Feminist future (1979)

Book Review from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every piece of art can't contain everything everybody would like to say . . . That's the slogan mentality at work, as if there were certain holy words that must always be named.

Thus one of the characters in Marge Piercy's science fiction novel Woman On The Edge Of Time* sums up the author's approach to writing a political story about present and future society without the usual incantation of political jargon. The future society which she so desirably depicts, though not named as such, is socialist in our terms: a moneyless society of common ownership based upon voluntary co-operation, with people contributing according to ability and taking according to need.

The story focuses on an inmate of a mental 'hospital', Connie Ramos. A Mexican-American woman, she is a victim of both poverty and colour prejudice and so is easy prey for the authorities. Having been committed to the institution once, she is sent back on the evidence of a pimp who Connie attacked with a bottle to protect her niece from a beating. She was committed the first time for hitting her daughter Angie although, as she says, "Most people hit kids. But if you were on welfare and on probation and the whole social pigeon-holing establishment had the right to trek regularly through your kitchen looking in the closets and under the bed, counting the bedbugs and your shoes, you had better not hit your kid once."

At a time when child battering is in the news, the author's fictional account shows how poverty can drive a loving parent to violence, and the palpable fact that they are as much victims of capitalist society as are the battered kids. Connie is living on welfare in a one-room flat following her husband's death in prison after a drug experiment. She wakes to Angie's screaming:

. . . She came staggering off the couch and saw that Angie, in kicking the table, in kicking the wall - every blow the blow of a hammer on her aching head - had kicked a hole in her lousy cheap shoes. Those were the only shoes Angie had, and where in hell was Connie going to get her another pair? Angie couldn't go out without shoes. There rose before Connie the long maze of conversations with her caseworker, of explanations, of pleas and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate and trips down to the welfare office to wait all day, first outside in the cold and then inside in line, for ever and ever for a lousy cheap pair of shoes to replace the lousy cheap pair Angie had just destroyed.
"You fucking kid!" she screamed, and hit her. Hit too hard. Knocked her across the room into the door. Angie's arm struck the heavy metal bolt of the police lock, and her wrist broke. The act was past in a moment. The consequences would go on as long as she breathed.

In the course of Connie's incarceration every protest is taken as 'a sign of sickness', and people in a so-called hospital are drugged into zombies. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that such institutions are used by the establishment against, in particular, underprivileged and inarticulate people as "just another way of getting busted', as a sort of warehouse fit only to 'store human machinery' broken by misuse. The story calls into question society's definition of madness.

Contrasted with today's sordid world is Mattapoisett, a village in a future time. Visions of the future often tend to depend almost totally on a 'back to nature' attitude. Unusually, this utopia encompasses both renewable, non-polluting energy sources of the 'small is beautiful' philosophy, and the application of advanced communications technology and machinery to carry out boring or repetitive work. Since unnecessary jobs like 'counting money and moving it about' have been abolished and necessary work is shared out, the workload is reduced to a minimum.

The most interesting aspect of this utopia is not the science fiction 'hardware' but the human relationships which are explored. Mattapoisett is a truly democratic society. Not only are the mechanics of decision-making democratic - local requirements are discussed with 'reps' chosen by lot each year who then meet, discuss and decide at planning councils - but social relationships are too. There are none of the hallmarks of authoritarianism or patriarchy here. No bosses, no leaders, no government. Gone too is that most pernicious institution, the nuclear family. School - that other fearsome institution - has also changed, with the artificial barriers between learning and doing in the real world removed. Children are treated as human beings, totally integrated and contributing to the community in their own right.

Since the characters are given unusual but charming names such as Morningstar, clues are rarely given to test sex role assumptions. Only Connie, the outsider, refers to the women and men as she or he, Mattapoisettians having no gender noun, using 'person' or 'per' for short. Assumptions about sexual and emotional relationships are also tested as the Mattapoisettians are no longer constrained by the concept of heterosexual monogamy.

There is little mention of how the author envisages change to a new society other than 'a thirty year war that culminated in a revolution'. A continuing war with the 'Richies' who have control of the 'space platforms, the moon, and Antarctica' supported by a population of androids, robots and cybernauts, is envisaged.

Utopian novels like Woman On The Edge Of Time are important for visualising a better future. By putting flesh on the theoretical bones of socialism they may inspire people to think about changing the world possibly as much a a library full of books on political science and economy. But there is another important reason. If socialism is to become more than a dream then all of us are going to be discussing how we each want to see the world shaped.

Finishing this book is like waking up thinking it's the weekend, only to find you've been dreaming and it's really Monday morning and WORK AGAIN! Capitalism is still with us, and the last thing to be complacent about is getting rid of it.

Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is  . . . we are only one possible future. 

Paul Moody

*The Women's Press, paperback £1.95

Pathfinders: Plastic Waste – Is There a Solution? (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Protecting the environment is in our hands’ –  a bold statement printed on a large supermarket chain’s plastic bags. The implication is that these bags are special, better than before or better than other ones. But are they really? The implication is also that it is consumers who are responsible for the state of the environment depending on the choices they make. Much money is spent on advertising and public relations to convince us of that responsibility; buy our product and know you’re supporting a worthwhile cause; use this product and do less damage to wildlife; for every one of these you consume 10p is donated to protecting dolphins/saving coral reefs/planting trees/rescuing donkeys etc, etc, ad infinitum. The poorly informed consumer, kept in the dark and fed mostly green bullshit is neatly handed the responsibility for consequences of decision making processes in which they played no part.

Plastics are polymers which do not, cannot, biodegrade. They cannot be decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms. What they do do is photodegrade, break down in light to smaller and smaller pieces, eventually becoming minute particles of polymer dust which stay around forever. Some of the latest technology claims that plastics with certain additives will degrade safely and more quickly given the correct conditions, i.e. carefully controlled landfills or industrial composters. The biggest challenge for composters is that they can only deal with discrete types of plastic and must not be contaminated with mixed lots – and they are few and far between because of the monetary cost. 

Landfill conditions vary widely and are recognised by environmentalists as being far from the ideal method of dealing with plastics. Current estimates for worldwide recycling of plastics is in the region of less than 5 percent, one reason being that there are so many different kinds of plastic. Recycling codes on packaging and containers trick consumers into believing such waste will be recycled after collection but there are at least seven different codes, all requiring different, separate methods of treatment, the outcome being that most of it is just dumped. 

As to how much is dumped it is probably impossible to say, however one recent estimate gives a figure of 65lbs of plastic waste per capita per annum in the USA. If we were to take a per capita figure for the whole of worldwide population of just 1lb per annum, 95 percent of which would be dumped, it works out at somewhere around 2.5 million tons. (At 10lbs 25 million tons, at 65lbs 160+million tons) – just plastic. 

