Religious Police and Women Drivers (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Government advice to anyone visiting Saudi Arabia includes the following:

‘Saudi Arabia is an exclusively Islamic (Muslim) kingdom and Islam governs nearly every aspect of life. The public practice of any form of religion other than Islam is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Severe punishment including imprisonment and deportation can result should such activities come to the attention of the authorities.’ ‘… certain sexual behaviour like adultery or homosexual acts carry the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. So does apostasy (renunciation of the Muslim faith). The death penalty is carried out in public, usually by beheading’ (www.gov.uk/living-in-saudi-arabia).

Yes, in Saudi Arabia Allah doesn’t mess about when making sure his laws are observed. And to keep an eye on what’s going on, according to the Koran, (Surah 82) we each have two angels watching over our shoulders recording everything we do (and yes, some people do take this nonsense seriously).

And, as if that were not enough, in Saudi Arabia Allah also has his own religious police force, the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ to keep an eye on things and enforce Sharia law.

During the recent National Day celebrations for example, when nationwide festivities were planned, they announced a ban on singing and dancing in public and warned that violators would be punished.

In another incident in March 2002, in order to preserve moral values, they prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school because the girls were not wearing headscarves, and were not accompanied by a male guardian. Fifteen girls died, and many more were injured as a result.

Exactly what qualities are required for the job is not clear, but claims have been made that they are staffed by ex-convicts whose only qualification is that they memorised the Koran in prison in order to reduce their sentence.

Another of their duties is to enforce the ban on women drivers – only men are allowed to hold driving licences in Saudi Arabia. Although the ban is informal (there is no section on driving violations in the Koran) it is strictly enforced. There is, however, a growing campaign to overturn the ban and activists are calling for women to take to the roads in protest.

This, of course, is seen as a threat to public morality by the devout, not to mention being a danger to the women themselves. One cleric, Sheik Saleh al-Lohaidan issued the following warning:

‘If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological medical impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards. That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees’.

Could this ridiculous situation get any more absurd? Well, yes, it could. Back in 2010, in a completely unrelated controversy, another nutty cleric, Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan announced that to overcome problems caused by the illicit mixing between sexes, women could be alone with, or appear without a veil in front of an unrelated male if he drank her breast milk. This, the good cleric explained, would establish a mother-son bond in Islamic tradition.

A group of women protesters, who until now have had to rely on male drivers in order to get about, are now threatening (if that is the right word?) to breastfeed their drivers if they are not allowed to drive themselves.

And no, this is not a sketch from an old Monty Python show.

NW

Obituary: Campbell McEwen (1996)

Obituary from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members throughout Britain will be saddened by the death at 65 of Campbell McEwen. Many will remember him for his forthright contributions at our conferences during the last 30 years.

Campbell became interested in working class politics when in his teens, and his first serious political act was to register as a conscientious objector. He appeared before the tribunal and, without any assistance, argued his case so convincingly that he won a rare full exemption from military service. Not bad for an 18-year-old!

A spell in the Communist Party soon brought disillusion and Campbell's courage (or foolhardiness, he had both aplenty) was shown when he and his lifelong pal Eric Darroch chose to leave the CP, not by simply dropping out, but by going along to their branch to present their reasons for resigning, and there they were denounced in the standard CP phraseology of the period. Soon after this, Campbell encountered the Socialist Party at the old Glasgow Workers Open Forum and he joined the party in 1953.

His job record resembled those often attributed to adventure-story writers by their publishers, but his loathing of wage-slavery ensured that he never settled at anything. He was a railway porter, tram driver, salesman, clerk, tally-man, trade union organiser, telephone operator, etc, and had a fund of hilarious and sometimes sobering stories to tell about all of them.

About 15 years go Campbell had a serious illness and life-saving surgery was necessary. Towards the end of last year cancer was diagnosed but this time not even prompt surgery could save our comrade. At the cremation a large turn-out of members heard comrades Donnelly and Darroch deliver valedictory addresses befitting a staunch materialist.

Campbell McEwen's contribution to the party was a generous one, and he spoke in his own uncompromising style at outdoor and indoor meetings for many years. He was a larger-than-life character and we will miss him. We extend our deepest condolences to his family.

An enemy of the state? (1995)

Book Review from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair, by Seumas Milne (Verso, 344pp, £16.95)

In a letter to me which Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, wrote in August 1992, he said: "It is now obvious from all the documentation in our possession that every single smear and allegation made against Peter Heathfield and myself has been discredited, disproved, thrown out by the court or been subject of a legal agreement which has vindicated the two National Officials and the Union itself."

Seumas Milne's long-awaited book on the 1984-5 miners' strike, and its aftermath, confirms this and much more besides. Unlike Paul Routledge, in his Scargill, Milne generally asserts that Scargill was more wronged than wrong.

Milne claims that there has been a twenty-year secret war against the NUM in general, and Arthur Scargill in particular. This was spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, Robert Maxwell and Stella Rimington, now head of MI5. It was, he asserts, an unholy alliance. "For the Tories and the British Establishment as a whole," he writes, "Arthur Scargill came to embody all that they most feared and hated about trade union power in general, and the miners in particular." Scargill was "a man apart"; the living "embodiment of the enemy". The ruling class hated, and did everything it could, to defeat the NUM and Scargill.

Although the NUM was defeated in the 1984-5 strike, the end of the strike did not end the war against Scargill and the miners. In the war against the NUM, the Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror was probably more vociferous than the traditional anti-union papers. Together with ITV's Cook Report, the Mirror accused Scargill and the NUM general secretary, Peter Heathfield, of theft and embezzlement of money donated for strike purposes; of using money sent from Libya to pay off mortgages; and of receiving million of pounds from the Soviet Union. Almost all the media, the government, and many Labour Party leaders, joined in the chorus of abuse - which continued well into 1990.

But as Arthur Scargill said in his letter to me, and as Milne demonstrates in meticulous details, every one of the claims proved to be untrue, unfounded or wildly exaggerated. Neither Scargill nor Heathfield paid off mortgages with Libyan money, because neither had a mortgage and neither received a penny from Libya. And although the Soviet Union belatedly sent a million dollars to the pro-"Communist" international miners' organisation for general purposes, none of this money reached the NUM, or its leaders, during the strike. The British state seized the NUM's assets, and Scargill arranged parallel, supposedly secret funds. But, as Milne demonstrates, MI5 and GCHQ, using all kind of illegal methods, knew about most of the money. They also, apparently, had a spy right in the headquarters of the union. Indeed, the government used every trick in the book to destroy the NUM and its top officials such as Peter Heathfield and Arthur Scargill. For instance, Scargill and the NUM were tricked into concentrating mass picketing at the British Steel coking plant at Orgreave near Sheffield and the resulting pitched battle with the police.

Although Milne is largely sympathetic towards Scargill and Heathfield, it is obvious from his account, and what we already know, particularly of Scargill, that he made many mistakes before, during and after the strike. This was largely due to his peculiar political views - an unholy mixture of Bolshevik/Stalinist vanguardism and ill-digested syndicalism.

Nevertheless, he was considered to be a danger to British capitalism. To the British ruling class, he was very much an "enemy within". Milne's book is well reading, even if it only demonstrates to what extent the capitalist class and its lackeys will go.

