Cooking the Books: Capitalism for ever? (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 2 March Jacques Attali, author of a recent biography of Marx in French (and former top adviser to President Mitterrand and former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), gave a talk with historian Eric Hobsbawm on “Marx for the 21st century” at the Jewish Book Fair in London.

Interviewed in the Guardian (25 February) he was reported as saying:

“Contrary to popular belief, Marx was not mistaken: capitalism will fall and be replaced by a socialist system. The only question is when. ‘For Marx the fall of the rate of profit will appear when capitalism has exhausted its capacity for growth, which is not the case,’ he says. ‘Socialism will come after this.’”

Marx did indeed think that capitalism would prepare the way for and eventually be replaced by socialism (which Attali correctly identifies, both in his book and in his talk, as a world non-market society in which money will have no place and in which goods and services will be freely available for people to take and use). And he could be interpreted as having argued (in the Grundrisse, in the section in Notebook VII on “Contradiction between the foundations of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development“) that, if capitalism were to continue long enough, productivity would eventually rise to such a level that the unit price of goods would fall so low (their labour-time content being so small) that they would be virtually free and that the prospect of making a profit would therefore be so low that the economic mechanism of capitalism would seize up.

Attali’s reported answer here implies that Marx really thought that socialism would only come when capitalism had reached that stage. Which it clearly hasn’t. So, capitalism would still have some way to go, until in fact it had not only come to dominate the globe (as at present and for at least a century) but had come to exist everywhere including in the currently “undeveloped” parts of the world in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Until, in short, capitalist globalisation had run its full course.

Marx certainly thought that in his day capitalism still had some years to go before it could be replaced by socialism (which is why he supported non-socialist developments within capitalism which he thought would speed up the development of capitalism and with it the material basis for socialism, such as free trade, the victory of the North in the American Civil War, and German unity). But it is doubtful whether the passage from the Grundrisse was anything more than Marx saying what would eventually happen if capitalism were to go on for long enough. In other words, that there were theoretical reasons why capitalism could not literally go on forever. It did have an economic limit, even if this would be far into the future.

Marx can’t be interpreted as saying that capitalism would, or should, continue for that long. His activities as a revolutionary socialist clearly showed that, on the contrary, he thought that capitalism could, and should, be ended by conscious working class action long before it reached its theoretical limit.

Material World: This Land is Our Land (2011)

The Material World Column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a time when 'land' used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, and to forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and also to where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with everything else one can imagine, land is just another commodity to be bought and sold at the best possible price and to be acquired whatever the consequences for long-term incumbents. So too is everything it can offer – food, fuel, minerals and water – with the added bonus of investment and speculation.

The phenomenon of 'land-grab', well known now, was originally seen as a way for food insecure and rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to gain access to foreign farmland in order to meet the food needs of their own populations. Then came the big push for biofuels following targets agreed by governments at a succession of meetings on climate change. The Worldwatch Institute recently reported that rural populations have been pushed off prime land in 25 sub-Saharan countries for the production of biofuel crops for foreign nations. In other examples, food is grown on an industrial scale solely for export, disenfranchising local populations and turning them into wage labourers if they are lucky, and forcing them into urban areas and likely penury if they are not.

The most exciting opportunity now for big money seeking even bigger money is that of investment and speculation in both food and land. Pension schemes, universities, bankers and large investors are jostling to invest in land for speculation. According to one spokesperson for a large company fund, it doesn't matter if nothing is grown for ten years, you'll still 'turn a good profit.' Pension funds globally run to around $23 trillion. Their investment in land and agriculture is relatively recent but growing fast and admitted by some investment bankers and civil society organisations to be a major cause of rising food prices globally.

At the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, this February an appeal against land-grabbing was launched. By September over 650 organisations had endorsed it. Estimates of land the size of western Europe (227 million hectares) have been sold, leased or licensed in the last decade. One Oxfam case study found at least 22,500 people lost both homes and land in Uganda when they were evicted in favour of a British company, the New Forest Company. There were conflicting versions from the company and from the evicted, but a high court order to restrain evictions was sidestepped and the company put the responsibility onto the Ugandan National Forest Authority. There are numerous accounts of promised benefits to displaced persons and communities not materialising even after several years of waiting. Efforts to draw up and implement regulations for the protection of local populations, even voluntary ones, have been less than robust.

In India government policy is to dispossess its own population. Prime Minister Singh has stated that 70 percent of India's farming population is surplus to requirements and that this surplus must be resettled in urban areas where 1,000 training institutions are being set up to facilitate new employment opportunities. Devinder Sharma, academic and commentator, says that this will be the world's biggest environmental displacement and that what is needed is a production system by the masses not for the masses. He says this policy will add another 95 million to the urban population within a decade, forcing farmers to abandon agriculture, usurping land, water and natural resources in the name of development. In West Bengal, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh fertile land has been taken for industrial development, residential development, businesses and Special Economic Zones whilst big corporations acquire land in other countries, specifically African countries, for development of agribusinesses to cultivate crops for Indian consumption. More than 80 companies have so far acquired land through direct negotiations with host governments but without input from the affected farmers. 1.8 million hectares in Ethiopia alone have changed hands this way to the detriment of small farmers in both countries. 250,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in the last 15 years. In the last decade more than two million hectares of farmland (equal in size to the whole of Kerala state) have been acquired for non-farm purposes, and studies show that India will be a major food importer by 2017-8.

The countries of Africa have been a major target for land-grab with agriculture on an industrial scale reaping substantial profits for investors. Corporate agriculture, however, is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be at this rate before its limits are reached – dispossessed millions starved to death in favour of a tidy accumulation for the few? A lengthy study by the Oakland Institute in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and South Sudan looked at the viability of industrial-scale farming compared with small family farms. What they found was that where 100,000 hectares of plantations would employ 1,000 workers, traditional agriculture of the same area would sustain 50,000 families, that is between 200-250,000 people.

This land is our land. Reclaiming the commons for the peoples of the world is a vital part of the socialist revolution.

Janet Surman

Obituaries: L. E. Weidberg and Stan C. Bathurst (1986)

Obituaries from the June 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

L. E. Weidberg

It is with regret that we report the death, after a long illness, of L. E. Weidberg who first joined Manchester branch of The Socialist Party in the 1930s. He read a copy of the Socialist Standard in the public library and was convinced instantly.

Laurie was a socialist eccentric—infuriatingly rude and dogmatic, lovably sharp-witted and passionate. Rarely did I have a conversation with him without finding reasons to expel him from the Party and other reasons to admire him: he was a most appealing rascal, a fellow who could (and did) provoke vicars to swear at him and who always seemed to have riots imminent within the vicinity of his presence. I have never witnesses a better socialist heckler—he must have been given his training by Moses Baritz, the man who blew his clarinet down the ventilator shaft of an SDF meeting from which he had been barred. As a speaker on the outdoor platform at Hyde Park and Lincoln's Inn, his oratory was always much to the point, usually funny, often vulgar and sometimes bloody offensive. His articles in the Socialist Standard possessed all of those characteristics, not least when he was laying in to his pet hate: the Guardian newspaper and its soggy bourgeois liberalism—or "half-baked lefty crap" as Laurie would put it. He worked hard for the Party as a tireless speaker, an EC member for one noisy year, a regular writer and a good friend to the new, younger members who were with him in Islington branch in which he spent his last years in the Party. In the branch he showed himself to possess unusual humility which allowed him to listen to and learn from others combined with the temper of one who took to co-operation like a duck takes to concrete.

