The Misplacing of Marx (1956)

From the November 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ruling class, through its defenders, have tried many methods over the years to kill the influence of his work, but, like a ghost, Marx continues to haunt them. In the early years he was ignored, but the penetration, power and pungency of his outlook compelled opponents to take notice of him. Then followed bitter attacks upon him and his views, but social development took the point out of these attacks and revealed the ignorance and malevolence of the attackers.

Since then Marx and his work has been approached from different angles, in the endeavour to remove the sting. He has been patronised on the plea that he was quite an energetic and fruitful thinker, but, alas, his theories were all wrong! That what he said was perhaps justified in his day, but times have changed. That his criticism of Capitalism was searching and true in his day, but Capitalism has completely changed since then. And so on. But it was no good. In spite of the claims that his theories were all wrong, and that no reputable economist or historian accepted them, time has shown that Capitalism is still fundamentally the same old Capitalism, and quotations from his writings reveal that his criticisms, his theories, and his conclusions are as applicable today as they were when they were written long ago.

In an editorial in The Times Literary Supplement (21st September, 1956) there is another approach to the work of Marx. He has become respectable, but the sting has been removed.

The editorial is concerned with a new book on Marx by T. B. Bottomore and M. Maximilien Rabel. The editorial tells us:

“The purpose of the editors is to exhibit Marx as, first and foremost, not a philosopher or an economist, but a student of society, and to show how much in the modem development of social theories is due to the impetus derived from Marx.”

The editorial then claims that Hegel was the root of Marxism: “Had Saint-Simon never written a line, the broad outlines of Marxism might still have been the same: without Hegel Marxism could not have existed.” This sweeping statement is nonsense; it ignores the fact that all past thinkers and practical movements played important parts in what ultimately became the Marxian outlook. The philosophers, from Aristotle to Feuerbach; the pre-French Revolutionary writers who were lumped 

together as the Encyclopaedists; economists from Sir Wm. Petty to Ricardo, including Benjamin Franklin; and finally the Utopian Socialists, whose influence, in spite of the editorial, may have been the most important in shaping the direction of Marx’s outlook.

The editorial then goes on:

“Once this reservation [relating to Hegel's influence] is made, however, the case for Marx's influence on the development of sociological thinking is overwhelmingly made out.”

This is a clever way of putting it; not that he was right in his outlook, but that be had a great influence in the development of modern thinking—but they refrain from enlightening us on the subject of modern thinking.

The real kick, however, is contained in the last few lines of the editorial:

"And it is possible to pay tribute to Marx's role in the formation of modern social theory without necessarily subscribing to all his conclusions. Few of the leading sociologists of the last fifty years have in fact been Marxists. But the study of society would not have attained the stature, or assumed the form, which it has reached to-day without the many-sided insights which Marx brought to it.”

There we have it! He was not a bad old chap; did a lot of good work in his time, but, of course, we have progressed far beyond him now! Thus he can be safely canonised and forgotten.

But the devil of it is "He’s dead, but be won’t lie down! ”

Gilmac.

Lost Illusion (1949)

Book Review from the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Lost Illusion,” by Freda Utley (Allen & Unwin,  237 pages, 10s. 6d.), tells of her conversion to the  Communist Party in 1926, of her marriage to a Russian and her life in Russia for many years, of her disillusionment and eventually of the arrest without charge or public trial of her husband. Except that she received a postcard in 1937 from a Siberian concentration camp she has never heard from him since his arrest and all her efforts to get information from the Russian authorities have produced no result whatever. She says that she refrained from publishing the story all these years lest it should harm him, but she assumes now that he must be dead, or, if still alive, that he no longer has any chance of release whether she publishes the facts or maintains silence.

Those whose interest in the book is in this tragic personal story will probably be well satisfied and will doubtless accept the tribute to her sincerity paid by her friend of many years Bertrand Russell, who contributes, an Introduction. If, however, they have the curiosity to wonder what led the authoress through her various political enthusiasms they may well be puzzled, as indeed she is herself. She writes: “ Looking back on that distant time, I now wonder, did I really believe it? 1 suppose I did, or I should never have thrown up my job in the capitalist world and gone off with my husband to take part, as we thought, in the construction of Socialism.” (p. 17). Elsewhere (p. 11) she quotes what Bertrand Russell said to her when she was toying with the idea that it was all Stalin’s fault and that perhaps Lenin or Trotsky would have changed things. All Russell said was: “ Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics?” The truth appears to be that in spite of having had what among the rich would be called a good education, and in spite of her economic and political studies, her changes of political faith have never been much more than violent emotional reactions against whatever unpleasant facts forced themselves on her attention. So when she came up against the sordid cruelty of British capitalism in the General Strike she suddenly had a vision that strange, faraway Russia, with its Communist Government, was different and must therefore be noble and beautiful. It is not clear from the book exactly where Freda Utley’s present political sympathies lie but we do know that it is the fate of many who approach politics in this emotional way to end up as cynical upholders of things as they are.

Socialists who read “Lost Illusion” will be interested in Freda Utley’s many first-hand examples of the inequalities of wealth, the class distinctions and snobbery, the callous attitude of the ruling clique towards the workers and peasants, and the brazen way the outward forms of democratic methods embodied in the Constitution are ignored in practice. Above all. Socialists will notice her description of Russia as a form of State Capitalism:

“The Russian workers, like the peasants have no say at all as regards the disposal of the wealth created by their labour. The Communist Party, although not in theory the ‘owner’ of the means of production, appropriates to itself or for its own purposes the profit and benefits derived from the labour of the rest of the population. One can call the system state capitalism with the Bolshevik Party drawing the dividends.” (P.184.)

By itself this may appear to indicate that Freda Utley has a clear insight into the nature of capitalism and Socialism. In fact she seems to have reached a correct form of words by accident, for there is nothing in the book to show that she understands what Socialism and capitalism are and much to show that she does not. Nowhere does she say what exactly she understands by Capitalism and Socialism and she repeatedly uses terms in a way that betrays lack of understanding. On page one we are told that Russia in 1927 “ might be called semi-Socialist,” and we learn that some time earlier she was “ active ... in the Socialist movement" but what she means by the latter is that she was a member of the Labour Party. As such, as also when she was in the I.L.P., she was supporting the movement to establish State capitalism in Britain, which makes her criticism of “State capitalist ” Russia somewhat mystifying. If in her eyes the difference is that Russia is now a dictatorship it is pertinent to remind her that so it was in the early days of her admiration for it. And when we are asked to note that in State Capitalist Russia since 1935 “the salaries of high officials have been anything from ten to thirty times as high as the wage of a worker of average qualifications” (p.191) it is relevant to point out that exactly the same inequality prevails in British State capitalism under [a] Labour government. There is just such a gulf between a railway porter’s £5 a week and the £8,500 a year paid to heads of some State Boards.

Quite late in the book (p.183) she is still calling the Russian government “Stalin’s Socialist government,” yet she complains (p.175) because the idea still persists in western countries that Russia is a “Socialist state.” She forgets that she was one of those who in the Labour Party and I.L.P. and later in the Communist Party spent years building up the illusion that State Capitalism is Socialism. If at the beginning she had seriously studied the problem and had asked herself whether the working class could be emancipated within capitalism, she would have realised that emancipation requires common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, that this cannot be achieved until the majority become Socialists, and that it involves the ending of property incomes, the wages system and production for sale and profit. Had she done this she would not have contributed to the perpetuation of forms of capitalism by backing the Labour Party and Communist Party. Incidentally she would have escaped the painful experience of going to Russia only to be disillusioned by what she found there. She would have known from the outset that Socialism did not exist in Russia and was not being built up there any more than it is being built up in Britain today.

Edgar Hardcastle

Power in society (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concept of power is a confused one. Whether we're thinking about political and social institutions, or individual relationships, power means to have some dominance or control. Capitalism, a system based on production for profit, works in the interests of a minority — those who own and control the means of life. Workers vote into parliamentary power, political parties pledged to the continuation of capitalism — parties which operate against their interests. As long as the workers allow this situation to persist, a conflict will exist between “us and them”, the majority and the minority, the producers and those who own, the powerless and the powerful. To resolve this conflict we have to understand what power really means and what it could mean. We have to challenge the whole ideology of present social arrangements.