For many decades a number of countries around the world had a policy of dumping household and industrial waste directly into the seas and although this policy has changed in certain areas the accumulated waste of plastic and its toxic chemical components are still there and are being added to daily. One estimate is that currently 80 percent of ocean rubbish is from the land and 20 percent from shipping. A single 3,000 passenger cruise ship accumulates about eight tons of waste weekly.

It was first predicted in 1988 that rubbish would be accumulating in the North Pacific gyre, a whirlpool created and moved around by the currents. Its existence was discovered to be true in 1997 when it was happened upon by Charles Moore returning from an ocean race when he sailed through a vast expanse of floating rubbish. The extent of the rubbish is difficult to measure as the particles are mostly broken down into tiny fragments and cannot be seen from the air, but they extend both outwards and downwards over an area variously claimed to be between the size of twice that of Texas to the overall size of the USA. 

Subsequent ongoing research has determined that the plastic concentration in this gyre is 6-7 times that of zooplankton, the basic foodstuff of oceans, and is continuously ingested by wildlife along with the absorbed organic pollutants which it attracts. Decomposition leaches toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A, PCBs etc., causing hormonal disruption right through the food chain from the tiniest organisms to birds, fish, reptiles and mammals, including humans. Moore’s team’s research recently estimated this particular ocean gyre to contain in the region of 100 million tons of rubbish. In the past decade it has been confirmed that this huge ocean rubbish tip in the North Pacific is not alone; there are now known to be another four – one each in the South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. An informative website including a ten minute video can be accessed at www.algalita.org.

A trawl of the internet shows that there is little interest from big business in using less oil-based resources in general manufacturing and packaging; that landfill sites are full to overflowing with no solution in sight and scant reference from governments; that profit-based schemes win out over environmentally sound ones; that there are limited moves towards more recycling in only a minority of countries. China now both exports plastic goods and imports waste plastics for recycling and remanufacturing in order to export more plastic goods – at what cost to the environment? And the rest of the world is complicit because it’s cheaper that way.

As consumers we can separate and recycle our rubbish diligently and have a (baseless) expectation that ‘the authorities’ will take care of the next stage but protecting the environment will only really be in our hands when the system is in our hands. 

Janet Surman

Bruce and Bannockburn (2014)

From the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The second part of our series exposing the myths of Scottish nationalism.

June 24th marked the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn which was just one of many battles between competing Anglo-Norman dynasties for the Scottish crown.

Separating myth from historical truth is no easy matter. Scottish nationalism starts from the assumption that Scotland was a nation from medieval times, if not earlier. Nationalists assert that Scotland achieved nationhood from the ‘War of Independence’ against the Edward the First, and William Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge (1297), the battle of Bannockburn (1314), and the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) are presented as expressions of Scotland’s national resistance against English colonialism.

The nationalist story of Scotland's past is that it has been a history of fighting to defend itself from England in a tale of freedom won, and freedom lost. Now with the Independence Referendum there is a chance of a separate state once more. It is, however, a fanciful notion that Scotland achieved national consciousness and nationhood in medieval times in the 'War of Independence' against proud Edward’s army.

Edward certainly sought to incorporate the territory of the kingdom of Scotland into his feudal empire. At first the means were peaceful. The Treaty of Birgham in 1290 set out terms of a future dynastic union through the marriage of Margaret, the 'Maid of Norway' to Edward's son. It recognised Scottish independence and the interests of the ruling nobility in Scotland would have been left unaffected. The merger was to be of crowns with no significant change for the commoners. However, Margaret died and this triggered a constitutional crisis in Scotland so with thirteen rival claims to the throne of Scotland, the barons turned to Edward to settle the dispute. He proclaimed himself lord paramount of Scotland, and decided that John Balliol had a better claim than Robert de Brus (Bruce the elder). John Balliol was accordingly crowned king and duly paid homage to Edward in 1292.

Conflicts within the feudal elite in Scotland, and harsh demands made by Edward on his vassals, drove John Balliol into revolt after Edward haughtily ordered Balliol into military service in France. The Scots instead ratified a treaty with Edward's enemy, Philip IV, and war was inevitable. Edward was free to roam through Scotland taking control of castles and humiliating Balliol until the forced abdication of Balliol in 1296, stripping him of the royal emblems that earned Balliol the insulting name ’Toom Tabard’ (Empty Tabard). He was sent to the Tower of London and thereafter spent the rest of his life in relatively comfortable exile. Edward's dominance over Scotland was total. He made over 2,000 freeholders swear allegiance to him, in a document which became known as the Ragman's Roll. Following several shifts of alliances, the feudal elite in Scotland began to turn the tables on Edward, beginning with William Wallace who never fought for an abstract ’people’ or even ’nation’, but always in the name of a legitimate power of which he was but the temporary protector or ’Guardian’ – King John Balliol.

‘Nationhood’

The kings and the nobility of Scotland  were feudal lords, who did not even understand, let alone entertain, modern-day ideas of nationhood, nor could they. They were possessed of a culture drawn from the Norman French, who married across the whole of the north-western part of Europe and were, in this sense, completely cosmopolitan. Their domains of exploitation, their rivalries and their commonalities invariably coincided. They were lords in Scotland who also held large tracts in England. For example, the Bruce family had ties both north and south of the border, the abbey of Guisborough in Northumberland was a Bruce foundation and they held 90,000 acres of land in Yorkshire, while John Balliol, held land in Normandy and England, as well as Scotland. Members of the nobility from the kingdom of Scotland, for example Bruce’s rival, John Comyn, fought on the side of Edward in the conquest of Wales. The armies of Edward were recruited from his feudal realms in France, Wales and Ireland. The internecine struggles between competing feudal dynasties were based on the belief systems of the then-prevailing notions of fief and vassalage, not on the present-day concepts of nationhood. The lords in Scotland were engaged in a desperate struggle to defend and safeguard their traditional monopoly to exploit their estate serfs against the centralising power of Edward.

Robert the Bruce’s conduct previous to Bannockburn was in no sense supporting the ‘patriotic cause’. The young Robert Bruce brought up at Edward's court had been a favourite of Edward. He probably shared a mixture of the Anglo-French culture of northern England and south-eastern Scotland, and the Gaelic culture of Ulster, French being his paternal-tongue and Gaelic his maternal-tongue, and Latin his written language. The facts speak for themselves. Both Bruce and his father supported Edward’s invasion of Scotland in 1296, hoping to gain the crown after Balliol's fall. They were understandably disappointed when Edward proceeded to install himself as king. In 1297, Bruce raised the standard of revolt. However, his rising failed whereupon Bruce declined to join Wallace at Stirling Bridge and was also absent at the Battle of Falkirk, in which Wallace's army was devastated.

