An Open Letter to Russell Brand (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

On his book, “Revolution”, Century, 2014

First, how do I come to be reading your book, Revolution? I have spent the past thirty years arguing the point whenever and however I could, that world capitalism has to be ended. Not just in its most excessive manifestations, not just when it is run for private corporations and shareholders as opposed to state bureaucracies, but in every conceivable form it might take. How can you tell if the system in operation is capitalism? With a simple check-list. Employment – the exploitation of employees (French for the ‘used’) by employers (users) via the legalised robbery of the wages system. The market; in other words, the buying and selling of things which could instead now be created in such abundance that they could be taken freely by anyone in the global population, without the need for any system of money, vouchers, tokens, barter or trade of any kind whatsoever. Also, state power: governments, armies, police, who enforce the class rule by a tiny fraction of the population who own and control all productive resources.

Your book is disarmingly honest about your past, your faults, your flaws, thought processes, previous ambitions and resulting disillusion, the sources of your unhappiness, your latest hopes and desires, your continuing self-doubt, your determination to continue speaking and writing uncompromisingly and unashamedly what you believe to be true, and your refusal to give in to the pressure from snobs and hypocrites. These are people who have often attempted to silence your expression by mocking almost everything about you from your accent to your origins, your supposed lack of education, your poverty, your wealth, your hair, your profession – and, when all else fails, by misquoting, misrepresenting and distorting the ideas you express.

I hope it will make a refreshing change to have it suggested that, far from advocating the impossible or going beyond the thinkable, rather that you need to go one step further by demanding the so-called ‘impossible’. Your book is a brave step in promoting discussion of revolution to end the capitalist system we have throughout the world today. You make several cogent and absolutely essential points which are not only true, they cry out to be endorsed and adopted by the thousands who have already read your book – and the millions of others who would relate to so much of it. Points such as:

1. Do not vote – IF there is nothing worth voting for. Do not feel obliged to give moral and practical consent to the status quo by endorsing it, through voting into power one of several parties, each of which are openly pledged to defending, running and upholding that status quo in one form or another. Most of your opponents in the wake of that Paxman interview conveniently ignored the second half of this proposition, pretending that you had some kind of bizarre antipathy to the concept of voting, under any circumstances. More heinous still was their subtle exclusion of even the possibility of allowing a different way of running society: ‘you have Labour, Tory, Liberals. Lots of ways of running Capitalism. What more do you want? Now get out there and vote for one of those! And be damn grateful for having this wonderful choice once every five years!’ runs their mantra.

2.  Global society is currently organised in a way which is designed purely to benefit a tiny (even less than one percent) minority, who have unfathomable wealth and power, who own and control the Earth and its resources – and who in doing so are depriving the 99 percent of access to the riches and comforts those resources have to offer us all. This is an insane, anti-social, irrational, illogical, unacceptable premise and starting point on which to found our global society. It is therefore urgently in our interests as that majority to end that regime completely and utterly, now. Another word for such a huge and urgent change in the way society is run is revolution, so clearly the fact that this is needed is beyond dispute.

3. There are many ways in which the present organisation of society like a vast prison camp (disguised as a holiday camp) causes unhappiness, suffering and distress – way beyond the crudely economic aspects of poverty, crucial and painful though those are too. Terms like alienation, epidemics like addiction are easy to dismiss as in the first case abstract waffle and in the second a poor choice made by (millions of) individuals. However, these are in fact very real, almost universal side-effects of the global social system we have. Indeed, for many people in the huge cities of the more ’developed’ parts of the world – like London or New York – these are some of the most powerful prompts which drive many of us to question the way society is currently structured. The one percent are devoted to maximising the surplus they extract from the work of the rest of us, and this in turn depends on them maintaining a certain social landscape, the consumer culture, the stifling of true dissent, the separation of people from one another and from themselves.

As your book progresses, you draw on input from a variety of activists and social thinkers. Some are more credible than others. One of the more compelling is Naomi Klein, with her brilliant expose of the stark choice now forced on us, between saving capitalism and saving the planet as a viable ecosystem or human habitat, and she shows incontrovertibly how incompatible the two are.

In eventually sketching a plurality of ‘alternatives’ , however, you may be unwittingly over-complicating the situation. There are not ‘loads’ of alternatives; the one key issue causing all significant social problems is the way we organise society – the system of minority ownership and production for profit. The solution, the one solution, to this is therefore common ownership and production for use. That means no money, banks, finance  – and no ‘co-operatives’ selling goods in the market. Free access to all, for all! From each according to ability, to each according to need  – one worldwide co-operative society, no buying and selling.

Some notes you quote about the virtues of co-ops mention ‘raising capital’, ‘job opportunities’ and making agreements with governments. But the revolution to get rid of capitalism has to mean getting rid of capital, government, finance, money, ‘jobs’ – all parts of the capitalist way of running world society. Of course, on paper, the idea of having thousands of autonomous co-operatives, each run democratically within itself, and engaging fairly with all the other units sounds a lot more just and pleasant than the current control of the world, its resources and its population by a tiny, powerful minority of less than one percent of the population. But if we are talking about ending that, then let’s end it. All these models and reforms are variations on the market system which, if ever pursued, would inevitably lead us eventually back to where we started. The solution is for us to withdraw our consent from capitalism, as you say – but to create instead a society without ownership, in which the whole world and all its resources becomes the common heritage of all humanity.

Of course, this necessitates all of the democratic aspects of administration which you touch on, local, regional and continental, but the key point is that these are ways for the world’s population to run a planet no longer divided into owners and non-owners. In the model of separate co-ops which you settle on at the end of the journey in your book, you do not go far enough – after all, if each co-op autonomously owns its resources then those outside that co-op are still alienated from the resources in it. You still then have money, trade, competition, separation  – and the certainty of corruption, accumulation and minority power again flourishing.

You emphasise your belief in God. Connecting with our true selves and connecting with one another are positive parts of the revolutionary ending of property-based society. Belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent force outside of ourselves is significantly less helpful in creating the freedom from oppression to which we aspire. On this I would be more inclined toward the healthy cynicism of the late, great American comedian George Carlin:

‘I've begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.’

You rightly describe as mere ‘pipsqueak reformism’ the Swedish workers’ shares schemes (which in fact are a means of co-opting the impoverished majority into supervising our own exploitation). In one of your final chapters, you then make a list of demands which includes, for example, ‘State power to dissolve wherever possible to empower autonomous, democratic communities.’ Wherever possible? Although I have no doubt of your sincerity in sketching possibilities for what we construct in place of the wretched system we currently have, I would strongly urge you to reconsider the wisdom of listing multiple ‘realistic’ steps as the culmination of a book so rich in its often poetic damning of current social relations. The biggest tragedy in history, already played out myriad times, is this lowering of expectations as the first slippery slope back to cynicism and misery.