There are two essentially different uses of the word power. The first is the typical way in which we experience power in capitalism; the power which other people exert over us. Because workers believe that the present system is the only way of organising society — that it has always existed and must therefore continue to exist — they go on allowing others to control our lives. Small wonder. From childhood to old age, we see and fit into the social arrangements of the society we are born into. We experience the authority structure of capitalism, at first through the family, with its extended period of “childhood" and legal powerlessness. Later through schooling, through churches, through employment, the newspapers, television and so on, we come to accept the view that some people are “better" than others, that we need "leaders", that hierarchies are inevitable and that left to our own devices, the workers would create chaos.

This indoctrination imbues us with a belief in our own weakness, in our inability to decide for ourselves. We learn to aspire only to a “normal” lifestyle and a mentality fragmented by the crippling contradictions between what we feel ourselves to be and how capitalism compels us to behave. As we grow up in this society, our hopes and expectations are progressively impoverished. Children, for example, are constantly learning, constantly active in response to the world they find around them. Contrast this with what we all learn in school. Education exists to train us for our function in the larger world, beyond the school and family, for an adulthood where our behaviour fits the requirements of capitalism.

In classrooms children learn to sit still, to “do as they’re told — or else” (and the punishment system of the school mirrors in miniature the punishment system of the wider society, with its “detention” and centres for the “maladjusted”). Ultimately, children learn that if what they want to do conflicts with how the teacher — the person with power over them — expects them to behave, they cannot beat the system. There are only two choices: either to respect and conform to the superiority of those who control them, or to channel their nonconformity and disrespect into a negative form — rebellion and disruption. Whatever else children learn at school, they are forced into the habits of passivity and powerlessness, to external regulation and imposed definitions of their capacities and aptitudes. They learn to be one of the crowd or risk the cruelly isolating behaviour of other children. From schooling and elsewhere we are all then coerced into an evaluative, limited and impoverished sense or view of ourselves and our needs. The opportunity does not exist for young people to continue the way they started out, with a “natural" and integrated active approach to their environment.

Capitalism creates disintegrated individuals and a disintegrated society; one which lives out of harmony with its people's material needs. In this society constraints are invariably imposed on us — we are governed, not self-governing. Is it surprising then that power has become a word with wholly negative connotations? In capitalism, power means oppression.

In sharp contrast is the original derivation of the word — the French verb “pouvoir” meaning “to be able". So power means also an "inherent quality in something" — whatever that something can do. It means an active property — a physical strength, energy itself residing in the material nature of an organ or mechanism. In this sense power is simply the ability to “affect” — the power of a herb or a drug to affect a body, the power of the press to affect opinions, the power of a film to affect our emotions, or the power of an argument to affect our ideas.

If we look at power and society in this context, we can see how that society functions. Physically we need certain things to sustain life — we need food, warmth, shelter, we need to reproduce ourselves and we need to achieve some sort of integration with other parts of the natural world. People are part of the natural world; it is therefore inseparable from our existence that we should be active; our activities are the means by which we express our abilities, our capacities, our human powers. It is these powers and activities which create wealth. Workers produce the food, the energy, the building materials; we operate the transport networks that distribute them.

In other words it is our labour which sustains life on this planet. It is in us. the people who work and produce useful wealth, that the power in society actually resides. Paradoxically, the workers who produce all that is useful at present don’t engage in this activity for themselves: the owners live parasitically on our backs, we are giving them sustenance by our labour and the quality of that sustenance is far higher than we'll get in this system. “Human power” — the human ability to be active and to be effective — could be used by us, the majority of people who are producing wealth anyway, in our own interests. It is precisely this consciousness of our own nature and our own class interest and our own needs which capitalism attempts to drum out of us. The dominant ideas of any age are those produced by and in support of the status quo — the interest of the controlling powerful class. The development of an education system with the characteristics already outlined, is necessary to train us to accept a social system which is at odds with our perceptions of our own natures. We have to be taught to submit to control from beyond ourselves — it is necessary that we go on believing in our inabilities and weaknesses.

There is another contradiction in the belief that we who produce wealth cannot do it for ourselves. This theory has it that we’d be driven by insatiable urges to kill and maim and rob: that we’d create chaos in the world. There is an irrational belief that we need money and markets, prisons and property, to prevent this happening. The agonising irony of this belief lies in the fact that it is capitalism itself which creates such behaviour. Wars fought in the interests of the capitalist class cause workers to murder each other. Theft is a concept valid only through the existence of private property. As for chaos: what could be more chaotic and irrational than an economic system where people starve to death while glib politicians speak of “overproduction" and pay farmers not to produce food? It is impossible to imagine how a world community, conscious of its needs and producing directly in response to them, could fail to function better than that. Still, it seems their propaganda has usurped our rationality — we go on denying the evidence of our senses.

Under capitalism virtually our only experience of the use of our abilities is in the sense that our capacities are regulated by others. We have no experience of how to use our abilities and powers for ourselves in our working lives. This has repercussions in personal relationships, simply because we are alienated from our abilities: we sell them weekly-and monthly, they don’t seem to be ours. Much is talked about power in relationships — about gratuitous acts of cruelty and violence, about sadism and masochism. Most of this behaviour can be traced back to our attitudes towards two particular forms of learnt behaviour: dominance and submission.

Why is such behaviour typical under capitalism? The fundamental cause lies in the opposed class interests, which requires that one class dominates and the other submits. Associated with this are the values we have had bred into us: our belief in the need for leaders and authority, our acceptance of the evaluative definition of ourselves by others (so that status can be awarded accordingly), and the attitude we have acquired of constantly assessing ourselves in comparison with fellow workers to decide who is “better” and who “worse”. Attitudes like these ensure that domination and submission continue: they ensure we use our “powers” against ourselves. We do not recognise that our interests as a class coincide. We spend our energies fighting among ourselves, men against women, blacks against whites, salaried against waged employees, young against old. The competition for artificially scarce resources encourages this class divided, mutually hostile attitude.

Because of all this our daily existence is made up of frustrating experiences, of contradictions and tensions in our working and personal lives. A sense of frustration usually has one of two effects, both destructive: it may be expressed outwards in angry and aggressive exhibitions, or inwards, causing stress illness, withdrawal and depression. The only positive way of resolving this frustration is to recognise it for what it is. Frustration is a sense of powerlessness, an inability to express what we feel to be our energies and powers. Frustration is synonymous with a feeling of “lack".

Under capitalism we are controlled externally, we are not in control of our own lives, and we lack a material existence in line with our needs. This situation will only change once we become conscious, as a class, of our power. Our weakness is a myth. Human beings are active and thoughtful; already the working class runs society from top to bottom. What we urgently need to do is create a society in which these abilities can be used productively. Socialist democracy means that we express our own sense of what we need, that we control our lives directly, develop our powers and use them for ourselves. Socialists rehabilitate the idea of “power”, to act on that frustration to end it.

Chira Lovat

Party News: Election Activity (2016)

Party News from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party will be standing in the 5 May elections to the Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Assembly. In London we will be contesting 3 of the 14 super-constituencies and in Wales Swansea West.

In all, over a million electors will have the chance to vote for a socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production with distribution on the basis of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’, and against present-day, capitalist society of minority class ownership and production for profit which all the other candidates will be standing for in one form or another.

The election campaigns are being organised locally. If you want to help out at street stalls and/or in distributing leaflets door-to-door or at stations  contact the local branch (see page 8 for details).

London North East: North London branch.

London South West: West London branch.

Lambeth & Southwark: Head Office.

Swansea West: Swansea branch.

