that it was precisely because they were the best-organised and disciplined group that the Bolsheviks finally emerged as the government of revolutionary Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist regime - and they came to power by successfully manipulating the soviets.

The soviet system served the Bolsheviks' purpose because elections to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets were neither universal nor direct nor secret. The Congress was composed of delegates from local soviets who were in their turn delegates from local factories. Its members were thus only indirectly elected. Urban areas were over-represented. There were no set procedures for the election of the delegates to the local soviets; in most cases they would have been chosen by a show of hands at a general assembly of the workforce of a factory, with all the drawbacks of this method of election.

We mention these points not to defend parliamentary democracy but to show how the soviet system was far from being the highest form of political democracy.

It is of course a reasonable point to say that in a revolutionary situation such as existed in Russia in 1917 democratic perfection was not to be expected. The soviets were only makeshift representative organisations which had come into being precisely because working class opinion had been denied expression under the Tsarist regime. They thus played a useful role, filling a void until such time as a more permanent, and structured, system of representation could be set up. To praise their makeshift, unstructured character as being a sign of their ultra-democratic nature is to make a virtue out of necessity and to forget that this made not just for flexibility but also meant that it was easier for a determined minority to manipulate them.

A second argument put forward by the Bolsheviks in favour of the soviet system was that it gave power to the more determined revolutionary elements in Russia whereas to have let power pass into the hands of a parliamentary government responsible to a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage would have led to a slowing-down of the revolutionary process. This is undoubtedly true, but it shows clearly that the Russian revolution was essentially a bourgeois rather than a socialist revolution.

The socialist revolution can only be a revolution carried out consciously by the immense working-class majority acting in their own interests. In these circumstances any system of representation - whether soviets or parliament - would give a majority for the revolution. This is not necessarily the case during a bourgeois revolution, however, where the revolutionaries can find themselves impeded by the lack of revolutionary will of the masses. Martov describes a typical bourgeois revolution thus:

"The role of active factor in the overturn belonged to minorities of the social classes in whose interest the revolution developed. These minorities exploited the confused discontent and the sporadic explosions of anger arising among scattered and socially inconsistent elements within the revolutionary class. They guided the latter in the destruction of the old social forms. In certain cases, the active leader minorities had to use the power of their concentrated energy in order to shatter the inertia of the elements they tried to wield for revolutionary purposes. Therefore, these active leader minorities sometimes made efforts - often successful efforts - to repress the passive resistance of the manipulated elements, when the latter refused to move forward toward the broadening and deepening of the revolution. The dictatorship of an active revolutionary minority, a dictatorship that tended to be terrorist, was the normal coming-to-a-head of the situation in which the old social order had confined the popular mass, now called on by the revolutionaries to forge their own destiny". (The State and the Socialist Revolution, p. 16).

That an enlightened minority of revolutionists were justified in ignoring the views of the unenlightened majority in order to carry through the revolution was an idea that had first made its appearance, in the form of Jacobinism, during the French bourgeois revolution. It was inherited by utopian Communists such as Buonarotti, Weitling and Blanqui. And it was, as Martov points out, an element in Bolshevik thinking too.

The Bolsheviks supported the soviet system because it enabled them, as a determined revolutionary minority, to come to power:

"The 'soviet regime' becomes the means of bringing into power and maintaining in power a revolutionary minority which claims to defend the interests of a majority, though the latter has not recognised these interests as its own, though this majority has not attached itself sufficiently to these interests to defend them with all its energy and determination." (p. 19).

This, Martov goes on, applied equally to the partisans of the soviet idea (workers' councils) outside of Russia. They too saw workers' councils as a short-cut to power, as a means of by-passing the need to have majority socialist understanding amongst the working class before trying to overthrow capitalism:

"The mystery of the 'soviet regime' is now deciphered. We see now how an organism that is supposedly created by the specific peculiarities of a labor movement corresponding to the highest development of capitalism is revealed to be, at the same time, suitable to the needs of countries knowing neither large capitalist production, nor a powerful bourgeoisie, nor a proletariat that has evolved through the experiences of the class struggle.

