Boring from Within (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among members of the Labour Party are some who, while admitting that Labour is not Socialist and cannot be an instrument for Socialism, still say that it is the party which, at the present time, Socialists should join. One particular group of such people is centred on the quarterly journal International Socialism. Their argument is well summarised in an article by P. Mansell "Work in the Labour Party’’ in their publication Socialist Review:

   Reformist illusions in the working class go very deep. They can be shattered only by experience. Reformism must be tried and found wanting.
   What must, at all costs, be avoided, is isolation from the mass of the workers and the development of their political consciousness.
   The Labour Party commands the allegiance—even if it is the pretty passive allegiance—of the great majority of the workers.

So, Socialists should join the Labour Party.

Let us concede that this argument is quite logical. What we are challenging in this article is not its logic but the assumptions on which it is based.

Who, first of all, are the working class? This is a basic question for all who claim to accept that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’. There is, in Britain, a social group which is regarded and regards itself as “the working class” or “the working classes”. This group is made up of urban, industrial workers, the men and women who operate the machines and do the unskilled manual work in factories, mines, docks, railways and the like. However, it is not the method of the materialist conception of society to accept what people say about themselves. And, in fact, the class properly called the working class takes in many more than this. A class is made up of people who have a common economic interest because they stand in the same relation to the means of production. In Britain the social status group known as the “middle class” stands in exactly the same relation to the means of production as the so-called working class. Clerks, civil servants, technicians and managers all too have to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer to live. So the working class in Britain make up over ninety per cent of the people.

If this point is conceded and this broader concept of the working class accepted, then difficulties arise at a later stage in the argument. For it is just not true that “the great majority of the workers” support the Labour Party or look on it as theirs. The political allegiance of the working class is at present about evenly split between Labour and Tory with a substantial minority backing the Liberals. This means that if Socialists should be where the working class are they should be in the Tory and Liberal parties as well as in the Labour Party.

In fact International Socialism avoids this difficulty by assuming that the working class is confined to industrial workers. So they are saying the agent of social revolution is not to be the working class as a whole but only a section of it — a significant departure from the Marxian position and one which the Socialist Party rejects.

Secondly, what is meant by “experience”? It is of course quite true that the experience of workers under capitalism will, in the end, lead them to want to change society since all ideas arise from social and material conditions. However, in the argument, the word seems to have the special restricted meaning of direct, immediate experience. People, however, learn not only from their own experiences but also from the experience of others. Indeed the greater part of everybody's knowledge is that of others, inherited from the past and handed down by oral and written tradition. What distinguishes man from the other animals is his ability to generalise, to think abstractly. Lower animals do only learn from their own experiences, like Pavlov's dogs and circus animals. If you argue that the working class can learn "only by experience" you are reducing their intelligence to a very low level Lenin, whose ideas greatly influence boring-from-within groups, himself did not think much of the working class's intellectual capacities. He wrote in 1902 in his pamphlet What is To be Done?

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.

T. Cliff, writing in International Socialism for Autumn 1960, employs an even more revealing analogy:

The role of the Marxists is to generalize the living, evolving experience of the class struggle, to give a conscious expression to the instinctive drive of the working class to reorganize society on a socialist basis.

Instinctive drive! The Socialist Party rejects this view which implies that the working class is a simple tool to be used by Socialists as a mass basis for their capture of power. The change from capitalism to Socialism can only be carried out consciously, as the conscious act of the great majority of the working class.

Finally, what is so special about Socialists? To argue that they should strive to avoid "isolation from the mass of the workers" is to assume that Socialists are not members of the working class; that they are people, whose ideas have evolved outside of the working class, who must strive to get into the working class and to impart to them Socialist consciousness.

The origin of this peculiar view of the role of Socialists is pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia and is outlined by Lenin in the above-mentioned pamphlet. In Tsarist Russia the bulk of the anti-Tsarist revolutionaries were members of "the intelligentsia". Intelligentsia is a Russian word and defined a peculiarly Russian social group composed of qualified, technical personnel of non-noble origin employed by the central and local government At one time, the revolutionary intelligentsia looked to the peasants as the mass basis for their insurrection. Later, some turned to the working class and dabbled in Marxist ideas. They were thus faced with the problem of how to get the working class to play the role they had allotted them. They did have the problem of how to make contact with the working class. Lenin refurbished an old Russian revolutionary idea of a party of professional revolutionaries which was to be the so-called vanguard of the working class.

Boring-from-within groups still seem to see Socialists as if they were Bolshevik professional revolutionaries trying to latch on to the working class. Socialists are not a special type of being whose ideas are formed in a different way from the rest of the working class. They are simply members of the working class who want and understand Socialism, faced with the problem of how to get their ideas over to the rest of the working class. To do this, they need take no special steps to be with the working class. They are already there.

What is the view of the Socialist Party? The Social revolution from capitalism to Socialism must be carried out by conscious democratic, political action. In other words, those who make the change must know what they are doing; must be in a majority; and must employ political means.

The task of Socialists at present, when they are a tiny minority, is to organise themselves in as effective a way as possible to put over the case for Socialism and to help the evolution of Socialist understanding. For this an independent political organisation and propaganda agency is best suited. This is the only organizational form which allows Socialists to express their views fully and freely, openly and honestly. If they were part of an organisation whose aims they did not share, Socialists would have to waste their time on the problems of that organisation, And besides, they would be associated with it and its failures.

This is not to lead an isolated existence. As already said, Socialists are members of the working class. In Britain there are many ways of getting ideas across to other workers; through your own journal, pamphlets and leaflets; through meetings indoor and outdoor; through canvassing and discussion. This is what the work of the Socialist Party is at the present time.

Further, we are a political party and as such contest elections in opposition to the other parties. Elections are about who shall control the state. At present, because the great majority of workers don't know what Socialism is or don't see it as a real alternative, they elect to office people pledged to run capitalism. Socialist Party members, however, vote only for Socialist candidates. We play no part in handing over political power to the capitalist class. Not so groups like International Socialism. In campaigning for Labour they are campaigning for one of the major parties committed to defending the interests of the capitalist class. They play their part, however little, in handing over power to political agents of the capitalist class to oppress and intimidate the working class with wage freezes and the like. For this reason alone, they forfeit the right to be called Socialists.

Adam Buick

Obituary: Freddie Adams (1967)

Obituary from the September 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our comrade Freddie Adams, of Haringey branch, died in hospital on June 12 at the age of 84. He joined the old Wood Green branch in 1910 and between the wars was involved in the central administration of party affairs as assistant and later as general secretary. After the war he was a regular attender and lecturer at Palmers Green branch. One of the last things he did for Socialism was to help in the GLC campaign in April by proposing, in accordance with the law, our three candidates in Haringey. He was very pleased that before he died he had the chance to cast his ballot for a Socialist world community.

What's Happening in China? (1967)

From the October 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is China communist? Look at the trouble in Hong Kong and you will get the answer.

It started in May with an industrial dispute between the employees of a factory and the owners over pay and conditions of work. The Hong Kong Communist Party used the dispute to make political capital and were backed by the Chinese Government on the Mainland. The rioting spread to a large overcrowded working-class area where many badly paid and frustrated young workers joined in. Some of the local capitalists panicked and prepared to move out; many rushed to change their local currency for gold. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange went dead, prices slumped and for a day or so not a single bargain was done.

As the British Administration of this Crown Colony cracked down heavily with police anti-riot squads on the dissatisfied workers, they probably silently sniggered at the Chinese Government’s dodge of using foreign adventures to divert the attention of the mainland workers from their problems at home—a dodge they would recognise as so often having been resorted to in the West.

