Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 125

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 125th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1551 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalism or Socialism?

A Man Before His Time - Gerrard Winstanley

The Myth of Soviet “Socialism”

Quote for the week:

"Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old form of slavery only in its impersonality, its annihilation of all humane relations with the slave." Leo Tolstoy, What to do?, 1887.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Smash Cash (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article was originally published in 1968 in issue 17 of the counter-culture magazine, Oz.

At the time of writing its author, David Ramsay Steele, was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This transcript is taken from the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard, which was a special issue given over to marking the hundredth anniversary of the SPGB.

400BC: Hey all you thirsty people, though you've got no money, come to the water. Buy corn without money and eat. Buy wine without money and milk without price. (Isaiah).

1652: There shall be no buying and selling . . . If any man or family want grain or other provisions, they may go to the storehouse and fetch without money. (Gerrard Winstantley).

1968: The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay
media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help and pay toilets. A society which works towards and actively promotes the concept of "full unemployment" . . . (Yippie election leaflet).

Abolition of Money! Down through the ages this wild and visionary slogan has been whispered by a subversive few. Ever since human beings discovered cash, they have hated it and tried to rid themselves of it whilst their own actions have kept it alive. In this respect, money is like syphilis.

Today the whisper has become a shout though still the shout of a tiny minority. Tomorrow it will be the roar of the crowd, the major topic of discussion in every pub and coffee house, factory and office.

The abolition of money is an ancient dream, the most radical demand of every social revolution for centuries past. We must not suppose that it is therefore destined to remain a Utopia, that the wheel will simply turn full circle once more. Today there is an entirely new element in the situation: Plenty.

All previous societies have been rationed societies, based on scarcity of food, clothing and shelter. The modern world is also a society of scarcity, but with a difference. Today's shortages are unnecessary; today's scarcity is artificial. More than that: scarcity achieved at the expense of strenuous effort, ingenious organization and the most sophisticated planning.

The world is haunted by a spectre the spectre of Abundance. Only by planned waste and destruction on a colossal scale can the terrifying threat of Plenty be averted.

Money means rationing. It is only useful when there are shortages to be rationed. No one can buy or sell air: it's free because there is plenty of it around. Food, clothing, shelter and entertainment should be free as air. But the means of rationing scarcity themselves keep the scarcity in existence. The only excuse for money is that there is not enough wealth to go round but it is the money system which makes sure there cannot be enough to go round. By abolishing money we create the conditions where money is unnecessary.

If we made a list of all those occupations which would be unnecessary in a Moneyless World, jobs people now have to do which are entirely useless from a human point of view, we might begin as follows: Customs officer, Security guard, Locksmith, Wages clerk, Tax assessor, Advertising man, Stockbroker, Insurance agent, Ticket puncher, Salesman, Accountant, Slot machine emptier, Industrial spy, Bank manager, before we realized the magnitude of what was involved. And these are merely the jobs which are wholly and utterly useless. Nearly all occupations involve something to do with costing or selling. Now we should see that the phrase "Abolition of Money" is just shorthand for immense, sweeping, root and branch changes in society. The abolition of money means the abolition of wages and profits, nations and frontiers, armies and prisons. It means that all work will be entirely voluntary.

Of course, the itemizing of those jobs which are financial does not end the catalogue of waste. Apart from astronomical sums spent on the Space Race, and the well known scandal of huge arms production, we have to realise that all production is carried on purely for profit. The profit motive often runs completely counter to human need. 'Built-in obsolescence' (planned shoddiness), the restrictive effects of the patents system, the waste of effort through duplication of activities by competing firms or nations these are just a few of the ways in which profits cause waste.

What this amounts to is that ninety per cent (a conservative estimate) of effort expended by human beings today is entirely pointless, does not the slightest bit of good to anybody. So it is quite ridiculous to talk about "how to make sure people work if they're not paid for it". If less than ten per cent of the population worked, and the other ninety per cent stayed at home watching telly, we'd be no worse off than we are now.

But there would be no need for them to watch telly all the time, because without the profit system work could be made enjoyable. Playing tennis, writing poems or climbing mountains are not essentially any more enjoyable than building houses, growing food or programming computors. The only reason we think of some things as 'leisure' and others as 'work' is because we get used to doing some things because we want to and others because we have to. Prostitutes despise love. We are all prostitutes. In a Moneyless World work would be recreation and art. That work which is unavoidably unhealthy or unpleasant, such as coalmining, would be automated immediately. Needless to say, the only reason these things aren't done by machines at present is because it is considered more important to lower the costs of the employer than to lower the unhappiness of his slaves.

The money system is obsolete and antihuman. So what should we do about it? In years to come, with the increasing education and increasing misery of modern life, together with growing plenty, we can expect the Abolition of Money to be treated more and more as a serious issue, to be inserted into more and more heads. The great mass of individuals will first ridicule, then dare to imagine (Fantasy is the first act of rebellion Freud), then overthrow.

In the meantime, as well as propagating the notion of a Moneyless World, those of us who see its necessity have a responsibility to sort our own ideas out, in order that we may present an intelligible and principled case. We must stop thinking of the Moneyless World as an 'ultimate aim' with no effect upon our actions now. We must realise that the Abolition of Money is THE immediate demand. A practical proposition and an urgent necessity not something to be vaguely 'worked towards'.

Unfortunately those who want the Moneyless World frequently wade in a mire of mystification. Above all it is necessary to understand the workings of this society, capitalist society (Moscow, Washington and Peking are all in the same boat) if we are to know how to destroy it.

For example there is a commonly held view that Automation is going to settle all our worries, that money will expire automatically as part of a "natural process of evolution". This is quite wrong. As pointed out above, this society only automates to increase profits and for no other reason. Employers even take machines out and put workers back in if they find that labour-power is cheaper. Any gain from automation these days is more than cancelled out by the waste explosion. Do not imagine that the slight increases in living standards of the last twenty years are the beginning of a smooth transition to Abundance. Another huge world slump is approaching.

A different illusion, also popular, is that cash can be abolished by example, by opening giveaway shops or by starting small moneyless communities which are parasitical upon the main body of society. These experiments accomplish little. Those people, for instance, who open stores to give and receive books without payment, face a predictable result: a large stock of lousy books.

These projects stem partly from a belief that we need to prove something. Relax. We don't need to prove anything. The defenders of this insane society, it is they who stand accused, they who have to supply the arguments arguments for poverty and enslavement in a world of Plethora!

All theoretical constructions which relate to wages, prices, profits and taxes are ghosts from the past, as absurdly outdated as the quibbles about how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. 'Incomes policy' is irrelevant we want the abolition of incomes. "Fighting crime" is irrelevant we want the abolition of the law. 'Workers' control' is irrelevant we want the abolition of 'workers'. 'Black Power' is irrelevant we want the abolition of power over people. 'The national interest' is irrelevantwe want the abolition of nations.

And let no one raise the banal cry: what are you going to put in their place? As though we would say to a research scientist: "And when you've cured Cancer, what are you going to put in its place?"

Then there is the myth of the small-scale. We cannot go back to being peasants and we should not want to. Keeping several thousand million people alive on this planet necessitates railways, oil wells, steel mills. Only by intricate organization and large-scale productive techniques can we maintain our Abundance. Do not be afraid of machines. It is not machines which enslave, but Capital, in whose service machines are employed. McLuhan represents the beginning of the New Consciousness of man-made artifacts. Computors are warm and cuddly creatures. We will have a beautiful time with them.

Many of the worst errors which retard the development of the New Consciousness, the Consciousness of Plenty, are to be found in Herbert Lomas' piece on "The Workless Society" in International Times 43. This at least has the merit that someone is putting forward a case for the removal of money in specific terms. Unfortunately, they are specific non-starters.