"In other words, in the advanced countries, the proletariat resorts, we are told, to the soviet form of the dictatorship as soon as its elan toward the social revolution strikes against the impossibility of realizing its power in any other way than through the dictatorship of a minority, a minority within the proletariat itself.

"The thesis of the 'finally discovered form', the thesis of the political form that, belonging to the specific circumstances of the imperialist phase of capitalism, is said to be the only form that can realize the social enfranchisement of the proletariat, constitutes the historically necessary illusion by whose effect the revolutionary section of the proletariat renounces its belief in its ability to draw behind it the majority of the population of the country and resuscitates the idea of the minority dictatorship of the Jacobins in the very form used by the bourgeois revolution of the 18th century. Must we recall here that this revolutionary method has been repudiated by the working class to the extent that it has freed itself from its heritage of petty-bourgeois revolutionism?" (p. 21-22).

The view that a revolutionary minority could and should establish its dictatorship in order to try to introduce socialism is of course a denial of the basic principle upheld by Marx that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". That this view should be popular amongst revolutionaries in Russia was no coincidence. For, as we have seen, the Russian revolution - as the process of overthrowing, root and branch, the Tsarist social order - was essentially bourgeois. The soviets had a role to play in this bourgeois revolution: to allow the determined revolutionary minority to come to power. After noting how in July 1917, when the Congress of Soviets was dominated by the vacillating Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, Lenin had thought of abandoning the slogan "all power to the soviets" in favour of an open demand for "all power to the Bolshevik Party", Martov goes on:

"The consequent course of the Russian revolution cured Lenin of his passing 'lack of faith'. The soviets fulfilled the role expected of them. The rising tide of bourgeois revolutionary enthusiasm set in motion the worker and peasant masses, washing away their 'meanness'. Lifted by the wave, the Bolsheviks possessed themselves of the government apparatus. Then the role of the insurrectionary element came to an end. The Moor had accomplished his task. The State that came into power with the aid of the 'Power of the Soviets' became the 'Soviet Power'. The Communist minority incorporated into this State made itself secure, once for always, against a possible return of the spirit of 'meanness'" (p. 28).

The coming to power of the Bolsheviks did not represent, as they themselves believed, progress from Russia's bourgeois revolution to its "proletarian revolution". It was, says Martov, echoing what Marx had said about the so-called Reign of Terror in France in 1794, "a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself". Commenting on the passage in Marx's 1847 article in which this phrase occurred (4), Martov says:

"One might say that Marx wrote this specially for the benefit of those people who consider the simple fact of a fortuitous conquest of power by the democratic small bourgeoisie and the proletariat as proof of the maturity of society for the socialist revolution. But it may also be said that he wrote this specially for the benefit of those socialists who believe that never in the course of a revolution that is bourgeois in its objectives can there occur a possibility permitting the political power to escape from the hands of the bourgeoisie and pass to the democratic masses. One may say that Marx wrote this also for the benefit of those socialists who consider utopian the mere idea of such a displacement of power and who do not realize that this phenomenon is 'only a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself', that it is a factor assuring, under certain conditions, the most complete and radical suppression of the obstacles rising in the way of this bourgeois revolution" (p. 59-60).

It only remains to add that, unlike in 1794 in France where the determined minority were replaced by the traditional bourgeoisie after having done their dirty work for them, in Russia the determined minority remained in power and that it was from amongst their ranks that evolved the ruling and exploiting class of the capitalist Russia they had no alternative but to develop.

So, from a bourgeois revolutionary point of view, the Bolsheviks were justified in maintaining their minority dictatorship. Where they were wrong was in imagining, and propagating amongst the workers of the rest of Europe, that this had something to do with "socialism". Their sympathisers in the West, including the Left and Council Communists, were equally mistaken in imagining that the soviets (or workers' councils), which had served as a cover for the Bolshevik minority to come to power, were the form of working class organisation for socialism in advanced capitalist countries.

Certainly, workers' councils or something akin to them, as workplace organisations of the workers, are bound to arise in the course of the socialist revolution. But to claim that they are the only possible form of working class self-organisation is to go too far, is in fact to make a fetish of a mere organisational form. What is important in working class self-organisation, however, is not the form but the principle.