The trouble continues with shots across the frontier, killing and wounding of workers in Hong Kong.

Mainland China is still in the throes of Red Guard trouble which at times appears almost like a civil war and the present seems a propitious time for analysing the origins and background of the Cultural Revolution, as this upheaval is euphemistically termed. Charges and counter-charges, vilification, discussion about The Thoughts of Mao and what he really means when correctly interpreted, all act as a smokescreen which conceals the basic differences, which are in fact largely economic, between the two groups of antagonists who are fighting to control China and impose their ideas of how capitalism should be developed there. This is the cause of the so-called Communist Party dividing into two mutually hostile groups, which, for simplicity’s sake we refer to as the old-time Communist Party leadership and the modern managerial elite.

The old-time members of the Communist Party organised the agrarian revolt throughout the countryside and finally won the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949 by the successful use of guerrilla fighting.

Both groups are agreed that war with the U.S.A. is inevitable. But the Old Guard plan that the professional army should absorb the brunt of the first shock of war but would be finally smashed. The army command should then knuckle-down and retreat—beaten—leaving the prosecution of the war in the hands of the guerrilla forces who they believe would eventually win.

These old campaigners, with their muddle-headed ideals and their fixed policies based on success in the now distant past in conditions that now no longer exist, have had their day. But like the old soldiers in the song, they never seem to die and are taking an unconscionable long time in fading away—too long for the likes of the up and coming management bureaucracy.

But the younger modern army officers are not taking this lying down—they are pressing forward to train the soldiers in the efficient technology of killing with modern equipment including the nuclear missiles which they are rapidly developing. They are horrified at the idea of confining their abilities to the training of an old fashioned amateur militia in what they regard as outmoded methods.

The Communist Party membership were drawn from the same class as the former mandarin administrators. For instance, Mao tse-Tung, who is a well-known poet and scholar, is the son of a landowner and employer of labour who could afford an expensive education for his son. Chou en-Lai, the Prime Minister, is a scion of a traditional mandarin family. The rest of the Party came from much the same background. So, the educated elite flocked in; the ordinary worker being conspicuous by his absence.

In the civil sector the Communist Party successfully roused the population to the policy of tighter belts and more work (so familiar to the workers of the West) by frenzied political exhortation.

The original leaders have remained practically unchanged in their ideas and policies, except, of course, that they are growing older (Mao tse-Tung, for instance, is 73).

But China, caught in the maelstrom of world capitalist techniques, developing with great' rapidity and, of course, in the concomitant power politics, is catching up with breathtaking speed.

The new bureaucracy of the Communist Party are not confined to the administration of the state machine; they are also in the management of the tremendous number of State Corporations running the factories, mines, transport, importing and exporting, and banks, in addition to the vast civil engineering enterprises. The young professional army officers of the 2½ million army, together with the allied nuclear missile scientists, are included in the elite.

These slick unprincipled executives, with a hankering for the good life and not for the continual sacrifices demanded by the Establishment, see the outdated policies of the old-timers as the burden of the past hanging around their necks like millstones and rendering these oldsters unsuitable for the important governing positions they still fill.

But they are as modern as their opposite numbers in Western Capitalism and trained in the sophisticated professional and management techniques, which owe very little to political haranguing in the efficient exploitation of the working-class.

At the heart of the political turmoil is the dispute over economics. Sun yeh-Fang, director of the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, spokesman of the anti-Mao brigade, makes no secret of his views that China should be run by orthodox Capitalist economic policies:

  In deciding what projects should receive investment funds, the State should insist that priority be based on potential profits. Capital should go to those projects that promise the greatest returns—any other criterion, Sun says, will be disastrous.
  If there is any question of taking political factors into account, he seems to argue, these too should be weighed up on the basis of their implications for future profits. The hallowed slogan of “putting politics in command" is derided as the "lazy-bone's" economics. Sun believes that the “Law of Value” must guide the economy at every step. By this be appears to mean basing economic activities on their returns to the economy and letting prices reflect the need to regulate the economy on the principle of profitability. (Far Eastern Economic Review—2/2/67.).

Then there is the disaffection of the urban working class with their pay and conditions. By now granting improvements where they feel they have to, the management elite are rallying this expanding labour force under their banner, and thus putting another nail in the coffin of the die-hards.

The reason for Mao tse-Tung organising a separate Red Guard is that the Communist Party, of which he is nominally chairman, being largely composed of the new style bright young people, is not so amenable to his commands as formerly, and so he has had to go outside this organisation to create a loyal and reliable following.

So it seems that the present ruling group is in the process of losing the support of the educated elite, but whoever wins out in this internal struggle for power, Mao tse-Tung will be likely to stay in nominal control because of the great prestige that has made him so useful not merely as a labour leader but almost as a God—as their Prophet of “Communism”.

This process of building-up Mao as a combined labour-leader, soothsayer and general know-all has taken many years and a great deal of money to accomplish and cannot be thrown away. The agnostic authoritarian dogma of the Communist Party, so similar to the Confucianism which was used for training the elite in former times, needs a God as orthodox religion does and Mao tse-Tung fills this vacuum.

Whichever side wins it will not be the Chinese workers, either in the cities or on the farms, even if it is they who are doing the actual fighting and suffering the casualties. It is not their interests that are being fought for. But part of the profits of their exploitation will provide large salaries and emoluments for the high-ranking managerial and military echelons in addition to paying the interest on capital invested.

Frank Offord

The Bolshevik Revolution (1967)

From the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution is now with us, and again dramatic and romantic descriptions of the Bolshevik seizure of power will circulate. Lurid official paintings of the event, with Stalin well to the fore and Trotsky nowhere to be seen, will appear in the glossy magazines. In fact the events that took place in Petrograd on November 7 1917 (October 26 by the old Russian Calendar) were largely a noisy farce. What little bloodshed occurred was unnecessary, the result of muddle and hysteria.

The grand climax, the storming of the Winter Palace and the capture of the Provisional Government, had all the makings of a legend—the ultimatum, brought by two armed cyclists across the river from the fortress of St Peter and St. Paul, the opening of the bombardment from the fortress and from the cruiser Aurora, while the cruiser’s searchlights swept the city. Finally the Red Guards closing in to storm the place. All the time, of course, Lenin from the Smolny Institute was directing operations with an iron hand.

In reality the cruiser fired only blanks, while most of the shells from the fortress went anywhere but the Winter Palace. The defending troops had been melting away all day, and the remnants gave up without a fight. In the final scene the cabinet made a pathetic pretence of being in session when the Red Guards broke in and captured them. The real work of the revolution had lain in the months that had preceded it, and in the ruthless period of consolidation and repression that was to follow. On November 7 the only well organised body in Russia, the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, took the power from the nervous hands of a government whose writ hardly ran beyond the committee rooms of Petrograd.

The overthrow of the Tzar, in the February insurrection, had revealed a country in a state of complete collapse, politically and economically. When the Tzar departed the whole machinery of government went with him. The completely unbending nature of the autocracy had made it impossible for any of the opposition parties to obtain real political experience; consequently nobody had any clear idea of what to do. All authority had centred on the Tzar, so with the monarchy gone loyalties shifted about and swung from one rallying point to another.

The army, the mainstay of the Tzarist State, had been broken by the unparalleled slaughter of the past three years. The economy was in ruins. Once the lid was off, the repressed grievances of the workers and peasants burst out in numerous acts of violence. It was predictable that the first organised body strong enough to rally substantial support would take control. That body was the Bolsheviks.

