Running Commentary : Poland - The Iron Heel (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poland: the iron heel

Jaruzelski, the Polish military dictator, has pushed through his Iron Heel Act. Rubber-stamped by the subservient pseudo- Parliament. the Sejm, it made illegal not only Solidarity but all forms of trade union organisation.

This Bismarckian act of repression, backed by the infamous thugs of ZOMO and other security forces, will not solve Poland’s desperate economic crisis, any more than the sacking of several economic ministers will help feed the hungry.

Sympathy for Polish workers is widespread. ranging from the far left to the Foreign Office statement:

The policy of the Polish government is one of confrontation rather than reconciliation. (Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1982)

We go further. The hardships experienced by Polish workers have been extreme. In peace-time Europe there is famine. Capitalism in chaos can — and does — kill. Poland is but one extreme example of this.

In 1981 plant closures and unemployment indicated the continuing decline of the economy. With the economy. the morale of the ruling Party collapsed. The bankrupt Party saw the workers' movement as a political threat. Jaruzelski’s actions in first suspending, and now banning. Solidarity were a reaction to a the movement's assumption of a wider role — "both a trade union and a wider social movement" (Solidarity Programme Resolution. Autumn 1981).

We cannot endorse the demand for a “new social contract" based on cooperation between workers and management in the "national interest". Yet Solidarity was the workers' only defence against the severe erosion of their wagcs and pitiful standard of living.

The class struggle cannot be legislated out of existence. Although this attempt to establish an independent trade union and political movement may have been crushed, we know that there will be others in the future.

We hope that such attempts will benefit from the lesson of the failure of Solidarity — that ultimately every class struggle is a political one.


Court in the act

Magistrates are called (in court, at any rate) Your Worships and their legal advisers are known as Your Learned Clerk and the whole procedure is carried along on a tidal wave of bowing and scraping and forelock-touching, so why they should want any help from On High must be a mystery.

However, there it is. The court in Coventry recently decided that each day's proceedings will open with a ten-minute prayer meeting in which everyone, including the defendants, will be asked to join.

Now this will present some obvious problems because there will be people praying for different things all at the same time which will be very difficult for god who has to hear all and see all and know all.

The police, for example, will be saying a few words in favour of the person in the dock getting the heaviest possible sentence because that is the righteous way of dealing with offenders against the law. But the offenders will be praying to be let off lightly or, if they are pleading not guilty, for the magistrates to believe a perhaps unlikely version of the events.

The magistrates will probably be asking god for some interesting cases, for the court reporter to make a careful note of all their witty asides and to get them in the local rag, for the court to run long enough for them to claim a whole day’s attendance allowance and for lunch time to come around quickly.

But of course it is not all farcical. Courts exist as part of the coercive machinery which enforces the rights and minority privileges of property society. Their job is to assert the fact that there is a class of people in capitalism who own the means of life and whose position must be protected with punishment for anyone who threatens it with breaches of property laws.

Religion is also a prop of this divisive, repressive social system. It teaches the non-owners, the non-privileged, to accept their lot and meekly to consent to their own exploitation. It stands up for the symbols of privilege and repression like the royal family and supports the nastiest aspects of the conflicts of capitalism, like its wars.

So it is entirely appropriate that the two factors — coercive state machine and lick-spittling religion — should come together in such open and unequivocal support for capitalism. In Coventry, the view from the dock could not be clearer.

Adman cometh

Travellers who have booked with British Airways may be having second thoughts since that airline announced that its advertising was being taken over by Saatchi and Saatchi, who masterminded the Tory election campaign in 1979 with the implied promise that unemployment would disappear when Thatcher got to Number Ten. With that record behind them, the new ad agency had better not try any slogans like “We’ll Take More Care of You" or all the passengers will be hastily booking to go by sea.

That famous phrase was followed by the patriotic "Fly The Flag”, which was probably intended to cash in on the Concorde boom which never came. Now more, similar, rubbish is promised; Saatchi and Saatchi have hired one of the advertising industry's (sic) wonder boys just to write the new slogans to persuade people to fly British Airways.

This wonder boy — Geoffrey Seymour — is still in his thirties but is well wise to the cut-throat ways of the advertising world. Seymour’s trade is to spend lengthy periods of time fashioning a few words of dramatic, enduring impact which will result in one product selling more than any others — even if the others are better.

He has already had a lot of success (for such it is called) at this. Products like Hovis bread, Heineken lager and Hamlet cigars are said to have sold better after Seymour's fertile mind had been at work (for such it is called).

Success has come in other ways; Seymour has actually won prizes for his slogans and, probably more to the point, he now gets something like £100,000 a year from the advertising world as reward; This may cause anger and bitterness among, say, Health Service workers who are doing a vital human job and have to struggle to defend an already meagre living standard. But there is another aspect to be considered. We live under a social system which produces its wealth for sale, winch means that the market is all-important.

So salespeople, advertising executives and the like have a very important place in this society. They don’t actually produce anything, their work does not make human life one jot easier or happier; a sane social system will have absolutely no use for what are called their talents. Their gargantuan rewards could happen only under a society in which all values are distorted and crazy, in which profit comes a long, long way ahead of people.

Family party

Margaret Thatcher, it is reported, sent her key ministers and advisers off on their holidays during the parliamentary recess with the instruction to Think About The Family. But protective parents need not worry; it is unlikely that the Prime Minister intended Geoffrey Howe to reflect on the effects of poverty on family relationships, or Norman Tebbitt to write a paper on the degrading frustrations in both employment and unemployment.

What Thatcher wanted from the Tory thinkers was some ideas on how to exploit electorally the concept of the family as a cosy, protective element in social stability. This may be shrewder than it at first appears. The present phase of property society encourages everyone to strive for an ideal in their personal relationships, based on the assumption that the human family must be a private, monogamous, exclusive unit.

 

In fact the style of family — whether monogamous or polygamous, whether nuclear or extended, whether patriarchal or matriarchal — can and does vary according to the basic social arrangements in force at the time. There is no evidence that the contemporary family is ideal, or beneficial, or that it will endure.

What is clear is that the present day family conforms with capitalism, with a social system based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and the consequent production of wealth as commodities. This form of family places no obstacles in the way of the organised, widespread wage slavery or the savage conflicts of capitalism. The restraints it imposes are on human freedoms — sexual, social and moral. Its privacy is only extended where a market can be created, where each family unit has its own private home having its own car. washing machine, TV .   .  .  .

A sane society will have a very different family. If the repressions, neuroses and exclusions of the capitalist family are so comforting to those who endure them as to be an electoral asset to some capitalist party, then that is apt comment on this system’s distortion of human relationships.

Russia 1917: As We Saw It (2017)

From the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Saviours of Russia

In September 1918 the Socialist Standard commented on the invasion of Russia by 'the Allies'.