Peter E. Newell

Alienated worker (1985)

From the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

All workers are forced to offer their labour for sale. If successful, they immediately forfeit all control over how, when and where it will be utilised. It is this loss of control which produces alienation between the worker and his labour. In my own circumstances this tends to occur frequently but varies in intensity.

I am employed as an engineer selling combustion equipment, and obviously have no control over what fuel is burnt, how the energy produced is used or how much pollution of the atmosphere is allowed to occur. Recently I was phoned in the early hours of the morning by a hospital in Glasgow which deals with geriatric patients. A combustion failure meant that they were running short of steam for heating and sterilisation. I rushed to the hospital, but it took several hours to repair the mechanical and electrical faults on the outdated equipment. I washed up and discussed the problems with the hospital engineer. "You know those burners are now illegal", I said. "Yes, I know, but I can't get the money to replace these units even though they contravene the Clean Air Act", he replied.

I was sharply reminded of this conversation when I travelled to an RAF base the following day to commission a new combustion unit on a new boiler. The base was playing war games and it took an hour to negotiate the sentry posts before I reached the boiler house. It took all day to commission the burner and complete efficiency tests. The engineer arrived to verify the combustion readings and I enquired what work the steam would be performing. "It's to keep the fighter planes in that hangar warm at night", he replied. "They must be kept at the right temperature so they can take off at a moment's notice." I was to learn later that the fuel bill for keeping the planes warm at night was over £650,000 a year.

The long drive home gave me plenty of time to reflect on a system which cares more for machines of destruction than the health of its elderly citizens.

SASS

How Did Social Inequality Arise? (2013)

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at one theory of the origins of hierarchy and social inequality

In The Creation of Inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus begin with the notion that the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology should inform one another. Anthropology learns from humans within living memory what they think and feel; while archaeology provides silent clues to the past: buildings, tools or bones.

They build a detailed account of how over the last five thousand or so years, humans have built unequal societies. They examine the underlying cultural logic of different social formations to show how inequality, and subsequent formations, can arise. They deny any straight line model of social development, that one stage leads to another, but rather that each stage can allow the next development. They also note that it isn’t a given level of technology or natural abundance that gives rise to different social formations (they note how the Andes, where the wheel was never even invented, can be seen as the graveyard of such theories). They suggest that over millennia, societies have oscillated between relatively equal or unequal forms, following ‘social logic’.

Hunters-gatherers

They begin with the most equal form of society: the nomadic extended kin group (such as has been encountered in the Arctic within historic memory). They observe that these groups of hunter/gatherers are relatively egalitarian, without formal leaders or classes. They also note that this distinguishes humans from our near primate relatives, who in similar bands operate either with alpha males or an alpha male/beta male coalition. They propose, though, that such dominance hierarchies and behavioural traits do remain in human communities; but that, rather, the function of the alpha male has been replaced by ‘God' with beta coalitions replaced by interceding ancestors and spirits.

That is, people treat the deity and ancestors as if they were above them in a dominance hierarchy (such as, by adopting submission positions), and thinking of themselves as subordinates to these entities. All living humans thus become gammas, in effect equal in subordination. Religion, they suggest, is accompanied by collective ritual, and by inducement of euphoric states to reinforce its effects.

As an aside, this is a fascinating concept, firstly because it does provide for the notion that there was a positive evolutionary reason for the development of the idea of god (which rebuts the arguments of some pro-theists who suggest the disutility of the idea as evidence for some real basis for religion). Secondly, it suggests a useful interpretation of contemporary political psychology. When dictators and their boot boys elevate themselves to godlike status or servants of god, they free themselves from the constraints imposed by such submission. As we shall see, below, the development of inequality was in part about the appropriation of divine sanction.

The hunter gatherer bands may have engaged in gift relations with other nearby bands. As the authors note, the emphasis would have been on seeking and maintaining social relations and retaining the possibility of help and assistance when things may have gone bad. They suggest that, rather than developing language to assist in practical tasks, language and symbolic thinking emerged as a means of coalition building and enabling links between extended kin groups. A development of this, for example, was the nomination of special friends for young males. They give the example of an Eskimo tribe, whose boys had friends allocated parts of a slaughtered seal, indicating their sharing of the goods. They also note the ‘magic of names’ where a bond is assumed between people sharing a name, even beyond a kinship relation.

They conjecture that it was such behaviour that gave rise to the extended clan-based society. A key feature of such a society is the notion of social substitutability. If a person commits a murder, say, it becomes acceptable to kill one of their clan as a substitute for retaliating directly against them individually.

Clan-based societies

Clan-based societies can be very complex. Often, they are divided into two moieties, and the members of one clan from one moiety cannot marry with the members of clans from that same moiety. This can be further complicated by lineages within clans, and much more specific clan-marriage-based arrangements (such as members of clan A always marry into clan D but not clan C).

Flannery and Marcus identify two important features of the cultural logic of such societies. The first is the principle of ‘We were here first’. This has repercussions as certain clans begin to claim pre-ordinance based on clans that are putatively descendants of later arrivers. The second is that individuals may have or acquire virtue. At first, this may be simply the difference between initiated men and un-initiated boys, later there may be stages to initiation, so that even some full grown men may lack virtue. They also note, by reference to Australian aboriginal tribes, that some clans can lay claim to a certain copyright of prestigious rites and rituals.

This sets the scene for the development of the next stage, the achievement-based societies. In hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, anyone getting too big for their boots and bossing others around would be quietly taken into a field and murdered. They also note that mockery, too, was a powerful tool for curbing ambition. In achievement based-societies, an individual could achieve the rank of chief, through a number of routes: success in warfare, or religious/ritual means being among them. The achievement at this stage is individual, and the chief is required to maintain their position through feasts and gift giving. Rank does not pass automatically to off-spring, but chiefs can take steps to try and confer honour on their children and put them in a strong position to achieve rank themselves.

The archaeological evidence at this stage consists of the examination of grave goods. The general absence of children with expensive funeral goods indicates that people did not have exalted status from birth, for example. A common feature of early human societies is the men’s hut, a place where men go and perform rituals (possibly a development from the men staying together while hunting). In achievement societies this becomes the chief’s hut, and the gradations within the men become apparent based on their sleeping position (the lowest ranked sleeping next to the door, thus being most at risk of being killed in a sneak attack).

Entire groups of people become known as ‘Nothing men’ with no status and no property to live off. The chief controls the land and natural resources: sumptuary goods come into existence, in the form of jade, gold or certain shells.

As the authors note, a feature of early human religion was that it could be frequently rewritten, based on new experiences and circumstances. In achievement societies, the leading members of society try to cast themselves as nearer to god (or descended from god) and, often, as different from the rest of humanity. A part of this attempted appropriation, they suggest, is the gradual transformation of the men’s hut into the public temple, and so that building becomes a key archaeological indicator of the development of hierarchy within a society.

Hereditary rulers

At its most fully developed, chiefly rank becomes hereditary. The chief becomes taboo, and no one may look at or touch him (often meaning foreigners have to be employed to assassinate him). Even his waste becomes charged with dangerous levels of virtue, and has to be safely disposed of. Instead of commanding great skill himself, he controls craftsmen who produce status goods, which he can distribute.