The revolution had been quite spontaneous and unplanned, and while the victorious soldiers and workers thronged the streets there emerged what has become known as the dual power. Two centres of power arose in opposite wings of the Tauride Palace, both of them relics of the 1905 revolution.

One was the State Duma or Parliament, which was the only institution of the old autocratic government to survive. It had been very limited in its powers, it was based on an extremely restricted electorate, and had been set up as a sop to revolutionary feelings in 1905. Like the Parliaments in Tudor England it was called only when there was trouble such as the outbreak of war, and very little notice had been taken of it. The Duma was to become the nucleus of the new Provisional Government. Its members were drawn from the landowning and embroyo capitalist classes, and its principal party was the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets. The Kadets had also come into being in 1905, and they favoured a Constitutional Monarchy. They were “progressive liberals”, but in any other place they would have been considered extreme reactionaries.

The other body was the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies that had been set up in imitation of 1905. Soviet is merely the Russian word for council. Its members were Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks with a few Bolsheviks and other minor parties. The Soviet held the real power, through the fact that the revolutionaries would take orders only from them. No train would run, no telegram would be sent, and nothing would be printed without the Soviet permission. The War Minister, A. I. Guchkov, in a letter to a general, wrote

The Provisional Government possesses no real power and its orders are executed only insofar as this is permitted by the Soviet of the Workers and Soldiers Deputies, which holds in its hands the most important elements of actual power, such as troops, railroads, postal and telegraph service. It is possible to say directly that the Provisional Government exists only while this is permitted by the Soviet. (A Short History of the Russian Revolution, Joel Carmichael.)

But the great irony was that, although the Soviet held the real power, they refused to exercise it. They held the view that a bourgeois government must first take power and engineer a capitalist revolution before a Socialist Revolution could follow. This, combined with their inexperience and the suddenness with which they had been pitchforked into power, led them to bolster up the Provisional Government, rather than make use of the power they held. Such an arrangement would have been difficult in any circumstances; in the Russia of 1917 it was doomed to failure from the start, and served to paralyse things still further.

Meanwhile the peasants throughout Russia were taking the law into their own hands, seizing land and burning down manor houses. This led to a further deterioration in the supply of food. And all the time the war was dragging on. It was into this mess that Lenin, a master of political organisation and intrigue, arrived in April. He began, with the able assistance of Trotsky—his equal in these matters— to organise the Bolsheviks, a despised minority party, into the only effective body in Russia.

The Provisional Government was determined to carry on with the war and in mid-summer Kerensky launched the long awaited offensive. It was a ghastly failure; the Germans smashed through the Russian lines and the Russian army was at an end as a fighting force. Men began to desert in droves, flocking back from the front and giving rise to the much-quoted expression of “voting with their feet”. The workers and soldiers of St. Petersburg outdid the Bolsheviks in revolutionary fervour. In the July Days, the uprising that led to the temporary suppression of the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks had been dragged along, rather unwillingly, behind events. It was to cash in on these feelings that the slogan, “Bread, Peace, Land" was devised.

In late August the Commander of Petrograd, General Kornilov, attempted to march on Petrograd and overthrow the Provisional Government. He had massed troops half way between Petrograd and Moscow, and began a serious attack on Petrograd. But once again the unreliability of the army was apparent and the troops just melted away. The immediate effect was to swing opinion, that had built up against the Bolsheviks after the July Days, back towards them.

When the Bolsheviks finally moved in October, it was quick. In Petrograd it was soon over. In Moscow resistance was greater, and fighting lasted for over three days, but the result was never really in doubt. The take over was quite easy, but the Bolsheviks’ troubles were only just beginning. The events in Petrograd had happened so quickly that the newspapers on October 26 came out with leading articles written the night before, talking of the “isolation of the Bolsheviks.” The Bolsheviks immediately began to show their hand, and on the first day the entire bourgeois press was shut down.

This was the shape of things to come. The Bolsheviks had used the revolutionary fervour of the masses, but they had no intention of acting in a democratic way. The long awaited Constituent Assembly was called, but as it gave a large majority to the opponents of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved the same day. One by one the other political parties went down, and the murderous civil war, that was to rage for two years, was fought by as vicious an autocracy as ever the Tzar had been. In 1918 the Cheka, the new political police, were established and they soon acquired absolute powers. It was not in the gay, romantic, brave uprising of the legend, that Russia was to be changed, but in the grim butchery of the civil war, in the quiet killings in the cellars of the Cheka, and the famines which followed the attempts to collectivise the land. Workers will be well advised to study that grim chapter of history, known as the Russian Revolution, when they are confronted with glib invitations to solve their problems with violence.

Les Dale

1917 Question and Answer (1967)

From the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question is, did the Bolsheviks know what they were caught up in? Did they realise that the upheaval in Russia would cause fifty years of argument, theorising and confusion about the working class? About working class courage, social consciousness, ambitions?

The Russian Revolution was not the only event of November 1917; about a thousand miles south-west of the crowds in Petrograd something was happening which supplied all the answers necessary to straighten out the theories and clear up the confusion which followed the Bolsheviks taking power.

On the 20th of that grim month Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British army in France, decided to close down what has become known as the Battle of Passchendaele. It had, he said, served its purpose. The battle had opened at the end of July; in the four months of fighting the British had advanced a few miles, had captured a small number of piles of rubble which had once been villages where human beings lived and worked, had landed themselves in what some soldiers thought was a more exposed position than when they had started — and had lost about three hundred thousand men.

Afterwards, Passchendaele was justified by the British commanders as a successful exposition of the art of attrition. This art is based on a grisly theory, which gives an insight into what is approvingly called the military mind. Attrition meant a battle carried on to destroy an opposing army, at no matter what cost. At Passchendaele it meant sending men out into an impassable swamp which was swept by concentrated machine gun fire and protected by blankets of barbed wire, in the hope that, while tens of thousands of them were being killed, they would kill more of the other side

This, bad as it was, was not the original intention behind Passchendaele. The battle was planned to capture the Channel ports, break the U-Boat threat, smash through the German lines in Flanders and open the way for the cavalry to speed into the heart of Germany and finish the war. Prime Minister Lloyd George — who mistrusted the plan from the start — recalled bitterly Haig’s promises for the offensive — the hands sweeping irresistibly over the map, as if with his fingers Haig could roll back the German armies, his nail resting on the frontier so far behind the lines.

The reality was very different. The Flanders countryside, its drainage system destroyed by the artillery, became a swamp under the late summer rains. Men waded waist-deep through the sticky yellow mud; sometimes they drowned in the stuff. If they were wounded they often simply disappeared into the slime. One survivor — Siegfried Sassoon —wrote savagely:

Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west . . .
What greater glory could a man desire?
                                                                           (Memorial Tablet)

and another — Alasdair Alpin MacGregor — contributed this to a recent discussion in the letter columns of the Daily Telegraph:

That autumn’s mud-and-blood baths were occupied mostly by young petrified, under-trained, lice-ridden, wounded, dying, drowned, parched, famishing, conscripts, cowering in the shell-holes, if not already hanging on the barbed wire.

(14/9/67).