He, along with most Scottish nobles, changed sides on more than one occasion, depending upon how the wind blew. In 1302, he resigned as a Guardian of Scotland to make peace with Edward in order to marry the daughter of the de Burgh family of the Earldom of Ulster. Bruce, like all his family, had a complete belief in his right to the throne. However his actions of supporting alternately the English and Scottish armies had led to a great deal of distrust towards Bruce. His struggle for the Scottish crown wasn't an enterprise born of patriotism. Bruce's motives were more self-serving than that. The ascension of his family to royalty seemed more central to his long-term plans than Scottish liberation from English rule. His ambition was further thwarted by his chief political rival, John Comyn, known simply as the Red Comyn, and another lord of Norman origin who Bruce murdered in 1306. This set off a chain of events which led to both his excommunication and his coronation as king. He was most certainly a usurper so long as there was a legitimate heir of the Balliol family.

To attribute to the Declaration of Arbroath modern connotations of nationhood is as false as to impart similar meanings to the Magna Carta. Both these documents should be seen for what they really were – an expression of the interests of barons from the respective kingdoms and their determination to hang on to their privileges against the monarch. The rhetoric of the Declaration of Arbroath – ’For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English’ – was never Bruce's rhetoric, for he had appealed to English lordship on more than one occasion.

A key passage in the Declaration runs thus:

‘Yet if he [Robert the Bruce] shall give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or to the English, we would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and we would make some other man who was able to defend us our king; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not [for] glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up without his life’.

The above passage has been represented by some as the prototype for modern nationalism. In truth, this passage suggests the function of the noble estate ‘as the defender of the kingdom against the claims of the individual monarch in a way that was entirely typical of absolutist Europe’ according to the historian Neil Davidson.

Its message was two-fold. First, it was directed at Edward II, informing him that it was pointless for him to attempt to depose Robert with a more subservient king, since the remainder of the Scottish aristocracy would not cease its resistance. Second, it was addressed to Robert the Bruce, making it clear that, in consideration of his past record, they would not brook his jeopardising their interests – which lay in their god-given right to unhindered exploitation of the peasants – through making concessions to Edward.

Bruce at Bannockburn never fought for the people of Scotland – he fought to place a crown upon his head.

ALJO

Next month: concluding article, on the Covenanters.

Greasy Pole: Elections... or Earthquakes (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Just listen' blurted the engineering geologist, in language he is more accustomed to use on some massive, remote construction site, 'I get right pissed off when I hear some jumped-up politician talking about an earthquake when what they mean is that they are scared about losing an election. Because it's a serious matter – an irresistible force which can kill tens of thousands of people and lay waste to a developed city'. He knew what he was talking about; over just the past ten years there has been a succession of such disasters each bringing about a horrific death toll. There was Kashmir in 2005 when 73,000 died; 1908 Sichuan Province in China 87,000; 2010 in Haiti when it was 210,000; 2011 in Japan with 200,000 plus. But our understanding of the cause is inadequate, other than seismic waves from the energy released through the rupture of geological faults or volcanic bursts or nuclear tests... Over time there has been a mass of work centred on constructing a reliable method of prediction from which an adequate defence might have been designed but without any appreciable success. By any standards it is a vastly serious problem for the human race so there must be some frustration when the likes of David Cameron or Ed Miliband drivel about an earthquake to express their anxiety about whether their party will survive against the onslaught of an equally futile bunch such as Nigel Farage and his UKIP. 

Bribes

This was how it happened during the by-election in June at Newark in Nottinghamshire. Early political tremors had already been felt by the time the parties had announced the names of their candidates and Farage had described UKIP's success in the recent local and Euro elections as an episode in his much-promised 'political earthquake'. The by-election came about after the resignation of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer, whose fall from the heights had been remarkably rapid. The son of a future Bishop of Exeter, he went to public school and Sandhurst which prepared him for a career in the Army, garnished by two decorations and the rank of Colonel when he left in 1999 and eventually became an MP. But things began to go seriously wrong. He had to resign from Shadow Minister for Home Security when he referred to ethnic minority soldiers as 'idle and useless', accustomed to using their race as a 'cover' for unmilitary behaviour. Another example of his lack of discretion was when he recalled thinking, on being introduced to a young female Israeli soldier, that 'You don't look like a soldier to me. You look like a bloody Jew'. His chances of surviving all this had almost disappeared when he described David Cameron as 'despicable' and an 'arse'. And finally he was exposed taking bribes from a couple of under-cover reporters for asking questions as an MP. It was inevitable that he should be at first suspended until he chose to resign – which gave UKIP some hope that they were in with a chance of winning the seat.

Newark

So the Newark Tories had to select a candidate for one of the safest seats in the country (Mercer's majority, even as he was under scrutiny, was some way above 16,000) and they would have been determined that whoever they settled on would be as different from Mercer as possible. Eventually emerging from the process was the smooth, prosperous 32 year old Robert Jenrick. But no sooner had he been chosen than a clutch of inconveniently undermining facts about him came to light. He had presented himself as 'a father, local man, son of a secretary and small businessman and state primary school educated'. But partnering these modest features there is a wife who is a high-flying commercial lawyer operating under a rather more colourful professional name. Between them they bring in some £500,000 a year. Jenrick' s claim to be a local man does not fit in with their joint ownership of a £2 million flat in Mayfair, a £2.5 million house in Westminster and a £1.1 million manor, originally owned by a slave owner, in Herefordshire. Somewhere in this lot there is a house in Newark which they recently began to rent – in fact just after Jenrick was adopted to fight the by-election. He works at Christies, the super-posh auction house but in this again there is some confusion for at first he described himself as the Managing Director of that firm when in fact he is at most a director – which would be lucrative enough for those others who are struggling to get by on the minimum wage or state benefit. So is Jenrick just another of Cameron's posh Tory boys? He defends himself with the assurance that owning three expensive homes '...doesn't mean I don't know about life on the bread-line', which seems to have been satisfactory to the voters of Newark, who elected him with a majority reduced enough to cause just a few bumps and trembles but not the earthquake Farage was hoping for.

Result

The UKIP candidate ('this brazen dandy' according to one observer) was Roger Helmer, who defected from the Tory Party in 2012 and has made himself notable with opinions, on a range of current issues, which could be moderately described as capricious. The Tories were anxious enough about UKIP to flood the constituency with big names; Cameron was there four times. It was to persuade – or frighten – the voters into supporting them because whatever the earthquakes may do capitalism cares for us.

Ivan

Between the Lines: Bore-o-vision (1985)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bore-o-vision

I am only just recovering from the non-excitement of Norway winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Watching the show is like taking an overdose of valium - and then there was the frustration of going to the toilet and missing "our" song. All over Europe (and Israel - TV bosses aren't too hot on geography) workers were sitting in front of their tellys and waiting for "our" song. What seems like bland light entertainment is doing its bit to encourage the sick sense of nationalism which the masters require of the wage slaves. It's like watching international soccer - millions of workers are urged to think of "us" taking a penalty and "our" goal difference. All ideological preparation for "us" nuking Leningrad and "our" gains in central Russia. If you want to show us a football match or a boring song contest, let them tell us in advance that we're in for a nationalist political broadcast. As for "our" song in the contest - fourth to Norway. Palmerston would never have stood for it. If I were Maggie I'd send a Task Force to Scandinavia.