For some years Laurie was very ill and knew that he was soon to die. It was this that led him to leave the Party, wrongly concluding that the working class are "a bleeding waste of time". But as a healthy, active man he was second to few in his unrestrained effort to knock socialist sense into the heads of workers. He will be missed by those of us who remember, and persist in, those efforts and our sympathy goes to his widow, sister and three sons.

S.C.

Stan C. Bathurst

It is with much regret that we report the death of Stan Bathurst, on 2 March, at the age of 80.

Between the wars, Stan's active membership of the Labour Party inevitably brought him into contact with the real socialist message of the SPGB but it was not until the late forties that he came to understand and accept the Party's principles. This came about through his association with the late comrade Bowie, when they were both employed as insurance agents in the south Essex area.

Membership of the Southend Branch in 1951 saw the commencement of Stan's active involvement in the Party's work for socialism. He took a full part in branch affairs and activities, acting as Treasurer for a number of years, canvassing and selling or distributing literature and worked hard during these special campaigns such as publicising the Party message in the run up to general or bye-elections.

Failing health since 1982 necessitated a decline in Stan's activities but he continued writing to local newspapers and selling the Socialist Standard in Basildon and Stanford. Even in the last week of his life, Stan organised distribution of the Standard to his regular purchasers from his hospital bed.

Stan's metier was the personal, one-to-one approach. Canvassing on countless doorsteps was his chief enjoyment and his employment as an insurance agent lent itself well to this type of activity. He derived much satisfaction from spreading the party message in the boss's time.

Stan's industrious and independent outlook led to a number of small but not insignificant achievements in his personal life. For example he built, more or less single-handed, two substantial family homes and made many improvements to a third. These and other achievements were realised mainly by dogged pegging away with limited resources to reach the desired target. Such an approach was mirrored in Stan's Party work where he felt that persistence would get eventual rewards.

The funeral was a simple but moving affair. The Party was well represented and comrade Pat Wilson gave a valedictory address on Stan's Party membership.

Stan leaves a widower and two sons, both of whom are Party members.

World Without Wages (1982)

Book Review from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a rare treat to review a book that claims to be about socialism which is not bursting with misconceptions and illusions. Samuel Leight's World Without Wages is not only readable (which contrasts sharply with those academic "Marxist" tracts written in language that only the initiated can comprehend), but it is full of the kind of basic socialist arguments which every open-minded worker will want to know about. There are fifty chapters and two hundred and twenty-nine pages, so it is possible to read the book in stages, absorbing the case for socialism bit by bit.

Samuel Leight is a member of the World Socialist Party of the United States, a companion party of the SPGB. World Without Money is based on talks given by him on KTUC radio station in Tucson, Arizona. From the first page the writer loses no time in providing the basic message:

Visualise with us a completely different economic, world-wide system of society. Within this system all the means of production and distribution that exist on the face of the earth will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole of society. Each person will stand in exactly the same economic relationship to the instruments for producing and distributing wealth. There will be no class owning and there will be no non-owning class—it will be a classless society. Goods and services will be produced and distributed solely for use and not for profit. People will contribute according to their individual ability, taking from society according to their needs. This means literally free access to whatever they require. Visualise then a system in which there will be no means of exchange, no money, no barter. A system wherein there will be no capitalist class paying wages, with no employers or employees. Such a system cannot operate in one country, as no one country is economically self-sufficient; nor can it be inaugurated until the vast majority understand its economic and social implications.

Recognising that socialism is "possibly the most abused, misused, misunderstood term in the English language", Leight makes no assumptions about his readers' acquaintance with the terms he is using; the socialist case is explained with the kind of clarity that only a real desire to communicate can achieve. Academic writers on the Left—especially those of the New Left Review type—often deter working class intellectual interest by the use of pretentious jargon. By contrast, Leight's approach is that of classical, down-to-earth Marxism—Marxism according to Marx, not Lenin, Trotsky, Mao or Mugabe. The class struggle, recognition of which is the basis of the socialist movement, is clearly explained:

In a society wherein the vast majority are non-owners of wealth production and distribution and a minority are the owners, a conflict of interest must exist . . .  We acknowledge the absolute necessity of Trade Unions under capitalism, and we support the active participation of workers within the Trade Union movement in their attempts to safeguard, and improve, their wage levels and working conditions. At the same time we also fully realise the limitations of the Trade Unions . . . We are the sole advocates of the highest expression of the class struggle on the political field—the demand for the abolition of class society, together with the class struggle, through the establishment of socialism.

The key to capitalism's "closely guarded secret"—the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist class—is well brought out in Chapter 22 on The Wages System:

Most workers spend a lifetime blissfully unaware of the fact that as a class they are being legally robbed when they produce values equal to their pay cheques, but then continue producing excess values for the bosses. 

There are chapters on war, human nature, Russian state capitalism, nationalisation, racism, ecology, charity, leadership, and the materialist conception of history—as well as chapters dealing with recent events in American labour history. Were this writer not a committed socialist he would have been convinced to become one by reading Samuel Leight's book. World Without Wages is distributed in Britain by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and costs £3.50, including postage and packing. Don't just buy a copy for yourself; buy one for your best friend and another for your worst enemy.

Steve Coleman 

Argh! The Movie (2013)

Film Review from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

March 16, 2013

Well, I just had to do it: go see this movie everyone was talking about. Let’s just say that Argo has more in common with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream than with Jason and the Argonauts searching for the golden fleece. The film features a fake movie (“Argo”) “produced” by the Central Intelligence Agency to rescue six U.S. nationals from the Canadian embassy in Teheran when the overthrown Shah of Iran, himself devilishly imposed on the Iranians by the U.S., was granted asylum in the United States. Hollywood producers were enlisted in an effort to make the pseudo-film “look real” to the enraged bazaaris who had put “Islamic Republics” on the political map.

This had to be the ultimate irony for a capitalism that has come to rely on Big Lies and Newspeak: to be invoking the semblance of make-believe fiction (the nonexistent movie Argo) in the cause of a simulated lie required by the intricacies of realpolitik, which itself resolutely excludes any concern with what really goes on in society. Argo is based on “real” events. But the spectacle of the CIA immersing itself in Hollywood hijinks reminds us of how grotesquely unreal the thought processes of the capitalist class really are.

At different points we hear a voice-over of what sounds like a running Aljazeera commentary on the “Great Satan’s” foreign policy, enunciated by a woman in clear and correct American English (with albeit a trace Arab accent). The points scored in these voice-overs are criticisms well known to all Lefties. Plainly, the producers wanted the audience to grasp the real political implications of the action; they were not presenting a Disneyfied adventure sealed off in a social vacuum. Which is remarkable in a film that manifestly glorifies the CIA as a sort of collective Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme.