The hand of the capitalist is slowly but surely revealing itself in Russian affairs. It will be remembered with what haste the capitalist Governments rushed to congratulate their triumphant (as they thought) fellow thieves upon their overthrow of the monarchy. They did not then stop to lecture on the enormity of "internal dissension" in the midst of war. No, they tumbled over each other in their anxiety to deliver their congratulations – because the 'victors' were of their own kidney.

They made a mistake, however. In the ultimate it proved to he more than the revolutionary capitalist class in Russia could do, once they had broken the tyrannical organisation which had kept the conscripted forces in subjection, to regain for themselves control of those forces. It was not for the want of trying that they failed. They soon got busy butchering soldiers who refused to go on with the war which they had not made, which they had never wanted, and which they realised could bring them no benefit. So the revolutionary capitalists, who were never for a moment strong enough to establish their authority over the forces and powers of State, were 'recognised' and accepted by their fellow capitalists as the 'representatives of the Russian people,' as the Russian people, as the natural successors, quite as a matter of course, to Bloody Nick and his crew. That they had no power as a Government made no difference.

How different, however, was the conduct of the capitalist Governments toward the Bolsheviks when the latter took the reins from the palsied grasp of the 'triumphant bourgeoisie' ! Their accredited envoys received only 'unofficial recognition, for the purpose of communication.' (. . .)

Fearful that if the Bolshevik enterprise should meet with success it might prove contagious, they have determined to crush it and restore their friends and allies, the Russian capitalists, to dominance. So we have a 'league of nations' in being against the Bolshevik Government. Under the plea that they are going to save Russia from the Germans they invade the country at various points. 'We come as the friends of Russia,' they declare, and disown any intention of interfering with 'the internal politics of the country.' (. . .)

As to the claim that they go into Russia as 'the friends of Russia,' this must be translated into 'the friends of Russian capitalists' if it is to have any truth at all. It is only by the continued exploitation of the Russian working class that the Allied capitalists can ever hope to recover the many millions which they have advanced, both before and since the outbreak of the war, to Russia, with the object of strengthening her against Germany.

(Full article here)

Russia: the left-wing fantasy (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty-five years ago a myth was born. A Dictatorship of the Russian Proletariat had been set up amid the chaos of World War 1. The simple slogan Peace, Land and Bread echoed from the cities to the remotest villages.

As the dust settled, facts emerged. The peasants had seized whatever land they could while the landlords, rightly fearing a repetition of the French Revolution, packed up and fled. Peace broke out as far as Russia's involvement in the World War was concerned but only temporarily: civil war was to follow. Bread was to be very scarce for a long time. The workers' councils, the Soviets, had no real power. The Bolshevik Party were in power and they meant to stay there. Within weeks the Cheka took the place of the Tsarist Okhrana — with unlimited powers. This was not a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was a dictatorship over the proletariat, and shortly over the peasants too.

The myth of a classless society — as socialism will indeed be — was widely publicised. Yet the reality was a society split by irreconcilable antagonisms. The Bolsheviks were desperate for food for the starving cities and sent raiding parties to rob the peasants, who fought back.

This conflict came to a head sixty years ago. The winter of 1920-21 was terrible; food in the cities was very scarce, rationing was arbitrary and chaotic, many workers fled the cities to join relatives in the countryside while those who remained starved on wages which were less than 10 per cent of the 1913 level.

The Kronstadt revolt highlighted real grievances, demanding better food supplies and new elections. “The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses . . . Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow which show clearly that the Party has lost the confidence of the working masses. [1] . . . Our cause is just. We stand for the power of the Soviets, not for that of the Party. We stand for freely elected representatives of the toiling masses. Deformed Soviets, dominated by the Party, have remained deaf to our pleas. Our appeals have been answered with bullets.”[2]

At the same time, peasant risings showed opposition to grain procurements. Lenin did a U-turn. In 1921, within weeks of Trotsky’s massacre of the Kronstadt garrison, he instituted the New Economic Policy. The collapse of Russian agriculture was halted and grain harvests increased through the twenties until the first Five Year Plan brought compulsory collectivisation and attacks on so-called kulaks. Food production nose-dived in the years 1928-32 and peasants slaughtered their livestock. Millions were liquidated or disappeared to concentration camps, others fled the hungry, terrorised countryside for the overcrowded cities. The gap between theory and practice widened:

  “From their bloodstained platforms they shout that the soil belongs to the peasants and the factories belong to the workers . . . [But] a new Communist serfdom arose. The peasant in the Soviet farms became a slave, and the worker in the factories a day-labourer.” [3]

From the time of the first Five Year Plan, which ended 50 years ago, we may date the completion of Russia's capitalist revolution. This was the third Russian Revolution. The first, in February 1917, toppled the Tsar and brought about a liberal bourgeois government under Kerensky; the second was the November coup by the Bolsheviks with promises of “Peace, Land and Bread". Between 1927 and 1932, the number of wage-workers in Russia increased by 30 per cent and the expropriation of the peasants proceeded by leaps and bounds.

Marx wrote of the “primitive accumulation" of capital — the process by which a landless proletariat is brought into being, with no means of livelihood except the sale of their labour power, renting themselves out for hire by the hour, the day or the week for wages. He pointed out that everywhere the methods employed "all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition "[4]. This ruthless, enforced process, was as cruel in the steppes of Russia as in the Highlands of Scotland. For Highland Clearances, read “de-kulakisation and collectivisation.”

But Russia, it was claimed, was different. There was no exploitation — it was illegal for individuals to own factories or mines, or to enrich themselves by employing a workforce. If there were no individual capitalists, there could be no capitalist class. Therefore this was not capitalism.

But. as Marx, Engels and Bukharin explained earlier, the wages system does not require individual capitalists. The capitalist class as a whole collectively exploits the working class as a whole. This can be done by means of institutional or corporate ownership of the land, factories, mines and so on as had already happened in the 19th century. (When Bismarck nationalised the railways, this had nothing whatever to do with socialism, as Engels pointed out.) Lenin's view was that in Russia what was needed was state capitalism, on the Prussian model. Yet to this day, it is generally believed that Russia's nationalisation is characteristic of socialism in practice. Later, Khrushchev tried to explain away the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat". This, he said, had been superseded by a “government of the whole people": there was still to be coercion "but not in a class sense, since it was no longer necessary to suppress entire social layers and classes, but only criminals and individuals who violated Soviet laws.”[5]

Now. however, this policy is disavowed in Moscow. On a recent visit to Russia we were invited to take part in a discussion with two official spokesmen at the Marx-Engels Institute. In response to this point — that Russia had developed beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat and had become a classless society, a "government of the whole people” — the official spokesmen were anxious to reassure all present that nothing so terrible had happened. Khrushchev, he scoffed, talked a lot of twaddle. Yet this position had been endorsed as part of the CFSU's programme at the 22nd Congress (1961): “(the party had) transformed the state of the proletarian dictatorship into a state of the whole people"[6]. Evidently, the CPSU also talks twaddle.

