Britain's "Red Guards" (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not a miracle but it is a transformation. Not so long ago they were a rather dreary collection of youngsters with not much hope in the age of swinging Britain. Now their numbers are growing, they have a reputation for fiery iconoclasm, they dress their girls in orange mini skirts and their leaders have a national standing which rivals may envy.

One up, in other words to the Young Liberals—one up in the cynical, vote-grubbing game of capitalist politics.

There are now 533 Young Liberal branches; their headquarters admit to having only a vague idea of total membership but claim about twenty thousand now, compared with about fourteen thousand at the beginning of 1966. Their publicity has been remarkably successful; they are famous as the so-called Red Guards of English politics and, although very few people could name the chairman of the Labour Party Young Socialists or of the Young Conservatives, George Kiloh, chairman of the National League of Young Liberals, is something of a national youth figure as are Terry Lacey and Jon Steel.

The Liberals have achieved this by a skilful propaganda mixture. Although they avoid the tag of extremism, they claim to be "radical", which means that they can take almost any problem and loudly demand that it be solved immediately, crash bang. They can oppose the Incomes Policy, American action in Vietnam, they can stand for votes at eighteen—yet nobody calls them fellow-travelling Communists. They can scream for pop radio and for the abandonment of Britain's bomb, without being dubbed beatniks.

They say they want a revolution but this does not cause anyone to look under the bed for the lurking anarchist.

It is not difficult to imagine the attraction which this policy could have for the youngster who, while he accepts the existence of capitalism, wants to do something about its problems. He might look at the Young Socialists, but the Labour Party's connection with the badly mauled policies of nationalisation, wage freeze, racialist immigration control, would be enough to put him off. Then there are the Young Tories but they seem to be divided between boys and girls looking for someone to marry and young men in the obligatory dress of coloured shirt and stiff white collar, bearing a sickening resemblance to the young Quintin Hogg. Besides, the Tories are also connected with spectacular failure.

Apart from these there are the Liberals, whose failures as a government have been forgotten. The Young Liberals have a smart new symbol, jazzed up policies and a freedom for their members which is found in none of the other parties. Yes, a youngster looking for a political party might well choose the Liberals.

George Kiloh agrees that the freedom enjoyed by the Young Liberals may have contributed to their recent success; the senior party obviously does well not to try to clamp down on its youngsters. When the Red Guards came roaring into the last party conference at Brighton with their swearing and demands for workers' control, Jo Grimond — who was then Liberal leader — merely made sure that he was photographed having an amiable drink with them. It is perhaps a measure of the Young Liberals' mood that they were not overwhelmed by this; a few months later Jon Steel said at Notting Hill:

Jo has had his day. he is finished. he must change his ways or get out. After 13 years leader of the Party he is tired and worn out.

George Kiloh was reported as asking, at the same meeting, whether the Liberal Party should keep Grimond as leader and risk "stagnation"; he also attacked Eric Lubbock for "keeping M.P.s in the House debating futile motions when they should be out keeping in touch with their constituents."

When we asked Kiloh about this report. he denied that he demanded Grimond's resignation. But the important point is that, even after they had expressed strong criticism of their party leaders, the Young Liberals were neither rebuked nor restrained. It is impossible to imagine the same tolerance in the Labour Party of a Young Socialist who said that Wilson must go.

Kiloh claims that during the past year the Young Liberals have attracted many young people who would otherwise have joined the Labour Party. They are, he said, taking advantage of the fact that Labour is "stranded" — the Young Liberals are "mopping up the Left."

So it's a success story — but there have been many others before. Is there anything new about policies which insist on five million new homes within ten years, a stronger United Nations, the end of slum schools, a cut in "defence" expenditure? This is typical of the countless reformist programmes which have been used to deceive the working class into the belief that the ailments of capitalism can be cured without getting rid of the system itself.

Let us be clear on one point. The Young Liberals proclaim: "We Want a Revolution." But they accept capitalism; they want "Cheap group travel for young people . . . "  . . .  thorough training for all employees." In other words they want a social system where the necessities of life have to be bought, whether cheaply or not, and where there are employers and employees. Their demand for a revolution is empty; it is safe to say that they do not even understand the meaning of the word.

No political party has yet solved the problem of transforming its promises, which are often so alluring to workers, into reality. Inevitably, there comes a time of reckoning — and this is something the Young Liberals may have to face. Many of their members (Kiloh claimed they would be "a minority") must have political ambitions. What will they do, if they see no prospect of realising their hopes in the Liberal Party?

Let us take a recent example. The Young Liberals, in true Red Guard style, insisted that the party contest the Brierley Hill by-election last April. This was all very exciting for them and proved what dare-devils they are. But when the votes were counted the Liberal candidate had lost his deposit. How much more of this can the Young Liberals take, before their ambitions persuade them to go seeking after safe seats and political plums with Labour or the Tories?

To the parties of capitalism, political principles are notoriously flexible. The Young Liberals are no exception to this. We are so accustomed to it, that it would not even be ironical if the Red Guards were beaten by the realities of the political struggle of which they are a part. They are full of fire, now. But perhaps one day they will be in the bigger battalions — Labour and Tory M.P,s who blushingly recall the days when they did their bit to make the mini skirt a political symbol.

Ivan

Marxism and Democracy (1941)

Book Review from the February 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

A useful addition to Socialist Literature

Lucien Laurat’s Marxism and Democracy (Gollancz, 1940, 7s. 6d.) was first published, in French, early in 1939 under the title "Marxism in Bankruptcy" (Marxisme en Faillite). It is a useful addition to Socialist literature and cannot fail to be of help to students of Marxism. While the author has decided views on the many controversies he deals with, he states a reasoned case and almost always gives the source of his many pointed quotations from the writings of Marx, Engels and others. He is not a doctrinaire, to whom Marx's writings are a text to be studied word by word and followed as a kind of Bible. As he says: "A Marxist cannot be orthodox unless he continually questions even the truths he has already acquired, including the words of Marx himself " (p. 48). But having considered the theories of the Bolsheviks, as well as the criticisms levelled at Marx from various hostile quarters, he shows once more how well the mature ideas of Marx and Engels accord with the developments and experiences of the years since their death.

The book will be of special interest to those who have read THE SOCIALIST STANDARD for a number of years. While on a few (but important) points his views differ from those of the S.P.G.B., it is remarkable to find him meeting one after another of the many misrepresentations of Marx with precisely the same arguments as those worked out in the ranks of the S.P.G.B. during its 36 years. Stating that one of his aims "is to disentangle the real ideas of Marx and Engels from the incredible confusion caused by their commentators," he summarises his conclusions as follows:—

"Firstly, that the ideas of Marx and Engels changed and developed as they learned from historical experience; secondly, that it is false to present them as apostles of violent methods at all costs; and thirdly, that whoever ascribes ideas of non-violence à la Gandhi to them would be equally wrong. In the light of the experience gained in the course of their lives as militant Socialists they decided that under a democratic regime the workers would be able to achieve their aims by peaceful means, providing that Capitalism did not itself destroy that democratic legality without which there could be no question of the successful adoption of peaceful means." (p.37)

Among the points he deals with on precisely the same lines as the S.P.G.B. are the Bolshevik claim that Marx and Engels advocated dictatorship on the Russian model (pp.38-43)—in passing he raps the knuckles of Mr. G. D. H. Cole for the same error; the Bolshevik claim that Marx favoured the smashing of the machinery of the capitalist state (p.44); the notion that Marx and Engels preached nationalisation (p. 45); and the claim that Bolshevik organisation and tactics were Marxian. Laurat shows, as did the S.P.G.B., that "the Bolshevist organisational theory . . . although labelled Marxist, in reality represents a lapse into Blanquism, and has its roots in the backward state of Russia in general and of the Russian working classes in particular " (p.122)

He points out interestingly how the Great War, 1914-1918, had as one of its consequences that it stirred into activity and drove into some of the workers' organisations great masses of workers whose political experience and understanding were not superior to the experience and understanding of workers who had been in such organisations before 1914, but greatly inferior. "Unacquainted with the ideas and methods of Socialism, except for a few ill-digested slogans," these inexperienced raw recruits were the material on which the Communists, with their theory of an intelligent minority leading the unenlightened masses, were able to work successfully. The backwardness inside Russia and the backwardness of these workers outside Russia combined to produce results which have been deplorable for the working class and Socialism.

