Obituary: Freddie James (1992)

Obituary from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freddie James, who was a Party member for many years, died on 29 August 1992, at the age of 67.

He joined the Party in 1948 and for many years was an active member of Hackney Branch, Although he did not continuously maintain his membership, drifting out and into the Party again at various times, he maintained his links with the Party and supported the party case until his death. He had a somewhat anarchic attitude towards payment of dues and replying to letters, and could rarely bring himself to ask for his dues to be waived, and thus became lapsed from the Party from time to time. However, he never left because of disagreement.

In the 1950s and after, he was a prominent and active member, frequently speaking at open-air venues in Hackney and elsewhere. He was also frequently to be seen at Head Office and Party meetings generally and was often active at Conference and Delegate Meetings. Fred had an aggressive and rumbustious style, which did not endear him to everyone, but he always displayed an underlying good humour, which softened many of his barbed comments.

Fred was also active for the Party in the Provinces, and for some time in the 50s stayed in Nottingham where he spoke at outdoor meetings and was active in the local branch. He also took an active interest in left-wing and anarchist meetings and was frequently to be found at meetings organized by other parties and groups, where he determinedly put forward the party case. He stood as a Socialist Party candidate in Bethnal Green in elections to the old London County Council in 1958.

Freddie James (as he was usually called) was a lifetime student of politics, history, psychology and social sciences generally. In his Hackney branch days he gave lectures and conducted classes on such topics as ancient society and anthropology. His former home in Weymouth Terrace, Hackney, was for many years a centre for party members and others to have discussions and arguments, drink tea and play chess. His last home, a flat near Euston Station, had every room and passageway crowded with the thousands of books that reflected his lifetime interests.

Apart from politics, Fred had consuming interests in psychology and music. He studied the guitar with Len Williams at the Guitar Centre, and himself became a teacher of the guitar, at GLC classes and at the City Literary Institute. He also maintained his enthusiasm for chess, and in recent years frequently had friends dropping in on him for a game. He also helped to found a community arts group in Kentish Town, and was treasurer of this group when he died.

About two years ago he was diagnosed as having cancer of the oesophagus, and underwent drastic surgery. During his periods of hospitalization he maintained a cheerful and lively demeanour and his hospital bed was often surrounded by relatives, friends and acquaintances, enjoying his company. He faced his frequently painful disabilities with remarkable courage and fortitude, and when there was a recurrence of his illness shortly before his death, he continued to display a calm but cheerful presence.

Fred will be much missed in the many fields in which he became well-known. A memorial meeting, to celebrate his life, was held on 25 October at Lauderdale House, Highgate, which was attended by party members who knew him, former members and many others.

Albert Ivimey

The Young Marx (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx before Marxism by David McLellan. Pelican. 40p

This book, now republished as a Pelican, traces the development of Marx's ideas until in 1844, at the age of 25, he became a Socialist (or Communist, as would then more usually have been said).

Marx was born in May 1818 in Trier in in the Rhineland, which had been annexed to France between 1795 and 1814. His father was a legal official who was originally a Jew but who, on the return of the Rhineland to Prussia, had to become a Christian in order to keep his job. Marx himself was baptized as a Lutheran Protestant and went to the local high school and later to university at Bonn, then at Berlin and then back at Bonn again, eventually getting a doctorate from the University of Jena for a thesis on the Ancient Greek philosophers, Democritos and Epicurus.

Marx had originally intended himself becoming a lawyer, but then planned an academic career as a teacher of philosophy. When political considerations made this impossible—Marx had become one of the Young-Hegelians who gave Hegel's philosophy an atheist and radical-democratic twist—he turned to journalism, becoming in October 1842 the editor of the liberal Rheinische Zeitung. At this time Marx was still politically a radical democrat and argued forcefully against censorship and for freedom of the press in Prussia. So forcefully, in fact, that the paper was banned in March 1843. In June Marx married Jenny von Westphalen (whose father had not only been a German baron but also related to the British Dukes of Argyll!) and in October moved to Paris.

Here Marx came into contact with German and French Communists (indeed he lived in the same house as one prominent member of the German Workers' League of the Just, which later became the Communist League for which the famous manifesto was written) and his writings take on a more pro-working class character. McLellan dates Marx's adherence to Communism as sometime during the first three months of 1844.

Marx's writings of this period are, to a modern reader, excessively philosophical, being full of the difficult terminology of the then fashionable German philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach. Marx's whole conception of the socialist revolution too was still philosophical: he saw it as the combination of man's most advanced consciousness (German philosophy or, rather, its outcome) and man's most suffering section (the proletariat). This conception had élitist undertones—the proletariat was to be the instrument of philosophy, i.e.,  a weapon in the hands of philosophers, to achieve Hegel's "rational reality" or Feuerbach's "true species-life"—which Marx was soon to abandon when he teamed up with Engels and the two of them began to put socialist theory on to a more scientific basis. Hence the title of this book of course.

McLellan here provides a good introduction to Marx's writings of this period: the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State (some unpublished notes written in March 1843 before he moved to Paris), on The Jewish Question and Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (both of which were published by Marx soon after moving to Paris, the latter containing the famous phrase about religion being the opium of the people) and the so-called Paris Manuscripts (again unpublished notes).

These works are not essential reading but they do provide the key to what Marx and Engels meant when in later works they wrote of "the end of philosophy" and of leaping "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom" and of Socialism as "the beginning of history".

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: The Dark Rebellion (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

10 years ago this month the British worker Ken Bigley was murdered in a video beheading by the leader of an Iraqi insurgency group, one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, despite appeals and interventions from, among others, Yasser Arafat, King Abdullah of Jordan, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and even Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi.

Zarqawi’s group affiliated to Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network at this same time, and became known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The following year, 2005, Zarqawi received a letter from Bin Laden’s military commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, outlining al-Qaeda’s four-stage strategic plan for expanding the Iraq war. The stages were, first, expel the Americans and their allies, then establish an Islamic caliphate, widen the conflict to engulf neighbouring states, and finally declare war on Israel.

Zarqawi continued to run AQI, specialising in extortion, kidnappings, hotel bombings and hostage beheadings, until a US Air Force F-16 dropped 460kg of high explosive on his safe-house in 2006. AQI lived on, however, and the same year merged with several other groups to form the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).

AQI thereafter became increasingly unpopular because of its targeting of Iraqi civilians, and open war developed between AQI and other Sunni groups. Bin Laden himself was said to regard the brutality of AQI’s video beheadings as counter-productive, and his commander, Zawahiri, had also criticised Zarqawi for recklessly squandering civilian sympathy and support. The US in 2007 began arming rival Sunni militias who agreed to fight AQI instead of the Americans (Guardian, 12 June 2007). This resulted in the ‘Anbar Awakening’ of Sunni counter-attacks, and by 2008 the ISI described itself as being in a state of ‘extraordinary crisis’.

With the withdrawal of US troops in 2009, AQI’s fortunes started to pick up again. They began blowing up government offices in a bid to destroy the Iraqi administration and sabotage the 2010 elections. But they hit problems again as communications with al-Qaeda in Pakistan were cut and, it was estimated, around 80 percent of their leadership were captured or blown up.

But like the mythical Hydra, AQI could grow heads as well as cut them off. The new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, began recruiting Saddam Hussein’s former military staff, and thereafter pursued an energetic campaign of highly successful prison breaks to free veteran insurgents held at, among other places, the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

And then, the Arab Spring fell upon Baghdadi like manna from heaven. Suddenly the regional strongmen who were able to contain and maintain regional stability fell or were in trouble. Baghdadi seized the moment and began planting ISI seeds in Syria which sprouted into the al-Nusra Front. This Syrian group, unlike ISI, was not interested in establishing caliphates but only in ousting Assad, and recruited its foreign fighters solely on this basis. In April 2013 Baghdadi announced, without consulting either al-Nusra or al-Qaeda, that al-Nusra and ISI were merging as the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (Isis or Isil). It was the equivalent of a hostile business merger, and the al-Nusra Front leader protested vociferously. Al-Qaeda promptly ruled against Baghdadi and ordered Isis to be disbanded. After months of argument, al-Qaeda got nowhere and severed all connections with Isis. After more months of internecine conflict, al-Qaeda resignedly told al-Nusra to stop fighting Isis. Elements of al-Nusra subsequently saw no option but to go over to Isis, as did parts of the Free Syrian Army, JMA and other anti-Assad groups. In June this year Isis declared itself a caliphate with Baghdadi as its caliph.