Inevitably, the failure of Passchendaele released a torrent of criticism which, fifty years after, still flows strongly. Soon after the end of the battle, Lloyd George unburdened himself to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian:

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow . . . The thing is horrible, and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can't go on any longer with the bloody business. [1] 

Which would have sounded more convincing were it not that the same man had earlier said of the very people some of whom did know, did want to stop the war — the conscientious objectors —

I shall only consider the best means of making the path of that class a very hard one. [2]

But wherever the the horrors of the war, and however powerful the criticisms of it, the peoples of Europe continued to fight it with a stupid courage. Passchendaele was not the first blood bath on the Western Front; it had been preceded by such as Loos, Verdun, the Somme, Aisne and it was to be followed by the last German offensive of March 1918 and the Allied counter-attack which finished the war.

Through all this, the working class remained solidly behind the war. The French soldiers showed the strain after Verdun and again after Nivelle had murdered tens of thousands of them in his attack in 1917. But they held. So did the Germans. And the British, in the words of Lloyd George, could be “. . . absolutely relied on for any enterprise.” [3]    

This support for the war was incited and encouraged by the politicians when it suited them; for example, it allowed an official blind eye to be turned to much of the inhuman treatment dished out to the conscientious objectors. But it was a weapon with two edges. Lloyd George, who could always rouse a mob, would dearly have loved to sack Haig but, apart from the political background to his appointment, the Field Marshall was the mob’s hero. To dismiss him would have been to admit the failure of all those spectacular offensives which, the newspapers were busily saying, were about to finish the war. If that happened, if “the people really knew”, the war might even be stopped — even tomorrow . . .

The Prime Minister held his hand, and kept his job, and the war went on. Later, his son Richard wrote that this was his final test “. . . and he shirked it." [4]

But perhaps Lloyd George was not shirking a test so much as facing it. In all the belligerent countries, the working class had been roused to the pitch of patriotism which brought them cheering onto the streets in August 1914. In London, the crowds singing the National Anthem outside Buckingham Palace merged with the mob who were smashing the windows of the German Embassy.

These were the people who most fervently supported the politicians. In particular, they were the people who backed Lloyd George as the man to prosecute the war in the most ruthless way. They were the people who attacked aliens and pacifists, who broke up Socialist meetings. They wanted victory above everything; they welcomed each great battle, gorged themselves on the bloodthirsty lies of the war correspondents.

Not everyone, of course, was a fiery patriot. There were also the apathetic, the bewildered and the docile, who assumed they should join up because Kitchener had said so, and because everyone else seemed to be doing it. Perhaps, if they thought about it, they justified their presence in the trenches by remembering the promises which were being made, like Lloyd George at the 1917 Eisteddfod:

Our footprints may be stained with blood, but we will reach the heights. And beyond them, we shall see the green valleys and the rich plains of the new world, which we have sacrificed so much to win. [5]

All of these people were cruelly deceived. They were deceived over 1914/18 and they were deceived over the Russian Revolution. Sadder yet, the deception goes on. Capitalism spawns the working class as a distinct social group, separate from its capitalist antagonists. But the ideological climate of capitalism — its morals, its priorities, its fables — convinces the workers that they are united with their masters.

A working class which accepts this, which believes that both classes have common interests, that class exploitation is eternal, that wars are periodically necessary, will not only fail to establish Socialism; It will perform massive feats of achievement and endurance for capitalism. It will, as it did fifty years ago, fight out a Passchendaele with hardly a word of complaint.

It is this fact — that working class awareness is vital to the achievement of Socialism and to the struggle under capitalism — which is persistently ignored by many of the political theorists who have confused matters so seriously since the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks in 1917 were presiding over the birth of a social system new to Russia — capitalism — and of its two opposing classes.

Since then, the Russian working class have conformed to the pattern. The evidence builds up, to support our opinion of 1917 that Socialism in Russia was impossible. The Russian working class, whatever the theorists may say, have done all that capitalism has required of them. They have even had their own Passchendaele, when tens of thousands of them died in hell but called—Stalingrad.

Ivan

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Frank Owen — Tempestuous Journey.

[2] David Boulton — Objection Overruled.

[3] John Terraine — The Western Front.

[4] Richard Lloyd George — Lloyd George.

[5] Frank Owen — Tempestuous Journey.

For Use or Profit? (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Societies in the past have subsisted without their material wealth being an accumulation of things for sale. This was historically and radically changed by the rise of capitalist production, which, seizing upon the simple domestic industry of the time, transformed it into capitalist manufacture. The handicraft workers who had worked independently of each other now became employed as wage workers in a co-operative effort under one roof, where the tools, workshop and product were the property of a single employer. With the invention of power-driven machinery these manufactories gave place to large-scale production, so that to-day one cannot think of modern capitalism without its factory system, its heavy industry and the resultant flood of commodities seeking a market. Thus Marx’s opening words in “Capital” eminently sum up the wealth of capitalist society as being “an immense accumulation of commodities.” If one therefore wishes to seek the source of capitalist wealth one must first analyse the commodity as a unit of capitalist production.

To begin with, a commodity must have both exchange-value and use-value; it must, in other words, be saleable and satisfy some need or other. We will deal with the usefulness of commodities first. To discover the various use of things is the work of history, says Marx. For example, seaweed that the Highland clansmen watched idly floating offshore, and which appeared to them us quite useless, is to-day, centuries later, the raw material for medicinal and fertiliser compounds. Again, the aborigines of what is now called Canada gazed at the falling waters of Niagara without the dimmest notion that one day this force would be used to light whole communities by hydro-electric power. Social production hud yet to arise and urge the need to investigate these possibilities; it was to use a Marxism not then "socially necessary." It is worth noting in this respect that in competing on the commodity market the capitalists are ever seeking new use-values in the shape of inventions, their motive being one of profit, a fact usually hidden when they point out that capitalism has given the wage-workers things that not even the richest of men could command in the past, things like electric lighting and radio sets. But to proceed. The qualities that make up usefulness are multifarious — colour, durability, hardness, etc. — some, if not all, having their own terms of measurement in their own sphere of production and use. It is this variability which makes it impossible to measure use-value by any common factor. One cannot, for example, measure the strength or hardness of steel against the heat-giving properties of coal. Neither, for that matter, will exchange-value give any clue to a commodity’s usefulness. Price or exchange value would tell one nothing of the health giving qualities of, say, a pint of milk as compared with a pot of tea, though both may be the same price to the consumer. Again, the usefulness of the ordinary needle is incalculable, for without it austerity Britain might go in worse tatters than ever, yet its price is a few pence per packet

Leaving for a moment the usual level of use-value and looking at the wider social view, what is more useful than the abilities of creators of all commodity use-value — the workers themselves — yet often a worker’s life is assessed in money terms at much less than a race-horse. Again, whole catches of fish were recently thrown back into the sea when the “market” for them showed little profit, their usefulness to hungry people being totally ignored. In the normal sense, the esteem or evaluation of a use-value is a subjective matter, giving service, comfort, etc., to the user, but it is not for this that the consumer pays, because before the consumer can come into possession of a use-value the whole process of capitalist production must be gone through, the motive behind which is not to attend to the wants of individuals, but to realise a profit for a class, the capitalist class. The capitalist process is to produce commodities (which have no personal use to the capitalists as such) and realise a profit by selling them at a greater price than the initial outlay. In this no special concern is shown about the inherent qualities that make up use-value, or even the kind of labour that went to the process. For the average profit a capitalist will supply the labour of skilled or “unskilled” workers, caring little whether the product of this labour be blacking or binoculars, while even harmful and useless things are marketed, necessitating such measures as the “Food and Drugs Act," etc. If, as is plain from all this, the goods of present-day society are not produced or exchanged on a basis of usefulness, what, then, is the common “something" which can qualitatively measure their value in exchange? Our following article, “ Exchange is no Robbery,” will endeavour to explain this “ something.”