At this point, it should be noted, the authors present evidence of societies oscillating between equality and hierarchy, and elite groups lose their grasp on power (through incompetence, or in-fighting, or both). It should also be noted that these developments are not dependent on the state of agriculture or prevailing techniques of production, and seem to stem as much from the capacity of individuals at the right time taking chances and staking a claim to pre-eminence.

This is certainly the case for their model of the emergence of kingship: a distinct caste apart with an hereditary leader. Their basic model is that kingdom’s emergence comes from a usurper taking control of a tribe and annexing nearby groups, in short, through a sort of revolution. They produce examples from African and Polynesian anthropology and history. They note that as hereditary rule emerges within one society, neighbouring societies begin to adopt more and more of its attributes, as a defensive mechanism. As with the move from achievement society to hereditary society, they suggest that multiple attempts to assert sovereignty may have been tried and failed before any given monarch ascended to the purple.

Empires continue the process of creating inequality, by denuding local elites of their power/virtue and creating a hierarchy of civic centres, with each successive layer subordinated to the centre and the king. Multiple strategies can be employed to achieve this (as can be said of each of the previous stages). Often, empires were born out of the ruins of preceding empires (as in the Andes), with successive waves of domination refining the process of conquering and absorbing neighbours.

If there is a flaw with the book, it lies in one of its great strengths. There is a wealth of detail about a great many societies, but the continued listing of the dimensions of huts does get slightly in the way of progressing the book’s points (and may inhibit its utility as a popular book).

Throughout there is a running side argument, around the nature of marriage. They note that historically it was a primarily economic arrangement, and they list at least seven different permutations of marriage (one man two women; one man one woman, two men, one woman, etc.) Their argument is very much with the so-called traditionalists whose model of marriage, they note, goes all the way back to the particular bureaucratic conditions of ancient Sumeria. Marriage, though, is often a route towards hierarchy, with control of marriage between people of high status being a means to create and sustain inequality.

They also touch on ancient warfare. They note how in clan societies, it has been known for the victors in a war to compensate the defeated for their dead, as a means of retaining social bonds and preventing conflict continuation. They show, through anthropological data from Polynesia, that tribal warfare was particularly brutal, with the sneak attack and massacre being favoured (the other evidence they have for this is the increasing incidence of defences around settlements as they develop). They point to Mesoamerican carvings to show how captives were taken and tortured in public display in kingdoms there.

The book does not conclude with any political programme. They do note that the attempt to impose hierarchy has been resisted at every stage. The nearest they come to a suggestion is an anecdote about an archaeologist whose proposal was to ‘put hunter gatherers in charge’.

Overall, this is a worthwhile and important book in the description and articulation of how we came to be where we are. At the very least, it is an eye-opening description of the amazing and varied forms of human society. If nothing else, you can finally discover exactly what a Big Kahuna was.

Pik Smeet

The First and Only Liberationists (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The inclusion of the phrase "without distinction of race or sex", in our Declaration of Principles, might today seem rather trite. Until we remember when it was written. Who else in 1904 was interested in the freedom of women? Indeed the idea that they might need a wider horizon than could be provided by a home and family had scarcely dawned. In the earliest Standards Socialism is proclaimed as the "only hope of the working class irrespective of sex". In the Socialists' definition it was easy to see that most women (like most men) were part of the propertyless majority. Whether or not they were actually employed did not alter their position as members of the working class. Certainly it would be nonsense to speak of an immense majority of that class unless it included women. During the difficult days of the first world war it was the women members who helped the Party going.

As for the "distinction of race", who else in 1904 saw all the world's people as members of one human race? The study of anthropology was still in its infancy and even Engels had not been entirely certain about the position of black races.

The founder members of the Socialist Party had no such doubts. The words had not simply been used to round off a sentence but reflected the level of their Socialist understanding. In capitalism, which was now the dominant social system, there was a division between those who owned the means for production and the vast majority who were obliged to work for the owning class in order to live. This class division cut across all differences of nationality, race or sex. The working class were the modern equivalent of all previous oppressed peoples. It was their historic task to abolish private property and establish Socialism thus ending forever the domination of one group by another. As every human being would have free access to the wealth produced by society, personal relationships would not be bound by material considerations.

Working-class problems are only  complicated by racial, sexual and religious prejudices. A little effort would reveal that the cause of the problems, and the prejudice, lies in capitalism. In the words of those early comrades the establishment of Socialism will freedom for the working class and thereby "the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex".

Pat Deutz

Letter: Herland (1994)

Letter in the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

While I would agree wholeheartedly with Kerima Mohideen that the gender roles we are expected to play in property society are injurious to the great majority of men and women, there were several aspects of the article "Herland" (Socialist Standard, March) which I found confusing as a contribution to a class-based analysis of the problems and potential of humanity.

1. Semantically a matriarchy ("form of social organisation in which the mother is the governing head") cannot be egalitarian and I was unable to gather from the context which of these characteristics the writer regarded as more desirable.

2. I was under the impression that, as socialists advocating the abolition of the wages system we were not merely suspicious of "wages for housework" but hostile to such campaigns and had recently debated a group with the precise title.

3. It is, frankly, outrageous to claim that a fable which sidesteps an inconvenient reality by positing a biological impossibility (asexual reproduction) is "firmly rooted in material possibility". Such literary devices are perfectly valid to make a point but the article sheds very little light on what point is being made. It is clearly sterile to argue that if things weren't as they are they'd be different so we must assume some point is being made about female potential: I cannot but suspect that here we have the extremely dubious contention that there is something intrinsically female about the more positive aspects of humanity. In fact in the course of capitalism women have developed their potential for being every bit as destructive as men; real flesh-and-blood women (as opposed to fictional characters) have become active participants in military carnage, fervent spouters of superstitious nonsense from pulpits and avid consumers of pornographic displays - all activities which are not only profoundly negative but were once almost exclusively masculine. In other words, the prospect which is truly "rooted in material possibility" is that of the female of this species becoming as brutalised as the male. To say that "women should always be able to organise as women as well as with men" is to say nothing: unless working class women and men choose to organise together for the overthrow of the system which threatens to dehumanise us both, it seems to me far more likely that the negative trends will continue than that the utopian ideal will be realised.

John Usher, 

London

Reply:

1. Perhaps "matriarchy" ought logically to be the exact opposite of "patriarchy" and therefore incompatible with an egalitarian society, but this is not the way the concept has been used in anthropology. The 19th century pioneers of anthropology believed that the first human societies had been matriarchal in the sense of tracing descent through the female line. Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State arguing that originally society had been communistic as well as matrilinear and that the switch to descent through the male line (which he described as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex") was part of the same process that led to the replacement of egalitarian "primitive communism" by class-divided, state-rule society. In other words, in the socialist tradition matriarchy has been seen as a feature of the egalitarian, communistic conditions in which humans originally lived while patriarchy was the form the family took in the unequal, class societies which have followed. Although later anthropological research did not bear out a one-to-one link between matrilinear and non-property societies as some unequal property societies were found to be matrilinear, it remains a fact that societies where  women were not oppressed have existed.