One of the questions on which Laurat holds a different view from that of the S.P.G.B. is that of Socialists collaborating with capitalist parties. His argument is that in the period of ferment after the last war "the strength of the Socialist parties had very considerably increased. Socialism judged, with very good reason . . . that it was now strong enough to exercise a considerable, if not decisive influence on the Government. However, it was nowhere strong enough to take power alone " (p.152)

There were three alternatives: (1) To share power with bourgeois parties whilst waiting until they had won over a majority of the electorate ; (2) to entrench themselves in intransigent opposition and decline the responsibilities of power until the situation was ripe; and (3) to try to seize power by force.

The last solution was the Bolshevik solution. It failed to produce Socialism and necessarily failed to do so:—

"Even in power alone, ruling by terror, and no longer hampered by the resistance of their bourgeois colleagues, the Socialist ministers, or commissars of the people, would still find themselves face to face with hard economic reality, peremptorily forbidding the immediate establishment of Socialism." (p.153)

The second solution he likewise rejects, because "when a Socialist party has between 40 and 45 per cent, of the seats in Parliament it is impossible for it to abstain from participation except at the price of feebly handing over power to a bourgeois coalition in which the extreme Right would have every chance of seizing the principal levers of government and weakening democracy " (pp.153-4)

“Nothing remains in practice but the first solution: Socialist participation in the Government, in spite of all the risks attached to it " (p.154)

Laurat here fails to face up to the fact that his first "solution'' led to the discrediting of the parties that adopted it and in doing so it helped to weaken parliamentary democracy and to turn the workers to Fascist or Communist doctrines of dictatorship. The weakness of his argument should have been obvious to him. He concedes (p.153) that refusing the responsibility of office (which means in all these instances refusing the responsibility of administering capitalism) is conceivable "in countries where the parliamentary representation of Socialism was still relatively feeble." He also concedes (p.152) that much of the support on which the "Socialist" parties relied was that of "immature" masses who had declared for "Socialism" "often by instinct rather than by knowledge and reflection." All of which boils down to the simple fact that the "Socialist" parties (by which he means such parties as the Labour Party) had made the fundamental error of building up their membership and fighting elections on a programme which attracted instead of repelling the "immature masses" who did not understand Socialism. In other words, the parties with 40 to 45 per cent. representation in Parliament had it under false pretences.

It is surprising that Laurat is blind to this, because elsewhere he stresses the importance of real Socialist understanding. As he puts it on page 119, these workers are "in need above all things of a strong dose of Socialist education."

Readers of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD will appreciate Laurat's final plea that the working class "must reject the ' leader ' cult more and more categorically. Unfortunately, far too many workers are still addicted to this cult, though it reeks of both Fascism and Bolshevism, and has nothing whatever to do with Marxism (pp.253-4)

As there are other important points in the book it is hoped to return to them in a further article.

It is a pity that the book costs 7s. 6d., and has no index. The translator, Mr. Edward Fitzgerald, is to be congratulated on his work.

Edgar Hardcastle

Beside the seaside (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled'

was how J. Alfred Prufrock intended to manage senility. But it was to be properly unchallenging:

'Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach'.

Paddling at the tide's edge, dressed in a style as might once have been admired, enjoying some rare luxury of tropical fruit. It was a day free from the stresses of the workplace, some slight easing of glum fears about the butt end of the days. Then dozing in a beach chair briefly unworried about the call to catch the coach back to the yellow fog rubbing its back on window panes and the pools which stand in drains. Late in 1949 as the nights drew in a married couple stared out from a bench on the sea front at Folkestone in Kent, where they had bought a small hotel called The Rhodesia. Sitting there that day they worried together about how they would survive as the hotel bookings fell off during the winter. Until the woman gave voice to what was obvious – at that moment they were among people who were too old for employment and who therefore did not have to go back home as the blinds were drawn on the summer season. Their hotel could survive in profit by offering pensioners the choice of a cheaper package holiday when the resort was quiet. It was in 1951 that Saga Holidays, based in that same sea front town, came to life.

Magazine

That man was Sidney De Haan who had long nursed an ambition to buy a seaside hotel – perhaps from his earliest employment as a chef in London and then when he was a prisoner of war in Poland under orders to escort some sick prisoners who were being repatriated. In truth this period was not unblemished as preparation for his future; during his time as a prisoner he was repeatedly in punishment for 'insubordination' – although which side he was insubordinate to is not known. In 1951 he faced different demands and priorities which encouraged him to reveal a keen talent for the manipulative art of what came to be known as market research. Perhaps drawing on what he had learned from getting those prisoners back he travelled the country looking for a place where he could rely on filling a regular coach service to Folkestone. When he found what he was looking for in Yorkshire he opened a service of regular trips from there to The Rhodesia hotel for bargain, all inclusive holidays. The result was an explosive growth in business, which spread across the country and then to hotels and resorts abroad. And now Saga is big time, selling holidays and tours around the world. It owns cruise ships and hotels and sells insurance for a wide range of what are called risks, financial advice, healthcare, direct mail trade. There is also their biggest-selling Saga Magazine which claims a readership of over a million.

Roger

Sidney De Haan retired in 1984, passing control of Saga to his eldest son Roger who left the company in 2004 after selling off its hotels and then himself moving into financial services and insurance. A management take-over of Saga backed by the private equity company Charterhouse yielded the De Haans a profit of £1.35 billion. This at a time when Folkestone was suffering from the decline of the Kentish coal mines, from losing the ferry trade to the Channel Tunnel and the competition of cheaper air fares and package holidays. In the eastern part of the town – described by De Haan as ‘the slum area around the harbour’ – there was one of the country’s lowest rated secondary schools under the dreaded ‘special measures’ performing the third worst in the country. Two wards in Folkestone are among the ten highest occurrences of pregnancy among the age group 15 to 17.

The 2011 Census revealed that respondents in the town considered their health to be significantly lower than the national average. It was symptomatic that Folkestone was part of a constituency where UKIP could benefit from any rampant dissatisfaction with the big parties and became of interest to Nigel Farage until he inflicted himself on Thanet South. The town was apparently in terminal decline until De Haan bought up the harbour for £11 million with the intention to revive it with new shops and premises to be known as a Creative Foundation. There has been a response to this. In August the beach was swarming with people hopefully wielding buckets and spades as they dug in the sand for gold bars which had been buried there by a visiting artist. This year’s Triennial art festival included the re-opening of the previously dilapidated Payers Park. It was all part of the intention to create another Barcelona presumably to be unaffected by the devastating Spanish recession as well as free super pricey footballers and the feather-fingered pickpockets along Las Ramblas.