According to Herbert Lomas, a political party is to be formed which will take power and proceed as follows. Useless workers in industry will be gradually be laid off and paid for not working. The process will be extended until money can be abolished. In the meantime, those being paid for doing nothing will do what they like. To begin with many of them might play Bingo; eventually more and more would aim at higher things.

What is wrong with this projection? Many things, but chiefly two. First, it fails to take account of the systematic nature of society. Second, it assumes that present-day society exhibits a harmony of interests.

In the first place, Lomas says: "Why are these people working? They are not working for the sake of production, for the truth is that if they were removed production could be increased beyond measure". He concludes that they are working because of their attitudes, the attitudes of their employers, the attitudes of the rest of society. But the fact of the matter is that these workers are working for the sake of production not the production of goods but the production of profits. The reason why things are "made with great ingenuity to wear out" is not because of the attitudes of the people involved. The management may think it's criminal but they are paid to optimize profits. If they produced razor blades to last for centuries, the firm would go broke. It is not the attitudes which are crucial, but economic interests. If a teetotaller owns shares in a brewery, it does not make booze less potent.

Which brings us to the second point. Today's world is a jungle of conflicting vested interests. The Abolition of Money will represent the liberation of slaves, yes but also the dispossession of masters, i.e. the employing class. We cannot view the government as an impartial panel which looks after the best interests of everybody; it is an instrument used by one set of people to oppress another.

On one point Herbert Lomas is correct. The movement for the Abolition of Money must be political, because when we destroy money we destroy the basis of the power of our rulers. They are unlikely to take kindly to this, so we must organize politically to remove them.

For the moment though, what is needed is more discussion and more understanding. We must be confident that the movement will grow. We must think, argue, and think again but never lose consciousness of the one, simple, astounding fact: Plenty is here. The Moneyless World is not an ultimate millennium. We need it now.

David Ramsay Steele, OZ, 1968.

Greasy Pole: TV Debates - much ado about nothing (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the general election is to go down in history it will not be through encouraging any prospects for the vital revolutionary, invigoratingly therapeutic society – but for the leaders of the tedious, outworn and discredited parties surprising everyone by agreeing to display their reactionary absurdity in a televised confrontation. That is, supposing the debates ever happen; there is likely to be some time before the election and a mass of obstacles to be negotiated before the leaders' agreement has any meaning. There is, to begin with, the likelihood that the idea sprang from their panic, which convinced them that they had nothing to lose. For Gordon Brown there is the fear that the exposure of New Labour's blundering chaos will lead to their practically disappearing come polling day. David Cameron will be anxious that his gamble on trying to replace his party's Thatcherite reputation as the Nasty Party with one for being Caring Conservatives may not come off in time. And Nick Clegg must be suffering anxiety about the fate of his pose as the real alternative way or running capitalism – with the unasked-for help of Vince Cable – and the effect of any failure on his ambition to make him the new brand of British politics. A crisis on any one of these could fatally undermine the debates.

Rows
Meanwhile it is not only TV soap addicts who wonder why viewing time should be allocated to the debates when there is already face-to-face confrontation in Prime Minister's Questions. Can there, it may be asked, be anything more, anything different, to be said about trying to tame and administer this strife-torn, repressive society? One response might be that anyone devoted to the ructions of Coronation Street would find much to divert them in the weekly posturing and screeching in the Commons. But witnessing at first hand the behaviour of our law-makers at their work may be encouraging them to, in more than one sense, switch off. Which would mean the wastage of all the meticulously detailed preparation being poured into the debates – the jockeying and the intrigue, the anguished rows about who will speak when, who will moderate, be in the audience, decide where everyone sits, winds up the discussion...it will be more than just a matter of assuaging some massive egos. Then there will be the analyses, with all parties claiming to have won the debate even if they lost the vote. A lot of this will revolve around the hope, by each participant, for the kind of seminal exchanges in debates between the candidates in previous US Presidential Elections which were widely supposed to have crucially affected the result.

Kennedy vs Nixon
The first example of this was in 1960, when Kennedy ran for the Democrats against Richard Nixon – both of them hardened, ruthless political operators with a suitably determined machine looking after them. In the first of four debates, watched by 80 million people, Nixon took part although he was still recovering after hospital treatment for an infected knee injury. His appearance – weary, sick and pale – was made worse by his refusal to wear the usual make-up, which drew attention to his facial stubble. He seemed shifty and hesitant so that Kennedy, whose image was rested, fresh and healthy, impressed the millions of voters who preferred leaders who looked like that.

The following debates were not so damaging to Nixon and in any case it was doubtful whether his sorry appearance had any crucial effect on the election because Kennedy won by the smallest of margins – 0.1 per cent of the vote – and even at that there was strong evidence of fraud in Texas – where Vice Presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson held sway – and Illinois where Mayor Richard Daley could always get the vote out by hook or by crook. In any case Nixon, stubble and all, eventually bounced back, winning the Presidency in 1968 and then, emphatically, in 1972 until his being sucked down into the Watergate affair exposed how shallow and saleable are what our leaders like to call their morals.

Carter vs Reagan
Another, less startling, example was in the election of 1980 when Ronald Reagan presented as a relaxed and fluent ex-film actor (albeit mainly in B movies) against the anguished born-again christian President Carter. Reagan took to the debates like – well, like any seasoned Hollywood star. The media loved it when he dismissed Carter's attack on his record of voting, as Governor of California, against Medicare and Social Security benefits, with the contemptuous phrase “There you go again!” Reagan ran away with the election, with nearly 10 per cent more than Carter of the popular vote. This was called the “Reagan Revolution”, which ran into the following election and to some extent carried George H.W. Bush into the White House in 1988.

The debates, in America and here, are intended to promote the idea that leaders are crucially significant and that workers should vote for them and not for what they and their parties represent, in denial of the real experience which points to the leaders' impotence in face of the inexorable demands of capitalism. So when the debates are staged here we cannot look forward to anything more constructive, nor even interesting, than the customary, tedious drone in feeble response to the system's persistent crises. It may be that some wretched participant will try to wriggle out of a particularly difficult question by imitating the Reagan approach – Brown satirising Cameron covering his ineptitude in assumed sincerity; or Cameron raising a laugh with Brown's memories of being brought up as a son of the manse; or both of them savaging Clegg's ambition to be treated as more than a querulous upstart. In doleful times it might get us chuckling, amid our contempt for the exhausted excuses which, even now, are probably being written into the script.

Ivan

Pollution and profits

From the Socialist Courier blog

Every vote seeking politician in the world waxes elequent about the urgent need for a curb to be placed on global emmisions. They fly hither and thither across the world addressing congresses about their deep concern for the planet's future. Behind these vote catching antics however lies a more pressing problem - how to compete against international rivals in obtaining a larger share of the profits. At a recent meeting in Singapore those politician showed where their real priorities lie:

"A key element of the international plan to address climate change is in jeopardy after several of the most powerful nations failed to confirm a previous commitment to halve gas emissions by 2050. The Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum, which includes the US, China, Japan and Russia deleted their commitment from the final version of the official communiqué issued after a two-day meeting in Singapore. ...Most climate scientists believe that a 50 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2050 is the minimum needed to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic change." (London Times, 16 November)

For national governments to reduce industrial pollution would be economic suicide. Their costs would go up and they would not be able to compete with other nations that had not reduced their pollution. Inside capitalism in the battle between less pollution or more profits there is only one winner.

Richard Donnelly

Pathfinders: Socialism in the Space Age (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone over the age of forty-five will remember very clearly two things from their school days. One was the moon landings. The other was the clear and certain knowledge that whatever it was that killed off the dinosaurs would remain eternally one of life’s unanswerable mysteries.