Proper Gander: The Golden Swill Bucket Awards (2016)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’ wrote George Orwell in Keep The Aspidistra Flying. In the seventy years since then, advertisers have found ever-more sophisticated sticks and swill buckets to grab our attention. The slogans which Orwell satirised look twee compared with today’s barrage of commercials jumping out at us from websites, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and at fifteen minute intervals during the dross we watch on telly. From the girl in the Flake advert to the Go Compare opera singer, TV commercials remain the most striking, even in our world of targeted online ads. However annoying, manipulative or offensive the rattling is, what’s important is how much it gets noticed and talked about. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so even a mention in the Socialist Standard might count as a small win for the ad agencies. In honour of this, Proper Gander presents the Golden Swill Bucket Awards for excellence in TV advertising.

The award for Most Rose-Tinted Depiction Of Driving is a tie between the ads for the Peugeot 208, the Infiniti Q30, the Mercedes Benz A-Class, and no doubt a load of other top-end cars. They glide silently through empty, shiny city streets, driven by the kind of attractive, confident businessperson we’re supposed to aspire to be. But if you fork out the £20,000+ for one, you’ll still end up stressed out in the same motorway traffic jams and suburban rat-runs as anyone in a clapped-out second-hand Ford KA.

Bisto Best gravy granules win the award for the Most Brazen Attempt To Manipulate Good Intentions. Their ‘Together Project’ campaign is an appeal for us to invite a lonely elderly neighbour round for a Sunday roast dinner (as long as it involves gravy). Yes, that’s a nice thing to do, but we could have a beef with Bisto’s implied emotional blackmail. Why should we put any stock into what a gravy company tells us?

The award for Most Crass Celebrity Endorsement goes to John Cleese for lowering himself to collaborate with Specsavers. For years, their adverts’ myopia-based misunderstandings have been desperately trying to make the phrase ‘should’ve gone to Specsavers’ part of the national lexicon. Having apparently run out of their own ideas, they’ve now turned to regurgitating other people’s. So they’ve decided to taint the memory of that scene in Fawlty Towers when Basil attacks his car with a branch by remaking it with Cleese as a short-sighted older version mistakenly whacking a police car instead of his own. The policemen inside are surprisingly nonchalant, whereas in real life Basil would have been tasered and restrained before falling down the stairs on his way to the cells.

The award for Most Depressing Visual Metaphor goes to Experian credit checking. A pretend-couple falling onto a settee laughing isn’t the most original scene to include in an advert, but the Experian couple’s laughter seems a bit deranged considering that they’re cuddling an upholstered number representing their credit rating. Having your life’s worth reduced to some digits isn’t made more palatable by making them out of stripy fabric.

The award for Most Blatant Use Of Spin goes to the government, who paint themselves as saviours of the working class in their commercial for the National Living Wage. Parliament doesn’t usually promote its law-changes on the gogglebox. We didn’t see their decision to bomb Syria advertised with a glossy campaign showing Tornado jets zooming towards their targets, apart from the latest RAF recruitment drive. The National Living Wage advert’s ‘step up’ slogan is illustrated by cleaners and waitresses walking up stairs, telling us that from April, the minimum wage rises by 50p to £7.20 an hour for workers aged over 25. Rebranding the minimum wage as the ‘living wage’ is presumably intended to side-step claims by the Living Wage Foundation that £7.85 an hour is the lowest for an ‘acceptable standard of living’. And cuts to child and working tax credits will undo some of the increase in income for many of those paid at the new minimum. However the minimum wage is calculated and advertised, it still just represents a rate at which we get exploited. It’s more like getting stepped on than a step up.

Our final award goes to First Direct bank for the Most Self-Consciously Wacky Campaign. Banking has suffered an image problem since sky-high bonuses and bail-outs hit the headlines. So what better way to rebrand a bank than with a monochrome CGI duck-billed platypus with a northern accent? This platypus – apparently called ‘Barry’ – hangs out with beat-boxing sparrows and shops in second-hand record stores while he’s eulogising First Direct bank. Barry likes ‘things a bit off-beat’, although considering how hard he’s trying to be hip, he could have thought of something more outré to promote than financial services.

Mike Foster

Gunmen, get lost! (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was the Saturday after St Patrick’s Day and roars went up in homes and pubs as Ireland thrashed England at rugby: the joyful, harmless chorus of the underdog. On that same afternoon there was another roar: the now familiar cry of anguish and confusion as workers doing their weekend shopping—this time in Warrington—became the victims of a carefully planted bomb. One of those shoppers, out with his father to buy a present for Mothers Day, was a little boy of less than four years of age. He was murdered—another "war victory” for the IRA. Another boy, aged twelve, out shopping for Everton football shorts, was so facially disfigured by the blast that his parents had to identify him by his watch. He died days later.

We live in a society that makes quite a habit of murdering children. Over two hundred have been killed as victims of the warfare in Ireland over the last quarter of a century. The youngest was six months old. The unspeakable thuggery of the paramilitaries—of both sides, regardless of religious or ideological labels: all of their gods are wanted for murder—is a shadow of the legally sanctioned bombings of children. in Vietnam, in Libya, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

Those who bring violence on to our streets in the name of liberating us— liberating anybody—are our most profound enemies. Only the most dogmatically programmed Leninist, still clinging to the belief that those who blow up defenceless children arc heroic fighters for colonial liberation, and the most detached and ignorant Irish American Catholics, with their rosary in one hand and their contributory cheque to the NORAID murder machine in the other, can condone, defend or apologise for what has been done. And then, with the imaginative intelligence of lemmings, competing with their IRA rivals to commit ethical suicide, the UFF joined in within a week of the Warrington atrocity to murder five new victims, one of them a young man of only seventeen.

“Enough is too much”

Sitting in a Dublin cinema on a rainy afternoon watching the Oscar-winning film The Crying Game was an electrifying experience. The film itself (which must have one of the least predictable twists of any film ever; one which probably detracts from the poignancy of the unambiguous attack on terrorist violence) shows vividly the cold and callous and futile world of IRA violence. (In this it contrasts well with the pathetically idealised Sinn Fein innocence depicted in the American film Patriot Games.) But that afternoon the film was not the main event.

I had just come from a meeting at Trinity College Dublin (there were several of them in the week after Warrington) where person after person, representing many organisations and none, had voiced their contempt for the perpetrators—all of them—of the kind of hate-filled murder campaigns which small, undemocratic gangs have dared to initiate in their names. The overwhelming sentiment in Dublin during the days following Warrington was that violent action was pointless and reprehensible. On one page of one day’s edition of the Irish Times (26 March) the letters and editorial blasted responses to the bombs, which were significant not for their uniqueness but for the extent to which they were reflected by everyone I spoke to in Dublin. Wrote John Sullivan:

Last Saturday, while Ireland cheered on 15 heroes in green, a four-year old child was blown apart in the name of Irish freedom. No excuse, no "accident of war", no apportionment of blame for alleged unheeded warnings can hide the IRA’s murderous intent. It is incumbent upon ordinary Irish people everywhere, who reject the realisation of national aspirations through violence, to protest . . . against those in our community who offer even the most tacit support to any terrorist organisation.

"As a mother of a small boy I am writing to express my disgust and contempt at the murder in Warrington of a three-year old boy by the IRA” began the letter from Allison Collier. "Both killing sides are interchangeable—most of all in their politics of devastation and fear", declared the editorial. In every bar there was spontaneous rage. (It says much for a culture that the killing of children incites such feeling). Over 30,000 people signed a peace petition at Trinity College. When Susan McHugh, a Dublin housewife, called in to a TV phone-in programme to say that "enough is enough" and "ordinary people" must stand up and be counted against the violence she was surely voicing the view of the majority.

The four days which intervened between McHugh’s call and Sunday afternoon were filled with an energy it was impossible to miss. A demonstration was called to be held at 3pm in O’Connell Street (the widest central street in any European capital city). Political leaders were banned from taking the platform; they had done nothing to end the killings so far and their speeches would not be welcome at an event which belonged to the people. At one meeting I expressed the view that no nation and no government was worthy of the support of the wealth-producing majority; we had no countries to die for, only a world to live once it is our own. Several people cheered—it was a cheering atmosphere— but it was obvious that more than favoured sentiments would need to enter the minds of the millions before the death of nation and statehood could become a reality.

