Running Commentary: Barbara’s response (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barbara’s response

In their widely used double whole-page advertisement the Conservative Party claimed that “putting a cross in the Labour box is the same as signing this piece of paper” and one of the items on the imaginary piece of paper was: “I waive my right to choose any form of private medicine for my family”.

This was of course completely untrue but, on the basis that if you are going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one — in letters half an inch high — it might have frightened some readers into voting Conservative if they had not already decided to do so.

One response was an article in The Times (26 May 1983) by Barbara Castle who was at pains to point out that "What Labour’s manifesto actually says is: ‘We shall remove private practice from the NHS’.” In other words. Labour has no objection to people queue jumping (her expression) provided they do it in Harley Street but not under the noses of the workers who build and run the hospitals and who might feel that they are entitled to as good a health service as anyone else.

But then, it has always been Labour’s policy to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the scramble for votes. Those workers who yet again voted for the Labour Party were voting for second class NHS treatment when they could receive of the best in a socialist society.

Exit with dignity

Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, is like a lot of other people. He is keen that everyone should have a job because, he thinks, anyone who is unemployed is not just penniless and hopeless: “These marchers,” he cried at a People’s March for Jobs demonstration in June, “have been cheated of their dignity by not being given a job".

Christopher Smith, devoted husband and father, was dignified alright. He had had the same job since he left school fifteen years ago and had been raised to assistant manager at the supermarket where he worked. One drawback to being assistant manager was that, as the company cut back on the staff forcing a lot of people into the indignity of the dole queue, Christopher was left to run the shop on his own.

In what the company probably thought of as his leisure time Christopher took the paperwork home to wrestle with. The responsibility and pressures became so great that a judge later described them as an “overwhelming terror”.

One day Christopher left the shop early, went home and stabbed his wife and daughter to death. He tried five times to kill himself and then told the police what he had done. At the Old Bailey the judge, probably reasoning that even for capitalism this man had been punished enough, put Christopher on probation with a condition that he accept medical treatment.

Employment, which is the process of being exploited for the benefit of a class of social parasites, is an outrageous indignity. One measure of this is the fact that, if it is not profitable to employ workers, they are brusquely thrust away onto the scrap heap. Those who arc kept on have to cope with the pressures of a fiercer exploitation.

Some can manage this without too much damage to themselves. Others fall ill, sprout ulcers, suffer heart attacks and strokes. A few. like Christopher Smith, in one way or another destroy their lives. For them, there is often a final indignity — to be told that it is they, and not this wretched social system, who are sick.

Ah, yes: which firm was it, to do this to this man? They call themselves Your Sharing, Caring Co-op.

Target practice

Like someone at a fairground shooting gallery, Margaret Thatcher has now picked off two Labour leaders and is probably at present squinting along the barrel waiting for the next target to come into view.

The Labour and Conservative parties continually tell us that political processes are something of a shoot-out between two intellectual Titans. For example the 1983 election was reduced at times to a personal battle between Foot and Thatcher, which implied that they are two specially capable people and that there was some reason to make a choice between them.

This theory of the need for leadership is essentially exclusive. Running modern society is so difficult and complicated a matter that it can be understood by only a small minority of specially gifted men and women. The rest of us must leave it up to them and be satisfied with an occasional opportunity to express our gratitude and admiration at the polls.

Well there may well be a rare technique in running a social system in which millions of people are idle in spite of the fact that there is an urgent need for wealth to be produced and distributed. A system in which every week human beings die on the scale of Hiroshima but not from a nuclear assault — from starvation in spite of the fact that huge amounts of food arc stockpiled and destroyed. A system which gives priority, not to the production of useful and constructive things but to weapons of mass destruction.

But to understand this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings, is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class.

For most workers — which means for most of the world’s people — this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society as surely and predictably as the targets moving across the fairground booth.

