Gruesome politics of Orange & Green (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are the killings, the bombings, the hunger strikes, the stone-throwing in Northern Ireland really quite as pointless as they seem on the surface? The short answer is, yes, they really are. They are completely pointless, both from the point of view of the wage and salary earning majority and also, nowadays, from that of the capitalist minority too.

Of course sectarian violence, which has been a recurring feature of Belfast life since early in the 19th century, was always pointless for the working class, but in the past it did make some sort of sense from the capitalist viewpoint in that it represented an expression of rival capitalist interests. But this is no longer the case.

What we are witnessing in Northern Ireland is a minority of workers fighting their masters’ battles of yesteryear, long after their masters have settled the differences which once divided them. We say a minority because the vast majority of workers in Northern Ireland, whatever their religious background, only want to be left alone to earn their living and live their lives under the sort of “normal” capitalist conditions as exist in Britain and the South of Ireland, free from the violence of both terrorists and so-called security forces.

A historical detour
At one time the capitalist class in Ireland was so divided that its two sections resorted to sectarianism in order to protect and further their divergent interests. The roots of the present situation go back, not to the Norman barons’ invasion of Ireland in 1169 nor to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, but to the uneven development of capitalism in Ireland in the 19th century.

In the North, in and around Belfast, industrial capitalism developed just as it did on the other side of the Irish Sea in Lancashire and on Clydeside. The industrial capitalists of Northern Ireland in textiles, shipbuilding and related engineering industries-were in fact an integral part of the industrial capitalist class of the British Isles. The South, on the other hand, remained overwhelmingly agricultural. The interests of its infant capitalist class were different from those of the industrial capitalists in the rest of the British Isles: they wanted the erection of tariff walls behind which they could develop, protected from the competition of English capitalists. Their interests were expressed by the politicians of the Home Rule, or Irish nationalist, party.

When in 1885 the leader of this party, Parnell, perfectly expressing the interests of the Southern Irish capitalists, demanded that a Home Rule parliament should have the power to impose tariffs, alarm bells began to sound in Northern Ireland, especially as the nationalists were playing the Catholic card (although Parnell himself was a protestant). This was a shrewd move on their part since, the Catholics being in a majority in Ireland, it was an easy way of ensuring majority support for their programme. Election results from this period confirmed the effectiveness of this tactic.

Faced with the prospect of being cut off from the rest of Britain, and its overseas markets and sources of raw material, behind the tariffs walls of a mainly agricultural Ireland governed by obscurantist and incompetent nationalist politicians, the Belfast and district industrial capitalists decided in their turn to play the Orange card: to stir up and play on Protestant fears of “Rome Rule”. This worked too, so that from the 1880s onward the workers and small farmers of Ireland were lined up, according to their religious background, behind one or other of the two rival sections of the capitalist class in Ireland; the Protestants behind the big capitalists of the industrial North-East and the Catholics behind the fledgling capitalists of the South.

It is from this period that dates the mythology and rhetoric which still has some sway over sections of the working class in Northern Ireland. The Unionists beat the Lamberg drum and shouted “No Surrender”, “Not An Inch”, “Remember 1690”, “No Popery", “Home Rule is Rome Rule" and other such crudities. The Nationalists rewrote Irish history to make it appear as a 700-year long struggle (800-year long now!) of the “Irish Nation” to free itself from English domination. And they created an artificial pseudo-Gaelic culture—with harps, “Gaelic” games, Gaelicized names and other such affectations—to replace the real one which had long since died out on the East coast of Ireland where the bulk of the population lived.

Enter the Republicans

The only addition to this mythology since this period, and it is an important one, of course, is Republicanism. The Irish nationalist politicians were not republicans: they only wanted autonomy within the British Empire, a Home Rule parliament with certain economic powers. There was, however, a small minority, mainly “intellectuals” and Irish emigrants in America, who wanted to establish an independent Irish Republic by force of arms if necessary. The Irish Republican Brotherhood had been formed in 1865 but, apart from the Fenian “rising” in 1867 and the subsequent bombing campaign to try to secure the release of the Fenian prisoners, did little until Easter 1916. Then they staged what, if human lives had not been sacrificed, could only be described as a comic-opera rising: a relative handful of republican fanatics tried to take on the might of the British imperialist state in the middle of a war! Needless to say. they were easily crushed, and ruthlessly—the leaders, including the wounded James Connolly, propped up on a chair, were shot. The severity of the repression earned the republican cause considerable sympathy and support and after the end of the First World War the republicans, re-organised as the Irish Republican Army, waged what in Irish history books is called “the war of independence” against the British state and its army.

This conflict ended in 1921 with a treaty which established a more or less independent Irish state, but at the same time excluded from it six counties in the North-East of Ireland which remained attached to the United Kingdom. This arrangement was not to the liking of the IRA which then turned its arms against the pro-treaty elements who formed the first government of the so-called Irish Free State and has been fighting on and off against all governments in Ireland, North and South, ever since. This gave rise to yet another myth—the need to liberate the “Six Counties" from British rule and re-unite them with the rest of Ireland.

The Partition of Ireland

The 1921 Partition of Ireland was, in the political circumstances, the most practical solution from a capitalist point of view, and it suited both sections of the capitalist class in Ireland. The Belfast capitalists remained united with the rest of the British capitalist class, while the Southern capitalists got their own state with which to protect and further their interests. When the republican party (whose absurd name, drawn from 19th century Irish mythology, Fianna Fail, comes out better in English: Soldiers of Destiny!) came to power in 1932 under De Valera, tariff barriers were put up against British goods and an attempt was made to develop a native Irish industry behind them. In Northern Ireland, the “statelet” that was established there was given a virtual free hand by successive Westminster governments. Labour as well as Conservative, to run its internal affairs as it wanted. The term “statelet” is justified as the Stormont government was not simply an administrative unit of central government like the the local authorities in the rest of Britain. It had at its disposal armed force: the notorious B Specials. These were little more than an officially-recognised Protestant militia and were used by the Stormont government to intimidate the one-third Catholic minority who, ever since 1921 and still today, have been “loyal” to the Irish State south of the Border rather than to the British state.

Despite the fact that any system of election would have given the Unionist party victory, (there is a two-thirds Protestant majority in Northern Ireland) local election boundaries were gerry-mandered to keep Catholic Nationalist representation to a minimum. When in 1948 one-man, one-vote was introduced into local government elections in Britain, this was not applied in Northern Ireland as it would have enfranchised more Nationalist than Unionist voters. An unofficial, but nevertheless effective, system of “job reservation" for Protestants grew up, especially in public employment but also in some industries.

By the end of the 1950s it was clear that the attempt by the successive Fianna Fail governments in the South to develop Irish industry behind protective tariff walls was not going to succeed. The government decided to recognise this and in 1965 signed the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement which, as its name suggests, provided for tariff barriers between Ireland and Britain to be lowered and eventually abolished. In addition, Ireland was associated with Britain’s various unsuccessful attempts to join the Common Market in the 1960s and went in when Britain was admitted in 1973.

In other words, by the 1960s the Border had ceased to have any economic significance. The conflict between the two sections of the capitalist class in Ireland, which had arisen out of the uneven development of capitalism there, had been settled. Sectarianism no longer served any capitalist interest and could be and was abandoned. However those who had stirred it up to defend their economic interests found that it was not something that could be turned off at will. Too many people had come to accept the poison they had been fed on. All the same, with the economic basis for sectarianism gone, it could have been expected to die out slowly and in fact at the beginning of the 1960s this was beginning to happen. The IRA campaign launched in 1956—which was nothing compared with what’s happening today was ignominiously abandoned in 1962. Flags on official buildings in Belfast even flew at half-mast on the death of the Pope in 1963.