Hapless Hobsbawm

The Communist Party is beating itself up and, with every justification, the political pundits are having a good laugh. So, Channel Four's A Week in Politics did a special report on the split. Following the informative film report, Peter Jay (married to Jim Callaghan's daughter and suitably boring) interviewed Eurocommunist "intellectual" (historian by trade) Eric Hobsbawm. Our Eric is of the view that "Thatcherism" is a totally new phase of capitalism and that all anti-Thatcherites, from the CP majority to the SDP, should form an anti-Thatcher electoral pact. Jay asked Hobsbawm a number of very pertinent questions (more by luck than judgement, no doubt) which left the Professor stammering in confusion. For example, Jay asked why a "communist" should advocate the election of a labour government when the last seven have brought us no nearer to socialism. He also made the quite valid political point that if CPers wanted to do the Labour Party any favours they would go away and leave them alone, as CP support for Kinnock undermines Labour's credibility with voters. Hobsbawm admitted that Jay had a good point. Which says a lot about CPer Hobsbawm - and about the kind of votes Kinnock is after.

Selling

The series put out by ITV entitled Television was not half as bad as some critics suggested. The penultimate programme was about how TV is used to "sell" politicians, in the same way as it has sold soap powder. It showed how Nixon used a telly broadcast to save his career when some cad accused him of taking bribes - he had the viewers weeping into their hankies with a sub-Crossroads monologue about how he loved his puppy. Then, some years later, when JFK was opposing Nixon for the Presidency, the former's advisors manipulated the set so that Nixon would come off worst; they told him to wear a light blue suit which wouldn't show up against the white background and insisted that the candidates stood up to speak, so exposing Nixon to pain from his recently injured leg. Oh, the seriousness of capitalist politics. What was that about excluding frivolous candidates from elections?

Praise Marx

When you get as little TV exposure as the Socialist Party, any little bit is worth reporting. A few weeks ago C4 showed a late-night film called Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition. It was quite a good send-up of trendy Leftists who think that their role is to lead the workers to the barricades, and included some pretty good information about British capitalism in the 1960s. But that is not why the film entered socialist history. In one scene the lefty protagonist enters a radical bookshop to deliver some pamphlets. And on what is there a close-up? The Socialist Standard and the Western Socialist. And it was a lengthy shot too. Proof, once again, that the capitalists are only too willing to give TV time to the Socialist Party.

Steve Coleman

Two anti-Leninists (1993)

Uğur Mumcu

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is probable that few of our readers will have noticed the brief news item at the end of January regarding the assassination in Ankara of the Turkish journalist, Ugur Mumcu. Even fewer will have linked this tragic news with the contacts we had with the émigré review, Marksist published in Paris. It should not go unnoticed, however, that Mumcu was part of a remarkable political trend which we in the Movement for World Socialism can welcome whole-heartedly.

For many years the Socialist Party here and our companion parties overseas have largely been alone in maintaining that Lenin's ideology paved the way for the establishment of state-capitalism in the Russian Empire and elsewhere. Even when the London-based magazine International Socialism diverged from its Trotskyist background by recognizing the USSR to be state-capitalist, they were still so ensnared in their Bolshevik mental straitjacket they could not see the oppressive Russian system as a direct consequence of Lenin's seizure of power in the backward conditions of 1917. The SWP, which emerged from IS in the mid-seventies, remains frozen in its incomplete understanding of the factors giving rise to state-capitalism and, to use a Trotskyist phrase, is accordingly degenerate.

By contrast to the most advance trend within Trotskyism, those around Marksist developed their understanding much further even though many of them emerged from yet more rigid Leninist disciplines as Maoism and its Albanian variant. Mumcu, too, came to a recognition that Leninism was a distortion, a perversion of Marxian ideas. Anyone familiar with the powerful grip which Stalinism has had over the working-class movement in Anatolia will not find it hard to see that Mumcu was not only at risk from those who conspire to re-establish a theocratic state in place of Ataturk's secular republic and who he regularly lambasted in his column in Turkey's best daily Cumhuriyet (the quasi-official mouthpiece of Turkey's own special mix of state and private capitalism). The fact that Mumcu was a scourge of the huge narcotics industry in his country and is said to have been near to publishing a major exposé of the whole business and its political links right the way to the top suggests he could have been in the sights of many different marksmen.

As it is, the TV news from Istanbul reports that Hesbollah, the Tehran-backed Islamic terrorist organization, has claimed responsibility for placing the fatal car-bomb. This could be true but then again MIT, the Turkish secret police who are a menace in their own right to political democracy might have their own reasons for floating this idea.

Whilst acknowledging the valuable contribution Uğur Mumcu and his associates have made to a clearer understanding of the Leninist phenomenon we would be deluding ourselves if we were to overlook the dangers inherent in their reversion to a kind of pre-Leninist Social-Democracy, with all its erroneous attitudes towards the role of leadership, reformist legislation, the nation-state etc. Nevertheless, we share the sense of outrage at this murder and we shall continue as best we can in the work of exchanging and clarifying ideas paving the way to the Socialist world community of the future.

E. S. Grant

Anton Ciliga, whose claim to fame amongst socialists is as the author of the book The Russian Enigma, died in October in Zagreb. As this book first appeared in English in 1940 many will perhaps will be surprised to learn that he was still alive in 1992.

Born in 1898 Anton (or rather, Ante in his native Croatian) Ciliga was a founding member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia who went to Russia in 1926 and was eventually imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia for "trotskyism". He managed to get out of Russia in 1935 and put down his experiences in writing. These were published in book form in French in 1938 under the title Au Pays du Grand Mensonge ("In the Land of the Big Lie", a much better title than that of the English version in fact).

The Big Lie of course was that Russia was a "socialist state", a "workers' paradise". Ciliga, who had been imprisoned as a Trotskyist, eventually came to realise that Russia was state capitalist and that the Party bureaucracy was a new ruling class. This, naturally, meant that he ceased to be a Trotskyist. In fact he came to see Trotsky as no different in principle from Stalin. As he put it himself:

Trotsky as well as Stalin wished to pass off the State as being the proletariat, the bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat as the proletarian dictatorship, the victory of State capitalism over both private capitalism and socialism as a victory of the latter. The difference between Trotsky and Stalin lay in the fact that in his victory Stalin saw the triumph of pure socialism, pure dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas Trotsky perceived and stressed the gaps and bureaucratic deformations of the system.

