Karl Marx (1959)

From the December 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seventy-Six years ago, on March 17th. 1883, Karl Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. No massive structure of marble or bronze is needed to remember the man. for his work is its own memorial At the graveside. Friedrich Engels, who was Marx’s best friend and his co-operator for over forty years, said this;

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history. He discovered the simple fact hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that man must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing before he can pursue politics, science religion, art. etc.; and therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, forms the foundation upon which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the ease.

Karl Marx was a German, the son of a lawyer who practised in the old cathedral town of Trier on the Mozelle, close to what was then the French frontier. There he was born on 5th May. 1818. He died an exile in London, after he had been forced to flee from Cologne, Paris and Brussels to escape the persecution of the ruling powers of the day. He could have chosen the comfortable career of a lawyer or a university professor, but he preferred to spend his time and energy in educating the workers. He first became active as a writer, championing the cause of the agricultural workers and small farmers in the Rhineland in their fight against the land-owners. When the newspaper in which he wrote was suspended he went to Paris, where he studied the history of the French Revolution. the Utopian Socialists and the start of the French labour movement.

He became a Socialist and made friends with Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer in Barmen, who was then employed in his father’s branch in Manchester. Engels, too, became a Socialist and thenceforth the two men were united in a partnership of thought and action. Notably, they produced the famous Communist Manifesto, which became a guide and compass to the Socialist movement. At the time, the political domination which the semi- feudal reactionaries of the Holy Alliance were able to exert in Europe was being threatened by the rise of Capitalism. The steam engine had put the factory in place of the old productive method of handicraft and the railway had begun to replace the stage coach. But the new social system had its own evils; the second half of the '40’s saw Europe plunged into a long and serious commercial crisis, which severely shook Capitalism.

Said the Communist Manifesto: “All history until now is the history of class struggles.” Capitalism sharpened the struggle into a clash between two classes, the Capitalists and the wage working class. The immediate task was the organisation of the workers into an independent movement for the conquest of political power and the overthrow of Capitalist society. This struggle is no national affair; it must be fought out internationally, until the establishment of Socialism brings the end of class rule and the exploitation of the working class. The Manifesto summed it up; ” Workers of the World Unite! ”

The International

In 1864, Marx took an active part, with Engels, in launching and directing the first International Working Men’s Association. The First International, although necessary, was foredoomed to failure by the immature consciousness of the workers, which arose from the undeveloped conditions of Capitalist society. Internal disputes and the repressive laws on the Continent eventually broke it, but it had not been all in vain. In the midst of his work for the International, Marx published the first volume of Capital, which has been attacked by many people prominent in various fields of thought and by a long line of professional and literary hacks. They have all claimed to prove Marxian theories incorrect and outdated, but events have been against them. Marx’s labour theory of value and his materialist conception of history have been vindicated again and again.

Marx was a great scientific thinker and a courageous man, who bore witness to the old saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. He offered the working class the knowledge—and through know- ledge the power—to establish a classless, warless, tradeless system of society. Because of this, his name will be remembered long after his revilers have perished.

J. E. Roe

Cooking the Books: Swizz Banking? (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Swiss banking reformers have obtained the 100,000 signatures needed to initiate a referendum to restrict bank lending or, as they put it, to stop banks benefiting from being able to create electronic money out of nothing.

Explaining the apparent logic behind the proposal in the Financial Times (5/6 December), Martin Sandhu wrote:

‘The bank decides whether it wants to make you a loan. If it does, then it simply adds the loan to its balance sheet as an asset and increases the balance in your deposit account by the same amount (that’s a liability for them). Voilà; new electronic money has been created.’

This is indeed what happens from an accounting point of view. Double-entry book-keeping requires every new asset or liability to be balanced by a corresponding liability or asset. In this case, in making the loan, the bank acquires a liability. This has to be balanced, in the accounts, by a corresponding asset, recorded as an IOU from the borrower. That a new asset has been created out of nothing is only an illusion arising from an accounting convention.

Outside the accounts department all that has happened is that the bank has committed itself to making a loan to a customer. It ought to be obvious that, to be able to meet the obligation (liability) to pay this, the bank will have to be able to fund it, but currency cranks (and, surprisingly, some financial journalists) overlook this and believe that banks really can ‘simply’ create out of thin air what they lend. Sandhu even used the word ‘scam’.

This is not to say that loans have to be funded entirely from what people have deposited with the bank (a view sometimes attributed to critics of the thin air school of banking) since other sources of funding are available, from the money market (i.e. other financial institutions) or the central bank, some of which can even be done after a loan has been made.

The Swiss banking reformers subscribe to the mistaken, monetarist view that an over-expansion of bank lending causes (rather than merely reflects) booms and busts and they want to control and restrict it to try to prevent this. It won’t work but that’s the theory.

The proposal is that banks should not be able to re-lend money deposited in current accounts. When it receives such a deposit the bank will be required to re-deposit it with the state’s central bank in return for what Sandhu calls ‘State e-money’. All banks would be able to do with this is transfer it between current accounts.

This would certainly restrict bank lending but it wouldn’t (and is not intended to) stop it altogether. As the Swiss banking reformers explain (tinyurl.com/hnemzep), after the enactment of their reform:

 ‘The banks can only work with money they have from savers, other banks or (if necessary) funds the central bank has lent them, or else money that they own themselves.’

But this is already, now, the case! Money deposited in a current account is just as much a loan to the bank as is money deposited in a savings account. Banks can, and do, re-lend most of it too, except that, unlike with a savings account, it keeps all the interest.

But if money re-lent from a current account is money created from thin air, why is money re-lent from a savings account not? Don’t ask us. Ask the currency cranks.

No Socialism at Labour Party Conference (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the foggy atmosphere of Labour Party conferences “socialism” is the self-conscious rallying cry of the faithful, and sop to them when used by the party leaders. (“Socialism” is a rallying cry of a different kind at Conservative conferences.) At Blackpool this year “grass roots” enthusiasts, from the constituencies and the Unions, talked earnestly about the evils of capitalism and called on the Government to carry out “Socialist” policies. Realizing only that “something” is wrong in society they live in perpetual hope of legislating the nastiness out of capitalism. Despite all evidence to the contrary many still see nationalization as the panacea to solve capitalism’s problems. Not understanding how capitalism works, delegates appear to think that Governments have unlimited resources at their disposal. Or that a cut in spending by one Government Department (usually Defence) automatically provides more money for another. In the Pensions debate Jack Jones claimed that the recent NATO exercise would have paid for quite a few Christmas bonuses.

In defending cuts in Education spending Shirley Williams said that in the real world we have to be “realistic Socialists”. We wish that her audience would learn about Socialism. The realism would include the complete rejection of the idea that the Labour Party represents the interests of the working class.

Delegates in the majority opposed Government policy on health, housing, immigration and the Euro-poll. The debate on direct elections to a European Parliament produced more “socialist” rhetoric. (Comment also on MPs who did not now make the short journey to visit their local constituency party and who might disappear altogether in Europe.) The Government had already agreed with its EEC partners on the principle of direct elections. When the conference voted firmly against this decision a delegate asked for the suspension of standing orders so that the Party leader could comment. This was ruled out of order by the Chairman, Tom Bradley MP, on the grounds that there had always been a clear distinction between the party conference and a Labour Government. O Democracy!

