Editorial: Devolution or revolution? (1979)

Editorial from the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

On March 1 voters in Scotland and Wales will be called upon to decide for or against the proposal to set up elected assemblies, with limited powers, in these areas. Some see this as a step towards independence for Scotland and Wales and are calling for a "yes" or "no" vote depending on how they view this prospect. Others (more realistically) see it as an attempt by the Labour government to buy off the nationalist sentiments which have increasingly manifested themselves in recent years. We in the Socialist Party say that both the proposal and the referendum are quite irrelevant from a working-class point of view.

The social problems which face wage and salary earners in such fields as housing, schooling and transport, and the constant struggle to make ends meet from month to month, arise from the fact that the means of wealth production are monopolised by a minority class. They are caused by capitalism and cannot be solved by any amount of tinkering with its political superstructure.

As a mere political or constitutional change the setting up of elected assemblies in Scotland and Wales will contribute nothing towards helping to solve the problems facing wage and salary earners, either there or elsewhere. Since these problems arise from the way in which society is at present organised they can only be solved by a change in the social system: by the social revolution involved in replacing class monopoly and production for profit by the common ownership and production solely for use of socialism. Revolution not devolution, is what is required.

Even if the elected assemblies were to be other than glorified county councils completely dependent, like all other local authorities in Britain, on the central government for funds, or embryo parliaments of an independent Scotland or an Independent Wales, we would still say that whether or not they are to be established is an irrelevant issue.

The basic argument put forward by the SNP and Plaid Cymru is that the problems of wage and salary earners living in Scotland and Wales arise from the fact they they are governed from London rather than from Edinburgh or Cardiff. The absurdity of this claim is matched only by that of the Tory and Labour Parties which attribute these problems to the fact that the rival party is or has been in power.

It makes no difference where the governments which enforce class monopoly have their headquarters—London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brussels or Timbuctoo. An independent Scotland or Wales would inevitably be a capitalist Scotland or a capitalist Wales where the means of production would continue to be governed by the laws of capitalism. And where the problems facing wage and salary earners would therefore continue to exist, as the eloquent example of Ireland where unemployment and emigration have continued despite nearly sixty years of political independence, clearly shows.

Because we regard Scottish or Welsh independence as an irrelevancy does not mean that we are therefore to be counted among the partisans of the maintenance of the United Kingdom as a single political unit. What we are saying is that, since the problems facing wage and salary earners are not caused by the way in which the political superstructure is arranged, changes in this superstructure—such as separation or union—are irrelevant. Hence our conclusion that workers should avoid taking sides in arguments over such issues.

What we do stand for is neither an independent Scotland or Wales nor a united Britain but a world without frontiers. Socialism cannot be established in a single country for a simple but sufficient reason: capitalism, the system it will replace, is already a world system. It exists in state capitalist Russia and China as well as in the West, and quite clearly dominates all so-called "national economies" through the operation of the world market.

Even the politicians recognise this in a vague, roundabout way. Are they not always telling us that "our" problems arise from the fact that "our" goods are not competitive enough on the world market? When you realise that politicians in America, France, Germany, Japan and all other countries are telling the same story then it becomes clear that there are no national solutions to today's social problems. They cannot be solved within the borders of particular States but only on a world scale, in a world without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control with production solely for use not sale or profit. Only on this basis can the highly-developed, world-wide productive apparatus turn out the abundance of wealth that it is capable of, so permitting society to implement the long-standing socialist principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

Recognising the potential class weapon that is the vote socialists in Scotland and Wales will be going to the polling booths and writing "SOCIALISM—SPGB" across their ballot papers. we urge all others who realise that world socialism is the only solution to their problems to do likewise.

Editorial: Putting down rebellion. (1913)

Editorial from the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Liberal Government are in power. This, of course, is equal to saying that cowardly bullying will reach its zenith during the period of the present administration. We have had many noisesome examples up to date, and now we are treated to another, in which humble people in Ireland are arrested and charged with conspiring to publish and circulate seditious libels concerning the Government and their armed forces. The offenders are alleged to have posted in the thoroughfares of Belfast placards stating that the "soldiers and police are used by the Government to crush the working man when he stands up for his rights."

We are perfectly well aware that a statement does not necessarily have to be untrue to be a libel. We know that a famous lawyer has laid it down that "the greater the truth the greater the libel," and it will be very interesting, in view of the use that was made of troops in Belfast a year or two back, in view of the part the military played in the great railway strike of August 1911, in view of the police activities in Manchester, Liverpool, and London during the last two years, in view of the menace of the gun-boats at Grimsby and Hull, and within the last fortnight, at Leith ; it will be interesting, we repeat, in view of all this, to observe whether the Government intend to rely upon the truth of the libel to magnify the enormity of the "crime."

However, we do not blame the Government for repressing every attack upon the security of the ruling class. Men holding the view that it is true that "the soldiers and police are used by the Government to crush the working man when he stands up for his rights" will by the force of logic expect those forces to be set in motion directly a blow is aimed at those who control them. To let light in upon the purpose of the armed forces was therefore bound to be "regarded by the law officers of the Crown as of the highest importance." Only what might be expected, therefore, has happened.

This latest piece of bullying, however, shows up the Liberals as what they are—the most cowardly of all political parties. For "King" Carson can openly incite to rebellion, and even go the length of enrolling and swearing thousands for the adventure, yet the Government dare not lay hands upon the powerful rebel. But when it comes to a couple of shop-assistants, then— why then it looks like a dodge of Lloyd-Georgian cunning to convert Ulster to Home Rule by the simple course of sickening it of "Saxon" tyranny.

Irish Notes. (1917)

From the June 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the Sinn Fein movement appears to be gaining prominence in Ireland and enlisting the sympathies of large numbers of Irish working men, it becomes necessary for Socialists to state clearly and definitely their attitude toward this movement. With this idea in view the following lines have been penned.

The pamphlet entitled The Sinn Fein Policy, published by the national council of the Sinn Fein movement, lays down their position.

This pamphlet shows clearly that Sinn Fein is the revolt of the Irish commercial class against landlords and the Government that supports the landlords to the detriment of the industrial capitalists. This movement gains its catch-cry and working class support on account of Ireland’s peculiar national position. The landlords having been for years mainly English and the governmental powers administered from London, the landlords naturally turned to the Government for support and got it. The position was further complicated by the development of the English capitalists, who were not so foolish as to permit commercial rivalry at their very doors, especially from a country where the standard of living was comparatively low, food being fairly abundant and cheap. Consequently steps were taken to throttle the anticipated rivalry. In the same way when the early English merchants were struggling for control of the carrying trade of the world, all available methods were pressed into use to crush their principal competitors, the Dutch, and the latter eventually went down.