So the fake movie “Argo” embedded in the “real” movie Argo is homologous to the play within the play “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, maintaining all the while an arm’s-length relation with a tenuously sensed real world in which capital, wages and class struggle, yes, do exist out there somewhere, but in a weirdly inverted way. You catch yourself wondering why this is such a cliff-hanger. The very real drama of the daily struggle that capitalists have reduced life to appears in the movie like so many googly-eyed tourists peering in through the glass walls of an aquarium.

Looming over this whole nefarious, psychotic maze stalks the specter of an organization that trains killers and torturers (the U.S. government), and globally promotes the interests of capital centered around the fairy tale of (U.S.) national security. Wherever it can attack efforts by the working class to organize itself, it does, often by remote control in a dismally repetitive pattern. (“Argo” was coincidentally “produced” in 1979 under the same benevolent Carter Administration that both laid the basis in El Salvador for the Reagan Administration’s bloody fairy tales and “intervened” in Afghanistan, materially contributing to the emergence of al Qaeda.) Innernashnal Commanism was out to git us. No time to waste! The Tough had to get going.

The CIA is deeply implicated in all this myth-making machinery, so it is no surprise that one of its operatives should have ingeniously suggested “producing” a fake movie in a moment of “real” crisis in Iran. At the Company they don’t fool around: they are no strangers to the vicious, the lethal and the ugly. The politic bow-ties upstairs are as good at hiring thugs as generals are supposed to be at setting up episodes of calculated mass murder. Argo lights up a sordid episode that fueled what must have been a heart-pounding experience for all of its participants. A good story, sure — but why must we have to stand on our heads to make sense of it?

The producers thankfully give the audience a chance to swim back up to get a lungful of reality when they show us a moment of celebration occurring at the end, with CIA personnel (presumably at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia) jumping up and down, high-fiving each other like scientists at Mission Control cheering a successful Mars landing. So now the Agency can get back to its Usual Business of knifing opposition movements in the back, maybe? Or of improving on the truth, or taking down the concept of “intelligence” out back in the alley?

The question all this begs is, of course, why governments do such things in the first place. But while the answer ought to be as plain as the nose on your face — that this is the road they must take to defend the interests of capital — spectacle and drama seem to be the decisive factors in shaping what we call “public opinion.” The sad fact is that the world’s working class has lost its way in the confusing hallucinations of a global capitalism that courts its victims’ political approval even as it clobbers them economically.

Yet when you leave the theater, if you tune in to the distant rumbles of global warming that persistently chatter like some sort of Langoliers at the fringes of your sense of reality, you might justifiably begin to doubt at least pieces of Capital’s Big Lie. Should it finally come to pass that a general consensus arises, that not just the capitalist class but capital itself bears the responsibility for triggering an age of ecological surprises, it is fascinating to speculate how society might receive capital’s cold-blooded refusal to shoulder that responsibility. Could a moment of truth perhaps be approaching, in which the capitalists figuratively get their heads handed to them on a platter, reminiscent of the French landed aristocracy that warm June day in 1789? For one of the truths of history is that increasingly tiny and powerful economic élites do not make good survival decisions for the rest of us. Once the ice caps disappear, our future will be indisputably on the line.

So, you want a gripping story? Try imagining a socialist revolution on a world scale following capital’s quasi-tragic attempts to break lances with Mother Nature.

ROEL

What About the Roma? (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe UKIP by the time you read this millions of Romanians and Bulgarians will have arrived in Britain, many of them Roma. This is nonsense of course, but who are the Roma?.

Nazi genocide was not limited to the Jewish population. An estimated 800,000 Roma were murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, an episode that has come to be known in the Romani language as the Porraimos (the ‘devouring’), or Romani holocaust. When Hitler started his ethnic cleansing of the gypsies he inherited elaborate discriminatory legislation specifically designed to keep the gypsies away. Germany had anti-gypsy laws since the end of the 19th century. During the early days of Nazism, existing anti-gypsy measures were strengthened and led to mass sterilisation and murder.

The history of the Roma (more commonly called gypsies) in Europe is a tragic one. Migrating from northern India to Europe in the eleventh century, most Roma live today in eastern and central Europe, particularly in Romania and Bulgaria, with many large communities in other European countries. In the parts of the Ottoman Empire today located in modern-day Romania, they have endured persecution and enslavement at the hands of landowners and clergy since the Middle Ages, being emancipated from slavery only in the mid-nineteenth century. The Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu described a life of misery:

’For centuries they could be bought and sold, families were torn apart, children taken from their mothers, women separated from their men. The young women were generally raped by their owners and the 'flock of crows', as they were called, was the target of general contempt and discrimination. One of the voivodes, or provincial governors, used to have them climb trees and then shot them down with arrows. He called it crow-hunting. Tied to one place and kept like animals, the gypsies multiplied more quickly in the Romanian principalities than anywhere else in Europe. Therefore we only have ourselves to blame for creating the gypsy problem. It is our historical guilt... We are appalled when other countries perceive us as a nation of criminals, but we see the gypsies in exactly the same way.’

After the Second World War in ’communist’ eastern Europe, the state set about targeting Roma, with social policies aimed to settle them forcibly and to eradicate ’anti-social traits’. Despite efforts to socially engineer their assimilation, the vast majority of Roma remained marginalised and discriminated against by both state and society. Anti-Roma racism across Europe has remained rampant. In many countries, segregation in schooling and housing is still a fact of life, social attitudes towards Roma are poisonous and pogroms are not unknown. Negative social attitudes and disastrous state policies toward the Roma has resulted in the reinforcement of the very conditions that contribute to their continued marginalisation, including low literacy levels, poverty, poor housing, poor health and low life expectancy. Throughout Europe reports of violence against the Roma have increased significantly, particularly in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, where extremist and openly racist groups and political parties are gaining in popularity.

There are an estimated million Roma in Hungary, making up one tenth of the population. During the Communist Party rule, social policies encouraged large families and those with three children or more were virtually guaranteed an unconditional mortgage loan. Such financial incentives allowed many Roma to build their own homes. But since the collapse of the former state capitalist system, Hungarians receive less than 50 dollars per child and with the slow Hungarian economy, many Roma are struggling to find work and feed their large families. The previous ’Communist’ regime refused to regard the gypsies as a minority, but as a social problem - undisciplined proletarians who needed to be forced into the same mould as the rest. They were accordingly given poor-quality worker housing with those very cheap mortgages, and obliged to toil, like everybody else. The regime didn't want them to get more education because they needed cheap unskilled labour. But when that system abruptly collapsed in 1989 the Communists' uneconomic factories and plants closed down. It was the unskilled workers at the bottom – the Roma in particular – who were left high and dry. Roma unemployment shot up from 15 percent to 85 percent in two years.