After this debate came fraternal greetings from the Co-operative Party. Followed by Tom Bradley’s serious suggestion that those who had complained about the evils of capitalism during the week had one way of opting out of these evils — they could shop at the Co-op!

We suggest that the first step to removing the evil of capitalism is to understand how the system works. When capitalism was in its infancy the early Socialists, looking at working class conditions, could only reject the consequences of capitalist production as bad. In the absence of an analysis of its essential character they were unable to define the only satisfactory solution to working-class exploitation.

The Labour Party and its supporters have never had this excuse, for the mystery surrounding capitalist production was solved by Karl Marx long before the Labour Party was formed. Using the labour theory of value, Marx was able to explain how the working class is exploited. Workers are paid the value of their labour power but only part of their working time is necessary to replace that value. For the remaining time their labour is unpaid. This unpaid labour is the source of the surplus-value appropriated by the capitalist class. Further, the materialist conception of history enabled him to present capitalism in its historical context. By looking at the way the means of life were produced and distributed, and the relationship of different social classes to that production and distribution, he was able to show that capitalism was the inevitable sequel to feudalism. Social development did not end with capitalism. The struggle between the two remaining classes would result in the downfall of capitalism.

Since Marx expounded the materialist conception of history and the labour theory of value, Socialism has had a precise meaning. It can only properly be used to describe the worldwide social system which will replace capitalism. When the working class takes the conscious, political steps to end its own exploitation it will emancipate the whole of mankind. Socialism, the system then established, will be based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means for production: something the Labour Party has never proposed.

Pat Deutz

Between the Lines: Whose Victory? (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

WHOSE VICTORY?

On Saturday, 9 February, while American and British bombers blew up their Baghdad targets and put the fear of bomb-blessing god into countless Iraqi kids, BBCI’s Going Live did its weekly "Press Conference" with Juliet Morris who had just returned from the Middle East where she was covering the war.

The Going Live programme allows teenagers to question the stars. Often the questions are more penetrating than the pompous political pundits ever dare ask. Sometimes they are naive. This week they were coated in fear.

How can we believe what we are told about the number of children killed and injured when the censors are at work? We can't, answered Morris - we just have to hope that the lies being told are not too great. Are Israeli kids scared of chemical missile attacks? Yes, very scared. How are they coping? Schools have been closed down - the difficulties of teachers putting gas masks on classes full of 30 six-year olds at a time are too great. Was she frightened when she was in the war zone? Yes.

Going Live is, by tradition, one of those jolly BBC shows put on to keep the kids smiling at the beginning of the long weekend. At the end of that week's show none of the children in the studio showed a tract of a smile. They had been dragged into the pit of fear which war pushes most of us in to. Going Live? But how long for?

SEEK TO BE DONE

On Sunday, 3 February your reviewer watched two films on TV. Both were about Justice. They could not have been more different. The Winslow Boy (Channel 4. 2pm) was about a false accusation made against an English public school boy. The boy’s father would not allow injustice to prevail and so sacrificed everything to see that his son's innocence was upheld. He took the matter to the House of Commons where the brilliant British defender of the law, Sir Henry Morton, made an impassioned plea for the right of the father to sue the Admiralty (who ran the boy's school). Of course, the parliamentarians were moved to a mass wave of sentimental awakening by the lawyer-MP’s speech and they voted for the case to be given a "fair trial". Then came the trial, with the sickening little goody-goody, Winslow up against the forces of the Mighty State. Needless to say, wee Winslow was in the Right, so the Mighty State had to concede defeat. Jolly good cricket, what! The film ends with the boy's father having been vindicated. But no, it was not he who was shown to be righteous in all of this, but the great English Legal System where Right is always done and, furthermore, seen to be done. What self-righteous little prats must have written, acted in and believed this film. What a smug and ridiculous act of complacent belief in good old English fairness this cinematic drivel symbolised.

Was the English parliament which decided to give young Winslow a "fair trial" the same kind as that which has refused persistently to free the Birmingham Six? Was the kindly judge out of the same stable as Lord Denning who is of the view that it would have been better for the Guildford Four to have been hanged, even though they have been found innocent?

The same night BBC1 showed Korczak, directed by Andrej Wajda. This was a film of painful truthfulness about one man's attempt to protect a group of orphan children from a full awareness of the brutalities of the Warsaw ghetto.

Korczak isolates the children in order to spare them a realisation of the grotesque social disorder which the fascist regime had imposed upon them. Perhaps he was wrong to deny them the truth; without a doubt, his intentions and actions, as depicted, were beautiful in their sincerity.

It was a film which refused to indulge in pathetic illusions about justice. In the end Korczak and his children are deported by train to meet their deaths in the gas ovens. There is a wonderful utopian moment close to the end of the film - a moment in which the carriage carrying the children falls off the end of the train and the young ones dance away to their freedom. It was one of the most moving scenes in any film ever. But Wajda, who is one of the finest film directors alive today, refused to allow viewers to roll back into the idiot's comfort of seeing justice done where it was not to be. The film ends with the stark information about the fate of Korczak and his children. It would have been a hardened viewer who did not weep.

THE MAD EMPIRE

First prize for the craziest moment of TV nationalism during the recent war lunacy goes to the half-time display during the US Superbowl. This was Nuremberg meeting Spielberg; George Bush on a big screen, and Fred Savage from The Wonder Years looking like junior commandant of the Florida Hitler Youth. Whoever devised this absurd pro-war pageant should be given an immediate offer of a star part in the sequel to Mel Brooks' The Producers. Bad taste? It’s the kind of thing that could make you wish that Columbus had never discovered America. And while the clowns performed workers died - needlessly.

Steve Coleman

Summer School 2016 - Money Talks (2016)

From the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summer School
 
22nd - 24th July 2016
 
Fircroft College, Birmingham
 
Money flows through every aspect of society, and therefore affects every aspect of our lives. What possessions we have, the efficiency of the services we use, and how we are supposed to value ourselves are all shaped by the money system.


We’re encouraged to think of the economy in much the same way as we think about the weather – something changeable, but always there. When the climate is ‘good’, life feels brighter. When the climate is ‘bad’, we huddle down until we can ride out the storm. Although we’ll always have the weather, the economy doesn’t have to be permanent.


Our weekend of talks and discussion looks at the role of money in our society. In what ways does money affect how we think and behave? How does the economy really function? How did money come to be such a dominant force? We also look forward to a moneyless socialist society, which will be – in more than one sense of the word – free.
 
Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100. The concessionary rate is £50. Day visitors are welcome, but please book in advance.
 
To book a place, send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) to Summer School, Sutton Farm, Aldborough, Boroughbridge, York, YO51 9ER, or book online through the QR code or at http://spgb.net/summerschool2016. E-mail enquiries tospgbschool@yahoo.co.uk

Letters: Solidarity (1970)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always held that the widest possible discussion of conflicting views is desirable. In this issue we publish, together with our replies, a number of letters we have received arising out of recent articles in the “Socialist Standard.”