2. It was to this past existence of societies where women were not oppressed that the article was referring when it said that the Utopias of writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were "firmly rooted in material possibility". Obviously, this wasn't a reference to the mode of reproduction (without men) in Gilman's Herland but to the fact that societies in which women were the equals of men had existed and so could exist again. Gilman used the literary fiction of a long-established all-woman society, as a society in which literally every task was performed by women, to make the point that women were just as capable as men of being architects, engineers, scientists, decision-makers and the like. Socialists have never doubted this, but many people used to especially in 1915 when Herland was written.

3. The article did not say that Socialists advocate wages for housework, which is really a demand for bigger payments to be made to women by the capitalist state so as to make them less economically dependent on men, less of "a slave of a slave". Maybe it would be in the unlikely event of it being achieved (where's the capitalist state going to find the money to finance it when it's already cutting back on its existing social security payments?), but this would still leave women economically dependent - on the capitalist state instead of on a wage - or salary-earning man. Socialists want an end to the economic and social dependence of women on men, i.e. women's liberation, but the way to achieve this is to establish Socialism, a society of common ownership and production solely for use, not profit, where everyone - men, women, children - would have free access without money to what they require to satisfy their needs.

4. Nor did the article say that women are somehow better than men. What it did was to re-iterate Gilamn's elementary point that women are just as capable of running society as men, concluding with the additional socialist point that women have an important role to play in the movement to establish socialism and that in fact an all-male or male-dominated socialist revolution is a contradiction in terms. The Socialist Party has always said that the majority class must actively participate in their own emancipation, so, since half are women, how could this happen if women did not participate just as actively and as massively as men, with all that this implies about the relationship between men and women?

Editors.

Herland (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have always been fascinated by accounts of societies that are different from ours, whether they be real or imagined. They serve as a reminder that things need not be as they are in our world today and that our lives need not be one endless round of compromise with the grim and confusing reality that surrounds us. Women's Utopias such as Herland and the more recent Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy describe forms of social organization that historical and anthropological research has shown to be possible. They also respresent a development of the ideas of Marx and Engels but as is the case with much that women have to say, and perhaps because it is not expressed in the dry, pseudo-scientific style of political philosophers, these Utopian visions, firmly rooted in material possibility, are vastly underrated. Herland was written in 1915, twenty-five years after William Morris published his News from Nowhere. Both novels describe a world where private property and class privilege no longer exist. News from Nowhere however barely explores the role and status of women in its Utopia and, in failing to do so, throws little insight into a deeply-engrained power relationship of present-day society. As a consequence, it is limited in exploring how people can bring about social change. In that respect, Herland is a less comfortable read than News from Nowhere as it reminds us of how deeply crippled most of us are by social conditioning and how much there is to overcome in order to bring about the necessary fundamental changes in society if we are to survive on this planet. Fortunately, what could be profoundly depressing is leavened by sparkling wit, and the book is a really entertaining read. Personal is Political For the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the personal was also political and her own life and ideas were intimately connected. Like William Morris, she was familiar with the ideas of Marx and Engels and other prevailing political and economic theories of the time. She was involved in the American Socialist Movement and saw herself as a socialist-humanist. She always brought her own experiences to bear on her work and studied ideas in order to understand her own insecure and intensely unhappy early life and first marriage and to gain control of her own destiny. She had little time for the psychological leadership of experts and the detached, academic and so-called scientific approach to understanding human behaviour, in particular that of women. In Herland, she exposes the fallibility of the sociologist who makes assumptions about the society he is about to experience on the basis of observing a single fact. He notices some women climbing trees and deduces thereby that the inhabitants of the society he us about to involve himself in must be arboreal. In fact they are not, and all his scientific insight and his role as commentator on human behaviour is about to be rendered useless as he is gently drawn into ways of living and relating that are completely new to him. The author after coming close to losing her mind, herself rejected the authority of the psychiatrist who attempted to cure her depression by advising her to rest, to live as domestic a life as possible, to limit her intellectual life to two hours a day and to never touch pen, brush or pencil. Instead, she faced the fact that she was not happy in her marriage or in her role as a mother, left home and divorced her husband. He promptly married her best friend and the couple took on the care of Charlotte's child. Charlotte, from a position of great financial insecurity launched herself into a career as a writer. The three adults remained close friends for the rest of their lives but Charlotte was severely censured by the press for divorcing her husband amicably and for no apparent reason, for maintaining a warm relationship with his new wife and for, as the media saw it, abandoning her child. This very honest working out of relationships finds a different interpretation in Herland. The community of Herland is characterized by sisterly solidarity and friendship which is not destroyed even when the men appear. In their world it is also recognized that while every woman may at some point feel the urge to be a mother, not every woman is either interested in or suited to bringing up children and children are better off with those who are. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's experience as a woman under capitalism forced her to recognize that our society is not merely class divided but patriarchal in nature as well. For her, the subordination of women dehumanized half of the human race and retarded all human progress and this has important implications for how we organize for change. In order to make our society truly human, women need to regain power over their minds and bodies and challenge the centuries of dominance that men have become used to. This is the central theme of Herland. Unlike News from Nowhere, Herland is not a static Utopia that we arrive at after a period of social upheaval - it is a society that has spent generations perfecting itself and remains always open to change. It is both a strategy for change and a complete way of life. Amazon Jungle Herland is written in the style of a Boys' Own adventure story. Deep in the Amazon jungle, three amateur explorers, men of course, find their way into a world inhabited only by women. Instead of meeting with exciting adventures in which they can display their superior macho skills - one man even has notions of ending up King of all the women - they are gently disarmed of all their prejudices and pre-conceptions about women and two of them are re-educated into new ways of thinking and relating to women. This is altogether a much more painful and demanding experience. far from behaving like detached and culturally-superior observers of an alien culture as did many of the anthropologists of Charlotte's day, all three of the men become heavily involved in the lives of the Herlanders and learn to adjust to their ways. Herland is a matriarchal society. A matriarchy is not simply a refelction of a patriarchal society which is also hierarchical in nature. It is an egalitarian society, a sisterhood in which women's capacity to bear children is of central importance and held in high regard. The anthropologist Evelyn Reed in her book Woman's Evolution has shown that many of the earliest human societies are likely to have been matriarchal and such societies continue to exist - just about - to this day. There have been no men in Herland for centuries. This has given the women the much-needed personal and social space to recover their automony as women. Every woman needs that space for herself. Women should always be able to organize as women as well as with men. In Aboriginal society, individual members of a group might express their need for personal space by going on a walkabout. Men and women retained control over separate spaces for themselves as two distinct and autonomous groups. They often led much more separate lives than we understand in our society and Aboriginal women tend not to be impressed with women who are dependent on the views and approval of men. Biological Urge The women of Herland reproduce simply by responding to the urge to be a mother. This biological urge is the driving force behind all their creative activity. Indeed in the interests of population control, collectively agreed by the community, the women restrict themselves to one child each and channel their mother urge into other activities. They are not at the mercy of their childbearing capacity although the idea of abortion is abhorrent to them. In many of the matriarchal societies described by Evelyn Reed, it would appear that women had similar control over their fertility. They knew about contraceptive medicines and practised periods of abstention from sexual intercourse. It is possible that they had a better sense of their biological rhythms than we do and knew when they were most likely to be fertile. Travelers noted that women in some Native American communities only had three or four children and they were shocked to hear that women in our society sometimes had ten or more children. All the women of Herland are single mothers - like many lesbian mothers today, they are not dependent on a relationship with a man for their sexual pleasure or in order to become mothers. Unlike for most women in our society there is no tension between their responsibilities as mothers and fulfilling a socially-useful and challenging role in the community. This is because in matriarchal societies, child-rearing is a communal and public activity. No mother is separated from other members of the society with solitary responsibility for her children. The women of Herland have managed to fulfill their need for food, shelter and transport in ways that are technologically developed as well as ecologically-sustainable. As far as food production is concerned, they are gatherers and cultivators. But there are no farms on Herland and virtually no domesticated animals, apart from a few cats left over from a previous era. The idea of eating meat and drinking the milk of animals other than themselves strikes the women of Herland as a rather cruel and abhorrent idea. Instead, they live on the rich variety of fruits and nuts which they have gathered from the forest which surrounds their dwellings. The trees bear the marks of cultivation. Their branches are trained so as to make the fruits easily accessible and species have been bred so as to obtain a high yield. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision of food production might seem a little twee by comparison with real-life examples, it is not dissimilar from the way some forest-dwelling peoples use their environment even to this day. In fact, the destruction of the forests by large-scale capitalist development projects such as dams and mines has particular implications for the lives of women among indigenous forest dwelling communities around the world. For the women who used the forest as a source of food, fuel, as a hygienic place to relieve calls of nature and a place of spiritual retreat, it represented social and economic independence. The impact of capitalism on their lives has thrust them into dependence on the wage-slavery of the men in a matter of months in some instances. There are no schools in Herland but learning as an ongoing process is of central importance in the women's lives. They are all open-minded and critically receptive to new ideas and fail to understand how religious beliefs going back thousands of years continue to hold such a powerful grip on the minds of people in our society. They set out to teach the men about Herland by enquiring about the world they have come from. Teaching for them is about sharing ideas and experiences, a much more egalitarian process than we experience in our schools and colleges. They meet the most conservative and sexist views of the men with patience and respect and draw them gently away from their prejudices and preconceptions with questions and information that might open their minds to alternative ways of thinking. Having captured the three explorers, the women of Herland decide that it is in their interests to allow this contact with men to develop. Nevertheless, they continue to retain their material and intellectual independence. Three of the women form intimate relationships with the men. Two of the couples marry but retain independent living quarters. Their relationships, particularly that of Ellador who marries the former sociologist who is perhaps the most receptive to the women's culture without feeling either that he has to challenge it or lose his own cultural and sexual identity in the process, are not dogged by the possessiveness and insecurity that so dogs relationships in our society today. Instead, they have an easy-going friendship based on shared interests, a meeting of minds, mutual trust and pleasure in each other's company. As far as Ellador is concerned, sex does not figure very highly in the relationship. It is an aspect of our culture, which she says she has yet to understand but she treats their different sexual needs with honesty and sensitivity and her partner finds himself being drawn into a calm and and deeply-rewarding understanding such as he has never experienced with a woman before. Terry on the other hand who is the most macho of the three men attempts to impose his desires on his partner during a much more stormy relationship. Unlike in our society where rape within marriage and date rapes are only just beginning to be recognized as such, the whole community of Herland responds to this attempted rape and Terry is asked to leave with no hope of reconciliation with his partner. Even the other two men recognize that they have a responsibility to deal with this man who they liked at the beginning of the book and whose behaviour they tolerated as long long as it did not implicate their own wives, sisters and daughters. Continued Relevance Although it was written nearly eighty years ago, Herland continues to have relevance today. In News from Nowhere there is a chapter on "How the Change Came About". We read of much that is familiar, of workers organizations, of mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and much more. In Herland the author reminds us of the central role that women have to play in bringing about a revolution. We should bear in mind that during the period when Charlotte Perkins Gilman and William Morris were writing, women had already made an enormous contribution to the working-class movement. Yet that is barely acknowledged today. In the early days of the trade union movement, their role as workers as dependent on a wage as the men was not recognized by those who advocated the family wage as opposed to equal pay. The enormous amount of unpaid work that women do continues to remain largely unrecognized and the women who do it largely unorganized. Any efforts to organize by such groups of women such as the wages for housework campaign is viewed with suspicion even by many of the male-dominated organizations on the left. The women who so staunchly supported the Miners' strike of 1984 were denied membership of the NUM. These are just a few symptoms of the deep-rooted sexism in our society that continues to exclude women from political action by failing to recognize the particular ways in which capitalism affects their lives. Herland demonstrates how class conscious women in full control of their minds and their bodies can organize themselves in peaceful co-operation and overcome this sexism and how they must play an important role in bringing about and maintaining the revolution. Men, deprived of their patriarchal role, will find for themselves a much more meaningful existence in the process. Kerima Mohideen The article elicited the following response in a later issue of the Socialist Standard.