Peace rally

The O’Connell demonstration, held with noted irony outside the GPO which was the scene of the Easter Rising of 1916, was one of the most moving events that this writer can recall. Tears flowed openly and with no shame. The presence of thousands of people straining to unleash pent-up passions for human brother- and sister-hood might be dismissed by the cynics as empty moral gesturing, but to this socialist it was comforting proof that humans are happier striving for peace than conspiring for violence.

One recalls the ghastly and tasteless Falklands victory parade through London: certainly there was feeling there, but it was the contrived, regimented unmelodious patriotic phoney-feeling which is as fragile as the wooden sticks on which schoolboys were told to wave Union Jack idiot-symbols. The Dublin Peace Rally was workers showing that guns are not part of our nature.

Of course, little really changed. Still the paramilitary chiefs pursue the total-blindness policy of an eye for an eye; still those leaders are now mainly racketeers, living in personal luxury thanks to protection rackets and robberies carried out for the pointless “cause” by impoverished ghetto- dwellers; still there will be those who will try to argue tortuously that the murder of someone on "the other side” is somehow less of an atrocity than violence against their own. It is easy for those with good memories to think back to the Peace People in the 1970s who, after a short-lived peaceful campaign against sectarianism, withdrew into obscurity for reasons that are still a matter for historical interpretation. It is at least possible that this time the momentum will be kept up—the widespread desire for peacefulness and hatred of the murdering few might just be uncrushable.

Speakers from various religious denominations addressed the rally. For a socialist this was hard to take—the only consolation being that it is better to hear them imploring listeners to love their neighbours as themselves than their more typical business of blessing bombs which have state approval. It was good to see The Dubliners, whose repertoire of occasionally nationalist songs has left a sour taste in the mouth of many a socialist music-lover, stand up and denounce the murderers. It was pleasing to see that Sinead O'Connor made it to the rally and preceded her song by saying, in marked contrast to the God Squad, that we should not wait until we die to reach "The Kingdom of Heaven”, for it was within all of us to bring it about down here on Earth now. From someone who had advocated the abolition of the money system the meaning, if not the words, made much sense.

I was not the only one who left the mass rally after three hours of almost non-stop heavy rain with a sense of elation. That afternoon several thousands of us had played the crying game and realised that we could do more than weep; we could make peace our practical objective. But there will be no peace while the economic and political motives for killing are implanted within the very social order which dominates our lives. Peaceful capitalism is like non-combative mugging. Capitalism or peace—it must be one or the other.

Steve Coleman

A seller's life (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One aspect of the market system is the selling of their mental and physical energies by members of the working class to "earn a living". We use the term “working class" in its widest sense: all those men. women and children who depend for their livelihood on selling their ability to work to an employer, dependants of those earners, the self-employed, those seeking an employer or who have had one (or more) and are now living on a pension. In other words, about 98 percent of the population. The other 2 percent own sufficient of the means of wealth production and distribution to enable them to live on profits, rents or interest on capital.

The labour, or more accurately the labour power, of workers—whether skilled or unskilled, experienced or inexperienced, poorly paid or relatively highly paid—is bought and sold in a market. But it is not like a supermarket or a car market or a housing market, where things change hands for money. In the labour market people are bought and sold. Not, of course, quite like slaves. The capitalist system is more subtle than that. It is the working capacities of people that are bought and sold, usually by periods of time, less often by piece-work or the amount of goods produced or finished.

Unequal deal

How fair are the terms of the transaction? Is it a case (as most economists would have us believe) of a willing buyer meeting a willing seller at a mutually acceptable price? Hardly. Capitalists, in their role as as employers, dictate the price at which they will buy labour power and even whether they will buy it at all. They have to make a profit from the use of that labour if they are to stay in business. So they compete with each other, not to bid up the price of labour power—though this does sometimes happen when particular types of labour are scarce—but to make the greatest profit from using it.

Trade unions help to prevent the price of labour power falling. Non-unionists may be exploited more easily by employers happy to pay the lowest wages acceptable to workers often desperate for employment. Such employers have recently been helped by the governments decision to abolish the Wages Councils, which set minimum wages for 2.5 million low-paid workers, 80 percent of whom are women.

The recession verging on slump means that unemployment is rising. Currently the official unemployment rate is just over 10 percent, with the true rate—counting all people who would like paid work— much higher. In Britain as a whole there are now 25 people chasing every job vacancy and in London the figure has risen to 56 (Evening Standard. 4 November).

Job training has a rapidly growing partner: job-seeking training. There are books, talks and classes on how best to present yourself at a job interview, how to write a CV, how to become one of the lucky one-in-25—or 56.

Special problems face those who seek to earn a living selling goods or services. Money is tight and sales resistance high. Only supcrsalespcrsons make decent money. One supersalesman hired the Wembley Conference Centre to bring his message of super- salesmanship to a keenly competitive, if not desperate audience. Part of his act was to carry a skull under his arm, raising its hinged head to display a chocolate-bar-sized product inside. "It gets peoples attention", he claimed enthusiastically. Interviewed briefly on television news, a couple of the punters said why they paid to see such nonsense: they wanted to get one jump ahead of their competitors, they were prepared to learn new and degrading tricks to earn what must mostly be a precarious living.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Gavin Kennedy, in his book Superdeal, writes about how sellers are forced to be leaner and meaner if they are to survive. “The hungrier (the sellers) are, the faster they spend their money, preferably while in abject debt, the better they are at reaching their sales targets”. Psychological studies are mined for the help they can give to this process of exploitation. “All good sellers know that one of the most powerful selling closes is to play on the ego, or conscience, of the buyer. They shame you into a ‘buy’ decision".

Leaner and meaner

Fictional literature, which so often reflects real life, dramatizes selling. Willie Loman, in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, epitomizes an ageing pawn in the capitalist game. Desperate to be liked by his potential customers, he is enjoined to "never fight fair with a stranger in the jungle". In the play Glengarry Glen Ross (now also a film) salesmen in a Chicago real estate office vie with each other to sell overpriced land in faraway Arizona, knowing that all but the two most successful of them will lose their jobs at the end of the week.

Buying and selling is the essence of the free-market capitalist system. That system has proved to be more efficient at producing wealth than the state bureaucratic or centrally-planned capitalist system. But at what human cost? It is sometimes claimed that workers’ co-operatives are the answer. But unfortunately these, too, have to work within the capitalist system. In the absence of socialist understanding, they are eventually overwhelmed by that system. The only way to end the exploitation and human degradation inherent in capitalism is to develop socialist ideas of production solely for use, so that corresponding practices may follow. Then buying and selling will be relegated to the status of a game of monopoly, amusing but nothing to do with maintaining a decent life.

Stan Parker

Politics: Syndicalism & the General Strike (1975)

From the January 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just as a seed contains the varied hues in a flower, so capitalism at its birth contained all that has flowered into various expressions of revolt. The misery it brought has fostered ideas of short cuts to salvation that continually reappear with different signposts.

Thus, the main arguments of Syndicalism were repeated by the Bolsheviks and their servile followers in Britain in the ’twenties and ’thirties. The Claims that Syndicalism was based on the principles of Marx; that the mass of workers were ignorant and inert, and required leading (and forcing) into the promised land; that the days of theory had passed and the days of action come — these and a host of other ideas demonstrated not only a similarity in outlook between Syndicalism and Bolshevism, but the common source of both movements.

The backbone of Syndicalism was the General Strike. As a proposed means to achieve the workers’ emancipation it has an old history, and received considerable support before the capture of power by parliamentary action had come within the workers’ reach. Like Anarchism, it attracted artists and professional people by its insistence upon leadership, its violent attacks on established institutions, its spurning of theoretical knowledge, and its promise of rapid victory.