Solidarity

If to wish to oppose capitalism and have it replaced by a society run by and for the workers themselves, without bosses or leaders, is “anarcho-syndicalism”, then Solidarity members will confess to that heinous deviation.

But as a member of North West Solidarity, I must beg your allowance of a reply to certain points made in the article "Listen Anarchist” (Socialist Standard, March 1970).

Firstly, workers management cannot be dismissed by saying that under Socialism, “all work should be entirely voluntary”. So it should, but even then, someone, some group, will have to organise society, plan the economy, run the towns, factories and farms. Our advocation is based on the proposition that the .Socialist-conscious working class, once they want to change society, are capable of establishing a Socialist system and running it without any orders from above. In other words, will run society without leaders, bosses, managers or any Party claiming to speak for them or represent "their interests". “Workers Management" means no more elitism!

Secondly, Solidarity is a democratic organisation of people united on certain basic beliefs. We have no "Party line” or “sacred texts”, so to try to lump us all with accepting the more obvious of Cardans faults is either a mistake due to misunderstanding of what Solidarity is, or a cheap way of scoring points.

Thirdly, to put down learning by experience as "claptrap" is to make the same wild generalisations as those who only believe in it. The relationship between experience and ideas is an ever-changing, dialectical one. in which either can alter the other. The worker’s experience within production, of having to act collectively, of “unofficially” regulating speed and amount of production so as to share out work and equalise wages, is such an experience that can produce Socialist ideas, as collective action and control are “fundamentally Socialist in content". After all, where do ideas conic from, not, as you point out yourselves, from the fresh air! But "can" produce Socialist ideas does not equal must. So our task is to spread Socialist ideas to the workers, ideas that correspond to their experience, ideas contributed as much as possible by workers themselves.

The last point explains why Solidarity mags have contained a lot of material on “strikes and other activities”, because these are workers’ activities, and we do believe workers should be able to read the truth about strikes and other anti-boss activities. However if any of your readers would like to buy a copy of North West Solidarity, they’ll find that it does cover more than strikes. If they do, they can get it from: Secretary. 96 Doveleys Road, Salford, 6. Lancs.

Paul A. Harris.

Bolton, Lancs.

REPLY: 

“Workers Management", as Paul Harris describes it here, does not seem to mean much different from what we understand by “democratic control" in our definition of Socialism as a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by and in the interests of the whole community. If he only means that, on the basis of common ownership (and the consequent abolition of the wages system, money and buying and selling), free men and women will democratically manage their social affairs including work, then our only objection would be to his choice of words. The word “workers” would be inappropriate since, with common ownership, the working class as well as the capitalist class would have disappeared.

We must say, however, that we had always thought Solidarity to mean something different by this phrase, namely, that a committee elected by the workers should take over the functions (including discipline, fixing wage rates, hiring and firing, price policies) now exercised by managers appointed either by the shareholders or by the government. But, as long as there is production for the market, it will be competition that determines how a factory is run whether the decisions are made by capitalist owners or by a manager he appoints or by an elected workers’ council. It was because we had always thought that Solidarity accepted the continued existence, though maybe temporary, of the wages system (“equal wages”) and production for the market that we said that their "workers management” was “in no way incompatible with capitalist exploitation”. We will stand by this until Paul Harris tells us he accepts our proposition that, on the basis of common ownership, wages and money can be abolished immediately.

We are glad we are not alone in seeing Cardan’s more obvious faults.

What we meant by “‘earning by experience’ claptrap” was, as explained earlier in the article, the view that workers can only learn the futility of reformism or the limitations of trade unionism by their own personal experience. We pointed out that by far the greater part of what people knew came from being taught the experiences of others. Of course, strictly speaking this learning is also experience — but this would not be accepted by the school of thought we were criticizing.

There is enough evidence now, and has been for many years, that only Socialism is the solution to working class problems. The task of a Socialist party is to see that hearing or reading the Socialist case is part of workers’ experience. Hence the vital importance of Socialist propaganda, of spreading Socialist ideas. In fact the ideas set out in our own declaration of principles (that this is a class society, that there is a class struggle, that this can only be ended by conscious majority political action, that a socialist party must be opposed to all other parties) are drawn from the experience of the working class under capitalism.

We must say, however, that Paul Harris’ list of the kind of experience that can, with Socialist propaganda (an important concession on his part to our point of view), lead to Socialist understanding is a bit limited. It is not just experience of factory life (after all many workers do not work in factories), but of generally having to live on a wage or salary and all the problems which lack of money brings in housing, education, health, transport and the rest. It is their general social experience, rather than their narrow experience at the point of production, that can lead workers to Socialist understanding on hearing the Socialist case.

Those who think we might have Solidarity’s position wrong should buy Paul Harris’ magazine and find out for themselves. 

Editorial Committee

Dear Friends:

The March 1970 Socialist Standard deals with Solidarity and Paul Cardan in an article entitled “Listen Anarchist!” Since my own beliefs have been rather similar to yours for years and now tend to approximate Solidarity’s much more closely, I read the article with interest. Unfortunately, when a group makes “some advances in understanding and on a number of issues (comes) round to views pioneered by” you, as you so patronizingly put it, you seem to exhibit great hostility and defensiveness. An attitude of empathy and open-minded evaluation would seem to be more useful, particularly in the ease of Solidarity which has evidently gone through a period of careful re-examination and whose works exhibit considerable scholarship. They have predicted that they would be attacked as anarchists by Marxists and as Marxists by anarchists. You seem to have fulfilled your half of the prophecy a little too readily.

Much of your critique consists of setting up straw men by exaggerating stated positions and then demolishing them. For example, Cardan criticizes “Marxists” who revise Marx “at their convenience.” You then ignore the clause “at their convenience” and state that Cardan claims that it is wrong to amend a theory. You follow this by satirical remarks re heinous crimes and fiendish tricks. When Solidarity rejects the propagandists approach of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (your wholly educational technique without participation), you make the irrelevant remark that Solidarity and the SPGB are equally concerned with propaganda, “but its propaganda consists overwhelmingly of reports on strikes and other activities (other activities!, a charge that could be levelled against National Geographic magazine), whereas ours consists of posing an alternative form of society and explaining how it can be achieved.” Actually both Solidarity and the SPGB report on “strikes and other activities” although there are deferences on emphasis (and analysis), and both pose an alternative form of society. The real difference is that Solidarity does offer a plausible mechanism for achieving socialism where you rely essentially on pure education although no historic examples of the successful unaided use of this approach exist. Your penchant for exaggerating an opponent’s position shows up in your reference to the “ ‘learning by experience’ clap-trap.” The SPGB of course must feel that experience in the class struggle will cause the workers to give credence to a socialist programme unless it takes the incredible view that unaided SPGB propaganda alone will turn the trick. That Solidarity doesn’t really believe that “learning by experience" is the whole answer is shown first by its existence and second by such statements as, “Many French workers who lived through the events of 1936 are still alive. But how many of them today draw the same lesson from that experience as would a revolutionary organization?” (Cardan, Modern Capitalism and Revolution.)