When in 1980 the geologists Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of iridium stretching from Italy to Colorado, dated to a period corresponding to the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago, they knew something pretty severe must have happened. Iridium lies deep in the core of the Earth, and is only found on the surface as a result of asteroid strikes. This one, they reasoned, must have been a humdinger, but where was the crater? Something that big couldn’t just erode away. Eventually, it was found, under the sea, off the coast of Mexico, a hole so big it must have taken a meteorite roughly the size of Brighton to create it, about 23 square miles.

Recently on a socialist discussion list, someone referred to the ‘failed experiment’ that was the dinosaurs. Failed perhaps in the sense that they are dead and we are not, but let homo sapiens survive and prosper as a race eight hundred times longer than we have so far managed before we can claim to equal their success. And the chances are, on current performance, we won’t get anywhere near.

The power-elites in capitalism are as keenly aware as benighted commoners just how vulnerable the Earth is to a giant meteor strike, and while the next close pass by a large lump of rock is still thirty years away, are even now debating what to do about it. For, even if the impossible happened and the capitalists worked out some ingenious way to stop destroying the planet themselves, there’s no accounting for the vagaries of chance in outer space.

October 4 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1, the first venture of humanity into space. A few more efforts, a dead dog, some nasty accidents and a few dead astronauts later, the world was dazzled by the budget-busting glory of the Kennedy administration in putting a man on the moon, putting one over on the Russians, and fixing the global gaze skyward instead of at Vietnam. Previous generations had lived through the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the steam age and the Tupperware age, but anybody alive in 1968 and watching the silver men on screen pogoing in slo-mo on the surface of the moon would have sworn they were living in the space age. The future was bright. Humanity was on the threshold of the stars.

But what a disappointment it all turned out to be. For once, the geometric acceleration of science seemed to falter. After the Apollo missions, there was no more. The moon was forgotten. Mars remained beyond reach. The engineers all retired, and took their knowledge with them. The stars seemed further away then ever, twinkling in cold amusement at humanity’s punctured hubris.

Sure, the world sent out a lot of probes, some of which didn’t crash, malfunction or get lost, and many fascinating pictures and much interesting knowledge was gained. But the two Big Questions remained unanswered. First: Is there anybody out there? And second: Even if there isn’t, can we get off this rock before it blows?

Capitalism invests in space research the same way it gambles on the rest of science, by backing every horse in the race, sure at least that one of them will come in eventually, bringing with it untold new knowledge and wisdom (aka big bucks and even bigger bucks). It isn’t really interested in existential anxieties about being alone in the universe, but when it comes to advanced communications and especially the military capability of peering into everybody else’s back yard, then filling the orbital paths with beeping space junk seems a superb notion. More ambitiously, the possibility of colonising other planets offers an unparalleled alibi for recklessly destroying your own. Space Capitalism: a sort of galactic venereal disease.

Meanwhile, George Bush’s Kennedy-like attempt to swivel the eyes of America away from Iraq and up to Mars is unlikely to outlive his incumbency. The cost of a manned mission is just too ludicrous, the risk (in lives but, more to the point, in credibility) not worth the gamble, and the scientific returns probably insignificant, given no conclusive sign so far of any organic material on that almost certainly dead planet.

Some scientists, playing a dubious numbers game, have famously calculated that the probability of there not being intelligent life out there, given the billions of galaxies, is virtually zero. Others have responded by calculating the probability of us ever having contact with any of these lifeforms, given the brain-shreddingly large space-time distances involved, as being also virtually zero. Capitalist Earth, being uncontrollably in the grip of a mindless and suicidal orgy of self-destruction, would love to find some comfort and company out there, feeling as it does that the prospects of life down here are diminishing like sand through an hourglass.

But what of a socialist Earth? Suppose that humanity has a moment of sanity and takes its affairs in order by abolishing capitalism before it’s too late, what then? Obviously expeditions to Enceladus would be somewhat down the priority list at first, as issues like food, water and shelter took the lead. But would a socialist world eventually develop a space programme? Perhaps so, if by then the depradations of capitalism had reduced the planet to an unsalvageable toxic tar-pit from which we had no choice but to escape. Hopefully though, we will have taken control of our common abode and our common responsibility much earlier than that. Then, living as free custodians of a newly green and pleasant planet, we may not feel such anxieties about our cosmic isolation, but in fact bask pleasurably in our unique biological identities and our uniquely fulfilling way of life. Children, though, will always gaze at the stars and wonder what is out there. Socialists may debate whether they could or should ever ‘export’ socialism to the cosmos. They might also, perhaps more pertinently, wonder when some of the cosmos is likely to pay a visit here. Among its other priorities, socialist Earth would be wise to remember what happened to the dinosaurs, and make contingency plans for the next Brighton rock.

Paddy Shannon

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 124

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 124th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1547 friends!

Recent blogs:

Out of control

Conspiraloons

Free is cheaper

Quote for the week:

"Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims." Harry Patch, WWI Veteran.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: Out of control (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some people are looking to China as the motor that will pull world capitalism out of its current slump. This ignores the fact that China’s double-digit rates of growth were led by exports, in large part to America and Europe. When these parts of the world entered the slump China, too, was affected. As the London Times reported last year (17 October):

“In the northern Chinese port of Quinhuandao, a dark mountain formed by nearly nine million tonnes of surplus coal soars from the dockside. By the end of the next week, the famous storage area – a dirty barometer of Chinese industrial demand – could be completely full of unwanted fossil fuel . . . [T]hose swelling piles of surplus coal, which is used for most of China’s electricity generation, indicate falls in demand for energy, a key measure of economic activity.”

In response the Chinese government decided to try to spend its way out. Some 4 trillion (a million million) yuan of stimulus money was injected into the economy, mainly in the form of lending by the State banks. But things didn’t turn out as planned. Most of the money was used to expand productive capacity without regard for the chances of selling the extra output (though some seems to have gone to fund a property and stock exchange bubble). In an article headlined “Beijing moves to halt growth juggernaut as supply starts to run away from demand” (1 October), Times Asia business correspondent, Leo Lewis, reported:

“China's State Council calculates that the impact of this year's 140 billion yuan (£13 billion) investment spree in steel mills will be to lift overall national production capacity some 40 per cent above the country's entire annual demand. The same dynamics reportedly apply to cement ( . . .) The astronomical levels of corporate investment, warn senior economists, place the booming Chinese economy at increased risk of a sudden collapse in growth.”

So, the brakes are being applied:

“The Government of China has launched an attack on overcapacity in its heavy industries with a series of stinging curbs on new factories, smelting plants and port-building projects. (…) In the absence of such controls, said the statement from the Chinese Cabinet, ‘it will be hard to prevent vicious market competition and to increase economic benefits, and this could result in facility closures, layoffs and increases in banks' bad assets.’”

It’s the same old story of headlong capitalist expansion, financed in this case by government funding, leading in the end to overcapacity and overproduction in relation to market demand. The Chinese government’s attempt to spend its way out of the slump is risking the very thing they were trying to overcome: “a sudden collapse in growth”.

Which goes to show that governments can’t control the way capitalism works and that, if they try, the chances are they’ll make things worse. Capitalism is an uncontrollable economic system that gets its way in the end, one way or the other.

To buy, or not to buy? (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

A hundred people go into a supermarket, stick all the things they need in their trolleys, and at the checkout the cashier asks each one: “Do you want to pay or take these for free?” Given that choice, how many would choose to hand over payment? Five? Three? Less? Anyone claiming most would opt to part with their money is clearly an idiot.

Of course, under capitalism, the choice not to pay for goods and services produced by waged employment does not exist. The store's shareholders pay for their supermarkets' construction, rents, electricity, products on the shelves, adverts, employees' incomes etc, and they want back their costs plus as much profit as the market will allow. The same goes for other businesses.