I recognise the courage and honesty with which you have put yourself on the line, derided your own celebrity status, taken on Paxman and others and often left them in gibbering defensiveness. Your regular podcasts, “The Trews” are a welcome window into reality without the twisting and obfuscation, the bullshit mediation of the media. In many ways it has been a breath of fresh air to see those hilarious and perceptive insights into the madness of capitalism viewed regularly by hundreds of thousands of people.

Let’s now take the next logical step and build a majority movement committed to the complete ending of capitalism, in all of its forms, with all of its trappings, and nothing less. On page 297 of your book you slightly misquote Marx in a way which could be significant. You say ‘From each according to his means, to each according to his needs’. On Twitter last year, however, you correctly quoted it as ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs’. It was never about redistributing money, but abolishing it – and Marx’s slogan is even more relevant today than it was 150 years ago.

Clifford Slapper

Mixed Media: British Folk Art (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Folk Art at Tate Britain, London this year was a rare exhibition of working class and artisan art from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth century when folk art would become a commodity, and too self-conscious. Jane Kallir in 1982 defined folk art as 'everything that everybody always thought was not art before the modernist revolution at the turn of the century.' Bourgeois condescension labelled such art as 'peasant art' or 'vernacular creativity', and it was such art and crafts that were deliberately excluded from the Royal Academy of Art when it was established in 1769.

The exhibition includes giant trade signs when shops and businesses hung painted or carved signs in the street outside to advertise their goods or services at the time of the 'golden age of trade signs' which lasted from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Notable examples are Scotsman tobacconist shop figure (1812) in a 1934 photograph of 37 London Street, Norwich, and Highlander tobacconist shop figure (c. 1866-1900). The rise of Glasgow as Britain's leading port dealing with tobacco in the mid 1700s explains the association with a highlander. There are examples of the Blackamoor tobacconist shop figure (1700s) which signified exoticism and cultural difference. 'Blackamoor' was a variant on 'Black Moor', a dark-skinned African from North Africa.

These artisan trade signs are from the early days of capitalism when a shop had a merchant's counter, and there was social interaction between the merchant and the customer. This was the time of the Petty Bourgeoisie, the owners of small stores, 'the small trades-people, shopkeepers' who worked alongside their employees. The Petty Bourgeois 'as owner of the means of production he is a capitalist; as a labourer he is his own wage-labourer' (Marx). This was the early days of retailing before bourgeois notions of refinement and good taste, mass production and supermarkets and 'the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois.' During the 1871 Paris Commune the shopkeepers set a good example by siding with the working class.

Rural Art is represented by The Four Alls, a popular pub sign found particularly in the West Country and Wales which was described as 'a country sign' in 1785. This example is from Caernarvonshire c. 1850 with the four figures representing 'I Govern All, I Pray For All, I Fight For All, I Pay For All', the last a John Bull character of yeoman country stock, stolid, stocky, the heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman. George Smart was a tailor in Frant near Tunbridge Wells who painted The Earth Stopper c. 1835. In this a male figure jumps in fright from his horse at night in a country lane by the shock of what he takes to be the Devil, who is in fact the Earth Stopper having stopped up the fox's earth while he is out feeding prior to the next day's hunt. The Rampton 1800s painted wood 'All vagrants who are seen begging in this town will be apprehended and punished as the laws directs' is a salutary reminder that the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable. This was remedied by the consolidation of the institution of the Workhouse ('bastilles of the proletariat') in the 1834 Poor Law Act. The triumph of the bourgeois class in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn Laws would mean small, under-capitalised farmers were squeezed out by low prices and inability to increase production.

Mid-nineteenth century working class sports are represented in several oils by anonymous worker-artists. Boxers (c 1850) portrays the pugilist world of the bare-knuckle London Prize Ring Rules, pre-Marquess of Queensbury, and is reminiscent of the boxing scene in Richard Lester's 1975 film of George MacDonald Fraser's Royal Flash with Henry Cooper as John Gully, prize fighter and MP. Bear Baiting (c.1830s) and Champion Ratcatcher (c.1840) portray the popular sports of the period. The 1835 and 1849 Cruelty to Animals Acts prohibited bear-baiting and cock-fighting but rat catching or 'ratting' was not enforced, and became a very popular sport (London had 70 ratting pits). A dog, usually a terrier would be let loose on a rabble of rats in a round or square pit set up at a pub. Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851) described 'brightly lit ratting pits with high wooden rims' and 'that these vermin are becoming a trade commodity.'

A room is dominated by the HMS Calcutta figurehead from the Royal Navy ship launched in 1831 in Bombay. HMS Calcutta saw action in the blockade of Russian ports in the Gulf of Finland in the Crimean War, and in the Second Opium War against the Qing Dynasty of China when the British Empire sought to legalise the opium trade, expand 'coolie' (indentured labour) trade and open China to British capitalism.

British Folk Art is a refreshing working class antidote to bourgeois sycophancy such as the Queen's Gallery exhibition The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy 1714-60 which 'explores royal patronage and taste.'

Steve Clayton

Too Many People or Not Enough Food Production? (2012)

From the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 31 October the world’s population was said to have reached 7 billion. Would this be a problem in socialism?

The Twentieth Century saw the biggest population increase in human history. This was due in some part to medical advances which lessened the death rate in many countries and to the increase in agricultural productivity attributed to the green revolution. However the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) considers the perceptions of a continuing population explosion to be false. World population is expected to go on rising but less rapidly than it has been. The birth rate even in poor countries has been falling (for example in Bangladesh where women are on average having three children where their mothers were having six). Annual births in the world have levelled at about 134 million per year since their peak at 163 million in the late 1990s. However, as births still outnumber deaths, the world’s population is expected to reach nine billion between 2040 and 2050. A UN projection suggests that after peaking in 2050 the figure for total population could start falling.

There are debates about the numbers of people the Earth could support. An extravagant example was given in 1967 by Professor Colin Clark who worked out each person’s land requirement for American-type food consumption.  Taking world resources of agricultural land at “10.7 billion hectares of standard land equivalent,” he concluded that this could feed 47 billion people at “maximum standards”. He also estimated a much higher level on a subsistence diet (Population Growth and Land Use, p. 153). The possibility of feeding an estimated figure of between 30 and 35 billion people “with existing technology, assuming it was properly deployed” was attributed to the FAO by Prof. Samuel Preston in a Horizon programme in June 1992 (transcript p.8)

While such projections may serve as a useful contribution to the argument that the size of the population is not the reason people are malnourished, we must not appear to be complacent as to how needs can be met: ‘We are already eating into our capital, collectively consuming the renewable resources of 1.5 planets’ (populationmatters.org).  The best prospects lie with a change to common ownership and democratic control but this also means making plausible suggestions which do not assume socialism as a magic panacea.