We are not concerned here as to whether those who support the Sinn Fein movement are sincere or not. We are endeavouring to show Irish working men the plain, bald facts of the position, regardless of whether these facts are palatable or not. People’s views are, in the main, the product of their particular social environment—they see the world from the point of view of the class into which they are born and with which their interests are bound up. Consequently the members of the small commercial firm (the germ of the large industrial concern) burn with injustice and struggle to break the bonds that interfere with the expansion of their business. They bawl at the tops of their voices for freedom, like their brothers of the 18^th century in France, but bye and bye we shall see that the freedom they desire (also like that of their French brethren) is commercial freedom—the liberty to exploit nature and the worker to the fullest extent possible.

We, who are working men, however, should concern ourselves with the bonds that bind us to the wheel of capital—that doom us forever to the toil and sweat of slavery.

In the Tracts for Irishmen there is a booklet entitled Ireland Looks into the Mirror which describes with some detail Hungary’s so-called march to freedom under Louis Kossuth and Francis Deak, and a parallel is drawn between Ireland and Hungary, Irishmen being invited to emulate the Hungarians in their struggle, which has resulted in the “resurrection of Hungary”. But what is really the position in Hungary? Free Hungary and Free Italy have meant nothing to the working class of the respective countries. A short time before the Mutual Murdering Association commenced the sanguinary operations in Europe the condition of affairs in Hungary was appalling. The wages were at starvation rate and thousands were actually starving. In Buda-Pesth alone there were 30,000 unemployed; the wages were 6d to 8d for a day of 10 to 12 hours, and hundreds were employed at 2d a day. Truly Free Hungary had brought its workers to a glorious pass! In the issue of our paper that was published at the time were given full details of the position. Now the workers of Hungary, in common with the workers of other countries, are murdering each other for the great god Capital. Evidently one of the benefits conferred upon the working class of Hungary and Italy by their resurrection from oppression has been the opportunity to pour out their blood on behalf of their masters in the struggle for international trade routes and the markets of the world—a truly remarkable privilege!

In case of any doubts arising as to whether we have stated the case correctly in contending that the mainspring of the Sinn Fein movement is the desire for power and expansion on the part of Irish Industrial Capitalists we will give a few quotations from authoritative sources. In the first place we will quote from the pamphlet The Sinn Fein Policy, to which we have already referred.

“With the development of her manufacturing arm will proceed the rise of a national middle class in Ireland and a trained national democracy.” (p. 15.)
“That the General Council of the Councils should have the country surveyed with a view to the profitable development of its natural resources, and having had the cost and return estimated as accurately as possible, should then invite the Irish-American millionaires to do what, at the St. Patrick’s banquet in New York, several professed themselves anxious to do—develop the country industrially. We can offer them 174,000,000 tons of coal, the finest stone in Europe, and an inexhaustible supply of peat to operate on, and we can offer them all the facilities possessed by the County Councils and Rural Councils of Ireland, and the assistance and goodwill of the Irish people in turning our coal, our stone, and our turf into gold. They can offer us in return profitable employment for our people, and an enormous increase of strength, socially, politically, and industrially.” (p. 17.)
“A necessary organisation is an agricultural and manufacturing union—a union of manufacturers and farmers, classes who at the present time, through an extraordinary delusion, are unfriendly to each other, and fail to realise their interdependence. The farmer is indifferent about the industrial revival, failing to realise the increased market an Ireland with a manufacturing arm means to the agriculturist: the manufacturer is indifferent to the agricultural interest, failing to realise that the extension of agriculture—the extension of tillage—means the extension of the market for his products.” (p. 10.)
“Through the lack of a mercantile marine we are debarred from our best markets, deprived of our share in the world’s carrying trade, and are lost to Europe’s interest. We lost sixty years ago one of the greatest opportunities—a share in the China trade, because we had no mercantile navy, and as a consequence the China market knows nothing of our linens, and we procure our tea through England. We lose for the same reason to-day our share in the Indian trade, which would be gladly given us if we only had a marine to work it, and we are losing yearly our share in the European and American trade for the same reason.” (p. 18.)
“In an excellent letter addressed to the Board of Guardians the Cork Chemical and Drug Co., Ltd., put the issue clearly. It wrote: ‘It is a comparatively simple matter for English capitalists to crush out their Irish competitors, and we know that this has been too often the fate of Irishmen striving to promote the manufactures of the country, but once the obstacle is removed it is easy enough for them to advance prices, and thus obtain compensation for preliminary losses. It is to this system that we, as Irish manufacturers and large employers of labour, object, but we are always ready to meet the ordinary competition of business, so long as this is conducted on fair lines.’ Many of the Irish Boards of Guardians have responded to this letter, but, unfortunately, the bulk of the unions have fallen into the net spread by the English ring, and in consequence a very large sum of Irish money, not a penny of which need have passed out of the country, finds its way this year into England’s pocket. Under the Sinn Fein policy such a deplorable error could not occur. The action of the Boards would, of course, be a united one, and no possibility would be left as far as they were concerned for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and the home trader.”

The Irishman of May 12^th last refers to the Cork Industrial Development Association under the heading of “A Live Association”, and two of the items quoted as evidence of its usefulness are the following:

“The Information Bureau of Irish Industries attached to the Association, has been, and still continues to be, availed of by correspondents drawn from all parts of Ireland and Great Britain, and, also, from Continental and American countries, and has, admittedly, resulted in securing for Irish firms orders running into many hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling.”
“The promotion of Industrial harmony between employers and workers in Ireland has long been a plank in the Association’s platform, and its successful endeavours to effect a satisfactory settlement of the recent disputes in the building trades in Cork City were greatly appreciated by the Cork public.”

When an association like the above has the support of the official Sinn Fein organ it shows plainly what the attitude of the principal people concerned in this movement is toward the Irish working class. The whole of the above quotations prove the truth of our contention. The continuance of the private property system is the central idea in the movement, and so long as private property remains the miseries that necessarily flow therefrom will remain also and continue to afflict the workers under the Irish Republic.

In the pamphlet from which we have quoted Germany is instanced as the country par excellence to be emulated by Ireland. But to what has industrial development brought Germany? To the dawn of the Social Revolution, some will truly reply. But then this is not the point of view of the publishers of the pamphlet. They are glorifying the pre-war state of Germany. The German peasant, who used to enjoy the fresh air working in the fields with nothing over him but the sky, while his wife spun at the cottage door, is now cooped up in a factory for the greater part of his waking hours, with the grim spectre of unemployment to haunt him for ever and make his life wretched. The once open country is now studded thickly with great factories, ugly industrial towns, and depressing mining districts. As a result of developing her industrial resources Germany has become one of the greatest industrial countries in the world. The German capitalist can put his feet under the mahogany with the capitalists of any nation, whilst the German workers, who toiled in tragic weariness to make these capitalists what they are, can hold their own with the workers of any nation for poverty, misery, and destitution.