Frank Dawe

Cooking the Books: Boo to Capitalism (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in the Times (3 July) mad marketeer Matt Ridley complained:

'”Capitalism” was a word largely invented by the opponents of commerce. The socialist Louis Blanc first used it in its modern sense in 1850, defining it as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” (“Capitalist” had been used much earlier.) Marx and Engels then made it into a proper “boo” word. Ever since, the left has used “capitalism” to imply that all free-market commerce is run by big financiers, with massive investments, rather than merchants and entrepreneurs taking risks on behalf of consumers and driving down prices.'

It is true that 'capitalism', following on from the use of 'capitalist' to mean someone with money capital, has been associated with 'big financiers, with massive investments'. It still is in populist and other non-socialist circles. But this was not Marx's usage. He didn't use the word itself, preferring to talk about the 'capitalist mode of production', a preference which shows that he associated what socialists now too call 'capitalism' with production rather than finance (or commerce).

Money capital, as a sum of money used to make more money, existed before the coming of the 'capitalist mode of production'. It took the forms of money-lending and of money being advanced to buy goods in some distant market and to transport and sell them in a nearer market at a profit. In neither case was money invested in the actual production of goods.

Capitalism, in the Marxist sense, only came into existence when money was directly invested in production with the aim of selling what was produced and ending up with more money than originally. Marx analysed this profit as not originating, like that of the pre-capitalist merchants, in the market, in Ridley's 'commerce', but in production. Its source was the unpaid labour of the wage workers employed to produce the goods.

In the capitalist mode of production, a capitalist is someone who invests capital in production, not finance. That capitalist might have borrowed the money. If so, the interest they had to pay on it would come out of the profits they made from exploiting wage-labour; it, too, would have its origin in the surplus value created by the producers.

For Marx, a capitalist was not a mere financier but someone who directly employed wage-labour, typically in his day a mill or factory owner. These days those who champion their interests talk of them as being 'entrepreneurs'.

Ridley claims that these entrepreneurs take risks 'on behalf of consumers'. Really? Investing money in production for sale on a market with a view to profit does involve the risk that in the end you might not make a profit. But this risk is taken on behalf of the shareholders, not the consumers who make up the market. The capitalist entrepreneurs (these days, 'big' enterprises 'with massive investments' rather the innovating individuals Ridley suggests) do have to be supplying what people want and can afford to pay for, but it is to make a profit not to satisfy a want that they risk investing the money.

In any event, what sort of economic system is it where a risk has to be taken to meet people's needs? The rational aim of production is to turn out what the population needs, not to make a profit out of providing for those needs that can be paid for. If a productive system really was geared to meeting needs, then it would do so directly without having to pass via detours such as money capital and entrepreneurs. Capitalism fails that test.

Greasy Pole: Working For Jeremy (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was last September that Theresa May spoke out on the matter of her feeling strong and stable in her place at Ten Downing Street: ‘I think the next election will be in 2020. I’m not going to be calling a snap election’. At the time she had a majority in the House of Commons and the Labour opposition under Jeremy Corbyn was in such disarray that it was usual for the more boisterous Tory benches to show how exultantly they despised him in guffaws of ‘More! . . . More! . . . ’ each time he sat down after speaking. Meanwhile one Labour MP had rated Corbyn’s performance in Prime Ministers Questions as ‘a fucking disaster’ – an opinion which, perhaps similarly worded, was crudely popular on the opposition benches. Except that in May the Prime Minster announced that she had changed her mind so there would be an election on 8 June. And when that day came, after the votes had been counted and all those Tory MPs had been voted out, there been such a change among the Labour ranks that Corbyn was welcomed by them with enthusiastic applause as a victor, which carried him onto the Front Bench wreathed in smiles.

Shipyard Language

That assessment of Corbyn and PMQ came from John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow In Furness where employment is heavily dependent on the production of those Trident nuclear submarines which Corbyn opposes. Woodcock thinks that under Corbyn the party is, to use again what might be called shipyard language, ‘fucked’. In the Labour leadership election he voted for Liz Kendall – possibly under the impression that Corbyn was not a serious candidate, but perhaps his knowledge of the electoral process is not as penetrating as he would like it to be; his majority in general elections has fallen from 5,208 in 2010 to 209 in 2017. Elsewhere, on the fringes of Parliament, the language was less manipulative but equally forceful for its doubts about where Corbyn stood on the issue of the European Union. For example the book All Out War by Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, claims to provide something of a ‘ringside seat’ on the decision-making processes at work during these tumultuous times. Overall, Corbyn does not feature as one of the more dynamic, demanding influences at work for change because he ‘. . . had no experience of top-level politics until he won the Labour leadership in September 2015’. There is reference to a ‘lacklustre performance’ in the matter of the continuing membership of British capitalism in the EU; his ‘ . . . behaviour stoked bemused irritation among his colleagues..’ Another, but similar, view from the political side came from ex-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls; ‘If I’d still been in Parliament, I don’t think I could have served in Jeremy’s Shadow Cabinet; not because I believe in sulking in tents, but because it would have been impossible to serve in any kind of senior position if I had fundamental disagreements with the leadership on core policy issues, and I suspect there would have been many’.

De Piero

The matter of whether that would have been good or bad for the Labour government was complicated by the various talents on offer. Consider for example Gloria De Piero, from a family originating in Italy but afflicted with severe and persistent impoverishment because neither parent was healthy enough to hold onto paid employment. But De Piero plugged on through all the stresses, achieving some handsomely relevant qualifications which were enough to carry her into a career in TV journalism with the likes of Jonathan Dimbleby and then into politics. In February 2010 she resigned from GMTV to try for the Labour nomination for the Ashfield seat where the sitting MP Geoff Hoon was stepping down after a varied career including a number of ministerial posts entailing predictable ambitions for the party leadership. But this was not all plain sailing, for Hoon was involved in a series of blunders and worse which eventually earned him the title of Geoff Buffoon. Whatever his defence in these matters it was clearly time for him to give way to a less contentious candidate and De Piero stood out for this. One outcome was that in her first attempt at the seat, in 2010, De Piero had a majority of 192 (compared to Hoon’s 2005 figure of 10,213) resulting from a swing of 17.2 percent to the Liberal candidate Jason Zadrozny – which was quickly wiped out in time for the next election in 2015 after Zadrozny was prosecuted for sexual offences.

Topless

However De Piero was not influenced by the stresses, the questions, the doubts about being a Labour candidate. At some stage – when she was 15 years old – she had been persuaded into posing for some topless photographs. The matter remained dormant until 2010, when it was reported in The Mail On Sunday which had bought the photos and again in October 2013 when a news agency was attempting to buy them. De Piero’s protests were supported by a former Tory MP describing the matter as a ‘ . . . quasi-sexual or moralistic assault on her behaviour as a 15-year old girl’ and at De Piero’s request the newspaper sent her the photos and the negatives with a written apology. Now she is more experienced; in July last year she demonstrated the assumed influence of a Front Bencher by contributing a piece to The Sun which was ‘begging’ that paper’s readers to join the Labour Party so that they could vote for ‘ . . . a leader who recognises that the Labour Party was founded to be a Party of Government’. A year later she had changed her mind to such an extent that she had been able to accept a place in Corbyn’s team in the vital job of Shadow Justice Minister.