Enough
According to the FAO, detailed analysis shows that “globally, there is enough land, soil and water, and enough potential for further growth in yields, to make the necessary [increase in] production feasible.” However, the policy environment has to be favourable to agriculture to make “feasible” become “actual” (World Agriculture: Towards 2015/2030 Summary Report 2003). The report also acknowledges that globally the likelihood is that producers will continue to satisfy “effective” market demand but that this does not help the millions of people who lack the money to buy or the resources to produce what they need for themselves.
 
The summary report also gives reasons for expecting the demand for agricultural products to continue to grow but more slowly. It attributes this to the less rapid rise of the world population, and to a rising proportion of the world population having reached “fairly high levels” of food consumption.

It gives the example of China where by 1997-99 the average daily food consumption had reached 3,040 kcal – only 10 percent short of the level in industrial countries. The aggregate food consumption is expected to grow in the next three decades but at only a quarter of the rate seen in the previous three decades, and though the population is also expected to grow during the same period this will be at only a third of the rate of the previous three decades. By contrast there is considerable scope for increase in food consumption in India but, unlike China where the demand for meat has been part of increased food consumption, the cultural traditions favour vegetable diet. A 2006 Interim Report based on UN data and projections also sees indications for a “rather drastic slowdown in world demographic growth” in prospect. The fact remains that in the coming decades food supplies must and will be increased. However, as the FAO admits, if it is within a system of market production, this will still leave millions of people too poor to have secure access to food. A different scenario emerges when market production is replaced with a system where food is grown and processed simply to be eaten.
 
More land resources are available. For example, Brazil has more spare farmland than any other country, at least 300million hectares. Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the amount of land under cultivation by a third, not in Amazonia, but mostly in the cerrado, an area previously thought to be unfit for agriculture being too acidic. The various methods used have included adding up to five tonnes of lime per hectare, no-till agriculture, and growing soybeans - not formerly a tropical crop.  Cross breeding with a variety of grass brought from Africa has also been used to produce a new variety of higher-yielding grass feed so that the amount of pasture has been extended – likewise the beef herd. Needless to say, the main purpose of this increased production is sale and profit including the export of palm oil.

The success achieved in the savannah of the cerrado in Brazil and elsewhere has encouraged the investigation of land with similar problems in other regions. Attention is turning to Africa as having an “abundance of natural resources including water” but very unevenly distributed. The FAO estimates that there are more than 700 million hectares of potential additional land available for cultivation in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Guinea Savannah region – an area twice as large as that currently planted to wheat worldwide – only 10 percent of some 600 million hectares of potentially cultivatable land is currently farmed. (FAO Media Centre: 2050 2009)

Land grabs
In recent years a scramble for land has developed involving some 7.6 million hectares worldwide. This “agri-colonial” acquisition of land means an expansion in production and shows what could be done if the only intention were to feed people. However, the aim is profit and not the meeting of needs. Many hectares of the land acquired are not intended for growing food but crops for biofuel. It was reported in 2009 that a former Wall Street banker had acquired 400,000 hectares of fertile ground in Southern Sudan from a local war lord – with the aim of looking for oil and uranium. Local people lose out in these land deals.
 
Much of the land grab is taking place in Africa, in Ethiopia,, for example, where the process is encouraged by the government with advertising which includes, “vast fertile, irrigable land at low rent” and “cheap labour” (Irish Times 30 January 2010). Sai Karaturi, a Bangalore businessman and one of the world’s biggest private landowners, has acquired a 50-year lease for 300,000 hectares in Gambella – Ethiopia’s western tip – to farm crops of maize, wheat and rice. Though it was reported in May 2011 that the Ethiopian Government has now reduced the concession by two-thirds, partly to allow for the migration of antelope (Businessweek 18 May). The same report mentioned criticism of Ethiopia’s policy of renting land cheaply to foreign investors to grow cash crops while 13 percent of its 80 million people rely on food aid and domestic farmers are being dispossessed. Investors include companies from India, China, and Saudi Arabia as well as from Ethiopia.
 
Cash crops
Crops are grown for sale, but the term “cash crops” refers to the need of developing countries to export in order to get foreign exchange. Fresh and processed fruit, and vegetables, fish, spices, nuts and flowers account for half of farm exports from developing countries and are overtaking coffee, tea and rice. In 2003-4 these exports were worth $106 billion.

Perhaps the most obvious cash crop which could be abandoned in favour of food production and without affecting anyone’s diet is flowers. Bangalore businessman Sai Karaturi – through Karaturi Global, an Indian company and the world’s largest producer of roses – has flower farms in both Kenya and Ethiopia producing 1.5 million rose stems daily for European markets (The East African 14 July 2008). Only 40 percent of the flower farms in Ethiopia are owned by Ethiopians. Power cuts could be a problem for flower growers there, but power is guaranteed to flower farms, which are given priority over other businesses including manufacturers of porridge and feeding paste for malnourished children. In Kenya, ranks of greenhouses and fields are devoted to producing flowers as well as high value crops such as green beans and peas for European consumers. In Columbia, millions of roses are grown for Valentines Day bouquets. Drought and a drop in the market affected the flower growers in 2009 especially in Uganda.

So, while reports warning about food supplies continue, population growth is not the problem that it is suggested to be: the rate of population growth has slowed, and although there will still be a sizable increase in population in the coming decades and a need to increase food production, there is the potential to increase the amount of land under cultivation, which a socialist society freed from production for profit will permit.

Pat Deutz

Telling it like it wasn't (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike Back by Ernie Roberts (Published by the author 1994)

The only thing of interest in this autobiography of a long-standing supporter of state-capitalist Russia who was an Assistant General Secretary of the AEU for twenty years and Labour MP for Hackney North from 1979 to 1987 is the following lying attack on the Socialist Party. It refers to an incident that allegedly took place in a Coventry factory about 1940:

"Armstrong-Whitworth had always been a well-organised factory, and as a result, wages and conditions there were among the best in the city. A small group of men - about ten in all - steadfastly refused to join the union. Not because they were anti-Socialist, but because they were members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was firmly anti-union. They claimed that trade union leaders were the lieutenants of capitalism - saddling the workers so that the boss could ride them better. Finally, the other workers decided to take some action against the SPGB members for breaking the closed shop, and they approached their shop stewards with the problem. The solution was a fairly amicable one: the non-union men agreed that they would pay a contribution equivalent to their union subscription to a charity of their choice, so that there could be no question of their opting out of membership for financial reasons, and the rest of the shop then let them hold on to their anti-union principles in peace" (pp. 32-33).

Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB knows this can't be true. The SPGB was founded by workers who were active members of their unions, particularly in the building trade. When the issue of the Party's attitude to the existing pure-and-simple, "reformist" trade unions came up soon after the Party was founded in 1904, the policy of opposing them by trying to set up rival "revolutionary" unions were rejected in favour of working within them to defend the workers' day-to-day interests at work within capitalism. Ever since Socialist Party members have been active in various trade unions, including the AEU.

It is possible that Roberts is referring to an incident, involving members of the old SLP, but the fact that he associates it with the SPGB reflects the influence of the now defunct Communist Party (of which he was first a member and then a fellow traveller) which always used to spread the lie that we were "anti-union".

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Value and Surplus Value (2012)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

People write the strangest things. Here, for instance, is John Lanchester in an essay ‘Marx at 193’ in the London Review of Books (5 April):

“In Marx’s judgement surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing.”

While Marx did say that the extraction of surplus value is the basis of capitalism and that all value is created by labour, he did not say that all value is “surplus value”. Only some value is.

In the process of capitalist production, according to Marx, the workers, through the exercise of their mental and physical energies (their ‘labour-power’), transfer to the product the previously existing value embodied in the raw materials, energy, wear and tear of machines and the like. At the same time they create new value. A part of this, corresponding to the value of their labour-power, returns to them as wages; the rest, over and above this, is appropriated by their employer as “surplus value”.

That Lanchester’s statement, “all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour” is not just bad wording becomes clear when he goes on to write of Marx’s “surplus theory of value” rather than of his “theory of surplus value”. This leads him to bandy about the term “surplus value” in bizarre ways. According to him, you can create surplus value for yourself, and, as a customer or client of a company, you create surplus value for that company when it makes you book online or deal with a phone menu. This has nothing to do with Marx’s use of the term.

While Marx thought that all value was created by labour, he did not think that all work created value. Products only acquire value when they are produced for sale on a market (as ‘commodities’). This was expressed, when they were bought and sold, as their ‘exchange value’ (in money terms, price). In fact, for Marx, it was only through exchange value that a commodity’s value can be expressed.

Products not produced for sale do not have a value even though they are products of work. They are simply products, useful things that people have made to use. Before capitalism, most products were produced to be used directly and not for sale. Even today under capitalism, there is work that does not produce value. Housework doesn’t, nor does DIY or gardening. To say that such work does not produce value is not to say that it is worthless. On the contrary, most of it is very worthwhile. It is just that it does not produce ‘value’. Work in socialism won’t either as it won‘t be producing things for sale.

Even when there is production for sale not all work produces value. According to Marx, only labour that is ‘socially necessary’ does that, by which he meant the time which it takes a worker of average skill to produce a particular product. Otherwise, the slower workers worked the more value they would create.

For Marx, the value of a commodity was determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour embodied in it from start to finish, i.e., not just the labour at the final stage, but also all the labour at previous stages right back to extracting the raw materials from nature.

Marx did not think that under capitalism commodities actually exchanged at their value. He explained in Volume III of Capital that, due to the averaging of the rate of profit, goods sold at what he called their ‘price of production’ (cost + the average rate of profit). So Marx’s theory of value is not a theory of price, but rather an explanatory tool to understand the working of the capitalist system as a whole.

Part of the union (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1980s by Ken Fuller (Lawrence & Wishart.)

One of the myths about the Socialist Party, perpetuated mainly by historians sympathetic to the Labour Party or the now-defunct Communist Party, is that we are opposed to trade union activity (see review of Ernie Roberts's book p21). But the fact is that there are few unions, in the London area at least, whose history would not have to include, if only in a footnote, a reference to the role played by Socialist Party members. 

The London busworkers are a case in point. SPGB members played so prominent a role here that in this fascinating and readable book even a sympathiser of the defunct Communist Party such as Ken Fuller has had to face what for him must have been an unpalatable fact.

In 1913 previously existing unions for busmen and cabdrivers (who were in a similar position through having to hold a licence to do their jobs) amalgamated to found the London and Provincial Union of Licensed Vehicle Workers (LPU). This was a militant union whose constitution allowed the members a large degree of control over policy (officials and organisers were subject to regular election and re-election, and all members had a right to attend the meetings of the union's Executive Committee). A number of SPGB members were active in this union, including the E. Fairbrother mentioned by Fuller of pages 39 and 40 (he had been a founder member of the SPGB) and George Bellingham, who served on the LPU  executive for a while and was also one of its organisers till it amalgamated with the other unions in 1921 to form the Transport and General Workers Union (Socialist Standard, June 1938).

The London busworkers, as the title of Fuller's book indicates, were a relatively privileged group within the working class, enjoying more job security and higher wages than most other workers. The TGWU's policy was to bring its other members, tramworkers for instance, up to their level, even if tis meant not using the busworkers' full strength to get the best deal possible for busworkers.

Under these circumstances tensions developed between the busworkers and the TGWU leadership. A Busmen's Rank and File Movement (RFM) was formed in 1932, mainly on the initiative of Communist Party members (whose anti-"reformist"-union line had been changed by Moscow earlier that year); mainly but not exclusively since the man who was elected chairman was Frank Snelling, described by Fuller as "a member of the anti-Communist Socialist Party of Great Britain"  (p. 111).

Within the TGWU the London busmen had an elected Central Bus Committee. In the 1933 elections the RFM assumed control of this body. Snelling became the chairman, a post he occupied until after the 1937 Coronation bus strike, which was defeated largely due to the strikers being stabbed in the back by the TGWU leader Ernest Bevin.

The result was the demise of the RFM and, in 1938, the formation of a breakaway union, the National Passenger Workers Union, by some of the non-CP members of the old RFM and Central Bus Commitee (CP members were under instructions to stay in the TGWU). Snelling became one of the officials of this union which survived until after the war when it was squeezed out by a closed-shop agreement between the TGWU and the London Passenger Transport Board.

The NPWU revived the old LPU practice of electing officials and organisers - in contrast to the TGWU where they were, and still are, appointed from above - and adopted a non-political stance (i.e. didn't support the Labour Party). In 1943 it was to be denounced by the Communist Party as "a hotbed of every kind of anti-working class politics - SPGB members (who believe the fight for Socialism is hopeless till every worker is a 'Marxist'), ILP-ers, Trotskyists" (Socialist Standard, August 1943).

The existence of this breakaway union posed a bit of a dilemma for the Socialist Party and in June 1938 a meeting was organised by our Lewisham branch in which two busworker members, Snelling and Bill Waters (who had chosen to stay in the TGWU) debated the issue. The debate was attended by many local busworkers and was reported in the local press (Fuller, pages 166-7). The position eventually adopted was that SPGB members were left to decide for themselves which particular union they joined.