The pamphlet in question also dilates largely on the increase of unemployment in Ireland, and the development of its resources through the investment of capital by the American millionaires. Are the Sinn Fein party anxious to see Ireland smothered with the ugly, stifling, sweating factories and mills that already encumber part of the North of Ireland, and smother England, Germany, America, and other countries? Is it employment Irish workers want, or is it the opportunity to work for themselves instead of working for others who live on the products of their toil? What the Sinn Feiners would have us believe, apparently, is that we want more employers in Ireland.

To sum it all up, the plea of this pamphlet is simply the echo of the plea of the English capitalists in their early struggle for markets. “The more markets we can get the more employment we can give,” cried they, and went merrily on their way murdering children from six years of age in their factories and destroying the lives of women and girls in their mines in the benevolent endeavour to give as much employment as possible, and of course, just by the way, rake in as much profit as possible.

The Irish Republic the Sinn Feiners are after is but the counterpart of France and America, where year by year the capitalist sweats dividends out of his helpless workers.

What part can the Irish workers, devoid of capital, take in the Industrial Revival except the toiling part? All these revivals are useless to the worker until he owns the product of his toil, then he will be able to enjoy to the full all the advantages to be obtained. So long as private property is the order of the day it matters little to the propertyless Irish worker (the vast majority of the population) who rules Ireland.

“Agin the British Government”, Separation with a King, Lords, and Commons for Ireland (Constitution of 1683), and full liberty to exploit Irish workers, are about the sum total of Sinn Fein. Some are ultra-revolutionary, and will have “no bloom’ king but a republic”—It is tantamount to the bosses saying they’ll exploit you with caps on instead of swanking in with top hats on. Republic or Constitutional Monarchy, it works out the same—the workers are always the bottom dogs.

The writers of these notes are Irish workers who have long since turned a deaf ear to the empty phrases of Nationalism, and they look forward with hopeful eyes to the day when Ireland shall be a land of peace and prosperity—its wealth owned and controlled by its workers—and a harmonious member of the great international Socialist Republic. This object, we claim, is far more worthy of the attention and support of Irish workers than the empty phrases and chimeras of Sinn Fein.

Mick and Mack

The dispossessed (1994)

Book Review from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin is a tale of future worlds. One is Anarres and clearly labelled "anarchist". The other, Urras, is less clearly described as "propertarian" and "archist". The plot is briefly but dramatically outlined in the blurb.

"Shevek, a brilliant physicist. . . single-handedly attempts to re-unite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek's homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic Utopian civilization; Urras, the mother planet, is a world very similar to Earth, with its warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Shevek risks everything in a courageous visit to Urras  to learn, to teach, to share. But his gift becomes a threat. . . and in the profound conflict which ensues, Shevek must re-examine his philosophy of life."

The book's thirteen chapters alternate between Anarres and Urras.

Invited to dislike

LeGuin tells us much that we seem to be invited to dislike about Urras, and just a few things that we are invited to approve (although, depending on your point of view, you may have a different ratio of approval to disapproval).

Urras is an "incredibly complex society with all its nations, classes, castes, cults, customs and its magnificent, appalling and interminable history". It is organized "hierarchically, from the top down". In education there is an examination system that involves "cramming in information and disgorging it at demand". "The state recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." So there are secret police. And the state uses force, with police helicopters and machine guns, to put down demonstrations that threaten the status quo.

Life on Urras closely resembles, and somewhat exaggerates, life in the USA in the 1970s, when the author was writing (in two decades the general picture has changed little). They burn dirty clothes because new cheap ones cost less than cleaning. There are private cars, "splendid machines of bizarre elegance". Everything is "either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use."

Rats and asylums

There are three competing mail companies. Everything comes "inside layers and layers of wrappings". The basic function of the radio "was advertising things for sale". Other delights on Urras included rats, army barracks, insane asylums, poorhouses, pawnshops, executions, thieves, tenements, rent collectors, the unemployed, and "a dead baby in a ditch".

In the realm of thought and ideas there is also much to dislike about Urras. There is religious bigotry ("He's a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.") There are "birdseed papers", "written by semiliterates for semiliterates" which manufacture news. Shevek observes that Urrasti people always look anxious: "Was it because, no matter how much money they had. they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor?"

Now to Anarres. the "anarchist country". It, too, has a system and has people doing things and thinking thoughts. Anarres is "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism. . . (the people) are not only socialists, they are anarchists".

No law, no police

There are no laws, no governments, no police, no money. Or, to add a bit of positive qualification, there is "no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. . . no government but the single principle of free association". While "nominally there's no government on Anarres. . . obviously there's administration. . ." The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. "They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production". Nobody is ever punished for anything, though sometimes "they make you go away by yourself for a while".

There is no distinction between men's work and women's work: "A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength -what has sex to do with that?" The "dirty work" is done by everyone on one day out of ten on a basis of choice from "rotating lists" "People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them".

Positive

Most of what we learn that is positive about Anarres is in terms of thoughts, ideas, even moral precepts. At a personal level, members of a community were not moved by mass feeling but "there were as many emotions as there were people". The status of religion on Anarres is ambiguous. There is no established religion in the sense of churches and creeds, but "you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity?" Takver "had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary". One character offers a moralistic judgment: "Having's wrong, Sharing's right." Shevek is described as having been brought up "in a culture that relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid".

Anarres has a population of only 20 million compared with a 1,000 million on Urras. It was given to the Odonians (theoretical anarchists) as a means of "buying them off with a world, before they totally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras". There was trade between the two worlds, but in practice Anarres was a mining colony of Urras. For an anarchist society, Anarres is remarkably centralized. Abbenay is the capital, "the mind and center of Anarres. . . There had to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labor and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates were in Abbenay, right from the start".

Despite this the people of Anarres have to put up with many shortages and deprivations. Printing had to cover the whole page because paper was short. The economy would not support the building and upkeep of individual houses and apartments. People had to save up their daily allowances for a party. and had to fetch their letters from the mail depot because there were no postmen. However, the general picture is one of high morale despite the shortages and deprivations.

Clear aim

LeGuin had an aim in writing The Dispossessed. Fortunately, we have her own account of this. Responding to a question by Lynn McCaffery, she says:

"... The only trouble with an anarchist country is going to come from its neighbors. Anarchism is like Christianity – it's never really been practised – so you can 't say it's a practical proposal. Still, it's a necessary idea. We have followed the state far enough – too far, in fact. The state is leading us to World War III. The whole idea of the state has got to be rethought from the beginning and then dismantled. One way to do this is to propose the most extreme solution imaginable: you don 't proceed little by little; you go to the extreme and say, "Let's have no government, no state at all." Then you try to figure out what you have without it, which is essentially what I was trying to do in 'The Dispossessed'. This kind of thinking is not idealistic, it's a practical necessity these days. We must begin to think in different terms, because if we just continue to follow the state, we've had it. So, yes, 'The Dispossessed' is very much in earnest about trying to rethink our assumptions about the relationships between human beings." (Across the Wounded Galaxies)

Then McCaffery asked LeGuin why-she had set her anarchist Utopia in such a bleak environment:

"The way I created Anarres was probably an unconscious economy of means: these people are going to be leading a very barren life, so I gave them a barren landscape. Anarres is a metaphor for the austere life, but I wasn't trying to make a general proposal that a Utopia has to be that way."