Distress

Meanwhile in 2013 Saga became a public limited company – Saga PLC – with its share price quoted, with a varying response, on the Stock Exchange. This aroused some arch comments from media financial and investment specialists but the overall result, typically in the present recession, was rather less successful than previously. Saga holidaymakers, anxious not to jeopardise their pensions, were intrigued but not wildly tempted. To judge from the prevailing popular subjects and style of discussion in hotel lounges and on the terraces they are now enjoying some unexpected consolations from being old. These spring from the assumption that vital components in working class life such as employment, health, a stable home, were more accessible to them when they were younger and employed than they are now for the generation who have replaced them in the workforce but do not yet qualify by age for a Saga holiday. This is not because the pensioners had any special skills or fortitude; all in all it expresses the particular passage in the economy which capitalism is going through. As a result, young workers who have a range of experience, educational qualifications and expectations which would once have given them some confidence about their immediate future on the labour market, and all the stress that goes with it, are now cruelly thrust onto an unimpressed and unwelcoming labour market to moulder in bewildered distress.

Revenge

But those hotel discussions too often take comfort that all of this is a kind of revenge for those infamous drunken evenings in places like Magaluf. This can often override the pensioners' memories of their own very real, hard struggle which, although different in detail from what is being experienced by younger people now, was nevertheless demanding and terrifying. The elements of working class oppression change with time but the basic realities remain. Meanwhile it is hard, in those terraces and lounges, to listen to opinions which allow no acknowledgement of those realities. Even when it is soothed by an 'entertainment' which can be as outworn and tiresome as music from Victor Sylvester.

Questionnaire

So what of those who work for Saga? The holiday reps? Overall they perform as mature, patient and hard-working. Amid the customary stress of expectant – very often demanding – holidaymakers they manage to stay placid and confident. Ask them about their job and if they enjoy it?

Most definitely. Yes.

What was their work before they joined Saga?

Er...marketing, office admin ...felt like getting something different to do...

Were these responses spontaneous or rehearsed? The replies of Saga employees to a questionnaire on The 10 best things about working at Saga provides some clues, not always comforting:

"the fact you receive Quarterly business presentations from the CEO himself as he updates staff on how Saga is growing..."

"the fact that there are constant goals and I'm always working hard to achieve my targets set ..."

"If you can't get to grips with selling a product they will provide you with 1-on-1 training to get you back on track ..."

When the De Haans were huddling on the sea front at Folkestone that day did they ever experience any awareness that holidays are commodities, designed and produced to be bought and sold and with all that follows by way of being contributive to capitalist society where all wealth has that character? We can have access only by buying them, which is subject to influence by the current situation in capitalism at large. It is all part of the system's repression and manipulation of our lives. Paddling at the tide-line or gazing out at the sea can be recommended as relaxing and can induce a reflective frame of mind, to reveal something vital even to the extent of our holidays. Well worth rolling our trousers for.

Ivan

The Dispute (1999)

Theatre Review from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dispute by Marivaux. Royal Shakespeare Company at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

Marivaux was born in 1688 and his work as a playwright—like the work of artists generally— very much reflects of the spirit of the times. Already, by the turn of the century, comedy writing had become firmly anchored in economic realities. Soon Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot were to make their marks as key figures of the French Enlightenment.

In The Dispute, a prince who disagrees with his lover about whether men and women are naturally adulterous, reveals an experiment which has been set up by his father to test the point. Four white teenagers have each been brought up on their own by two black servants. On the command of the prince they are released into a dark 18th century palace, where they meet and mix, and we (the audience) watch what happens.

Several of us watched the play together, and our reactions were very different. One of my companions found the occasion arch and unconvincing; the pace slow not to say boring. Another was struck by the powerful resonances with our own time, especially the idea of experimenting with human beings, and found the impact more persuasive because the players wore modern dress. A third found the occasion sufficiently gripping to surrender to the experience, and to demand time afterwards in which to reflect. I sympathised. Perhaps more familiar with the period in which Marivaux was writing than my companions, I was fascinated by the way in which he had fashioned a story which allowed him to play with many of the ideas which underpinned the Enlightenment: empiricism and scepticism as the basis of belief; life in the "state of nature"; freedom and equality, and so on. But I found that unpacking the play, comprehensively, was difficult.

An hour or so later, however, I was struck by a number of things. First, the grisly experiment which forms the basis of the action, and the way that this presumes the power of one group (represented by the prince) to manipulate the lives of another group (represented by the four children), seemingly without restriction. Second, the idea that experimentation is an appropriate way of settling some disputes; associated with the corollary that such experiments must nevertheless be validly formulated if they are to be useful. (Whatever we might think about the nature of Marivaux's experiment, and especially its use of human beings as "guinea pigs", its design is such that it could never be used to confirm whether or not men and/or women are "naturally adulterous".) Third, I was conscious of the sexual stereotyping: and fourth of the overt racism; with two black people fulfilling the roles of servants. And finally there was the problem of language. We are told by the prince that the four young people "have been taught the language we use", as though language can be taught in a way which is free of social meanings; as though, for example, the meaning of "woman" is constant.

And I wondered, in the light of the thoughts of myself and my companions, how much better a group of professional critics might have unpacked the play a couple of hours after seeing it. So I examined the columns of the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Times, Time Out and the London Evening Standard, to see what their worthy critics had to say about my five key issues.

Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard found the play difficult to watch "partly because of human experimentation", but he failed to consider the class basis of the experiment, or the problem of language. He did, however, mention the sexual stereotyping and the racism. WE in Time Out was concerned about the cruelty of the experiment, but again failed to see its class basis. None of the other key issues was even mentioned. Michael Billington in the Guardian described the experiment in terms of "autocratic manipulation", and spotted both the sexism and racism. But he said nothing about the problem of language. Kate Bassett in the Daily Telegraph made no comment about either the legitimacy of the experiment, or its cruelty. She also had nothing to say about both the racism of the language, but in predictable Telegraph fashion she did tell readers that in Neil Bartlett's production the first meeting of the two young men is seen in terms of "some latent homosexuality". Finally, Jeremy Kingston in the Times had nothing at all to say about any of the issues.

From which I conclude that, in the light of the available evidence, most newspaper critics are about as insightful as their colleagues who daily dribble their half-truths and distortions onto the news and comment pages of the press. My complaint is not that the critics disagree with my judgments, but rather that they choose to ignore the significant in favour of the trivial. Theatre criticism seems much like other aspects of contemporary life in western capitalist, so-called democracies—more about style than substance.

Michael Gill

The Left’s Catastrophic Logic (2013)

From the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Radical leftists’ cling to the belief that capitalism will collapse, thereby ushering in a new society—an illusion that suits their hazy understanding of socialism.

Back in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Socialist Party of Great Britain went out on a limb, or so it may have seemed to many leftists of the time, by insisting that capitalism would certainly not self-destruct. In a pamphlet titled ‘Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse,’ it rejected the ‘wrong and lazy idea’ that capitalism would ‘collapse under the weight of its own problems’ and criticised the ‘fatalistic attitude of waiting for the system to end itself.’

‘The lesson to be learned,’ the pamphlet concluded, ‘is that there is no simple way out of capitalism by leaving the system to collapse of its own accord. Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely.’

It would have been nice if the prediction had been wrong: if capitalism had done us the great service of ending its own life or if the calamity of economic crisis (or war) could have automatically converted the bulk of the working class to socialism. But in fact, over the eight decades since then, capitalism has managed to stagger or even strut along, defying the hope (or fear) that it would self-destruct or bump up against some absolute limit to growth.

Despite all the examples history has provided us of how capitalism can weather a crisis and how a social cataclysm is no guarantee that workers will be ‘radicalised,’ many leftists still cling to the hope that economic crisis, war, or environmental catastrophe could topple capitalism or suddenly transform the consciousness of workers.