Both Snelling and Waters reappear after the war. Snelling as the national organiser of another breakway from the TGWU, the National Union of Port Workers (Socialist Standard, October 1946) and Waters as a founding member of an unofficial busworkers' journal The Platform that appeared between 1950 and 1967 (see Fuller, page 199). Waters was also a regular writer in the Socialist Standard on busworkers' problems (his February 1949 article is quoted by Fuller).

The Platform was edited, under the name George Moore, by George Renshaw who before the war had been the London Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party but who by this time had left the CP; Waters, in fact, went on record as stating that Renshaw was a sympathiser of the Socialist Party (Socialist Standard, June 1968).

Adam Buick

Confusion About Class (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gorän Therborn, Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, is known for his writings on 'post-Marxism,' notably his 1980 book, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, where he reflects on the writings of Louis Althusser, and then describes the 'ideological constitution of classes' and the relationships between ideology, political power and social change.

In his 25-page essay, Class in the 21^st Century (New Left Review 78, Nov/Dec 2012), Therborn describes the twentieth century as ‘clearly the age of the working class,’ stating that ‘working people who lacked property became a major and sustained political force’ but ‘the working-class century no doubt ended in defeat, disillusion and disenchantment, it also left behind enduring achievements’.

From a Marxist perspective, this survey of the twentieth century is open to criticism. Primarily, the fact remains that the capitalist class in the West were never removed from political power. In Russia, China, and Cuba, a Leninist 'vanguard' party bureaucratic class operated a state capitalist system of production and the working class continued to have their surplus value stolen from them. Reforms in the West to capitalism in the 20^th century that could be said to have benefited the working class like the introduction of the Welfare State in Britain are also open to question. So-called 'achievements' like full employment, economic policies in the Keynesian mould adopted after 1945, state capitalist 'nationalisations' of major industries, legislation to protect collective bargaining and industrial action have all been reversed after world capitalist production went into crisis in the 1970s and the global capitalist class adopted a more unfettered form of capitalism in order to shore up profits.

Therborn discusses the working class and political power in the context of capitalist society but never acknowledges the need for the ‘overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, and conquest of political power by the proletariat’. There is no talk of abolishing capitalism, ending the wages system and transforming world capitalist society into global socialism.

He writes of the ‘Social Democratic labour movement’, ‘the reformist wing of 20th century labour’, ‘modern, centre-left social democracy’ and ‘Communist parties or their descendants’ as the sources of the 'achievements' of the past and claims that they have left ‘progressive legacies’ for the 21^st century. Therborn feels ‘whatever may be said about the ruthless authoritarianism of its leaders, the Communist movement produced an extraordinary number of self-sacrificing, dedicated militants in every corner of the world. Their adulation of Stalin or Mao was wrong-headed, but very often they were the best - sometimes the only – friends of the poor and the downtrodden. This everyday commitment demands the respect of all progressives’.

That's as may be, but Therborn admires leftist leaders and organisations such as Castro, Chavez, and ‘Morales and his coca growers with a spine of disciplined cadres’. He appears committed to a belief in leftist political organisation and leadership as formulated by Lenin. Therborn writes that ‘the October Revolution provided a model of political organisation’. Lenin wrote ‘that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness’, and argued that class-consciousness had to be brought to the working class ‘from without’ by professional revolutionaries organised as a vanguard leading the working class to ‘socialism’. Therborn does not speak of socialism; it is always about reforms in the interests of the working class in capitalism. One is again reminded of Lenin who argued that 'socialism' is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism in which ‘there still remains the need for a state’ and a money economy. Lenin emphasised the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which would become the 'dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat'. According to Lenin: ‘It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!’ The theory of ‘socialism’ as a transitional society is an apology for state capitalism.

Therborn writes that ‘the persistence of Communist-led states after 1989-91 means that a socialist option remains open to some degree’ which clearly establishes that Therborn believes China under Mao was a 'socialist' society.

Leftist and Leninist political parties and governments have not abolished capitalism, do not promote socialism and do not agree that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’. Therborn believes that in Latin America ‘socialism is on the agenda’ with ‘left-of-centre governments’ but Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela are 'state capitalist' economies.

Therborn sees the 21st century as heralding ‘the return of class as an ever-more powerful determinant of inequality,’ but Marxists argue that class never went away. He points correctly to the development of capitalism in China, India and Brazil as being of importance and that ‘the emergence of a powerful movement based on this proletariat would have a tremendous impact,’ although he concludes that a ‘political transformation spearheaded by working-class parties seems even more improbable – whether they are reformist or revolutionary in character’. But Therborn does say that ‘For a new left to have true global significance, deeper roots will have to be dug in Asia.’

Therborn says ‘the liberal media looks to an ascendant middle class as the vanguard of democratic reform’. He believes that the 21^st century will be ‘the age of the global middle class. The workers of the last century are banished from memory; a project of universal emancipation led by the proletariat is replaced by universal aspiration to middle-class status’.  Progress, he thinks ‘is likely to be driven by the hopes and resentments of the middle class’ and ‘workers and the popular classes in all their diversity – the plebeians, rather than the proletariat’. Here, Therborn appears to be using definitions of social class from Ancient Rome: the plebeians were a class below the patrician landowners but above the 'capite censi' of the proletariat, and so they are akin to a modern 'middle class' or petty bourgeoisie. But later Therborn confusingly distinguishes between ‘the new middle class, or the plebeian masses’. He sees that in ‘a confrontation between the rich and the rest, with the middle class playing an important role among the latter’.

Marxists argue that the 'middle class' is part of the proletariat, the working class, ‘who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live’. The 'middle class' are excluded from ownership of the means of production, sell their mental power, and so form part of the working class too.

The world in the 21^st century needs global socialism which is ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.

Steve Clayton

Material World: Dying to Migrate (2014)

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

Migrants, hoping to find a better life, face death during various stages of their journey, and with destination in sight, face the possibility of being picked up by border guards, detained indefinitely and in most cases deported back to their homeland. Those lucky enough to avoid death or capture then enter into a world of uncertainty, where they are likely to work in low-wage labour, forming an under-class of Europe and North America. People who have risked everything to escape the dire life that they were born into will not be dissuaded by the threat of death or detention and deportation.

It is only going to get worse as the effects of climate change are already impacting upon the growing migration trends. 2.8 million people are struggling to feed themselves in a drought-prone area shared by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, according to the UN World Food Programme. The Red Cross said some 571,710 people were affected by the drought in Honduras and that '...families are selling their belongings and livestock to secure food for survival, while others are migrating to escape the effects of the drought.' Researchers believe drought, amplified by deforestation, was a key factor in the collapse of the Mayan empire around 950 C.E.