In the absence of work there was now welfare. Milking the system became a survival strategy. A Roma family would live off welfare, which arrives on the fifth of the month. By the money would run out, so they would run up credit at the local shop, and the men of the family would get a few days' casual work, building walls, fixing roofs, in the neighbourhood. But with the financial crisis, credit stopped and people stopped spending money and the work dried up. For the Roma the economic crisis has driven them to the wall, perhaps a bit more than for the rest of us. With increasing poverty amongst the Roma in Eastern Europe, it is hardly surprising that families travel to other countries in order to find work.

Throughout their history the Roma have had good reason to be mistrustful of authorities, and have survived at the absolute margins of society. Europe's roughly 10 million Roma remain the poorest of the poor, often migrating abroad in search of work. In several eastern European countries there is a war against the Roma. There are marches against them. Self-proclaimed vigilantes bully and threaten them. Walls are built around the sections of town where they live. Their houses are set on fire. They are forced out of their homes and sometimes brutally murdered. Almost everywhere, the authorities have stood aside. In 1993, after three Roma in the Romanian village of Hadareni were lynched with the involvement of the police, the government, in its official explanation, expressed understanding for the ’anger of the villagers’.

These and events since has prompted tens of thousands of them, primarily from Romania and Bulgaria, to head west. Roma refugees have come to Italy, France, UK, and to Germany. In the western European countries they work for a couple of euros an hour doing cleaning, construction, or they beg. Some steal. For many, it is more than they could have ever imagined in their home countries. Those who fight for Roma rights make the argument that those who head to the West are as much political refugees as they are economic ones.

The Roma suffer threefold prejudice in the UK. Firstly because they are gypsies, secondly because they are often asylum seekers or refugees and thirdly because many are Romanian. The Roma are easy scapegoats. They're at the bottom of society and have no effective political lobby. In 2012 the European Parliament had only one member of Roma origin. 90,000 to 120,000 Roma are estimated to be in the UK, a fraction of the one million gypsies who live in France and Germany. Next year, the quotas which let EU countries limit the number of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants crossing their borders will be lifted. Britain wants to deter them from crossing the Channel and is financing an anti-migrant ad campaign in those countries. Suspicions have been raised that what the UK Government really fears – but dares not say publicly – is the mass migration of Roma.

It is not difficult to believe that the government's very public stance against eastern European (aka Roma) immigration is fuelled largely by a desire to appeal to the populist vote and is a demagogic tactic aimed at seducing the far right. Each year we are reminded by the government of the day to remember the Jewish Holocaust, yet the Roma Devouring stays forgotten. August the 2nd is the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the start of the liquidation by the Nazis of the ’gypsy’ camp at Auschwitz. The silence of British politicians was deafening. Our rulers have a long history of camouflaging the failures of capitalism, particularly in times of economic slump, by seeking out scapegoats.

ALJO

The image of capitalism (2000)

Book Review from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review Naomi Klein's passionate exposé, No Logo. But what does she suggest we do?

In No Logo (Flamingo, £14.99) Naomi Klein tells the story of the rise of the brand name, the way in which this typified in a logo has achieved a position way beyond ordinary advertising and in so doing has had an impact on the lives of many people. Her study is based on researching and exposing the operations of some powerful firms, such as Nike, Wal-Mart, Shell, McDonalds, Microsoft and quite a few more.

What happened was that in the late 70s and 80s the rôle of the logo, in the beginning only seen on clothing, escalated from a small emblem, discreetly placed on say the inside of the collar to a position of prominence:

"Gradually the logo was transformed from an ostentatious affectation to an active fashion accessory. Most significantly the logo itself was growing in size, ballooning from a three-quarter-inch emblem into a chest-sized marque. This process of logo inflation is still progressing, and none is more bloated than Tommy Hilfiger who has managed to pioneer a clothing style that transforms its faithful adherents into walking, talking, life-sized Tommy dolls, mummified in full branded Tommy worlds."

Klein's contention is that this scaling up of the logo's rôle has become a change in substance; "logos have become so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent".

This started the process in which the brand names began to divorce themselves from the actual process of manufacturing; their rôle became that of selling, but selling an image, while the making the articles that carried the brand image was given to others. The consequences of this had huge economic and social repercussions, especially in the US, where most of these firms were based. In the first place the manufacturers were going to go for the cheapest manufacturing costs they could, which of course inevitably meant basing their factories in the Third World. In the second place, it meant massive job losses in the factories formerly based in the US and Canada, where thousands of workers were made redundant, with not much hope of getting another job in an economy which was in transition to what is known as "service".

In the Third World factories things were even worse. Industrial estates were set up, managed by all sorts of chicanery, to be enclaves independent of the labour laws existing in those countries, mainly the Philippines, Malaysia and China. Young mostly female labour was and is employed, and any form of workers' industrial organisation ruthlessly discouraged, to the point where the life of a known labour organiser was precarious indeed. If all this reminds you of the early days of working-class history in America and Britain not to mention Europe, you are indeed right, and it only goes to show that nothing is ever gained permanently in the capitalist system and that the lot of the working class is a never-ending struggle to gain small improvements in their wages and working conditions an equally difficult one to hold on to them. Klein personally visited many of these Third-World factories, managed, with difficulty, to talk to people forced to work incredibly long hours, and heard of abysmal working conditions, of pregnant girls who are frightened to reveal their condition for fear of the sack and cases where babies are born at work and mothers who have died because they were pushed too far.

The social consequences of "the brand image" in its country of origin have in the ten years or so since the concept of goods being marketed as a lifestyle in which you are invited to kill to obtain designer labels have been immense and have permeated deep into the Western world. Not content with advertising alone, firms have infiltrated the universities, schools and sport. Deals have been struck with universities for the monopoly to sell and promote such brands, Coca-Cola one of the foremost. Even the educational material offered by the host has been influenced by or actually supplied by commercial companies, one of the worst offenders being Microsoft. All this goes under the name of sponsorship where the benefits supposedly go to the recipients but in actuality are firmly in the hands of the donors.

This has had repercussions on "normal", shall we say existing, labour relations within capitalism. In the highly-skilled creative areas of firms like Microsoft, traditional labour contracts have been replaced by something more akin to supply. Job security, such as it was, is a thing of the past. Whilst some are happy with this the major result has been an increase in mental illness and a rising level of stress-related sickness.

There is much more in Klein's passionate exposé, but inevitably we reach the point where we have to say, what are we going to do about it? What should our reactions and actions be? Capitalism is a social system which has showed a great ability to change yet stay the same. Klein appears to believe that something worthwhile can be done within the system of capitalism. She is an activist, who believes that by a series of demonstrations, street parties and suchlike activities this current trend within capitalism can be contained and we can return to, what? The idyllic days of some non-existent period of capitalism in which everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

There is a new dogma which is challenging the social democratic reformists like the Labour Party or the pseudo-revolutionary totalitarian reformists like the "Communist" Party, which is that "global capitalism" has brought about a totally new kind of capitalism which requires new tactics. On examination these consist of making an awfully big fuss and causing a moderate amount of damage to property in the hope of bringing about publicity and public sympathy for their ideas. In some mysterious way this is supposed to halt the profit system from behaving in the way it was always behaved, that is, exploring any avenue legal or otherwise in the hope of maximum profit. It won't work. No reform has ever achieved its aim in the past and this is another one which is doomed to failure, as well as wasting an awful lot of energy. Even the limited aim of achieving favourable press coverage won't work because such coverage as is obtained is reported as the work of "anarchists", "militants" or whatever the current term of abuse may happen to be and the damage to property is reported as the work of "mindless hooligans". Capitalism cannot be humanised, cannot even be slowed down. It will grind its own remorseless way until we organise to replace it with socialism.