Illustration by George Meddemmen

Capitalism breeds divisions 

Why, then, did sectarianism not gradually disappear? When in the middle of the 1960s the Civil Rights movement was launched in Northern Ireland, the Unionist government in Stormont could have granted all its demands basically for the dismantling of the undemocratic features of the Northern Irish statelet since even the purest democratic system would still have left them in power, as subsequent events have proved. All the demands of the Civil Rights movement have now been granted and yet still, as the recent district council elections show, the Unionists can rely on winning.

The Unionist government, however, chose to react to the Civil Rights movement as if it were a Republican plot and unleashed the B-Specials. The result was predictable: the revival of the IRA as an armed protection against the club-wielding, trigger-happy official state thugs. The IRA was able to establish a basis from which to develop as a Catholic sectarian murder gang. But the leaders of the Civil Rights movement are not entirely free from blame for the worsening of the situation. In their political naivety—many of them were influenced by Trotskyite ideas that thrive in student circles they decided to supplement the basic demands for “civil rights" by social reform demands on which they hoped to unite Catholic and Protestant workers.

Their solution to the traditional Protestant/Catholic rivalry for houses and jobs in Northern Ireland was the apparently obvious and simple one of building new houses and opening new factories. But that is not the way capitalism works. Houses and jobs are limited under capitalism because it is a system of production for profit and not a system of production for use. Thus to talk, as Bernadette Devlin and the rest of them did, of establishing “equal opportunity” in housing and jobs when one group had come to acquire some priority in these fields as against another was bound to be interpreted by the first group as an attempt to take away jobs from them. The Protestants regarded this as an attack on their “rights” and “privileges” and responded by abandoning the Unionist wets (O'Neill, Chichester-Clark, Faulkner) and rallying round the more sectarian Protestant groups. Hence the rise of Paisley. Thus did the admittedly well-meaning attempt of the Civil Rights movement to overcome sectarianism have the opposite effect.

Crimes against the working class 

Thus, apart from the political bungling, the situation in Northern Ireland, even though taking an irrational form, still does have an economic basis. For historical reasons, the frustrations and indignities suffered by the workers in the Catholic ghettoes of Belfast and Derry and along the border areas of Northern Ireland—where percentage unemployment has long been well into double-figures—have expressed themselves as a support for the imaginary solution of a united 32-county Ireland. A number of unemployed young men and women from these areas, given the strength of republican and Catholic nationalist mythology in their communities, have been prepared to go so far as to take up arms to achieve this irrelevant objective. They have been prepared not only to shoot and kill other young men from a similar background who joined the British Army to escape from unemployment, but also an unforgiveable crime against the working class—to place bombs in pubs and shops, knowing full well that the victims would be ordinary working-class men and women. We hasten to add that the private murder gangs on the other side of the sectarian divide—the UVF and the like have been equally guilty of such atrocities.

This is one of the reasons socialists do not support the IRA but denounce it as an anti-working class, sectarian murder gang. The other reason is that the “solution” they propose—a united Ireland—is no solution at all. Apart from the violent methods they use, they share the illusion of other nationalists in the British Isles that the problems facing workers of Catholic background in Northern Ireland or workers in Wales or in Scotland are caused by some faulty political arrangement: rule from London rather than from Edinburgh, Cardiff or Dublin. In actual fact, however, these problems have an economic cause: the capitalist system of class ownership of the means of production and distribution. As long as capitalism continues to exist these problems will remain, however the political superstructure is re-arranged and no matter how radical or violent the rearrangement. The experience of the South of Ireland since independence in 1921 is proof enough of this.

Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O'Hara . . . died, in the light of cold logic, for nothing more than to have the pillar-boxes in Northern Ireland painted green. While other young men, in the so-called “security” forces, are dying to ensure that these same pillar-boxes stay painted red. Nothing more, nothing less in the end.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: How much are you worth? (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat member of the US House of Representatives who calls herself a socialist, tweeted in February:

 ‘Workers are often paid for less than the value they create.’

The American financial magazine, Business Insider, picked this up, commenting ‘this is essentially a restatement of Karl Marx’s “Labour Theory of Value”’. But was it?

Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t claim to be a Marxist – claiming to be a socialist is shocking enough for mainstream America – but her tweet is in the language of Marxian economics: workers create value and are paid less than the value they create. However, a further tweet suggested that she has a different theory of worker exploitation:

 ‘In fact, wages are so low today compared to actual worker productivity that they are no longer the reflection of worker value as they used to be. Productivity has grown has grown 62x more than wages.’

Since productivity is output per worker measured in money, ‘output’ can be very crudely – very crudely – interpreted as ‘value’, so what she is saying is that value created has increased faster than the value of what workers have been paid as wages.

Her beef is not that workers are paid less than the value of what they produce, but that they are not being paid enough of this value. On this theory, workers exploitation ‘in the economic sense’ is, as Paul Johnson put it in the Times (18 March), ‘being paid less than their productivity would warrant’. This was not Marx’s theory. He regarded all workers who produced value (and, for him, not all workers did) as being exploited in the sense that they always created a greater value than they were paid.

In its attempt to explain Marx’s theory, the Business Insider wrote:

  ‘Workers in a shoe factory are paid far less than the value they create. They have to be. If 100% of the money from shoe sales were paid directly to the workers then the factory would go out of business … But that raises a contradiction. If all workers are paid less than the value they create, then there will never be enough workers to buy the things they make.’

This is obviously true, but the article went on to misinterpret Marx:

  ‘Marx thought capitalism was inherently unstable precisely because workers are not paid the full value of their labour, and precisely because it is impossible for capitalists to pay them the full value without going bankrupt. It’s one of the internal contradictions that capitalism cannot resolve.’

There is a whole school of economics which argues this. But not Marx. The obvious flaw in this ‘underconsumption’ argument is that the part of the newly created value that the workers can’t buy back can be bought by the capitalists out of the ‘surplus value’ they receive. Not so much to buy shoes and other consumer goods but producer goods like factories, machines, parts, materials and power. However, they will only re-invest profits in expanding production if they judge there is a prospect of making further profits by doing so. It is this that makes capitalism ‘inherently instable’ as this condition is regularly not met, meaning that capitalism continuously lurches from boom to slump and back again.

A Hundred Years Ago: The Winnipeg General Strike (2019)

From the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Winnipeg Strike will go down in history as a magnificent example of working-class solidarity and courage’ (Bill Pritchard).

In February 1919, Seattle workers engaged in the general strike tactic, with 30,000 workers in 130 unions walking out for 5 days in sympathy with 38,000 shipyard workers. The city’s mayor, Ole Hanson, described the strike as an ‘attempted revolution’. A few months after, on 15 May, the Winnipeg general strike took place. It ended on 26 June. As in Seattle, the authorities declared that the Winnipeg general strike the first stage of a revolutionary conspiracy. For six weeks Winnipeg was the scene of a dramatic general strike when, having to endure unemployment, high prices and poor working conditions, workers from both the private and public sectors joined forces. The New York Times headline was ‘Bolshevism invades Canada’. The strikers, however, as in Seattle, sought only the right to collective bargaining and a wage increase. The evidence is overwhelming that the intent was not political revolution, and the great majority of Canadian workers, including most workers in Winnipeg, were not socialists. For most men and women, the Winnipeg General Strike arose from economic inequality that had become too impossible to ignore. Hugh Amos Robson wrote in his 1919 Royal Commission report on the causes of the strike. ‘There has been… an increasing display of carefree, idle luxury and extravagance on one hand, while on the other is intensified deprivation.’