Blobby Culture (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard The new emblem of British culture has been unleashed. From the great system of dynamic enterprise which tried to sell us the Sinclair C5 and Charles 'n' Di mugs has emerged the ubiquitous Mister Blobby. Once a mere pseudo-personality to share a screen with the non-personality of Noel Edmonds, now Blobby has achieved the success of shooting to the top of the Christmas record charts and being mobbed by adoring fans wherever he appears. That he is not real (there is not even an out-of-work actor inside him, we are told by an official at the BBC) well reflects the condition of contemporary art. Like a glove puppet with no human hand to manipulate him, Blobby embodies - if not emblobbies - the emptiness of late-twentieth century market culture. Blobby was not invited to be a judge in the Turner Prize for the greatest art in Britain. His comments would have been about as meaningful and dynamic as the Snobbies from the art critics' enclosure whose task was to determine which piece of socially estranged exhibition art deserved the jackpot. It was awarded eventually to Rachel Whiteread whose dislocated semi-house structure beat the pile of rice with neon lights running through it which was another contender for the most vacuous piece of insignificance to stun the red-rimmed spectacled spectators. A pile of bricks in the Tate Gallery, a sack of neon-lit rice, an inside-out house, Mister Blobby booming from the radio ... is somebody trying to tell us something? Perhaps they are telling us this: that capitalism has run out of ideas. Just as its political defenders can think of nothing at all except to go back to basics which they can't define, those who write, paint, sculpt or dance to the tune of a social order which is increasingly socially fragmented and ideologically unconfident in itself will all too frequently produce nonsense. This is not to attack artistic modernity in defence of some romanticized memory of high art which was largely the production of pompous postures for the privileged. The art critic, Brian Sewell, whose arrogant dismissal of "the new" is a thinly-disguised fear of artistic expression by those previously excluded from "posh art" (women, non-Europeans and the non-rich), persists in defending a vision of artistic quality which means little more than the fading values of a worn-out aristocracy. Anyone tempted by the snobbish ramblings of Sewell should read William Morris's Art Under Plutocracy (1883) or Art And Socialism (1884) as an antidote. The issue is not really about art at all. It is about finding meanings in a world that has become meaningless to so many people. The old-guard defenders of High Culture seek meaning in a past where capitalist relations were still dynamic and able to offer some inspiration to creative minds. The new snobs invent ever more outrageous adventures in escapist and abstracted imagery in a bid to create meaning where nothing is meant. It is like a restaurant which has run out of recipes selling expensive bowls of boiled water which is coloured purple to make the punters imagine they are tasting something new. The problem of capitalism's current cultural crisis is that productive relations are so outmoded in relation to the potential for dynamic productivity of creative abundance that artists thinking and working within the belief-structure of the capitalist system are only likely to reproduce the stagnation arising from redundant relationships. Just as the late Roman Empire produced a decadent and dying artistic culture and the collapsing Ottoman Empire found itself artistically adrift, so "art" in the present stage of capitalism is increasingly divided between the commercial populism of cartoon video imagery which is pointless and often poisonous and fake innovations which impress only those who are paid to be impressionable. Living art must relate to people as we are and not to trained consumers of warmed-up relics by the dead or pretentious trash by the dead boring. The rhythm of art is social activity: productive work in its broadest sense (from wood-cutting to mixing paints). As Ernst Fischer explained in his very clearly-stated Marxist analysis, The Necessity of Art: Art... is a form of work, and work is an activity peculiar to mankind . . . Man takes possession of the natural by transforming it. Work is transformation of the natural. Man also dreams of working magic upon nature, of being able to change objects and give them new form by magic means. This is the equivalent in the imagination of what work means in reality. Man is, from the outset, a magician. But the magicians of our age are more like tricky conjurers pulling imitation rabbits out of their hats. For, the principal art of capitalism is the advertising industry and its insidious assault upon our tastes and desires does not reflect the rhythm of life but rather seeks to dictate it. Today's "artists" are the producers of ads for Renault and Guinness - the product is immaterial: drive it or drink it, but the boys in red-rimmed specs will make you buy it. Is there any hope for meaningful art in a society where money buys creativity, distorts wants and crushes hope? Is such a wretched social order capable of much more than Mister Blobby? And yet there does emerge subversive art. Sometimes it is appropriated by those it threatens. Just as armies defuse explosive devices, the artists who rebel are made safe by being given jobs and allowed to turn rebellion into a fashion. So it is that designer-made Anarchist symbols can now be purchased from the trendiest clothes shops and chinless wonders frequent the wine bars of Kensington wearing ripped jeans and expensive punk labels. Capitalism finds it easier to buy subversion than to fight it. Exceptions do exist. The photo-art of the Brazilian photographer, Sebastiao Salgada, whose images of the hellish lives of workers were recently exhibited in a remarkable free exhibition "Workers - An Archeology of the Industrial Age" at the Royal Festival Hall, shows just how much of an impact the depiction of the conditions of contemporary wage slavery can make. For the present writer (as for several other socialists who saw the exhibition) this was a refreshing glimmer of haunting reality within an art world usually inhabited by preciously insignificant artifacts. Without lionizing workers in the grotesque manner of the old "socialist realists", Salgada's pictures capture the essential dignity of productive creation while never flinching from the nightmarish wretchedness which characterizes so much daily labour. (A book containing some of the photographs has been published.) Here is art penetrating existing relations rather than retreating from them into the pseudo-inner-soul of the artist. Those who saw Tony Hancock's satirical depiction of the pretensions of the art world in his 1960 film, The Rebel, will recognize that with the Turner Prize art has come to imitate comedy. Likewise, readers of Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World, will detect in the recent superstardom of Mister Blobby the rise of a form of artistic expression only possible when its audience is being conditioned to the idiotic level of meaningless entertainment. Poverty takes many forms, and not the least of them is that which holds up an artistic mirror to the social ethos and reflects in it an abstract, ludicrous portrait of a system of social chaos. Steve Coleman