The brutality of what followed has been of biblical proportions. The Islamic State rolled over Mosul and cleared out its bank vaults, while crucifying opponents and non-Sunni Muslims, eviscerating women and reputedly executing children and putting their heads on spikes on Mosul Park. The West has looked on aghast at the scale of the atrocities.

Despite its chilling barbarity the Islamic State seems to know what it’s doing. With an estimated fund of US$2m it is building all the infrastructure of a new state with efficiently-functioning public services and administrative and military control systems amid continued revenues from robbing banks, ransoming hostages and allegedly, selling captured Syrian energy supplies back to the Syrian government. It is noted for its unusually professional management of social media and even its harrowing beheading videos, clearly a key part of its conception of asymmetric warfare, are described as looking increasingly slick and well-produced. It employs if not ‘awe’ then certainly ‘shock’ in its campaign to subdue opposition and deter western and regional powers from intervening.

Some commentators speculate that the brutality is so excessive that the world’s Muslim communities will recoil from it, if they haven’t already done so, forcing IS towards moderating its behaviour in the future. But this is the legacy of the killer of Ken Bigley ten years ago, and they didn’t get where they are today by being moderate.

A recent edition of New Scientist (13 September) carried two articles that bear on the subject. In the first,Lifting the black mask, academics have been demanding access to US intelligence data as part of studies to establish the factors which go towards radicalising western-based jihadists. Some conclusions are already in, however, in particular that the idea of jihadists being ‘brainwashed’ by recruiters or radical imams is wrong. These young people who go to fight for Isis have simply absorbed and applied the views of their own circle of friends and family. Socialists say that capitalism, in oppressing workers everywhere, spontaneously assists the spread of socialist ideas. What we also have to acknowledge is that capitalism is also fostering a ‘dark rebellion’ which is, in many ways, the antithesis of everything that socialism stands for. Capitalism plays the same hateful pop song on an endless loop, while socialists aim to press Fast Forward, but there are also those who are keen to press Fast Rewind, all the way back to the Middle Ages.

The second article concerns a reappraisal of two notorious and now considered unethical psychology studies, which now suggests that acts of deliberate cruelty are not perpetrated as a matter of routine by ordinary people who are ‘just following orders’, an argument known as the Nuremberg Defence, but only by individuals who can be characterised as ‘committed’ believers.

In the 1960s series of ‘shock’ obedience studies conducted at Yale by Stanley Milgram, it turns out that participants were regularly badgered to administer electric shocks, and that up to 50 percent refused, while in the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, participant ‘guards’ were heavily coached to mistreat ‘prisoners’ by having forms of mistreatment suggested to them. In both studies participants were repeatedly told to conform and obey ‘in the interests of science’. The reappraisal suggests that those who bought into this formulation of the ‘science ethic’ tended to conform, while ‘non-believers’ did not.

Capitalist ideology loves to demonise ‘human nature’, and media reports of torture and murder barely seen outside the Old Testament seem almost to justify that demonisation. But we don’t just do what we’re told, like mindless zombies. It matters what we believe. Whatever excesses the world’s unhinged fanatics manage to drive themselves to, the capacity for evil does not, after all, lie dormant in the banal heart of humanity.

PJS

The Second International and the 1914 War (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and the Great War, by Professor Georges Haupt. Oxford University Press. £5.00.

In this revised edition of a work published a few years ago in French and German, Professor Haupt sets out to examine the activities of the International Socialist Bureau and its affiliated national parties in the years before 1914 and to explain why it failed to prevent the war.

Professor Haupt has had access to the archives of the Bureau and claims that his re-examination of the reasons for the collapse of the International has led him to reject or modify various earlier attempts to explain why, when the war came, the International disintegrated. If we accepted the view shared by the organisations which belonged to the International and by Professor Haupt, that it was a body representing the Socialist convictions of millions of organised workers, there would be a mystery needing to be explained; but of course this belief is a myth. Most of the affiliated organisations were non-socialist, most of the four million workers supposed to be represented at the International congresses were indifferent to it and were neither internationalist nor Socialist in outlook. There was never any real unity among the organisation and not even the leaders who attended congresses took the Bureau seriously.

It is absurd to treat the electoral success of the German Social Democratic Party in 1912, with its 4 million votes, as a victory for Socialism, and the half-million votes given to the candidates of the British Labour Party in 1910 as another—the Labour Party at this time was running hand-in-hand with the Liberal Party. When Bruce Glasier made an impassioned speech declaring that "the British proletariat was ready to obey the International's instructions to the last detail", he was speaking without any mandate from British workers and simply deluding himself and the other members of the Bureau.

The material unearthed by Professor Haupt from the Bureau's discussions and resolutions shows an almost universal inability to understand how capitalism engenders war, and an equal ignorance of Socialist principles. When the war was about to begin the members of the Bureau were relying for the preservation of peace on the belief that capitalism had outlived its warlike propensities and on blind confidence that the German, French and British governments were all "against war".

It is not that the non-socialist outlook of the Bureau and its affiliated parties was entirely unknown. It was pointed out repeatedly by the Socialist Party of Great Britain but, strangely, Professor Haupt's researches into the Bureau's archives fail to disclose this. Having sent delegates to the Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, the SPGB tried in vain to secure that membership should be restricted to genuinely socialist parties based on recognition of the class struggle—at that time the British affiliates were the ILP, Fabian Society, SDF and Labour Representation Committee (later to become the Labour Party). Failing to secure this, the SPGB withdrew from membership of the International.

Though Professor Haupt still thinks that what happened in 1914 needs to be explained, it came as no surprise to the SPGB that war found most of the parties affiliated to the International supporting the policies of their respective governments and most of the prominent individuals who had declared their intention to oppose war—including Keir Hardie—supporting it.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Death of Khrushchev (1971)

From the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The former director of Russia, who died last month. was not a member of the SPGB so this is not that kind of an obituary. Nor is it a salute to the passing of a "great man" in the manner of the capitalist press (whether so-called left or right). Rather do we take the opportunity of the passing of the former despot (one of the rare cases in the Soviet Union of an ousted top man who managed to die of old age), to point out that this man, who started to climb the ladder of Russian power nearly fifty years ago, has contrived to die with his country as far from justifying its assumed title of socialist as ever it was. In fact it is probably true to any that nowadays there are far more people around who fail to register shocked surprise at our contention that Russia is a capitalist country, like all other countries in the modern world. The fact that it is state-capitalist (instead of only partly thus and partly private enterprise capitalist like England) is a matter almost of indifference compared with the salient fact that it is not socialist and has never remotely justified its claim to that title. Khrushchev's country is just as much a wage-slave economy as the USA.

The capitalist papers (such as the Morning Star and the New Statesman) can safely be left to recount the career of the Stalinist today who danced the gopak for his master (and also acted as his henchman in the slaughter of untold thousands of his fellow countrymen).

The most illuminating incident in his career was one which does not appear to have been noticed in the obituaries. This was the argument with Molotov at the time when Khrushchev was establishing his power which involved smashing the "anti-party group". His rival had just gone on record as saying that Russia had by then (some forty odd years after the revolution) laid the foundations of Socialism. Khrushchev seized the opportunity to slam into him. Foundation be damned. We have built Socialism. And as Molotov was the one who was exiled into Outer Mongolia (a welcome change from Outer Space, of course, where previous failed leaders went), it was Khrushchev's version which carried the day. It was an argument which had a lot of fascination but it attracted little or no interest in the papers. What can you think of a house when two people can look at it and one says it's a fine house and the other says it's a fine foundation? (And not just lay people mark you. These were a couple of architects of this kind of edifice.) The only possible answer is that Lenin and his heirs were frauds. There is no Socialism in Russia and all the millions of deaths have been merely to establish a capitalist tyranny where, pre-Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev, the propagation of Socialism is punished as treason. A grisly and tragic story.

L. E. Weidberg

Politics not history (1969)

Book Review from the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21. by Walter Kendall. 5 gns.