1919 Strike Strike Leader Roger Bray in Victoria Park.

Not a revolution

The immediate reasons for the building trades and metal workers going on strike were for better wages and working conditions, for recognition of their unions and for the principle of collective bargaining. What took place in the city was a historic labour protest and one of the biggest social resistance movements Canada has ever seen. On 1 May, after months of negotiations, building workers went on strike. On 2 May, metalworkers went on strike when the employers refused to negotiate with the union, refusing even to recognise the Metal Trades Council as a legitimate union. On 6 May both unions met with leaders of the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council who agreed to poll its other member unions on the idea of forcing the issues with a general strike. A week later, the final tally was 8,667 for and 645 against. On 15 May workers all over the city walked off their jobs. The women who worked the city’s telephones walked off their shift; nobody came to replace them. Within hours, almost 30,000 workers had joined the strike. It was almost the entire workforce of the city. Delegates elected from each of the unions formed a Central Strike Committee to coordinate on behalf of the workers so as to make sure essential services still operated in the city, such as the initiative to issue licences in order to authorise milk and bread delivery. The real lesson learned was how the workers conducted themselves during the strike. The strike demonstrated that the workers were fully capable of organising the community, and performing the jobs done for the smooth running of society.

But there were elements within the Winnipeg working class that were not sympathetic to the strike. De-mobbed servicemen returned to find many jobs filled by immigrant workers and some expressed a hostility against the presence of these people. Most veterans decided to support the strike, notably the Great War Veterans Association. On 1 June 10,000 veterans marched in solidarity with the strike and they regularly held open-air meetings. However, others formed the Loyalists Veterans’ Association encouraged by the establishment of the Manitoba’s Alien Investigation Board that allowed for immediate deportation of any immigrant deemed to be disloyal or seditious, legislation directly targeted at the immigrant participants in the strike.

There are those who claim that the Winnipeg strike was a revolution that failed as the press and authorities alleged at the time. Yet it was a strike by trade unions for very modest demands who fully understood that any attempt at insurrection would have resulted in failure and bloodshed. Socialism was not on the agenda. No bank closed its doors, and commerce and business carried on practically as normal. The workers were orderly and peaceful, avoiding any excuse which would provoke military force. Essential services were maintained. But the reaction from the employers, city council and the federal government was extreme with the federal government arming a bosses’ militia after the police voiced support for the strikers. The Citizens Committee of 1000, made up of vigilantes of businessmen and politicians, was organised to oppose the strike. It ignored the strikers’ demands and with the assistance of local press accused the strikers of ‘Bolshevism,’ of being ‘enemy aliens’ and of undermining ‘British values’. As the Citizens’ Committee was made up of members of the city’s elite, its motivations for breaking the strike aren’t difficult to see: the strike posed a threat to their businesses, and by defeating the strikers, they would continue to make their profits.

The authorities’ reaction

Federal Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen and Labour Minister Gideon Robertson met with the Citizens Committee which described the situation as a revolution and not a strike, convincing the Federal government that Winnipeg was in a state of rebellion. The ministers refused to meet or negotiate with the Strike Committee. Federal government employees, provincial government employees, and municipal workers were ordered back to work. An amendment to the Immigration Act was rushed through Parliament to allow the deportation of foreign-born strikers and the definition of sedition in the Criminal Code was expanded. The city council outlawed the regular demonstration marches.

Winnipeg’s city police had formed their own union in July 1918 and they officially joined the strike but were advised by the Strike Committee to keep reporting for duty to avoid the city from being placed under martial law. On 19 May Mayor Charles Gray instructed the policemen to sign a pledge not to participate in a sympathy strike. On 30 May the Winnipeg police refused to sign a no-strike agreement. They were all sacked bar 23. An 1,800-man force of Special Constables was hired and deputised to suppress the strike, many of them from the Loyalist Veterans’ Association who were now essentially strike-breaking goons.

At the time of the strike, daily newspapers — the Winnipeg Telegram, the Winnipeg Tribune, and the Manitoba Free Press — were the primary sources of information for the citizens of Winnipeg. The newspapers endeavoured to plant the image in the minds of the general public that the strikers were Bolshevik revolutionaries. The typographers at all three papers walked off the job on 17 May, but by 3 June the newspapers restored their regular distribution and redoubled their condemnation of the strike, misrepresenting the strikers and promoting the idea that the strikers intended to overthrow the government. The articles against the strikers became more strident in a campaign aimed at convincing the public and the world that Winnipeg was about to be taken over by insurrectionists. The Western Labour News was distributed by the Strike Committee to counter the propaganda.

The strike activists were to learn that there would be consequences from their actions. Eight involved in the strike were arrested on 18 July and subsequently brought to trial. A.A. Heaps, Reverend William Ivens, R.E. Bray, George Armstrong, John Queen, R.J. Johns and W.A. Pritchard were jointly charged on six counts of seditious conspiracy.

Bloody Saturday took place on 21 June. 25,000 workers assembled downtown for a planned march. Winnipeg Mayor Charles Gray read the riot act. When the ‘forbidden’ rally began Mayor Gray had at his disposal nearly 2,000 special constables, men from the Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP), and General Ketchen’s 800-strong militia along with its armoured car with three machine guns. RNWMP rode into the crowd of strikers, beating them with clubs, and then the Specials followed up, beating protesters with baseball bats and cudgels while the army patrolled the streets. By the time Bloody Saturday was over, one man – Mike Sokolowski – was shot dead and another protestor dying a few days later from his wounds. Many were injured and many arrested. Authorities also shut down the striker’s paper and arrested the editors for commentating on the events of Bloody Saturday.

On 26 June, the strike was called off.

General Strikes as union tactic

The tactic of a general strike keeps returning so we should not be surprised that the Winnipeg Strike will receive the attention of many on the Left who think that a general strike can bring on the social revolution and the fall of the whole capitalist system. The mirage that the general strike is the way to achieve socialism must be rejected. It is impossible for the working class to take and hold industry as long as the state is in the hands of the capitalist class. Time after time we have seen general strikes defeated by the forces at the disposal of the ruling class through their control of the machinery of government. Sometimes brutal force has been used, sometimes concessions are made, and sometimes, workers are starved into submission. As James Connolly said, ‘a full wallet wins out against an empty belly.’

An ill-prepared or poorly supported general strike usually is a huge self-inflicted defeat for the working class. The groundwork for one needs to be laid in every workplace and every community to ensure that no one is under any illusions that it will be an easy fight against an alliance of employers and the government. When we speak of the general strike, we are not concerned with the all-out strike of a single trade union but of all workers. It is no longer an expression of the trade union movement but has become a class movement. For the general strike to have a chance of success, workers should be convinced of the importance of the goal. It must be shown that the purpose is legitimate and victory a realisable prospect. The general strike cannot be camouflage for revolution. The general strike, although powerless in itself as a revolutionary strategy, remains an important tool for the working class. In war, including the class war, there are only two options: fight to win, or yield. Both options produce casualties. There is no safe option for workers under attack in the class war, no place to hide in the hope of protecting one’s individual job, dignity and life. We can be certain that capital will continue to assault labour and workers will continue to defend their rights. Whether workers prevail will depend on the extent to which they fight as a class, using their greatest power – the power to stop production. Workers must use their power as a class and fight as a class. We must remember what it takes to win – fighting as a class. The general strike is a method to inflict damage upon our class enemy to protect ourselves rather than the means of our emancipation. Unions are bodies for economic defence, not political struggle. Workers join unions and go on strike to put more bread on the table. Only an independent political organisation of workers – a world socialist party – can promote the interests of the working class as a whole.