Gloria De Piero is not the only Labour MP to change their mind over accepting the temptation to work with Jeremy Corbyn. Roberta Blackman-Woods (‘I no longer have confidence in you as a leader’) is one. Another is Karl Turner (‘I’ve eaten humble pie over criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn’). And Holly Lynch (‘An ineffective Leader’). This fact informs us, and strengthens us, in our opposition to the people who are elected to rule over us in a social system which is essentially, inhumanely, chaotic.

Ivan

Religion Retreats (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last decade has seen the rise of a new phenomenon— Christian Unity. Salvation Army bands play in Anglican cathedrals; Baptists, Methodists and Congregationalists co-operate in “Free Church Councils" and, most startling of all, priests of the Roman Catholic Church, that most unbending of bodies, preach in the churches of other denominations.

A glance at the strife-torn history of Christianity will show just how novel such a situation is. Britain, like the United States, has always been particularly rich in religious denominations. Each denomination, with its particular theories held as essential truths, was in conflict with others. These conflicts were bitter, often bloody. What has happened to draw the members of this much divided society together?

The early development of Capitalism in Britain, and comparative freedom from autocracy, produced an unusual degree of religious freedom. Controversy could rage and it became both the right and duty of dissenting minorities to form their own circle, and to proclaim the truth as they saw it. This was unlike Catholic or Lutheran countries, where a strong tradition of conformity prevailed. There, when disagreements occurred, new groups were formed, but within the framework of the main body. A united front was thus presented, that was often deceptive; war to the knife, as between Jesuits and Dominicans, could be fought within the folds of the Church.

One of the results of the religious freedom in Great Britain has been the virtual absence of politico-religious parties. Catholics and Protestants, Atheists and Jews, are found in any and every political party, according to individual conviction, and there are no anti-clerical parties. Only in Ireland, with its tragic and violent recent history, does religion wear a political garb.

Towards the end of the last century a fundamental change began. Scientific discoveries, and the works of biologists like Darwin, ceased to be the prerogative of the educated few and began to be accepted as commonplace by the many. The great retreat had begun. The dogmas upon which each denomination stood began to become obsolete. When you are struggling to prove the very existence of a God, such questions as whether the bread and wine used at the Mass actually turn into the blood and flesh of Christ, or whether they are just symbolic, become academic.

But there was nothing academic about it 400 years ago. Then men were prepared to kill and be killed for it Many people went to the stake for denying the dogma of Transubstantiation, as it was called, while as many more died for upholding it. Faced with this dilemma not only theology, but large chunks of the Bible itself, have been jettisoned in an effort to make Christianity fit in with modern knowledge. It is difficult at times to know just what Christians do still believe. Fundamentalists have become a minority.

There are many denominations, large and small, in Britain, each one a product of a particular stage in history. First, there are the three Churches, the direct descendants of the Medieval Churches of England and Scotland: Anglican, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian. In Medieval Western Europe only one religious authority existed—the Catholic Church with ultimate authority in Rome. Any attempt to deviate was ruthlessly crushed. The English Church had always been rather more independent. Britain’s geographical position, plus its excellent army, made Papal intervention difficult and its early emergence as a centralised State produced an extreme chauvinism.

Saintly kings, like Henry III and Henry VI, had always been regarded with suspicion, as being too open to foreign influence, and the suppression of foreign based monasteries was always a popular move. When the Church of England withdrew its allegiance to Rome, it still remained the Church of England. The monarch became its head instead of the Pope, but it remained in all other respects a Catholic Church. Its doctrine, its organisation, its ceremony and vestments, remain to this day basically Catholic. It is Episcopalian, which means the government of the church by Bishops, and it is still the official church. This makes it unique among religious bodies. It is not, contrary to popular misconception, financed and run by the State, but in keeping with the British practice of forgetting out of date legislation, rather than repealing it, the Church possesses vast powers in theory that it has long since lost in practice.

In this it resembles the Monarchy and the Nobility, to whom it is tied. Bishops sit in the House of Lords, the Royal Family must be members of the Church of England and Parliament decides major Church policy. It conducts all State religious ceremonies like Coronations. It is still a very large landowner, and finds itself the custodian of a vast number of historic buildings and works of art. It has always been very liberal in allowing a diversity of ideas within its ranks, even down to a “communist’’ Dean and a near-atheist Bishop. Because it is the official Church, the semi-religious turn to it for marriages, burials, and christenings, as well as somewhere to scamper in times of trouble.

The old joke about people with no fixed views being C. of E., is based on fact. This makes it difficult to gauge the Church’s true strength. The figures for 1964 gave the number of people in England baptised in the C. of E. as 27,005,000, the number confirmed as 9,748,000, but the number on the “Electoral Rolls of the Parishes’’, as only 2,739,023. This is nearer to its true strength. In spite of its landowning, and other special assistance, it ultimately rests, like all other groups, on its hard core of members.

Throughout the 16th century there raged within the Church a three cornered battle for control between the Episcopalians, the Catholics and the Puritans. Fortunes fluctuated; under the regency of Edward VI extreme Protestants got the upperhand. Later under Mary I England returned to Roman Catholicism. Parliament supported this move, but on the very important condition that they hung on to the lands plundered from the monasteries. Neither Catholic nor Protestant had the slightest intention of handing these back. The main body of Puritans favoured the Presbyterian system, a more democratic form of church government with no Bishops, and with government by presbyters or elders who are elected. They are Calvinistic. Once again there was no question of freedom, the Puritans wished to control the church, and were just as keen on coercion as the rest. Presbyterianism reached its peak in England during the Civil War, but lost out after the Restoration. In Scotland however Presbyterianism was adopted by the Church, and replaced Episcopalianism. In modern times Presbyterian Churches have been established in England, but Scotland and Northern Ireland are its main strongholds. Its membership in Scotland is 1,400,000 but in England only 71,000.

The third body, the Roman Catholics, lost out both in England and Scotland, and were forced underground for over two centuries. In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act removed most of the restrictions on them, and they began to build up anew. They are perhaps the largest, and certainly the best organised, religious body in the world, with about 487 million members. They are not very large in Britain—only about 3 million—but they are still the largest single denomination here. The most important factor is a constant influx of members from Ireland. If the Roman Catholics had to rely solely on converts in Britain, they would be much smaller.

The Catholic Church is the most authoritarian and keeps a tough grip on its members. Its organisation is such that it can retain the waverers that others would lose. The Roman Catholic Church is retreating, but it is an orderly retreat. The recent irony, when the Catholic Herald stated that the arch-enemy Luther was really a good Roman Catholic, will take some swallowing by the faithful but they will manage it. They’ve swallowed worse than that. The Hierarchy are masters at the game, and will certainly dig their heels in when they have to.

The Puritanism of the 16th century had another side—the Independents, and in them one can see the beginnings of modern thought. The mass of the people still tended to think in Medieval terms, and still visualised a State Church, but one dominated by their own particular ideas. The Independents, or Congregationalists, as the names imply believed that churches should be self governing bodies composed of believers only. Each church should be autonomous and the congregation itself should be the ultimate authority. In other words direct democracy. This was extremely revolutionary in the 16th century, and for long after, and brought down the inevitable persecution. The independents were sometimes called Brownists, after one of their founders. The Pilgrim Fathers were mainly composed of Brownists. They covered a wide range of ideas, and from the Independents arose the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Quakers.