That people will avoid paying for their needs, given the choice, is obvious. Money matters, and if you can freely choose to go home with a week's shopping buckshee with no chance of any retribution whatsoever, who wouldn't? What about when you're expected to pay, but avoid doing so?

The record industry's recent efforts to prevent people obtaining free singles and albums by shutting down Napster's pioneering internet file-sharing facility, while introducing new paid-for music services, has so far failed miserably. Those denied free digital downloads from Napster have instead switched to more elusive net services like Gnutella, Aimster and Morpheus, and saved their money.

For defying society's laws, millions are called “pirates”, “thieves” and “cheats”. Accusations that big record companies also engage in thievery by cheating workers and music fans to grossly reward big shareholders can be ignored since this piracy is “legitimate” within today's economic system. Eventually, business measures, state legislation and enforcement in defence of capitalist property rights, markets and profits will probably crush this determined “dot.communism”.

Fare dodging, TV licence shunning, vehicle tax evasion. If people can get away without paying, they will. But why merely settle for endless conflict, just occasionally 'getting away' from restrictive and iniquitous laws unbeatable as long as capitalism exists, or alternatively compliantly paying up zombie-style, when we possess the power to be rid of them permanently?

If we want and enjoy having goods and services for free, there's only one obstacle – capitalism. If we choose to replace it with socialism, free access to whatever we need becomes reality. People don't have to buy goods and services when they directly own and control the means of producing them. Analogously, by collectively owning the bakery you own the bread, cakes and biscuits too, with the unrestricted ability to produce as much as is required.

Would people work co-operatively to produce the goods and services this moneyless free-access socialist society needed, in a similar way that a hundred million or so internet users are presently working together to provide and share free music? Or, conscious of the differences between the capitalist present and a socialist future, would they choose to continue working and living within the money-wages-profit system, where incomes for most are insufficient to meet needs; involve a longer, harder, exploitative working week just so profits can be extracted from labour to sate the owning class's greed and selfishness; involve constant annoyance, time-wasting and worry from money-related mortgages, debts, bills, income tax returns, welfare benefit form filling, price comparing, insurance selecting, utility switching, queuing to pay, burglaries, car thefts etc; inadequate health care and public transport; environmental destruction and pollution; endless food scandals; political sleaze; terrorism and warfare?

The choice is as difficult as deciding whether to pay or not at a supermarket checkout

Max Hess

The Myth of Soviet “Socialism” (2009)

From the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

An analysis from Russia makes many of the points we do.

On all sides we hear it said that “after 1917 a Marxist utopia was realised in our country,” that we had a “communist regime” or “socialist state,” that “we were building socialism and communism,” and so on. This makes it essential for us to grasp the true essence of Marxism, to understand what socialism and communism are.

From a scientific – in particular, Marxist – point of view, communism (or socialism, as Marx and Engels rarely distinguished between these two concepts) means an absolutely free society of universal equality and abundance, in which all people work – more precisely, seek self-realisation – voluntarily, in accordance with their abilities and inclinations, and receives goods in accordance with their needs.

This is the second stage, the phase of socialism or communism (or communism, strictly speaking). The first stage (or, more rarely, socialism in the narrow sense) means almost the same, with the sole difference that there is still some connection between how much labour an able-bodied person has given society and the quantity of goods that he or she receives.

But for Marx and Engels, as a rule, the words “socialism” and “communism” were synonyms.

And so, socialism or communism is the complete liberation of each person and all humanity from any form of exploitation and oppression! The government of people is replaced by the administration of things. The absence of any state power over people!

Socialism in a single country?
Marx and Engels categorically denied the possibility of establishing socialism or communism in a single country or in a few countries. They even denied the possibility of the sustained victory or success of a workers’ revolution in a single country – let alone in a backward or not very developed country. For a whole number of serious reasons.

Let us start with the fact that such concepts as “socialism” or “communism” are absolutely incompatible with the concept of “the state.” For a real Marxist, the very idea of a “socialist” or “communist” state is empty nonsense, the height of absurdity.

Of course, so long as another, hostile system exists, especially if it dominates the greater part of the planet, there can be no question of the state dying out. Let us imagine a state in which a workers’ revolution takes place but is not soon followed by a world revolution. That state is forced to compete with other states in the surrounding world in the accumulation of armaments, heavy industry, and so on.

But competitive accumulation – of capital, in the final analysis – runs counter to the popular need to give priority to consumption. It prevents expansion of the conquests of the revolution and makes it necessary to preserve the state. Giving priority to consumption would require abolishing a fundamental feature of capitalist society – accumulation for the sake of accumulation. For this two conditions are needed: workers’ self-management (working people themselves taking control of production) and the elimination of national borders (that is, of competition on a world scale). The latter also requires abolition of the state.

From the elementary foundations of Marxism it follows that such phenomena as commodity-money relations and the law of value are absolutely incompatible with socialism. For capitalism, according to Marx and Engels, has two chief defining defects. First, goods have to be produced as commodities (for sale), in the form of commodities, thereby giving social relations a fetishized, mercantile character. Second, the basic purpose of production is the extraction of surplus value, which is the source of the exploitation of man by man.

It is self-evident that money and the state can only die out together. Commodity-money relations cannot exist in the absence of state structures. For money is backed up by the assets of the state bank. Given commodity production, competition, the necessity for each state to compete economically with other states, a common measure of some sort is needed to calibrate inputs and outputs in comparison with other countries. Therefore, prices inevitably exist so that records can be kept of value. Finally, some way is needed to monitor the effectiveness of economic activity.

In order to realise the specifically capitalist tendency of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, two things are necessary. First, workers must be alienated from the means of production and from the results of their labour. Second, there must be competition between capitalists. In the absence of workers’ revolution on a global scale, the pursuit of surplus labour in the world as a whole inevitably thwarts any attempt to establish socialism, even if it is undertaken in a highly developed and wealthy region.

Socialism – a world system
Thus, socialism or communism can only be a world system. In this respect it resembles capitalism, which also arises at the international level, becoming a world system as it expands to absorb the pre-capitalist periphery. According to Marx, capitalism is characterised by the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few, the organization of labour as social labour, and the creation of a world market. In principle, two world systems cannot exist simultaneously.

“Dictatorship of the proletariat”
For a long time the Bolsheviks justified their dictatorship by calling it “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx used this term to mean not dictatorship as a repressive political regime but social dominance of the working people as a counterweight to the exploiters (while they still exist) – a workers’ semi-state. He put forward this idea in opposition to the idea, popular in his day, of the dictatorship of revolutionary leaders.

The democratic power of the working class, the conquest of true, broad democracy, and not the power of any leaders – that was and is the meaning of “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Undoubtedly, such a regime is not socialism. It is still capitalism, although of a milder and more democratic variety.

The Bolshevik party dictatorship
The Bolshevik party dictatorship has its origins in the upheaval of 1917. After the fall of the autocracy, Russia won great democratic freedoms and became (for a short time) the most democratic state in the world. However, the provisional government failed to act. It did not begin peace negotiations and made no attempt to get out of the war. It did not embark on agrarian reform. It took no measures against the forces of reaction. The people got neither peace nor bread nor land. What is more, despite all the rights and freedoms, strong democratic institutions (apart, perhaps, from the Soviets) were not created in the country. Thus, there was nothing surprising about the Bolshevik takeover. A reactionary military dictatorship was also a real possibility at the time.

The Bolshevik regime claimed the mantle of a workers’ state. However, in a workers’ state (more precisely, semi-state) there would have been the broadest freedom and human rights, with political power exercised democratically through Soviets, trade unions and competing political parties.