When the UK Government announced they will not support any future search and rescue operations to prevent migrants and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, responded:

‘Governments that do not support the search and rescue efforts have reduced themselves to the same level as the smugglers. They are preying on the precariousness of the migrants and asylum seekers, robbing them of their dignity and playing with their lives.'

He went on to say: 'Migrants are human beings and just like the rest of us they too have rights. They too have the right to live and thrive. To bank on the rise in the number of dead migrants to act as deterrence for future migrants and asylum seekers is appalling. It’s like saying, let them die because this is a good deterrence.'

He cast doubt upon its deterrence 'Sealing international borders is impossible, and migrants will continue arriving despite all efforts to stop them, at a terrible cost in lives and suffering.' (www.scoop.co.nz/stories, 31 October).

This view has been supported by Italy’s Admiral Filippo Foffi who dismissed the idea that having a rescue system ‘Mare Nostrum’ for migrants in place has created a pull factor: 'If someone is talking about pull factors, he simply doesn’t know what he is speaking about,' he said, adding that that many refugees’ journeys start more than three months before they make it to the shores of Libya and northern Africa with the majority enduring hardships that meant an estimated half die before reaching the coast (Guardian, 29 October).

America’s war on illegal immigration with its higher, longer fences and intensified border patrol surveillance merely provides business for the people smugglers. Peter Andreas in his 2001 study, 'Border Games', pointed out that reliance on human traffickers emerged only in response to the US government’s border build-up in the 1990s, and not a product of porous borders where people would just walk across on their own and not bother with procuring the services of a smuggler. In 2005, Phil Marshall and Susu Thatunon on the basis of their extensive study of anti-trafficking experience in the six-nation SE-Asia region explained 'tighter border controls exacerbate trafficking...' (Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered).

No matter their reason for leaving the country of their birth, as an asylum seeker or as an economic refugee, record numbers are dying in this process. Yet their deaths and desperation receive muted responses from the politicians who prefer to whinge about how migrants are scrounging from the welfare state, despite the fact that the vast majority of people move home to work and not claim benefits.

For millennia there were no borders, nor countries or nationalities - people wandered freely over the planet. Who are we, each one of us, if not a mongrel species of mixed ethnicities? It's long past time to recognise our common heritage globally and work for a world shared in common. The rich, including African oligarchs, can as always live anywhere they choose (Guardian, 26 October).

ALJO

Horrors of Vietnam (1979)

Film Review from the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Deer Hunter

This is a haunting film, of great emotional intensity, with little relief. The story begins in a Pennsylvanian steel town—a hell-hole of heat and noise and smoke. There, in impossible conditions, the three young men who are conscripted to fight in Vietnam work—and when they leave work it is to live under the very shadows of the mills.

Their recreation is juvenile; stalking and killing deer, getting riotously drunk, playing worship to a shocked soldier home from the war. Before they get to Vietnam it seems an exciting adventure, a glorious change from the grinding routine of the furnaces. Once in combat it becomes a nightmare in which all three are destroyed physically or emotionally.

One loses his legs and withdraws into the shell of the Veterans' Hospital where volunteers from the American Legion lay on macabre games of bingo for the limbless. Another is hooked on heroin and dies playing Russian roulette for money in a Saigon casino. The third, the caricature of a hero, comes home in one piece but can no longer relate to his former life. Once the expert deer hunter, when he goes out to hunt again he is so sated with death and pain that he cannot pull the trigger on the animal he has in his sights.

The film has come under heavy criticism, notably from reviewers like John Pilger and other war correspondents who witnessed the fighting. They argue that The Deer Hunter is biased against the Vietcong and shows nothing of the opposition to war in America. (None of which prevented it from winning a number of Oscars!)

There is some force in these criticisms, yet there is no hint in the film that war is anything other than obscene. No better world is promised, to rise from the ashes in Vietnam. The legionnaires in the hospital are shown up as ridiculous, prepared to absorb endless punishment from capitalism. Saigon is depicted as a city where human standards have been crushed by the violence, the cynicism and the rush to make money while the going was good.

Patriotism is made to look futile, out of touch with reality. The final scene, after the funeral of the man who died playing Russian roulette, shows his friends in the shack where he lived, in the middle of the wasteland among the steel mills. It is a ghastly place and they are wretchedly unhappy. Yet their tears are dried as they sing, together, "God Bless America". No patriot could find comfort in that scene—nor, for that matter, could any socialist. We do not look easily at capitalism's vile face.

Proper Gander: Fiscal Exercise (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Considering how important our income is in shaping our life, talking about it can feel more embarrassing than a conversation about genital herpes. Channel 4’s How Rich Are You? aims to encourage some fiscal debate with its mix of interviews, pundits, comments from the studio audience and lots of statistics. Even when jazzed up with flashy graphics, the show’s stats give a depressing picture of our divided society. For example, poorer people die up to 12 years earlier than the rich on average, and just five families have as much wealth as 12 million other people. The widening gap between rich and poor is explained by a tendency for an increasing proportion of wealth to end up as capital rather than being paid as wages. This is illustrated with a replica of a machine built during the 1960s at the London School of Economics, which pushes cold tea through pipes into containers marked ‘taxes’, ‘capital’, ‘labour’ etc to represent how money flows round the economy. While much of this data would benefit from clarification, and terms like ‘rich’ and ‘wealth’ are often left fuzzily defined, the clear message is that the capitalists are still winning the class war. As one member of the audience says, while a minority are laughing their way to the bank, he’s on his way to the food bank.

One of the show’s richer contributors suggests that to get assets, you should ‘get off your fucking arse’, as if that’s how he acquired his inherited booty. As economist Dr Faiza Shaheen points out, effort and talent are less important in determining our income than the circumstances we’re born into. Social mobility has reduced as wealth inequality has increased. So, it’s now harder to break free of the constraining opportunities and life expectancy we grow up with. Dr Shaheen gives plenty of examples of how wealth inequality damages our wellbeing, but her disappointing conclusion is only that too much of a divide hinders capitalist growth. And presenter Richard Bacon’s two-penn’orth is to say that we need some rich people for society to function. Unfortunately, capitalism itself isn’t questioned by those participating in How Rich Are You?, only how it’s administered. Despite this, the programme still reminds us why the system doesn’t work in the interests of the majority.

Mike Foster

Obituary: Vic Heaven (1980)

Obituary from the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over forty years the socialist cause has been kept alive in Bristol by a trio of members with a happy collection of names—Force, Flowers and Heaven. Our small era came to an end when Vic Heaven died on 22 April, aged 81.

Vic joined the army as a boy trumpeter in 1914; political maturity came a decade later. In 1925 he became a socialist and gave his war medals to his children, saying "Here, you can have these begging irons as toys, they're only fit for standing on the pavement with and selling matches". A nice sense of proportion made him keep and cherish the eleven medals he won as an amateur footballer.