For LeGuin what seems to be preventing people making a better fist of life on contemporary Earth is not so much capitalism as government and the state.

It follows that what she believes desirable is not so much socialism, a system to replace capitalism, as anarchism, a system to replace "archism". That last term isn't actually in the dictionary, not even in a large one. But so much of what LeGuin writes about Urras is also a fair description of capitalism that perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned about her choice of words for its alternative.

The important difference between LeGuin's view and the socialist view is surely about the means of changing from one type of society to the other. LeGuin is vague about these means. Like most anarchists, she doesn't think in terms of democratic political organization for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. She is right to "see the folly of reformism ('you don't proceed little by little')". But organization is important – indeed it is vital. By allowing the "archists" to be well-organized in a favourable environment, and the anarchists to be a minority shipped off to a barren planet, she is not only giving the devil the best tunes: she is allowing him to take over the whole music profession.

One serious criticism of The Dispossessed is that we aren't told enough about the Urras "working class", and what little we are told is derogatory and disillusioning. We know they read "birdseed" papers and get massacred when they revolt, but that's about all. LeGuin sketches them in as semiliterates, as a kind of ancient Roman "bread and circuses" mob. There is something deeply pessimistic about a scenario that envisages the intellectual, material and political degradation of over 90 percent of the population.

This remarkable book stimulates the imagination and paints a picture of a future world that has a good many socialist features even if it doesn't deal at all adequately with the politics of how we can get to that world.

Stan Parker

Editorial: Bebel's Incursion Into English Politics (1906)

Editorial from the April 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

In another column we publish the correspondence which has passed between the Executive Committee of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, our comrade Bebel, and Vorwaerts, the official organ of the German Socialist Party. There is no occasion to amplify that correspondence, and the only purpose of a reference to it here is to direct attention more particularly to it in justification of the attitude taken up by this Party. That attitude which is, of course, no more than a logical expression of the class struggle, and cannot be departed from by any Socialist except by the immolation of Principle on the altar of Expediency, coincides exactly with the pronouncement made by Bebel himself in other connections. He may only object to it, therefore, at the risk of self stultification. We regret exceedingly that instead of recognising that he had allowed himself to be betrayed into an act calculated, because it lent the countenance of approval to what was merely a capitalist victory, to defeat the purpose of Socialist propaganda, he should have preferred to attempt to exonerate himself by reading into his telegram something which in point of fact was neither implied nor expressed. We expected better things of Bebel.

Our intervention in this matter, however much we may deplore the occasion for it, will, like our protest to the French Socialist Party against the fraternisation of Dr. Brousse (a member of the Party and President of the Municipal Council of Paris) with the L.C.C. representatives of capitalism in municipal politics, serve to show that in England there is now a party jealous of the integrity and the unswerving adherence to principle, of the International Socialist Movement, zealous for the elimination of all confusing elements in industrial and political warfare, and determined to do all in its power—however little or much that may be—to organise the working class upon the basis of their distinctive class interests, for the final struggle with the hosts of capitalism, whatever the form of their manifestation, and the realisation of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

Until The Socialist Party of Great Britain Came into existence our Continental comrades may well have been in lugubrious ignorance of the existence of such a party : we sincerely hope our stand for principle will remove any misapprehension they may have had on this issue.

Where Rockfeller Rules. (1913)

Book Review from the June 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Poverty," by Robert Hunter. London : The Macmillan Co. 2s. net.

This is a cheap reprint of a work that originally appeared in 1904 in America. It is written by a member of that body of reformers known as the Socialist Party of America. The author defines the main object of the volume as an estimate of the extent of poverty in the United States of America, and a description of "some of its evils."

A further object of the book, we are told, is to point out certain remedial actions which society may wisely prosecute.

To one who is familiar with the investigations in this country of Mr. Charles Booth, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, and Dr. H. H. Mann, the method of this work is certainly disappointing. As the author himself admits : "The poor of the rural districts have hardly been mentioned and the working woman and the mother are left almost entirely out of consideration."

Little information, if any, can be gleaned beyond that already to be obtained in the works of Jacob A. Riis and Mrs. Van Vorst, etc.

The estimate given by the author of this book on poverty in America is sufficient to show of how little use the work is to the serious student. "I have not the slightest doubt," he says, "that there are in the United States ten millions in precisely these conditions of poverty, but I am largely guessing at it, and there may be as many as fifteen or twenty millions."

The condition which Mr. Hunter takes for his standard of poverty he defines as the lack of those necessaries sufficient to maintain a state of physical efficiency.

The real remedy for the poverty of the workers amidst the luxury of the idlers is not shown, and the preventive measures advocated by our author are worthy of the moat zealous supporter of the present system.

Sanitary laws and shorter hours for women and children. Laws to "make industry pay the necessary and legitimate coat of producing and maintaining efficient labourers." Compensation and Insurance Acts and Anti-Immigration laws. In short, all those measures which are in operation in many lands, where they dismally fail to improve the workers' conditions. Our author shrinks from the true position, viz., that as the poverty of the working class is due to robbery the remedy is to stop the robbers by ousting them, first from political, and then from economic power. 

Adolph Kohn

Letters to the editors (2014)

Letters to the editors from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stone Age violence: old or new?

Dear Editors

Thanks for sending me this article. As you guessed, I'm not convinced. The evidence for lethal violence goes back well beyond the neolithic revolution (there's a fairly recent list of examples going back at least 500,000 years available in Table S2 of this link, and there are large massacre sites from about 11,000 BC onward. The arithmetic in the article is also misleading. A rate of violent death of 10-20% would mean that your group of 30 HGs would experience 3-6 violent deaths per 30-year generation, which means one killing per 5-10 years. The level of killing mentioned in the article, of 3-6 people per year, would add up to 90-180 violent deaths per 30-year generation, or a rate of 300-600%. That obviously makes no sense, and whoever wrote that paragraph should have realized that he or she had got the sums seriously wrong. On Palaeolithic demography, the skeletal evidence is very clear that the modal adult age at death was somewhere in the thirties, not 72. And Gurven and Kaplan aren't saying that the modal age at death among Palaeolithic hunter gatherers was 72; if you look at their Figure 1d, it shows that they estimate that only 20% of h-g's would have still been alive at 70. If you discount the 40-45% of people who died by age 15, the modal age at death for adults is still going to be somewhere in the early 40s. And one other factual point--whoever wrote the article can't seem to decide whether my name is Morris or Harris.