Who could write a book about those who said they were Marxists in the period 1900 to 1921 and only mention the Socialist Party of Great Britain once, and that in a couple of footnotes? Answer: almost any Labour historian. We have commented before on the bias of such people, and Walter Kendall is well in this tradition. The SPGB, according to him "unwilling to enter the political fray even to the extent of adopting a programme of 'palliatives' retained its political virginity only at the cost of failing to reproduce anything at all".

We have met Kendall's type before (indeed we have met Kendall); his pro-Labour bias comes through everywhere. Labour is "the mass party of the working class". Those in the early Communist Party who supported its affiliation to the Labour Party were "essentially activist and involved" while their opponents were, of course, "notably propagandist, passivist, and detached". Kendall's own illusions also come through in his criticism of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation for not trying "to assume the leadership of working class struggles once they were under way".

We have no doubt about accusing Kendall of deliberately ignoring the SPGB's active existence in this period out of blatant political bias. After all, what else explains his praise of the Socialist Labour Party's journal for having "the highest level of Marxist literature in Great Britain" without a mention of the SOCIALIST STANDARD or the SPGB? We do not necessarily want the superlatives; we only want some recognition! In any event, Kendall is not in any position to judge which journal had the highest Marxist discussion since he obviously did not bother to read the SOCIALIST STANDARD—otherwise he would have known that E. J. B. Allen, the syndicalist, was once in the SPGB. Mind you, it is Kendall who loses by ignoring this obvious source of material for his book. He misses, for instance, a scoop about Litvinov's statement to the conference of 'Allied Socialists' in February 1915. Litvinov was the Bolshevik representative in Britain and was barred from reading his anti-war statement to the conference. Kendall refers his readers to journals published in France and Switzerland for the text. We have a better suggestion: look up the SOCIALIST STANDARD of March 1915.

During this period, the SPGB exposed syndicalism and industrial unionism, opposed the first world war from the start and foresaw that the Bolshevik coup could not have led to Socialism. All these are matters central to Kendall's theme but he prefers to search around for someone else to give the credit to. He comes up with John Maclean of Glasgow. Only Maclean and his followers, says Kendall in a passage he knows to be untrue, raised the socialist revolution as an alternative to the war. The SPGB (who must have numbered more than Maclean and his followers) consistently opposed the war on socialist grounds. Maclean was a member of the British Socialist Party (the successor of the SDF) which like the ILP and even the SLP, was split over its attitude to the war. The depth of his 'Socialism; can be judged by his support for Scottish separatism and the formation before he died in 1923 of a Scottish Workers' Republican Party. Maclean never joined the Communist Party and it is this, in view of the current unpopularity on 'the Left' of Russia, which makes him attractive to people like Kendall.

To be fair, Kendall makes one or two good points: that the SDF played a useful role in introducing Marxist ideas into Britain; that the CPGB was an artificial creation sustained only by Russian gold; that the Comintern put the clock back for the workers' movement in the rest of Europe. But even here Kendall's bias gets the better of him. He accuses the Communist Party of playing a major role in destroying the whole of the pre-1917 revolutionary tradition in Britain. Wrong again! The SPGB has been in continuous existence since 1904, a constant source of embarrassment to the Communists' bid to palm off their views as Marxism—and of course to the likes of Walter Kendall.

Adam Buick

What we stand for (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain comes under criticism from some left-wingers for engaging in a policy of peaceful action to establish Socialism.

These pseudo-socialists claim erroneously that it is near impossible to get a majority of class conscious workers who understand and want Socialism and are prepared to work for it. They prefer to side with Lenin who is reported to have said, "If Socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years" (From a speech in November 1918 quoted by John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World) and that the working class is not capable of Socialist consciousness but that "exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop  only trade union consciousness" (What is to be Done). They, therefore, favour insurrection and smashing the State and army by a professional elite and who will lead workers to the promised land.

We in the Socialist Party on the other hand hold that the emancipation of the working class can and must be achieved by the working class itself through capturing the State machine and not be a vanguard demolition squad (Marx and Engels held this opinion too as seen by their letter to August Bebel, Bracke, Liebknecht and others in September 1879). But we also realise that we face a difficult struggle considering the stranglehold the ruling class have over the ideas held by the working class. We face powerful weapons wielded by the State which operate from the day we enter this world until the day we leave it. Then the capitalists use the radio, television, newspapers, literature and films to spread capitalistic values.

These mind-controlling weapons ensure that the obedient wage-slaves pop down to the polling station to vote for one of the capitalist parties. They also provide willing recruits—and corpses—for inter-capitalist rivalries for markets in the form of war. "For Queen and Country" is a sentiment still prevalent among working class circles, although not always in such words.

Minority insurrectionists would fail in any attempt to overthrow the capitalist system while the masses are still conditioned in this way.

How will the Socialist Party counter these highly sophisticated instruments of submission? One way is to propagate the case for Socialism wherever and whenever it is possible. That is why we publish literature and hold regular indoor and outdoor meetings throughout the country urging workers to organise politically and send delegates to Parliament with a view to setting up world Socialism, in conjunction with the workers of the rest of the world.

But a more powerful force on our side is capitalism itself. The deprivations and contradictions of the present system of society must lead more people to challenge capitalist values. The uncertainty of the future caused by the spectre of war, pollution and starvation forces the workers to think. Some drop out of society and form isolated Hippy communes, others sink into an alcoholic or drug induced escape. But as they realise that man is not an island they have to return to the rest of the slaves. More people are being confronted with the economic scrap-heap and the dole queue. Salary earners of 5000 a year are sinking in the same boat as a man earning 500. No one is secure under capitalism. The system is its own gravedigger.

ALJO

Material World: Desperately Seeking Safety (2014)

The Material World Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Racism and xenophobia are not specifically Australian personality traits, for racism isn't biological or innate. It was created to rationalise and justify slavery and colonialism, exploiting pseudo-science to persuade people that racial superiority is natural. There is nothing natural about it. The attitude of today’s government contrasts with the reception given to the Vietnamese boat-people in the 70s and 80s. Back then, Australia honoured its obligation as a signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The 2006 census recorded 173,663 Australian people of Vietnamese ancestry who were first or second generation Australians. The logistics of accommodating newcomers is something that Australia has repeatedly demonstrated it is capable of achieving.

Hamid Kehazaei, a young Iranian asylum seeker, has been declared brain-dead following his emergency medical evacuation from the Manus island detention centre. Dr Peter Young, the former director of mental health services at IHMS and one of the most senior doctors working in immigration detention, explained he would not be surprised if there were delays to Kehazaei’s medical care.

'Whenever people are placed in a remote place like this, where there isn’t access to local services on the ground, it inevitably creates a situation in which there are going to be delays when people have deteriorating conditions and when higher level, tertiary care is required. That’s just a characteristic of being in a remote location and that’s leaving aside the issues of the logistics when someone needs to be moved out and the bureaucratic delays when approval needs to be sought through multiple agencies' (theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/03/).

Draconian immigration policies are increasingly being imposed by various countries around the world. Australia detains refugees who arrive by boat to seek political asylum on Christmas Island and in camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Australian governments, both Liberal and Labour parties, have demonised boat people for 15 years, defying international law.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, accused Australia of causing human rights violations through its policy of detaining asylum seekers offshore:

 'Australia’s policy of offshore processing for asylum seekers arriving by sea, and its interception and turning back of vessels, is leading to a chain of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention and possible torture following return to home countries. It could also lead to the resettlement of migrants in countries that are not adequately equipped... Human rights are not reserved for citizens only, or for people with visas. They are the inalienable rights of every individual, regardless of his or her location and migration status.' he declares (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September).

Admiral Chris Barrie, responsible for border protection under the Howard government, said the demonising of asylum seekers in Australia's detention centres was a central concern for him:

'I'm not sure we should continue to use the term 'mandatory detention' when we actually mean jail. At least in Australian jails the incarcerated have rights of access to legal support and representation. In these jails no such rights exist.' He continued: 'Australians are doing their utmost to extinguish hope, the most powerful of human emotions' (Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September).