Besides being an interesting account of the privileged lifestyle of the Bolshevik leaders (and Comintern official from abroad) in the 1920s and of the discussion amongst the political prisoners of various sorts in the 1930s, it is this denunciation of Trotskyism as an ideology of state capitalism that makes the book still worth reading (a new edition was published by Ink Links in 1979), an antidote to the Leninist vanguardist views still being peddled on the streets by the SWP in Britain.

Ciliga, however, soon drifted away from any claim to be a Marxist and became a Croatian nationalist. In later years he was active in Croatian exile politics and when Croatia became a separate state in 1991 he returned from exile and was granted a pension by the new authorities.

Adam Buick 

Roots of gay oppression (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Homosexuality—sexual relations between, or attraction to, members of the same sex—has existed from the beginning of human history. In Ancient Greece the love of men was "integral both to the concept and the practice of Greek maleness" according to Rosalind Miles in her recent book The Rites of Man. Already in 1917 in his The Origin and Development of the Moral Idea Westermarck had stated that homosexuality probably occurred among every race of mankind.

Although homosexual love was considered commonplace, natural and pleasurable in the ancient world, homosexuals became increasingly ostracised, ridiculed and persecuted in the modern world. The development of Christianity, Judaism and Islam as international powers, able to wield influence over a wide range of human affairs led to homosexuality being outlawed.

An early condemnation of homosexuality occurs in the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament of the Bible. Homosexuals are condemned to death along with adulterers and those committing bestiality. But Christians have been notorious at changing the rules and deciding which parts of the Bible are to be slavishly followed and which parts are ignored. Usury is condemned in the Bible but, with the rise of capitalism, banking is now a respectable profession. Polygamy was accepted in biblical times but is now strictly illegal in many countries and punishable by imprisonment.

The term "bugger" derives from "bougre" used to describe the supporters of the Bogomil heresy in Bulgaria in the tenth century. The Albingensias in Southern France in 1208 were also known as "bourges" or "bougeron". It was in fact from about the twelfth century onwards that homosexuality came to be perceived as a vice and harsh punishments were meted out. The rich and powerful, however, escaped the prohibition that applied to other homosexuals. Richard I ("The Lionheart") had a passionate affair with King Phillip of France which was carried on quite openly.

In Britain an ecclesiastical law of 1290 ordered "sodomites" to be buried alive, but this sentence seems to have been never carried out. The few who were convicted by the Church courts were hanged by the secular authorities. King Henry VIII introduced hanging as the secular punishment for sodomy in 1533 to remove the power of the Catholic Church that he was in the process of breaking away from.  But this move was politically rather than morally motivated and there were few prosecutions for sodomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sexual relations between men were considered a commonplace method of getting sexual pleasure. Local authorities were more concerned to prevent the birth of bastards who might well have to be supported by the parish and a blind eye was turned to homosexual behaviour despite its illegality.

Persecution

From about the 1700 attitudes to homosexuality hardened again. Homosexuals responded by setting up "molly houses", back rooms in private houses or taverns where heterosexual relationships were mimicked and mocked. According to R. Davenport Hines in his Sex, Death and Punishment, "mock marriages and pregnancy rituals were performed with mock lying-ins and the "pregnant" man being delivered of a doll or a Cheshire cheese.

Homosexuals were depicted as effeminate, partly in retaliation for the "molly house" rituals, partly because transvestites were thought to be homosexuals and partly as a result of social labelling and stereotyping.

As early as 1728 men solicited in London for the sole purpose of blackmailing those who responded to their advances. Police spies and agent provocateurs were used in England for the first time to trap homosexuals. Lord Jowitt claimed that at least 95 percent of blackmail cases which he knew about when Attorney General in 1929-32 involved fears of prosecution for homosexual behaviour.

Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly the best known homosexual to be prosecuted in the late Victorian era. He received two years hard labour in 1895. According to N. Greig in his introduction to Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings "it was the act of treason of taking working-class boys to upper-class clubs which sealed his fate".

In this century the persecution of homosexuals has continued. In 1942 at Abergavenny 18 men received gaol sentences of between 10 months and 12 years. Thirteen of the men received a total of 57 years imprisonment. In 1955, alone, 1065 men were imprisoned for homosexual offences. And in 1951 a campaign against homosexuals in government services started after the homosexual Guy Burgess and the bisexual Donald Maclean absconded to Russia after it was revealed that they had spied for the Russian government for years.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards homosexuality was seen in some quarters as a medical condition and homosexuals were treated with drugs, hypnotism, psychotherapy and aversion therapy. However, the American Psychiatric Association has now voted to delete homosexuality from its official list of pathologies.

Most teenagers seem to be aware of their homosexuality between 12-14 years of age. Yet such is the social pressure to conform that 61 percent of lesbians and a quarter of male homosexuals had their first sexual experience with a member of the opposite sex (J. M. Stafford, Homosexuality and Education, 1988). The London Gay Teenage Group found, from a sample of over 400 homosexual teenagers, that over half had been verbally abused, a fifth had been beaten up, one in ten had been thrown out of home and many others sent to a doctor or psychiatrist. Suicide had been attempted by one-fifth of them because of intolerable social pressure.

Lesbians had been spared legal persecution but have been subjected to the same prejudices and discrimination as male homosexuals. At times lesbianism has been ignored as if it did not exist, or its existence denied. Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness was banned as obscene in 1928 although there is nothing lewd or erotic in the book. Its lesbian theme was considered sufficient reason for it to be outlawed.

In 1967 homosexual relations, between consenting males over 21 years, in private ceased to be a criminal offence in this country. But prejudice cannot be legislated out of existence and hard-won reforms can always be attacked or withdrawn. The 1988 Halsbury clause of the Local Government Act has made it illegal for local authorities to give financial or other assistance to homosexual groups.

Capitalism thrives on scapegoats because they absorb the blame for the poverty, stress and insecurity that the system cause and divert the pressure for change into other channels.

Socialists hold that sexual activity between consenting adults which gives please to the participants and does not harm anybody should be entirely their own affair. Discrimination is wrong and pressure groups are right to want to change it but we must tackle cause and not effects. Pressure groups fragment the strength of the working class which should be united to bring about the overthrow of the capitalist system. Partial reforms have allowed a resurgence of homophobia to be whipped up over AIDS. And economic stress will make minority groups vulnerable to attack in the future. The overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism is the only way of preventing this from happening.

Carl Pinel

Voice From The Back: Pawn move (2003)

The Voice From The Back column from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pawn move

We are constantly being told what a wonderful society modern capitalism is and how it has solved the problems of poverty that used to occur in the “bad old days”. So what have me to make of the following information in the Business Section of the Times (18 February)? “With many banks suffering from rising bad debts and margin pressures, pawnbrokers have emerged as one of the few sectors of the finance industry expected to see strong growth in 2003. Experts yesterday predicted that Britain's pawnbroking industry would expand as much as 15 per cent this year to achieve record turnover of more than £85 million, almost triple the amount seen five years ago . . .The business is not helped, it says, by its perception as a “Dickensian institution” and the existence of annual interest rates of more than 100 percent.” Despite two Labour governments it seems that some of us have still got to go down to the pawn. We know how you feel. Sometimes we get skint.