Bill Pritchard made a solidarity speech to Vancouver workers that their comrades in Winnipeg were in the fight, and it was now a question of standing by them and, if necessary, going down with them — or, later, going down by themselves. His advice was: ‘If you are going to drown — drown splashing!’ The working class must stand united, however ill-prepared their forces and however badly chosen the field.

ALJO

Party News: Lestor (1953)

Obituary from the March-April 1953 issue of The Western Socialist

Word came a few days ago that our old comrade, Charlie Lestor, died in London in mid December. He was 80 years old.

Since my first contact with socialist teaching, back in Vancouver in 1906, the Party in Canada has produced many extraordinary characters. Lestor was one of these and in some respects it is doubtful if his remarkable capacity for outdoor propaganda was ever excelled or even equalled. In Western Canada, in the earlier years of the century, he did trojan work in the formation of Socialist Party locals, and the theoretical knowledge that spread from these centers influenced workers throughout the continent.

The years Lestor spent in Vancouver are still remembered. There is a spot close to the heart of the city where the Party during these years held meetings regularly. Lestor was so frequently the speaker at these meetings that the place became known as Lestor's Corner. He not infrequently kept meetings going eight hours at a time, returning again and again to the soap-box as the other speakers tired.

He was perhaps the first propagandist to carry the message of socialism to Alaska. He also carried with him a degree of recklessness and boisterousness that would be frowned upon today, allowing himself to become embroiled in the militant affairs of the Alaska Labor Union even to the extent of raising the red flag over the town hall of a town that had been taken over by striking miners. From Alaska to the prairies Lestor was known to miners, lumber workers, fishermen, dockers, farmers and town workers. Wherever there was a soap-box, there went Lestor.

In the late 1920’s he came to Winnipeg to edit the One Big Union Bulletin, the weekly journal of the One Big Union, and demonstrated at once that his talents were not limited to the lecture platform and soapbox. Under his guidance the OBU Bulletin became a labor union journal with a distinctly socialist slant, so much so that he was often asked (and not always in gentle terms) if he realised that the Bulletin was not an organ of the S. P. of C. Ever the work-horse, Lestor wrote editorials that often filled a page, news sheet size, gathered most of the news items that were sprinkled through the journal and wrote a weekly column (usually extending to several columns) that bore the heading. Lestor’s Corner. He also found time to engage in the preliminary work that led to the reorganization of the Party in the early 1930s.

Lestor gave up his position on the OBU Bulletin in 1933 or ’34 and went to England shortly after, becoming a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in London. He remained active in the SPGB until he no longer had strength to be active.

A. P.

Blogger's Note:

Obituary for Charles Lestor from the January 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard.

What is ‘millennial socialism’? (2019)

From the WSPUS website

Opinion polls suggest that the younger age groups in the United States – colloquially referred to as ‘millennials’¹– are much more open to socialist ideas than their elders. At least the taboo that used to surround the word ‘socialism’ is rapidly disappearing. The figures are quite striking. A poll conducted in April 2009 found that 33% of the 18–29 age group favored ‘socialism’ over ‘capitalism’ with slightly more (37%) still favoring ‘capitalism.’ By August 2018 a little over half (51%) of the new generation of 18–29 year-olds favored ‘socialism’ with 45% favoring ‘capitalism.’ An even more recent poll, conducted in January 2019, found that 51% of those aged 25-34 and 61% of the youngest cohort polled, aged 18-24 years, favored ‘socialism.’  

Three factors help explain this dramatic shift.

First, the millennials are the first generation no longer affected by the legacy of the Cold War. During the Cold War ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were associated with a fearsome external threat. Advocating them marked you out as a traitor. For today’s young Americans the Cold War is ancient history.²

Second, the millennials are the first generation to grow up with the internet. They are less likely than their elders to rely on the corporate media for news and its interpretation. The internet exposes them to a broader range of ideas, including socialist ones. 

For example, efforts by the corporate media to discredit and ridicule warnings about climate change have had considerable success. Thus the proportion of respondents in Gallup polls who agree that ‘the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated’ rose from 30% in 2006 to 33% in 2007, 35% in 2008, and 41% in 2009. However, this regressive shift was confined to people aged 30 years and over. The campaign to deny climate change did not affect the distribution of views in the 18–29 age group.   

Third, the millennials are the first young generation since the Great Depression of the 1930s who have no hope of maintaining, let alone improving on, their parents’ standard of living. Many are already laboring under a pile of student debt. They face a grim and uncertain future. 

A broader radicalization

The changing reaction to the word ‘socialism’ is part of a broader radicalization of public perceptions of American society. Polls show increasing proportions of respondents willing to acknowledge deep-seated injustice in the country’s political and judicial as well as economic system. Only half of those questioned in a July 2018 poll thought that elections in the United States are fair and open. A March 2014 poll found an almost even split between respondents who considered the judicial system ‘fair to most Americans’ and others who thought it ‘unfair to most Americans.’ (Only a third thought it ‘fair to poor Americans’ with a half disagreeing.) And fewer than a third now believe the myth that ‘it is still possible for just about anyone in America to work hard and get rich.’ 

But what do Americans in general and millennials in particular mean by ‘socialism’? 

Here the polls are much less helpful. I have found no studies of this question that single out millennials. That leaves us with the answers offered by pundits. First, however, it is worth looking at a paper by Gallup pollster Frank Newport entitled ‘The meaning of “socialism” to Americans today’ (posted October 4, 2018). 

Newport offered his respondents a choice of eight answers to the question What is your understanding of the term ‘socialism’? (They were allowed to formulate an answer of their own if they wished, but only a few took advantage of the opportunity.) He compares the results obtained in 2018 with the results of a similar poll conducted in 1949, at the start of the Cold War. Here are the main results:

• The definition of socialism as ‘state or government ownership or control of business,’ chosen by 1 in 3 respondents in 1949, was selected by only 1 in 6 in 2018. 
• A definition of socialism in terms of ‘equality’ (‘equal standing for everybody, all equal in rights, equal in distribution’) was preferred by 23% in 2018, up from 12% in 1949. 
• A ‘welfare-state’ definition of socialism focusing on free social services, universal healthcare, and other benefits was chosen by 2% in 1949 and 10% in 2018. 
• The proportion of ‘don’t knows’ was very high in both surveys. 

The most popular marker of ‘socialism,’ now chosen by almost a quarter of the respondents, is therefore equality of status and rights, including consumption rights. I regard this as good news, because although this is not adequate as a definition it does have something to do with socialism.  