The actual situation, alas, was nothing like this. Political power was exercised mainly through a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party and vanguard, with all forms of democracy restricted from the very first months. Yes, in the early years there were progressive, humane laws in various spheres. (To what extent they were observed is another question.) But the main trends were negative: further curtailment of democratic rights and freedoms, consolidation of the one-party system, secret police repression even within the ruling party, formation of a hierarchy of officials appointed from above.

Stalin’s industrial revolution
The Stalinist faction, which in 1925 had introduced the anti-Marxist conception of “building socialism in a single country,” gained full control by the end of the 1920s. The chief concern of the ruling group was now the forging of a “great power”; this required expansion of the industrial base through unrestrained exploitation of the working people – for the sake, above all, of successful competition with the outside world, with foreign states. In practice, this meant the rapid accumulation of capital.

By the 1930s the authoritarian state had evolved into a totalitarian state. It was precisely at this period that the gap between the higher-ups and the masses deepened into an abyss. By means of so-called “collectivisation” the peasants were either, in essence, enserfed or driven from the soil and turned into a reserve labour force for industry. (Those who managed to get to the cities became, as a rule, hired workers.) Repression intensified, filling the rapidly expanding Gulag with prisoners.

During the first five-year plan, real wages declined by at least half, while the working day lengthened. Thus, the living standard of the absolute majority of the population fell substantially and exploitation sharply increased.

The Stalin regime was totalitarian state capitalism with significant elements of serfdom and slavery (which weakened but did not disappear even after the tyrant’s death). In practice, it accomplished an industrial revolution – that is, the accelerated accumulation of capital. To a large extent, this was primitive accumulation. We find pertinent parallels between industrialisation under Stalin and the path followed by Japan from the bourgeois “Meiji revolution” to World War Two. There too, capital grew rapidly. There too, despotic methods were used to modernise the economy, create an industrial base and strengthen military might, with the state playing a major role.
Thus, both under Stalin and later we had in Russia a right-wing dictatorship with a state monopoly over the economy. Stalinism is a broader concept than the Stalin regime. In the USSR, the Stalinist era lasted from the late 1920s until the collapse of the “Soviet” “socialist” system in 1991 (with various changes and modifications, of course).

Bureaucratic state capitalism
Stalinism is bureaucratic state capitalism. The bulk of direct producers did not own means of production and so were forced to sell their labour power to the real owner of those means of production – a special group called the nomenklatura. The members of this group belonged to a hierarchically organized system for the appropriation and distribution of surplus value. The ruling class of the Soviet Union was therefore a state bourgeoisie. It was an exploiting class that through the possession of state power owned the means of production, the whole of the so-called “national economy.”

In this way the traditional ultra-conservative status quo was re-established and the Russian Empire restored.

For several decades, both under Stalin and after his death, the ruling class or state bourgeoisie governed the country through a powerful and ramified bureaucratic apparatus. They relied on the age-old traditions of the Russian Empire and out of inertia continued to make formal and hypocritical use of pseudo-socialist, pseudo-communist, pseudo-left and pseudo-Marxist slogans. Such slogans were a convenient means of masking their real aims and playing on the sincere faith of many people, both inside the country and abroad.

(Translated by Stefan)
Vladimir Sirotin, Moscow

First Way Marxists (2000)

Book Review from the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way by Peter Campbell, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; Kingston, pp.303, 1999.

Peter Campbell discusses, and focuses on, the lives of four individuals—Ernest Winch, William Pritchard, Arthur Mould and Robert Russell, all of whom originally came from Britain and from religious backgrounds. The title and the phrase, "a Third Way", is something of a misnomer, as the author himself admits, writing:

"The description requires explanation, because these socialists might more accurately be called Marxists of the first way. Their guiding philosophy is to be found in the provisional rules of the International Workingmen's Association, founded in London, England, September 1864 . . ."

Campbell's definition of a Marxist, and on occasion a socialist, is somewhat more wide than ours, although less so than that of many writers and commentators. His introduction is as important, and revealing, as his four pen-portraits.

The author uses the phrase "third way" in order to differentiate his subjects—and the organisations to which they belonged—from mass social democratic parties, such as the German Social Democratic Party, and later the so-called Communist parties. In that sense, he feels that they were Marxists of a "third way", opposing the idea of leadership, and advocating mass understanding as the only way to working-class emancipation. Education was, and is, everything. "Challenging the wages system meant educating the workers, and education became the key concern of Marxists of the third way", says Campbell. "The overthrow of capitalism and the eradication of the wages system were the responsibility of the workers themselves", although in practice, education was seen as a predominately male realm, as few women in such parties as the Socialist Party of Canada became public speakers or lecturers.

Nevertheless, Campbell shows that the early "third way" socialists, and particularly members of the SPC, were largely free of sexist and racist prejudices. Indeed, their close ties to the Jewish community became very important during the general strike, in Winnipeg, in 1919. Interestingly, although socialists like Bill Pritchard came from predominately religious backgrounds, they put the scientific method to the fore, with much emphasis on evolution.

Except for Arthur Mould (of whom more later), they were not pacifists. They considered violence a possible, if not unavoidable, outcome of revolutionary change; but they argued that the more that the workers understood, the more educated they became in socialist ideas, the less likelihood there would be of violence. Bill Pritchard saw "revolutionary violence" as a sign of weakness in the working class. Says Campbell: "The assumption was that significant numbers of capitalists would see the futility of resisting a well-educated, well-organised working-class majority and go over to the winning side."

Inevitably, not all "third way" socialists remained consistent in their views or beliefs. A few joined the Communist Party; others embraced the reformism of the Social Democrat and Labour parties. And a few, like Bill Pritchard, embraced reformist politics for a few years, only to return to revolutionary socialism, and membership of the Socialist Party of Canada or the World Socialist Party of the United States, later.

Between 1910 and 1940, Ernest Winch was successively a leading member of the Social Democratic Party, secretary of the International Longshoremen's Association in British Columbia, president of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, for a time a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, an organiser of the Independent Labour Party, secretary and organiser of the "bogus" SPC in the early 1930s and, lastly, a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) member of the British Columbia provincial legislature for almost twenty-five years. Yet he considered himself, and was considered by many others, to be a Marxist and defender of "third way" Marxism.

Winch was renowned for his fiery, revolutionary phraseology, defending Marxism and "scientific socialism"; yet in practice his politics led to reform, not revolution. And during the late 1920s and through much of the 1930s Winch co-operated with the Canadian Communist Party. Of him, Campbell says: "While Winch's rhetoric continued to be revolutionary, many of his thoughts were confused and contradictory."

Bill Pritchard, however, was far more consistent except for a period during the 1930s.

On 21 May 1911, he arrived in Vancouver, from England. Two days later he applied for membership of the Socialist Party of Canada, and was admitted a week later. He became an avid reader of socialist and scientific literature. From December of that year, he wrote regularly for the Western Clarion, the paper of the SPC, and was its editor from 1914 to 1917. Despite his religious background, Pritchard became a materialist and atheist "believing religion was irrational". Although not mentioned by Campbell, Pritchard was largely responsible for the SPC reprinting the SPGB pamphlet Socialism and Religion. He accepted, and propounded, the materialist conception of history, the class struggle, the labour theory of value, and the necessity for workers, in a majority and without leaders, to abolish the wages system. As Campbell notes, there was no shortcut to emancipation—"nothing less than class conscious effort and class conscious knowledge". But he was no mere theorist. He travelled over vast areas of Canada, and British Columbia in particular, speaking at SPC meetings, often under horrendous conditions. And for many years, he was actively involved in various trade and industrial unions.