This unfounded belief came to the fore again in late 2008 amidst an intense financial crisis, as even mainstream economists were toying with words like ‘collapse’ and ‘meltdown’ to describe the condition of capitalism. The crisis still continues today, of course, but then again so does capitalism.

Yet one can hope that some of these misconceptions will be reconsidered in light of how these five crisis-filled years have not shaken capitalism at its roots, and that ‘radical leftists’ will rethink the process of fundamental social change. One sign that this reflection on a failed outlook and strategy may already be underway is the recent publication of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (PM Press).

The book is a collection of four articles by ‘partisans of the radical left,’ critiquing those on both the left and the right who believe society is headed for some sort of total collapse that will either usher in a new age or ‘awaken the masses from their long slumber.’ The authors label this apocalyptic outlook ‘catastrophism’.

The article of most interest to socialists in the book is, ‘Great Chaos Under Heaven: Catastrophism and the Left,’ written by Sasha Lilley, the co-host of the radio programme, Against the Grain, on KPFA (Berkeley, California).

Lilley identifies the two sides of the left catastrophism that has ‘shaped the radical tradition for well over a century’—namely, the expectation that capitalism will collapse and ‘predestined forces [will] transform society for the better,’ on the one hand, and the ‘idea that the worse things get, the more auspicious they become for radical prospects.’ She also quite astutely points out how these mistaken assumptions are connected to ‘the twin dangers of adventurism (the ill-conceived actions of the few) and political quietism (the inaction that flows from awaiting the inexorable laws of history to put an end to capitalism).

The idea among leftists that capitalism would collapse is typically based on a one-dimensional reading of Marx, Lilley observes. She notes that, even though Marx had ‘argued that crises are essential to capitalism, he did not equate such crises with the collapse of the system;’ and that ‘those who believe the system will crumble from crises and disasters lose sight of the ways that capitalism uses crises for its own regeneration and expansion.’ Unfortunately, the misinterpretation of Marx’s theory of crisis took root within the German Social Democratic Party and other supposedly Marxist organisations, exercising a powerful influence throughout the twentieth century.  

Intertwined with the belief that capitalism will collapse is the idea that the worse things get, the better the prospects for revolution. Even though Lilley accepts that ‘social context’ obviously ‘shapes how people see their own situation and the forces at play around them,’ she emphasises that ‘there is no alignment of the stars that leads to collective, rather than atomised, resistance.’

The German Communist Party in the early 1930s provides the best example of where the ‘worse-is-better’ logic of the left can lead, encapsulated in their cheerful slogan, ‘After Hitler, our turn!’ Their turn to be rounded up and sent to the concentration camps, the Communists soon discovered.

The attitude of waiting for things to get worse (so that they can get better) is bad enough, but some leftists take it a further step, Lilley explains, by following the logic that ‘if worsening conditions are more propitious for radical change, then radicals should do what they can to make things worse.’ This is the asinine logic of the radical terrorists of the late 1960s and early 1970s who tried to ‘heighten the contradictions’ through violent or spectacular actions and bring down the state repression that could ‘mobilise the unmobilised.’

This strategy is riddled with problems, Lilley explains, ‘not the least of which is bringing repression down on others for their own good.’ Above all, it is a strategy that simply doesn’t work, she concludes: ‘radical mass movements typically grow because they offer hope for positive change,’ whereas ‘fear is corrosive’ and ‘demobilises.’

The lack of hope is at the heart of the politics of ‘left-wing catastrophism,’ Lilley argues, reflecting ‘a deep-seated pessimism about mass collective action and radical social transformation.’ This is certainly true, but socialists would add that this sense of despair is connected to the basic inability of leftists to envisage a true alternative to capitalism. In short, they are (at best) anti-capitalist but not pro-anything, really—at least nothing that isn’t upon closer inspection a variation of capitalism.

Lilley sidesteps this issue of what she and other radical partisans are for by inserting a sort of disclaimer in the introduction to the book and at the beginning of her article, stating that the aim will not be to ‘furnish prescriptions for mass action and revolt’ but to point out ‘what does not, and will not, work.’ She adds that a ‘militant radicalism with any prospects of success embraces catastrophism at its peril.’

Pointing out what does not work is certainly welcome, but one has the impression that Lilley limits the scope of her argument in part because, like the leftists she criticises, she has no clear idea of what a post-capitalist society would be like.

This muddled outlook is apparent from her attachment to words and expressions that sound revolutionary but are exceedingly vague, such as ‘militant radicalism,’ ‘radical collective politics,’ ‘mass action and revolt,’ ‘radical mass movements,’ ‘a broad anti-capitalist project,’ ‘mass collective action,’ and ‘radical social transformation.’

What does any of this mean, really? How can you advocate a ‘mass’ or ‘radical ’or ‘militant ’movement without saying even a word about what the aim of that movement is? Isn’t this lack of clarity among anti-capitalists precisely why they are so strongly attracted to the outlook of ‘catastrophism’ in the first place? Without a clear notion of a new society to replace capitalism, or of how workers could democratically bring it about, (anti-capitalist) leftists can only hope that a collapse will usher in a new age.

Instead of offering any source of real hope regarding the sort of society that could take the place of capitalism, Lilley concludes her essay with a sort of pep talk, reminding the reader that ‘navigating away from the stormy shoals of catastrophism ... requires a commitment to mass radical collective politics, in inauspicious times as well as auspicious ones.’ But some readers might wish to understand what ‘mass radical collective politics’ means, exactly, before deciding on their commitment.

Still, even recognising the limited scope of the book (whether intentional or inevitable), it is a valuable and timely contribution to those who are frustrated by the limitations of the left. And, in addition to Lilley’s critique of the left, the book contains interesting essays dealing with the right-wing version of catastrophism and the Malthusian outlook prevalent among environmentalists.

Michael Schauerte

Obituary: Comrade MacHaffie (1931)

From the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with great regret that we record the death of Comrade W. E. MacHaffie (Mac), of the East London Branch, at the age of 47 years, on Thursday, March 12th.

Comrade MacHaffie joined the Party shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914. As a result of his activities during the War he came into conflict with the authorities and was sent to prison. Later, during transfer from one prison to another, he escaped. From that time began a struggle against odds which finally defeated him and undoubtedly shortened his life. The necessity of keeping "on the run" to avoid arrest, the difficulty of obtaining food because of the Government's rationing schemes, and lack of money finally reduced him to a shadow of his former self. Early in 1918, starvation, accompanied by a tubercular disease which he had developed, compelled him, after nearly four years of struggle, to give himself up to the police. From that time his life was constantly interrupted by periods of hospital and sanatorium treatment. Never willing to believe that he was really ill, he invariably discharged himself from these institutions as soon as he was physically capable of walking out, causing much consternation to the hospital authorities thereby. A few days before his death he assured the writer, who expressed concern at his deathly appearance, that he would improve his health with the arrival of the finer weather.

He could never be persuaded to take any part in the Head Office side of the Party's work. He was a "branch man" and was perhaps almost unknown by many with long service in the Party. Essentially a propagandist and educationist, he was impatient with cant and timidity of thought. Yet with patient skill he would spend hours explaining complex points to younger members of the branch he did so much to form, and encouraging them to do the work his health prevented him from doing.

He was a powerful and feared opponent; a kindly and generous friend; a fountain of knowledge and an almost inexhaustible source of information to hundreds who had come in contact with him inside and outside of the Party.

He will be gratefully remembered for a long time to come by those who knew him.