Crawling to work

When Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the ex-president, was offered a job at McKinsey management consultants, starting at £40,000 a year, The Guardian ran a feature on this long established firm. It revealed some of the slavish attitudes that capitalism engenders. “Among things that McKinsey stands for is consistency of presentation. Until the early 1960s, that meant all McKinsey men were expected to wear hats because their chief executive clients did so. When one executive realised that fashion had changed and turned up for work bare-headed one day, colleagues reacted warily. “Should we all give up our hats?” asked one. “I'd wait six weeks,” a partner replied. “It may be a trap.” The Guardian (21 February) It is easy to sneer our critics may say. We reply how many arses would you lick for 40 grand a year?

There be dragons

“A panel of Church of Scotland ministers and psychiatrists has been formed to revisit the controversial area of exorcism for the first time in 15 years. It follows concerns the Church is not doing enough for people some believe have been possessed by devils.” The Herald (4 March) In their leaflet “Dealing With Darkness” the church claims that signs of this demonic possession can be “revulsion from Christian ideas”. It seems more likely to us that this revulsion could spring from christianity's awful record of torture, sexual suppression, misery and mumbo-jumbo like exorcism.

Another Great Man speaks

As if to prove that the US President isn't the only one of the US capitalist's representatives to speak in a less than lucid fashion. Donald Rumsfield, the US Secretary of Defence has come up with a couple of gems to rival his boss. When asked why such heavy bombs were being used in Afghanistan he uttered this profundity. “They are being used on frontline al-Qaeda and Taleban troops to try and kill them.” And when asked about Bin Laden, “We do know of a certain knowledge that Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. Or in another country. Or dead.” The Times (13 March) Bombs being used to kill people? Bin Laden is either alive or dead? Its good to know that such sages are in charge, isn't it?

T-shirts of mass destruction

That war hysteria breeds irrational behaviour is surely proven by the case of Stephen Downs, who was arrested and charged with trespassing at a New York mall. His crime? He was wearing a T-shirt that said Peace on Earth and Give Peace a Chance. “I was confronted by two security guards and ordered to either take off the T-shirt or leave the mall”, said Stephen Downs. Newsweek(17 March) What such guardians of New York malls will make of our comrades in Canada who have been distributing for some years T-shirts proclaiming “Abolish the wages system” is left to your imagination.

A fishy tale

Members of the world socialist movement base their ideas on science. So of course we were extremely interested in the way-out happenings that recently occurred in New York .”According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte for Sabbath dinner when it suddenly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew.” The Observer (16 March) “Many of the 7,000 Skver sect of hasidim in New Square, 30 miles north of Manhattan, believe God has revealed himself in fish form.” Next time you buy fish and chips listen to the God instead of eating the cod. What a load of nonsense. All religious ideas are.

Cooking the Books: Fighting Against Falling Prices (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Draghi holds QE in reserve as he wheels out the big guns for the fight against deflation’ read the headline in the Times (6 June) reporting an announcement by the president of the European Central Bank of a package of measures aimed at increasing inflation in the Eurozone.

Deflation is the opposite of inflation whatever the definition of the latter. These days ‘inflation’ means rising prices, so deflation means falling prices. So what’s wrong with that? Aren’t supermarkets, furniture stores and the like always boasting about how they have cut, slashed or even massacred prices? If things cost less to buy shouldn’t that mean that we are better off as we don’t have to spend so much on what we need? That the pound in our pocket has expanded not shrunk?

‘Inflation’ originally meant a rise in the general price level caused by issuing too much currency, i.e., by inflating the amount of it put into circulation. But a general rise in prices can be caused by another factor – the level of economic activity in a boom which leads to paying demand coming to rise faster than industry can supply it. In a slump the opposite tends to happen with supply coming to exceed demand, so driving prices down.

In between the two world wars falls in the general price level, some quite severe, were not uncommon. Not that this made people better off, at least not for long as wages too are a price and, despite rearguard trade union action, fell along with prices generally. In that period inflation, as increasing the amount of money in circulation, was seen by some as a way-out of a slump in the belief that rising prices would encourage capitalist firms to invest. Keynes, without putting it so crudely, lent some support to this by arguing that what was important were the government’s tax and borrowing policies while the amount of currency put into circulation (by then not linked to gold but ‘managed’ by the central bank) could be left to follow suit.

The first Keynesian budget in Britain was in 1940 and it is no coincidence that ever since the general price level has risen steadily. It continued to rise even during a severe economic downturn in the mid-70s when, between the wars, this would have resulted in a fall. In fact a new phenomenon emerged – a rising price level during a slump – which was dubbed ‘stagflation’. What had happened was that the upward pressure on the price level exerted by the government inflating the currency had countered the downward pressure that occurs during a slump.

This discredited Keynesianism and governments tried to reduce inflation by reducing the money supply. The rise in the genera price level was eventually steadied at about 2 percent a year, which is now the level at which it is government policy in all developed capitalist countries to aim to maintain it. But the present slump has been so severe that central banks and governments are afraid that this time the downward pressures might overcome the upward pressures, resulting in a fall in the general price level, or deflation.

In April the rise in the price level in the Eurozone fell to a mere 0.5 percent from 0.7 percent the previous month. That’s not yet deflation but Draghi said that the ECB’s measures were a reaction ‘to the risks of a too prolonged period of low inflation’. We always used to be told that inflation was a bad thing but now they are telling us that it’s too low inflation that’s bad and that falling prices are even worse. It seems they want the pound in our pocket to shrink.

Editorial: Middle East - Wars Without End (2014)

Editorial from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The collapse 25 years ago of US rivals for world domination, the Russian state-capitalist empire, was hailed as a step forward for humanity by the US and its bloc of Western capitalist states. Their ideologues proclaimed the end of history and the beginning of an era of peace and free trade in a world of democratic states.

It hasn’t turned out like that and was never going to. Capitalism is a system which has a built-in conflict between states, and the capitalist groups they represent, over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets and areas to secure or protect these. Usually this takes place economically and through diplomacy but, when a state feels that its vital economic interests in one of these fields is under real threat, they resort to war.

Their rivals defeated, the United States and some of the others in the Western capitalist bloc felt confident enough to intervene militarily to overthrow regimes that were hostile to it even though they didn’t really constitute a real immediate threat to their vital economic interests. Which is why some of the states in the bloc were opposed to this. But the attacks went ahead. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was overthrown. Then the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Then the Gaddafi regime in Libya. All were toppled, though after 14 years of war the Taliban have not been crushed and the Western powers are preparing to call it a day and withdraw their troops without victory. Next up for regime change was Syria. After that it was to be a much tougher nut, Iran.