I think the article also gives Steven Pinker both too much blame and too much praise. The real starting place for the new understanding of prehistoric violence is Larry Keeler's 1996 book War Before Civilization, and the most important analysis extending this perspective through historically documented times is Azar Gat's 2006 War in Human Civilization. Pinker certainly did an impressive job in The Better Angels of Our Natures, but he shouldn't have to bear the lion's share of the criticisms. I'm also kind of baffled about why so many people want to make this debate a left-right issue. I was just today interviewed on a radio show in Washington called ‘Left Jab,’ which is very left of center, and they didn't seem to think the new understanding of the history of violence was a right-wing plot. When Marx and Engels wrote about prehistory they used the most up-to-date scholarship then available, but back in the 1870s and 1880s archaeologists basically knew almost nothing about anything before 1000 BC. If Engels were writing his Origins today, it would be a very different book.

It sounds like this article was just talking about the short essay I wrote for New Scientist. If you have time to look at the book that was summarizing, I'd be interested to hear if you still feel the same way.

Ian Morris (by email) 

Reply: 

We’re sorry about the mix up over names.  

The evidence in Table S2 shows various injuries to the cranium, thorax, ribs, pelvis, shins and feet, most of which also show subsequent bone regrowth and/or infection or osteoarthritis, meaning that the victim usually survived. It’s not obvious what caused the injuries, however the presence at the Lion Rock site in China of bones from rhinoceros, bear, wild dog, hyena and tiger invites an easy speculation. Life in the Pleistocene could well have been risky, even dangerous in places, but it seems a leap on this evidence to guess that the main source of human injuries was other humans. 

In the study we cited, Gurven and Kaplan discuss severe difficulties in reconstructing prehistoric life tables because of systematic biases in bone ageing techniques, and then state that ‘while excessive warfare could explain the shape of one or more of these typical prehistoric forager mortality profiles, it is improbable that these profiles represent the long-term prehistoric forager mortality profile. Such rapid mortality increase late in life would have severe consequences for our human life history evolution…’(p 345), which is pretty much what we said in the article. 

The New Scientist article was necessarily short but it ought to have stated that the 10-20 percent fatality estimate was per generation, not per year, which omission of course was the source of our claim that the loss rate was absurdly unsustainable. Even at this lower rate, common sense suggests that small HG bands would regard ANY loss as too costly and therefore do everything in their power to avoid conflict, probably by moving away, a tactic which perhaps drove migration but which became increasingly difficult in the settled Neolithic.

We do know, through figurines, that sex and fertility were considered highly important in the Upper Paleolithic, and animals and hunting were regular features of cave art. Of all the cave paintings known from this period, not one shows human violence against other humans, in contrast to later Neolithic art where it is prominent.

There is not merely an absence of evidence, there is evidence of absence. The Paleo-Neolithic settlement of Tell Abu Hureyra, near the Euphrates, showed 4,000 years of continuous occupation with no signs of violence (John Horgan, Scientific American blog, 29 June 2010). According to the Wikipedia entry on the Paleolithic, towns of this period ‘are generally unfortified and built in areas difficult to defend. Skeletal and burial remains do not generally indicate the presence of warfare.'  In studies of 21 modern forager bands (Scientific American, 18 July) three had no lethal events at all and only one showed behaviour described as ‘war’ – the conclusion being that violence was not an innate behaviour of such groups but once initiated could become self-perpetuating through blood feuds. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that this could have happened in the Paleolithic, however it was probably the exception not the rule.

So we don’t think the Paleolithic was a playground or a love-in, and the socialist case certainly doesn’t require this to be so, but if advocates of the ‘ignoble savage’ hypothesis want to overturn the accepted textbook narrative of this period, according to which war and organised violence first arose in the Neolithic, they are going to have to do better than the arguments they currently have. If Professor Morris really wants to make the extraordinary claim that ‘war is good for us’, based on his interpretation of human prehistory, he can hardly be surprised when some of us demand to see extraordinary evidence to support it.—Editors.

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Betrayal

Dear Editors

As usual I found the article on ‘The Economic Causes of the First World War’ authoritative and convincing. I was, however, surprised that you made no reference to the betrayal by the reformist left in Germany of the ‘Second International’. There, of course, can be no doubt that this organisation never possessed a majority with socialist consciousness but I think it is important to highlight the inevitable consequences of reformist leftist policies. An early, and quite possibly the greatest, example of betrayal of the working class by leftist leaders needs to be emphasised because without this historical reference the rise of such monsters as Tony Blair would be inexplicable. The fact is that if 100 years ago the German members of the Second International had refused to allow the finance of the war it could not have began. I fully appreciate that the underlying economic tensions made some kind of major international conflict probable but this can never excuse the actions of the reformists that helped make the war inevitable.

Andrew Westley, 

Cambridge

Reply: 
This might be a matter of emphasis and interpretation, but we certainly agree that the pro-war vote of the German Social Democrats was a betrayal of working-class interests, and a milestone in the tragic journey towards out-and-out reformism within European Social Democracy.. -- Editors

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Squeamish                                                                                                                  

Dear Editors

I'd like to add a short comment to the article on Field Marshall Sir Douglas 'Butcher' Haig in the August Socialist Standard.

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild cites a statement by Haig's son that his father did not visit casualty stations 'because these visits made him physically ill'. I had not realised he was quite so sensitive, but no doubt this squeamishness helped him to demand high casualty rates.

Paul Bennett, 

Manchester

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Decline

Dear Editors

I am writing with a query about an item in ‘Voice from the Back’ in your July issue. In the paragraph headed ‘the Decline of Religion’ you conclude that ‘religion has always been a barrier to socialism; so no tears here on learning churches are closing’. I understand the decline in organised religion is largely confined to ‘the West’. Does your comment imply that people here are now more open to receiving the ideas of socialism? Is this your experience; and, if not, why not.

Andrew Durrant, 

Norwich

Reply: 
There are many barriers to workers understanding and supporting socialism. Here are just a few. Some believe there is a God and an after-life, so this present existence is of little importance. Some believe that patriotism is of prime importance and we should be concerned about ‘our’ country rather than a world-wide solution. Others think that it is ‘human nature’ to be greedy and acquisitive, so socialism is impossible. All of these barriers to understanding the case for world-wide socialism have to be overcome before we can get socialism. Probably greater than all these barriers is the lack of imagination that can foresee a future society based on co-operation and harmony rather than capitalism with its wars, poverty, starvation, racialism and crime. All we were saying in our article was that the diminishing power of religion is a step forward in the eventual attaining of a new socialist society. --Editors

Work and human nature (1954)

Book Review from the July 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Confirmation of the Socialist Attitude

Every Socialist has, at some time or another, met the "human nature argument." He has almost certainly had to do verbal battle with those who insist that work is distasteful to man, that he is naturally lazy and solely motivated by fear or greed. Such beliefs, we have maintained, correspond to no fundamental human traits, but arise from a confusion of human nature with behaviour under certain social circumstances.

Now along comes a book by a psychologist whose purpose in writing is obviously very far from advocating Socialism—but who nevertheless succeeds in demolishing most of the long-cherished ideas that have been put up against it. The Social Psychology of Industry, by J. A. C. Brown (Pelican, 2/6d.) is one of the best pieces of grist to come to the Socialist mill for a long time.