Keeping a promise

It took rather a long time but at last, it seemed, something happened as a politician had promised. When he was the minister responsible for housing in the 1945 Labour government, Aneurin Bevan one day pronounced that housing would not be an issue at a future election. And in 1983, sure enough, it was hardly mentioned.

Of course Bevan meant that his government would have been so successful in dealing with housing that there would no longer be any reason to discuss it. What happened in the election was that it was overlaid by other matters of current interest to the voters — would Thatcher or Foot be the more futile leader, how should British capitalism deploy its nuclear weapons, which party would most effectively get those three million unemployed back into active, full time exploitation? Such developments in political debate are sometimes known as the onward and upward march of the working class.

It was in the background, then, that Shelter announced its opinion that one of the urgent matters awaiting the new government is a “shortage" of 800,000 homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there arc those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

Much water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since Bevan made that claim all those years ago, and much suffering has been endured by the homeless, the slum dwellers and by those who exist in the social deserts of the high rise and the council estates or in the pressured neurosis of suburbia. And the problem is still there, as troublesome as ever. It may have been ignored in the election but as long as capitalism lasts it will not go away.

Down the drain

Speaking in Bolton during his election campaign, Michael Foot was reported as promising that Labour would create 500,000 jobs during its first year in office. 

We are not setting impossible targets. When we reduce unemployment to the level we left it in 1979, it will save the government enough money to pay for the whole of Labour’s emergency programme (The Times, 28 May).

In other words, during a Labour Government’s first year half a million workers would be paid with money later to be saved by an imaginary reduction in unemployment of more than two millions.

Leaving aside the “spend now, pay later” aspect of this form of book-keeping, one is left wondering why, with this remedy for unemployment available, there was anybody at all out of work during the period of the last Labour government.

It is of course a fallacy to suggest that jobs can be created just by taking workers off the dole and paying them with the money saved in benefits.

The kind of work Labour politicians had in mind (such as new sewers) shows no financial return on expenditure. One might almost say it is “money down the drain” which will have to be found by increased taxation. But this proposal would not have attracted many votes.

Election nasties (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it got to the point of the politicians telling us that 1983 was to be one of the most important elections ever, we knew we were in for a campaign of stupefying bathos and irrelevance.

While there was much sympathy for the apparently doomed Labour Party (the Daily Telegraph, in a leader a couple of days before the poll, said "For a party that is supposed to be terrifying us . . . Labour looks oddly loveable”) it was really the Tories who began with the more testing task. As the outgoing government, they had to convince millions of people that several unpalatable things were actually good for them and that they should volunteer for another five years of the same. As indeed they did.

Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like the sexual and personal repression which are often thought of, through a misreading of history, as Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to attack other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

In order to get some advantage from persuading people that such things are good for them, the Conservatives needed also to claim that they came about through their deliberate policies. Unemployment, for example, had to be represented as something which could easily be abolished or diminished through high state spending but which is kept in being as the price of something else which is good for us called Beating Inflation. As everyone should know by now, because politicians of all parties have been telling us for many years, inflation is one of the few things a government does not claim to be able easily to control. It is, they say, an enemy which can be kept in check only through great skill (theirs) and hardship (ours). But what everyone should, but does not, know by now is that inflation is actually in the government’s control; it is a contrived policy which they choose not to reverse and actually has no overall significant effect on our living standards.

Perhaps it was the exertion of pretending that the Tory government had planned all these things for our especial benefit and had them under control, rather than having them foisted on them, which caused Margaret Thatcher to go mad during the campaign. The famous image of the Resolute Approach is not really an initiative but a cobbled up response to events. Ignoring this piece of reality had its effect on Thatcher and television watchers throughout the country, although not qualified in psychiatry, became worried at her obvious mania.