Why do some Australians 'hate' asylum seekers? Many are led to believe they are one of society's biggest problems. Little wonder. The media claims Australia is under siege from asylum seekers and they are blamed for higher taxes, increasing crime, rising house prices, longer hospital waits, cheap labour, as well as terrorism and disease. Mainstream politicians promote such stories.

Even if all the boats were stopped, even if they were all sent back into Indonesian waters, even if all asylum seekers were locked up in detention camps situated in puppet countries, none of that would increase wages or pensions, increase the numbers of nurses and doctors in public hospitals, make the education system any better, or make more affordable housing available. The campaign against asylum seekers won't lead to a single affordable house, a single hospital or a single school being built. Everybody knows this deep down, yet asylum seekers are the scapegoat for the ignorant and aggrieved. It is a campaign of fear to cover-up the failures of capitalism.

ALJO

Listen, Anarchist! (1970)

Book Review from the March 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the great crimes of Bolshevism has been to identify its own dictatorial state-capitalist policies with Marxism, thus unfairly discrediting the latter. Quite sincere people have been understandably repulsed by the arrogance, cynicism and dishonesty of the self-appointed Bolshevik "vanguards", and have reacted in various mistaken anti-Marxist ways — by losing interest in politics, becoming Social Democrats, moving to the "Right" or enrolling with the anarchists.

We repeat: this must be laid at the door of the Bolsheviks. This is the upshot of their "leadership" delusions, their "developing consciousness through struggle". That does not excuse the anarchists and others from all responsibility. They have drawn the wrong conclusions; with a little thought most of them are capable of drawing the right ones. For example, many of the anarchists who represent bolshevism (or even the present Russian regime) as the logical outcome of Marxism, are well-read enough to realise that they are thereby doing a disservice to the truth.

Curiously enough, though anarchists and Bolsheviks abuse each other heartily, they are agreed on the fundamental question. This basic agreement can be seen in their response if confronted with the Socialist case. When it is suggested that prior to the Socialist revolution the majority of workers must grasp what Socialism entails, both anarchist and Bolshevik reply in precisely the same manner: by ridiculing such an "academic" approach, by muttering about "sectarianism", in short, by claiming that ordinary workers are incapable of acquiring a clear understanding of Socialism before organising together to achieve it.

But since both, in a confused manner, want some sort of social change, and both see the working-class as vital to this process, it is necessary to maintain that workers possess some naive revolutionary desire. Therefore, in analysing the events of May 68 in France (for example) they need some explanation of why revolution didn't result, and find it in the French "Communist" Party.

Socialists, on the contrary, maintain (as a fact, and not because they like it) that the great majority of workers have no wish for Socialism nor understanding of it. Because of traditional ideas, most workers see Capitalism as the only practicable method of operating society. This applies to French workers, just as it does to workers in Britain, America, Russia or China. It is therefore pointless to seek for some special agency which "holds the workers back". The French CP is chiefly an expression of the workers' capitalist outlook, not the cause of it. Since Socialist understanding does not drop out of heaven like the holy ghost, in the space of a few hours, it was clear to every Socialist that the May events had no prospect whatsoever of turning into a revolution. The subsequent election proved this beyond question.

Both anarchists  and Bolsheviks  take the view that "goals emerge from struggle." If any form of "struggle" intensifies, they tend to welcome it as a sign of "rising consciousness" (though often the workers involved are clearly as conservative in their ideas as they were before). If "struggle" becomes very sharp, this is seen as a "revolutionary situation," and in such situations the actions of determined minorities are thought decisive. It is argued either that the workers really do want a revolution, but this desire is "inarticulate" (even "instinctive"!) Or else it is admitted that they have no such aim, but the claim is made that in certain circumstances they will be forced by necessity to adopt the revolutionary course.

These views are often defended with the statement that "people learn by experience," an utterance which demonstrates confusion. The great majority of ideas in anyone's head did not derive from their own personal experience, but from friends, workmates, school, the family, newspapers, TV etc. We all know that arsenic is poison; few of us learnt it by personal experience.

In fact, an item of experience does not lead of itself to a specific conclusion. If a group of people are subjected to a similar experience, they may draw a variety of conclusions about it: the decisive factor will be the system of ideas they have formed before the experience. If there is an economic slump with mass unemployment, Socialists will recognise this as a consequence of the anarchic capitalist market, Christians will conclude that lack of righteousness among the population has brought its inevitable retribution, common-or-garden reformists will believe that incompetence or utterly abnormal circumstances are responsible, fascists and Bolsheviks will put the blame on "finance capitalists," attack political democracy and demand better leadership. Most workers will probably decide that "their country" has been too soft on immigrants, long-haired layabouts, dole scroungers and red wreckers. These ideas will largely determine the way they act, especially the way they vote — and the rise of Hitler should have taught us the crucial importance of the way workers vote.

Naturally, experiences spark off changes in ideas, but until the possibility of Socialism, the moneyless world community, has become widely known and discussed, there is no hope for the emergence of mass Socialist understanding. When two explanatory systems compete in people's minds, then events may decide which is adopted. But given the present near-monopoly of capitalist ideas, it is impossible for the minds of millions to wake up to Socialism until there is a sizeable Socialist movement spelling out the arguments for social revolution.

Given their similar view of working-class ideas, both anarchists and Bolsheviks counterpose leadership plus formal organisation to leaderlessness plus "spontaneity." The Socialist proposal that ordinary working people can operate democratically without leaders, using a large, complex organisation to carry through the revolution, is beyond the comprehension of anarchists and Bolsheviks alike.

The writings reviewed here seem to make some effort to escape from the conventional anarchist standpoint, but this effort turns out to be little more than a gesture. Listen, Marxist! is the bravest try, consisting mostly of an attack on what the author imagines to be Marxism, which is really bolshevism. "Marxism", we are told, means soviet power, puritanical morality, workers' states, vanguards, leaders. We are informed that Marx thought of the Socialist revolution "almost entirely by analogy with the transition of feudalism to capitalism," that chronic economic crisis formed the focal point of his theories, that Marx predicted a continual reduction of workers' real wages, that he didn't foresee increasing state ownership, that he didn’t include white-collar workers in the working-class, etc, etc. On this last point the author admits that Marx defined workers as people who had to sell their labour power— and then argues that he must have meant something different!

In view of all these elementary mistakes about what the writer is supposed to be attacking, it is tempting to dismiss this pamphlet as a tale told by an ignoramus, full of four-letter words, signifying nothing. This would be wrong however, for the author has come to a number of conclusions in line with the Socialist case, and in contradiction to the consensus of traditional anarchism. For example, he lays great stress on the potential plenty which now exists, and concedes that anarchism in the past was doomed to failure because it was rooted in scarcity. He admits that the Russian Revolution replaced Tsarism by state capitalism, a change from the usual anarchist line that Russia is Communist (which is supposed to show that Communism is the same as Capitalism). Further, he emphasises that what has been lacking in twentieth-century revolts until now, including the French May Events, has been sufficient consciousness among the population at large, (or as we would prefer to say, with our desire to avoid unnecessary jargon, sufficient understanding).

Of course, these arguments are precisely those of Marxism. We can only confront the followers of Anarchos and similar groups with the fact that most of the observations they announce with such pride as sensational novelties designed to show "that Marxism has ceased to be applicable to our time . . . because it is not visionary or revolutionary enough," are to be found in the pages of the SOCIALIST STANDARD for years (or decades) past. And without some of the confusions which appear in the Anarchos document.

Apart from numerous cloudy assertions ("Political institutions as such are decaying." The revolution will be made by a "non-class." etc.) we find here the specific dogma which underlies anarchist as well as Bolshevik activity: the incapacity of workers inside capitalism to understand Socialism. Thus, Anarchos tells us that "in a revolutionary situation, the revolutionary organisation presents the most advanced demands: it is prepared at every turn of events to formulate . . . the immediate task . . ." So for all the writer's talk about "consciousness," he does not envisage a united working-class which has democratically decided on its revolutionary strategy, but an entirely fluid situation with competing groups advocating different demands: it is he who falls into the trap of seeing the Socialist revolution by analogy with capitalist revolutions.

"For the first time in history, the anarchic phase that opened all the great revolutions of the past can be preserved as a permanent condition by the advanced technology of our time." But this "anarchic phase" and its apparent alternative, vanguardism, really mutually condition each other: where workers have not advanced to the Socialist stage of leaderless democratically-disciplined organisation, their choice is naturally between leaders, who will stamp on them, and foredoomed, futile "spontaneity."