They were strong in the manufacturing and trading areas, such as London, East Anglia, Bristol and Hull. They had their main following among the skilled artisans and the merchant class. Their great breeding ground was the New Model Army of Cromwell, and they found political expression in such movements as the Levellers and Fifth Monarchy Men. In the 18th century they slipped into obscurity and stagnation, to emerge again at the beginning of the 19th Century. The Congregationalists and Baptists each have a membership of about 300,000 in Britain but they have a very wide following throughout the world.

The Baptists are the largest religious body in the United States, with a considerable following in such unlikely places as Spain and Russia. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, have never been very large but their influence has always been much greater than their numbers. They have always carried Puritan simplicity and democracy to its ultimate. Their most outstanding feature has been opposition to war. One effect of this has been that Quaker industrialists have tended to avoid not only armaments but heavy industry, and concentrated on light industry. Their membership is about twenty thousand.

The early stages of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to extensive movements of reform within the Church of England. The most important offshoot was the Methodist movement founded by John Wesley, an Anglican priest, which eventually broke away as an independent Church. Unlike the old non-conformist bodies, the Methodist Church was authoritarian. Its greatest importance lay in its educational efforts among an often illiterate membership. Wesley was an extreme reactionary, although an outspoken opponent of slavery, but ironically in later years the movement became a breeding ground for Radicals. Many leading Chartists were Methodists. The Methodist Church has a membership of about a million in Britain but nearer to 20 millions throughout the world.

A typical product of the late 19th Century was the Salvation Army. Founded by William Booth in the 1870’s, it was proletarian in origin. Its unique feature was its quasi-military form of organisation, and it concentrated extensively on social welfare work. It was completely authoritarian in its organisation. It added nothing very new to religious ideas, its theories being uncomplicated and nothing more than basic Protestant dogma. Alone amongst large Protestant bodies it has not really changed its ideas, although it has ceased its extreme isolation and is prepared to co-operate.

The picture of the main religious bodies is one of retreat before the growth of scientific ideas and a steady but slow decline of membership. Their dilemma is that as they weaken their case, far from increasing membership, they decline. Too much should not be read into this; there are still something like ten million members of Christian Churches in Britain, although this would include a large number of very lukewarm members. Christianity is tough, it has had massive drifts away before, and could very well make a comeback. But at the moment the retreat is on.

Les Dale

Electoral Activity (1947)

From the January 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clause 8 of our Declaration of Principles commences with a punch—"The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist.” This war the Party has carried on ever since our declaration of principles was first drawn up. Always we have attacked the parasites, their henchmen and apologists with the weapon of Socialist knowledge. Literature on all aspects of the Socialist case against capitalism has been issued; an enormous amount of effort has been expended by Party speakers and others in addressing meetings or discussing with fellow workers, in an endeavour to make more Socialists. This work goes on and will continue until our class has completed its emancipation.

Until recently, our opponents have been able to put up a pretence of ignoring the Party, referring to it as a “small party,” not to be bothered about, or if noticed, to be sneered at in the usual manner of those who cannot, or dare not, answer our case. The following decisions and actions have compelled them to take notice.

In 1927 a meeting of Party members, held in the Friars Hall, Blackfriars Road, London, decided that the Party should contest Parliamentary Elections as soon as possible. At the following General Election it was proposed to contest North Battersea, the job of candidate being delegated to Comrade Barker. In this constituency there were represented the Tory, Liberal and Labour Parties. The possibility of the Socialist Party making a fourth created quite a stir in North Battersea. Unfortunately it remained a possibility only, as there were not sufficient funds to meet the £150 which has to he paid in the form of the deposit. From this time on we slowly built up our Parliamentary Fund. It was slow work, as a large number of our members were out of work or getting a living with difficulty. However, we built up this fund sufficiently to contemplate contesting a seat in 1939 General Election. The outbreak of war, with the postponing of elections till the cessation of hostilities, led us to abandon the work we started in 1938 at East Ham North, which was the chosen constituency.

The General Election, held after the termination of the war, gave us our chance at North Paddington, where we went into action with £230 in the Parliamentary Fund. This fight cost us £900, most of which was contributed by members and sympathisers during the Election. The cost to our General Fund was £130.

As members, readers of the S.S. and a lot of people who had never before heard of the S.P.G.B. know, we contested the bye-election at N. Paddington. This time the cost was £560, and again the funds came in to meet the need.

There is one outstanding feature we have noticed as a result of these contests: it is that there are far more workers prepared to listen and read about Socialism, than many of us believed. To have been at our meetings would have cured any one of pessimism; the reception of our canvassers was also very sympathetic, and the amount of literature sold was also a very encouraging feature.

The S.P.G.B. is definitely on the attack at the place where it hurts the enemy most, that is, the seat of power. We know the struggle is hard, it may he long and bitter, but still we shall go on determined to wage war as we state in Clause 8 of our Declaration of Principles quoted at the beginning of this appeal. Yes, it is an appeal! We want to contest more than one constituency at the next General Election, and the amount of money in the Parliamentary Fund will be one of the factors that will determine how many we shall contest. Donations to this fund should be sent to E. Lake, at 2, Rugby Chambers, Rugby Street, W.C.1, marked “Parliamentary Fund."

Remember our class enemy will not in future be able to ignore us. Your donation will help us to forge the ammunition to carry on the fight.

Parliamentary Committee.

Personalities or Principles? (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The conflict now raging between Social Democrats and Communists in almost every European country is receiving far more attention than it deserves. From the working-class view-point the questions in dispute are of little or no importance, and personalities, not principles, are the chief issues.

The corresponding parties in this country are the Labour Party, now in power, and the Communist Party. Both these parties claim to be out for a fundamental change, and to base their respective policies on this aim. Yet the activities of both parties are concerned solely with the advocacy of reforms within the capitalist system.

At the general election the Communists supported the Labour Party and sponsored their programme. They still do so, although criticising details here and there, together with the lack of speed and firmness in carrying out nationalisation schemes. At times these “blind leaders of the blind” endeavour to link their frothy rise to leadership and power with that glorious past when a real social science was in the making.

Such an attempt was made recently on the 50th anniversary of the death of William Morris. According to the Daily Worker (16/11/46), the Daily Herald claimed Morris as a forerunner of the Labour Party, and “the Attlee pastorale.”

W. Holmes, in the Worker, disputed this and claimed him for the Communists because

  “He left the S.D.F. in disgust at its reformist trend. But despite its vagaries, the S.D.F. was the forerunner of the Communist Party.”
   The Herald claimed him because ‘‘by Socialist he meant almost precisely what we mean, although the practical technique of British Socialism had not then been invented.”

We are not concerned with their respective claims on Morris. His chief merit lay in his thorough exposure of working-class conditions under capitalism. He was, perhaps, to some extent a reformist, but one who visualised correctly the real meaning of Socialism. Yet W. Holmes says of him:

   ‘‘But Morris wanted to tell the world that ‘It is not a small change in life that we advocate, but a very great one; that Socialism will transform our lives and habits.' ” “That full-blooded faith,” says Holmes, “led Moms to break with all the reformists of his day. For he was a Marxist, and called himself a 'Communist.’ ”

It is unfortunate for the Daily Worker, and the writer of the above notes on Labour Party gradualism, that in the adjoining columns Harry Pollitt should lay himself open to the same criticism in the following words:

  “Alongside this policy must also go the real fight against monopoly and its profits at home; improvement of the wages and working hours of the workers now; speed-up in the building of new houses, and reorganisation of the basic industries with the full participation of the workers. In this way we can lay, at home and abroad, the firm foundation which alone can guarantee the fulfilment of the policy the people voted for at the General Election in 1945.”