Foot’s problem was to paper over the wide and deep cracks in his party by relating almost every question and argument to the issue of unemployment, presumably because he thought that this was a vote winner for the Labour Party. There was small chance of his succeeding and it must also have been rather exhausting for him as it required him to forget that under the last Labour government, in which he served so fanatically, unemployment doubled and was on the upward path when they lost power. In this Foot showed he has the amnesic talents required by many a mental patient and by all serious politicians. Throughout the campaign Labour’s inconsistencies — on nuclear weapons, on what they call defence, on how they relate to the wilder fringes of loony reformism called the left wing — kept catching up with Foot. Under close questioning he tried to be nimble but was exposed as evasive, cynical and politically bankrupt.

The press — even so normally sympathetic a paper as the Observer — were notably cruel to him. Yet Foot could still pull in the crowds, large affectionate gatherings of devotees of the idea that he is a man of unswerving principle who, provided he does not disappear altogether through the personality change, will one day deliver us all to the Promised Land. As polling day drew nearer he seemed to lose heart. Perhaps he was reading the Sporting Life; the bookmakers, with a properly hard-nosed assessment of reality, began to discourage bets on the election result and started offering odds on who would replace Foot when the Labour Party lost.

Perhaps the SDP/Liberal Alliance claim to be the mould-breakers of British politics who will cast out the Old Gang would have appealed to someone in a natural despair at the alternating futility of the two parties which have shared power over British capitalism. But the SDP leaders themselves sprang from the Old Gang and were responsible, when they were ministers, for many of the policies they now so heartily denounce. Of course the other part of the Alliance, the Liberals, have a trump card; they can claim not to have recently had the chance to fail which is just as well for them in view of their record when, all those years ago, they were in power. In any case their policies now are no more than a variation on the same reformist hash as offered by the Labour and Conservative parties. It was when they were faced with an unexceptional political crisis that the mould breakers showed how similar they are to the despised Old Gang.

Worried at first by their poor showing at the opinion polls, they moved quickly to make Jenkins their scapegoat. A nasty, but revealing, clash was narrowly avoided when in the nick of time the Alliance poll ratings went up which allowed all SDP/ Liberals to go back to saying how much they admired and supported Jenkins.

This disreputable incident illustrated the ability of the opinion polls to inspire panic or complacency, according to their findings. It was poll ratings which caused the initial assumption that the Labour Party would lose the election, hardening into the certainty that Thatcher would have a majority comparable to Attlee's in 1945. Labour’s depression at their years of schism and confusion, their weak showing at by-elections, their failure to profit from the Thatcher government’s problems and to win some of the nauseous flag-waving glory from the Falklands war, seemed to blind them to the fact that the polls have a history of fallibility. In 1970 the Wilson government, at first confident of victory, lost the election although at one point the polls had them leading by over 12 per cent. In February 1974 the Tories, fighting among the black-outs of the Three Day Week on the theme of Who Governs the Country, were at one time ahead in the polls by 6.5 per cent but in the end they narrowly lost. In October 1974 and again in May 1979 the polls gave the winners a much larger percentage of support than they eventually notched up.

Perhaps more important for them, the Labour Party’s reliance on unemployment as a vote winner was also not supported by history. The only comparable period, in terms of numbers out of work and general elections on a popular franchise, was the twenties and thirties. Labour were in office, as a minority government, in 1929 partly on a pledge to cure unemployment and when their brief, wretched span was ended in 1931 they suffered the most crushing defeat in their history. The monthly average of unemployment during 1931 was 2,717,000 or 21.3 per cent of total employees. At the election the National government won a majority of 497 — a result caused, not by concern at unemployment but through patriotism and fear at the crass failure of the MacDonald government to control capitalism. When the next election came in 1935 unemployment had fallen to 2,027,000 but at 15.5 per cent it was still a serious problem: ". . after four years (of National government) unemployment, depression, misery still overshadowed the land” (Britain Between The Wars, Charles Loch Mowat). But the voters were still mainly satisfied with Conservative government; the best the Labour Party could do was to increase their MPs from the freak number of 51 to 158, leaving Baldwin with a majority of 247 over all other parties.