After they were expelled from the International the anarchist movement fell to pieces, unable to make progress because of their own opposition to all organization; and the acts of violence to which groups of anarchists resorted led to vigorous police action against them. In their extremity they sought a new lease of life by infiltrating the developing trade union movement. The propaganda of the General Strike fitted in with their anti-State and general-destruction policies, as well as the idea of the capture of power by a militant minority. Sorel describes the position as follows:

Many anarchists, tired at last of continually reading the same grandiloquent maledictions hurled at the capitalist system, set themselves to find a way which would lead them to acts which were really revolutionary. They became members of syndicates which, thanks to violent strikes, realised to a certain extent, the social war they had often heard spoken of. Historians will one day see in this entry of the anarchists into the syndicates one of the greatest events that has been produced in our times, and then the name of my poor friend Fernand Pelloutier will be as well known as it deserves to be.

(Reflections on Violence)

In England and America the influence was brief (though for a short time it captured the imaginations of some who should have known better). The main support was in countries where small industries flourished as France, Italy, Spain and Russia.

It was in France that the General Strike was first exhaustively discussed and propagated. The growth of the trade-union movement led to a struggle between its advocates and those of political action At the Trade Union Congress in 1879 the Guesdist movement, which stood for the conquest of political power, scored a temporary victory, but political action subsequently lost its hold. To the impatient, industrial action appeared as a royal and easy road without having to wait. In 1888 the Congress of the French National Federation of Trade Unions voted in favour of the General Strike and the idea then spread rapidly, even receiving some support from political parties. Among its champions was Aristide Briand who, later as a capitalist cabinet minister, was its vigorous opponent and oppressor.

The arguments for the General Strike at that time may be summed up as follows. To strike was legal, so no matter how widespread it might be the government was unable to prosecute the strikers. A general stoppage of work would reduce the ruling class to famine; it would need to be operated only a short time to compel the government to capitulate and bring the workers into control of power. Its spontaneity meant that it could begin at any time and, hastened by propaganda and organization, bring about the revolution rapidly. The workers must have an organization to take over production afterwards, and the trade unions were admirably suited for this purpose.

Although a minority in the trade-union movement, the anarchists soon occupied key positions and by the middle of the ’nineties were the dominating section. Apart from their fanatical activity, they were assisted by the method of selecting delegates by group and not by number. Being divided in many small groups while their opponents were in fewer larger ones, the anarchists were able to capture the controlling influence; the few highly industrialized parts of France were not able to send as many delegates to conferences as the scattered backward parts where the anarchists predominated. Consequently each congress was “packed” by anarchists — a form of “tactics” with which we are still familiar.

Under their influence, General Strike propaganda went beyond just sitting down and folding arms. Sabotage was adopted, involving the destruction of means of production and the forcing of the support of the unwilling. The practical policy that grew out of the French Revolution and was adopted by Blanqui, Bakunin, De Leon and Lenin was based on the idea that an active minority can carry with it an inert and ignorant mass. It is a policy that depends upon leadership and always places power in the hands of one or two outstanding persons, finally degenerating into personal quarrels between these leaders. Behind it, though rarely recognized, is the conflict between idealism and materialism: the power of the idea alone against the power of material circumstances, which include ideas.

In 1895 a new federation of workers was formed, the General Confederation of Labour (known as the CGT — Confederation General de Travail). It included the General Strike as part of its programme. A conglomeration of unions and federations, it comprised all political shades but was ruled by the anarchist minority until 1909, when the crushing of a large-scale postal strike made clear the weakness of industrial action against the power of the state. The opposition to the General Strike policy, particularly by the Guesdists, also showed its failings. For example, the syndicalists were compelled to include anti-militarist propaganda, as an admission that governmental power would not collapse in a general cessation of work.

Probably the most complete expression of the syndicalist outlook is  contained in Arnold Roller’s The Social General Strike (published by the Debating Club No. I, Chicago, 1905). Sliding over difficulties and inconsistencies, the writer distinguishes between strikes for higher wages or political privileges and the strike. According to him the General Strike begins in a small way, spreads in sympathetic strikes, and develops into the overthrowing of the system; it is the culmination of hundreds of earlier strikes in which the workers have gained experience and an ever-stronger sense of solidarity.

Following that argument, one would imagine that the majority of workers had gradually acquired sufficient class-consciousness to understand their social position and desire a change in the basis of society. But this is not the syndicalist view. According to them, the mass of workers are backward and inert until the General Strike commences. Then, in the course of the movement, they become more active and enthusiastic until they convert the strike from the attainment of some minor object into the social revolution. And this change is supposed to occur in a few days or weeks, as production and distribution are brought to a standstill: knowledge grows like a mushroom out of the quagmires of disaster!

Roller is not disturbed by the fact that all workers will not come out on strike. He says: “This ideal of propaganda will, however, in spite of its beauty always be a dream.” He claims that it is only necessary to interrupt production in the whole country for long enough to totally disorganize capitalist society; this, he claims, can be done by sabotage in the principal industries. (But at another time he insists that a great advantage of the General Strike, that will gain for it many adherents who lack courage, is that it will be perfectly legal.) He makes the following very significant statement:

Modern industry, with its extremely specialised labour division and complications, is but poorly adapted to oppose a general strike caused by a minority, for the strike will completely wreck the whole system necessary for the management of production, and vital to the life of modem society.

The sabotage to assist in this wrecking was to include cutting telephone and telegraph wires; tearing up railway lines; causing accidents; loosening screws in machinery; destroying supports and applying fire and dynamite in mines; sinking ships; and many other methods of destruction — a choice assortment is also described by Pataud and Pouget in their phantasy Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, 1913. Thus, as in the policy of Bakunin, society is to be completely wrecked.

In such circumstances, what would be the position of the workers? The inert mass that has suddenly developed “revolutionary fervour” is supposed to trust local leaders, who will pacify them by reporting the progress of the revolution (how, with the means of communication smashed, is not explained). The feeding of the population in the midst of this wreckage is also glossed over with childlike simplicity, with the answer that hungry people will attack stores of food. Leaving out of consideration the action of the government, what city has stores of food to support its inhabitants for any length of time? And what about water and sanitation? It does not require a great deal of imagination to foresee disease and devastation sweeping through cities like London, Paris, Berlin and New York. If the syndicalists were as successful as they hoped, it would not be a question of bringing the ruling class to their knees but of submerging everyone in a common holocaust of disaster.

But before matters had reached such a pitch the government would have stepped in with the forces at its disposal. Roller has an inkling of this. He claims first that the destruction would be so widespread that there would be insufficient military forces to cope with it, and then that it is essential to get the military on the side of the workers: “For the revolutionising of the present order of society, anti-militarism and its propaganda is an absolute necessary supplement to the General Strike.”

Time after time the power of governments to smash big strikes has been demonstrated. Sometimes naked power has been used, sometimes concessions made, and sometimes the workers have been starved into subjection. The condition the syndicalists take for granted, lack of knowledge on the part of the majority, is a condition that is bound to defeat them by playing into the government’s hands. The experience of large strikes has been the very opposite of that anticipated by the syndicalists. The government smashed the French postal workers in 1909 by simply calling the postal workers to the colours and then sending them back to their old jobs as soldiers. Soldiers are average members of the working class made more amenable by the discipline to which they are subjected and, like the mass of workers up to the present, accept the suppression of "disorder" as a proper course of action.

Gilmac.

Part 2 of this article will deal with the Syndicalist movement in the United States of America.

War and Socialism (1951)

From the July 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sunday Express on May 20th, 1951, reported that a “United Nations curtain of guns, armour and planes today battered massed Chinese assaults and thwarted attempts to make major breaches in the Allied line.”

Did you read that? If you did, we expect you have forgotten it already. But we do not forget. Later the report says that, “the United Nations forces were still killing scores of Chinese for every Allied casualty.” How glibly do our newspaper’s speak of the loss of working-class life. They are glad that large numbers of Chinese should be slaughtered. We are not. We are sorrowful. These Chinese arc our class brothers. True, they speak a different language, wear different clothes, eat different food, but underneath it all they are members of our class, the working-class. The struggle being fought out in Korea is not their struggle. Whoever wins, their conditions will remain the same— poverty and struggle.