Another Leftwing fantasy is that in Russia there is no unemployment. But with deportation to Siberia, pass laws which fix where any individual is allowed to live, black-listing of the system's critics, a paternalist state, gross waste of human resources in the overmanned and hopelessly inefficient farms, large scale unemployment would be unlikely. Yet there are unemployed workers in Russia.

Workers may be sacked for absenteeism or other infringements of the Labour Code. They may be sacked and blacklisted for complaining or protesting against abuses by management [7]. The only difference is that in Russia, unemployed workers cannot get any unemployment benefit and there are no published statistics. In any case, with or without unemployment, the wages system exploits workers.

If Russia is Utopia, it is Utopia only for the Male Chauvinist Pig. On my first visit, twenty-five years ago, I saw Moscow in sweltering summer. All the people queueing with buckets for water at standpipes were women — never men: This year I visited three cities (Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad) in the winter. In each city, snow was being shovelled off the pavements by women and only by women. I asked why such hard work is done only by women and why women do not reach the higher decision-making strata. The official response: "We don't like our women to be put under stress"!

Russia is said to represent a “transition stage’’, not capitalist (no individual capitalists) but not yet communist. But how long can a transition be expected to last? This one qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records: sixty-five years is an awful long time to be in transit.

The claim that in Russia there is no class struggle is fraudulent. In 1956-57 there was a wave of strikes (especially “Italian strikes", a form of go-slow); in 1962, the Army machine-gunned demonstrators, including children, protesting at food prices and work norms; and about ten years ago, 30,000 workers struck at the Kiev car factory. What has developed is a form of capitalism where most capital is state property.

As Engels wrote: “State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict . . . The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers — proletarians.” [9]

The history of Russia in the last fifty years has demonstrated the truth of this proposition.

Workers have learned to associate Marxism and socialism with a totalitarian dictatorship, ruthless and corrupt. The damage done by this to the socialist cause is immeasurable. Yet there is some cause for hope. Moscow’s magicians find it harder to support the illusion of a Workers' Paradise. In the last twenty-five years, the publication of samizdat material has become well established. The early critics wrote poems and novels. Later came scientists, historians, economists and engineers, and in the last decade a number of shop-floor workers. These usually follow Sakharov, who described the system as state capitalism. as in the 1972 leaflet:

   It is not towards communism that we are heading: all that is idle talk. Our system is state capitalism — the very worst, the most wretched political system possible . . . The Kremlin bosses and their hangers-on live better and richer than many Tsarist noblemen did before the Revolution — and yet they call themselves ‘the vanguard of the Soviet people', its servants! [10] 

Just as forthright are the comments of Pohyba arguing for independent trade unions: “ultimately it is the state which is the exploiter along with the State-party bourgeoisie which is in its service and which is the one wielding real power in the country . . . Our country is actually a State capitalist society with a totalitarian form of government’’. [11]

How can Left-wingers explain the existence of profits in what they claim is a socialist society? The Kremlin’s tame economists worry about new methods of measuring “the true rate of profit for each enterprise” (Nemchinov), and Liberman's Kharkov plan stipulated that a factory's rewards should be linked to the profits it could earn on its capital investment. [12] If there are profits, they can only come about by the exploitation of the working class. Profits arc part of our unpaid labour. Yet the myth of this “socialist state” confronts us still and debunking it is still a necessary chore for every socialist speaker or writer.

Charmian Skelton

References
1. 1st issue of Kronstadt Izvestya (3 March 1921) — see Ida Mett The Kronstadt Uprising.
2. Final Kronstadt appeal (same source).
3. Kronstadt Izvestya, quoted by Kautsky Bolshevism at a Deadlock (1930).
4. Capital I ch. xxxi (Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist).
5. Pravda, December 1964.
6. Quoted by Gollan in C.P. Pamphlet Socialist Democracy — some problems (1976) from The Road to Communism — The Proceedings of the 22nd Congress (Moscow, 1961).
7. See Workers Against the Gulag (Pluto Press 1979).
8. Censorship rules ban publication of information on accidents, epidemics and unemployment.
9. Socialism Utopian and Scientific.
10. An Underground Leaflet, June 1972. published in full in Socialist Standard. January 1973.
11. Cf. Nove, An economic History of the Soviet Union.

Race-Prejudice in Washington D. C. (1949)

From the January 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the chapters in our pamphlet, “The Racial Problem,” deals with race-prejudice in the United States. In this chapter, as an example of the fantastic and utterly stupid lengths to which race-prejudice can take some human beings, we refer to the fact that, in certain parts of the U.S.A., there are separate cemeteries for Whites and Negroes.

It now appears that we were not ridiculous enough. From the Manchester Guardian (11/12/19*8) we learn that in Washington D.C. a cemetery for dogs has refused to bury dogs belonging to coloured people!

This masterpiece of stupidity is one of the items mentioned in a report on race-prejudice in, of all places, the District of Columbia, which is Federal Territory, contains Washington, the capital and centre of State power, and is itself under the direct control and administration of the U.S. Government! After alleging that the Government itself is a chief offender and that “Its practice of systematically denying Negroes equal employment opportunities sets a bad example,” the report is further quoted by the Manchester Guardian as follows:

   “Sharing the blame, says the report, are Congressmen who champion ‘white supremacy’ and real estate, commercial, and financial interests which consider segregation is a 'matter of good business.’ Discrimination against Negroes in Washington, the report says, is now more widespread than it was five years ago. Segregation is practised not only in hotels, theatres, restaurants, and housing developments, but in Government posts and even in churches, schools, and hospitals.
   “The largest churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, followed a policy of discouraging attendance by Negroes. ‘The exclusion of Negro Catholics from white-Catholic churches is one of the most disturbing aspects of segregation,’ the report said. It also claimed that Negro doctors could attend patients in only one local hospital, and the schools for coloured children were inferior to those for the whites.
   “It said that 260,000 Negroes—about one-third of the population of Washington—were crowded together in ‘black belts’ which had become some of the ugliest slums in the country. Because of these conditions, a Negro living in Washington had an expectation of life 12 years less than that of a white person.”

A copy of the report, says the Guardian finally, has been sent to President Truman, who has promised to read “with close attention” this account of the racial discrimination prevalent on his own back doorstep.

Stan Hampson

Letter: A Dissatisfied Reader (1949)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader of the Socialist Standard (O.V.F., Rickmansworth) writes explaining why he did not renew his subscription.

“I agree with your ‘Object’ completely. But is there not too much of the old obsession about class? Working class, master class, etc. It seems to me that the change to a Socialist basis is progressing steadily and satisfactorily. Perhaps there is too much hurry in waging war against all other political parties to help the movement on quick enough!”