Dr. Brown packs his book with facts, quotations and sources of information, yet contrives also not to ignore the more personal side of his subject. In a critical survey of the history of industrial psychology he notes the reminiscences of Frederick Winslow Taylor, pioneer of Time and Motion Study: "It's a horrid life for any man to live not being able to look any workman in the face without seeing hostility there, and a feeling that every man around you is your virtual enemy." It is scarcely surprising that "Speedy" Taylor (as he was known to his colleagues) should have encountered such hostility, since he accepted without question the fact that every capitalist workshop exists first, last and all the time for the purpose of paying dividends to its owners.

Brown is critical of the old theory that human nature is unchanging and explicable solely in terms of biological instincts. He contrasts that with the new view that "does not accept instinct as an adequate explanation of human behaviour, and is more interested in how the biological drives are socially modified than in their mere existence; i.e. its explanations are in social rather than biological terms."

He elaborates this view in an analysis of the formal organisations of (capitalist) industry: 

" (1) It is deliberately impersonal.
" (2) It is based on ideal relationships.
" (3) It is based on the ' rabble hypothesis' of the nature of man (i.e. it is assumed that competition leads to maximum efficiency, that when each man fights for himself the best interests of the group are served, and that men are isolated units who may be moved about from one job to another depending only on their ability to do the job)."

Brown rightly points out that such organisation produces harmful effects on people, particularly on the workers who are shifted about from one department to another like so much cattle. It is refreshing to note that he does not think that vast improvements have been made in workers' conditions under the "welfare state," which he likens to a model cowhouse with the workers as the milch cows.

Recognition for Effort

It is often said that it is human nature to want to "get on" (meaning promotion in the sense of higher formal status). Brown shows that this is just another popular fallacy. "What people do want is a position in which it is possible to increase in prestige. Thus the average skilled craftsman does not want to become a supervisor or a factory manager—he wants to become a better craftsman and recognised as such."

Brown quotes Gordon Rattray Taylor's comment that "the best dentist in the community is not the less respected because someone else is the best ploughman", and adds "functional status leads to less rivalry and more satisfaction than derived status based on power or wealth." It is good to realise that, despite capitalist society which habitually defines status in terms of power or wealth, there are other and better ways of recognising the contributions of one's fellows to the social wellbeing.

The critics of Socialism who ask "who is going to do the dirty work?" can also learn something from this book:

". . . the lowliness or nastiness of a job are subjective estimates ... A doctor or nurse, for example, or a sanitary inspector, have to do some things which would disgust the most unskilled casual labourer who did not see these actions in their social context. Yet the status and prestige of such people is generally high.
". . . although few people object to work which is unavoidably dirty or dangerous, they will certainly not forgive the sort of unpleasantness which indicates neglect of their interests on the part of management.
" Above all, it is the prestige of his working group and his position in it which will influence the worker's attitude to such jobs. If the prestige of his group is high and he is satisfied in his membership of it, the type of work he has to do becomes a minor consideration."

Hitherto, Socialists have frequently met the criticism that, with freedom from economic compulsion, no one will want to do certain necessary but dirty or dangerous jobs. If such explanations as Brown's become widely known and accepted, Socialists can expect less of these "dirty work" objections. In any case we have given the answer that people will not be called upon to do such work against their wishes, and that society as a whole will be prepared to do without any products obtainable only at the cost of harmful work.

It is clear that the system of society we advocate fulfils all the requirements considered desirable by Brown—namely, people who hold Socialist ideas see all actions in their social context; management will not exist as a body of individuals over and above the people who actually do the work; and the "working group," being the whole of society, will give the worker the best possible satisfaction in his membership of it. The "problem" of dirty work in fact resolves itself and is merged into the wider problem of wage-labour-capital society.

A Common Task

Dealing with the more positive question of desirable social conditions, Brown again makes statements that back up the Socialist case: "People do not like to be ordered about like automatons; they like to participate in a common task." Explaining this, he writes:

" Ordinarily men and women like their work, and at most periods of history always have done so. When they do not like it, the fault lies in the psychological and social conditions of the job rather than in the worker. Furthermore, work is a social activity . . . Even when their security and that of their children is assured, they continue to labour. Obviously this is so because the rewards they get from their work are social, such as respect and admiration from their fellow-men."

Brown effectively shows that Freud and others were wrong in believing that human nature is naturally aggressive, in the sense of a tendency to sadism or deliberate cruelty. "Aggression" as the need to master painful or unpleasant circumstances is, of course, quite natural. Similarly, the concept of leadership is reduced in the book to the view that "every man should be capable of some degree of leadership—influencing others towards a satisfying participation in collective effort." No Socialist would quarrel with such a concept and practice—because it is obviously very far removed from the prejudices we usually meet about "great men."

To Socialists, Brown's conclusions are both encouraging and disappointing. Recognising that present society, more than any previous one, stimulates people's desires without being able to satisfy them, he believes that "the future approach to health is likely to be primarily in terms of the sick society rather than the sick individual." Yet he misses the significance of all he writes in suggesting that "it is necessary for the politician to bring about a state of affairs in which it is possible for the industrial worker to feel that his own interests and, those of management coincide."

In the last paragraph of the book he tells us that it is up to us to decide whether society develops within a framework of fascist barbarism, communist intolerance, or Social Democratic humanitarianism. He leaves us in no doubt that he is strongly in favour of the latter. It would be a pity if this meant nothing more than a continuation in some form of capitalist society, when the book as a whole is so obviously pointing in the direction of new social relationships based, not on property, but on co-operative endeavour.

S. R. P.

First Steps In Socialism: II. - Are Wages Necessary? (1913)

From the July 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our first article under the above heading was devoted to the consideration of the question: "Who are the Working Class?" We will now consider the significance of the working-class position.

The working class are wage workers. That is, they depend for their livelihood entirely upon the money they receive by the sale of their labour power.

It must not be supposed that a wage-worker class has existed through all time. People are so accustomed now-a-days to the wages idea that a great many of them have considerable difficulty in realising that any form or degree of civilisation could have existed without wages. They are so used to the idea that without wages they can get nothing; they are so accustomed to the hard experience that when wages cease to come in they starve; they are impressed and saturated with the concrete knowledge that the orbit of their lives are inexorably prescribed by the magnitude of the magic wage: they are so inured to the aspect presented by these circumstances of their environment, that the admission that under Socialism there will be neither paying nor receiving of wages is sufficient to cause them to reject the Socialist proposition with the remark: "Can't be done!"

But the wages system and the wage-worker, as we understand them to-day, are quite modern social characteristics—newer, say, than St. Paul's Cathedral; newer, perhaps, even than such symbols of God's will on earth as the top-hat and the pipe-clay belt.

When we speak of the wages system and the wage-worker, however, we have in mind a very definite social feature, and it will be as well to explain here exactly what is meant by the terms, for the benefit of those who are new to the study of social science.