In Korea the scene is being set for the next major world conflict. Who controls Korea will control a large part of Asia. Korea belongs neither to us nor to the Chinese who are dying there. Brothers of the working-class, isn’t it time we stopped this insane slaughter? Korea is but a picture in miniature of what is to come. Then millions and millions will die. The last war cost probably 40,000,000 lives. The next one may cost more.

There is only one way to stop wars and that is to establish socialism. Don’t tell us that that will take a long time. How long it takes depends on you. You can hasten it or delay it There can be no doubt that it will come. We need it, the working-class of the world needs it. Join with us and help bring it about.

Clifford Groves

The latest criticism of Karl Marx (1925)

Book Review from the July 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been asked to deal with a publication called "The Socialist’s Bible." It is sold by the "Industrial League and Council," which is one of the many bodies aiming at a reconciliation between the employed and employing classes.

The endless stream of books to prove that Marx was wrong is not only a tribute to Marx in showing how great is the respect his writings still inspire, but it reminds us also how limited and unscientific is the outlook of sections of the propertied class. Not knowing the way in which real social forces work, and quite lacking a sense of proportion, they are told and believe in their simplicity that revolutions are made by the wrongheaded brilliance of the Cromwells, the Rousseaus and the Marxs of history. What, then, could be more natural than the everlasting effort to stop the coming revolution by hurling tomes and pamphlets at the reputation of Marx? How perverse they must think the workers are who go on organising and striking despite, and, in fact, indifferent to the repeated "destruction" of Marxian theories. And how aggravating that the theories keep coming up as fresh and sound as ever although Labourites and Tories, intellectuals and economists have all agreed together that they are as dead as the Dodo.

The anonymous author of this pamphlet :discusses Karl Marx’s Theories" in 20 pages, and while going out of his way to appear generous in recognition of the genius of the man, rejects his philosophy in detail and in the lump.

He says nothing that is new, but in case there are novices who may be imposed upon we can perhaps usefully point out some weaknesses in these old restated objections to Marxism. A short sketch of the life of Marx is followed by some silly and ill-informed remarks about his influence on Socialism in England. We are told that few Socialists have ever read Marx, but rely upon “some small explanatory handbook." This is a queer complaint from the author of a 20-page " small explanatory handbook" which is to serve Marx critics in place of reading Marx himself; and worse follows.

Our critic of Marx goes not to Marx for his references and for a statement of the Marxian case, but to a "small explanatory handbook” by Mr. A. E. Cook. What we get is not a discussion of Marx but a cheap triumph over the grossly inaccurate work of one whose ignorance of Marx has been exposed in the pages of the Socialist Standard.

On page 1 Marx is condemned for not being “ scientific and impartial.’’ On page 2 it is admitted that he was scientific enough to “avoid any moral condemnation of the Capitalist," which is a tribute not earned by many active political workers and writers in their attacks on their opponents’ theories.

We are told that "Events having falsified his doctrine of social change the followers of Marx do not lay stress upon it.” The critic cautiously gives no evidence for the second assertion, but it saved him from the trouble of having to show where the doctrine has been proved false. The Socialist Party of Great Britain regards the doctrine as still unassailable, and is prepared to defend it.

The first volume of “Capital” was published in 1867 and it is argued that “many of the evils which Marx regarded as permanent features of industry have since been removed.”  Our author does not offer to tell us that the poverty of the poor and the riches of the wealthy are some of the evils which “have since been removed,” and they happen to be very important. He forgets, too, that the first Factory Act was passed as early as 1802; and that at the end of the last war it was still necessary to set up numerous Trade Boards to remove “sweating.” At the present time we have a Conservative Government compelled to give legal protection against intolerably low wages to the workers in what is almost our chief industry—agriculture. Has poverty passed away—if so why health insurance and pensions for the aged and for widows? Has insecurity been abolished from the lives of the wealth producers in face of 1¼ million unemployed dependent on the dole?

The most important of the foundations of the Marxian argument is the increasing disparity between the economic positions of the working and propertied classes. This tendency has not passed away. Relative to the powers of wealth production, the workers, as Marx forecast, have been and are getting worse off. Power and wealth are concentrated more and more at one end of the social scale, poverty and individual helplessness at the other. Events have justified Marx, not falsified him.

The author of the pamphlet is aware that Marx did not claim that labour is the source of all wealth; that, in fact, he pointed out the absurdity of ignoring the existence of wealth provided by Nature. But he attributes to Marx the assertion that an object “is worth something because it is useful.” (Page 4.)

On the contrary, what Marx said was that an article, “therefore, has value only because human labour . . . has been embodied in it.” (Capital, Vol. I., page 5, 1912 Edition. W. Glaisher.)

This is what comes of going for information to small handbooks.

Objection to the labour theory is made on the ground that “virgin soil or an undeveloped mine have a value for exchange although no labour has been put into them ” (p. 6). He omits, as is usual in this type of argument, to give instances of virgin soil, and undeveloped mines which have value for exchange. There are at the present day vast areas of land and mineral resources to be had for nothing. When, and not until, the necessary labour has been expended to make the soil usable and both the soil and the minerals accessible to civilisation, will they have exchange value.

There are other points that could be mentioned, but enough has been written to show that even where the criticisms are levelled against Marx and not against Cook, the author makes no real attempt to justify them, and that the basic theories of Marxism have not been seriously attacked, far less demolished.

Edgar Hardcastle

As You Like It (1978)

Theatre Review from the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

As You Like It, Aldwych Theatre, London.

“Was Shakespeare a revolutionary?” is about as facile as “Was Shakespeare a petty-bourgeois reactionary?” The answer to both is that Shakespeare was far too complex a writer to be slotted into any such categories. What can be said is that there are elements in his plays which can be seen to have revolutionary implications, just as there are elements which have reactionary implications. One of the beauties of Shakespeare is that the richness of the texts enables them to be seen as a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, now showing one aspect now the other. Productions of the plays can emphasise many different points; much depends on what the individual director sees.

But at first glance a play like AS YOU hardly strikes director or reader as having revolutionary implications. In so far as there is a plot, it tells of rather soppy true love in a romantic forest where shepherds and shepherdesses form a backdrop to what in essence, is a voyage of self discovery of the principal lovers, and the several secondary ones. Not much revolution going on there.

But as with all Shakespeare, as Celia put it in the play, “There’s more in it”. The play actually draws a sharp and bitter contrast between two societies, the Court and the Forest. The former is painted in colours of unremitting evil. Tyrant Duke and tyrant brother, as Orlando calls them, rule a Society where the worst evils of greed are callously exposed. The usurping Duke seizes lands and lives, and the Court reaches the stage where Touchstone exposing the folly of it all (as well as the avarice) can say: “The more pity that fools may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly”. Not only is the Court evil, Shakespeare is saying, the tyranny results in stupidity.

But is it arguable that Shakespeare is saying more than this. The Court can be seen as representative of emerging capitalist society and Shakespeare is inveighing against it for all he is worth. Rosalind’s hilarious advice to Phoebe to “sell when you can, you are not for all markets”, could be taken as the philosophy of the rising merchant class of the time.

In contrast is the society in the forest of Arden. Home of the banished Duke, here a society is presented without the absurd values of the Court. Here people seek the food they eat, and are content with what they get; here the enemy is not other people but winter and rough weather. No one deludes themselves that the life in the forest is easy; “Ay, now am I in Arden", says Touchstone, adding realistically, “the more fool I”, but at least the difficulties are knowable and can be overcome by social cooperation. In this society the evils of the wealth grabbing usurping Duke have no place; the forest almost magically wipes them out. And when the usurping Duke finally comes to the forest full of barbarous intentions, the very air of the forest (he meets an old hermit and is “converted”!) almost sufficient to change his wicked ways.

The forest society is aware of the advantages and disadvantages of Court life. No easy answers are posited, but even though they have all either left or lost “wealth and ease, a stubborn will to please”, the attendants in the forest can say to the banished Duke that they would not change this life. Jaques even goes so far as to say that if he were given leave to speak his mind he would "through and through cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world". (What else are socialists trying to do?).