Mere exaggeration cannot condone your fantastic allegation that the “workers management” programme for socialism “is in no way incompatible with Capitalist exploitation." "Workers Management” means the total participation and control by the people in the making of all decisions regarding production and other areas of life affecting their common interests. This programme specifically rejects hierarchical and leadership concepts. Your statement “that in terms of genuine human freedom, how work is managed is a side issue” represents a serious blind spot. Any form of coercion in production (or elsewhere), or division of the producers into order-takers and order-givers is obviously wholly antithetical to human freedom, and the workers ought to start thinking about it now and not after the revolution. The picture that could be drawn (hopefully unintended) from your remark here, is that socialist production could consist of “voluntary” producers operating without knowledge of or control over orders sent down from socialist bureaucrats belonging to some parliament which has been taken over by socialist ballot.

I am not a member of Solidarity and have no authority to speak officially on their behalf. However, their influence is growing here as well as in Britain and any serious attempt at refutation is going to require a much greater knowledge and much more serious analysis of their views than was demonstrated in your article.

Benson Perry, 

member, Socialist Committee of Correspondence 

(Philadelphia), U.S.A.

REPLY:
Most of the points Benson Perry raises have been covered in the previous reply to Paul Harris. So we will here spell out in more detail our own position.

The idea of Socialism as a solution to working class problems arises out of capitalism partly because it is the solution and partly because people’s experience of capitalism teaches them that it is. The role of a socialist party, at the present time, is to put socialist ideas before the working class to ensure that hearing the socialist ease is a part of their experience. This is our participation, as a party, in the class struggle. Later the socialist party will be the instrument which the working class can use to win power for Socialism and will disappear as soon as Socialism has been established.

Members of the Socialist Party, as workers, are engaged in the day-to-day struggle to live under capitalism. They could not avoid this even if they wanted to. In so far as this struggle is organised our members are active mainly in the trade unions but also in unofficial workers committees, tenants associations and students unions. The real difference between us and organisations like Solidarity is how we assess this day-to-day struggle. We see it as having the practical aim of protecting workers’ living and working conditions under capitalism. The effectiveness of this struggle, we might add, is limited not only by the economic workings of capitalism but also by the ideas of the workers involved (which is why the spread of socialist ideas, in which we are engaged, helps the day-to-day struggle). Solidarity, on the other hand, sees these struggles as “fundamentally socialist in content”. This we deny. The only struggle that warrants this description is the conscious political struggle for Socialism.

We also say that it is not the task of a socialist party to propose reforms of capitalism. In this way we avoid attracting the support of non-socialists and so being turned into a reformist party.

Finally, a word on management. Under capitalism production is not just a technical question; it is also a question of exploitation. Thus, in varying proportions, a manager’s function is partly technical and partly disciplinary (“order-giving”, as Benson Perry puts it). In socialist society production will just be a technical question; there will be no “discipline”. Work will be voluntary and democratically-controlled — though of course we cannot now give a blueprint of the way this will be done.

The division between “order-givers” and “order-takers” arises out of the capitalist exploitation of the workers through the wages system. This is why genuine democratic control of work demands the abolition of the market and working for wages. To retain these is to retain the same economic pressures on the workers even if exercised through a workers’ management committee rather than a capitalist-appointed manager. We throw out the same challenge to Benson Perry as to Paul Harris: Does he accept our proposition that, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, wages and money can be abolished immediately?

Editorial Committee.

Stalin the Bolshevik (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent ITV series Stalin provided further evidence to show that the Bolshevik revolution was an utter sham. Contrary to all the heroic myths and propaganda. 1917 was not a glorious workers' revolution but a coup d'etat carried out by the Bolsheviks who as a minority were able to seize and retain power because of the chaotic conditions prevailing at the time.

Having seized power, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly when they were overwhelmingly rejected by a large majority of the people. From that time, under Lenin and Trotsky's leadership, they established the CHEKA Secret Police and embarked on a systematic programme of hi-jacking the Soviets (Workers Councils) and crushing all opposition. The struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was nothing more than the dirty political infighting between the two to decide who would be the next dictator after Lenin.

It is nonsense therefore to talk, as Trotskyists do, of "the gains of the October 1917 Revolution” and to portray the Bolsheviks as decent chaps whose revolution to the promised land, supposedly backed by the people, was inexplicably turned on its head by one man—Stalin.

The Bolsheviks set in motion in 1917, a dictatorship that inevitably led to an escalating number of atrocities. To attempt therefore to whitewash Trotsky's responsibility in all this is as absurd as absolving Yezhov and Beria of genocide because they also fell victim to the very tyranny they helped create.

In historical terms, Russia's 1917 was its equivalent of France's 1789. Both these so-called "peoples revolutions” led to nothing more than the replacement of feudalism by capitalism. In France this developed along "free-market" lines but in Russia the story was different.

The Bolsheviks fell under the illusion that an industrially backward country could by-pass capitalism altogether and thus move into socialism/communism. This was based on the peculiar notion that a dictatorial minority could impose on the majority of people socialism (a democratic cooperative form of society relying on a politically mature majority having at its disposal, highly developed productive forces)—and this in a country where the vast majority of people were politically ignorant peasants having no experience of capitalism and no knowledge of socialism, let alone any desire to reject the former in favour of the latter.

Such an obsessional illusion could only result in failure and the seeking out of scapegoats and enemies to blame and liquidate. Due to the above-mentioned circumstances the Bolsheviks had no option but to establish capitalism. They did this by instituting a "Command Economy"— state-capitalism but owing to the ideological millstone they'd created for themselves, were forced to pretend that it was socialism.

But even the Bolsheviks had to concede that 1917 was not the spearhead of a world-wide workers' revolution and were therefore compelled to adopt the inane slogan "Socialism in one country" to maintain the myth. Due to the same ideological millstone, the Russian rulers were forced to adhere to state-capitalism until, with the Soviet economy in dire straits, they have been obliged to officially move towards free market capitalism.

Trotskyists could of course dismiss all of this as "Stalinism" but as they claim 1917 was a workers revolution they presumably believe it was "Marxist”. It is therefore enlightening to see what Marx and Engels said on the subject.

Marx and Engels argued that it was a historical impossibility for a society in an inferior stage of development to by-pass the successive phases of its normal development. Both were of the view that only when socialism had been established in the West could this development period be shortened in a backward country and that, as Engels put it, "this goes for all countries in the pre-capitalistic stage of development not only for Russia” (Postface to Social Problems in Russia, 1894).

Further scorn was poured on those who advocated the "small conspiracy" road to socialist revolution in that such "people who boasted that they had made a revolution, have always seen next day, that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made bore no resemblance whatsoever to that they intended to make" (Engels to Vera Zasulich, 23 April 1885)—a statement that aptly sums up the Bolsheviks and 1917. Perhaps Engels also had in mind people like the Bolsheviks when he said that anyone stating that the socialist revolution could be carried out more easily in a backward country "proves by his statement that he has understood nothing of Socialism" (Social Problems in Russia, 1875).