The Western capitalist bloc stirred up a civil war in Syria and now they are reaping the whirlwind – a fanatical Islamist movement which has conquered parts of Syria and has now invaded Iraq and whose ultimate aim is to drive the West out of the Middle East. Panic stricken, the West has now appealed to Iran to help them out. No doubt Iran will seize the opportunity to steal a march on its main rival for regional hegemony, Saudi Arabia.

Tony Blair is claiming that this has nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which he tricked his cabinet and parliament into backing. But nobody believes him. It is a continuation of the same battle for control of the Middle East and its oil resources that has gone on ever since the end of the Second World War, with crisis after crisis and war after war.

The West's rivals for the control of the Middle East oilfields and the trade routes needed to get the oil out – as well as of the strategic areas and points to protect these – have been sections of the local capitalist class in the region. The ideology they used, to begin with, to get a mass following was an anti-imperialist nationalism which had a left-wing tinge and even employed a ’socialist’ terminology. This was the ideology of Nasser in Egypt, the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq, and the PLO in the 1970s. Since the collapse of the Russian state-capitalist bloc, Islamic fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant ideology of those who want local capitalist, rather than Western imperialist, control of the oil resources of the Middle East. Hardly a step forward for humanity. In many ways, rather the opposite.

Bacon and Steam Trains: The Serbian Pork War and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway (2014)

From the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the centenary commemorations of the First World War start to build up, we look at some of the causes of the conflict.

The rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia for territories and influence in the Balkan region was a fundamental cause of the First World War. The rivalry between the Hapsburg and the Romanov dynasties  manifested itself in the economic rivalry between the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the landlocked Kingdom of Serbia, and this rivalry was prosaically expressed in a customs war about pork. Between 1906-09 the huge Austrian-Hungarian Empire imposed a customs blockade on the importation of  Serbian pigs.

The friendly relations between the German Reich and the Ottoman Empire were seen as a threat by both  Tsarist Russia and the British Empire. Russia feared losing influence in the Balkans (its close ally was Serbia), and German control of the Dardanelles, while the British felt threatened by German access to the Middle East which would affect the Suez Canal, the oil rich Persian Gulf and the vital route to India. These fears for Russia and Britain were manifested in the building of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway.

In 1903 90 percent of Serbia's foreign trade was with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire which was mainly livestock in the form of pigs. This economic arrangement with Austria-Hungary guaranteed trade and revenue for the Kingdom of Serbia but it also impeded Serbia's industrial growth. In 1903 the Austrian-Serb commercial treaty was expiring, and negotiations were foundering because Serbia wanted to reduce its economic dependence on Austria-Hungary. In order to evade the economic control of Austria-Hungary, Serbia started to build economic links with other counties such as Bulgaria and France.

Serbian pork

In January 1904 Serbia arranged a loan through a French businessman who would purchase 150,000 Serbian pigs per year, and then placed a large artillery order with Schnedier, a French munitions firm. Previously, Serbia purchased munitions from the Skoda factories in Bohemia in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

In April 1904 Serbia entered into secret commercial negotiations with Bulgaria which became public in June 1905, and the Serbian-Bulgarian Customs Union became effective in March 1906. Trade negotiations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary came to an end. Tariff-laden Austrian goods became unsellable in Serbia.

In retaliation, Austria-Hungary closed its borders to all trade with Serbia with effect from 1 March 1906. The Imperial authorities claimed there was an outbreak of disease in Serbian pigs which threatened to infect Austrian livestock.  This meant the end of exporting Serbian pigs to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and the beginning of what became known as the Serbian Pork War.

Initially the end of pig exports to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was a shock to the Serbian economy. Serbia framed the issue of its pigs in terms of Serbian nationalism and Balkan independence from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The trade embargo forced Serbia to find alternative export markets. French investment was sought to build new packing plants for international trade, materials were ordered from Germany, construction projects were financed with capital from France, and  trade agreements were signed with Romania, France, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Germany. Serbia also put pressure on the Austria-Hungary protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina to allow a rail link  so it could have an economic outlet on the Adriatic Sea. Serbia also made an arrangement with the Ottoman Empire to export livestock from the port of Salonica on the Aegean Sea,  and received  aid for the construction of processing plants, modern slaughterhouses and canning factories for livestock. The net economic result for Serbia was that its foreign trade surpassed what it had been before the embargo and its agricultural industry was thoroughly modernised, pig farming was vertically integrated into a single operation.

Serbia was also interested in expanding its territory to include Bosnia-Herzegovina where many ethnic Serbs lived.  Austria-Hungary, fearing greater Serbian economic power, formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina to their empire in October 1908 which angered Russia and Serbia but they were unable to take action because they received no support from Britain or France. The annexation had to be accepted by Russia and Serbia in March 1909.  Austria-Hungary also planned to build a railway line to the Aegean Sea through Austrian occupied former Ottoman territory which would by-pass Serbia and also create a commercial barrier between Serbia and the Adriatic Sea.  The annexation coupled with pork embargo only fanned the flames of Serbian nationalism at home in Serbia and amongst Bosnian Serbs. In fact it was a Bosnian Serb who assassinated  Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary  in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo which precipitated the First World War.

German ultimatum

In 1909 the economic war over pigs between Austria-Hungary and Serbia came to an end when tensions over Bosnia-Herzegovina between Austria-Hungary and Russia reached such a level that international war was a possibility. Germany intervened and issued an ultimatum demanding the ending of Russian aid to Serbia. Trade was normalised between Austria-Hungary and Serbia but increased Serbian nationalism was the result of Austria-Hungary's economic war.

The major international issue of the nineteenth century was the 'Eastern Question' or what to do with the 'sick old man of Europe' which was the decaying Ottoman Empire on the European mainland. By the turn of the twentieth century the Ottoman Empire had little territory left in Europe  but it still held vast swathes of territory in Asia Minor, the Levant, Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula which was all resource-rich with oil, chrome, antimony, lead and zinc, and with effective irrigation had a thriving agricultural industry. What was needed was a railway transportation system to move minerals and resources through the Ottoman Empire to link up with industrialised Europe.

The 'Orient Express' reached Istanbul in 1889, and in 1892 the railway was built from Istanbul to Ankara in Asia Minor by a syndicate of German businesses. The German Reich and  the Porte (Ottoman Empire) were on friendly terms, and both opposed to Russian attempts to control the Dardanelles and yielding influence in the Balkans. The proposed 'Berlin to Baghdad' railway line would link Germany to the oilfields in the Persian Gulf, in striking distance of  British oilfields in Persia, Russian oilfields in the Caucasus, close to British India,  and a railway  from Baghdad to Basra would also be a connection to Germany's African colonies in East and South West Africa and thereby avoid the British-controlled Suez Canal.