Editorial: Not The Millenium (1987)

Editorial from the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard Those who contributed to the first issue of the Socialist Standard 83 years ago shared an excitement and optimism difficult to conceive 1,000 uninterrupted issues on. As their high hopes dissolved in face of gruesome reality, they did what socialists have done ever since: propagated the case for a free society at every opportunity and by any means, usually with scant success. The journal's vigour and survival through numerous testing times is testimony both to the soundness of our principles and analysis of capitalism's operation, as well as a tribute to the dedication of individuals. That said, self congratulation would be both inappropriate and deluding, given that the subject for which we exist appears as remote as ever. The Standard has been the product of voluntary effort by hundreds of socialists with widely differing opinions about the best way to present the Party's case. This has helped to mitigate a constant difficulty: we have had to be both a topical commentary on current affairs (a task made difficult by monthly publication) as well as a vehicle for at times abstract and demanding theory. There has always been a band of contributors who wanted us to seek popular appeal with a style of presentation modeled on the tabloid press, but this has lacked support and been impractical because of our numerical weakness. Those who wanted more solid expositions of Marxist theory have likewise had to content themselves with a hybrid which seeks to satisfy both demands. Although the form of communicating our ideas has varied over the years, political fashion has had no effect on the kernel of our proposition: that capitalism is inherently incapable of reform in the interest of the majority, who must consciously opt for a new society before it can be realised. Our strength has lain in the uniqueness of our case, not in the extent to which we have been able to find common cause with the trends of the day; an accommodating socialism would have had but a short time to live. We have always tried, not always successfully, to contain an arrogance born of a consistent correctness about the century's major issues and events, a weakness for which we make no apology. For it is not we who packed our bags and departed, or are crawling around on all fours in the desperate search for a new road to El Dorado. Our sometimes harsh treatment of opponents' views has inevitably drawn strong criticism, even from people claiming to be in broad sympathy with our object. Why, they say, after calling a spade a spade, do you find it necessary to finish the job with repeated kicks to the shins in hobnail boots? What's wrong with carpet slippers now and again? Even if we accept that the critic is basically unhappy with the content of our argument, or that abuse for its own sake may lose support for our ideas, there remains a contradiction difficult to resolve: a tolerant society rich in sensibility and feeling can only be realised through the concerted actions of a self-disciplined, combative and ostensibly "hard" body of socialists. The "soft" utopian ingredient of the socialist movement, best represented in the writings of William Morris, adds an important imaginative element to our materialist approach but can never itself be the engine of change. The assumption of the sensitive reader is that a wholly rational and explanatory socialism is required, whereas we know only too well that Even hatred of squalor Makes the brow grow stern. Even anger against injustice Makes the voice grow harsh . . . Unless our articles can draw into the socialist movement those motivated by a deep and bitter revulsion against a system of organised poverty and waste, as well as a appeal to others who consider socialism a good idea, we will rightfully be restricted to the political backwater. Were our true opinions concealed behind euphemism, then how could we continue to criticise the defenders of capitalism for their hypocrisy and double standards? If we contend, for example, the animal rights lobby has obscenely warped and disturbing priorities, or that the aims of black liberation movements are inimical to socialists, then we must unfailingly say so. We have sought to disabuse workers of a belief that society would be tolerable if only we could reduce or ban armaments, build more houses, feed the hungry, create more jobs, make our priorities green, foster the growth of co-operatives, control crime and hang criminals, or be generally much nicer to each other. While repeated coverage of these issues has given our arguments a firm base in experience, the core of resistance to fundamental change is a widespread belief that society is as it is because of "the nature of things". This inability to accept a distinction between human constants and the products of a class society is the last and most difficult barrier we have to break down. Fortunately, in our efforts to turn the world upside down we have a constant ally in capitalism, which offers its largely passive collaborators a succession of unfulfilled dreams; if consumer choice does not yet extend to the rejection of everything on offer, at least we know that there is always deep dissatisfaction and a constant groping for solutions. The credibility of the Socialist Standard has never hinged on the size of our readership or the support for our position at elections, but on whether our connection of cause and effect can be seen with hindsight to have been sound. We know that socialism is presently rejected by all but a handful, usually on spurious grounds but rejected nevertheless. In such circumstances we can only persist in the publication of a sane alternative, always bearing in mind that the self-righteous are unlikely to inherit the earth.