Richard Layton

Marx and vulgar economics (1987)

From the March 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

For Marx the social reality that lay behind capitalist production consisted of more than just prices and quantities. The publication of Capital in 1867 was Marx's own unique contribution to this more detailed study of commodity production. The result was the systematic discovery and critique of the laws of capitalism: the economic relationship between capital and labour; the basis on which the product of labour takes the form of a commodity and the underlying contradictions which cause the system repeatedly to pass through periods of boom, crisis and slump. In other words Marx stripped away the surface appearances of capitalist production to show that the central feature of the system was the economic exploitation of the working class during the process of production itself. In so doing he highlighted the parasitical nature of the capitalist class and their ever-increasing historical irrelevance to a point where today the very system of commodity production acts as an obstacle to a more rational organisation and development of society.

Consequently Marx had little time for those economists of his own day who deliberately set out either to defend capitalism or to rectify its inherent contradictions by means of various palliatives or reforms. The footnotes to Capital are strewn with vitriolic comments and side remarks against the leading economists of the 19th century, whether they were "mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes" or the "shallow syncretism" of men like John Stuart Mill.

But it was the "herd of vulgar economic apologists", like Bentham and Malthus, whom Marx particularly singled out to attack. As he wrote in an earlier work:

Their object is rather to represent production in contradiction to distribution ... as subject to eternal laws independent of history, and then to substitute bourgeois relations, in an underhand way. as immutable laws of society in abstracto. (Grundrisse, pp.26-32).

Since his death, what has passed for twentieth century economics has generally followed the vulgar economist trend of the preceding century. There seems to be a Bentham or Malthus born every generation. The so-called leading economists of this century — Keynes, Hayek, Galbraith, Friedman and now Buchanan — have all written works either justifying the principles of the free market or offered "solutions" to capitalism’s periodic upheavals. Divorced from the real world of working-class experience, these economists have only ever concerned themselves with fiscal studies, profits, competition. markets and consumers. They have drifted aimlessly from one crisis to another, unable to understand the very system they purport to defend. Even though they use sophisticated mathematical analysis, statistical data and computer modelling of the economy, it does not make their theories or pronouncements credible, correct or scientific. On the contrary they are in a similar position to the eccentric mysticism of the alchemists during the Middle Ages, forever reformulating the same impotent propositions in an ever more incomprehensible language.

However, the utter failure of twentieth century economics to address the real problems of people’s day-to-day needs throughout the world has not seemed to deter the publication of one new economic theory after another. Each new theory — and there seems to be a pet economic theory for every professor living or dead — is offered up as some universal panacea for the continuing waste, poverty and occasional deliberate under-production that characterises capitalism. Some theories remain unread, just left to gather dust on some academic library shelf, while others have been dissected or watered down to suit the immediate pragmatic or ideological needs of successive governments as they have struggled to administer the economy. In the same way that clothes or pop stars come in and out of fashion so too do the ideas and personalities that abound within the Alice in Wonderland world of vulgar economy. Keynes’ theories, no longer fashionable as a useful political dogma, have been largely abandoned by economists and politicians alike in favour of the more entrenched anti-working-class doctrines of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek.

If it was not for the economic crisis during the 1970s Friedman would most probably have spent the remainder of his life offering advice to capitalists living in and around Chicago; but with the almost universal rejection of Keynes, Friedman and his monetarist doctrines were adopted to fill the void in government economic policy. But monetarism did not help solve the problems facing governments and it certainly had no bearing on the unemployed. But then Friedman has no interest in the working class; they do not pay his salaries or buy his books. The revival of 19th century economic liberalism spearheaded by Hayek is the latest economic fashion. Hardly a day passes without one of the master's disciples claiming on the television or radio, that the whole business of buying and selling will create some form of capitalist Utopia. Indeed Hayek's rise to stardom has been as rapid as Keynes' was during the late 1930s. From power centres such as the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Directors and from economics departments such as the LSE and Liverpool University, these market anarchists preach the Hayekian virtues of an “entrepreneur-led and market-driven society".

Although Hayek has been around for a long time the idea that capitalism works in terms of efficient production and distribution of wealth is even older. However, we have just to consider capitalism from an historical perspective in conjunction with our day-to- day struggle to realise that the claim made by Hayek and his disciples is wrong. Capitalism has never worked in our interests, with or without government interference. It is incapable of satisfying human needs while at the same time producing for profit. Throughout their writings the market anarchists seldom mention the millions who die of hunger, nor the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few privileged social parasites. They are also quiet, to the point of dumbness, on the deliberate under-production of foodstuffs to maintain profits as they are about the burning of wheat or fruit because there is no market for it. As the pamphlet A World of Abundance, produced by socialists in Canada, stated:

Socialists are hardened by now to meeting the opinion that the system of production for profit is essentially sane and efficient. The opposite is true; . . . capitalism wastes its wealth and its abilities. The profit motive cannot work efficiently. Capitalism cannot cater for the needs of its people. It produces waste and it produces want and both are profitable only to the minority who hold positions of privilege.

Marx did not write for academics but for the working class. He wanted us to understand the system that to this day enslaves us and to use his works in our continuing class struggle. Hayek will become unfashionable as quickly as he became fashionable; not so Marx, whose relevance will remain until that day when the working class finally capture political power and democratically establish socialism.

Richard Lloyd 

Jesus v Islam: Let’s Call it a Draw (2016)

The Halo Halo! column from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s no clear winner amongst the various religions to have their absurdities recorded in the Standard this month. Despite the usual stiff competition from Islam, the followers of Jesus have again fought back to prove that Allah does not have the monopoly on stupidity. And as it’s been such a close thing, this month we’re including some of the most moronic examples from both over the last few weeks.

We start with a couple of examples of devotion to Allah by his young followers. One aged 20 in the city of Raqqa in Syria, and one by a 15 year-old in Pakistan.

In January one of Allah’s 20 year-old, bumfluff-bearded Isis fighters in Syria, who, after being warned by his mother that Isis would probably be wiped out and being encouraged to leave, came to the conclusion that this amounted to the crime against Allah of apostasy, and publicly executed her with a rifle.

And in Pakistan, during an event praising Muhammed with songs and poetry, the mullah challenged anyone who did not love the prophet to raise their hand. One fifteen year-old boy, mishearing the question raised his hand and was denounced by the cleric as a ‘blasphemer who was liable to be killed’. The boy rushed home in tears, hacked off his hand and returned to the mosque and presented it to the mullah to show his remorse. The mullah was arrested, but released after pressure from other clerics. The boy’s father said he was proud of his son’s actions. Devotion to Allah, it seems, knows no bounds.

Back here in the UK the ‘worship leader’ of the New Chapel Unitarian meeting place in Denton, Manchester was preparing to carry out their first transgender baptism. (Yes, we’ve come across this before in the Halo-Halo column, see July 2015 issue). But this time it concerns a 10 year-old child. Yes, baptisms are regularly carried out on small children, we know, but a transgender baptism being inflicted on a 10 year old?

If consenting adults choose to do this in the privacy of their own home, then that’s no-one's business but their own. But exposing a ten year old to the sexual hang-ups of an imaginary old man with a beard who lives in the sky surely amounts to child abuse.