The principles of democratic self-organisation - which are in fact democratic principles generally - can be applied, given a sufficient democratic consciousness, to any working class organisation, including even organisation to contest elections and to control central parliaments and local councils. There is no reason whatsoever in theory why a workers' socialist political party could not be organised on the same basis as has been proposed by Left Communists for workers' councils: no leadership and so no division into leaders and led; the candidates, including those elected, just like the delegates to the ideal workers' council, could be subject to continual control and, if need be, instantly recalled; they could be strictly mandated to fight for socialism and not to pursue reforms of capitalism. In other words, there is no necessary connexion between the principle of democratic working class self-organisation and organisation at the place of work. As stated, what is important is not the form of organisation but the democratic - and socialist - consciousness of the working class. This can express itself in a great variety of organisational forms, including a mass political party. Indeed, this was the form Marx himself expected it to take.

Martov, whose writings are unfortunately not generally known, must be given credit for having demystified a little the idea of workers' councils by showing the essentially bourgeois revolutionary role that the soviets played in Russia in 1917.

Adam Buick

(1) Common ownership is not the same as State ownership. Since the State is a feature only of class societies State ownership is a form of sectional or class monopoly of the means of production. In socialism the State is replaced by the democratic administration of social affairs, including production which would be directed solely to satisfying human needs, with the resulting disappearance of production for sale, profits, wages, money, banks and all the other paraphernalia of buying and selling.
(2) The State and the Socialist Revolution, translated by Integer, International Review, New York, 1939. Integer gives as the source of the articles translated:

"The first two sections of this book, The Ideology of Sovietism and The Conquest of the State, were written early in 1919. They form a compact whole and should be read as such. The first essay appeared serially in the periodical Mysl of Kharkov. The introductory section of the second was first published in the issues of July 8 and September 1, 1921, of the Sozialisticheski Vestnik (Berlin). The remainder of the second essay appeared for the first time in Mirovoi Bolshevism (World Bolshevism), Berlin, 1923, from the text of which the entire present translation was made. The final section, entitled Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was first published in 1918 in the Workers International of Moscow, edited by Martov".

(3) For Marx the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was the political form of the period during which the working class would be transforming capitalism into socialism. He advocated that it take the form of a fully democratised State controlled by the working class. See H. Draper 'Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', New Politics, Vol. I, Number 4, Summer 1962.
(4) "Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritische Moral". A recent English translation of the passage in question reads:

"If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, this will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1974, so long as in the course of history, in its movement', the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule" (Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Penguin Books, London, 1963, p. 244).

FURTHER READING:
The Julius Martov page at the Marxist Internet Archive
Review of Martov's 'The State and the Socialist Revolution' that originally appeared in the Socialist Standard in 1940.

Socialism, sudden and gradual change (2002)

From the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

In modern times the idea of a new society, or a change from capitalism to socialism, goes back to the turn of the 19th century when it was discussed by utopian writers. These ideas were developed by Marx and Engels as a political and economic criticism of the capitalist system and in 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, they set out a revolutionary programme for achieving this change. The pamphlet became a great influence on the growth of working class movements when the many Communist, Social Democratic and Labour Parties were founded. Some were eventually successful in winning power and forming governments. Even now, in China, a so-called Communist government wields power over nearly a quarter of the world's population.

As we now look back over the struggles of countless millions of working people throughout the world during the l9th and 20th centuries, which were dedicated to the idea of building a new society, it is important to ask what has been achieved? And if the aims that inspired all these movements have not been realised, what went wrong? It has to be accepted that they made no progress towards a socialist society, and it should now be asked why the methods and policies of these movements were doomed to failure.

Though it was a great influence it would be unjust to blame the failures on the Communist Manifesto. However, whilst we may still admire that great historical document we should also accept that the revolutionary programme it set out was fatally flawed. One problem with this programme was that it envisaged that socialism would be established after a period of time following the capture of power by a working class government:

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as a ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."

So the expropriation of the capitalists was to take place gradually and would include the continued use of such features of capitalism as money, rent from land, income tax, private property and a national bank with state capital. It was in effect, a recipe for state capitalism.