H. W.

Our First Prospective Candidate for Parliament (1928)

From the November 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a meeting of the Battersea Branch, Comrade Barker of the Tooting Branch, was adopted as prospective candidate of the Socialist Party of Great Britain for Battersea.

It now remains for those who desire to see our candidate go to the polls to give practical effect to their wishes by swelling the parliamentary fund to the required dimensions.

As we pointed out originally, our candidate will go to the polls if we are provided with sufficient funds to carry the business through.

Between the Lines: Jewish Anarchists and the Wobblies (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

We lost; they won

It has been a miserable few weeks for "us". First "we" got torn apart by the Indians in the Test Match. Of course, "they" were using unfair tactics -  and "we" taught "them" how to play the game. Then "the Argies" get their own back in the World Cup. Maradona, using the Belgrano tactic (when "they" do it's called cheating to win) knocked the Falklands spirit out of Jimmy Hill. Then some unknown American (worse still, a negro) demolished "our" boy, McGuigan. And to finish it off "we" didn't stand a chance at Wimbledon. TV sports commentators — a unique tribe of know-nothing nationalists — are buried in the vocabulary of "us" and "them". World sport becomes a spectator version of world war, and viewers are treated to such phrases of nationalist nonsense as "Well Jimmy, it looks like the Brazilians are up to their old Latin tricks" and "Look at those Moroccans — they must be proud to be playing against a team like England". (Morocco beat England.) And as the World Cup final was played between England's two old enemies, "the Jerries" and "the Argies", wasn't it a pleasure to watch Jimmy Hill sitting there trying to find a way to hate each more than the other?

How to succeed in nastiness

It is not often that this column has reason to mention Terry Wogan. Perhaps that is because we endeavour to deal with the TV output which our readers are likely to bother with. But much as one tries to avoid him, it is difficult to watch BBC TV for very long without being caught. Wogan (BBC1, 2 July, 7.00pm) had as his guest a fifteen year old boy who had started his own business, employed other people and was raking in a five-figure income. He boasted about being driven to school in a chauffeur-driven car and eating in the best of restaurants. How did he achieve this? By employing others to work hard to make him profit. We were not told where he got his initial capital from and no doubt viewers were supposed to conclude that here was a model of how they too could get rich. In fact, the kid was a rather nasty bit of work, boasting about how he ensured that his employees did not "misbehave" and explaining how examination knowledge was of no interest to him. Quite true: you don't need to have many ideas to get rich, just plenty of wage slaves willing to carry you on their backs. Capitalism loves the successful entrepreneur (remember Freddie Laker?) and the mass media offers every impoverished wage slave the promise of reaching such frank prosperity. We look forward to seeing Wogan interviewing a few of the countless victims of the dole queue to see if they have as much to laugh about.

The Jewish anarchists

It makes a refreshing change to find a TV programme dealing with radical ideas in a serious and sympathetic manner. The Free Voice of Labour: The Jewish Anarchists (Channel 4, June 26), was the fourth programme in an excellent series on American labour. The film, using interviews, snippets of rare films, newsreels, stills and song, told the story of the Yiddish anarchist paper, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, established on 4 July 1896. Although the aim of the paper was to spread ideas about a society without government, coercion and wars, it also provided a medium for Yiddish culture, theatre, poetry and literature.

The historian Paul Avrich, author of several books on anarchism, explained how Jewish immigrants escaping from Eastern Europe were disappointed with life in capitalist America. The so-called land of liberty, promise and opportunity, was brutal and oppressive. The conditions of labour in the sweatshops and factories of Boston and New York were miserable, the wages low. Some of these experiences are reflected in the folksong, Mayn Rue Plats, (My Place of Rest).

Don't look for me where the myrtles grow
You won't find me there, my love.
Where lives wither at machines, that is my resting place
Don't look for me where birds sing.
You won't find me there, my love.
I am a slave, and where my chains ring,
That is my resting place.

The Jewish immigrants worked mainly in the needle trades and it was here that anarchists and radicals became involved in the struggle, often violent, to establish trade unions and the eight hour day. This story is captured in the Yiddish feature film, Uncle Moses (1932) and in the folksong, Makhnes Geyen (Masses Marching):

How long, oh how long
Will you remain enslaved
Bearing the shameful shackles?
How long can you create magnificent riches
For him who robs you of your bread?
How long will you stand stopped back,
Down trodden, homeless, in pain?
It's dawn, already! Wake up!
Open your eyes!
Recognise your strength of steel!

The Jewish anarchist movement was at its height between 1880 and 1920, and during this short period of time it helped to influence the development of the American labour movement. In the 1920s and 1930s anarchist ideas were kept alive by Italian and Spanish immigrants. Several reasons were given for the decline of the Jewish anarchists. Firstly, the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia by the Bolsheviks, who used slogans such as "All Power to the Soviets", attracted many young and active anarchists, who formed the backbone of the American Communist Party. Secondly, America's entry into the First World War led to an increase in patriotic fervour and a crackdown on all "subversive organisations". Anarchists and Wobblies were attacked for making anti-war speeches. The Palmer raids led to persecution and imprisonment for radicals. Under the Espionage Act, anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported. Finally, Jewish anarchism can be seen as partly a response to the experience of being an immigrant in a strange and hostile country. Future generations were rapidly assimilated into mainstream American life. With the decline of Yiddish language and culture went the decline of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. It ceased publication on the 25 November 1977, with a circulation of 1,700.

Many of the ideas discussed in this fascinating programme have been consistently advocated by the Socialist Party - the abolition of the state, opposition to all capitalist wars, and rejection of the state-capitalist system found in Russia and other so-called socialist societies.

Having watched this programme and sung along with Hey, Hey, Daloy Polltsey (Down with the Police), I somehow couldn't face the next programme, Their Lordship House.


The Wobblies

On July 3, C4 continued their series about American labour history with a programme on the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. It described their attempts before and during the First World War to organise unskilled and immigrant workers into the one big union. These workers were in a weak position, working long hours for low pay and often their periods of exploitation were irregular. The Wobblies had some success in recruiting them, much to the consternation of the bosses and their newspapers, who described the union men as thugs, vagabonds, workshy and other such names popular among defenders of the parasite class.

The programme had some old Wobblies recalling several successful strikes, where the solidarity of the workers paid off despite the violence and intimidation of the bosses, their police and courts. The determination and intelligence of these people was a conclusive answer to those who doubt workers' ability to organise for themselves.

The Industrial Workers of the World were beaten when America joined the war and the bosses made sure there would be no interruption to the military defence of their markets and strategic interests. This came about at a time when the Wobblies were split over the Russian revolution, which many wrongly saw as the workers taking over the factories for themselves. One weakness of having leaders and followers was shown when the leaders of the Wobblies were jailed on trumped-up charges or fled the country to Russia. If there are no ringleaders then it is difficult to pick them out.

The actions of the state in breaking up the Wobblies show the inadequacy of organising in one big union. You ignore the state at your peril. A separate political organisation aiming at democratically seizing state power is needed; union organisation is necessary, but is never enough.

Many of the Wobblies as migrant workers were deported for their "anti-American" activities, and a poignant scene showed them being shipped out past the Statue of Liberty. Coincidentally, the next day most news programmes had an item on the restoration of the statue, and its lighting up on Independence Day. This is a time when Americans are supposed to celebrate the anniversary of a change in their exploiters, from foreign to homegrown ones.

Ronald Reagan was at the ceremony, of course, where he made his usual speech about freedom, liberty and the US being a shining city on a hill, showing the way for all freedom-loving people. Reagan uses the words freedom and liberty a lot. The previous night's programme showed that in America, as elsewhere, it is the freedom for the bosses to exploit the workers, and the liberty of the workers to be wage-slaves, to starve or to get beaten up for resisting.