Reply.

Our correspondent’s two statements, that he agrees with our ”Object,” and that the change to a Socialist basis is progressing steadily and satisfactorily, bring into the open a misconception that is very common. The Socialist objective is a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution. Is it true that progress towards that basis is going on? Obviously what this critic has in mind is the fact that coal, transport, electricity and gas have been nationalised and steel is about to be nationalised. He will be astonished to learn that this is not common ownership and is not the objective of the Socialist Party. It is not the intention of the Labour Government to nationalise more than a small part of industry, but even if it were their intention to nationalise all industry it would not be Socialism or progress to Socialism. The act of changing the capitalist investor from an owner of coal shares or railway or steel shares into an owner of government bonds does not end or even essentially alter the class relationship of capitalism. It still leaves the capitalist class living by owning, and the working class exploited fur capitalist profit. The Socialist objective of production solely for use instead of production for sale and profit making, does not at all enter into the Labour Government’s plans, not even as a most distant objective. If the ”obsession” about class was justified before Labour Government (and our correspondent appears to imply his agreement that it was) it is just as necessary now. Nothing has changed except that in a certain proportion of capitalist industry the State exploits the workers directly and hands over the proceeds of exploitation to the capitalist bondholder. An interesting sidelight on this can be seen in the ‘‘Daily Mail Yearbook.” For many years the Yearbook has published a list of millionaires who had died during the year. It is just the same under Labour government. The 1949 issue (page 138) reports:

  ‘‘There have been ten millionaire estates published since the last issue of the 'Daily Mail Year Book.’ ”

Here follows a list of 10 estates totalling over £16 million, together with a further list of 22 estates of between £500,000 and £1,000,000 which together total another £14 million.

If our critic can view capitalism with its millionaires at the top and its workers struggling to make ends meet, and can find it satisfactory because now a huger proportion of the capitalists’ property-income reaches them in the form of interest on Government bonds, it can only be because in spite of his opening remark he does not agree with our object at all.

Editorial Committee

Editorial: May Day in Hyde Park (1949)

Editorial from the March 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a report about plans for a May Day procession to Hyde Park the Daily Worker (14/1/49) had the following:

  “And the Ministry of Works has told the 600,000-strong Trades Council it cannot use loudspeakers in Hyde Park on May Day unless it can come to an agreement with the tiny Socialist Party of Great Britain which had already applied to use loudspeakers on that day. The Council decided to hold the meeting in Hyde Park if permission could be obtained for loudspeakers, otherwise in Trafalgar Square.”

The Ministry of Works take the line that they will not allow more than one organisation to use loudspeakers, presumably because of the noise, and it happens that this year the S.P.G.B. got in its application first. We are, however, not in favour of loudspeakers being permitted to one organisation and not to others and we have so informed the Ministry. Equally, we would be satisfied if no loudspeakers were used by any speaker in the Park.

There is, however, an entertaining side issue. A Russian Communist journalist, a Miss Catherine Sheveleva, after visiting Hyde Park in 1948 informed her Russian readers in the columns of the Moscow Bolshevik that “democratic” (i.e. Communist) speakers do not get a chance of addressing meetings in Hyde Park. She wrote:

   “I was told that in Hyde Park I would see British democracy in action. Yet, in reality, it is full of cranks, behaving like showmen at a village fair. And when a real democrat starts speaking he is nearly always pulled down from the platform by the police.” (Cable from Moscow, Manchester Guardian, 18/5/1948.)

If Miss Sheveleva’s yarn were the truth the British Communists shouldn’t want to waste their time vainly trying to mount a platform in Hyde Park. It was, however, only a bit of the usual dope fed to the Russian workers by their government-controlled press. Did Miss Sheveleva invent it herself? Or was it perhaps innocently accepted by her from her British comrades?

Housewives: Let Us Face the Future (1949)

From the April 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party 1945 Election pamphlet, “Let Us Face the Future," states that "by good food much ill-health can be prevented,” (P.10.) That’s what Socialists have been saying for years. What the sponsors of this aforesaid pamphlet overlooked is that food is produced primarily for profit. In the Daily Telegraph (3/12/48) a report was published dealing with an inquiry into the health and welfare of housewives made recently by members of the New Sussex Hospital (Brighton), It disclosed that ”88 per cent. of the 61 volunteers showed signs of fatigue ” and “ more than 77 per cent. of the wives were under-nourished.” The inquiry further disclosed that “the effects of fatigue in the housewives exceed those of fatigue in any other worker.” Let us try to imagine the housewife, often with several children, living in tenements or sublets. Her vitality is diminished by repeated childbirths and the daily struggle to cook, wash, shop, clean, and care for her little ones in unsatisfactory surroundings, living on “filler” foods such as bread, margarine and fish and chips.

The problem is one of poverty, a problem which repeatedly asserts itself as the cause of bad health. Despite a world of potential plenty Capitalism destroys food and creates shortages in order to safeguard profits when it becomes necessary. According to a December issue of the Daily Telegraph, hundreds of tons of onions have rotted and only half the 40,000 tons of onions grown on the Cambridgeshire Fens has found a market. Again the Sunday Observer (12/12/48) reported that there is a glut of cabbages and they are ”being ploughed in or fed to livestock." No modification of capitalism can alter this condition of affairs. The solution is to abolish capitalism. Capitalism is only one of the forms of society which have evolved, and Socialism must succeed it if poverty, privilege, slavery, are to give way to comfort, equality and freedom. Unite for Socialism.

Cyril Acton

Dublin Letter (1949)

From the May 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is some weeks now since the world heard the result of the General Election in Northern Ireland—though how much the world really cared about that election result, we, of course, can’t say. The election issue, however, was said to be a clear one. "King or Republic?”—that is, maintenance of the constitutional status quo or incorporation in an all-Ireland Republic. For the King and continued union with Gt. Britain, were the ”Ulster Unionists” (Tories); for the Republic, the Nationalists. Uncomfortably straddling the constitutional fence, swaying, now this side, now that, were the Northern Ireland Labour party, and a few “Independents.” Though the result was never in any doubt—the return to power of the Tories—the utter debacle of the Labour party came about as a complete surprise to most people. Not one of their nine candidates were elected, including three fighting to retain their seats in Belfast; all told, the Labour party lost about 35,000 votes. And McCullough, the one Communist party candidate, only got 688 votes as compared with his 5,802 in 1945—in the same constituency, and against the same opponent. Lord Glentoran, one of the foremost Tory leaders.