A process of change, by degrees, from capitalism to socialism is not possible. This would have to assume that at each stage there would be, side by side, wage labour producing commodities for sale on the markets with people co-operating voluntarily to produced goods solely for needs. It would also have to assume that sales of goods would operate side by side with free access to goods. But if the function of state capital was that it should be invested in labour, machinery and materials with a view to its circulation and accumulation throughout production and the sales of commodities, then this could only have resulted from the exploitation of workers. That this function of capital would gradually disappear from the system, and voluntary co-operation with free access to goods would displace wage labour producing commodities for sale, is, once again, just not credible.

Taking the works of Marx as a whole, we can understand that the productive relationships of capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive and cannot operate together. In fact, a capitalist basis compels each part of the productive system to be profitable or at least solvent, and if they are not they tend to drop out because they are not viable. These are the pressures of economic selection which tend to maintain the system as an exclusively capitalist structure.

It is true that later in his political life Marx came to see the revolutionary programme of the Communist Manifesto differently, but by that time the idea of nationalisation and state control as providing a road to socialism had become the received wisdom of working class movements and tragically, it all was to lead to failure, disaster and disillusion. It was the founder members of the Socialist Party who insisted that the change from capitalism to socialism could only be achieved by a majority of socialists taking democratic control, bringing in the common ownership of the means of production and commencing the organisation of socialist society from that point.

On the face of it, this suggests that the change from capitalism to socialism would be a sudden leap from one social system to another. But, seen against the background of continuous development and the particular factors that would be involved, it would not be a total social change so much as a change in the social relationships through which society is operated. This would be the new basis on which people would reorganise society to meet their needs.

An example of a "sudden" and far-reaching change in social relationships was that carried out by the Bolsheviks as part of their state capitalist revolution in 1917. Not the nationalisation of industry and manufacture, which was not so much a basic change as a transfer of private ownership to the benefits of monopoly and control for a new class of state bosses. But, in the countryside, the Bolsheviks destroyed the landed aristocracy overnight. These feudal relationships had existed for centuries and involved millions of people over the entire land mass. This destruction of an entire class and its corresponding mode of agricultural production was enacted at 2.30 in the morning on 9 November 1917.

But this is not to suggest that this sudden change can be explained solely in terms of the events of 9 November 1917. Although the power of the landed aristocracy had remained barely unaltered for centuries, the pressures on it from a wide range of external sources had been gradually intensifying. In this broader context, the sudden destruction of the landed aristocracy in Russia is explained in relation to the slow pace of social development during the preceding century including the failure to develop more efficient capitalist agriculture compared with other European Powers. This lack of proportionate development meant that in the First World War Russia was unable to sustain its war effort on equal terms. The failures of the Russian Army, the bankruptcy of the state, and the desperate condition of the Russian masses in poverty and famine led to social and political breakdown, which gave the Bolsheviks their opportunity to seize power. So the sudden changes enacted by the Bolsheviks in l917 were the outcome of these tensions which acted as a more gradual build up of predisposing factors. Although the circumstances would be totally different this may be a useful analogy in considering sudden and gradual change as elements in a socialist revolution.

At the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels believed that one of the limitations on what could be achieved was the relative lack of capitalist development. This meant that, though the political and economic arrangements were vague, the first thing the working class would have to do with its "political supremacy" would be to "increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible." But 150 years later this has been massively achieved by capitalism itself. In fact it has done much more.

A key concept in the materialist view of change is what Marx referred to as the conflict between the "material productive forces of society" and the "existing relations of production". Applying this to capitalist society, its productive relations of class ownership, wage labour and capital have not changed over more than two hundred years. These define capitalism as a system and cannot change. But its productive forces have changed enormously. These have increased and spread to every corner of the globe to become a world system. Means of production of every kind, transport and advanced technique have been developed together with instant world communications, administration and institutions. These developments over time now pre-dispose the ease with which a majority of socialists could stop the operation of capitalism and immediately commence the organisation of socialist society.