This, almost inevitably, led to his arrest and imprisonment following the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. His two-day speech at the trial in January 1920 is part of Canadian working-class history. During his imprisonment, Pritchard was visited by Adolph Kohn, a member of the SPGB, who brought him three volumes of Marx's Capital, which he was able to pass through the bars to him! During this period, Bill Pritchard, unlike some of his comrades, was very critical of the Communist Party and its undemocratic tactics.

However, in 1932, Pritchard joined the recently-formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and became heavily involved in its activities. In 1938, he left Canada for California. And some time later "he returned to Marxism of the third way by joining the World Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS) a sister party of the Socialist Party of Canada". He continued to propound revolutionary socialism until his death in 1981.

Arthur Mould is, at least to his reviewer, a far less interesting figure; and whether he could be described as a Marxist "of the third way" is highly problematical.

He was never a member of the pre-1919 Socialist Party of Canada; indeed, he began as a Methodist Church lay preacher in England. He was not as well read in Marx's writings as Pritchard or even Winch. Although he was a forthright critic of organised religions, he was not opposed to religion as such. Although opposed to war, at least until the Second World War, Mould was more a pacifist and admirer of Leo Tolstoy than an opponent in the Marxist tradition of the SPC. In fact, he was particularly upset when Moses Baritz, a member of the SPGB who was speaking on behalf of the SPC, defended the use violence in a lecture on the French Revolution in 1916. At about this time, Mould became active in the Independent Labour Party, in London, Ontario. Although remaining a committed Christian, during the 1920s he became increasingly sympathetic towards the Communist Party and joined it in 1943. And in 1961, still a member of the CCP, though a critical one, Arthur Mould died.

Robert Boyd Russell was an active member of the US Socialist Party, a key figure in the Winnipeg general strike, a leading organiser of the Railway Machinists during the First World War, a ceaseless advocate of industrial unions, in which he emphasised the necessity of waging the class war from a position of strength, and an active member of the One Big Union which had been formed in the aftermath of the Winnipeg strike in 1919. He, like Pritchard, was imprisoned. In 1922 he dropped out of the Socialist Party, but continued as general secretary of the OBU and, later, editor of the OBU Bulletin following the resignation of Charles Lestor, until the OBU became part of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in 1956. He died in 1964.

Although this reviewer has some strong reservations about some of the views expressed by Peter Campbell, this is an important book, detailing as it does, much information on the Canadian labour and socialist movement. It is well worth reading.

Peter E. Newell

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 123

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 123rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1544 friends!

Recent blogs:

Afghanistan - lying about dying

Joining the killing machine

The myth of Maastricht

Coming Events:

Funny Money - DVD followed by discussion.

Tuesday 17 November 8pm

Committee Room, Chiswick Town Hall, Heathfield Terrace W4, Chiswick

The Zeitgeist Movement

Wednesday 18 November, 8.30pm

Community Central Halls, 304 Maryhill Road, Glasgow

Discussion on The Case for Socialism

Monday 23 November, 8.30 pm

Unicorn, Church Street, Manchester City Centre

Radical Film Forum, Sundays 6pm - 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

29th November - Sicko

13th December - Earthlings

Quote for the week:

"Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included)." Karl Marx, Letter to Kugelmann, 1868.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Editorial: From Bad to Worse: A Short History of Labour (2000)

Editorial from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party, like Russia, is another issue over which history has done our job for us. In the past we had to argue that the Labour Party was not a socialist party and that its policy of step-by-step, piecemeal reform could not lead to Socialism.

Today, nobody thinks for one moment that the Labour Party has anything to do with Socialism. They see them, correctly, as just another bunch of politicians out to run the present system at national and local level.

In a sense, then, this editorial is redundant. We are pushing at an open door. Even so, on the centenary of the conference at which the Labour Party was conceived, it is worth recalling why the Labour Party has been the failure—in terms of transforming capitalism into something better—that it has been.

This has not been because its leaders were traitors or corrupt or incompetent—though some of them were—but because the task that the Labour Party set itself after the First World War (up till then its aim had merely been to get trade union bums onto the benches of the House of Commons), of gradually changing capitalism by social reform legislation into a new and different society based on co-operation, equality and meeting people's needs instead of on competition, privilege and profit, was an impossible one.

But, instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism, the opposite happened. Trying to reform capitalism changed the Labour Party into the out-and-out capitalist party it is today. Elected by a working class that only wanted improvements within capitalism, Labour governments found they had no choice other than to administer capitalism. But capitalism can only function as a profit-making system in which priority has to be given to profits over all other considerations.

Even Labour politicians learn by experience, and the experience of governing capitalism taught them to be "realistic" and accept capitalism's priorities. Under every Labour government ministers ended up defending profits. Blair and Gordon Brown only innovated by doing this before they came to power. All they did in openly proclaiming that Labour is a pro-business, pro-profit party was to bring Labour's rhetoric belatedly into line with its consistent practice when in office.

As Socialists we don't blame them for this. In fact, we can appreciate their honesty since, in putting the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Labour has anything to do with socialism, they have saved us having to spend too much time making this point ourselves.

Letter: Three questions (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three questions

Dear Editors,

There are three questions that I would like to put to you concerning the operations of a future socialist state.

1. Whenever I talk to others about the abolition of the wages system, free housing, and communal use of the means of production they react strongly. They think that under such a system no-one would work and that chaos would ensue. Lenin's assurances to the Soviet Communists was that one in every ten idlers would be shot! How would the Socialist Party deal with this problem to generate national productivity?

2. I do agree that the wages system should be abolished, but envisage much resistance to it. It is possible that there will be a need for a voucher system in the initial phase (which is not revolutionary). What I would like to know more of, is how the shops and distribution centres will distribute the goods to the people under socialism. What system of organisation do you think will be required for fair and equal distribution? What kind of demands will determine the scale of the operation?

3. How would you prevent anarchy and crime – including theft which might be carried out by syndicates springing up as opportunists and creating a black market under socialism?
I look forward to your reply.

Gary Cubbage, 

Bolton, Lancs

Reply: 

Let's clear up one misunderstanding straightaway. You seem to be under the impression that the Socialist Party is like other parties and that, one day, it will “come to power” and run things. This is not our view. We do not see our role as to do things for people. Rather we see the future mass socialist party as the organisation that people will form to do things for themselves, in particular to win control of political power. So it's not the Socialist Party that will come to power; it will be the socialist-minded majority who will be assuming the power to change and run society. What happens will be their responsibility, to be decided democratically. In fact, once the wage and salary working class has won political control, the socialist political party they will have formed to do this has no further role and will be dissolved.

1. So, to rephrase your question, how would socialist society deal with what used to be called “the lazy man”? Certainly not by shooting one in ten of them (did Lenin really advocate that? If so, he was worse than we thought). For a start, we don't think there will be that many. Remember, socialism will not have been established unless a clear majority wanted it and understood what it involved. We would think that in the early stages people would be motivated by a desire to clear up as soon as possible the mess left by capitalism and to build a decent society, and that they'd be prepared to make sacrifices in order to do so. Later, when socialism was up and running, we would expect people to want to work at doing something useful and creative and to meet and co-operate with other people. Very few would want to stay at home and contribute nothing.

People don't like “work” today essentially because it is “employment”, i.e. working for someone else, and not interesting, nor often obviously useful and sometimes downright dangerous. But these same people are prepared to exercise themselves – i.e. to work – quite hard in their free time, digging their gardens, repairing their cars, doing up their homes, i.e. on something they consider useful and beneficial. So it's not work – exercising their mental and physical energies – as such that is regarded as the problem but the conditions under which it is exercised. Socialism should be able to remedy that.