To Socialists, the ups and downs of the Tory and Nationalist votes are unimpressive by comparison with the disintegration of the “Leftist and Progressive” ones; for these went, overwhelmingly, to the Tory party. Apologists have said that the supporters of the Labour party and the "Leftist” groups were stampeded. into voting Tory because of the jingoism and sabre-rattling of the Orange (Freemason) Lodges and the alleged threat to their Protestantism, etc., of absorption in a Papist-dominated all-Ireland Republic. Be that as it may, what volumes does it not speak for the Socialist attitude on reformism in general and, to Socialists in Ireland, on the "Partition question” in particular? That one-time adherents of the Labour party can be persuaded that a new national flag is a greater threat to their interests than the continuation of the capitalist economic system constitutes, indeed, a pitiful and sad commentary on the efficacy and worthwhileness of that tragically mis-named party, the Labour Party. But then, what are we to say of the lamentable decline of the alleged "revolutionary” vote, the Communist Party one ? Of McCullough’s [3.9] per cent. depleted vote, can we justifiably attribute it to the same cause? We think so, for no other fits the facts.

So, in this respect, the Northern Ireland elections have afforded one more demonstration of the uselessness of reformist votes as a means of effecting any real change in the worker’s position vis-a-vis the capitalist. Such votes are as easily lost in the next election as they are won in this. Though Hitler won quite a proportion of the Communist and Social Democrat parties’ votes, to a large extent by outdoing their promises of "social betterment,” any analogy between that phase of German history and the recent Tory victory in Northern Ireland would be not only misleading but involve the paying of false compliments to the Labour and "Leftist” parties. For the truth is that Sir Basil Brooke (Tory leader) and his party were under no great pressure to defend existing social and economic conditions in Northern Ireland. When, now and then, they did do so, it was only by way of superficial comparison with Eire, saying: "Look how worse off you’d be in an Irish Republic!” But that all they had to do, for the most part, was to wave the Orange flag and beat the Orange drum, is due to the pusillanimity of the Labour party and others, and their inability, because of their capitalist-reformist base, to point the way out to the Northern Ireland workers.

That the workers there, no less than their fellows down here in Eire, and elsewhere under capitalism, are “getting it in the neck ” all of the time, is ably borne out by an examination of the available social and economic statistics. With a population of 1,330,000, Northern Ireland has, at present, 37,000 men and women on the Unemployment Register. And this unemployment figure is not only proportionately higher than Britain’s—it was two-and-a-half times the British rate in 1947—but higher even than Eire’s, with 83,766 unemployed. This very large and ugly social blot on Northern Ireland is not of recent occurrence either. Except for the war periods, unemployment has always hovered round the 20,000 mark, and in more recent years, between 25,000 and 35,000. As a matter of fact, in March, 1947, it actually reached the 45,000 figure.

Working class housing and health conditions are, in general, no better than they are here in Eire—and that comparison is, indeed, an odious one. The number of houses officially estimated as unfit for habitation in Northern Ireland is 27,000. In Belfast itself (the Northern Ireland capital), where there were over 17,000 applications for houses by January, 1948, the Corporation and Housing Trust had between them built only 322! A survey recently undertaken by the Northern Ireland Council of Social Service (a semi-official body) revealed appalling conditions existing in this area of the "King’s Dominions.” Those conditions are all too graphically detailed in the work embodying the Council’s findings, "Rural Life in Northern Ireland ” (Oxford University Press, 1947).

For instance, taking the Beveridge Report subsistence benefit (and that low enough by any standards) as “ the poverty line,” the Council found that in County Fermanagh, twelve labourers’ households out of twenty-nine fell below this line, as well as nineteen pensioners’ households out of twenty-nine. And in Co. Down, likewise; while in Nth. Antrim, fifty per cent. of the farm labourers exist below this "minimum required to maintain health.” As to housing; not a single labourer’s cottage has been built by any Rural Council in Co. Fermanagh since Northern Ireland became a separate State (1921)! Much the same story is told of the other five counties. Even in Nth. Down, which is claimed to be the "most advanced” area because of its proximity to Belfast, only six per cent. of the houses have a W.C.! Also—and not far from Stormont either, where the "King’s men” legislate in the interests of the linen, brewing and shipbuilding industrialists and big farmers, and rave about the ‘‘prosperity of Ulster and the poverty of Eire”—in Belfast, according to the Council, the main causes of distress in that city were tuberculosis and the housing shortage.

But enough has been said already to show that there are working-class problems in Northern Ireland apart from the capitalist constitutional ones. The solution of these problems, because they are specifically working-class ones, is not to be found in formulae concerned with national boundaries. Neither Statute of Westminster nor Republican Declaration can offer a solution of them. The division which gave birth to these problems—the division of the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many—is, needless to say, conveniently ignored by all of the current publicity devoted to that sorrowing tale, "Divided Ireland.” Even a King and a Republic (and that’s not a piece of Irishry, for through the External Relations Act that was the situation in Eire from 1937 to 1949) holds no hope of the ending of that division. And that Partition is one which will remain until a majority of the workers decide to end the capitalist system—complete with all its Republican and Monarchical paraphernalia—and establish Socialism.

Chris Walsh

(Dublin Socialist Group).

Debate With Conservatives (1949)

From the June 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The debate with Conservative at Ealing Town Hall on April 4th commenced late owing to the late arrival of the Conservative representative, David Eccles, M.P., and it finished early owing to his request to get away by 9.30.

W. Waters opened the debate for the S.P.G.B. by warning his opponent not to waste time attacking the Labour Party, as most Conservatives do when debating with us. If an indictment of the Labour Party was called for, we could do it far better than any Conservative. The question, “Which Party should the working class support?” prompted other questions, such as. “What is a political party?”; “Why are there many parties?”; “Is it necessary to support any?”, and if so, “ Which one?” A political party is an organisation that seeks to control the machinery of government in order to serve the interests of a section of the community. It was because there are varying interests to be served that there are a number of political parties. Landlords, industrialists, etc., have separate sectional interests, but they also have a common interest as owners of the means of production. The working class had interests opposed to these groups of the capitalist class. It is necessary for the workers to have a political party to express their interests or they would be forever at the mercy of the capitalists. The workers should support the party that aims at the abolition of the social system that keeps them in subjection. Supporting other parties, such as the Conservative Party, would solve no problems for the working class. The Conservative Party had a history of vicious opposition to working class interests, intense exploitation of the workers and suppression of their organisations. In conclusion Waters pointed out that the S.P.G.B. placed a different meaning on the word “support” to the Conservatives. The Conservatives asked for the confidence and trust of the workers, the S.P.G.B. said that the overthrow of capitalism required that the workers should understand and actively work for that objective. The Conservative Party would use the workers, the S.P.G.B. was a party the workers could use.