These changes have altered the conditions in which the work for socialism is carried on. For example, the existence of great powers of production which cannot be used for the benefit of all people because they are constrained to serve the interests of a few in a profit system sharpens the conflict between human needs and the prevailing class relations. We are also able to learn from the political experience of failure. Mainly the disastrous idea that socialism can be established over time by a "working class government" through nationalisation and state control.

In practical terms the change from capitalism to socialism will not mean the introduction of anything materially new so much as the immediate removal of redundant features of an existing structure of production and social organisation. The establishment of common ownership does not and could not imply a sudden transformation of all the material processes of living. There could be no sudden change in the actual work processes of people in mining, industry, manufacture, transport and distribution, farming, building and construction, energy supply, health services, etc. All these people would carry on with what they are doing but within the new relationships of voluntary co-operation. From this point a period of rapid re-organisation and development would also be commenced after production and administration has been released from the economic constraints of capitalism. This will necessarily take time. Seen in this practical perspective the change from capitalism to socialism can be seen as combining elements of both short and long-term change.

Pieter Lawrence

World View: Redefining War (2001)

From the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

George W. Bush has said that the best way to keep "peace" is to redefine war on his own terms. Our own war against Bush and his ilk, the class war, needs no redefining.

Whatever the post-Taliban set-up in Afghanistan one thing is a forgone conclusion. Any new government will have to be ready to bow with supplicant's knee before the interests of US and in particular its oil hounds, paying back the support their military wing the US air force and US army afforded them. But by all accounts Afghanistan looks to be years away from any semblance of peace and order - which of course gives the US an ideal excuse to maintain a military presence in an oil rich region.

Whilst Tony Blair has been globetrotting, drumming up support for the US cause like some keen-to-impress US foreign secretary, there has been every sign that George W is attempting to fulfil his father's prophecy, mouthed during his presidential inaugural address all those years ago, that the 21st Century would be "another American century".

For anyone interested in US domestic politics, aware that George W could never sway an electorate by the power of his words, it perhaps came as no surprise to learn that he could so blatantly repay his corporate backers and grassroots supporters so early into his administration. Within months of coming to office the gun lobbyists, oil companies, and defence contractors had their services recognised for the world to see. The 1997 Kyoto protocol on emission reductions is now history. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - the cornerstone of all arms-control negotiations during and since the cold war is now only fit to wipe the presidential arse with, and down the proverbial toilet went the comprehensive test-ban treaty and the UN treaty on the control of small arms. Bush even denounced the recent UN convention on slavery.

On 25 July, the US scuppered a decade of international negotiations by announcing in Geneva its intention not to back a draft protocol to reinforce the biological weapons and toxin convention, which was initially signed in 1972. Its reason? Such a move threatened US commercial interests. The protocol would have included verification measures that would have given international inspectors access to laboratories in the signatory countries. Perhaps the US has some stronger reason for denying inspections at thousands of its defence plants and biotechnology sites. What on earth are its commercial interests that it can nonchalantly destroy a treaty signed in the interest of humanity? What is the US developing? And wasn't it the US that was so insistent that an international scientific inspectorate search behind every Iraqi door capable of being locked?

In effect, President Bush has told the world: "Fuck off, it's US first. The world will be ruled by force and on behalf of US corporate interests".

The evidence has been ever present since 11 September. Colin Powell, when asked to publicly provide evidence of bin Laden's links to the attack on New York and Washington, avoided the issue by claiming such a disclosure would be a breach of national security. When the Taliban wished to negotiate, offering to hand bin Laden to a third party, Bush replied: "I said no negotiations and I mean no negotiations." And while the US is keen to point out it has a "coalition" of support against the Taliban it has bombed Afghanistan virtually unilaterally, except for a few token cruise missiles fired from a British submarine (a doggie-snack for the ever-loyal poodle) on the first day of the attack upon Afghanistan.

It is now not only full steam ahead with the prized National Missile Defence (NMD) system with a target date for the deployment of the system set for 2005 (See March 2001 Socialist Standard), but plans are now afoot in the US to develop a space bomber that could destroy targets on the other side of the globe within 30 minutes; the bomber travelling 15 times faster than conventional bombers, able to hit a target from 60 miles up and paving the way for a new era of stratospheric warfare. And research is ongoing into direct energy weaponry, to be precise, the future use of air-based lasers and space-based lasers, able to hit even moving targets from 400 miles away at the speed of light.