If the wage-worker is new, wages, of course, are not. "The labourer is worthy of his hire" was written many generations before the hired labourer was a wage-worker in the modern sense of the term, just as the reference to Joseph's "coat of many colours" was penned ages before the world knew a tailor. Wages are older than the wages system, just as coats are older than the tailoring trade.

The wages system is that system whereunder the whole of the wealth of the community is produced by wage-labour. The wage-worker is one whose sole means of subsistence are the proceeds of the sale of his or her labour power—wages.

Now the wages system, as here described, obviously could not exist save in conjunction with a certain form of property ownership. It is not that this ownership must be private ownership. Property was privately owned centuries before the wages system grew up. The social system which immediately preceded the present one was based on private property, yet very little of the community's wealth was produced by wage labour then.

The particular form of private ownership which is essential for the development of the wages system is that form which provides a propertyless class - that form which takes away from a section every shred of the means of living except their labour power. In other words, the whole of the means of production must belong to a section of the people.

This particular form of private property did not exist till comparatively recent times. Prior to its establishment the working class had free access to the land, and consequently had not to depend upon the sale of their labour power for their livelihood. They did occasionally work for wages, just as they did occasionally sell part of the produce of their labour, in order to procure money to pay taxes, or to purchase the few things required that they did not produce for themselves. But they never became wage slaves while they had access to the sod, for the simple reason that they had at hand the means of producing all the essentials of life for themselves, without being driven to hire themselves to others.

Even the arizans and the handicraftsmen in the towns, where they did work for wages, had their portion of land, on which they produced many of their requirements, and had, besides, reasonable certainty that, when they had become proficient in their craft, the ownership of the implements of their trade would be within their easy reach, and present them with the opportunity of gaining freedom.

So it will be seen that the wages system is by no means an indispensable part of human life. Our ancestors got on very well without it. Indeed, they had neither use nor need for it until they had been stripped of everything they possessed except their labour-power.

Only when they had been driven from their homes and their fields and converted into propertyless outcasts did the working class resort to the labour market for their livelihood. Prior to that they had produced wealth for their own consumption, and money had played but small part in their life. Thorold Rogers calculated that about 16s. a year sufficed to cover all the wants of an average working-class family apart from the direct produce of their own labour for one year, and though the sum represented more then than it does to day, it seems to show how small a figure wages cut in mediaeval life. For that 16s. worth of goods purchased by a family in a year (the chief item of which was boots) represented all that they consumed of the products of wage labour.

I am perfectly conscious of the fact that things have changed greatly since those days; I am aware that men no longer produce the goods they require to satisfy their own needs; I know that it is utterly impossible for us to go back to the state of things wherein each family produced all their own requirements; I understand how the furthermost corners of the earth must contribute to the maintenance of the meanest among us, and if it be even it merest highway beggar , who ties his pitiful rags about him with a waste end of string that has already served a dozen worthier purposes, half the world must labour to provide his girdle: and knowing all this, I ask what function is there that wages serve that is not, like wages, the direct outcome of private ownership in the means of living?

To say that we cannot do without wages and the wages system is to say that which is absurd. Though it is true that wages are the means by which the workers live, it is equally true that wages are the means whereby the workers are robbed. The wage serves no other function than to render possible this robbery. It does not even record the fact that its possessor has performed his share of the world's work, for wages have a fleeting identity, and there is nothing to show how the coins they consist of are come by.

With the abolition of private property, wages, and money, it will be very easy to assure that each person shall perform his or her share of the necessary labour of production, and the "problem" of distribution then would be no problem at all — as we shall see in a future contribution.

A. E. Jacomb.

Barebones (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

A couple of months ago the social historian, F. A. Ridley, gave a talk on "English Revolutionaries". On the publicity material he was advertised as one of the founders of the European socialist movement. Of course, members of the Socialist Party were present to find out how justified this reference to socialism would prove. Sadly, we found that this term had once again been used merely as window-dressing, its direct application being dismissed as unsuited to the current millennium.

The talk began with a survey of revolutionary activity in England over the past 440 years, starting with Cromwell and advancing through Chartism to the two world wars, in which millions of workers were slaughtered in the interests of one capitalist nation or another. Our trip through the tunnels of confusion and disillusion ended with the recent Labour administrations of the profit system, and the current "blue period" of monetarism.

Ridley regarded as most revolutionary those periods in which there had been an apparent upsurge in the cries for reform and mentioned as paramount among these Cromwell's Barebones Parliament. From the audience we pointed out, firstly, that the socialists of the present century are revolutionary in pointing out the futility of reform. Present social problems can only be removed by a conscious, majority desire to change the basis of society. The, we demonstrated how the Barebones Parliament was a vehicle for reform in the interests of the ascendant capitalist class. The vote was granted only to those possessing over £200 and the real revolutionaries of the period, the Diggers, were routed and even put to the sword by Cromwell's Roundheads.

At this point, Ridley compared the Diggers with the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and said that he would have full support for us if only we would retire from the field of active politics and become a merely educational body. To this the socialists present pointed out that for us, theory and practice cannot be separated in this way. The socialist movement has a function which is practical, political and educational. The Socialist Party enters the political field in order to expose and oppose every party whose policy works against the interests of the working class.

Another speaker from the floor began to defend the record of the Labour Party, referring to the building of "20 million" council houses during their periods of office. At this a cry of "slums" came simultaneously from various members of the audience, and Ridley pointed out quite appropriately how the Tory Party has in principle been equally prepared to endorse reform of this kind in order to ensure the smooth running of capitalism. Another question was raised about the existence of a "different form of society" in Russia, but Ridley again dealt with this pertinently by explaining that what has existed there for the past 67 years is state capitalism.

Clearly, Ridley has an understanding of how capitalism functions. He recognises the limitations of reformism and the inability of state control to serve the working-class interest. But what this meeting demonstrated was the urgent need for him, like the rest of the working class, to join the movement for world socialism without delay. Reformism has not brought us any closer to resolving the fundamental contradictions of capitalist society. Four hundred years of so-called revolutionary history demonstrated this.

AM/CS

Anthony Blunt: no sort of traitor (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did Anthony Blunt —that frail, effeminate, learned man — ever dream that we would be responsible for so much confusion?

Consider, first, the sorry plight of the left wing. Blunt might have been one of their heroes, for he turned his back on his past — the public school, one of the more exclusive Cambridge colleges — to become an agent for Russia, which has nourished so many left wing false hopes and delusions. Yet Blunt also enraged the left because the personified the cohesive protectiveness of their arch provocator — the Establishment. And worse, Labour ministers, including Wilson and Callaghan, connived in this apparent exercise of the Establishment looking after its own. No wonder Willie Hamilton fumed in the House of Commons: " . . . feelings of outrage . . . I have never felt so sick, angry and frustrated . . . squalid conspiracy in high places . . ."