David Eccles opened by stating that he had, that day, gone into the lobby of the House of Commons and asked three Labour M.P’s. what they knew of the S.P.G.B. Two of them had denied any knowledge of the Party and the third had used filthy language. He admitted that he was unable to understand the object of the S.P.G.B., it was a new animal to him. He could only conceive of common ownership as a system where the state took over industry on behalf of the community. That was what the Labour Party was doing. It was not always in keeping with the interests of the nation. Private enterprise should be encouraged with the state being used to prevent any abuses such as the restrictive activities of monopolies. The small trader was the backbone of the country and he should be assisted. The Conservative Party aimed at a property-owning democracy with everyone owning his own house. Property was power and it was the object of the Conservative Party to spread the power over as wide a section of the people as possible. It aimed at a more fair distribution of property and an opportunity for everyone to get on. Social services were a means of redistribution, they were a substitute for property. Transferring property to the state means more power to the ministers. A property-owning democracy would give a larger freedom of choice. Mr. Eccles said that he could not understand how Waters could carve out a section of the people and call it a working class.

Waters commenced his second contribution by again defining the working class—that section of society which had no other means of obtaining its livelihood except by the sale of its ability to work. His opponent was a man who had been elected to a responsible position—to the job of governing. Any man in such an important job should make himself acquainted with the political ideas that were held by the people that he professed to represent. Despite the warning given, his opponent had spent his time opposing the Labour Party programme of nationalisation but without using the word. The Industrial Charter of the Conservative Party, which had been described by Conservative Sir Waldron Smithers as the most revolutionary document since the Communist Manifesto, was an example of what the Conservatives offered the working class. Boiled down it amounted to a scheme to get more out of the workers without giving them more of the wealth they produced. It claimed to offer new incentives such as dismissal from employment on a seniority basis. A recent employee might only get a week’s notice whilst an older hand might get, perhaps, a month’s. It was for such nonsense as this that the Conservatives sought the support of the workers.

David Eccles said that his opponent’s ideas were the result of a mixture of envy and philanthropic desire and the offspring was a rather ugly dream. How could property be abolished? It was beyond conception. He had travelled to Ealing by train and the railway he came by was property. Was the railway to be abolished? Were houses to have no keys so that anyone could walk in? Who would distribute the goods that were made if they were not owned by someone? The whole proposition was a dream. It was alright to dream, but the Conservative Party was more realistic. If his opponent’s definition was analysed it would be found that all but one per cent, of the nation were members of the working class. He was satisfied that the people wanted something more than a dream. Nine million of them supported the Conservative Party and if only his opponent at the next election would expound the same ideas as Water?, he, Eccles, would feel that his seat was safe.

Waters replied that it was beyond belief that anyone should think that a railway was property just because it was a railway. It became property when some person or group of persons had the right to dispose of it. Referring to the idea that everyone should own his own house. Waters quoted from a newspaper dated February, 1932, when a Conservative Party had a majority in Parliament showing that Welsh miners who had bought their houses during more prosperous times, had to surrender the mortgage when unemployed and drawing relief, and as they had little chance of redeeming it, the house property was lost to them, after a lifetime of saving. The Conservative Party was responsible for the Trade Disputes Act, 1927, the Incitement to Disaffection Act, 1934, the Public Order Act, 1937, not forgetting the Taff Vale Judgment of 1901 and the Means Test of 1931. Waters quoted from Conservative sources to show that the co-partnership idea proposed by the Conservative Party offered nothing to the workers but an inducement to work harder for their employers' benefit. Nine million workers may have supported the Conservative Party but although the Conservatives might fool some of the workers all the time, or all the workers some of the time, they would not fool them all for all the time. The days of the capitalist class were numbered and with its passing would also go its lickspittle lackeys.

David Eccles said that the ideas expressed by his opponent were isolated. The S.P.G.B. would isolate England. We had to sell our goods abroad in order to get the things we needed from other countries. Our great problem was the dollar shortage. His party was concerned with the practical problems of living not with dreams. He was pleased to have been invited to debate with the S.P.G.B. He had learned much and regretted that he must leave early.

D. C.

Editorial: Mugabe - From 'Marxist' Guerrilla to Fat Cat Dictator (2017)

Editorial from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the late 19th century, the major European powers came together at a conference in Berlin to 'carve up' the African territories amongst themselves as part of the 'Scramble for Africa'. European capitalists looted the natural resources and ruthlessly exploited the working population of their African colonies. The racist ideology of white superiority was used to justify their rule. In response, national 'liberation' movements emerged, many of which claimed to be socialist. Robert Mugabe, who led the guerrilla war against the white minority regime in what was then known as Rhodesia in the 1970s, was a self-styled 'Marxist Revolutionary'.

Some have said that socialists should support these liberation struggles. After all, it was argued, victory would bring freedom and dignity to the African people, and according to Lenin's theory of imperialism, with the loss of their overseas colonies the Western Powers would be unable to buy off a section of their working class, thus hastening the workers' revolution.

However, experience has not lived up to these expectations, and what emerged in the new states was not socialism, but the rule of emergent local capitalist elites, who, like their colonial predecessors, lived off the labour of the local population. Rival groups competing for power have led, in some cases, to civil war. Although the new local ruling classes did not employ the racist ideology of the European colonialists, they did, however, exploit the ethnic divisions within their own populations. And far from cutting into their 'super profits', Western states found, in many cases, that they could do business with the new regimes.

A case in point is Zimbabwe. After Robert Mugabe achieved power in 1980, he dropped any pretence of being a 'Marxist' and adopted openly capitalist measures, designed to attract foreign investment. Believing that he was a safe pair of hands, Western Powers poured in financial aid. Under his rule, a new local capitalist elite emerged who bought large mansions, expensive cars and sent their children to private schools. As for the majority working population, life was of grinding poverty and unemployment. Unrest in Matabeleland led to thousands, mainly from the minority Ndebele population, being killed in a state crackdown. As the Zimbabwean economy deteriorated and the living standards of the majority fell, Robert Mugabe's rule became more autocratic and corrupt. In the 2000s, he gave support to seizures of white owned land by armed groups, which were given over mainly to Mugabe's cronies. When he was forced to resign as President in the aftermath of a military takeover, working class Zimbabweans took to the streets and danced and cheered.   

This is not to argue that Africans are unable to govern themselves and were better off under European colonial rule. The new African states, in the absence of a large socialist movement, could only develop capitalism and in the context of the undeveloped state that African economies were left in the wake of colonialism and slavery, and having to compete in a world capitalist market dominated by the western powers, would likely to be insecure, authoritarian and corrupt. For African workers to achieve real freedom, they will need to unite with workers in other countries to fight for Socialism. 

The Radio War (1949)

From the July 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, as the Communists are so fond of telling us, the Russian system is so wonderful and so enthusiastically supported by the Russian workers, why does the Soviet government go to such fantastic lengths to prevent them hearing the slightest piece of news of the outside world that has not already been carefully vetted beforehand? Why all these efforts to keep the Russian workers in a mental vacuum? At the last elections for the Supreme Soviet, 99 per cent. of the electorate were said to have voted for the Government candidates, yet so uncertain are the Russian ruling clique of their supporters that they cannot even run the risk of a few of them hearing any other propaganda than the propaganda they chose to put out themselves. Why this reluctance? Why this anxiety and fear? Fear it must be, for the lengths to which the Russian government is prepared to go are almost incredible.