And in Peckham, home turf of Del boy and Rodney, a ‘Fake Archbishop’ has been flogging budget supermarket olive oil as miracle cure for cancer, said an article in the Sun (25 Jan 2016). Gilbert Deya, or ‘The Bishop of Peckham’, as his flock know him, apparently charges £5 for the Aldi £1.99 olive oil.

This wonder oil not only cures cancer, it seems, but also the HIV virus, broken arms and legs, and makes debts disappear. Oh, and The Archbishop of Peckham is apparently also wanted in Kenya on baby stealing charges.

The Sun seems to have missed the bigger story here though. If a ‘fake’ Archbishop can dress up in robes and a silly hat and convince his punters that his cheapo olive oil has miraculous powers, consider the superior magical skills of the ‘genuine’ bishops, vicars and priests who, up and down the country, week after week splash ‘holy water’ about, turn wine and wafers into the blood and body of Christ, and feed it to their flocks. Now that, as Paul Daniels would say, is magic. This ‘fake’ Archbishop is clearly a bumbling amateur.

NW

James Connolly - An Unpublished Letter (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Below is a previously unpublished letter from Connolly to the Edinburgh branch of the Social Democratic Federation. We publish it, together with a commentary and an assessment of Connolly’s political career, as it throws some interesting light on the “Impossibilist revolt” in the SDF which eventually led to the founding of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904.

Memo from Irish Socialist Republican Party.

Central Branch.

To: Sec. Edin. S.D.F

1 November 1901.

Dear Comrade,

I am forwarding herewith a copy of the pamphlet part of this month’s “Workers Republic”. The full paper will be delivered in a few days. I must take this opportunity to congratulate you on the magnificent stand made by the Scotch and more especially the Edinburgh comrades against the present compromising policy of the leaders of the S.D.F. Things may seem to look dangerous for you at present, but time is on your side, and when the English branches really realise the issues at stake and understand your position, the triumph will be yours. I speak with the knowledge of who one having been all through England knows that the only hope of the gang in power is to keep the English comrades ignorant. The present issue of our paper is primarily intended to prevent that hope being realised, by giving the large number of English branches who now take our paper a more clear exposition of this question than Justice has allowed them to have.

I only wish our paper was bigger or that our plant was more suitable for rapid printing than it is at present, but we are poor and we are still short of the cash necessary to supply us with a quick printing machine, but such help as we have we will readily give to you.

I would only say in conclusion to beware of all dodges and devices to drive you out of the S.D.F. Help in the organisation, do not be brow-beaten, nor get disgusted; for the sake of those who are in remain in also, and sooner or later you will find your policy tacitly adopted by the whole body even if they do not admit their indebtedness to you.

For the Revolution

Your old comrade

James Connolly

Dublin

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James Connolly was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, the son of an Irish immigrant labourer. He went to work at the age of ten or eleven and then seems to have joined the British army, being stationed in Cork. In 1889 he left (deserted) and went back to Scotland planning to marry a girl he had met in Dublin. In Dundee Connolly, who must already have had vague radical Irish nationalist sentiments, joined the local branch of the Socialist League. This was a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, in which William Morris was prominently involved. However by this time there was little difference between the Socialist League and the SDF and it was only an accident that Connolly joined the one and not the other. Soon in Scotland the two bodies united to form the Scottish Socialist Federation which in 1895 became the Edinburgh branch of the SDF. It was this organisation which first introduced Connolly to Socialist and Marxist ideas.

But the SDF was not an uncompromisingly Socialist body. It advocated reforms (or “palliatives” as they were then called) as stepping stones towards Socialism and was involved in the general ferment of the time in favour of independent (of the Liberals, that is, and not necessarily Socialist) working-class representation in Parliament and local councils. Connolly himself seems also to have been a member of the ILP as well as being secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the SSF/SDF. In 1894 he had stood as a “Labour” candidate in the local elections. Being an unskilled labourer - and an “agitator” - he found work difficult to get and eventually advertised his services to the “Labour movement” as a paid speaker, lecturer, and organiser. His offer was taken up by the Dublin Socialist Society and in 1896 he and his family left Scotland for Ireland.

In Dublin he was instrumental in forming an Irish Socialist Republican Party similar in character to the SDF. Basically “Labourist”, it also argued some Socialist and Marxist ideas. But it had a programme of palliatives ranging from nationalisation of the railways and a 48-hour week to free maintenance for children and universal suffrage. And it supported the demand for Irish independence. This last was quite in accord with the Social Democratic (though not Socialist) thinking which, when it spoke of “international socialism”, envisaged this as a federation of independent national “socialist republics”; so, on this view, insofar as “the Irish” were to be regarded as a “nation” they were entitled to an independent State - so ran the mistaken Social Democratic argument which Connolly accepted.

He believed that only through the establishment of an Irish “socialist republic” could Ireland really become independent of England, and appealed to Irish nationalist sentiment on this basis. He was of course an implacable opponent of the Irish Home Rule MPs at Westminster, pointing out that Home Rule under capitalism would make no difference to the poverty and misery of the workers of Ireland. In fact up until the turn of the century the activities of the IRSP seem to have been a combination of Labourism and Irish Republicanism, both of which were deviations from straight agitation for working-class political power for Socialism.

But by 1900 the position inside the SDF was changing. Some of the younger members were challenging the autocracy and opportunism of the clique around Hyndman which dominated the organisation. In Scotland they came under the influence of Daniel De Leon and the American Socialist Labor Party which some of them had come across at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. Connolly, who still kept in contact with Scotland, also to a certain extent came under their influence. In 1901 he had done a paid speaking tour in England and Scotland.

The American SLP was on what might be called the extreme left of the Second International. It was completely opposed to compromises with the bourgeois parties and was moving towards saying that the struggle for reforms was futile and that instead socialists should concentrate exclusively on the capture of political power for Socialism via the ballot box. (The SLP’s syndicalism deviation was to occur later, as we shall see) It still, however, had a national rather than world conception of “socialism” (and still does to this day)

In 1899 a French “Socialist” MP by the name of Millerand accepted a post in a bourgeois government There was an immediate storm. At the Paris Congress of the Second International a compromise resolution which condemned Millerand but not the principle of participating in bourgeois governments, was carried in place of one opposing participation on principle. The critics, or “impossibilists” as they were called (since they were supposed to be saying that improvements in working-class conditions under capitalism were impossible and so not worth striving for), also challenged the lack of Party control over Justice which, despite being the SDF’s official organ, was owned and controlled by Hyndman and some of his friends.

Connolly associated himself with the impossibilists and allowed them to use the IRSP paper, the Workers’ Republic, to put their case on this, and other issues. A pamphlet of the pages was later published as the New Evangel which shows the limitations of Connolly’s position at this time. He still had not broken with the idea that a socialist party should struggle for palliatives as well as for Socialism. In fact the following January he stood as a candidate in the Dublin local elections on a programme of immediate demands.