Pundits agree that the majority of millennials are opposed to state ownership. Even a major government role in regulating the economy has the support of only 25–30%. Christopher Gage concludes from this that ‘millennial socialism’ is a myth (American Greatness, 2/22/2019). Jimmy Quinn does not go quite so far, but in an article entitled ‘Don’t assume millennials and Generation Z have given up on capitalism’ he argues that many millennials are open to the idea of tackling social problems by giving freer rein to market forces. For instance, many millennials support the movement for zoning deregulation as a means of increasing the housing supply and reducing rents.³ 

We in the World Socialist Movement (WSM) do not automatically equate opposition to state ownership with support of capitalism. That is because we do not define socialism as state ownership. State ownership can be and often is opposed from the vantage point of private ownership, but that is not the onlyvantage point from which it can be opposed. The WSM opposes both state and private ownership from the vantage point of common ownership, i.e., genuine socialism. 

It is useful to distinguish between ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ versions of ‘millennial socialism.’ The conservative version accepts ownership by private companies and seeks only reforms of the ‘welfare-state’ variety, such as Medicare for All and free college tuition – a stance shared by many Americans who do not call themselves socialists (see, for instance, the dialog between Luigi Zingales and Kate Waldock in Chicago Booth Review, 2/28/19). By contrast, radical ‘millennial socialists,’ although they too oppose state ownership, want social change of a more far-reaching nature.

Older Left, Old/New Left, Newer Left

It is this radical variety that Ben Judah has in mind in his piece ‘What Is Millennial Socialism?’ in The American Interest (July 24, 2018). He draws three main contrasts between radical ‘millennial socialism’ and ‘the old 1970s Left’ – which back then was called the New Left to distinguish it from an even older Left.   

First, the 1970s Left – like that even older Left – appealed to ‘the working class’ in the narrow sense of manual workers, while the millennial Left appeals to ‘the 99%’ against ‘the 1%’ – terms borrowed from the Occupy Wall Street movement:

The fraying middle class was not the natural ally of the wealthy; it was not protected by the 1%. People who looked middle class, thought of themselves as middle class, and had ‘middle class jobs,’ but were in fact now drowning in mortgage debt, with their children saddled with vast college debt – these were also victims of the 1%.

Here the WSM has always been in sync with the view that Judah attributes to the ‘millennial socialists.’ We have always regarded those ‘people with middle class jobs’ as part of the working class.

Second, the 1970s Left still thought of ‘revolution’ in terms of violent insurrection by crowds led by charismatic leaders, while the millennial Left works for change by peaceful democratic means – through parliamentarian party politics. Here again the WSM is in sync with the ‘millennial socialists.’ Hopefully the Leninist/Bolshevik tradition of the vanguard party is fading at last.

Third, Judah joins the chorus of those who declare that the millennial Left is against ‘national state ownership’ and central planning. Its commitment to decentralization, he suggests, reflects the influence of anarchism. In his interpretation, however, the ‘millennial socialists’ are against private enterprise as well. Their goal is ‘a patchwork of social, collective, municipal, and union-run enterprises.’ As an example of this sort of thinking he cites the British Labour Party’s 2017 report Alternative Models of Ownership:

These are some of their alternatives: national profit-sharing schemes, community land trusts, municipal businesses, workers’ cooperatives like Legacoop in Italy or the Mondragon Group in Spain, employee stock ownership plans or a sovereign wealth fund to which FTSE-listed companies are required to issue a percentage of stock on incorporation. Millennial socialism is not trying to stop the market economy, but to change its players and rewrite its rules.

So it appears that joint-stock companies will continue to exist after all. And by omitting state ownership from the mix Judah distorts the position of the report’s authors, who do in fact include it in their economic model under the name of ‘national ownership.’  

Clearly the radical ‘millennial socialists’ have been deeply influenced by theories of ‘market socialism’ and workers’ self-management within capitalism. These are the main areas where we in the WSM are out of sync with the outlook that predominates among millennials. If we are to communicate effectively with radical millennials we need to acquire deeper understanding of these theories and broader knowledge of the practical experience associated with them.   

Notes

 [1] Millennials in the narrow sense are people who came to maturity around the turn of the century. Some observers identify those who have come to maturity in the last decade and are now aged 15 – 25 as a separate group, dubbed Generation Z (Z for Zero). I do not try to draw a distinction between the two groups and refer to them all as millennials.

 [2] About ten years ago I had the following exchange with a student at a local college. He told me that his sociology professor had announced to the class: ‘I’ll come straight out with this and hope you aren’t too shocked. I’m a socialist.’ ‘Well,’ I asked him, ‘were you and your friends shocked?’ ‘We weren’t quite sure what to make of it,’ he replied. ‘But no, none of us was shocked.’

 [3] This movement had its first success in December 2018 when the Minneapolis City Council voted to eliminate single-family zoning (National Review, May 2, 2019).

Stefan

Fake News (2019)

The Woods for the Trees Column from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are amused at the establishment’s latest discovery: something called ‘fake news’. Information and its interpretation has, until the advent of the internet, traditionally been the preserve of the ruling class. Ownership of information (the media) is seen as a vital component for preserving the wealth and power of the 1 percent. Besides the handful of private owners (Murdoch etc.) their representatives in various governments have sought to monopolise the access to information. Socialists have, therefore, dismissed most of it as bourgeois propaganda and have always sought to render it transparent in terms of the agenda that defines its content (fake news). Can we ever disentangle the relationship between the events and their (political) interpretation? Of course raw data is useless without interpretation as can be seen from the information overload that is the World Wide Web. Let us engage in a thought experiment and examine what news might look like in a socialist society.

As a species we are always curious about the activities of our fellow beings and there’s no reason to believe that this will fundamentally change in socialism. In terms of global news there would still have to be a decision about the importance of any event. Those with journalistic responsibility (due to their talent in that area) will make this decision. Sometimes it will be obvious that an event has to be covered (a natural disaster or major technical failure etc.) otherwise an editorial judgment will be made. Upon the convergence of journalists at the required scene footage, interviews and interpretation would follow – just as it does today but with one significant difference: no political agenda. There would be no need to discover ‘scapegoats’ so as to deflect responsibility from one class to another, no need to feed the prejudice of the ideologies of racism, sexism, xenophobia, conspiracy or envy and above all there will be no need to protect the interest of privileged minorities – in other words it would not resemble, in any significant way, the ‘news’ we suffer today. In the absence of the political agenda outlined above what would be the nature of the interpretation of events in socialism?

Without the tensions inherent within class society the interpretation of events (the news) would assume that the mistakes (‘bad news’) are due to system malfunctions, human error, unforeseen natural formations or human scientific and/or technological hubris; the good news would, therefore, celebrate achievement in the absence of these qualities. Unlike today no default human malevolence would be assumed although the possible activity of psychologically disturbed individuals would not be entirely discounted.

Another important contrast to today’s newscasts would be the use of the historical perspective to explain the context of any event. History is humankind’s primary teacher. If we have failed to learn through the experience of the past then this will be highlighted. Socialist consciousness will allow journalists to access the dialectical processes inherent within any system and this will, hopefully, reveal the internal faults (or strengths) that have led to a ‘newsworthy’ event. From this the reader may assume, as we do, that this news of the future will be primarily ‘good news’ – something which is, with good reason, almost entirely absent in the contemporary media. Given our cynical cultural context many will roll their eyes at the perceived naivety and idealism of the above account of such a journalistic future unaware that this is a response conditioned by today’s media which seeks to explain events in terms of an innate and unchanging malevolent ‘human nature’ rather than by reference to the underlying tensions within capitalism.