As is well known a part of the Russians' own propaganda technique has been to use radio to the utmost, and they have turned the whole business of wireless propaganda into a fine art. Day and night, hundreds of broadcasts in dozens of languages go out over the short waves from Moscow, directed to all parts of the world. In retaliation, the British and American governments have recently taken to playing the Russians at their own game and have been putting out a stream of their own brand of propaganda in the reverse direction of Moscow. Evidently convinced that the Russian workers may not be able to stand up to this flow of words from the other side of the “ Iron Curtain,” the Russian come-back has been to resort to “ jamming.”

The number of Russians able to hear these broadcasts cannot be very large, yet so afraid is the Kremlin of even this small trickle that it has increased jamming to such an extent that the “Voice of America” and the B.B.C. can pierce the interference only in spots (Manchester Guardian, 9/6/49.) To ensure that hardly one small word can get through, the same paper says that the Russians have tripled the number of jamming transmitters to no less than 205. Such a terrific concentration of transmitters has been achieved only at the expense of Moscow’s own domestic radio programmes and foreign broadcasts, but the Russians seem quite prepared to go even to these lengths to blot out the aerial intruders.

Nor is this the end of the story. In an attempt to beat the blockade, British and American technicians tried the dodge of tuning their transmissions close to the remaining Russian domestic stations, but the dodge failed. So anxious is the Soviet government to protect its subjects from contamination that it is quite prepared to jam its own broadcasts!

What the result of this wireless warfare will be, we do not know. What it does provide is yet one more example of the hollowness of the claim that Russia is a contented workers’ paradise. If it were all the Russian ruling clique and their Communist apologists make it out to be, one thing is certain and that is that the Russian workers would be proof against any amount of Western capitalist propaganda. That they go to such fantastic lengths to keep the Russian workers in mental straitjackets shows up the claim for what it really is, a monstrous fabrication sedulously fostered by the Russian Government to further its own political and economic ends, and the parrot-cry of Communists, fellow-travellers and other workers politically ignorant enough to be taken in by it.

We pose the question again, .and any supporter of Russia is at perfect liberty to take up the challenge. Why is it necessary for a government with (so we are told) 99 per cent. of the electorate behind it, to take these, and other fantastic measures to prevent a little capitalist propaganda from reaching the ears of its subjects? Is it because the workers’ conditions are not all that they are cracked up to be? Or that the Russian government has not the overwhelming support it says it has, and the election results were faked? Or what is it?

These columns are open to any supporter of the Russian system to take up the challenge.

Stan Hampson

Death of a Clown (1949)

From the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

Coming out of the factory I bought a “mid-day” to look at the runners. A bob each-way on a decent priced winner would pay for a night in town.

“Seen the stop press?” the paper boy asked as he took my coin. I glanced down.

“Early this morning Peter Waring, the comedian who was yesterday sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, was found hanged in his cell.”

I hadn’t read much of the case. Every day in courtrooms up and down the country men, women and adolescents are being sentenced to so many weeks, months or years imprisonment for enjoying property to which they have no legal right. Borstal institutions are full of boys who wanted bicycles or girls who wanted gay new dresses for the summer; Holloway is full of women who were light-fingered in the chain stores; the Scrubs and the Pen are full of men who were fools enough to believe that merely because they produce they have a right to the product.

But Waring was a celebrity. By nature of his work he was in the public eye and hence his tragedy had commercial value as news. The Sunday papers revelled in it. Each one probed into his past, examined every angle; each one attempting to outdo its rival in hounding the victim even beyond the grave. But the facts they produced examined carefully provide a useful object lesson in the effects of a system of exploitation upon the exploited.

He was born in Camberwell in 1917. D’you know Camberwell? An ugly place just like Stepney or Salford, Bermondsey or Birmingham, East Ham or Everton, or any other place where workers are hounded together to live, breed, and die.

Silly fellow—he objected to it, and vainly sought escape across the seas. At the age of sixteen he stowed away in the funnel of a liner and was badly burnt for his trouble. The second attempt won him twenty-eight days in jail.

Working as a footman he absconded with £100 belonging to Lord Sysonby—three years in Borstal. 1939, guilty of fraud—six months—again in 1941. And then came his big chance! His talent as a comic made him a top of the bill star.

Yet still the ugliness of his past haunted him. Was he not a child of the threadbare thirties? Still he strove for the antithesis of his youth. He wanted to enjoy the luxuries he had seen as a servant. In 1948 he was bankrupt.

Finally he was charged with obtaining money under false pretences, When sentenced he wept, “I am not a criminal. I have been foolish but—.”

What does it matter? So many workers end the same way. Seeing the good things of life always in sight, never in reach, they conduct a one-man struggle to make them their own. Always Nemesis, in the form of the state overtakes them and back they are pitched.

For this is a system of society based upon private property and all the powers spiritual and temporal are bound up in its protection. No one man can permanently assail its defences. But many men and women—the useful but propertyless section upon whose energies it depends, can when they are ready destroy it for ever.

You who can study the intricacies of racehorse breeding, forms and timing; you who are wily enough to make a few bob here and there at the expense of your masters; you who go to your graves still hoping for something to turn up; give a few moments’ thought to the world in which you live. Understand the comparatively simple workings of capitalism and the need for Socialism. Equipped with that knowledge nothing can stand in your way.

Ronald

It's Laughable (1949)

From the September 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"All you Socialist fellows are alike. You all lack a sense of humour.”

This remark is thrown at Socialists time and time again, so let us examine the question of a sense of humour.

Psychologists and doctors tell us that laughter is a safety valve. Nature’s way of protecting our mental set-up from shock. We laugh at the fat man who slips on a banana skin because, were we to regard the accident coolly and thoughtfully we should no doubt suffer some of the mental anguish if not the physical pain of his fall.

But the realm of humour is greater than this. Take stock of the jokes of comedians who help to make our life more bearable in an almost unbearable servitude. They help us to laugh at ourselves. The more ridiculous a joke makes us look, the more we laugh—the tramp with a hole in the seat of his pants—parasitic mothers-in-law—the worker asking the boss for a rise —the raw recruit in the army and all these “funny" stories in which human beings have failed to reconcile their sex-lives with the economics and twisted morals of this social system.