The Lovers too when they arrive in the forest, can escape the corrupting influence of the Court. Their escape is essentially personal, whereas the Duke’s escape has a far more universal quality. Nevertheless, the point is still there; here in the forest they can all be “themselves”.

There are a lot of backward (and therefore, potentially reactionary) references in the play — in particular the vision of the golden world of the past. However, what this production does, is to transform the forest, where all the escaping characters arrive, into a sort of idealised Winstanley-type diggers’ community in accordance with Winstanley’s vision of a free cooperative, moneyless society. (Though without the productive foundations of Winstanley’s scheme. See the Socialist Standard June 1978 for more on Winstanley). It is not primitive communism; there are still the (textually inevitable) differences between Dukes and Servants, sheep-owners and labourers. Nonetheless, the picture of human satisfaction in contrast to the evident dissatisfaction of city (here equal to property) life is beautifully drawn.

Ronnie Warrington

Revolutionary Reform (1905)

From the June 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two tendencies, apparently contradictory, manifest themselves in Socialist tactics on the subject of reforms.

On one hand, the very principle of Socialism is found in opposition to democratic illusions. Instead of seeing the solution of the so-called “social question” in the expansion of liberties, in therealisationof an ideal of Justice, in the perfecting of the republican regime by means ofuniversal suffrage, Socialism declares that all the social phenomena of our days are the results of capitalism, manifestations of the class war, which will cease only with the disappearance of classes. Therefore the Socialist Party is a party of class and of revolution.

On the other hand, the desire for some immediate bettering of his lot is too well engendered in the heart of man for him to lose hope, even against all logic. Logic is weak against the power of an instinctive desire. The political parties promise reforms to their electors just as a nurse promises the moon to a child.

The Socialist Party is thus caught between the logic of its scientific principle and the universal desire for an immediate amelioration - ”something now”. It cannot betray its principle, but it is likewise impossible that this party- of men - can escape this human desire for reforms.

This contradiction is, however, not without a solution, if we discriminate between the conditions of fighting and the conditions of existence of the working-class.

(. . . . .)

The conditions of existence of the wage-workers depends upon their wages. It is not determined by the legal law, but by the economic law of supply and demand.

The condition of existence of the wage-workers is determined in each corporate body, by the progress of the development of machinery, the concentration of capital, the proportion of the unemployed industrial reserve army, and the stock-in-trade of merchandise.

Social realities are outside of parliaments. The crowd of ambitious folk who jostle one another in the unhealthy atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament can do nothing -  absolutely nothing - to modify the real wage of the workers.

The legal law is of straw; the economic law is of iron.

Why change the tax-gathering plate if you do not change what is put into it?

Why agitate against clericalism if clericalism is a social necessity? You do nothing more nor less than substitute idolatry of the flag for that of the cross.

To dream of bettering the conditions of existence by political means is Utopia.

(. . . . . )

Although the bettering of the conditions of existence by way of political reform is impossible, it is not the same as regards the conditions of fighting, and it appears to us to be possible to make easier the struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist middle-class.

We do not here make a specious distinction. To distinguish between the conditions of fighting and the conditions of existence is not to split a hair. The difference is real.

When a soldier marches under a shower of rain, you better his conditions of existence in giving him an umbrella which protects him from getting wet, and you better his condition of fighting in supplying him with an up-to-date rifle instead of a stone-slinger.

By the very fact of capitalist production the proletariat is at war with the bourgeoisie. This struggle is sometimes hidden, at other times visible to the eyes of all, but it is without truce. Far from becoming less evident, conflicts increase daily. Some reforms would render the attacks of the proletariat more powerful, those of its adversary weaker, and would make the effort easier and more efficient.

One reform which is considered above all others as an amelioration of the conditions of carrying on the proletarian struggle is the reduction in the hours of labour.

The reduction in the hours of the working day makes the workers mentally and physically stronger and better equipped for carrying on the social struggle. Rebels are not made of the starved and wretched: rebellion is a luxury.

The reduction of the working-day facilitates the concentration of capital, thereby hastening the disappearance of the middle-class, making clearer the social struggle.

That is the revolutionary reform par excellence.

It is not an amelioration in the condition of existence. Applications of the reform already made in England and America prove that the amount of labour furnished is sensibly the same: labour-time diminished, work becomes more intense. The proportion of surplus labour is perhaps greater: the 8 hours day probably increasing the relative surplus-value would thereby increase the capitalist profits.

The 8 hours day is an amelioration of the conditions of fighting - nothing more. It is an immense gain.

(. . . . . )

The moment the Trade Unions take up the agitation in favour of the 8 hours day, of which Socialism hitherto took the initiative, when “labour” elected candidates will have introduced themselves into ministerial combinations and lose all thought of economic realities in the reforms pourrire of which the Radicals are so prodigious -the Socialist Party cannot, in my opinion, but find it profitable to direct its efforts towards the reduction of the hours of labour.

Without seeking to discover to-day what is the value of Parliamentary action to obtain this revolutionary reform, we will attempt to show in another article how it is possible to draft a law effectively reducing the working-day, because the difficulty does not consist in having a law passed, but in having it applied.

A. Bruckère in Le Socialiste

(Translated by P. J. Tobin.)

The Stickies and the Provos (2016)

From the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We examine a key division within Irish nationalism which reflected tensions between those who asserted the primacy of ‘nation’ and those who ended up seeking to prioritise ‘class’.

A significant feature of those who situate themselves in the anti-establishment tradition of any country is their attitude to nationalism and imperialism. While reformist politicians of the Labour and Social Democrat varieties tend to identify with their own ruling class and seek to work with them to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalism, those further to the left often seek alliances (even if just at a conceptual, ideological level) with the ruling classes of other countries. This is often done on the basis that an enemy of an enemy must be a friend. It is the reason why much of the left in Britain has been sympathetic to Irish nationalism and why Irish nationalists have repeatedly sought support from almost anyone hostile to the British state.

Behind this viewpoint often lies the concept of imperialism. This comes in various guises, though the most common conception is the idea that big powerful countries exploit smaller, weaker ones and that this is a fundamental feature of the way capitalism works. Some, such as Lenin, took this concept to its logical conclusion by arguing that sections of the working class in the stronger countries have shared in the fruits of the exploitation of all those in the weaker countries (creating a so-called ‘aristocracy of labour’).

One of the key divisions among people calling themselves revolutionaries has been around this issue. And in the countries deemed to be small, weaker and under the subjugation of a power like the British Empire, this has influenced the thinking and methods of those who wished to create a different type of society. Some have taken the view that the priority must be to fight a battle against the ruling class of the dominant country as they are construed as being the main enemy. Others have been more mindful that in attempting to overthrow the ruling class of a ‘foreign’ empire it is possible to merely install a domestic ruling class instead, leaving capitalism and its attendant problems intact.

This has been one of the most significant, historic divisions in the Irish republican movement for decades, though these days it receives relatively little attention (including from left-wing organisations and commentators in Britain).

The Troubles

In the late 1960s, when much of the developed world was impacted by waves of radical protest, and impelled by the events of May 1968 in Paris, a split developed among Irish republicans. It reflected a division between those who thought nationhood was more important than class interest, and vice versa. It was expressed very clearly at the time in this statement by the youth wing of Sinn Fein (Na Fianna Eireann):

‘The doctrine of Karl Marx is contrary to the Fianna teaching. It is contrary to the Fianna declaration which states – I pledge my allegiance to God and the Irish Republic. Marx also stated that the workingman has no country. We of the Fianna for the most part are the sons of workers but we have a country and we love it very dearly. We can in no way be associated with International Socialism’ (Irish News, 24^th December, 1970).

Exactly what part of the country these young republicans owned (in truth, little if anything) was part of the problem identified by those on the other side of the debate. Whether republicans in Northern Ireland or the Southern Republic, these were people who took the contrary view that they had more in common with their fellow workers in the pro-British loyalist community than they did with the owners and controllers of capital on either side of the Irish border. In some ways, the ideas of this group were ill-formed and sometimes even contradictory but they were struggling towards a position where in answer to the question ‘which is more important – nation or class?’ they answered ‘class’.