CYR

Opportunism before principle (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was only in 1918 that Labour officially adopted the word socialism to describe its aim. It is true that prior to that date Keir Hardie, the father of the Labour Party, had stated his aim to be that of working for a socialist society whose character we would not have argued against. But Hardie's views was one amongst many in an organisation primarily concerned with representing trade union interests in parliament. He also mistakenly believed that socialism could be offered up to workers after winning mass support for reform programmes.

So why did this party representing a vast mix of reformers and single-issue campaigners adopt the word socialism in 1918? It was a pragmatic decision to present Labour as a serious contender for power. The Conservatives had Toryism, the Liberals Liberalism, and Labour needed a label, something to wear on their lapel with which to court the newly enfranchised workers—the label was Socialism. As Samuel Beer wrote in Modern British Politics:

Labour saw the real possibility of achieving parliamentary power with the help of the new working class votes. The adoption of socialism as an ideology was functional to this choice of political independence.

Labour Seeks To Govern

The achievement of state power to govern over people has never had any place within socialist thought. The state could never exist within socialist society as, with its agents of coercion, the armed forces, the police and all other representatives of law enforcement, it only exists only to serve and protect the interests of the ruling class. The Socialist Party was formed to urge upon workers the need to understand their position of exploitation under capitalism and to organise to end class society, abolish the state and to replace "government over people" with "the administration of things". This can never be achieved as long as workers continue to leave parliamentary power in the hands of leader.

Wring in 1905 in Socialism and Society Ramsay MacDonald, who at the time as the Secretary of the Labour Party was one of its top leaders, made it quite clear that Labour only ever intended to use workers to gain power and that he considered them incapable of autonomous thought:

It is practically impossible to maintain a pure and simple socialist party . . . in Great Britain. The mass of the people are prepared to accept the new doctrines not as absolute ideas, as the fully fledged socialists do, but as guiding principles in experimental legislation. That is what the rise of the Labour Party means, that is all it need ever mean.

It should not be thought that MacDonald's use of the term socialism bears any resemblance to what socialism really is. He took his cue from the Fabians who envisaged socialism as ownership by the state in a society run by "enlightened intellectuals". These enlightened intellectuals were to be  . . . you've guessed it, themselves.

Share Ownership or Common Ownership?

Labour is now having doubts about whether socialism still is a useful label today to help win power. It is now seeking to win support by emphasising the virtues of the free market which is what its leaders perceive to be the popular bandwagon. At last year's Labour Conference the Sunday Times (2 October 1988) quoted Bryan Gould, architect of Labour's "new realism" as saying:

It would be stupid . . . to be frightened of labels by saying that anything which bears the name 'shares' is not socialist.

Labour have never been frightened of labels, it is all they have ever dealt in. But Gould went on in his cynical abuse of socialist concepts to say that "workers owning shares in the company they work for is a form of common ownership". In support of this idea Labour's Deputy Leader, Hattersley, referred to "the full clause four of our constitution".

Labour has never understood the true meaning of common ownership. Their Clause Four speaks of common ownership of the means of exchange, which is a contradiction in terms. It has been left to us to explain that common ownership is the ownership of all the means of production by society as a whole and that it must mean the disappearance of exchange as there cannot by any exchange of what is commonly owned.

So, with another Labour Conference on the horizon, can we unmask Labour's real intent? All we need do is let them speak for themselves. There are the words of Kinnock, again speaking at last year's conference, that "we will be faced with a market economy and we are going to have to make it work better than the Tories". Socialists have never seen Labour as trying to do anything else, but this sort of talk shook the faith of some of those present. One exasperated delegate declared:

Given that we, ordinary working people, built the bakery in the first place and installed the machinery, we should own the bloody bakery. (Daily Telegraph, 4 October 1988).  

If workers listen to the rhetoric of leaders, who time and again promise a fair and equal society—on condition that you give them power of course—and if workers let these leaders occupy the political arena with their smug assertion that all will be safe in their hands, then the result is inevitable. It is—as this delegate learnt—betrayal.

Tony Dobson 

Mixed Media: 'Nothing But a Man' (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing But a Man (dir. Michael Roemer)

Nothing But a Man, a 'lost' black 1960s American film was recently screened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London. It won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1964 Venice Film Festival then disappeared although it was released in 16mm format and found a black audience when it was shown in churches and schools. It was re-released in the USA in 1993 when the US National Film Registry at the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation as 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'.              

Nothing But a Man was made by white New York liberal Jews, the director and writer was the German Jewish Michael Roemer who had fled the Nazis, and the producer, cinematographer and co-writer Robert M Young. Roemer and Young with the help of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) travelled to the South for three months to research the script for Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man was filmed in the Summer of 1963 on a budget of $230,000 around Atlantic City and Cape May in New Jersey although set in Alabama which was out of the question as a film location. This was the time of the civil rights movement, and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s support for 'segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever', and the existence of 'Jim Crow Laws' (mandated de jure racial segregation) in the South. Everyone on the film crew was paid $100 per week, the crew and cast took the day off to march on Washington DC with Martin Luther King Jr.

Nothing But a Man tells of the relationship and rather sweet courtship between Duff, a railroad worker and Josie, a schoolteacher and daughter of a preacher against a background of economic, social and institutional racism and deals with the discrimination, lack of jobs for blacks, and poverty in American society. Duff is played by Ivan Dixon later in the TV series Hogan's Heroes, and Josie by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln who sang on Max Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite 1960 civil rights jazz album. The film is notable for its Motown soundtrack of Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, and Little Stevie Wonder.

Nothing But a Man is a pioneering drama about African-American life, 'one of the most sensitive films about black life ever made in this country' (Washington Post 10 July 1993), and an early portrait of black pride and anger. Duff says ‘They can reach right inside you with their white hands and turn you on and off'. The film was Malcolm X's favourite and was endorsed by the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks. The film is emotionally powerful with its portrait of Duff's embittered alcoholic father who was maimed at work in a sawmill, Duff's attacks on Josie's preacher father as a 'white man's nigger, you been stoopin' for so long you don't know how to stand up. You're only half a man', and the heart aches with lines like 'It's not gonna be easy but everything's gonna be alright' and 'I feel so free inside'.

Nothing But a Man has a naturalistic and neo-realist style that is in stark contrast to the Hollywood liberal middle-America films about African-Americans such as Lilies of the Field, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It can be compared to the cinéma vérité of Fred Hampton's Chicago Black Panther Party in Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler and the Paul Schrader film Blue Collar about Detroit car workers which starred Yaphet Kotto who was also in Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man is set in the period of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin', but how much did life change for African-Americans in American capitalist society with the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts?