Perpetually short of money, Connolly decided to go later that year on a speaking tour to America to help the American SLP get the Irish vote (yes, despite their stand on reforms, aspects of opportunism survived!). Before he went he arranged to for the press on which theWorkers Republic was printed to be used to publish a journal called The Socialist, on paper the organ of the Scottish Council of the SDF but in fact controlled by the Scottish “impossibilists”. In America he spoke all across the country from New York and Buffalo to San Francisco and Los Angeles. He returned to Ireland an SLP man. In January 1903 he again stood for the local council in Dublin. This time, however, there was no immediate demands in his programme, only the advocacy of political power for Socialism via the ballot box - in fact the sort of election manifesto we ourselves could have endorsed.

Meanwhile things were coming to a head in the SDF. At their 1903 Conference in London over Easter the expulsion of the leading Scottish impossibilists, Yates, was confirmed. The other Scottish impossibilists thereupon resigned and in June was founded the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, with The Socialist as its official organ. Connolly, who was on another paid speaking tour of Scotland at the time (and reversing the opinion expressed in 1901 to stay in the SDF), chaired the first conference of the new party and was appointed its first organiser. However, the new party, like the SDF, had it list of palliatives - a move to delete them was defeated and it was not until 1905 that they were dropped, probably under the influence of the SPGB which never had such a list. By then Connolly was in America but it is probably safe to assume, in view of his subsequent evolution of his political ideas, that in 1903 he had been one of those in favour of the SLP having a reform programme.

The SPGB had been formed in June 1904 by the London “impossibilists”. Right from the start it advocated only socialism and had no reform programme. Among the founding members was Alex Anderson, who before moving to London had been the Secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the SDF.

To complete the Connolly story. In the autumn of 1903 he returned to America hoping to pursue his chosen career as a professional “labour organiser” by getting a job with the SLP. He got no such job, though he remained an SLP member and activist becoming a member of its National Executive Committee. In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago. Connolly, as part of the SLP delegation, attended this congress and spoke on their behalf in favour of founding the new organisation. This support for the IWW represented a complete reversal of the previous policy of the SLP and its leader Daniel De Leon. Previously they had stressed the primacy of political action through a class-conscious socialist political party; now they reduced political action to a subordinate, supporting role to the “socialist industrial unions” which were to take and hold the means of production. Connolly accepted this syndicalism deviation from Marxism and also its corollary that the industrial unions were to be the future administration of “socialist” society.

Connolly, however, was beginning to get tired of the sectarianism of the SLP and had already spoken in favour of a merger between the SLP and the more opportunist Socialist Party of America. In March 1907 he helped establish an “Irish Socialist Federation”. This brought him into conflict with the SLP hierarchy and led to his expulsion or resignation (depending on your point of view). Anyway he left, and continued his career as a professional organiser by getting a job with the IWW. The IWW was in reality a militant general union with a revolutionary ideology and, like all unions, (as they must to be effective, of course) recruited members on an open-house principle, i.e. workers of all political views and not just revolutionaries. In January 1908 The Harp was launched as the organ of the ISF and Connolly used it to urge support for Eugene Debs, the SPA candidate in the 1908 Presidential elections. This despite the fact that the IWW, for which he worked, had that year adopted a completely anti-political stance - though this was the occasion on a rare sensible comment from Connolly: asked if this meant he was against the workers taking political action to establish Socialism, he replied that when the time came “it would be impossible to prevent the workers taking it”, a point that could well be borne in mind by today‘s anti-parliamentarians. But he soon moved to a new job in line with his increasingly reformist views, becoming in 1909 a national organiser for the SPA.

When he returned to Ireland in July 1910 he had gone quite reformist. His new job was organiser for the “Socialist Party of Ireland”. This was the at-this-time somewhat moribund successor to the IRSP he had founded in 1896, a self-styled “Marxist” party involved in reformist and Irish nationalist politics. The SPI soon found it couldn’t afford a paid organiser so Connolly moved on to become the Belfast organiser of Larkin’s Irish Transport Workers Union. Here he joined in the campaign to get the Irish TUC to set up an Irish (as, purposely, opposed to the British ) Labour Party, i.e. a non-socialist, trade union party to act as a pressure group in the expected Home Rule Parliament. This was eventually done in 1912.

So Connolly had now embraced Labourism and it is not surprising to find him standing as a Labour (and Irish nationalist) candidate on a completely reformist programme in the Belfast municipal elections of January 1913. Later that year he returned to Dublin to play a leading role in resisting the Great Lock-Out through which the Dublin employers, led by William Murphy, tried to destroy the ITWU. Connolly stayed on afterwards as the acting general secretary. The depth of his reformism at this period can be gauged from reading his Re-conquest of Ireland. This envisages “socialism” being established in Ireland as a gradual process, commencing with “municipal socialism”, a reform of the educational system, etc. A sentimental nationalism (so often found in “patriots” born outside their “native” country, as Connolly was) with talk of the “soul of the Irish nation” is also evident.

When the first world war broke out Connolly can at least be given credit for opposing it, though behind the socialist rhetoric it is possible to detect a more basic Irish nationalism. As the war dragged on Connolly was to get involved in a conspiracy with “pure and simple” republicans to stage an armed uprising with help from Imperial Germany, to try to establish an independent Irish Republic. He began to neglect his trade union duties for military training and put the Irish Citizen Army, originally a self-defence body formed by the ITWU to protect its members from police brutality, at the disposal of the Republicans. The “rising” at Easter 1916 was a fiasco, easily put down by the British army. Connolly was executed for his part in it and so became an Irish National Hero - a sad end for someone who for a while came near to becoming a revolutionary socialist but who later fell back into the bog of careerism, Labour reformism and Irish republicanism.

Adam Buick

The War to End War. (1919)

From the June 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since August 1914 the assertion has been continually cropping up in the most unlikely places that the “ Great War” was being fought in order to prevent, for all time, the possibility of such a disaster ever again overtaking the world. The workers of every country engaged in the struggle were urged to come in and do their bit, so that when the strife was over and one side or the other emerged victorious a reign of perpetual peace should be inaugurated.

Papers and people of the sentimental type, such, for instance, as the “Daily News” and Harold Begbie, were particularly vehement in their repeated declarations that the war that has been devastating Europe for the past five years was, must and should be the last, or as some of them put it, the very last war.

A great many people believed it. Undoubtedly many men joined the Army and fought and died in the belief that they were acting in the best possible way to prevent the recurrence of such an overwhelming catastrophe. They were inflamed with what is so often, and so erroneously, considered the noble idea of self-sacrifice, were willing to go through a course of brutal and degrading training in the art (!) of warfare, allowed themselves to be sent abroad to kill and be killed at the command of their superior officers, thinking that they were thereby helping to make future generations safe from the horrors of militarism. They were most of them quite sincere in the matter. Mixed with the contempt one cannot help but feel for their wrong-headed and foolish idea of patriotic self-sacrifice, we may perhaps spare a little leaven of pity for the waste of what was in its inception a not altogether ignoble impulse.

The utter foolishness of this idea of the late war having as one of its results the ending of all warfare, can be seen at once if we consider the world situation to-day.