2. As to the distribution of things once they've been produced, you're quite right to say that a permanent voucher system would not be revolutionary and not very different from using money today. Although in the very early stages of socialism there might have to be some very temporary rationing of some goods, the aim will be to move as rapidly as possible to “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. This should be possible because (a) people's needs are not limitless, and (b) a lot more useful things can be produced than today, once the waste (e.g., arms, the whole buying and selling system) and artificial scarcity (imposed by the economic law of “no profit, no production”) of capitalism have been eliminated. Socialist society will be capable of producing enough to go over to free distribution and free access to what people need.

3. How to prevent crime and the emergence of a black market? First, about 95 percent of all crime is property-related and so would disappear in a socialist society: why steal what you can have for nothing? It's the same with a black market: why buy something you can have for free? As to the remaining 5 percent of crimes, i.e. crimes against people, much of this too could be expected to die out as the frustrations and psychological problems caused by money worries that lead to much of it will disappear too. Any remaining violence or other non-social behaviour will be a medical problem, to be treated as such, i.e. not by punishing people but by treating them, if necessary for the protection of the rest of the community in a confined place. For a more developed argument about crime, did you read the lead article in the May Socialist Standard?

—Editors.

"Criticism, alienation and engagement." (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is a transcript of a talk given by the late Pieter Lawrence to Central London branch of the SPGB at its meeting of the 25th February 2004.

Comrades, I hope you will forgive the pretentious title, but it does say what the discussion is about, which is what titles are supposed to do. I am not a great student of the sociologist Weber, but from what I know he did say some useful things about the life of institutions which may have a bearing on the present situation of our Party.

So, in opening up this discussion I would like to focus on a dilemma which can confront an organisation that is founded at one time on new ideas and is at the forefront of progress. At this point it is innovative; it is very much a product of its own time; and it marks a break with the past. If it has some success it attracts support and what we might call "its own time" begins to move into the past. The result is a tradition which inevitably includes some conservative tendencies and as further time passes this can make it difficult for it to adapt to new conditions. As we know from any evolutionary process, failure to adapt can be a serious risk to your health. On the other hand, a complete absence of conservative tendencies would surely make for an unstable organisation that would be unlikely to survive anyway.

These hazards are particularly acute in our modern world which, without any shadow of a doubt is the most dynamic, fast changing society in history. So, what is the solution? We are not talking here about organisations in general. We are talking about our Party which has been in existence for a hundred years. The problems of how organisations should adapt in our fast changing world is different in each case; what I want to focus on are the special circumstances that affect our Party.

One important feature of our situation stems from the fact that we argue a body of economic and political criticism which results in our dissociation from most of the of the political activity that is carried on. We don't choose this. It results from the logic of our criticism. In order to maintain the integrity of our principled stand we have no choice. Our position of distance from most of what goes on in politics is determined by factors beyond our control. These strictures even demand that we be distanced from movements and activities which contain some progressive elements or at least, have some progressive intentions.

The fact underlying this unavoidable but regrettable situation is that we know that compromise would be self defeating. If compromise is summarised as "reformism", then we can look back and see the tragic failures of reformist policies throughout the 20th Century. The mistaken idea that we should devote our energies to improving capitalist society through reforms has led, certainly in absolute terms, to the most destructive century in history. Had we ever abandoned our socialist principles the very idea of a new society based on equality and co-operation would have been lost and that would have only compounded the tragedy.

Whilst this is true, and in all circumstances, inescapable, one consequence of our principled stand is that for the most part we do remain alienated from the political life of society. This is the connection, in the case of our Party, between criticism and alienation, and of course, this has a history.

In accounting for this history it is useful to consider 3 significant stages in the history of socialist criticism over 150 years The first is the position of Marx and Engels in 1848 at the time of the Communist Manifesto. The second is the position of our founder members in 1904. Lastly, we come to our present position at the turn of the 21st Century. I want to argue that each of these stages of socialist criticism relate to successive stages in the development of the Capitalist system and that each stage provided both limitations and expanded options for what socialists could say and do. I also want to argue that we now have opportunities to engage much more positively with social developments in ways that could reduce our alienated situation.

So, beginning with 1848 I don't think any of us would deny the importance of the Communist Manifesto; how could we? It was a brilliant summary of the preceding development of revolutionary thought and it expanded on these ideas. Together with other works the outcome was an economic and class analysis of the capitalist system that laid the foundations of scientific socialism. We are all of us condemned to think and act only within a given social context and Marx and Engels were quite frank in accepting that they operated at an early stage of capitalism and therefore their position suffered from a lack of productive and political development. They were constrained by two major limitations. Firstly, they accepted that the capitalist systems had not yet developed to the point where it had laid down a material basis for a full socialist society. Secondly, they accepted that the battle for democratic rights, that is, the vote was yet to be won.

As a result of these limitations they realised that workers would first have to, "win the battle of democracy," then having captured political control would, and I use their own words, "wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state... and to increase the total of productive forces as soon as possible."

With the wisdom of hindsight we can now look back and say that the programme set out in the Communist Manifesto was a recipe for a state capitalist system, but then of course we understand this in relation to all the economic and political limitations of the time.

When we come up to the situation of our founder members in 1904 they could work within conditions that were more developed. In most of Europe sufficient workers had the vote to enable a majority of socialists to gain political control. Also, I think the question is far from settled, but at least Engels took the view in the later 19th. Century that capitalist development had in fact laid down a material basis for the immediate commencement of socialist society. Personally, I have my doubts. Recently our Branch put this question on a Conference Agenda where the discussion was inconclusive.

But to their great credit, our founder members in 1904 did something that neither Marx nor Engels had ever done. This was to apply Marxian economic theory to the limitations of political action within the capitalist system. This defined the limitations of reformism in a way that clarified the whole question of revolution or reform. But it did more than this. This development of ideas led to a body of theory and criticism that came to have predictive value. This has been a most important theoretical contribution which is yet to be recognised. If we look over the century from 1904 we find that our members predicted the failure of reform programmes to change society; the failure of the Bolshevik revolution and all programmes including those of labour and social democratic parties to use nationalisation as a means of changing society. Later on, by applying the same method, our members predicted the failure of Keynsian policies designed to set the capitalist system on a course of steady expansion without the destructive affects of the boom/slump cycle.

However, whilst without doubt our early members won the theoretical argument the working class did not take it up and instead went for reformist policies. This had one important consequence. Whereas Marx and Engels had been much more supportive and much more engaged with what they regarded as progressive movements, and whilst because of the early stages of capitalist development they had been justified in this support, the more sophisticated criticism of our members in 1904 at a later stage of capitalist development, meant that they would certainly not campaign for reforms of any kind. They would not advocate reforms and would only express a very qualified support for those reforms that could be seen, unequivocally, to contain some benefit to workers; and of course, you don't get many of those.

So here we enter a period in 1904 when socialist criticism is not just an analysis of the economic development of the capitalist system, it is also a criticism of the political activities of the overwhelming majority of workers in their pursuit of reforms and the various policies which were mistakenly believed to be in the direction of socialism. Inevitably this resulted, for all practical purposes, in a dissociation or alienation of the Socialist Party from the working class movement.

One hundred years later we are in more or less the same position of the Party in 1904. Our political case still applies, and still consists mostly of applying Marxian economic theory to the limitations of political action within the capitalist system. The law of value; the nature of capital that can only exist through accumulation, operates as a set of class interests and economic constraints that no government, regardless of its declared aspirations can offset or control. This relentless drive of capital to accumulate results in a constant pressure of economic selection through which the structure of production is maintained as an exclusively capitalist structure. This remains mostly immune to ideological interference.

We therefore still confine ourselves to this narrow analytical perspective; partly because for the past hundred years it is what we have done and this has led to some institutional inertia; partly because through this method we have been proved by experience to be right; and above all the fact that we have still got capitalism which is bigger and stronger than ever, therefore, we don't see any reason to change. The problem is, we may not change, but the world does change and we need to address that change. We find it difficult to engage with change because we remain locked into the 1904 method of economic and political criticism.