Ironically one of the most infamous examples of fake news in recent times was the scandal of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In an attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq (for its oil) the Tony Blair government built a fantasy upon very flimsy and scant ‘intelligence’ that we were all in immediate danger from a weapons technology developed by a madman called Saddam Hussein. The British establishment chose to accept this as a show of loyalty to the flag bearer of international capitalist ideology (the USA) with the added incentive of a share of the liberated oil revenue. However this was such an extreme example of fake news that even the BBC exposed it as such only to have the journalist concerned martyred alongside his boss Greg Dyke for their pains. After the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis those who sought to expose the lies of the Labour government were justified and the reputation of both the Labour Party and the BBC should never be allowed to recover from such invidious and servile behaviour.

If the antithesis of fake news is real news how do we access it in a world of propaganda? Is there some source of raw data that exists apart from its interpretation? Given the impossibility of such an unpolluted reservoir of facts perhaps the duality of fake and real is unhelpful in this respect. We may replace it with the human traits of integrity and mendacity. In a society where the news is, like everything else, a commodity which is bought and sold the inability to understand the world in any other terms is intellectually and morally corrosive and inevitably leads to a level of mendacity. When the level of spin reaches such a lofty peak of contradiction then it usually becomes a matter of integrity and courage for those in a position to potentially become a whistle blower. That such individuals continue to exist inspires us all when our turn comes to articulate our defiance toward the manipulated consensus with the subsequent possibility of the loss of our job or even the love and respect of those whom we hold close.

Wez

The Class Struggle in Poland – A Socialist Statement (1980)

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain applauds with sympathy and admiration the courageous stand of the Polish strikers in their struggle to independently organise and negotiate over their wages and conditions. Their action bears out what we have constantly claimed and what no amount of repression, censorship, and pretence can indefinitely conceal. Poland is no “workers’ state on the road to socialism”, but a state capitalist, one party regime, where the working class inevitably comes into conflict with those who control the means of wealth production and distribution. The unity and determination of the Polish workers and the way they have handled their strike does them credit, and shows that their earlier clashes with the Polish leadership have taught them much. Their fight echoes the struggle of British workers in the nineteenth century to organise Trade Unions. They too could not be suppressed despite the Anti-Combination Laws and employers and governments since have been forced to acknowledge and negotiate with them.

The Polish strikers’ actions is being reported in the British Press and on television in a manner which is in marked contrast to the way the media reacts to strikes by British workers. We hear the same whining about “economic difficulties” and the “national interest” that the Polish government is now invoking. But workers have no national interest. All over the world we have a common class interest with each other.

In every country where capitalism develops it can easily be recognised by wage labour, buying  and selling, and production for sale and profit. Those forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary—the working class—will come into conflict with those who own and control the land, mines, factories, docks, means of transport, etc—the capitalist class—because their interests are opposed. This happens whether ownership is bound up with individuals, companies or the State. State ownership provides a facade behind which the privileged class extracts its profit. In Poland, Russia, and similar countries that class is the ruling clique of the misnamed Communist Party.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain looks forward to the working class winning independent trade unions wherever they do not exist. Workers will find that trade unions can best defend their interests on the industrial front by insuring that their officials are subject to the control of the membership, that links with political and non-union organisations are avoided, and decisions made democratically. Over 60 years ago Rosa Luxemburg wrote contradicting Lenin to tell him that trade unions without  democracy dominated by communist party leaders would become mere empty shells. Luxemburg was right, Lenin was  wrong.

Necessary and inevitable though workers’ struggles are, their results are limited. Whether promises of economic reform are made with sincerity or cynicism, while capitalism exists workers will find that a system based on their exploitation can never be made to operate in their interest. The next step is for workers to organise a class conscious democratic political party which stands solely for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution and rejects action for reform legislation. Such a party must work for the political objective of gaining control of the state machine as a result of majority consciousness for world socialism. No longer will minority ownership of the means of living stand in the way of the general welfare. No wages system between producers and the means of production and distribution. No market standing between people and products. Socialism will be a democratic co-operative system where production takes place for the benefit of the whole community.

Workers of all countries unite with us for world socialism!

Executive Committee

Socialist Party of Great Britain

September 1980

Let’s End Charity (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you do when someone comes to your door and say, It’s for the blind” or “I’m collecting for Cancer Research” or “we’re asking people to give to Oxfam”?

The easiest thing is to dip into your pocket, put a few coppers in their envelope and get back to whatever you were doing. That way you get rid of your unwanted caller and at the same time put at rest any conscience that may have been pricked. Harder by far is it to refuse those few coppers, and indeed few people do.

But does the money you’ve given really serve a useful purpose? Well first of all, although you may wonder how much of it actually gets to the unfortunates in whose name it was collected, you’re fairly sure that the benefit of your donation will be felt at least in some small way by a needy person somewhere. Secondly you’re reassured that the world isn’t such a bad place after all, that there are people doing something about its problems.

Not many people get further than this in their thoughts on charities, and very few indeed get as far as asking whether charities ever actually solve basic problems like hunger, homelessness and disease. In fact charities never do; think of any one you like and you’ll find that, despite the funds it’s collected in the past, its need for funds is greater-than ever. And although charities occasionally pack up, they hardly ever do so because the cause for which they were collecting has ceased to exist. On the contrary, new causes are springing up all the time.

The sad thing is that charities, despite the enormous amount of human energy and goodwill that go into them, can rarely do more than touch the surface of the problems they were set up to deal with. They can never get to the root of these problems. Only political action aimed at revolutionising the whole structure of society and abolishing its profit system can wipe out the problems that give rise to charities. Yet, in law, the benefits and privileges (like tax exemption) of a recognised charity are conditional upon its abstinence from political activity. In other words to be recognised as a charity you are forbidden to do anything which might conceivably tackle the problems of need and. suffering at their root.

Another irony is that, while for most people charity seems to be a sacred institution, the world we live in could not be more uncharitable. Apart from such large-scale horrors as food being dumped or left to rot in some parts of the world while people starve in others and human beings engaging in or turning a blind eye to the mass slaughter of other human beings, our day-to-day existence is based on the assumption that we will try to get as much as possible for as little as possible. So we will squeeze our employer for the highest wage or salary we think he can afford and he will squeeze us too, to produce as much for him as possible for as little money as he thinks we will to accept. When we go shopping we would never dream of paying double the marked price for the goods we need. On the contrary we usually try to find places where we can get the goods we need for as low a price as possible. And most of us spend time comparing prices and complaining about how little we get for our money. All this is the exact opposite of charity. None of it could be further from the ethic of “giving to help others”.

What it amounts to is that in a society which is bound to be overwhelmingly uncharitable because of the shortages and rivalries built into its buying and selling system, charity can never be more than a small closed compartment of life.

We want to persuade people of the severe limitations of organised charity and also of the unfortunate effect it has in wrongly suggesting to people that, by giving money, they are doing something about solving the world’s problems. What charities never suggest is the plain truth that the perpetual calamities and suffering they exist to cope with are due not to any inevitable defects in man’s capacity for organising the world but to a social system which puts profits-and armaments to guard these profits-before human welfare.

Charity will end when we get socialism. People won’t need it then. It’s something worth thinking about next time you slip those coppers into that envelope.