Soon after joining the Party he teamed up with a Comrade Howell. Heaven and Howell used to delight in walking around Bristol and calling out to the navvies digging trenches "when are you blokes going to realise that you're being exploited?" The night before Howell died of cancer he threw a party and Vic was pleased to play the piano as Howell sang the Red Flag for the last time.

I first met Vic in 1935, when I was studying for holy orders and was walking through Bristol with my vicar. Heaven was there, selling the Socialist Standard, and he put the case to us. After hearing it, the vicar intoned pompously, "young man, you are 200 years before your time". With his lightning tongue Vic flashed "old man, you are 2,000 years behind the times!" My religious belief evaporated.

Later Vic became a civil servant with the Ministry of Labour, and this cramped his public propaganda work. Nevertheless, he was pleased to have advised every conscript who passed through his department during the second world war of the alternative to fighting for capitalism.

On retirement Vic kept a beautiful cottage garden and, amid the pear trees, he would talk socialism with all his visitors. "The world's first socialist candidate, Clifford Groves" holidayed there; and "Fellow Worker White", so-called because anywhere, and without warning, he would shout "fellow workers!" and gather an audience to hear the socialist case.

Our sympathy and gratitude go to Vic's four daughters, who looked after him in his latter years.

J. Force

Brotherly Love in the U.S.A. (1930)

From the April 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, the author of "Babbitt," "Main Street," and other widely read novels, dealing with life in the U.S.A., was on the spot during the recent embittered struggle between mill-owners and cotton workers at Marion, North Carolina, one of the new industrial areas in the Southern States. He was inspired to write a pamphlet, "Cheap and Contented Labor," in which he tells of some of the incidents of industrial conflict as it is waged in America. It is written in simple, direct language, and is a powerful indictment of the unrestrained brutality of the employing class when they believe their interests to be endangered.

The operatives were on strike for an increase in their wages of 13 dollars a week—a starvation wage at American prices.

No sooner had the workers struck than all the forces of capitalist suppression were turned against them. Armed militia fired upon them on the least provocation. Hospitals refused to tend their sick and wounded. The law courts discounted their evidence, and charges were fabricated in the favour of the employers. Parsons ranted and demanded public whipping posts as a punishment for the "agitators."

General housing and social conditions in Marion are appalling, and call to mind the conditions of the mining and cotton districts of England in the early days of English factory development. Mr. Lewis, who has visited the Lancashire cotton districts, says that the condition of the workers there "is the abomination of desolation," but, he adds, these are "some three or four hundred per cent. superior to those of the workers in Marion." To any who are acquainted with the cotton districts of England such a comparison is enough.

We are also told that the conditions of the mill-workers of Marion are representative of scores of mill towns in America.

However, America still is a land of "prosperity and golden opportunities"—for the Capitalist. For the workers—slavery.

Mr. Lewis wants to abolish this slavery, although in this pamphlet he does not tell us what are his own views on the method of doing it.

H. W.

Dreaming spires and screaming tyres (1991)

From the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A resident of the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford describes the background to the recent riots there.

For a week during the summer Blackbird Leys, a housing estate in Oxford, was catapulted (and I choose that word carefully) to the the forefront of public attention after a sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of violence. Rioting occurred and petrol bombs were thrown when police tried to break up crowds of young people who had come to watch a display of the driving of stolen cars, something of a local pastime. Why did this happen? What is the origin of this conflict with authority in the shape of the police which is such a feature of Blackbird Leys? And why did it erupt on this occasion, as it never had done before, into such open violence?

The violence and conflict was not the product of simple material deprivation; unemployment at 9 percent, but this is not the highest in Oxford. It was more subtle; to do with things which are more intangible; boredom, police insensitivity and the alienation of a whole category of people from mainstream values, opportunities and ideals, and the establishment of a youth culture with its own values which are irreconcilable with the bourgeois values of the wider society.

Blackbird Leys is a large featureless 1960s council estate with a population of around 9,000 which, although it is technically part of the city of Oxford, is attached to the south of Oxford, outside the main Ring Road, in a way which gives it the definite appearance of being an afterthought, something which is artificial and created, not something natural or organic but an excrescence, manufactured to cope with a category of people somehow left out of mainstream society. This feeling of exclusion both physical and social is real and tangible. The actual situation of the estate—you have to go there specially; it is not on the way to anywhere—is mirrored by social exclusion, the feeling of being somehow outside the rest of Oxford and not integrated into the community at large.

The estate itself is oval-shaped and lacks any proper social centre or focus. The nearest thing to this is "the oval"—roads around a rectangular space with trees which functions as a traffic island. It is around this space that most of the driving stolen cars for excitement and danger takes place. The whole estate with its long straight roads is laid out in a way that encourages this joy-riding and speeding. Recently humps that were put in by the City Council to slow traffic down on these long roads have made joy-riding even more exciting and have only served to inconvenience legitimate traffic.

Blackbird Leys was originally built to house Oxford's population overspill and to serve the nearby Cowley car plant, an ambitious programme of public building which one could never imagine happening today. The reality was quite different: it was not built with people and their real needs in mind and was a planning failure. Blackbird Leys is now perceived as an area which is "bad" and which concentrates Oxford City's unwanted into one area, a sort of semi-unofficial social asylum, housing, for example, those with criminal records, and "problem" families. Not surprisingly it also has a high immigrant population. It is also large enough to have its own social differences. Away from the centre are streets of mostly privately-owned houses whereas nearer in and closer to the centre are the more regular and featureless council properties.

Blackbird Leys also borders on to the south Oxfordshire countryside with its picture-postcard villages. Garsington is one of these and is a particularly exclusive small village (exclusive in a real economic sense—it excludes others from participation in its way of life and in its attractiveness) with its beautiful small church, manor-house and thatched cottages. From the centre of Garsington can be seen a swathe of green country which suddenly turns grey and out of which rise tower blocks. The contrast is striking, both between the grey and green and between the life of some and the life of others. From the centre of Blackbird Leys one can see a pleasant green wooded hill which speaks of an otherness to the regularity and featurelessness of the area.

This real sense of difference both from the city and the country only serves to heighten the isolation of the residents. If you have money you can participate in the richness and variety of life, you can live in attractive surroundings, and if you don't you are demeaned and devalued and such things as pleasant surroundings are not seen to matter or to be important—or necessary. These social differences will surely be exacerbated even further by the new development of Greater Leys, a private development starting to enclose Blackbird Leys from the south. This is an estate which is very different, both qualitatively and quantitatively from its larger neighbour. A no-man's-land separates the two and walking across it there is a feeling of stepping from one section of society into another.