In 1903 the Deutsche Bank was awarded the concession to build the railway line from Konya in Anatolia through the Levant (Syria), Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Baghdad and thence to the Persian Gulf at Basra. By 1915 the railway line was 300 miles short of completion. The line was eventually completed in 1940. German advice and support was involved in the building of the Hejaz railway from 1900-08 which linked Damascus through Palestine to Medina in the Arabian peninsula. This line connected with the Berlin to Baghdad railway but was principally for the Ottoman Empire to strengthen its control over the desert tribes of the Arabian peninsula.

Threats to the Empire

The main issue for the British Empire was the economic threat posed by Germany in the competition for oil and trade  by the existence of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. The British believed that the Persian Gulf  with its oil resources and strategic importance was 'their' sphere of economic and political influence; the British Residency of the Persian Gulf was a diplomatic posting from 1763 to 1971.

The British policy in regard to Kuwait is testament to British attempts to exclude Germany from the Persian Gulf.  In 1899 Kuwait signed a treaty with Britain that gave the British control over Kuwait's foreign policy in exchange for British protection and an annual subsidy. The treaty was prompted by British fears about the proposed Berlin to Baghdad railway which with a link to Basra would lead to an expansion of German economic influence in the Persian Gulf. The creation of the artificial state of Kuwait at the head of the Gulf blocks access from Basra to the Gulf. In 1913 Britain signed a convention with the Porte that the Emir of Kuwait was diplomatically recognised by both the Ottoman and British Empires as the ruler of the autonomous city of Kuwait and hinterlands. With the start of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire in alliance with Germany, the British invalidated the convention and declared Kuwait an independent principality under the protection of the British Empire.

In 1901 British capitalists had negotiated a concession to explore for oil in Persia and in 1908 an oilfield was discovered which led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) which would later become BP.  Production of Persian oil products started at the Abadan refinery in 1913, and in the same year APOC was awarded a contract with the British government, in the shape of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, as part of a three year modernisation programme for the Royal Navy to convert from using coal to oil. The British government took a controlling share in APOC.  Earlier in 1912 APOC had taken a 50 percent share in the new Turkish Petroleum Company to explore and develop oil resources in Mesopotamia (Iraq) which would eventually bear fruit with the discovery of a massive oilfield in 1927. 

It is clear British economic interests in the region were vital and the threat posed by Germany and its Berlin to Baghdad/Basra railway was very real. The British war aim in the First World War was to restrict German access to Mesopotamia and its oil, and strategic exclusion from rail access to the Persian Gulf was to be enforced by British military presence, and afterwards by removal of German ownership of the railway. The British Empire fully engaged  in a war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, capturing Basra in 1914, defending the Suez Canal, supporting the Arab Revolt (Colonel T.E. Lawrence) 1916-18,  capturing Baghdad and  Jerusalem in 1917, and Damascus and Aleppo in the Levant (Syria) in 1918. The armistice of 30 October 1918 ended six hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Middle East and left the British and French in charge of the region.

A book called The War and the Baghdad Railway: The Story of Asia Minor and its relation to the present conflict  by Morris Jastrow was published in 1917. Jastrow wrote that 'Baghdad and the Persian Gulf in the hands of Germany would be a 42-centimetre gun pointed at India.' The contemporary history book  Pollard's Short History of the Great War (1919) notes the importance of the Berlin to Baghdad railway: 'on the 26 October 1918 Aleppo fell, and on 28 October we reached Muslimeh, that junction on the Baghdad railway on which longing eyes had been cast as the nodal point in the conflict of German and other ambitions in the East.'

The 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty accomplished everything that the British Empire wanted.  Germany lost its colonies in Africa which became mandates of the British Empire, Germany lost the ownership of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Britain received as mandates Mesopotamia and Palestine, and  economic influence in Persia and the Gulf continued. But as we said in this magazine after the war, further wars were inevitable within this capitalist set-up:

'While competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets, and control of raw material exists, the cause of war remains' (Socialist Standard August 1919).

Steve Clayton

Obituary: Sean Doherty (2007)

Obituary from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sean Doherty who died, aged 79 , at the end of July was a committed lifetime Socialist whose belief in a better world never wavered right to the end.

I often was reminded of the line in Roger Whittaker's song "New World in the Morning" which goes "I met a man who had a dream he'd had since he was twenty. I met that man when he was eighty one" when I thought of Sean's continual, innate, deep belief in what he believed was a better, refined and ultimately more intelligent way of life, i.e. Socialism.

I first met Sean in 1994 through a mutual love of hiking and the Great Outdoors. Despite a considerable age difference we got along together terrifically from the start and he became a sort of elder, wise father figure to me through all the years that followed. Sean loved nature and carried his belief in a natural way of living through to never knowingly harming another creature. He became a vegetarian in his youth, when such a way of life invited all kinds of accusations of being a crank and eccentric. He later embraced full veganism, a lifestyle he maintained up until his death. Long before alternative medicine, herbalism and a holistic approach to one's body became popular Sean had embraced them.

Sean was, like us all, a person of many parts and though he held his views with great conviction was a gentle man in every sense of the word. He had, like myself, a great love for the arts. He was a great appreciator of classical music, could quote Shakespeare and had a deep love of both paintings and theatre. He carried his appreciation of the latter discipline and his talent for acting to training as an actor himself and for a few years in the late 1960's appeared in small parts on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's National Theatre, at a time when this theatre could be proud of that title. During the time I knew him we often went to a play or spent a few hours in an art gallery.

Sean never married or pursued an elevated career. Despite long term relationships with a number of women and a job in the Civil Service which he carried out professionally, both he felt would interfere with his "freedom" or at least as much of it as Capitalism would allow.

His involvement with the Socialist party stretched back to his youth. His father's involvement in Trade Unionism and the ideas of James Connolly and Jim Larkin, set Sean off on a path which brought him ultimately to the Socialist Party. From the 1940's to the 1990's the World Socialist Movement party had an affiliated Irish party (the Socialist Party of Ireland, later the World Socialist Party of Ireland), whose existence reflected, I suppose, the volume of people who shared an enthusiasm for these type of ideals at that time. Sean was an active member of the party until it disbanded whereupon he became, subsequently, a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

It was Sean's influence that made me a Socialist. I've always felt Socialists are born thus and people like this just need the right nurturing and the logical, guiding hand of an already committed fellow traveller, to make them see the sense of the Socialist argument, and, by default the inherent, jumbled nonsense at the heart of the capitalist system.

People like Sean are special and don't come along every day. I'm just glad we met and I had the privilege of thirteen years of his unique company and personality. He was a good and genuine friend and his legacy to me is both immense and far reaching.

David Marlborough (Dublin)