In 2010 law professor and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more African American men in prison than were slaves before the start of the Civil War. 846,000 black men were in prison comprising 40 percent of the total when African Americans comprise 13.6 percent of the U.S. Population. More African American men were disenfranchised due to felony convictions in 2004 than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

The black and white working class need to realise that they create the world's wealth and that their interests are in common irrespective of race and when the united black and white working class recognise this they can solve their problems by abolishing capitalism.

Steve Clayton

SLP history (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991. A Short History by Frank Girard and Ben Perry (Livra Books, 422 W. Upsal St, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA.

In our August issue we referred to the SLP of America as "our political cousins". This was a reference to the common historical origin of us and the SLP in the "impossibilist" (i.e, anti-reform-programme) wing of pre-WWI Social Democracy. It was not meant to suggest that we had some political affiliation with them. In fact, of course, we are opposed to them as we are to all other political parties.

The SLP, for those who don't know, is a party founded in America in 1878 and whose outstanding figure was Daniel De Leon who edited their paper from 1891 till his death in 1914. Until 1976 it used to contest the US presidential elections every four years, polling around 40,000 votes. Its main plank is "socialist industrial unionism" which advocates that, to establish socialism, workers should organise into industrial unions to take and hold the means of production and then to administer future society.

The SLP has a detailed blueprint for future society involving the substitution of what they call "industrial government" for the political state (people are to vote at their places of work rather than where they live as at present) and the substitution of labour-time vouchers for money, and which is seen as being able to exist in just one country. We have seen this as pre-empting the democratic decision of those who will set up and live in socialist society. Clearly there will be democratic control in the workplaces in socialism, but there is no reason why the whole decision-making and administrative processes should be based on industrial constituencies and we have never favoured labour-time vouchers even to deal with any temporary problems of supply that might exist in the very early days of socialism. We also say that socialism must be worldwide, because capitalism already is.

Although they never regarded the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as a socialist revolution nor Russia as socialist, right up until the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 the SLP did consider Russia to be some sort of "proletarian" regime and even today are reluctant to refer to it during this period as "state capitalism". They took the view that Russia was not ripe for socialism and had first to be industrialised and saw the Bolsheviks as doing this in some "non-capitalist" way (a position similar to that of some Trotskyist groups).

This short history of the SLP by two of its ex-members brings out another difference which is not apparent from a comparison of their policies and analyses and ours: the SLP's undemocratic internal structure. Girard and Perry describe how the National Secretary and the NEC have the power to expel any member and how this has been widely used over the years. This contrasts with the position in the SPGB where a vote of the entire membership is required before anyone can be expelled.

In covering the period after De Leon's death in 1914 this booklet is a useful complement to Stephen Coleman's 1990 biography of Daniel De Leon in the Manchester University Press's "Lives of the Left" series.

Adam Buick

Science versus spoon-benders (2001)

From the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

I didn't much like science at school. It was my brother who took things to bits, not me. Mathematics was the worst, and afterwards an almost lifelong phobia. Physics was almost as bad as Maths. Chemistry was only interesting when something exploded. Biology seemed designed specifically to put me off my lunch. Science for me was just another cross to bear in a Christian school. 

Fortunately we find ways of justifying our little ignorances to ourselves. I accepted the ancient and venerable "two brains" theory of learning, according to which you either have a scientific brain or an artistic brain. There was no point trying to learn science if you didn't have "that sort of brain", and anyway it was better not to have "that sort of brain" because then we wouldn't be us, and goodness but weren't we interesting people! We were all artists in those days, naturally, and everyone knew that scientists had no imagination and no creative talent. Apart from Tom Lehrer, the singing mathematician, that is, but we'd allow them one. We decided that science was clever the way a performing poodle is clever, good at a few tricks but not really genteel company for dinner. And this wasn't just my snobbery. Post-war Britain just couldn't seem to turn out scientists, its very culture was against it. Nobody wanted to do science because it was work as in "manual work" not as in "work of art". Everyone in the sixties wanted to be a beat poet, even the snotty little kids like me. Harold Wilson tried to do something about the huge bias in education towards the Humanities (the very name suggested that scientists were inhuman). Britain was up to its shins in philosophers and therapists, and no-one to mend the roof or rewire the sitting-room. My local LETS scheme is still the same today. But while Wilson talked thrillingly of the "white heat of technology", everyone continued to regard science as a good thing for someone else to learn, and his new science-oriented Polytechnics turned out to be dustbin colleges for those who couldn't get into a real University.

Was god an astronaut?

In my late teens Britain was swept by a “revolutionary” new theory, propounded by a best-selling author, to the effect that God was an astronaut. In book-after-book the theory expanded, multiplied, made ever larger claims and sold ever more copies. Everyone, it seemed, had read these books. Everyone, it seemed was talking about them. Conventional science, astonishingly, was silent.

Like the excellent scientist I was, I ignored the text, looked at the pictures, read the captions and the blurb on the back cover, and concluded that it must all be true. He'd gone to a lot of trouble after all, so he must know what he's talking about. The phrase "don't believe everything you read" came back to me, but really, how was one to tell? Even supposing I read every word properly, how would I know whether it was right or not? Who was I to criticise? You needed to be a scientist to criticise.

Eventually, at last, it had to happen. The scientific community wearily responded. The BBC flagship science programme Horizon finally dealt with Erik von Daniken's theory. In fact it destroyed his case so comprehensively that even I, the eminent believer, had to laugh out loud. I'd been had, big time, and so had everyone else. Maybe I should have been annoyed at having my time wasted, or being made a fool of, but I wasn't. We can forgive any sin if it's entertaining.

It made me think of other times when I'd been conned, or baffled, usually both, by some fantastic claim. Uri Geller, the mind-control and spoon-bender, had me and my friends stroking teaspoons. We read assiduously the Arnall Bloxham tape transcripts of people regressing into past lives, serialised prominently in that most august periodical the Sunday Times, and were astounded when Bloxham admitted he'd cheated. At school we tried using Ouija boards to try to get in a quick communication with the hereafter before Afternoon bell. After much tumbler wrestling we got a name, Bill, and a date, 1780, and we went around in awe for a week. I didn't think of myself as gullible, or even ignorant. After all, the world was an amazing place and anything was possible. I could criticise a poem but not a proposition. School didn't arm me for that, despite the pickled frogs and the fizzing chemicals.

"Scientific Socialists"

By the time I encountered the Socialist Party I had already learned how to criticise society for myself, and I understood the importance of reason, but I was nevertheless startled by the party's description of their “scientific socialism”. I envisaged a whole population in lab coats. A scientific socialist to me was a party member who knew the Periodic Table. But it was explained to me that it was the "method" that was "scientific", not the membership. This meant nothing to me. They weren't saying simply that the case for socialism was a logical one. It was more than that. Any stupid idea can be expressed in logical terms. What was “scientific” was not so much the argument itself but the means by which the argument was first thought out, the habitual mode of thinking of the individual. And the scientific method which socialists follow is both open-minded and sceptical, willing to embrace or drop an idea depending on the evidence, willing to change the theory if the evidence demands it. Carl Sagan described it well:

"Science is generated by and devoted to free enquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge."