The group called Solidarity do not use the words "anarchist" or "anarcho-syndicalist" to describe themselves, but the gist of their case is the same. Since they are reacting against Bolshevism (nearly all their pamphlets read as though penned with a Trotskyist peering over the writer's shoulder) they have undoubtedly made some advances in understanding, and on a number of issues have come round to views pioneered by us. But they remain entangled in outdated Leftist ideas. Their fundamental flaw is an obsession with "workers management" as a solution to working-class problems. They fail to appreciate that in terms of genuine human freedom, how work is managed is a side issue. The important thing is that all work should be entirely voluntary—a condition demanded by Marx's slogan "Abolition of the wages system!" "Workers management" is in no way incompatible with Capitalist exploitation.

Cardan begins The Fate of Marxism by listing some of the bewildering variety of so-called "Marxisms," all mutually contradictory. He bemoans the fact that Marxism "has become impossible to pin down. For with which Marxism should we deal?" An obvious first step would seem to be to look at what Marx had to say, but Cardan evades this by a curious line of argument. (He has already given ample evidence that he hasn't read Marx. See the SOCIALIST STANDARD, February 69) He claims that "the significance of a theory cannot be grasped independently of the historical and social practice which it inspires and initiates." In other words, Marxism must be held responsible for everything done in its name—which opens up truly fabulous possibilities. In a similar manner, Darwin could be refuted by Desmond Morris, or Mendel by Hitler.

Like everyone else, Marx made mistakes, and so has the Socialist Party. But Cardan cannot stomach this approach:

“It is no longer possible to maintain or to rediscover some kind of 'Marxist orthodoxy'. It can't be done in the ludicrous (and ludicrously linked) way in which the task is attempted by the high priests of Stalinism and by the sectarian hermits, who see a Marxist doctrine which they presume intact, but 'amend,' 'improve,' or 'bring up to date' on this or that specific point, at their convenience.”

According to Cardan then, it is wrong to stick to a theory, and equally wrong to amend it. We must admit to accepting some of Marx's ideas — a heinous crime, certainly. And rejecting some of Marx's ideas? Oh dear yes, we plead guilty to that fiendish trick as well!

Revolutionary Organisation declares: “Whilst rejecting the substitutionism of both reformism and Bolshevism, we also reject the essentially propagandist approach of organisations such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain." Solidarity is of course equally as concerned with propaganda as we are, but its propaganda consists overwhelmingly of reports of strikes and other activities, whereas ours consists of posing an alternative form of society and explaining how it can be achieved.

The "learning by experience" clap-trap predominates here: Solidarity apparently seriously believes the "people in struggle do draw conclusions which are fundamentally socialist in content." Not that they occasionally do, nor that they might do, but that they do. Obviously if this were the case we should have got Socialism long ago.

In this vein, the pamphlet stresses that workers in conflict with management "counterpose their own conceptions and ideas of how production should be organised." Often they do—but these conceptions and ideas are equally capitalist in character. The number of workers who understand the need for doing away with production for sale, remains very tiny.

If we are to appreciate how the revolution in ideas (a necessary precondition of the social revolution) will occur, we must first rid ourselves of the simplistic fallacy that people change their minds only when they burn their fingers.

David Ramsay Steele

"We are the Lambeth Boys" (1960)

Film Review from the March 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are the Lambeth Boys, sponsored by the Ford Motor Company and shown in a Free Cinema programme at the National Film Institute recently is a documentary film with an impact. It was directed by Karel Reisz, already quite well-known for his earlier documentary about a London Jazz Club Momma Don't Allow. It has received special consideration from the specialist cinema magazine, and even found space in the popular Picturegoer. We are the Lambeth Boys concerns itself with youth. It deals with teenagers at a Walworth Youth Club, their activity at the club during the course of a few evenings and includes a club outing to a public school.

It has a largely explanatory commentary and makes no effort to discuss the attitudes and actions of young people couple with the delinquency arguments. For the most part the camera seems unnoticed by the boys. Nothing seems rehearsed. The boys play at the cricket nets, the girls gather in groups and talk; later they are seen jiving in the hall of the club. It shows some of them at work; a Post-Office boy clipping an endless pile of circulars, a girl putting cream on an endless supply of cakes in a factory, another girl sewing, a boy at a typical secondary modern school in the morning assembly, with its purely perfunctory prayer and hymns. In the evening boys lounge at the street corners in the "caffs" and chip-shops. The girls giggle in groups, shouting across the road.

The picture of their lives is one of aimless routine. Despite their aggressiveness, the club is important to them because it enables them to be together at somewhere other than the pictures, dance halls or billiard-saloons.

With no bar on language, or any need to be on their best behaviour they talk and discuss various topics with a club warden in a quiet, natural way. In one discussion about corporal punishment they show themselves to be more savage and primitive, despite the jokes which cover their embarrassment at having to talk seriously, than any M.P. or any Tory women's conference. They talk about clothes, and in one of the films few interviews a teenager tells how he buys expensive suits to wear for only a few months. An indication of their frame of mind. Jobs are fairly easy to get, especially when they only have to clip circulars. The money is good, and they can spend plenty on records and all the other teenage items that sell in such numbers. In other discussions about what they do and what they think of London they show a cynical yet naive attitude—one moment tough and hard thinking, the next showing incredible sentimentality and crude bravado. Growing up into capitalist society, realising some of its violent pressures, teenagers get the full force of the difference between illusion and reality. Thus in a dream world created by frustrations they live a life governed by frustration.

We are the Lambeth Boys gives some indication of this. As the makers of the film did not proffer any social commentary themselves, perhaps they thought it would go down better without waving genuine social problems in the public's face. Though many people realise that adolescence is not a wholly joyful time, when young people look ahead expectantly, the truth of the matter should be even plainer. Teenage conditions may have improved since before the war but their world is still resentful, bitter, aimless or just plain empty. The post war changes and the introduction of the flat estates and hire purchase prosperity may cause a further change which could affect the next generation and cause the next delinquency problems.

Robert Jarvis

Young Delinquents (1950)

From the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

During recent weeks sensational newspaper reports have told us of the recent increase of attacks with violence. Our sentiment is appealed to when we hear that young girls and old women are beaten up and robbed of a few shillings. Judges say that flogging should be introduced, and women write hysterical letters to the press. 

Everything is done to whip up mass hysteria and exaggerated fear to impress us with horror at the vicious adolescent attackers.

As much as any, we regret these violent attacks by young thugs, but, unlike most who have voiced their horror recently, we are consistent in our opposition to violence of this kind.

Those who cry loudest have, however, a strange morality. Few Judges or parsons complained of the brutality and cruelty inflicted by our soldiers during the war—that was a matter of course—they only raised their hands and voices when the enemy were brutal.

These sensitive people are not shocked that workers are compelled by necessity to work out their lives in occupations which permanently harm their health and in many cases eventually kill them. We hear very little outcry about the thousands of workers who are killed or crippled in the course of their work due to insufficient protection from machines. At any time, the number of workers killed or injured because their employer would find it less profitable to introduce safety measures beyond the letter of the law, far exceeds the number of cosh victims.

These adolescent gangsters are victims of Capitalism as much as are the people they attack. During their childhood and early adolescence they were raised on patriotic films, stories of what a hero their father was, out there killing Germans, those in large towns were bombed, seeing the dead and wounded and learning not to be shocked or surprised at blood and horror. They are later encouraged to join army cadet forces, are then conscripted and trained in the best methods of self-defence and murder.

These young people are disillusioned early. They see quite a bit of life and they realise that no worker  ever gets rich by working hard. They look at their parents, old before their time with work, dreading the slump that is already on its way. The boys know it's not work that makes you rich—they don't know why—but they use their eyes. They see the brutality, cruelty and injustice of Capitalism at work and they try to get rich quickly by the violent means that society has taught them.

And they are bored. At work, doing a useless or monotonous job, longing for the adventure that their fathers wanted in their youth and never got. Once more youth determines to succeed where the previous generation has failed.

Thus they rebel against society.