Howard Moss

Letters: Class Struggle in Poland (1981)

Letters to the Editors from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class Struggle in Poland

Dear Editors

I was astounded when I read the article in your December (1980) issue, "The Class Struggle in Poland". I not only find it nonsensical. but hypocritical. During the 1950s and the 1960s I attended many of your meetings and debates in Manchester and your speakers constantly attacked the trade union movement as part and parcel of the capitalist system. Now I see you support the new so-called Polish independent trade union. Solidarity. If you think that this struggle is a workers’ united movement for socialism, as printed on your front page, you must be a lot of political illiterates. Who are the people backing them? The Catholic Church and Right wing organisations all over the world who are filling their coffers with capitalistic money. To find that the SPGB have found new allies with the Catholic Church and some of the most reactionary capitalist organisations in the world, the pioneers of the SPGB must be turning over in their graves.

I. Brown 

Manchester

Reply

It is ironic that I. Brown refers to us as illiterates. when it is his own failure to read the front cover of the December 1980 Socialist Standard which leads him to imagine that the setting up of independent trades unions in Poland is seen by the SPGB as a workers’ united movement for socialism. Nothing of the kind was said. The EC statement which was published in the Socialist Standard pointed out the severe limitations of a purely defensive struggle, while recognising the important uses of trade unions. It has never been the case that SPGB speakers have attacked the existence of trade unions. Far from it, we recognise the use which they can have and have had.

Indeed, there are many Solidarity members who follow the Catholic Church, although for some of them it may be only for tactical reasons. But there is no evidence to show that the Church, as such, is backing the new union and there is some evidence to show that the Church is in league with the Polish government. The following article, which appeared in the West German newspaper, Der Spiegel, in January 1981, provides evidence of the Catholic Church’s real role in the recent developments:

  Ever since early September 1980 there have been secret contacts between the Soviet leadership and the Vatican. The aim has been to find a method of damming up the revolt in Poland which has been inconvenient for both sides. One of Moscow's first emissaries to Rome was one of the directors of the foreign dept., of the CPSU, who in September met the Vatican representative responsible for Eastern policy together with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Secretary of the Curia . . . the secret talks were mainly concerned with the situation in Poland. Cascroli assured the Moscow representative that the Pope and the Vatican would do everything possible “to ward off the misfortune facing Poland”.

The SPGB has not changed its position regarding the uses and limitations of trade unions, although we suspect that I. Brown, after years of listening to SPGB speakers without hearing what they were saying, has at last understood where we stand.

Editors

End Charity

Dear Editors

This week 1 read for the first time The Socialist Standard and I was struck by the quality of its articles: well thought-out and well written. However, I disagree with the article, "Let’s End Charity’’ because I don’t think charities pretend to “solve" basic problems, but to solve the problems or at least alleviate the fate of individuals or communities crushed by the world situation or by official machinery. They have not the time to wait until the whole world has turned socialist. I see that my copy bears the number 918, vol. 77 and that vol. 27 appeared 50 years ago. The Socialist Standard hasn’t changed the world nor solved the basic problem. Meanwhile Oxfam has been digging wells in India and saved hundreds from starvation. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has saved many of them. Dr. Barnardo has housed orphans; Shelter has found shelter for quite a few people without roofs over their heads. All partial benefits, I agree. But benefits all the same and for some of the beneficiaries it made the difference between life and death. And, come to think of it, if I hadn’t taken pity on the chap who was peddling your periodical in front of the tube station I would not have had the pleasure of coming to know it. Made me feel good . . .

R. Leys

Dorset

Reply

Thank you for the compliments and we hope that you will become a regular reader. You are correct when you say that the SPGB has been working for a long time and yet socialism has not been established. But at least we can say that the work we have done has helped to build up a principled socialist movement and that we are now nearer to establishing socialism than we were when we started. Oxfam and the other charities have been going for a long time too. They have had larger funds than the SPGB, many more supporters and much greater official approval. And yet they are further from eradicating poverty now than when they started. More people are starving throughout the world today than when Oxfam was formed. More communities are being destroyed. More poverty exists worldwide, in both absolute and relative terms, than it did fifty years ago. Indeed, the NSPCC, which you mention, has recently had to appeal for funds in The Guardian not so as to stop parents beating children (and why do parents beat children?), but so as to pay the salaries of their full-time officials and keep the administrative machine going. Charities have done a great deal of hard work and achieved many specific beneficial results. But the general problems of the working class are more important than specific examples of amelioration. The point is that the profit system as a whole is bigger and more ferocious than the goodwill of charities. Capitalism cannot be humanised by the rich giving to the poor. What is needed is for the class which is poor to dispossess the class which is rich so that we may have a society in which we will all live in a condition of security and equality. If every worker who donated time, energy and money to charitable causes would have been working for socialism we would now be much nearer to such a condition. So, our message to R. Leys is that he should stop feeling sorry for others and start looking after his own material interest. When he does that he will realise that there are millions of workers throughout the world who are impoverished due to their own acquiescence in a system which robs them of the fruits of their labour.

Editors

Different Socialisms

Dear Editors

Because there are several different kinds of socialism available to the casual reader, I am somewhat confused as to the real meaning of socialism. I do not really understand why there are several different kinds of truth (socialism) instead of just one. People want a better life. That is a single, simple truth. If people could work together, co-operatively, towards a common goal, they could possible achieve a better life. Is there a difference between socialism and the co-operative movement, or sharing together in a group for the common good? I feel that capitalism will no longer be an effective method for improving society, but neither is argument between socialist groups.

The Soviets believe that they are socialist, which means total government control. I think local control is a better method, but competition between groups could result in one group taking control of another, which would not be local control. A larger food co-op can buy products cheaper than a small co-op, but how big is too big?

I am not theoretical and do not care to read theoretical articles which result in more useless verbiage. People talk and write as they will, but the poor are today in great need. The point should be to stop talking and move towards a common goal, such as a workers’ co-operative in an agricultural setting, where the people are as self-sufficient as possible, and even export food and clothing for sale to the outside. That would be socialism in action, which would be an example for all the world to examine.

I should think that co-operative socialism would, in fact, be revolutionary, because it would give hope to the members Books and magazines are important, but socialist groups have been talking for years and I can’t see any real, visible progress towards socialism. If some sort of progress isn’t made within a few years it will be too late. Reagan and Haig seem to be determined to destroy the world in their own way, and I believe that to form a workers’ cooperative movement is the only way out of this capitalistic retrogression.

I enclose a contribution, not for your magazine, but for your general fund, because I can buy your magazine at a nearby store and I don't wish to read articles that can’t be put to immediate practical use. Time is short, as mentioned. We don’t have time to read and argue. There is only time to do. Socialism must be promoted by whatever means possible, even on the BBC and I TV.

Tom Todd 

Moseley, Birmingham

Reply

We do not accept that there are different kinds of socialism. There is either capitalism (production for profit) which exists throughout the world today, including the misnamed communist countries, or socialism (production solely for human need) which the SPGB is the only party in this country standing for. Socialism will be a worldwide co-operative community and will replace the worldwide system of production and distribution which capitalism has created. Some aspects of socialist living will be localised for the sake of convenience, but the primary concern of socialist society will be to provide for the complete needs and desires of the people of the world.

Your ideal of an island of socialism within the sea of capitalism will not be achieved so long as the resources of the earth, and the means of producing and distributing wealth, are the private property of a minority class. You refer to workers’ co-operatives selling food and clothing to the outside world. But production for sale is a feature of capitalism. Where would the co-operative get the capital to invest in production? How much would it sell its commodities for? Would it have trade unions to protect the wages and conditions of those working on the co-operative? What would the co-operative do if a rival firm produced goods at a cheaper rate? In short, how could a community within capitalism detach itself from the inherent features of that society? It could not.