Police clampdown
The immediate trigger for the Oxford violence was a long-planned police clampdown on the persistent problem of joy-riding and the opportunity which this gave to frustrated, bored excluded young people in hot weather for a confrontation with authority. By coming in as they did, as a posse, the police made themselves a target for violence and aggression. They were perceived as representing mainstream culture and the interests of the privileged and powerful rather than those of (this particular section of) the working class. Thus they presented a symbol of authority against which the original trouble was a reaction.

This insensitivity made the situation much worse. At the height of the trouble the estate crawled with police spoiling for a row and television camera-crews (I saw some from Germany) and journalists from the national press falling over themselves to film any sign of violence. This turned a fairly small-scale confrontation into one played out for a national and international audience. This, of course, electrified the atmosphere and prolonged the trouble.

Various superficial attempts have been made to improve the situation on the estate. These concern the symptoms but not the underlying disease and, in fact, the situation cannot be resolved within capitalism at all. The wide oval in the centre of the estate where joy-riders do their handbrake turns has been narrowed in a way which has made the featureless, impoverished centre into even more of an eye-sore. The tarmac extensions to the pavements look ugly because no attempt has been made to harmonise them with the existing pavement. Pathetic attempts like this make it more difficult to express the symptoms of the underlying disease, which is capitalism, an economic system, which separates people from each other and makes them compete in a cut-throat way for the necessaries of life; it creates an underclass which never gets a look-in to the better things of life.

What is needed is a wholesale change, a revolution, and end to the misery of private property and the inevitable inequality which goes with it; a new system of society which integrates everyone and distributes its wealth according to the reasonable needs of its members. This new socialist society would abolish at a stroke the problems of deprivation and exclusion of Blackbird Leys and inner-city areas. It would enable the wasted talent of those who are presently excluded on economic grounds from a proper participation in the life of society to be properly developed. The energy squandered on destructive and anti-social pastimes like joy-riding could be put into activities which are more rewarding, fulfilling and socially useful. Young people have much energy, enthusiasm and intelligence and the loss of this is a tragic waste, for society and for those who never fulfil themselves. What is really needed in Oxford is not condemnation from the Home Secretary, nor more police or re-designed pavements but a fundamental change in society.

Iain Jamieson

The Myth of National Characteristics (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

There once was a very bad TV situation comedy called 'Mind Your Language'. The basis of this unfunny comedy was a well-meaning hero teaching an adult night class the English language to a cliché-ridden group of non-English speakers. Stereotypes abounded.

There was the sexually attractive French girl in a short skirt, the randy bottom-pinching Italian, the very proper but dull German and a wide variety of stupid Orientals and Asians. The whole thing was complete nonsense and it says much for the better informed prospective audience that the whole thing sunk without trace after a short run. Although this particular attempt at national characteristics failed the notion that whole groups of people from a particular geographical area are genetically programmed to behave in particularly predictable fashion is very widespread. It would be almost impossible to watch TV or read a newspaper without observing a reference to 'Latin temperament', 'Germanic thoroughness', or even 'American brashness'. In journalism so-called national traits are the norm. In tabloid journalism like theSun or the Daily Mail they are almost mandatory. What lies behind this crass affectation? After all journalists are not stupid and they must recognise the wide variety of human foibles and unique behaviour patterns that exist amongst people. The basis of this pernicious poison lies in the misguided nationalistic aims of the mass media. These means of communications exist not just to sell and make a profit they also have a very important function to perform for the owning class.

It is imperative for the smooth functioning of a class-divided society that the working class imagines that they share a common identity with their exploiters. Thus we have deluded wage slaves on the last night of The Proms puffing out their chests and chanting 'Land of Hope and Glory'. This is a world-wide illusion. BeProud That You Are British or exulting in the American Way of Life are all of a cliched pattern.

It is impossible to imagine how capitalism would function so smoothly without the poison of nationalism. In the event of an economic crisis we must learn to buckle to and beat Johnny Foreigner. In the event of a war we must fight and die for 'our country'. In reality of course the working class have no country. It is an accident which country you were born into - it is probably even an accident that you were born at all. There is nothing to be proud or ashamed of the country you happen to live in. `

So wake up to reality, Bertie Wooster! You are not British. Put your non-existent monocle away and stop sticking out your pinky when having a cup of char. Aunt Agatha isn't going to call shortly.

RD

Cooking the Books: Hard Work, Taxes and Profits (2014)

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

In an article in the Times (30 October) David Cameron pontificated about having a moral duty to reduce taxes:

‘Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward or the classroom.’

The first sentence is not true but the rest is.

As the government as such produces nothing it does have to get all its money from elsewhere. However, it cannot be said that ‘every pound’ comes from ‘private earning’ if by this latter is meant wage and salary earners.

The government’s money comes from two sources: taxes and borrowing. Governments borrow from financial institutions but what these lend it can hardly be described as ‘private earning’. It is money capital accumulated from past profits, i.e., from past ‘unearned income’ (as the Inland Revenue used to call it in the days before spin).

As to taxation, some comes directly from taxes on profits, once again not ‘private earning’ but unearned income. Even the taxes paid by workers fall in the end on employers (though ‘paid’ is probably not the right word here as, with PAYE, workers never see it and what they have to live on is the take-home pay that goes into their bank account). A tax on wages is an indirect tax on profits as it increases the cost of recreating a worker’s labour-power and so what the employer has to pay for it. Economists have long known this but politicians are reluctant to acknowledge this as it blows apart their myth that we are all taxpayers together.

On the other hand, that ‘every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work’ is true. The hard work described by Cameron is the source both of the taxes that ultimately fall on profits on and of the accumulated profits that governments borrow.

So, if there’s any moral duty involved because of the ‘hard work’, it would not be to reduce taxes but to reduce, in fact eliminate, the unpaid hard work of wage and salary workers which produces the profits that governments tax or borrow.

In any event, Cameron’s moral high ground begins to crumble when he sets out another reason for reducing taxes on profits:

‘We know the economic case for cutting taxes: in a competitive world we cannot afford to carry on as a bloated, high-taxing, welfare-heavy nation (…) We have to fight the notion that you can endlessly suck more taxes out of businesses and bite the hand that feeds.’

That’s a rather different argument – that taxes on profits have to be reduced so that businesses operating from Britain can remain competitive on world markets. It’s an admission, too, that capitalism is governed by the quest for profits and that governments have to go along with this, even at the expense of the welfare of those they rule over.

In fact, how come that ‘welfare’ has become a dirty word under capitalism? The dictionaries define it as ‘the state of faring or doing well’ and ‘good health, happiness and prosperity’. Capitalism, on Cameron and the other politicians’ admission, is not geared to pursuing these objectives but to pursuing profits. It’s profits before welfare, which is why capitalism must go if we are to have a true welfare society.