Those who criticise our rejection of religious beliefs do not perhaps grasp this "scientific" nature of the case for socialism, that it is rooted in the real world of hard facts and reliable evidence, and so must people be if the world is to see any real progress. But we don't particularly have it in for the God squad, because they're not the only mystery merchants out there spreading fog and confusion wherever they go. There is a plethora of pseudo-sciences to choose from if virgin births and original sin are a bit hard to take and Buddha is uncool. In my area recently there was a spate of UFO sightings, and the local press had a fun-filled week out of it. Judging by the number of sightings, I should have been abducted for experiments long since, with the rest of the town. No aliens have called, however. They probably watched one episode of Eastenders and decided not to bother with homo sapiens.

According to a report in Cultural Trends, in the past five years the market for "new age" and occult books has grown by 75 percent. As Catherine Bennett observed in the Guardian a while ago:

"neither incoherence, nor ignorance, nor overwhelming implausibility is any impediment to publication. These books are not going to face scholarly competition, but sell in a dedicated drivel department, along with feng shui, astrology [etc]" (31 October 1998).

She deliciously strips bare the pretensions of one particularly awful offering from Channel 4, called Quest for A Lost Civilisation. Graham Hancock, the best-selling writer, is firmly in the von Daniken tradition:

"Hancock's principal strategy is to exploit his readers' ignorance, dazzling them with irrelevant sums, flourishing spurious connections . . . He asks big questions, rushing on before you realize he hasn't answered them."

She concludes, correctly, that publishers don't give a damn about truth so long as they sell books, and attacks the scientists who, by remaining "mute with distaste" actually do the von Danikens a big favour. And she is right. Very few scientists seem worried about what the rest of us believe. Undoubtedly, scientists have themselves to blame if nobody understands what they're doing. In increasing desperation, Horizon has devoted no less than three programmes in the past year to unravelling Hancock's nonsense, such is the demand for fake science in a fantasy-filled world. Yet still scientists seem to think they can ignore reality, rather like Archimedes thought he could rudely ignore the Roman sergeant with the drawn sword.

Common sense rules 

But it's not all their fault, and it wouldn't kill us to be a little more scientific in our thinking when considering the world around us. Surprisingly, it's not that difficult, if one observes a few basic rules, most of which are common sense. That these rules can be applied to politics as much as science will be illustrated in the course of description. This list is probably not exhaustive, (10 seems a suspiciously round number, for one thing) and I invite readers to send in their own suggestions.

1. First of all, don't believe a complicated explanation if a simpler one will do. 

This rule, known as Occam's Razor, would really dismiss von Daniken instantly. After all, it is simpler, and fits all the facts, to believe that astronauts did not land on Earth in prehistory than to believe that they did. Lack of hard evidence for UFOs can be, and often is, enthusiastically ascribed to a huge government cover-up, but conversely, and more simply, it could be ascribed to the fact that UFOs don't exist. In politics too, conspiracy theories are seldom the simplest explanation for anything, even if they appeal to some people's penchant for paranoia.

2. A second rule would be: never believe anyone who will profit by lying.

This lets out every politician, I fear, as well as best-selling authors. By the same token, if one applies this rule to the Socialist Party, which has no plans to take power for itself now or in the future, its statements are automatically rendered more reliable than those of Trotskyist groups with a vested interest in being leaders. That doesn't mean we're always right, just that we have no particular reason to lie about it.

3. Exceptions don't prove rules, despite the saying, they break them.

The term "prove" in this expression is related to the Italian "provare" which means "test" or "try out", which explains how this sensible maxim has acquired a modern, nonsensical meaning. As an illustration of this rule, if some societies are known to be peaceful, it destroys the claim that humans are basically aggressive and warlike. If a majority of people are poor in capitalism, it destroys the claim that capitalism is in the common interest or that it is a "good provider".

4. Even if the structure is logical, the basic assumptions may not be.

As an example, capitalism is a supremely logical structure, based on the assumption that resources are limited but wants are unlimited. When one examines this assumption critically there appears no justification for it at all, and the entire structure sinks like a Monty Python castle built on a swamp

5. Beware of the sleight-of-hand known as special pleading, which is essentially a sales tactic.

Emotive arguments are a good example of this, and very common in politics, where it is hard not to be emotional sometimes. I recall a woman defending the Peace Camp at Greenham Common thus: “Something that feels so good just can't be wrong.”

6. Don't be bamboozled or "blinded by science". 

Carl Sagan relates how, when discussing with an Egyptologist the theories of Velikovsky (who had been excitedly compared to Darwin and Einstein by the popular press), he had remarked that the ancient history looked impressive whereas the physics was nonsense, whereupon the Egyptologist responded in surprise that he had thought precisely the reverse. Even scientists can temporarily be taken in. Anything emanating from government experts, especially economists, needs to be treated with caution.

7. An idea is not a valid theory unless a way exists of disproving it (falsification). 

Hence, the argument that God exists is not a valid theory, whereas you can disprove the case for socialism by showing, for example, how material abundance is impossible to achieve.

8. A test result is not valid until and unless it can be recreated. 

One recent sensation was the achievement of "cold fusion", another was the transmission of light at 4.7 times the speed of light. Neither have been successfully repeated. Governments which claim economic success once are certainly just lucky, and are unable to repeat this success later, when conditions have altered.

9. A theory which cannot predict anything is worthless.

If the Socialist Party's analysis was incorrect, its predictions would also be. However, we have a surprisingly good hit rate over the past 100 years.

10. The most obvious (but most often broken) rule is that if the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory.

You don't need to be a scientist to know that, but you need to think like a scientist to stick to it.

Will reason win?

Socialists try to apply these rules to society, and expect to have them applied to their own case. Perhaps we are not always as rigorous as we should be. Perhaps you aren't either. So if you think you can disprove all, or part, or a bit of our case, go right ahead. We'll listen. If you find a flaw we'll have to change our ideas, and if, by the same token, we find a flaw in your thinking, you'll have to change yours. That is how the scientific method works. It doesn't mean you won't ever fall for a con, or make a mistake, but it makes it much less likely.

The world is as full of superstition and silly ideas as it was in the Middle Ages, but it is far richer in knowledge. Whether the scientific method prevails in the future is open to question, for it has failed in the past to rescue societies from decline, and the ideology of capitalism is reinforced constantly by a battery of propaganda and mystification that are a perpetual obstacle to clear thinking. The battle is ongoing, and will continue in this new century, and reason will either win or it won't. The last word ought to go to that supremely humanitarian scientist and visionary, the late Carl Sagan:

“Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other's company; we care for one another. We cooperate. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?”

Paddy Shannon 

Comical revolution (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious. By Adam Krause, New Compass Press, 2013

The cover of Adam Krause's book features the unlikely combination of Lenin and Groucho Marx. Groucho would be uncomfortable with being in such proximity to Lenin whose regime announced 'without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood'. Groucho observed about capitalism 'the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.'