What is needed is a worldwide movement of the people who produce all of the wealth of society (the working class) to take political action to gain control of the productive and distributive machinery of society. Then we can have world socialism. Practical action is useless without theory and Tom Todd is advised to visit the Birmingham branch of the SPGB and help to turn the vision of socialism into an immediate, practical reality.

Editors

50 Years Ago: Russian Illusions (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is claimed by many that the Russian Government has discovered a means of developing Russian industry on Socialist lines and free from the disturbing effects of the world trading conditions that affect the other capitalist countries. Actually, the more Russian industry enters into the world market as importer and exporter, the more Russian industrial conditions will be affected by conditions outside.

For example, the world slump in prices has hit Russian industry as badly as any, and has necessitated hasty and difficult modifications of the so-called Five-Year Plan. Estimates were based upon the exporting of certain quantities of goods at certain prices, the yield from which was to be used for machinery and other imports. Owing to the unforeseen slump, Russian exports in January and February of 1931 decreased in value by nearly one-fifth as compared with the corresponding period of 1930, and this in spite of a big increase in the quantities of goods exported. The output of the exporting industries had to be increased above the planned amount owing to the fall in the prices obtained for the exported goods in the world market, and in order to pay for the imports. The machinery and other imports either have not fallen in price at all, have not fallen as heavily, or have been contracted for at a stated price. The final result has been that imports have had to be curtailed. The imports for January and February, 1931, were one-third below those for January and February, 1930. Thus does capitalism frustrate attempts at planning.

Mr. Fenner Brockway, the new Chairman of the I.L.P., writing in the New Leader (April 17th), assumes that Russian industry is being run on a “ Socialist basis.” This is quite incorrect and indicates either a misreading of the Russian industrial system or—more probably—a failure to grasp what constitutes Socialism. In Russia, as elsewhere, goods are produced, not for use, but for sale. The producers are a wage-earning class with no effective control over the machinery of production. There is great inequality, as in other capitalist countries. The first charge on industry is the payment of interest to the investors in the State loans. The way in which inequality of wealth is growing is shown by the increasing yield from the graduated income tax. Already the yield is over £60 millions a year. The Government is now itself catering for the wants of monied people by opening shops at which goods are sold at rates far above the official prices.

(Editorial from the July 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard)

Running Commentary: Behind the Iron Curtain (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind the Iron Curtain

On 8 June, Panorama (BBC television) showed a film called “Behind The Curtain” made by Antoine Fournier, which consisted of interviews with workers in Moscow. The similarity with life in the West was quite remarkable, as the camera panned over Coca-Cola adverts, horse- and car-racing and amusement arcades. One assistant salesman on £45 a month explained how he is forced to try to earn some money “on the side” dealing in the black market. Another, dealing in the foreign clothes market, explained:

  Underground market is a very popular thing in the Soviet Union. All the young people I know do the things I do because, for two reasons. The first is a great profit, and the second is a simple interest to connect with foreigners. But there are lots of police in civil clothes who control the situation and if they catch you with the clothes, they never take you to the police station, they simply take your clothes and then resell them. Policemen have a little salary too, so we can understand them.

Here are some more excerpts from the interviews.

Can we film you at work? The bosses would never allow it.
Do you get good wages? Good pay? You must be joking . . . If I make 150 roubles a month. I’m doing alright . . . I’m just slaving away.
Do many women do your job? What can I say? There are so many of them. They need money, or they want to get a flat. But we're told a pack of lies. They’ve been lying for five years now about the flat, saying they’re going to give it to us. But we’re still living in a room like this one, we still haven’t a flat, just a room. When will you get your flat? We haven’t any idea. That depends on the boss. Go and ask him yourself. Looks like we haven’t earned it yet so they haven’t given it to us.
Are you going to vote tomorrow? Of course (they laugh) what a stupid question!
And who are you going to vote for? Don’t you have an easier question? (They all laugh cynically.) The portrait of our deputy is already hung up in the entrance!
What about Party members? If somebody joins the Party, either that means he’s a careerist, that he's already decided he wants to make a career of it, or, well it means that he’s just no good.
And Western people? First of all, I think they shouldn’t be afraid of us. We are people just like them. We live like they do.

Brixton

The hysteria over the Brixton riots has faded now, but with unemployment and resentment mounting all the time, it is quite possible that there will be further outbreaks of violence in inner-city areas. Brixton was quite clearly not a “race riot”; the police were attacked as representatives of state harassment and authority. But in the aftermath, references to the “black community” in the press suggested that the main division is between blacks and whites. In fact, the whole community, black and white, is divided into two classes. There are both black and white investors, property-owners, who profit from the poverty suffered by black and white workers.

For example, a Nigerian called Chief Francis Nzeribe has said he wants to invest money in Brixton. Some people in Brixton will be allowed to have jobs, to get wages which are just enough to live one, while Nzeribe will own all of the wealth they produce for him. He owns £50 million worth of assets around the world, and heads twenty-seven companies. He has been a private arms dealer and lives in a flat in Mayfair. He has said of his plans for Brixton: “I see this as an opportunity to make money” (New Standard, 5/5/81). Colour is irrelevant.

Gluts

A few years ago, the media were stirring up a popular fear that oil resources were going to run out. There was a danger of a shortage. Now the tune has changed, and they are getting worried about a “glut”. OPFC and other representatives of oil interests are complaining about the threat of falling prices and profits as hundreds of barrels of oil pour out from the Middle Fast each week, to say nothing of all of the other sources in the world. Because of the recession, world market demand is down, so supply seems to be too high to satisfy the profit demands of the owners.

Resources today are not measured by simple human needs, any more than production is controlled by them. The market rules. This is why today's glut becomes tomorrow’s scarcity. The present crisis in world capitalism is not just affecting oil, though. America has a “butter mountain” which is “growing by ten million pounds a week” (Guardian, 30/5/81); and on 26 May a Guardian article entitled: “There's an awful lot of coffee” referred to “the prospect that the world is likely to be oversupplied with coffee during the next twelve months or so”. But in today’s insane system, that will not prevent millions of people from starving to death this year, and millions more from drinking tea because it is cheaper.

China-Cola

China is supposed to be a People’s Republic. Its government claims to have saved its workers from the ravages of capitalist exploitation. So it is rather odd that on 15 April, Coca-Cola, the epitome of world capitalism, opened a bottling plant in Peking. But the Chinese workers will, it seems, be saved from this danger by their benevolent masters after all. At first, the drink will only be sold to people with hard currency (the Chinese ruling class). Later it may be available for “ordinary” Chinese people (the working class), but probably at a price well over what most of them could afford, (Times, 16/4/81) so thoroughly are they being drained dry by the “People’s” Parasites.

Capitalism's Casualties

Dr. Jay Herbert, chairman of the Hospital Doctors’ Association, remarked recently that more than half the country’s junior doctors work more than eighty hours a week, and that their resulting tiredness was a major cause of death in hospitals (Guardian 30/5/81). He pointed to Sunday evenings as a critical time, and said that the massive amount of overtime worked by doctors was allowed to continue for economic reasons: “Juniors are still expected to work for an overtime rate of one-third the basic rate. It is cheaper for hospitals to employ fewer doctors for longer hours than more doctors.”

Clifford Slapper