But the difference between the rebel and the revolutionary is that the latter has knowledge. The rebel is doomed to defeat, for he beats his head against a wall that he doesn't understand and eventually he is smashed by it.

The revolutionary understands the workings of Capitalism and realises that the violence, cruelty and misery of life under this system cannot be removed or mitigated within society as it is. A complete change is necessary.

There won't be any cosh boys under Socialism. Private property society that denies workers access to the things they need will be abolished: Socialism will be democratic with common ownership in the interests of everyone, not—as at present—a society based on force. To-day, the cleverest, most unscrupulous, vicious and most lucky, sometimes get to the top—provided they exercise these characteristics legally.

The rebel is bound to be broken by society, but the revolutionary intends to change it. And it is Socialist knowledge that makes the revolutionary.

Lisa Bryan

Return to Labour (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concluding article in our series on the early history and ideas of the British Communist Party

One of the main political events of 1932 in Britain was the breakaway of the ILP from the Labour Party. Until July of that year the ILP had been a constituent part of, and indeed had played a key role in establishing and maintaining the Labour Party. Its secession reflected the feeling of disillusion with the failure of the Labour Party's reformism which had been demonstrated by the collapse the previous year of the Labour government amid a record number of unemployed and with their leader going over to the Tories.

The ILP breakaway had no effect on the attitude of the CPGB to the ILP and its members. Which is not surprising since no authorisation for any change had come from Moscow. But at the 12th Plenum in September Gusev denounced the British party's attitude to the ILP as "right opportunist lagging behind the mass movement". The Party, in other words, had failed to realise that the breakaway of the ILP represented a leftward trend amongst working class militant and so had failed to take advantage of this.

"Right opportunism", as we saw, is in Bolshevik jargon the opposite of "Left sectarianism" and since in this period the Comintern was abandoning the old "sectarian" line it was on the face of it odd that a Party should be accused of "right opportunism". But an incident in 1932 well illustrates what "right opportunism" was. The victim was ex-SLP man, J. T. Murphy, a local Communist leader with a trade union following in the factories of eastern Sheffield. At this time the CPGB was pursuing an anti-militarist policy and had raised the slogan "Stop the Transport of Munitions". Murphy was against this and suggested as an alternative "Credits for the Soviet Union". In fairness Murphy really was guilty of opportunism be- cause the factories of eastern Sheffield where his followers worked were munitions factories -an interesting example of how Communist trade union leaders had built up their following for industrial rather than political reasons.

The Comintern order to co-operate with and try to win over the members of the ILP was conveyed to the 12th Congress of the Party in November 1932. "The basic task", said Pollitt, "is a definite turn in our united front work, to drawing in ILP workers in every phase of united front activity". The ILP leaders, however, continued to be denounced as "the most dangerous reformists in this country" who were trying "to build a barrier between the leftward workers and the CP" (The Road to Victory, Pollitt's Speech to the 12th Party Congress).

Four months later, however, in February 1933 the CPGB, following another lead given by the Comintern, called for united action with Labour, the TUC, the Co-operative Movement and the ILP. The "United front", the Comintern had decreed, was to be extended from co-operation with workers who were members of other workers parties to co-operation with those parties themselves. What had caused this change of line was Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor at the end of January 1933. This represented a failure of the policies pursued by both the Social Democrats and the Communists to stop the rise of fascism. The Labour Party, needless to say, turned down this appeal with contempt but the ILP had agreed and in May a kind of non-aggression pact between the ILP and CPGB was concluded. This alliance was to prove highly embarrassing to the CPGB since they were moving rightwards while the ILP continued moving leftwards. The ILP, said Bell, "subsequently tried to break up the united front by making anti-Soviet Trotskyist attacks upon the USSR and the Communist International" {p.152). Actually, what was happening was that both the Trotskyists and the Communists were trying to take over the ILP by the dishonest policy of boring from within.

The Communist Party, we said, was continuing rightwards. A curious feature of this was that each step in this direction was justified by saying that the final revolutionary crisis was getting nearer. Bolshevik ideology, we saw earlier, demanded that any change in "tactics" had to be justified by a change in the "objective" situation. Since the VIth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928 authorised the "left" turn its EC had met four times. Each time it authorised a move away from "sectarianism" and each time this was justified by saying that the final crisis was getting nearer. Thus the 10th Plenum of the ECCI held from July to September 1929 predicted the imminence of a world economic crisis. The 11th Plenum held at the end of 1931 declared that the crisis was deepening {and authorised a revival of the united front tactic, but "only from below"). The 12th Plenum in September 1932 spoke of a transition from the economic to a revolutionary crisis {and again ex- tended the united front). The 13th Plenum in December 1933 declared that times were even nearer to a revolutionary crisis; at any moment the revolutionary crisis could come; the capitalists were abandoning democracy for fascism; the slogan "Soviet Power" should be raised by all Communist parties. In response the British party republished in March 1934 the thesis of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, the previous occasion the Bolshevik leaders had hysterically predicted an immediate world revolution.

This demand of the 13th Plenum to step up "united front" tactics amounted to a demand to intensify the struggle for immediate demands under the leadership of the CPGB. From the beginning of 1934, however, as the Russian government re-thought its foreign policy, there were so many changes in the Comintern's line that the British Party was unable to keep up with them.

In February 1934 it was urging workers to vote against both the Tories and the Labour Party in the London County Council elections and in March put up a candidate against the Labour nominee in a parliamentary by-election in Hammersmith. "A third Labour government", it was said, "means only betrayals" (One Million London Workers to Welcome Hunger Marchers!, February 1934). Harry Pollitt declared that there was "no contradiction between being associated with the other parties in united front activity against capitalist attack, and opposing the same parties in elections" (Daily Worker, 19 March, 1934). As late as 9 August the Daily Worker was still arguing that for the Communist Party to extend the united front to electoral activities would be "renouncing its revolutionary policy and programme . . . This it cannot do and remain the workers' party. Therefore it opposes Labour Party and ILP candidates whenever possible". Less than two weeks later, on 21 August, the Daily Worker was reporting that the French Communist Party had concluded just such a deal with the Social Democrats there! The significance of this was not lost on the leaders of the British party and by the time the February 1935 local elections came round their policy had again shifted. Now they were prepared to back any Labour candidate who supported the united front. Harry Pollitt had the unenviable task of explaining this shift to the delegates at the Party's 13th Congress in February .The already bewildered delegates were treated to the now familiar excuse:

“The question has been raised: 'Do our new tactics in the elections imply that the previous line of the Party was wrong?' This question principally arises from our in- ability to understand that the application of the tactical line and policy of the Communist party is always adapted to the immediate concrete situation and needs to be changed as the situation changes, with its subsequent changes in the working class movement” (A Call To All Workers, 13th CPGB Congress, February, 1935).

Pollitt went on to speak of this leading to the conditions for "sweeping away the National Government, returning of CP MP's and a Labour Government".

This was in fact way to the right of the new programme For Soviet Britain adopted at the Congress. This had been drafted before Pollitt was ordered to do his about-turn and still reflected the policy of the 13th Plenum as far back as December 1933! After the Congress the old slogan of "Down With the National Government" was replaced by a call for a "Third Labour Government", though unqualified support for all Labour Party candidates had yet to come. In June the CPGB offered to form a United Communist Party with the ILP, but this was just a way of withdrawing its members who had been boring from within the ILP since by now the ILP was regarding the CPGB as a little moderate for them.

By the middle of 1935 the Russian government had decided on its new foreign policy: to seek the support of "democratic" France and Britain against "fascist" Germany. A full Congress -the 7th -of the Communist International was summoned in order to let the various Communist parties know what the new line was. "In the mobilisation of the toiling masses for the struggle against fascism", Georgi Dimitrov, hero of the Reichstag fire, told them, "the formation of a broad people's anti-fascist front on the basis of the proletarian united front is a particularly important task". Unity of action against fascism, he went on, must lead to political unity, to one working class political party in each country.

Their instructions clear, the leaders of the British party returned from Moscow and called a special Party Congress. The old programme For Soviet Britain adopted earlier that year was quietly forgotten and a call for a Labour government substituted. From then on the Communist Party gave unqualified support to the Labour Party; it backed all the Labour candidates, not just left-wingers, in the November General Election and soon applied for affiliation -only to be rejected of course, with some pointed reminders about their previous policy and the lack of democracy in Russia. In accordance with Dimitrov's instructions the Party went patriotic, dropped its anti-militarist line and cut out the subheading of the Daily Worker which read "Organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Section of the Communist International)".