The Wirecutters

World in Action (ITV, 7 July, 8.30) showed a documentary entitled The Wirecutters. It was about the 2,000 odd reformists whose contribution to preventing a Third World War is to cut the wire fencing around US military bases — a pathetically futile waste of time, although one could not doubt their sincerity. No doubt either about the sincerity of Lady Olga Maitland when she says that we need bombs to preserve peace, but sincerity is insufficient. The reaction of most workers to reformists like the Wirecutters is to say that they will get nowhere. Then when they encounter socialists talking about how the means are at hand to really end all war they dismiss us with the same cynicism. The message of this documentary is that reformists not only fail to eradicate the problems they claim to be solving — they make it harder for those of us who are advocating the real solution.


Peacock

First came the leak and then the publication and then the interpretation of the Peacock Report on whether the BBC should be nationalised, privatised, commercialised or simply left to carry on telling lies in the same old way. The Socialist Party's verdict on the report? Yawn! Snore! Throw Terry Wogan to the lions!

Steve Coleman

The Right to be Lazy (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the course of the French revolution of 1848 the workers of Paris  went into the streets to demand "The Right to Work".  Ever since, whenever unemployment has grown, trade unionists have demanded the same "right". In fact the Clydeside shipworkers are supposed to be asserting it at this very moment

But what is this high-sounding Right to Work? To the average trade unionist it is probably the "right" to have a job and the pay packet that goes with it. It would, in other words, be more accurately called "The Right to Employment" or "The Right to Work for Wages"

It should not be necessary to argue that under capitalism no such right exists, nor could it. Capitalism is based on the ownership of means of production by a minority.  The rest have no alternative but to sell their ability to work — when they can — to one or other of these  employers.  But the employers are not philanthropists. They do not employ people in order to give these employees a living. They  only employ people when they have calculated that they themselves can make a profit from selling the goods the workers produce.

Production, and therefore employment, is determined under capitalism by the profit motive. The rule "no profit, no production" is the guiding economic principle. If those who own the means of production calculate — as many have done recently — that they cannot make a profit by selling the goods their factories could turn out, then they will run those factories below full capacity or even close them down altogether. The result is the mounting redundancies and growing unemployment we are now experiencing.

This is the normal way capitalism works and is one reason why the Right to Work is a completely unrealistic demand. It amounts to demanding that employers abandon the profit motive and operate their system on some other principle. But they could not do this even if they wanted to, since what they can do is limited by the working of capitalism's market forces. Nor could they be forced to do it even by the most militant trade union or political action. If pressed too far, they would merely shut up shop. The stark fact is that capitalism creates, and needs to create, rising unemployment from time to time.

So, our average trade unionist may now be thinking, are you saying that in order to get the Right to Work we must get rid of capitalism and establish Socialism? No, we are not! We are not in favour of the Right to Work in the first place. Remember the Right to Work is merely a fancy way of referring to the Right of Employment, the Right to Work for Wages. In our view, this is demanding the Right To Be Exploited. It involves accepting capitalism and its wages system. The employer/employee relationship is based on exploitation since, if the employer is to make a profit, the wages he pays his employees must be less than the value of what they produce. The system of employment for wages shows that human brain and muscle power has become a mere commodity, to be bought and sold like some object. It signifies that those who actually produce the wealth of society are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and so have no choice but to operate them for the employers on the employers' terms — and at the employers' convenience. The wage packet is in fact a badge of slavery.

No, Socialists don't want the Right to Work. It would be more accurate to say that we want its opposite, the Right To Be Lazy. This isn't as way-out as might seem. Just think of developments in technology over the past hundred or so years, developments which  are still going on, and you will see that the bulk of the hard grind of production is now done, and could be done even more, by machines. Automation could now relieve human beings of the burden of boring toil. Nobody need do a job he doesn't like doing. The set working day could be reduced to two or three hours, freeing men to engage in the activities of their choice, including even producing useful things.

Of course, this will never happen as long as the means of production are the property of a minority. It could only happen in a society where the factories, farms and other places where wealth is produced are commonly owned by all the people. There would then be no employers, nor wage-earners. Instead everybody would be an equal member of a free community organised to produce an abundance of good-quality consumer goods for people to take freely according to their needs.

Actually, so long as it is enjoyable, work is a natural human activity, not to say need. In this sense to talk of the Right To Be Lazy can be misleading. But although men will always work, there is no reason for it take the form of boring toil. It could and should be interesting and so become like some of today's leisure-time activities — done for the fun of it.

To convert work from boring toil to creative activity is now possible. The ethic of hard work — necessary perhaps in the past to build up the means of production to the point where they can now turn out abundance — is outdated, and worse: it helps to keep capitalism going. No five words better sum up the Socialist's emphatic rejection of the dogma that boring toil must be the lot of mankind than the slogan "The Right To Be Lazy". Speed the day when trade unionists begin to demonstrate for this rather than some spurious Right to Work.

Between the Lines: Utopias and First Tuesday (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Myopic Visionaries

Somewhere in the basement of Channel Four there is an office in which is to be found a team of timewasters whose lifelong project is to make lengthy documentaries about "socialism" or "Marxism". Over the years the C4 audience has been subjected to numerous programmes of this kind. We wait excitedly, expecting a serious analysis of the subjects so seductively advertised in the titles — and with regularity we are left feeling frustrated, cheated and wondering when the case for socialism would at least be mentioned in passing.

Utopias (C4, 10.45 pm, 1 May) was a classical production of the basement timewasters. The programme lasted for over an hour. It was clearly produced with enormous technical care, using props and recordings of speakers which looked like they were going to serve as a backdrop for something more than superficial. The title was intriguing. Socialists are often called utopians, and here was a programme offering eight "socialists" the chance to discuss their visions of what socialism means. Within the first few minutes that sinking feeling began: the declaration was made that this would not be a programme about definitions. Which meant, more precisely, that it would be a programme in which anyone who felt like it could call themselves socialists without being under the least pressure to explain themselves.

Then the visions commenced. Eight miserable bloody visions of capitalism run better than it is now, with the occasional reference to such limited dreams as being elements of socialism. Jack Jones, the first lofty dreamer, who as head of the TGWU advocated the so-called Social Contract whereby trade unions would agree to take lower wages in order to assist a Labour government to manage the capitalist economy, offered the vision of "fair pensions" and an incomes policy as his taste of utopia. Then came a "socialist" economist who talked a bit about the need for morality and the impossibility of doing away with market forces altogether; followed by some ex-strikers from Silentnight who had set up a furniture-making co-operative business and saw this little dot on the market map as their own piece of socialism in practice; Sheila Rowbotham's utopia had been and gone. It was the GLC, and if that was utopia, then Birmingham's a tropical holiday resort.

Rarely has so much valuable TV time been wasted upon such vague and limited visions of what could be. Here was a chance for a socialist to really show what life could be like in a world set free from the bondage of the profit system. A world of abundant resources in which people could give according to their abilities and have free access to the goods and services that they desire. This would have been something to make them sit up, make them now that there is something more that we could have if only capitalism was not here.

Instead of that we are offered neither socialism nor utopia, but the stale reformist outlooks of capitalism's tame leftwing. As is often the case, the worst contribution of the evening was provided by the SWP. David Widgery, who is an SWP Leninist, a GP and a very pleasant fellow, trotted out the usual line that workers must organise to get reforms out of capitalism. As he put it, "In these times, to be a revolutionary means to try to hang on to reforms". So, the total destruction of the capitalist system is to be postponed a while; there are prescription charges to be fought over. We can only hope that the men in the basement (or wherever they are) take a long time before producing their next intellectual tease.