The trouble with a Socialist, we are told repeatedly, is that he will take everything so damned seriously. For some inexplicable reason, some mental quirk, he finds it difficult and a little stupid to laugh at poverty, squalor and sexual maladjustment. The poker-faced individual will keep harping on economics. He spoils every joke by pointing out the unpleasant truth in it. Laughter was given to protect us from shock and the Socialist will keep showing up the shocking things that we escape seeing through humour. A regular boor and a bore is the Socialist. Even the antics of Labour politicians hardly raise a smile on his face and they are current topics of radio humour these days. Wisecracks on pre-fab houses start him off about “ ’omes fit for ’eroes to live in,” and industrial slums and the speed of the housing programme. They seem to have hit the mark, these critics. There does seem to be a lack of humour somewhere. Perhaps the reason could lie in the fact that these things are not so funny after all. Perhaps if all the canned humour ceased on the radio and in comic strips; perhaps if people in general turned a little less to humour for escape; perhaps when life gets unbearable even beyond a joke, people might come to see these things as needing a remedy. But then, they might also become so shocked and disgusted with their lot that they would throw the whole social system overboard and institute Socialism.

And that would never do. That would be no joke. Or would it?

L. C.

The Old Order Reigneth Not (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has often been asked by members of the audience at meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, how will the new social order known as Socialism be established? The best answer to that question, would be for the questioner and indeed the whole audience, to go with the speaker, inside the British Parliament and to visualize this scene.

The benches are packed. Packed with Socialist delegates. Not M.P’s as hitherto known. It is a very fateful session. For what purpose have these Socialist delegates been sent there? Only for one single purpose. To put into effect one single decree or law which will end for ever and ever, the present order of society known as Capitalism. At the same time, throughout the best part of the world, in such Parliaments at Paris, Madrid, Rome, Cairo, Nanking, the Congress at Washington and even Moscow, similar and eventful sessions are taking place. One single decree or law is being deliberated upon and about to be put to the vote and which can only have one result. This decree may suitably be worded thus:

 “It is hereby decreed, that what is now known as the private ownership of the land and means of wealth, production and distribution is hereby abolished, now and for ever more.
  “In substitution thereof, there shall be instituted as what shall be known as the common ownership of the aforesaid land and means of wealth production and distribution.
 "Furthermore it is hereby decreed that the aforesaid land and means of wealth production and distribution shall remain under Common Ownership and shall be democratically controlled by and on behalf of the whole of the community, regardless of their colour or sex.”

The significance of the above decree will be readily understood by all and sundry. The result of the voting can only end in its passing. When this is done, then that is the end of Capitalist society. A new social order has now been born, known as Socialism. Prior to this fateful session a meeting of the Socialist electorate in the different townships, villages, communes, etc., has been held. And the Socialist delegates have been instructed something like this: —

  “When this decree comes up for vote in Parliament, or National Assembly, or Congress, etc., ye are hereby instructed to vote for this decree and nothing else. For so doing this is our will and pleasure.”

It refutes the argument that Socialism can be established by a minority group against the will and understanding of the electorate. Now the Socialist electorate know what they are doing. They have demanded this great social change and have said so in no uncertain voice. Thus will Socialism be established.

Nat Posner

Cuba: No ‘New Man’ (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seen in its most favourable light (and not just as a theory of political dictatorship that it is), Leninism can be seen as the view that the way to socialism is for a minority of socialists to seize power at the head of a discontented but non-socialist working class and then using this power to educate this majority into becoming socialists.

This accepts that socialism is a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society based on common ownership and with voluntary work and free access to goods and services, and also that such a society can only function with majority support and participation. (Leninists call it ‘communism’, confusingly reserving the word ‘socialism’ to describe the state-capitalist regimes they establish when they come to power.)

This view is based on the premise that, due to capitalist control of the idea-forming apparatus, a majority can never come to be socialists while capitalist rule lasts; only a minority can and therefore it is their duty to seize power to liberate the majority. Lenin did not invent this view; he merely followed a tradition that went back to Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ in the French Revolution.

One Leninist who took this seriously was Che Guevara who was a minister in the Cuban government in the early 1960s. He liked to quote from a review Lenin wrote in January 1923 of a chronicle of the Russian Revolution written by the non-Bolshevik Russian revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov:

'You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible? ' (MIA Link.)

Answer: in everything that Karl Marx wrote.

Guevara wanted Cuba to ‘start moving towards socialism’ straightaway by, among other things, creating ‘the new man’. This meant the 'revolutionary vanguard', as the government, educating people into becoming and behaving like socialists, in particular getting them to participate in the running and work of society on a voluntary basis because they realised this had to be done in the common interest. Hence he favoured ‘moral incentives’ over ‘material incentives’.

In Socialism and Man in Cuba Guevara said that creating 'the new man' had to involve moving away from commodity production (production for sale):

'The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist society. So long as it exists its effects will make themselves felt in the organization of production and, consequently, in consciousness.' (MIA Link). 

Castro took the same view, declaring in an interview with a French magazine in 1967:

‘I am against material incentives because I regard them as incompatible with socialism . . .  What we want is to demystify money, not rehabilitate it. We even intend to abolish it completely’ (Nouvel Observateur, 17 September 1967).

Quite apart from considerations of how voluntary for some workers’ ‘voluntary work’ really was, this was never going to succeed because people in Cuba were not living in socialist conditions. Socialism presupposes that plenty for all is being produced. People can’t be expected to behave in a socialist way in conditions of continuing scarcity, such as existed in Cuba. Marx and Engels pointed this out in a passage in The German Ideology which is the perfect answer to Lenin’s question (though Lenin was not aware of it since this work wasn’t published until 1932). Discussing ‘the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce’ when there is private property, they wrote:

'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, ie. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced .'

Moral exhortations cannot overcome the economic reality of material scarcity. Scarcity means that people are obliged to try to get as much money as they can, not for its own sake but to get access to what they need to live. In other words, ‘material incentives’ will prevail.

There was a rather less appealing side to the attempt to create ‘the new man’ as it also involved the 'revolutionary vanguard' stopping people hearing further the capitalist-individualist ideas that had been inculcated in them before the revolution. In practice this meant suppressing these ideas and the parties and individuals (imprisoning some) deemed to be advocating them, including some of the original Cuban revolutionaries who thought that the revolution’s aim was political democracy rather than socialism (actually, this had been Castro’s view at the time too).

Castro and Guevara were of course well aware that socialism (or communism as they called it) was not possible in isolation on the island of Cuba, but they did believe that progress towards it could be made. Fifty years later, however, there is still production for sale, money still exists, and ‘material incentives’ prevail.

The fact is that Lenin could not have been more wrong in imagining that progress towards socialism could be made where its essential prerequisites did not exist, neither objective (a sufficient development of productive capacity) nor subjective (a working class with a sufficient degree of culture wanting and understanding socialism). All a socialist minority that seized power in the absence of these conditions could do would be to preside over the further development of capitalism in one form or another; which, granting that Castro and Guevara did want socialism, was what happened in Cuba. State capitalism was supposed to be a step on the way to socialism but that's where it stopped.

Adam Buick