The end of 1935 is a good place to stop in our early history of the Communist Party of Great Britain since this party's present policy is substantially the same as it had then become: support for the Labour Party and a Labour government. There is one difference, however, the Communist Party now puts up candidates against the Labour Party. How long it will take them to drop this inconsistency remains to be seen.

(concluded)

Adam Buick

The Rise and Decline of Capitalism (2014)

From the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism was progressive during its ascendance i.e. in its formative stage. During this phase all its necessary formations and reformations were progressive, even though it emerged having been drenched in blood and gore. Both the capitalist and working classes were sprouting, growing – evolving. All the productive forces – means of production, instruments of labour and labour power - were developing within the womb of the new born relations of production. Hence here the working class movements for formation/reformation were progressive simply because elimination of capitalist relations, which were just taking shapes, was out of the question, even though consciousness about its negation i.e. socialism, began to appear as working class ideas and interests alongside the ruling ideas and interests of the capitalist class. Both classes were involved in severing feudal relations of production and installing capitalist ones. This was the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolution.

For world socialist revolution to occur two interrelated conditions must mature – the subjective condition i.e. the revolutionary will and organization of the working class on a world scale and the objective condition i.e. a comprehensive material maturity of the productive forces for abundance. Until the end of the 19th century the revolutionary replacement of capitalism was impossible since these necessary conditions were not yet ripe.

However, by the beginning of the 20th century, the situation reversed. Capitalism entered into its era of decadence. Decadence – because, from then onwards, the revolutionary situation (objective condition) remains ready but the revolution has not happened owing to immaturity of working class consciousness and organization (subjective condition).

Thus, humankind has reached the ‘era of social revolution’ but the revolution is yet to begin. Capitalism has gone into its phase of global crisis cycles and anarchy leading to world wars involving capital against capital, fomenting national prejudices and pitting workers against workers to slaughter one another, destroying productive forces on all contending sides and producing misery, poverty, waste, pollution and environment destruction. This is, however, not to say that capital has come to a dead halt. Capital’s nature of exploitation, appropriation and accumulation of surplus value continues as long as it exists.

Capital develops unevenly through concentration and centralization. And for that matter capital is still going on accumulating globally whereby one capital kills many giving rise to gigantic conglomerates. Accumulation is going through destruction and annihilation. This is reactionary. This is decadence

Productive forces have developed to the stage of both actual and potential abundance for all. But the working class consciousness and organization have remained subdued under the domination of capitalist ideas and interests – constantly and crushingly campaigned by all pervading 'right', 'left', 'centre' chronicles and ideologies. They comprise all various belligerent factions of capital. Although they use different names and slogans on their banners, they don’t have any scientific alternative to capital’s devastatingly continued reproduction. They are mere reformists of all various hues. We have experienced enough of such things. And enough is enough! They have given capitalism a century long anachronistic existence. Measures which were once very necessary and useful for maturation of the system have already more or less accomplished their tasks and grown old and outdated. The material productive forces of society have come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations have turned into their fetters or, in other words, the productive forces have outgrown the production relations.

The history of the past hundred years has shown us that the reformist movements around the world have not only been futile, but also have increasingly grown reactionary by providing capitalism with a new lease of life by the entire capitalist media which has baffled the people as a whole. Moreover the leftists and the Leninists have further confused the workers and actually defended capitalism. Now we need a change – a radical change at the foundation of society – and more – a change of the base-structure-superstructure of society – lock, stock, and barrel.

The precise task of socialists today is to hasten the revolution by raising class consciousness through education and organization of the working class world-wide. The working class is not required to establish any eternal truth, or to realize any far-fetched ideal, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old decadent capitalist society itself is pregnant. ‘… the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today, which are summed up in its own situation.’ (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, 1845, CW, Vol. 4, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1975, p. 37). And from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.’

And remember Marx’s famous pronouncement: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).

Binay Sarkar

The Pendulum Swings Back (1972)

From the April 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fourth in our series on the early history and ideas of the British Communist Party

The Communist International, or Comintern, was a valuable political asset to the rulers of state capitalist Russia. It was also a financial investment since they spent considerable sums subsidising Communist parties abroad. The Comintern was useful to them because it could be used as an adjunct to Russian foreign policy. But to do this it had to have some following in the countries Russia wanted to influence. So, although there were very real political reasons for the policy of "independent leadership", its disastrous effect on the membership and influence of Communist Parties throughout the world was bound to lead sooner or later to a re-assessment of the whole policy.

This is what did happen though gradually and it was not until the end of 1934 that the pre-1928 position was again reached. Though this time it did not stop there but kept on going to the right till by 1939 the CPGB was a chauvinist body calling for an alliance of all anti-fascist elements including those in the Tory party.

Using the word in its Bolshevik sense the CPGB was at its most "sectarian" in the years 1930 and 1931 following the Leeds Conference in December 1929. This was during the depth of the slump with a helpless Labour government in power. The Communists' denunciations of the Labour Party and the trade unions as anti-working class found a ready hearing amongst some of the unemployed, who provided the bulk of the members and supporters of the party in this period.

During this period the Communists were, literally, violently opposed to the Labour Party. The Daily Worker, which was launched in January 1930, carried that very same month a call from Harry Pollitt to physically break-up Labour meetings:

“There should not be a Labour meeting held anywhere, but what the revolutionary workers in that district attend such meetings and fight against the speakers, whoever they are, so-called 'left', 'right' or 'centre'. They should never be allowed to address the workers. This will bring us into conflict with the authorities, but this must be done. The fight can no longer be conducted in a passive manner” (29 January).

This kind of talk and action earned the Communists the reputation of being anti-trade union also. This was a valid criticism, not in the sense that the Communists were opposed to workers putting up a fight on the industrial field but in that of urging workers to conduct this fight outside the unions and under the leadership of rival bodies set up and led by the Communists. For the policy of “independent leadership" was to apply on the industrial as well as on the political field.

The Comintern's policy involved withdrawing not only from the Labour Party but also from the reformist trade unions whose bureaucracy was said to be actively aiding the capitalists to crush the workers. Instead the Communists were supposed to set up rival "red unions". This policy may have made some sense in Europe where the workers had a tradition of being organised on political or religious lines but in Britain it was madness. For one lesson the workers of Britain had learned was trade union unity, a lesson embodied in the slogans "Unity is Strength" and "United We Stand, Divided We Fall". Trade and occupation, rather than politics or religion, were recognised as the proper bases for organisation on the industrial field.

But faced with the Comintern instructions the CPGB had to make a show. They did manage to set up two "red" unions -the United Mineworkers of Scotland and the United Clothing Workers Union. The Scottish coalfield had a tradition of splits and breakaways which the Communists were able to draw on. The clothing workers' union was a breakaway of the London members of the Garment Workers Union under the popular Sam Elsbury who were dissatisfied with the timid attitude of the union's national leaders.

For the rest the policy of "independent leadership" relied on what was left of the Minority Movement and on so-called Workers' Committees the Communists set up in the factories and mines and during strikes as would-be rivals to the established unions.

The MM, which had been the vehicle of Communist pressure on the TUC in the mid-twenties, issued its own membership cards and so could be regarded as a kind of union, though it was never involved in negotiations with employers or in calling strikes. In any event, this was how the Communists chose to regard it. For instance, the Seamen's Minority Movement was an attempt to organise a rival to the National Union of Seamen. When in the summer of 1930 the CPGB decided to launch a "Workers' Charter" in a bid to gain a mass following the MM was used. The Charter, with obvious historical significance, had six points such as higher unemployment pay, against speed-up, against increased national insurance contributions, repeal of the Trades Disputes Act - ordinary reforms. Actually the Party's own programme went further forClass Against Class called for a national minimum wage of £4 a week while the Charter only demanded £3. But then consistency was not something the Communist Party could ever be accused of.