• The Entente and its allies are fighting the Hungarian revolutionarists.
• The Entente and the reactionary Russian party are fighting both the Bolsheviks and the Poles.
• The German Government are fighting the German Spartacists.
• The Bulgarian Government is fighting the Bulgarian revolutionists.
• The Italians and the Jugo-Slavs are on the verge of a conflict (if such has not already started).
• The Greeks are calling up their 1920 class of recruits, to be ready for anticipated happenings in the Balkan States.
• New Zealand is alarmed at what it considers to be the aims of the Japanese to dominate the Pacific.
• There are rebellions and riots, accompanied by wholesale executions and repressions, in India and Egypt.
• Ireland is only kept from an outbreak by the menace of machine-guns and tanks.
• There are strike-riots in Australia and in America.
• Conflicts, with many casualties resulting, have taken place between the French authorities and the French trade unions.
• England is nominally the most peaceful, but even here there is an undercurrent of discontent among all sections of the populace, which may at any moment break through the sheep-like docility of the British working man.

Perpetual peace has not even started to be yet awhile.

Anyone who has even the most rudimentary knowledge of economics knows how futile are the expectations as to a capitalist war, waged all capitalist States, resulting in a cessation of by armed conflict While capitalism lasts; while certain groups of capitalists struggle among themselves for, the possession of the most-favoured—from the profit-making standpoint—portions of the earth; while you have such groups intriguing one against the other for the possession of the world markets, you must inevitably have a condition of things that leads eventually to war. There comes a time when neither of the rival groups will give way: then comes a deadlock and an appeal to their respective governments, leading up to appeals to the credulous working man in the various countries to join up and fight “the war to end war,” “the war of liberty,” “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” “the war for the rights of small nationalities,” and the war for all the other catch-phrases with which we have become familiar during the last few years.

The way to end war is by the detraction of the root-cause of war, that is by the destruction of the capitalist system itself. There can be no escape from the spectacle of bloodshed, rapine, and horror while capitalism lasts.

The Socialist, from his inception as Socialist, has for his part been waging a war more bitter and deadly even than that which has reddened the plains and fouled the air of Europe. His war is the age-long struggle of the dispossessed against the owners of the world’s wealth. This is the last and greatest war, the waging and winning of which stand as beacons of hope in this dark age of death and destruction.

To his comrades in the fight the writer sends a message of courage and endurance; to the non-Socialist members of his class (his future comrades) he voices an appeal for a patient and intelligent examination of the principles of Socialism; to both he reiterates his assurance of the final speedy emancipation of his class from the thralldom of capitalism to the new-born freedom of the Socialist Commonwealth.

F. J. Webb

Class struggle (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The class struggle is a very real historical fact within capitalism arising from commodity production and exchange. At the very heart of this transient social system, there exists an antagonistic struggle between a majority class of workers who administer, design, produce and distribute all the social wealth of society as commodities and a small minority which, although playing no part in the productive process, has the major advantage of owning and controlling all the resources of the planet—the factories and the distribution and communication systems and also what the workers produce.

Since workers do not own and control the various forms of property found in capitalism we are, as a class, cut off from deciding what should be produced, how and for whom. “No profit, no production" is the rule. If profits are to be protected by deliberate under-production, burning of foodstuffs or the taking of farming land out of production, then under capitalism this has to be carried out. Ownership and control of property with a view to profit means that the facilities required to meet social needs and aspirations are going to he severely restricted.

Exploitation

Excluded from ownership and control, workers are forced to trade their mental and physical abilities (their labour power) as a commodity to capital for a wage or a salary. The class struggle has its origins in the exploitation of the workers’ labour power by employers during the production process. The origin of profit is an excess produced by workers over the value of the goods which sustain and reproduce their labour-power. This surplus is taken by the capitalists on account of their monopoly as a class over the means and methods of production and distribution. On the one hand there are the employers trying to extract as much surplus value out of the workforce as possible while, on the other hand, workers are struggling, usually in trade unions, to gain higher wages and better working conditions at the expense of profit.

These conflicting class interests between an oppressive class and a subject class cannot be balanced harmomiously. If profits are threatened then it is the standard of living of the working class which is attacked. If there is an accidental over-production of commodities which cannot be sold on the market then it is the jobs of workers which are at risk with all the hardship and worry that unemployment brings.

Naturally the existence of the class struggle is not to the liking of those who are paid to defend the economic interests of the capitalist class. Many academics and politicians try to get around the question of the class struggle by disputing its existence or blaming it on the writings of Karl Marx. But Marx merely found classes and the class struggle existing as a historical fact. In recent years these intellectual prostitutes have pointed to the low level of strikes during the late I980s compared to the mid-1970s as an indication of the class struggle’s demise. However, like the reported eclipse of Marx’s ideas and his scientific analysis of capitalism due to events in eastern Europe, this obituary is wholly premature. The critique of political economy and the class struggle only end with the abolition of capitalism by a working-class socialist majority not by the wishful thinking of economists or journalists.

Strikes and the state

Strikes, like trade unions themselves, are effects of the class struggle not the cause. The class struggle is due to the very class nature of capitalism. It is also a two-way struggle. In times of high profits when capitalism is booming, employers will generally concede to pay demands. The last thing they want is for profitable production to be curtailed through industrial action. But during depressions capitalists dig in their heels and resist, with workers defending previous gains from the encroachment of capital. At times of high unemployment trade unions lose effectiveness as membership declines and firms are unable to pay wage increases without going bankrupt.

The class struggle must become political if workers are to realise their class interests and ensure that production and distribution is undertaken to meet the needs of society rather than the anti-social pursuit of profit. But why? After all, the capitalist class play no role in the productive process. Why can’t workers just take what they need? This question overlooks one important feature of capitalism: the state.

The state is the instrument used by governments to protect the property ownership of the capitalist class whose general and particular interests they represent. This is done in a number of ways. First, governments formulate economic or social policies to attack wage levels like the ill-fated Incomes Policy of the 1960’s under Harold Wilson. Second, the government of the day, Labour or Conservative, can use state violence against workers, breaking strikes, imprisoning trade unionists or passing anti—working—class legislation. Third, the government finances a continual stream or propaganda via schools, universities and other institutions it subsidises.

The political power used to protect the property of the capitalist class is also vulnerable because it is dependent upon workers periodically voting capital's political parties into power to protect it anti further capitalist interests.

Death knell

If the working class is to create a society of free men and women in which social wealth production is held in common and democratically controlled, they must stop voting for the interests of capital. Instead, they must take political action as socialists in order to capture political power and gain control of the machinery of government. Since workers are the last oppressed class in human history it is only by their political action that socialism can be established. The failure of Leninism to impose “socialism” on society by a group of professional revolutionaries has shown that workers must freely accept the need for socialism and understand their active part in its realisation, rather than surrender their political thinking to leaders.

Socialists are in fact workers ourselves facing the same social and economic problems peculiar to our class. We know where our class interests lie and how our political objective is to be achieved, yet the only tool we possess to demonstrate to workers where their class interests lie is continual argument and persuasion wherever the opportunity presents itself. The contradictions inherent within commodity production can only intensify as the techniques and forces of production are continually subordinated to further the aims of profit. It is the very material conditions of capitalism, along with socialist argument, which convince workers to accept the need for socialism, and when enough workers do, the death knell of capitalism will peal across the six continents of the world.

Richard Lloyd