The productive relationships of capitalism do not change but within that basic relationship many kinds of change do take place and these changes are the actual stuff of history. At a rough guess, I suppose that by 1750, the wage labour/capital relationship had become the dominant productive relationship in Europe. Without question, but now throughout the world this is still the same. Commodity production begins with an exchange of wages for labour time and this has been the case for over 250 years. But of course, over that time, and within that basic economic relationship there have been very great productive, technical and scientific, administrative and institutional, communicative not to say, cultural changes. By focusing exclusively on a basic and unchanging class relationship, and by confining our economic analysis of events to the limitations of that relationship we are blinded to the revolutionary implications of the dynamic changes that are going on all around us.

Our attitude is in great contrast to the attitude that Marx took who was much more aware of change and its revolutionary possibilities. For example we can take a brief quote from the Communist Manifesto:

"Modern industry has established the world market. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Now, its possible that Marx got a bit carried away by his own magnificent prose, but whatever you may think of the sense of that passage, one thing that comes through is the very real sense of excitement that he and Engels felt about the great changes that were taking place in their day. What I want to suggest is that our alienation from all that is happening around us now prevents us from recognising the potential revolutionary importance of modern change. Marx was not just observing the dynamism of capitalist society his comments were predictive because since his day, of course, these changes have not only gathered pace but they have gone on to establish the material basis of world socialist society. It is this fact that provides us with the opportunity to be more positively engaged with modern development.

I am the last person to argue that if we had socialism to-morrow we could solve social problems without any further development. For example the number of seriously undernourished people increases every year. In 1975 there were 435 million; now there are over 820 million. Some members mistakenly think that capitalism produces enough food for all needs, but I remember Hardy's response to this when he said that if everyone had free access to the food in the shops it wouldn't last ten minutes. Hardy was right. So world food production would have to be greatly increased by at least 60%. That would need to be organised, or at least co-ordinated, on a world scale.

According to the recent United Nations report "The Challenge of Slums", across the world in 2001 there were about 1 billion people living in shanty towns and other slums. The report predicts that on present trends by 2030 2 billion people will be living in such slums. Then of course there are more billions living in sub standard housing. To solve this problem in socialism would require a massive expansion of every part of production connected with housing. Given the integrated nature of modern world production, this again would have to be co-ordinated on a world scale.

Then again, who can doubt that capitalism is in an ever worsening mess with its energy supplies. Here again, this would be an enormous project in socialism to set up an adequate and non destructive world energy system.

So when we say that capitalism has established the basis of socialist society it is a qualified statement that means we have a structure of world production; we have the communications; we have the skills and talents; we have the decision making bodies; we have the means of administration at local, regional and world levels, all of which could be swiftly adapted, re-organised and developed so as to concentrate all these resources on providing for needs. What this in fact amounts to is an immense accumulation of the powers of social labour and of social organisation.

What I find quite shocking, especially in a party that prides itself on its Marxian scholarship, is that these great changes have not been incorporated into our general arguments. This prompts the question, has the fear of reformist compromise and our general hostility to the capitalist system made us blind to the revolutionary significance of change; is this why we remain locked into the narrow, negative perspective of 1904 criticism? The plain fact is that if we take the sum total of all the socially useful factors of modern life that are linked throughout the world in all their wide ranging functions, we find that capitalism has itself established what could be the structure of world production and organisation of socialist society. This exists now all around us. It is what capitalism has brought about.

The question that follows is this; how do we become more engaged with the socialist possibilities of these great world developments? The answer lies in the fact that as it has developed as a global system, capitalism has been compelled to develop not just the class/value factors of production and administration but also its socially useful factors.

There is no better way to express this than with a quote directly from Marx. In Capital Volume 1 he said this - "So far as therefore labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race: it is an eternal nature imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between Man and nature, and therefore no life."

This then becomes a key part of the Marxian method of formulating practical proposals for how socialism could operate. This is to separate the class/value factors of production, decision making and administration, which would be redundant in socialism, from the socially useful factors which would be retained and developed for the sole purpose of providing for needs.

So, as the advocates of a society in which useful labour will produce goods solely for use, this is the task that is now in front of us; it is a task which has been set by modern capitalist development. To be engaged positively with this development it is our job to propose how all these socially useful factors could combine to make up the organisation of democratic decision making, administration and production in socialism.

In the past, not going beyond critical analysis was justified by lack of development. This was well expressed by Engels in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" where, in criticising the utopian thinkers he said, "The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain." Now of course, almost 150 years further on, the solution of social problems is no longer hidden in undeveloped conditions. On the contrary, the material means of solving problems are all around us. So, in the developed conditions of modern global capitalism, whilst critical analysis constitutes the theoretical basis of our case, now it is a starting point from which we should set out how socialism could be organised.

This could have consequences for the whole range of our arguments. Positive engagement with social development could also modify our approach to non-socialist activities. This again has its difficulties because it requires a change of entrenched attitudes which is always painful.

As a Party we tend to be hostile to the activities of all non-socialists. This has a simple logic. In one way or another non-socialists are supporters of capitalism. We are opposed to capitalism. Therefore we are opposed to the activities of non-socialists. In the past this was often spat our with total conviction, not to say a certain some venom, and for many members this has been the last socialist word on the subject. But is it? I think not!

What we actually find is that we share many of the basic hopes and intentions of many thousands of people who are active in all kinds organisations. Socialists do not hold a monopoly on social concern. For example, many people are concerned with the plight of these 820 million starving people we mentioned and they try to do something about it. We share that concern, this is something that we have in common with them. So it is not true that we are hostile to all non socialists. So how can we be more engaged with these people with whom we share some common ground?

They are in organisations like Oxfam. They work voluntarily collecting money, running charity shops and organising raffles. This is to finance workers in the field in many places, doing what they can to provide seeds, tools and equipment and small scale irrigation schemes and things like fresh water wells. Others are in organisations such as the United Nations Association in the hope that agencies like the Food and Agricultural Organisation could do more to help the starving.

We are quite right to say that these efforts do not stand a chance of ever being able to solve a problem that is getting worse. As I said, over the past 25 years the numbers of starving people have doubled. But rather than be hostile to the activities of these people we should adopt a much less alienated approach.

Instead of emphasising the futility of their activities argued exclusively from the alienated position of 1904 economic criticism; instead of shouting great abstract slogans them such as common ownership, democratic control and production for use to which we attach very little practical meaning; we could argue from a basis where we have set out how existing world wide organisation already exists for dealing with the problem of world hunger. This more engaged approach would be to describe how the principles of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use could be applied in practical ways. This would convert the higher abstractions of economic analysis into proposed lines of practical activity. This would in turn project what people in OXFAM are trying to do into a different social context in which their work could be more successful in solving the problem. This would draw their attention more directly to the need to alter the present economic and political framework which is so destructive of their efforts.

I see no difficulty in producing literature specifically aimed at people in such organisations as OXFAM that would set out such practical proposals. This more engaged approach would be to acknowledge that they are doing what they can to lessen world hunger but the problem is getting worse, and then say, "The action to solve this problem must include action to bring about a society where you will have the freedom to act more effectively and this is how it could actually work. The work of solving the problem and the work of creating the conditions in which it can be solved go together."

And of course the same approach could be directed at other organisations, for example, the many environmentalist groups.

To summarise then: I am suggesting that we should build on our economic and political analysis and apply its logic to the fantastic development of all the socially useful factors of modern world society in setting out how socialism could operate. Then armed with this set of practical proposals we make every attempt to be more positively engaged with the many non socialists with whom we share common ground of concern and indignation and the need to establish a world of equality, democracy and co-operation."

Pieter Lawrence