A better kind of capitalism (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard "He is considered the most graceful speaker who can say nothing in most words." Samuel Butler, Notebooks. At a meeting of business men in San Francisco recently, two speakers put forward their views about the American economic system. They were Michael Harrington, author of The Twilight of Capitalism and the  widely-read Socialism, and Fletcher Byrom, chairman of the board of the Kopper Corporation, a thriving industrial enterprise. Their suggestions for solving American capitalism's problems turned out to be remarkably similar. Only their descriptions of their views were different. The debate was reported in the New York Times of 5th May. Harrington, described his standpoint as a "democratic socialist" one, while Byrom's word for his projected future society was "technocratic". The symmetry of their proposals makes clear that one or other was using words wrongly; or was it both of them? Harrington claimed that the American system has undergone changes away from "free-enterprise capitalism" and in the direction of "collectivism". Byrom argued that, with increased mechanization and automation, making people work hard was less important than organizing society better through government. Both speakers agreed that there is something wrong with the present management of American society. Both proposed, to solve America's problems, a better planned administration. In spite of Harrington's description of the present order as "welfare decadent capitalism", neither saw the cause of the problems as capitalism itself; both blamed the inefficient use of government resources. Thus, Harrington's "democratic socialist" programme included "increasing public sector employment, redistributing wealth towards the poor, and social control of investment in the United States". And Byrom's "technocratic" solution included the following measures: "longer terms in office for elected politicians, improvements in health delivery systems, inner city schools and other social programmes to reduce unemployment". The reforms suggested have nothing whatever to do with Socialism. On the contrary, increased state intervention is something required by capitalism. Harrington's ideas are those of a section of the Labour Party, who claim to be able to "reform away" capitalist evils; but they also belong to a school of thought whose roots lie in a book published in 1940 called The Managerial Revolution. Its author, James Burnham, claimed that capitalism was being superceded - it was no longer the owners of capital who controlled society but the "managerial class": salaried executives, engineers, managers and civil servants. None of these doctrines is correct or provides an understanding of what takes place in the capitalist system. It is based on the ownership - which may or may not be synonymous with control - of the means of living by a class. Wealth takes one form only: commodities, or articles produced for sale at a profit. In some cases distribution, including transport and communications may need to be centrally organized virtually from the outset: the roads and postal system were "nationalized" at a very early stage in capitalism. In others, the production of basic materials such as coal, electricity, iron and steel eventually appears too important to capitalism as a whole to be left to "free enterprise", and the state takes control of them; or, as with agriculture, provides money and lays down conditions to ensure production in line with national policies. All this is necessary capitalist practice. At the same time, the state is obliged to legislate in what are called "social" matters on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole, or dominant sections of it. The working class has to be educated. Beyond a minimum general standard, the introduction of more complex machinery requires workers with technical skill and scientific knowledge. The state has to intervene (e.g. the central aim of Polytechnics is to co-operate with industry and to serve its needs). Subsidies and controls are used to keep wage demands in check; medical welfare, to minimize the losses to industry through illness; and so on. The measures advocated by Harrington and Byrom are part and parcel of the profit system. For example, "increasing public sector employment" happens as a matter of course - at certain times. They have nothing to do with a change away from capitalism, and therefore (vis-a-vis Harrington's use of the phrase "democratic socialist") nothing to do with Socialism. One last question on Harrington's contribution. He argues for "redistributing wealth towards the poor". It sounds humane and unexceptionable, yet it betrays lack of comprehension of what capitalism is about. Why does he think they are poor? They are, of course, wage-workers and the dependents of wage-workers, or the unemployed ones. In a book called The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962, he spoke repeatedly of "cheap unorganized labour" as the basic problem. But the working class as a whole is condemned to poverty, differing only in the degree of it. Apart from charitable handouts, there is no means for workers to get wealth "redistributed towards" them (whatever that means). They can and will struggle for higher wages and improved living standards, and the capitalist class at times finds itself forced to pay higher wages for labour-power. The fundamental wage-labour relationship which is the cause of poverty remains. Attempts to redistribute wealth by reform legislation have been going on for for a lifetime in Britain - and the reformers now admit that they have failed. In The Other America Harrington calls poverty "needless", as if it were the result of carelessness or mismanagement. As long as he thinks that, he is not thinking of Socialism. Alison Waters

A World Without Money - 5 Questions (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard Are socialists suggesting that we should do away with money and revert to barter? No, we are not. Both money and barter are forms of exchange. Exchange is only possible when there is private property. In a society in which all wealth is owned in common there will be no property to exchange and there will therefore be no need for money or barter. When you get dressed in the morning you do not sell your clothes to yourself, nor do you barter them for some other possession, for you cannot exchange that which is already yours. In socialist society there will be free access to all social wealth because men and women will commonly own the means of production and distribution. Without having to pay for goods and services will people take more than they need? Why should they? As long as there is enough wealth to provide for everyone (and the potentiality already exists), people in socialist society will take freely to satisfy their self-determined needs. There will be no need to take more than you want because tomorrow you will be able to go back and take more. Socialism will not come into being without conscious socialists and such people will appreciate the importance of reasonable co-operation. If, for example, there is a shortage of a particular resource in socialism, they will have to co-operatively and democratically ration that which is available. The so-called greedy man is an invention of capitalist anthropology: a worker is said to be greedy if he wants more than his wage packet can buy him. Is the price system the best way of allocating resources? Look around and see. The world is abundant in resources, yet poverty is the lot of the majority. The buying and selling system, based on production for profit, is economically inefficient from the point of view of those who produce the wealth. Socialism means free access to all wealth and production solely for need. This will mean that in a socialist society bread will be produced simply so that people may eat it, and not for sale on the market with a view to profit. Without wages or salaries, who will do the dirty work? In society which can land men on the moon and fire missiles across the face of the earth to within inches of a target, the technology certainly exists to do away with much of the unpleasant labour of society. Instead of research into more and more sophisticated killing machines socialism will devote resources to improving productive efficiency from the point of view of both the wealth producer and the wealth consumer. Work in socialism will be based upon voluntary co-operation and not the coercion of the wages system. The division between work (enforced drudgery) and leisure (when your time is your own) will be ended by socialism. Instead of advocating a world without money, shouldn't socialists be campaigning for a fairer distribution of money? To expect "fairness" from an inherently unequal is a form of utopianism which has diverted the working class movement for far too long. Under capitalism wealth ownership is concentrated into the hands of a small minority of the world's population. These are the people who have plenty of money. Most people can only obtain money by selling their mental and physical energies to an employer for a price called a wage or salary. You will never get rich by working for money. The only way for the working class to get rich is by getting rid of the money system. Steve Coleman

Morris and Revolution (1990)

From the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Morris's News From Nowhere is a speculative work in the same genre as More's Utopia. It challenges us to reject mere piecemeal reforms and to aim for a real community of co-operation. Some would call him Utopian, both for rejecting reformism - what E.P. Thompson calls his "purism" - and for speculating as to what such a socialist/communist society might be like.