Then there are the Tories, who work most comfortably on the assumption that the best of all possible property societies is one run by an indulgent elite from the best families, schools, clubs, regiments  . . . This elite pretend that they hold their privileges as an act of kindness to the rest of us; they don't really own those thousands of acres, stately homes, works of art, stocks and shares. They merely hold them in trust for the less fortunately born majority in society. If this theory is to be at all presentable, it is essential that no member of the elite should let the side down. When one of them does — and, in the case of Blunt, in the worst possible way, by spying — the Tories too are thrown into confusion, aggravated by the knowledge that their ministers also knew about, and protected, the spy.

Brilliant Young Men

And out of all the confusion emerges a picture of British capitalism which does not meet the demands of modern, thrusting, super-competitive capitalism. The Blunt affair, like its predecessors in the Great Whitehall Spy Drama, was taken by many people as evidence that Britain is run by a bunch of effete, disreputable upper class twits who all went to the same school, and who are too stupid, or too corrupt, to recognise a spy even if he was delivered to their In Tray in manacles. Well, there is nothing to be gained by discussing the accuracy of that caricature; it is more useful to point out some of the lessons to be learned from the infamous scandal of Anthony Blunt.

We have already said that Blunt is a very learned man — although it is another matter whether his talents would ever have seen the light of day had he been born into a working class family, who rely on selling their labour power to live. There is little demand among employers for experts in the works of Nicolas Poussin. But then the other spies Blunt was associated with — Philby, Maclean, Burgess — were also very clever. Burgess, said Blunt, was " . . . one of the most remarkable, brilliant, and one of the most intelligent people I've ever known". (He might also have used words like 'drunken' and 'abusive' except that such minor faults can be overlooked in one of such rare gifts.) Philby too was once highly thought of, the rising star in the Secret Service, described by Hugh Trevor Roper (The Philby Affair) as " favoured by society, liberally educated, regarded by all who knew him as intelligent, sensitive, transparently sincere".

Stalinist Murders

Now the working class are depressingly willing to pay their respects to people who are described as 'intellectuals' even when, like this bunch, they are blind to some obvious facts of reality. Blunt has told us their version of reality in the Thirties:

. . . in October 1934 I found that  . . . almost all the intelligent and bright undergraduates who had come up to Cambridge had suddenly become Marxist [sic] . . . and there was this very powerful group, very remarkable group of Communist intellectuals in Cambridge . . . 

(This provoked a doctor to write, irritably, to the Daily Telegraph from Moreton-in-theMarsh: "I was up at Cambridge in 1935 and many of my circle were bright. But had any of them expressed Marxist views he would have been debagged and thrown into the Cam")

But what was happening in Russia at that time to impress all those incredibly brainy undergraduates? In 1934 the 17th Party Congress was held, with perhaps many of the participants being as brainy as those bright young men in Cambridge. Unfortunately, their leader Stalin was not favourably impressed with them, and soon afterwards he had over half of them shot, along with nearly three-quarters of the Central Committee they had elected. This was a comparatively minor incident in the horrifying story of imprisonment, torture and murder which characterised Stalin's rule over Russia. One estimate of the total casualties during these years appeared in Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror. Conquest used a variety of sources — participants' accounts, official statistics and the 1959 Census — and he came to the conservative estimate of 20 million dead.

Forgetful Politicians

Much of the information about this was available at the time, but it did not impress those brilliant students at Cambridge. Some of them were even prepared to justify the August 1939 pact between Russia and Nazi Germany. "We argued", said Blunt, "that it was simply a tactical necessity . . . " In fact he carried his enthusiasm a bit too far, continuing to pass British secrets to Russia after the two staters were in the war on the same side. This illustrates not only his blind devotion to the blood-soaked dictatorship but also the actual fragility of the unity between capitalist powers, even when they call themselves the Allies.

But it was not only Blunt and his fellow geniuses who have been confused, because several prominent politicians said they had quite forgotten being told that a senior member of the royal household was a Russian spy. One of these politicians is Lord Brooke, who could never be accused of being an intellectual and who 'forgot' quite a few things during his time as Home Secretary. So how much more do the leaders of capitalism 'forget'? Do they 'forget' the realities of capitalism — its power cliques, its privileges for the few, its international conflicts, its cynicism and deceit? Do they 'forget' that the whole rotten mess is kept in being by the very people who suffer under it — the working class — the people who get excited about the Blunt Affair because they have been induced into a trance of patriotism? And who will help them 'remember'?

One thing to remember is that international conflict is ineradicable under capitalism. Those conflicts are fought out by all appropriate means and not just in the military sense; all sides have an elaborate machinery of espionage. Those who operate that machinery develop an especially cynical devotion to the interests of the master class they serve. The schemes they hatch often have an arithmetic a lot more intricate than that of a simple double cross.

Concepts in Privilege

If one side uncovers another's spies they usually give vent to a great blast of innocent indignation, which is designed to obscure the fact they they have their own agents busily at work. Thus Burgess, Maclean and the rest had their counterparts — Volkov, Petrov, Dolynytsin and, arguably the significant of them all, Penkovsky, who passed to the Western powers thousands of items of secret information, including some on Russian rocketry, notably at the time of the Cuban crisis.

Nobody needed Anthony Blunt to tell us that capitalism is a society in which a small minority are privileged a long way above the rest of us. But he throws an interesting light on the extent of that privilege. His job in the royal household, for example, consisted of looking after the Queen's pictures, rehanging them and redecorating the rooms where they hang (or at any rate ordering other people to do the actual hanging and decorating). As a flunkey to a super-parasite, he lived in a different world to the rest of us, with concepts and expectations quite foreign to those of the majority. He described his interrogations between 1951 and 1964 as 'mainly comfortable conversations'. This is in stark contrast to the treatment habitually handed out to workers who 'help the police with their inquiries' over some offence against capitalism's laws. On the very day of Blunt's press conference, a fatal 'accident' inquiry in Glasgow was told by a former policeman of how sickened he had been at the violence meted out by the police there to a man who later died from his injuries.There are few 'comfortable conversations; between the police and the workers they arrest in places like Glasgow.

A great deal of indignation has been spilled out over Anthony Blunt, but outraged workers would do better to direct their feelings against this social system itself. Capitalism is a society in which one class, although numerically insignificant, owns the means whereby the rest of us live. That fact is central to all privilege — the aristocrats, the clubs, the old boy network, the cover-ups in high places. It is also a society in which a lot of effort goes into persuading us that we should devote ourselves to the work of keeping capitalism going on the orders if some super-intellectual beings. Anthony Blunt has provided the latest piece of evidence to show what a myth that is. Workers should not trust leaders, no matter how allegedly brainy or evidently stupid they are; they should organise their own confidence to run society on a different basis, in their own interests.

The sordid story of Blunt and his clever friends is but a minor episode in the horrendous, cynical passage of a society which can operate in no other way. Blunt betrayed his own ruling class, but to capitalism itself he was no sort of traitor; he was, and remains, its most devoted, if devious, servant.

Ivan