The Practitioners of Genocide

First Tuesday (ITV, 10.40 pm, 2 May) contrasted strikingly with Utopias. It did not claim to deal with any grand intellectual theme; its subject was the My Lai massacre carried out by the US army twenty years ago. It was the most forceful and moving documentary to be shown on British TV for a long time. It should be seen by anybody who has illusions about the glory of war.

The documentary concentrated upon the way that military training brutalised a group of American workers, whose average age was twenty, into Nazi-like sadistic thugs. One of the few surviors in My Lai was interviewed. Like most villagers, her entire family had been killed in the massacre: "The more I think about it, the more I want to cry" she said, two decades after the atrocity had been committed. She had been thrown into a ditch with scores of dead villagers piled in on top of her. She explained how the soldiers had indiscriminately shot old men and women and infants and babies, how they had raped the women and done worse to young girls, how they had tortured the villagers and then lined them up in rows to be shot. Nearly every one of them was murdered in what the US press called the 'Pinkville' massacre.

The interviews with the screwed up soldiers who are still around to tell the tale demonstrated just how much both killer and killed are the brutalised victims of war. To be sure, the uniformed murderers survive, but with what memories? Psychologically, these men were wrecked; Vietnam had taken their minds and left them badly injured. One black ex-GI sat shaking and twitching. He is on major tranquilisers. He cries a lot. He looks over and over again at press cuttings of the massacre. He recalls, self-torturingly, how he personally shot dead about twenty-five villagers. including several little children. He sits next to a photo of his own son who was murdered in a street attack — and he explains that this must have happened as a punishment for his action in Vietnam.

But, as the documentary clearly showed, these men did not decide to go to Vietnam and slaughter innocent people. They did not act upon a whim. They were driven into a frenzy of violent hatred against the unknown enemy as part of their preparation for the job of being good soldiers.

The documentary ended with pictures of the modern US army being trained, explaining that what is happening to the soldiers is not different from the brutalising process which had turned those of twenty years ago into the practitioners of genocide. No doubt there will be some who will have seen this powerful documentary and concluded that this only demonstrates the awfulness of human nature. That would be a false conclusion; these soldiers were not born thugs, it was the system which required them to be that way. It is capitalism which makes killers out of decent men and women. These men should not feel self-guilt about what they have done, but angry about what they were made to become.

Steve Coleman

A Free Market Guru Gone Wrong (2007)

From the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of the economist Milton Friedman at the age of 94 last November has robbed the free-market of perhaps its greatest advocate of modern times, but his views were wrong in theory and a failure in practice

Friedman did much to prepare the ground for the resurgence in free-market economics that occurred once capitalism had entered a new phase of economic crisis in the 1970s, and was the main driving force behind what became known as ‘monetarist’ economic theory.

Friedman was a New Yorker by birth but made his name at the University of Chicago, where he was Professor of Economics from 1948. His particular brand of free-market economics gave rise to the ‘Chicago School’ of economists who provided much of the intellectual impetus behind Mrs Thatcher’s early years as UK Prime Minister and influenced countless other governments across the world. After his retirement from Chicago, Friedman joined the Hoover Institute and spent considerable time on the lucrative US lecture circuit preaching his free-market creed.

Friedman was a prolific writer on economic matters for much of his life, but his two most well-known works were also the most transparently political: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free To Choose (1980), the latter written jointly with his wife, Rose. Most of his other writings were concerned with monetary economics where he became the guru of those opposed to the dominant economic orthodoxies of the post-war period, particularly Keynesian economics.

The position of Friedman and the Chicago School can be divided into two (related) parts. Firstly, the view that markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources and that government intervention in the economy should be as limited as possible, leaving firms and individuals free to maximise their wealth in competitive markets. Secondly, the view that the massive and persistent rise in price levels across much of the world since the Second World War has been essentially a monetary phenomenon, causing dislocations in the normally efficient workings of the market mechanism, eventually leading to rising unemployment and other economic problems.

Free market voodoo

Friedman and the Chicago School viewed capitalism – if left to its own devices – as a largely unproblematic way of organising society, with its own in-built regulatory mechanisms for successful wealth generation and allocation. The key problem with society was not capitalism, but governments. Throughout the twentieth century governments had become more involved in every aspect of economic life and, in the view of Friedman, were creating problems under the guise of preventing them. State ownership, direction and fiscal policy meant that firms were unable to operate in ways that would otherwise be encouraged by free and unregulated markets, causing economic inefficiencies and blockages. The solution was to ‘free the market’ and reduce as far as practicable the interference of the state.

To this end, within a year of Mrs Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in the UK, Friedman latched upon her government’s stated intention to ‘roll-back the state’ as the first example of his free-market solution in action in the developed world. Friedman advocated ‘the elimination of all government interference in free enterprise, from minimum wage to social welfare programmes’ and told the Washington Post in 1980 that Mrs Thatcher’s economic experiment ‘could mark the turning away from the welfare state back to the free-market economies of the nineteenth century’.

But this view was problematic for two reasons. One, that no economy, even in the nineteenth century, was a genuinely free-market one. Indeed, the free-market economy is a construct or model – a postulate of economists – and has never existed in reality. Because of the way the capitalist economy works in practice, it almost certainly never will as capitalism, a competitive and necessarily class-divided society, is dependent on state intervention and regulation as an arbiter (and enforcer) of competing interests. Indeed, ironically enough, it was brought into being in large part because of the actions of the state itself in removing feudal peasants from the land through the Enclosure Acts and other devices, so as to create a pool of available wage-workers (without which capitalism would have no producer class).

Second, while the economies of the nineteenth century (and other economies too admired by Friedman in more recent times such as South Korea and Malaysia) were closer to this model than most, there is little about their economic structure which is suggestive of a desirable environment for human beings. In fact, countries with the most rampant free-market economies tend to exhibit characteristics of mass poverty, social polarisation and raging crime above all others.

In many respects then, Friedman’s conception of the free-market was a utopian one, a notion that existed in the heads of the Chicago School economists but not in reality. It could never exist in actuality and the nearer one got to it, the less desirable it appeared anyway.

But Friedman’s resurrection of the totem of the free-market betrayed its unoriginality too. From the outset, Friedman had been a follower of some of those in the earlier ‘classical’ school of economics (such as Alfred Marshall) who thought that governments and trade unions were the economic villains preventing the effective operation of the market economy as the most efficient mechanism for allocating scarce resources. Whatever the inadequacies of the Keynesian School that had replaced their thinking as the dominant one, the very reason classical economics from Adam Smith to Marshall was overturned as the orthodoxy by Keynes was precisely because it had failed to explain – let alone provide a cure for – the most persistent and endemic problems of the capitalist system, such as poverty amidst plenty, mass unemployment and economic crises.

So Friedman’s solution to the emerging economic crises of the 1970s and 80s was an old, discredited one, resurrected for a new audience but where – as the mass unemployment record of the Thatcher government testified – the second performance was no better than the first. That right-wing US politicians such as the former President George Bush were driven to describe the Chicago School’s tax-cutting, free-market approach as ‘voodoo economics’ is in itself quite some testimony to its failure.

Monetarism

The second distinctive aspect of Friedman’s economic thinking was often – and loosely – labelled ‘monetarism’. This was the idea that inflation is a monetary phenomenon with a monetary cause, but – just like free-market economics – this was really an old idea given new life by Friedman and the Chicago School. As an attempt to explain the persistent rises in the price level that had taken place since the Second World War, together with the Keynesian failure to deal with the problem, monetarism represented an attempt to get back to economic basics.