However, Engels, contrasting Utopian Socialists to "Scientific Socialists" focussed on the point that the latter base their argument on class interests. Utopian Socialists lived at a time when the working class was emerging as a new class "quite incapable of independent political action . . . an oppressed suffering order". Marxists however recognize the working class as a "revolutionary class", capable of changing society.

The Utopians saw society as presenting "nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary . . . to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda" (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific). What is it that prevents Morris, with his capitalist background, his lack of experience of working class struggle, and the emphasis he gave to propaganda from being called a "Utopian Socialist"?

How the change could come

In News From Nowhere, his most widely-read work, Morris set out in detail how, in 1890, he thought the "change" might come about. Central to his concept is his view that the new society is the outcome of working class struggle, based on awareness of class interests. Like Marx, he perceives the working class as a revolutionary class, not merely as "the oppressed". In some details - for instance, Trafalgar Square demonstrations attacked by soldiers and police - he reminds his readers of recent events, fresh to their memory.

The 1880s had been a period of recession - the Great Depression. Morris suggests that a major economic crisis, resulting in working class suffering and discontent, could help trigger revolution. In News From Nowhere there is a highly developed workers' industrial organisation -  the "Combined Workers". And, crucially, class-consciousness is enhanced by the economic crisis and the "spread of communistic theories". This led to the Resolution of the Combined Workers, effectively a demand for workers control, demanding that control of the "whole natural resources of the country" be handed over to the Combined Workers.

However, the workers' movement was not politically powerful and the government (first Liberal, later Conservative) decided to crush it. Extra soldiers were brought in and a militia was recruited, but the government "did not dare use them".

The media "blazed into the fury of frightened people", and leading businessmen put pressure on the government. In a state of siege, troops were used to massacre the (mostly) unarmed demonstrators in Trafalgar Square.

The workers arranged free distribution of food and created a new form of organisation - "a new network of workmen's associations". This was able to carry on the struggle even when the leaders of the movement (the Committee of Public Safety) were arrested, or, when free, active only as "a focus of opposition".

With the general strike ("a weapon stronger than street fighting") and impending civil war, there was also the "rapidly approaching breakdown of the whole system founded on the World Market and its supply". Two years of civil war followed and the working people were victorious. The soldiers had mostly joined them, and qualities of leadership and organisation were developed in the struggle.

. . . Or Could It?

In Morris's account of this imaginery struggle there are inconsistencies and somethings downright unbelievable. One is that the working-class, so class-conscious, so well-organised, should have only a few representatives in Parliament. Another is his view of the speedy effectiveness of the general strike: in 1926 workers found out that this could last longer than a few days and would not shake the system, as Morris suggested.

Then there is the suggestion that world capitalism could be brought, in such circumstances, to the point of collapse. In a serious economic crisis, mass strikes do not really hurt the employers much. It is the workers whose families are first to feel the pinch of hunger, even if the strikers do organise free food (as in the 1889 London Dock Strike). In a crisis, factories can be shut down while directors and shareholders play a waiting game till despair and distress force the workers back.

But there were historic precedents for some of the developments Morris suggested. The government's inability to use its troops at an early stage to crush the revolution is paralleled in Belfort Bax's comment on the fall of the Bastille, achieved with the support of the mutinous French Guard, showing the "eminent utility of popular 'force' if only applied at the right moment". (Bax, The French Revolution, 1890).

However, in News From Nowhere, Morris seems not to recognize the crucial importance for the working class of gaining control of the state and its administrative machinery. It seems that, if the soldiers had not come over to the revolution, the workers - poorly-armed, with no military training - would have gone into battle against trained, organised and well-equipped government forces. In real life, that would have been that.

When the time comes that the workers are determined to overthrow the capitalist system, they will only be able to do this if they have the political power to prevent the state's armed forces from being used to crush the revolution. That is why workers have to be organised politically. The state exists precisely to defend the interests of the owners of property in the last resort, against us and our movement.

In 1890, when News From Nowhere first came into print as a serial in Commonweal the League was splitting. Morris and other socialists could no longer work with the anarchists who had come to dominate the Socialist League. Some of these advocated "direct action", others terrorist methods - the so-called "propaganda by deed". All rejected political organisation and using parliament.

Yet, since 1884, the electorate was, overwhelmingly, working class. If. once united on a clear objective, the workers could organize themselves effectively in a political party, they could obtain control over the executive.

The League's failure served as a lesson for other Socialists. In his introduction to the American edition of Plekhanov's book, Anarchism and Socialism, Robert Rives La Monte made the point "every revolt from the Socialist Party in America, which is based on disgust with the fact that it is a 'pure and simple' political party of 'ballot-worshippers' is destined to repeat the history of the Socialist League", to land "in the quagmire of Anarchism". Plekhanov's book was important since it argued that "every class war is a political war".

To prevent a repitition of the League's failure, the Socialist Party of Great Britain's Declaration of Principles was explicit in asserting the necessity of political organisation and action.

A 'Quasi-Socialist Machinery'

The other significant trend at the time Morris wrote News From Nowhere was the birth of the "New Unionism". Whereas previously trade unions had represented mainly the (Liberal) "aristocracy of labour", the radical New Unions mobilised casual and low-paid workers. But along with New Unionism, workers were being encouraged towards what Morris called "palliatives". In Commonweal, in 1890, Morris wrote

The hope of the partial and vulgarised realisation of Socialism is now pressing on us . . . The whole set [of] opinion amongst those more or less touched by Socialism . . . is towards the New Trades' Unions and palliation. Men believe that they can wrest from the capitalists some portion of their privileged profits  . . . [but] I say for us to make Socialists is the business (Where Are We Now, in Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. Morton)

Not that he thought it enough merely to "make Socialists". Later he wrote

I cannot fail to see that it is necessary somehow to get hold of the machine which has at its back the executive power of the country . . . And that the organisation and labour which will be necessary to effect that by means of the ballot box will be little indeed compared with what would be necessary to effect it by open revolt (in May Morris, Supplementary Volume II, pp. 350).

At the same time (1892) he was stating clearly his position on the Fabian, 'gas and water socialism', and the other partial demands:

rise of wages, shortening of hours of labour, better education etc., all these things are good, even in themselves, but unless they are used as steps towards equality of condition, the inconvenience they will cause to the capitalists will be met by changes in the markets, and in the methods of production, which will make the gains of the workers mere names. (Quoted in E.P Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, revised edition, 1976, p.600).

Morris's yardstick for assessing the long-term benefit of welfare state or other Labourite nostrums for making capitalism less unacceptable was simply: would it help to educate the workers towards Socialism? He warned that social democratic measures could be seen as "ends in themselves", rather than as promoting and encouraging "a knowledge of the aims of socialism", and a longing "to build it about". He foresaw that capitalism might accept this "quasi-socialist machinery" and use it as a means of safeguarding the system, with "the workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now". (Political Writings of William Morris, p.229). That lecture, Communism, should be compulsory reading for all in the Labour Party who call themselves socialists!

This lecture also expresses Morris's confidence in the working class to establish socialism:

Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working-people; and then, I say, the thing will be done.

Charmian Skelton