One writer blames the Labour Government for their reformism and the other asks no more from them than the implementation of the programme of reforms on which they were elected!

Gradualism means slowing-up progress towards Socialism and is the avowed policy of the Fabians. They professed to bring Socialism about by evolution, not social revolution. Taken in this sense, the Labour Party’s programme is gradualism pure and simple, its nationalisation schemes are put forward on the assumption that nationalisation must precede Socialism; and form a necessary part of the process. But this assumption has never been justified by the Fabians, or anyone else. The reverse, of course, being true, because of the confusion arising over the two terms, public ownership and common ownership; for which both Fabians and Communists are responsible, and which neither have made the slightest attempt to remove. It is this reformist and nationalisation programme that Pollitt and the Communist Party insist on being carried through; while W. Holmes, in the same paper and on the same day, describes it as gradualism.

To advocate reforms is to slow-up the progress towards Socialism, because it concentrates the attention of the workers on a fruitless struggle for something now. W. Holmes agrees with this, for he quotes Morris to that' effect, as follows:

   “There is, generally speaking, among democrats, a leaning towards a kind of limited State Socialism, and it is through that that they hope to bring about a peaceful Revolution which, if it does not introduce a condition of equality, will at least make the workers better off and contented with their lot . . . nor would some of them be discontented if we could glide into complete State Socialism.”

Which is where Fabians and Communists are heading if we call it by its correct name, State Capitalism.

But in addition to this reform policy which diverts the workers from Socialist knowledge and activity, Pollitt has a further diversion:

   “The Labour Government must be compelled to change its policy at home and abroad so that we stand four-square with those nations which think politically like millions do in Britain. This is the best insurance against the predatory designs of American imperialism. If Britain, the Soviet Union, France and the other democratic nations in Europe now stand together, then for these nations there will be no new economic crises or new wars.” 

In this he helps the capitalists to split the workers of Europe and America into hostile camps, battling for supremacy in world trade, a conflict leading inevitably to future wars. Nothing is more certain to slow up the spread of Socialist thought than to sow dissension between the workers by emphasising nationalist differences that are purely capitalist in character. Far from being a Marxist, Pollitt, in the above paragraph, repudiates Marx and his famous slogan: Workers of the World Unite.

But where does nationalisation lead? According to the Labour Party, Socialism will be complete with the nationalisation of every possible industry. The Communists do not deny this, although they criticise the Government for paying too much in compensation to dispossessed shareholders. Sometimes they say no compensation at all should be paid. If these eventually have their way, the likeness to Russia will be complete. The dream of the Fabians realised: Government by experts, and the working-class still wage-workers: Industry still run for profits, and the results, over and above wages, shared between the experts, political and industrial. As in Russia, they can bring into existence a perfect hierarchy of officials, industrial experts, scientists, economists and technicians, to create an atmosphereof inevitability and permanence to their rule.

Small wonder that G. B. Shaw greeted the Soviet leaders as Fabians, and, incidentally, showed that the aims of Communists and Fabians were identical: Government by the middle-class, as he termed the intellectuals and professionals. In short, a totalitarian form of government in "Socialist" Britain as in “Communist" Russia.

The British Communist Party, adopting the methods of the Kremlin, can only land themselves in the same vicious circle of competitive struggle for markets with its ever-present threat of war. It stamps it as being of the same nature as the Labour Party; thirsting for power, that they may impose their ideas and methods on a working-class not yet alive to their real interests. 

No government can establish Socialism. Only the working class, the overwhelming mass of the people, can do that. Because, as Morris said, Socialism involves revolutionary changes in every aspect of the working-class way of life. The wages system must be supplanted by a democratic administration of production and distribution, based on individual needs and equality. This means the building of a working-class organisation now, where every worker understands and accepts the democratic principles of administration; and is ready to take his place in the scheme of things, both on the productive and administrative side.

Until the workers do this. Society cannot move forward to its higher and freer conception of life. Workers everywhere should concentrate on Socialism and leave reforms and public ownership to those interested in preserving Capitalism.

F. Foan

Exchange Is No Robbery (1947)

From the March 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

If use-value is not the basis by which exchange-value can be measured, what then is the “something" common to all commodities by which this can be effected?

Take the two metals, iron and gold. Both are mined and brought to market where they exchange, weight for weight, in a ratio of some thousands to one. It is not their respective use-values that causes this exchange disparity, for while gold is a commodity essential to the capitalist mode of production, in that it is hoarded by the banks to back up the money-notes issued by them as currency, etc., a more than equal case exists for iron in that it is the material of industrialisation and its modem machinery and tools without which present-day society ceases to function.

Finding in use-value no common factor that is measurable, there is left the fact that all commodities are the product of human labour. Human labour measured by time is therefore the obvious basis for assessing value in exchange. Take again our iron and gold example; miners, according to a recent radio talk, must hew and process some six tons of quartz rock before it will yield gold enough to fill a matchbox, while on the other hand, the same amount of labour would produce tons of more freely found iron.

Exchange is therefore the interchange of one labour product for another of different use-value, the exchange-relation being based on the labour-time that capitalist society allots to the production and reproduction of any particular commodity, while in every exchange the kind of labour that produced the commodities, be it specialised or “unskilled” is reduced to the unity of undifferentiated human labour, i.e., the labour embodied in machinery made by industrial workers, will exchange for the products of agricultural labour, skilled labour being a multiple of unskilled labour. Yet the amount of labour in commodities is not decided by the whims of the individual capitalists but is thrust on them all by those who manage to reduce the labour-time by the latest labour-saving technique and machinery, setting up in effect the “socially necessary labour time” to which one and all must adhere or have their commodities rejected by the market as too “dear.”

Every exchange comprises a sale and purchase and looking at our gold and iron example one can say that either could change position, in that the iron could "buy” the gold or vice-versa. This implication is borne out by the long history of exchange in which first this and then that commodity served as a universal equivalent, the most favoured, being the precious metals because they concentrated labour in a handy form and were easily divisible. Among these, gold holds supreme position to-day as the commodity set aside as the measure of value and standard of price. Thus an ounce of gold of legal fineness, will mint as coinage into just under four sovereigns of legal weight, making it possible for the labour embodied in one or many such portions of this metal to express in currency terms the labour-relation between it and any other product of labour. In brief, while labour is the cause of value, gold measures this value and expresses it in the various national currencies as price. The fact that sovereigns have been replaced by paper tokens does not invalidate the foregoing, except that tokens open the door to inflation by legally expressing price in an unwanted number of tokens over and above the real money of gold.

Keeping in mind the meaning of price, one can say that exchange is but the movement of labour products for others of equal labour value, and the question which naturally arises here is that if exchange amounts to the giving of one value for an equal, how can profit arise? It might appear that the capitalists in the exchange of labour products out-smart each other by giving less labour for more in return, but a seller, to continue in business, must at some time be a buyer and is himself “caught,” thus levelling up any gain. Finally, the “outsmarting” theory is entirely nullified by the fact that the whole capitalist class make a profit regularly. Let us look a little closer at this. The capitalist buys at the proper market price, machinery, raw materials and workers’ energies and when the process of converting the materials is completed and the sale of the new product is effected, he finds that not only has he sufficient money to repeat this process, but enough and more as the business grows to cease all ”work" and hand over his mandate to his paid manager. No “robbery” has been committed by the honest business man, yet he is in possession of values in the shape of commodities for which he has given no equivalent in return. How does it happen? Read the next article entitled “Something for Nothing.” 

Frank Dawe