If persistently rising prices had become a noticeable issue after the war, by the 1970s it was a serious problem across much of the world, reaching double-digit figures in most countries, including the most advanced. The explanations for it advanced by economists and politicians of every hue were many and varied. The most prominent were that it was caused by factors such as:

1 the profiteering of the big corporations

2 excess levels of overall demand in the economy

3 wage increases above rises in productivity/ coupled with trade union power

4 excessive government expenditure

5 excessive government borrowing

6 the expansion of bank deposits and credit

7 psychological ‘expectations’, i.e. that price rises are a self-fulfillingprophecy

8 low interest rates

As the problem got worse and the analysis of it more desperate, some of these explanations interlinked. The monetarists at various times indicated some agreement with all of these explanations except the first two, though it was the monetary aspect of their argument that won them most attention and separated their approach most clearly from what had become the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy.

In essence, monetarism was based on the Quantity Theory of Money and a formula for it developed by Irving Fisher which is the notion that changes in the money supply, all other things being equal, have a direct impact on the general level of prices. Friedman even went so far as to explain that in this respect Karl Marx was one of the first monetarists, holding to an explanation of inflation that focused on the supply of money as the key variable.

Friedman’s argument was that persistent inflation caused a serious imbalance to the successful operation of the market economy, leading to market distortions and failures (which, in turn, explained high unemployment and other contemporary phenomena). Its cause was once again mistaken government interference, this time governments failing to conduct monetary policy based on the equilibrium formula identified by the Quantity Theory of Money as being essential for a stable price level.

Friedman summarised his view in the Financial Times (7 September 1970) by claiming that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon – in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output’. This indeed sounded like the analysis of Karl Marx based on his labour theory of value. Marx’s view was that the over-issue of an inconvertible (such as into gold) paper currency above and beyond that needed to carry out production and trade in an economy at any one time, would cause a commensurate rise in prices. This was because such an excess issue of paper money caused an artificial bloating of monetary demand, injecting purchasing power into the economy that was not based on the production of real value embodied in commodities. As demand increases, caused by this excess of circulating money, prices rise in response to it.

For Marx as well as many of the earlier classical economists, inflation was properly called ‘currency inflation’ as it was based on an artificial bloating of the currency leading to a diminution of its purchasing power. Individual prices of commodities could rise and fall too, of course, and the trade cycle would cause the price level as a whole to rise in booms and fall in slumps, but currency inflation was a different phenomenon, caused by governments over-issuing an inconvertible currency.

If this is what Friedman had really meant too, it would have no doubt had some effect on the conduct of monetary policy in a way that could have tackled the problem – but in the eventuality it was not quite what the monetarists meant at all. In fact, the monetarists got themselves into the ridiculous position of agreeing that inflation was caused by an excess supply of money, without being able to agree on what actually constituted ‘money’ in the first place.

Applying his labour theory of value, Marx had taken the view that ‘money’ in capitalism was really the money-commodity, typically gold, through which other commodities acquire a price, and which denotes how much of the money-commodity they will exchange for. In the situation of a currency that is not convertible into gold, this underlying relationship is merely expressed by paper token money (as today) and its purchasing power is determined solely by its quantity in relation to the amount of gold the token paper money is supposed to represent.

Lacking a labour theory of value to underpin their analysis and – just like the other conventional economists who content themselves with examining surface appearances in the capitalist economy rather than underlying relationships – the monetarists decided that things that had often been termed ‘near-money’ were so close to money as to become indistinguishable from it and should therefore be included in any definition of the money supply. This primarily included bank deposits.

This seemingly theoretical distinction had a real, practical impact. When Jim Callaghan’s Labour government from 1976-9 signalled a move towards rejecting Keynesianism in favour of monetarism – and was then followed by the more full-blooded version of monetarism from 1979 onwards when Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power – their stated aim was to ‘watch and control’ the expansion of the money supply. But the favoured money supply indicators (labelled ‘M1’ and ‘M3’ at the time) consisted primarily of bank deposits and it was no surprise that their movements bore little relationship to what was happening to the price level. Indeed, Thatcher herself was later to comment that these indicators were ‘often distorted, confusing and volatile’ (The Downing Street Years, p.688), with their control soon being abandoned as a policy instrument.

In effect, what Friedman had done was to encourage governments in the UK, US and elsewhere to resurrect what had been known decades earlier as the ‘bank deposit theory of prices’. This was a long-discredited theory that had been comprehensively demolished by (among others) one of the last of the classical economists, Professor Edwin Cannan of the London School of Economics, who, in his Modern Currency and the Regulation Of Its Value (1931) claimed with a remarkable sense of prophecy that ‘this is one of the most obstructive of all modern monetary delusions’. Like Marx, and like his fellow classical economists, Cannan adhered to a theory of value which allowed him to underpin what happened on the ‘surface’ of the economy with what was happening in the sphere of real wealth production and distribution. His argument was summarised in his Money: Its Connexion With Rising and Falling Prices (1923):

‘A[n] . . . error, which has, unfortunately, been countenanced by many high monetary authorities in recent years, is to suppose that the aggregate of deposits is a kind of money (sometimes it is called ‘bank-money’) which should be added to the actual stock of coins and notes existing at any moment. The individual, no doubt, finds ‘money in the bank’ much the same as ‘cash in the house’, but the aggregate of all the individuals’ balances at their banks is only an amount which the bankers are liable to pay, but which they could not possibly pay in cash at one moment. A liability to pay cash is certainly not cash: both debtors and creditors are painfully aware of the fact. When additional currency is put on the market by some one who has the power of issuing it, prices are raised, because the issuer’s offer of money in exchange for goods and services is additional, the power of nobody else to spend money having been reduced. When, on the other hand, a person increases his balance at his bank he increases the bank’s power to lend only at most by the amount which he forgoes, so that the aggregate money-spending is not increased’ (p.81).

An inability to recognise this fact (compounded by a general adherence to the mistaken view that banks can create vast multiples of credit from a single deposit base) meant that Friedman’s ‘monetarism’ amounted to little more than the advocacy of a discredited economic theory with predictably disastrous results.

Legacy

The modern legacy of Milton Friedman is not a strong one. Where free-market solutions to problems are not in open retreat, they are being questioned with renewed vigour and ‘monetarism’ has deservedly died something of a death, even among many of its previous adherents. And while Friedman hugely exaggerated the role governments have played in market failures such as economic slumps (his book A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 being something of a case in point) where he was right – with inflation being a government-promoted monetary phenomenon – it was not always for the right reasons.

In most developed countries the creeping inflation of the currency that started at the time of the Second World War is still with us, partly because Friedman’s ‘monetarism’ ended up obscuring the issue. The amount of currency in circulation in the UK in 1938 was under £600 million, now it is around £45,000 million having steadily increased year-on-year, being far in excess of what is actually required for production and trade. The result is that the price level has risen every single year since and – despite the current downward pressure on many prices caused by world competition – continues to do so. And capitalism’s other attendant social and economic problems are still with us as they always are, whether there is inflation or not.

Seen in this light, Professor Friedman’s most important interventions verged between the disastrous and the useless. In promoting a free-market dogma which refuses, against all the evidence, to countenance the fact that there is something intrinsically wrong with the capitalist system of production for profit he was seriously misguided; furthermore, in effectively resurrecting the formerly discredited ‘bank deposit theory of prices’ he did little but add further confusion on the principal issue that made his name.

In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Little did they probably suspect at the time that it was for breathing life into two economic corpses that would have been better left dead and buried.

DAP