NMD, however is clearly a sign that the US is moving towards becoming a more aggressive and threatening military power. Experts now maintain that the issue is not so much whether an anti-missile system is feasible or desirable, but what kind of diplomatic and military policies the world's only superpower would pursue from beneath the relative safety of a nuclear umbrella. It seems less the case that NMD is about protecting the USA from 'rogue states', and more the likelihood that such a sophisticated system of defence will ensure the profits flow in the right direction and that the global schoolyard bully can streamline its protection racket, safe in the knowledge it will meet little resistance.

Back in 1992, Paul Walfowitz (now Deputy Secretary of Defence) and Lew Libby (Bush's National Security Adviser) formulated ideas which were presented as a confidential Pentagon document by none other than vice-president Dick Cheney:

"The US must hold global power and a monopoly of force. It will then protect the new order while allowing others to pursue their legitimate interests as Washington defines them. The US must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership, or seeking to overturn the established political order, or aspiring to a larger regional or global role . . . we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but also those of our allies and friends. The US alone will determine what are those wrongs and where they are to be selectively righted." (quoted by Noam Chomsky in Year 501).

This is an extremely revealing document - a document that is also very worrying. And it's not a one-off. There are others, take for instance the US Space Command's document "Vision 2020" which, now five years old, well telegraphs US designs for the 21st Century, suggesting that globalisation will lead to greater misery, to a lot more "have-nots" with an axe to grind and who will have to kept in line:

"Although unlikely to be challenged by a global peer competitor, the United States will continue to be challenged regionally. The globalisation of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between the haves and have-nots. Accelerating rates of technological development will be increasingly driven by commercial interests not the military. Increased weapons lethality and precision will lead to new operational doctrines . . . only military dominance will protect US interests and investments."

In 1998, the US government report "The Long-Term Plan" reiterated this notion of there being trouble ahead from the dispossessed:

"The US will remain global power and exert global leadership. Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality of life, contributing to unrest in developing countries . . . The gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' will widen, creating regional unrest. The US will remain the only nation able to project power globally."

It is a fair bet that such sentiments have been prominent components of the US worldview for some years - at least since 1945 and definitely since 1989 and the collapse of Russian-style state capitalism. Moreover, it's no bold assertion to suggest that China is the chief enemy in waiting - not the allegedly "rogue states" such as Iraq and North Korea, nor the threat of international terrorism which has really been a US favourite since the days of Reagan - for the simple reason that China is an economic and military power on a collision course with the US over domination of the Pacific. And if the US learns anything from its military history it is to get in first - hence the dire necessity of a fully functioning NMD.

At the beginning of July this year, only days before the New York Times announced Bush's plans to ditch the comprehensive test ban treaty, his administration enquired of nuclear laboratories just how soon they could begin testing again - clearly intent on breaching agreements made 16 months earlier by 187 countries who had negotiated steps to strengthen the non-proliferation treaty.

On the 14 July, the US launched a missile from the Marshall Islands. Twenty-nine minutes later a second missile, launched from Vanderburg, California, intercepted it at an altitude of 144 miles. The success not only strengthened Republican arguments for a competent star wars system, but was the order for similar multi-million dollar tests to be carried out every month and helped justify the mobilisation of contractors into Fort Greeley, Alaska, to begin foundation work on a new missile silo.

Just over two years ago George W Bush, gave a speech at Charleston, South Carolina. He spoke of the "contagious spread of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction" and hence the necessity of strengthening the unrivalled military power of the US. He then boldly announced that "the best way to keep peace is to redefine war on our terms." Which just about says it all - "to redefine war on our terms." Forget all the crap that George W's father mouthed when he became president. The "peace dividend" that was supposed to replace cold war hostilities and benefit all after the collapse of "communism" was as fictitious as fairies. The agenda now is as it was then and 50 years previous - US global domination in the military and economic fields and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

As socialists we certainly do not need to redefine our war. The war we must fight to end the insanity and horror Bush and Co would hurl us headlong into is the Class War. And this can not be fought with missiles, but something more powerful - our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the majority exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

Are you with us? Don't take too long to think of a reply - the doomsday clock really is ticking.