During the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland from 1969, the division between these two groups of republicans was to become almost as poisonous as the division between Protestants and Catholics (or more accurately UK nationalists and Irish nationalists). It was so severe that it led to a fundamental split in both Sinn Fein and its paramilitary wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This division was between the ‘pro-communist’ group that held many of the leadership positions in these organizations at the time, around Cathal Goulding, Chief of Staff of the IRA, and Tomos Mac Giolla, President of Sinn Fein – and those who opposed them. Though mainly Dublin-based, the leadership had considerable support in parts of the Republic and pockets of support in the North too, including republican strongholds in Belfast such as the Lower Falls and the Markets, some of the border counties and parts of Derry including the Bogside. Because of their leadership positions within the movement they became known in the press as the ‘Official’ IRA.

Those who criticised  their ‘communism’ and irreligion, placing emphasis on the nationalist, sectarian struggle against the British state and their loyalist ‘stooges’ instead, emerged  as a new, Provisional IRA – the ‘Provos’. Cathal Goulding labelled them blackshirts in balaclavas. Indeed, many of the Officials believed the Provos had been funded by elements in the then Irish government around Minster of Finance – and later Taoiseach – Charles Haughey, who wanted to see ‘communists’ removed from the IRA leadership (even if a later court case failed to prove this conclusively).

Sectarianism

Over time, the Provos (who set up their own political party, Provisional Sinn Fein) became the majority within the movement – and the main reason for this was a very practical one. In a period when many Northern Irish Catholics felt themselves to be not only discriminated against but also terrorized by the British state and the Protestant mobs whipped up by demagogues such as Ian Paisley, the traditional IRA was seen to have failed. The epithet ‘I Ran Away’ was levelled at the Officials, and the Provos were often seen as being more proactive defenders of Catholic communities, while taunting the ‘Marxist’ Officials with the nickname ‘the Stickies’ after the new, adhesive lily they adopted when commemorating the Easter Rising.

In reality, the situation was more complicated than the stereotyping might suggest – some young Provos, attracted by romantic notions of the armed struggle, also had pronounced left-wing sympathies (including both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness). Meanwhile the Officials were often involved in bloody battles against the security services, loyalist paramilitaries and the Provos.

What was clear, though, over time, was the trajectory of the Officials away from traditional, Irish nationalist politics and the armed struggle to achieve a united Ireland. Indeed, in 1972 they became the first paramilitary organisation to declare a ceasefire. Catholic priests in Derry declared that as representatives of international communism the Officials were not welcome there, while ‘better dead than red’ graffiti was painted on walls in the Bogside by the Provos. For their part, the Officials declared that they were not a Catholic organisation and emphasized the need to win over loyalist workers to the cause of socialism (even if what they meant by this usually amounted to vague aspirations common on the radical left towards what would effectively be state-run capitalism, and a penchant for left-wing icons of the time such as Che Guevara).

Other elements emerged that became hostile to the Provos and Officials alike, adopting a mix of hardline Irish nationalism with Leninism. Most notably, this led to the foundation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and its paramilitary wing, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). This was effectively another breakaway from the Officials by those unhappy with their lack of proactive military engagement. It became an especially violent and sectarian organisation under the leadership of Seamus Costello and infamously blew up Tory politician Airey Neave. The INLA initially attracted tacit support from independent MP Bernadette Devlin who was to claim ‘the Provos are concentrating on getting rid of the British in a military campaign without any policy on the class war, and the Officials now have no policy on the national question . . . We will agitate on both the national and class issues’ (Irish Times, 14 December, 1974). But the INLA was prone to feuds – both internal and external – and while Costello had at one time been Director of Operations for the Official IRA under Cathal Goulding, he was almost certainly murdered by them in 1977.

Of more lasting significance was that the differing positions of the Provos and Officials was reflected in their attitudes when incarcerated in prison, typically at the time in Long Kesh and the Crumlin Road jail. The Provos refused to mix with Protestant prisoners and demanded political segregation – the Officials saw the opportunity to speak politically to fellow workers who had come from the other side of the religious divide, including in Open University seminars. It was here that contact was made with loyalist paramilitary leaders such as Gusty Spence of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). A secret meeting in Dublin between the Official IRA and UVF paramilitary leaderships followed in 1974 and while obvious differences remained, it was clear that a certain strand of Ulster Loyalism had some sympathy with positions taken by the Officials and their general approach to politics. In 1981 Gusty Spence publicly announced his conversion to what he called ‘socialism’ and – perhaps bizarrely – his nephew was arrested for membership of the Official IRA. This type of shift within a particular current of Protestant politics was later to be reflected in the emergence of the political wing of the UVF, the Progressive Unionist Party under David Ervine. This developed a political position that appeared in some respects to be non-sectarian and with an economic programme that was unashamedly leftist.

Workers’ Party

In 1977 the Official’s political organisation renamed itself Sinn Fein – the Workers’ Party, later to become just the Workers’ Party. Once again in distinction to the traditional IRA/Sinn Fein nationalist position, they were prepared to not only stand in elections either side of the border, but to take their seats too. This meant abandoning the policy of so-called ‘abstentionism’ which refused to recognise the legitimacy of either the British state in the six county Northern Ireland, or the ‘incomplete’ 26 county Republic in the South.

Thus began a long march towards a form of political respectability, and long before Provisional Sinn Fein began to make a similar journey. It was a journey though that wasn’t without trauma and led to a familiar leftist split in the 1990s when a ‘reformist’ faction around Workers’ Party Irish MP and MEP Proinsias De Rossa ended up forming the Democratic Left. This then drifted into the Irish Labour Party in 1998, though only after having formed a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ government with Fine Gael and the Labour Party first. 

This left the hardline rump of the Workers’ Party to soldier on around veterans Mac Giolla, Sean Garland and Seamus Lynch  – ‘soldier on’ being the operative phrase. For while the Official IRA had gone on conditional ceasefire in 1972, it had never entirely gone away or ceased activity. Though officially denied, overwhelming evidence suggests that this particular strand of republicanism had long organised itself into ‘Group A’, which was the political wing called the Workers’ Party, and ‘Group B’ which was the remnants of the Official IRA. The latter was mainly charged with protection of members and fundraising activities that were somewhat unorthodox. These notably included bank robberies, as their leftist politics was not to the liking of traditional republican fundraisers in the US who had helped bankroll the Provos.

Perhaps most bizarrely of all, in 2009 WP leader Sean Garland was arrested in Dublin by the Garda with subsequent (unsuccessful) attempts to extradite him to the US that made him an ageing cause célèbre for leftists and celebrities alike. The charge from the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was that he had – through contacts in North Korea –helped create vast quantities of high-quality counterfeit US dollars. This was allegedly an attempt to both fundraise for the cause and undermine capitalism from within at the same time. Coincidentally, it was at this point that the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning of weapons in Northern Ireland confirmed that ‘Group B’ armaments, including weapons used forty years previously, had finally been put beyond use.

So effectively ended a story partly tragic and partly comic. The WP does still exist (standing candidates in the 2015 UK General Election in Belfast) but is a shadow of its former self. It is a fascinating case study of the tensions between nationalism and class-based politics, and which nevertheless had a major, if partly hidden, wider influence including on its old adversaries the Provos. For they – under the leadership of Adams and McGuinness – ended up adopting many of its political positions (and allegedly even one or two high profile bank robberies) when decades before the Provos had all but attempted to wipe them out as traitors to their cause.

Books such as Inside the IRA by Andrew Sanders are worth reading for those interested in learning more about their political tradition and position within Irish republican politics, though The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar is indispensable – a veritable tour de force about this historical political curio. Partly hard-headed pragmatists who realised they had more in common with their fellow workers than with their bosses, and partly romantic rebels with naïve attitudes towards the rebellions and revolutions of the past, their history is one from which many lessons can be drawn – and not all of them in the way they intended.

Dave Perrin