Krause opens his book with a scene from Woody Allen's film Stardust Memories but the more appropriate film would be Annie Hall where Allen places comedy in the service of the radical left:

'Allison: I'm in the midst of doing my thesis on Political Commitment in Twentieth Century Literature. Alvy: You're New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, socialist summer camps, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, strike-oriented. Allison: That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype. Alvy: Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.'

George Carlin and Bill Hicks have used their comedy to question the way we live and posit an alternative to capitalism. Carlin's lines like 'that's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it' and Bill Hicks's statement 'It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth' contribute to developing class consciousness.

Krause cites the role of the Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear as a character that can speak the truth to authority without fear of reprisal. A different Shakespearian reference could be the role of 'working class' characters in Henry IV Part 1 such as Poins, Bardolph, and Peto who 'hang out' with Falstaff and Prince Hal (the future Henry V) in taverns drinking, whoring, and engaging in tomfoolery and even robbery. Here, the class boundaries are blurred in a revelry of youthful rebellion paid homage to in Gus Van Sant's film My Own Private Idaho.

Krause cites Emma Goldman's popular misquote 'If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution' although it is never clear from Krause's book what this 'revolution' is. Krause does not mention socialism although he refers to William Morris's novel News from Nowhere. Krause's 'three favourite Marxists' Groucho, Harpo and Chico hilariously send-up militarism and nationalism in the film Duck Soup which is also used in Woody Allen's film Hannah and Her Sisters as motivation for a character to carry on with life.

Socialists expect the aftermath of 'revolution' to be as Guy Debord writes in Theses on the Paris Commune: 'the Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century'. Krause concludes that 'the revolution will be hilarious. Seriously' but during his book he forgets EB White's advice 'humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind'.

Steve Clayton

Practical politics. (1920)

From the February 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have often been told that they are not practical, that their ideas are of a visionary character, and that they lack knowledge of political affairs. Let us see how far this stock argument of the "anti" is correct.

In the sixth clause of its Declaration of Principles the Socialist Party states: " . . . the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers . . . " That is to say that Parliament, which passes the laws, the Cabinet, which frames them, the officials at Whitehall and elsewhere who execute them by giving orders to generals and judges, who in turn direct soldiers and policemen, all have one common object, which is to 

PROTECT PROPERTY!

We see this illustrated nearly every day of our lives. Take up any paper and you will find how this or that unfortunate member of the working class has been run in for taking, by "direct action," something which did not "belong" to him. Let any considerable body of workers strike, and immediately troops are despatched to the scene of action. Why? Because strikes mean hunger, which in turn leads to attacks on property. Finally, let any foreign group of capitalists threaten "our" trade, "our" empire, or "our" country, and forthwith the same troops are sent, not by the hundred or thousand, but by the million, to defend that which, to "our" masters, is dearer than our lives, i.e.,

THEIR PROPERTY.

And this property is all the product of the workers' labour. Whether it be acres of land, picks or ploughs, ships or railroads, factories or machines, shops or goods for sale, all are taken from the workers, all are owned and controlled by the master class for the purpose of wringing still more wealth from the sons and daughters of toil.

Is there anything fanciful or far-fetched about this statement? Does it not rather reek of reality at every turn? Let us, then, proceed to examine the following:

"The working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government . . . in order that this machinery . . . may be converted . . . into the agent of emancipation . . . "

This is the Socialist policy in a nutshell.

In the first place the workers are accustomed to organising for defence. Trade unions to-day comprise something like a quarter of the adult population. In fact, the amount of organisation existing is worthy of a better cause. We suggest that a change in tactics from mere defence (varied by surrender on important occasions) to a vigorous attack is necessary. And the proper place to deliver an attack is against the enemy's weakest spot—the ballot box. It is not enough to strike—the bosses can sack you and starve you! It is not WAR to start a little street-corner insurrection, in which only the workers' blood is shed and a capitalist can only get hurt by accident! These, of all policies, are the least practicable. 

But

SEIZE THE POLITICAL MACHINE!

That is the source of the masters' strength. And it is to control that for which they most need your support! It is for that they tell you all kinds of lies, make all kinds of false promises, and employ the most cunning scoundrels the country holds. Don't be deceived by the fact that a vote is simply a piece of paper. So is a bank note or a police summons! But behind the paper is the power! Capitalists are practical men; they don't ask you to vote for fun. They know that when the workers cease to vote for them and send to Parliament, instead, the representatives of a revolutionary class, the game will be up. It will be the turn of the "respectable people" to turn rebel—if they have the guts. The worst they are likely to achieve, however, is to bribe a few fools to do their dirty work for them; but the machinery of government includes the armed forces of the nation. The workers supply the guns and all the equipment of the fighting forces, in addition to the personnel of the rank and file. All that is necessary, therefore, to control those forces is the organisation of the workers themselves

AS A CLASS

for that purpose. Is there anything impossible in that?

This organisation once established can only have one object, i.e., to abolish the monopoly of the wealth taken from the workers by the masters. It will convert into common property the means of production, i.e., land, factories, railways, etc., and thus impose upon everyone the necessity of work and the freedom of all to enjoy the fruits of their common labour. No one will be able to live on rent, interest, or dividends, a life of idleness. None, on the other hand, who are willing to work, will stagnate in the half-starved ranks of the unemployed. The organisation of the workers will proceed to control industry. Again we challenge contradiction when we assert that this is the only practical solution of the workers' problems.

The various parties of the master class—Tories, Unionists, Radicals, etc., have long ago established their privileges, and now spend their time in retaining them. This they do by interesting the workers in every piece of legislation, etc., which they, the masters, from time to time consider necessary. Taxes on imports, taxes on land, taxes on incomes, more efficient State control of this, that or the other; all these measures are dressed up

IN THE GUISE OF REFORMS

for the benefit of the workers in order to gull them into voting their masters into power. In opposition (so called) to these parties stands the alleged Labour Party (or hotch-potch of parties) which differs from them only in the fact that its programme of "reforms" is more "advanced"—that is to say, it is calculated to more thoroughly organise capitalism and deceive the workers. None of the Labour Party's proposals differ in this from the Single Tax and other "progressive" nostrums! Every measure proposed by non-Socialist parties reveals, when closely analysed, some other attempt on the part of some section of the masters to increase or protect their revenue in some way. In no case will it be found that the workers benefit in any way. Parties are the expression of interests. The "practical politician" will be hard put to dispute this. Turn for yourselves to history and see for example how the landed Conservatives struggled against the rising manufacturing Liberals. Where is the party of the workers?

It can only be a party which

FIGHTS THE MASTERS!

It cannt be a party, which, like the "Labour" Party, joined the Coalition of Capital when it saw jobs given away and only left it to get into a position to bargain for more! This sort of thing may be "practical" for job-hunters: it is of no use to revolutionary workers. The Socialist Party, therefore, wages war on all other parties, and calls upon the workers of this country to muster under its banner.

Eric Boden