The other expedient, workers' councils or committees, were set up especially during strikes. So, for instance, when the textile workers of Lancashire and Yorkshire or the South Wales miners went on strike there were two strike committees - the official union one and its Communist rival. Needless to say, the Communists represented no-one but themselves. The result was the dread "isolation from the masses" and an unenviable reputation for wrecking tactics.

As we saw, it was not as wreckers that Communist trade unionists had built up their following, but as militant union members. They were thus in a difficult position, torn between loyalty to the Party's wrecking line and loyalty to their fellow workers in the unions. The fates of Arthur Horner and Sam Elsbury illustrate this dilemma.

Horner was a prominent and very active member of the South Wales Miners Federation. Up until 1929 he was on the Central Committee of the CPGB, being one of those excluded for refusing to wholeheartedly endorse the "left" turn. It was clear that after the line was changed Homer was going to be singled out as an example of how a Communist should not behave. In 1929 he opposed continuing unofficially a strike which the SWMF had decided to call off because it had no chance of success. For this he was accused of capitulating to the union bureaucrats, a heresy that was labelled "Hornerism". Homer, however, was not the sort of man to take this lying down. He appealed to the Political Bureau and then to the Central Committee and finally, as the dispute dragged on into 1930, to the Communist International. Anxious not to lose so popular an industrial leader, the Comintern ruled that Horner was wrong but that the CPGB was also wrong to inflate this into “Hornerism". Horner was satisfied, or at least he stayed in the Party. But the policy of "independent leadership" was again to try his patience in March 1931. During a strike of Welsh miners the Communists had applied their policy of setting up their own strike committees. Horner wrote to Moscow denouncing this saying it resulted "only in our isolation". The Communist Party, he went on, was "effectively bankrupt from every angle" (Daily Worker, 10 March, 1931). Strong words! Hornerism was rearing its head again. By now the Comintern had had time to see the disastrous effects of their 1928 policy and Homer's letter must have played a part in bringing about the relaxation of "independent leadership" that was allowed at the end of 1931. There was speculation at the time that Homer would set up a rival Communist Party less given to wrecking tactics but in the end he again stayed a member.

The policy of "independent leadership" succeeded in wrecking one of the two "red" unions - the United Clothing Workers Union under Sam Elsbury. Elsbury, who had been London organiser of the old union, was the secretary of the new union but had to take his orders from the CPGB. Those orders involved calling strikes whenever the slightest excuse arose with little or no regard for the chances of success or for the finances of the union. This led to one of the more sordid episodes in the history of the British Communist Party. In order to get Elsbury to call a strike on one occasion in 1930 the Party promised £400 for union funds which otherwise could not have borne the burden. Promised such financial support the men went on strike, but the money was not forthcoming and they had to return to work defeated with their union organisation at the factory in ruins. This was too much for Elsbury. He resigned from the Communist Party denouncing its methods. This the Party was not prepared to accept - nobody resigned from a Bolshevik party! - and expelled him instead, using the childish trick of backdating his expulsion to the day before he wrote his letter of resignation. Elsbury was viciously denounced and, needless to say, was driven out of his union job also. While Horner remained a lifelong Communist and went on to become General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, Elsbury later became a Labour councillor in the east end of London. He was able to get his own back on the CPGB for its shabby treatment of him when in 1937 he won a libel action that caused the withdrawal of an official history of the Party written by Tom Bell.

The 11th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) that met at the end of 1931 decided to call a halt to this disastrous policy. "Sectarianism" and the "isolation" it caused were denounced. The sort of reputation the CPGB had got can be gathered from comments made at the 12th Plenum in September 1932 when the beneficial results, influence-wise, of the new turn were discussed. .'Our party", declared Comintern-man Gusev, "was not popular amongst the organised workers because it had obtained a firm reputation for being against the trade unions". Pollitt admitted:

“Wrong formulations on this question of the trade union movement have given the impression that we are out to smash and disrupt the trade union movement.”

The British Party began the process of picking up the pieces with its 1932 "January Resolution" which echoed the new Comintern line. As described by Bell (Communist historians are not reliable except as a guide to what at the time of writing the Party wanted people to think, but on this he happened to be right):

“This Resolution demanded a complete transformation in the direction of revolutionary mass work in the trade unions; a fight against 'Left' sectarianism, which interpreted independent leadership as the abandonment of all work in the reformist trade unions; at the same time it demanded a struggle against trade union legalism, for persistent recruiting to the party, for improving the con- tent and increasing the sales of the Daily Worker, and, finally insisted on the need for tirelessly explaining to the workers the revolutionary way out of the crisis.” (The British Communist Party, A Short History, 1937, p. 150).

The reference to a “way out” of the crisis reflected another chance in the line. Up till 1932 the CPGB held that capitalism was collapsing. Palme Dutt, as the Party theorist, was the main spokesman for this viewpoint.

In Capitalism or Socialism in Britain? (March 1931), he declared:

“Capitalism or Socialism in Britain - capitalist collapse or Workers' Revolution - this is no longer a debating issue of the future, it is a life and death issue, a fight for life that draws close”

and, in The Workers' Answer to the Crisis (August 1931):

“The final issue is: Workers’ Revolution or final collapse and mass starvation.”

So Dutt, and the Communist Party, were committed in these pamphlets to the view that capitalism was collapsing and that, without a socialist revolution, the workers would starve. In effect the reason the communists were giving the workers for rising up was to avoid mass starvation. It wasn't a very encouraging message but it did provide a sort of justification for the desperate wrecking tactics the Communists had been engaging in: the situation was urgent; the Labour and trade union bureaucrats were blocking the way; to avoid mass starvation they must be smashed.

After January 1932 this was not the attitude of mind the Communists wanted the workers to have. They wanted them to fight for reforms so that the Communists by leading them in such struggles could regain some of their lost influence. They had thus to pander to reformist illusions. This was done in two ways: the harsh doctrine of "Revolt or Starve" was abandoned and the "united front" tactic was revived to a small extent.

"Revolt or Starve" was a doctrine that might have stirred the Communists to do desperate things they wouldn't normally do, but it was also by implication a declaration that it was futile to struggle for reforms. As the Communists now wanted to lead such struggles with some chance of winning a following this doctrine had to go. It was done in an ingenious way. The Communists now said that Socialism or Starvation were not the only two alternatives but that there was a "capitalist way out of the crisis" involving attacks from various sides on the workers' standard of living. This served a dual purpose for the Communists could now claim that the "revolutionary way out" of the crisis could be found in struggling against the capitalist way out. They had done it again: Reform could be justified in terms of Revolution without offending too much the illusions of pro-Labour workers.

Dutt recanted at the earliest possible moment. In the February 1932 issue of Labour Monthly he wrote:

“Until the proletarian revolution overthrows capitalism, it is inevitable that capitalism, whatever the extremity of its chaos and breakdown, will drag on, will of necessity find its own 'way out', from form to form from stage to stage, with increasing misery and renewed contradictions-until the proletariat acts.”

Earlier in the same article Dutt had written that until there was the necessary "action, organisation and victory of the working class . . . capitalism will still drag on from crisis to crisis." This in fact was the classic Marxist position - that capitalism would go on from crisis to crisis until the workers consciously organised to end it. A few months later in April, as we saw, Pollitt was brazenly denouncing the ILP for being defeatist in preaching the collapse of capitalism, though, it is true, the ILP went further than the CPGB ever did. Maxton once gave capitalism only six weeks!

The second concession was the revival of "united front" tactics, "but only from below". This proviso nullified the effect since it ruled out united action between Communist and Labour and Social Democrat organisations. Which was what the united front was supposed to be. So it would be inaccurate to say that after 1931 the Communists were again wooing the Social Democrats. Far from it, they were still "social fascists" pre- paring the way for fascism proper. The new formula did, however, represent a significant departure from the previous line. In calling for Labour and Communist workers to undertake joint activity it was a concession to the pro-Labour sentiments of the workers. It was a slight move from the previous rigid anti-Labour position. And was recognised as such by some members. For as Pollitt told the 12th Plenum in September 1932:

“the tactic of the united front with the workers who be- longed to the Labour Party was looked on, by a large portion of the Party members, as a step back from the tactic of 'class against class'.”

Adam Buick

Next month: (The concluding article): The Communist Party continues to move in the direction of full support for a Labour Government.