John Bissett

For more information about the World Socialist Party of the United States, please click on the picture below:

Venezuela and Chile (2006)

Film Review from the forthcoming October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Video by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. 74 minutes. Available from Power Pictures - Screen Scene, 41 Upper Mount St, Dublin 2. http://www.chavezthefilm.com

In 1992 Hugo Chavez, a junior parachute officer, tried to seize power in Venezuela in a traditional South American coup. He failed and spent some time in jail. He then tried another way and in 1998 was elected President, with 56 percent of the votes cast; he was re-elected in 2000 with a 60 percent vote. In elections held to a constituent assembly in 1999 his supporters obtained 120 of the 131 seats.

Chavez is a populist nationalist and radical reformist not a socialist, but his programme of radical reforms and moving from private capitalism towards state capitalism threatened the vested interests of powerful private capitalist groups. According to anarchist and anti-parliamentarist theory, which says that even if power can be won via the ballot box for radical change it can't be retained, what should have happened next was that the powerful groups whose interests were threatened should stage a coup and unleash a bloody repression. As, for instance, in Chile in September 1973:

"Socialism cannot come through the Parliament. If we look at a country like Chile we can see why. In 1973 the people elected a moderate socialist government led by President Allende. This democratically-elected government was toppled by a CIA backed military coup. Repression followed in which the workers movement was smashed and thousands of militants lost their lives". (From "What is Anarchism?")

(This statement is both factually wrong and logically flawed. Allende became president in 1970 and so was not immediately overthrown as is suggested. And if he was a "moderate socialist", i.e. a mere reformist like the Labour and Social Democratic parties of Europe and Australasia, there have been plenty of other such governments, which have not been toppled in a coup; in fact, most haven't. Having said this, socialism cannot come through electing such governments but for quite other reasons than that they come to power through elections.)

On 11 April 2002, true to anarchist theory, a group of top Venezuelan army officers and business leaders did stage a coup. Chavez was arrested and taken to a secret destination where he was put under pressure to resign (he refused). It so happened that an Irish film crew, which had come to make a documentary about Chavez and Venezuela, was actually in the presidential palace at the time. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a fascinating and instructive record of how events unfolded over the next few days (together with material from the originally-planned film and lots of Spanish with sub-titles): the dejected ministers, the installation of the usurper president, the recapture of the palace by the presidential guard, the arrest of some of the plotters, the pro-Chavez street demonstrations and the return of Chavez two days later. He is still there.

So the coup failed. It failed because those who had voted for Chavez were prepared to take to the streets to back up their vote and because the bulk of the armed forces remained loyal to the constitution and the constitutionally-elected president. The anarchist theory that power obtained by the ballot box to effect radical changes can't be retained was disproved by experience.

What happened confirms rather our view that a socialist majority can both win and retain power via the ballot box if that majority is sufficiently organised and determined and if there is no question as to their democratic legitimacy. If pro-capitalist elements were to stage a coup after a socialist election victory it could prove to be even more short-lived than in Venezuela in April 2002. The slogan that anarchists and other chant on demonstrations that "the people united can never be defeated" is actually true, to back up an electoral victory too.

The film is being shown at the Anarchist Bookfair in London this month*. It will be interesting to see how they will explain away the events it records. Perhaps they'll change the text of their leaflet to:

"Socialism may be able to come through the Parliament. If we look at a country like Venezuela we cannot see why not. In 1998 and 2000 the people elected a radical reformist government led by President Chavez. An attempt was made in 2002 to topple this democratically elected government but it failed because the government enjoyed majority popular support and the loyalty of the armed forces".

Adam Buick

*Correction:
The film was actually shown at the 2005 Anarchist Bookfair. The general point being made still stands, though.

Further Reading:
Hugo Chavez: revolutionary socialist or left-wing reformist?