Whatever success might have attended Foot’s desperate efforts to conceal his party’s miserable disarray on other issues was effectively nuked by Jim Callaghan's headline-catching declaration in favour of British capitalism keeping its own nuclear armoury. Foot might well have been deeply hurt by this act of ingratitude for when Foot was one of Callaghan's ministers his standing as Labour's left-wing conscience was useful in reconciling the party's doubters to the policies of strikebreaking. holding down wages, cutting public spending, racist immigration laws and so on for which that government will always be remembered. After Callaghan’s intervention Labour spokespeople grew increasingly despondent while Thatcher, seeing an unexpectedly emphatic victory looming over the horizon, became ever more manic. At times she went too far even for seasoned media hacks, addressing the galactically great Robin Day without his title and upsetting the faithful Daily Telegraph, which may have been responsible for an element of objectivity creeping into their reporting, the crux of which was their giving some space to a reasonably accurate piece on the Socialist candidate in Islington South.

So yes, it was an election of familiar bathos. Labour supporters were excitedly convinced that at all costs the Tories must be thrown out without knowing why since Labour is fundamentally no different. The Conservatives treated it as a crusade against the threat of revolution although they could not explain why something they called a revolution was designed to keep the same capitalist social system in being.

For the unwary it might have been very confusing because in one sense all sides could take heart from the result. The election spelled out again that, whatever stress and degradation capitalism subjects them to. the working class have a large and enduring appetite for the system. The people in the advertising agencies could be excused for believing in a diabolical power to convince the workers that facts and experience go for nothing and that what counts is an ability to present those facts and that experience in a distorted and deceptive way. So yet there is hope for the Labour Party and the Alliance.

Amid all despair, only the Socialist candidate in Islington stood apart. There was no bathos in that campaign, only a rational, conclusive case for the new society. It was a small effort compared to that of the big parties, and solitary, but as significant as the oyster's grain of sand.

Ivan

Crisis of the Left (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever happened to the Labour Party? Remember how they used to tell us that Labour was “the mass party of the working class” — the party that workers would instinctively turn to, like Mullahs to Mecca. If you wanted to be “in with the workers”, said the Left, the Labour Party was the place to be. On 9 June the workers made it clear to their patronising would-be leaders that the party was over — that they could not be relied on to flock to the support of Labour Party capitalism, like cattle voting for “compassionate” slaughterers. The workers of Britain gave the party which tried to con them that it stood for their interests the biggest kick in the teeth for fifty years. These are the facts:

• In 1979, 11,506,661 electors voted Labour — just under 37 per cent of those who voted. In 1983, 8,460,860 electors voted Labour — less than 28 per cent of the total national poll, which was itself 3.3 per cent lower than the total national poll in 1979.
• In 1983 the Labour Party lost its deposit in 125 of the constituencies contested: well over one in five of the deposits it paid. This was a larger number of losses than the Labour party sustained in all four general elections in the 1970s added together.
• Not since 1931, when Labour polled just under seven million votes, have so few electors voted Labour; not since 1918, when Labour’s percentage of the total votes cast was 24 per cent, has Labour received such a low poll.
• More than one in four electors did not vote on 9 June; a quarter of the electorate regarded the differences between the main parties as too insignificant to go out and vote about.

The Labour Party has all but had its death certificate written for it by the workers of Britain. Frantic efforts are now being made to revive its fortunes; a leader of the Wilson-Callaghan calibre is being anxiously sought; the Right is blaming the Left and the Left is blaming the Right. Fraternal purges are on the agenda.

Why did the Labour Party fail to defeat a government presiding over capitalism in the midst of a recession which is hitting the workers hard? The answer is that workers preferred the openly capitalist policies of the Tories — whose disgusting prejudices appealed to the mass of the pro-capitalist workers — rather than the vaguely idealistic capitalist utopianism on offer from the Labour reformists. Margaret Thatcher offered “more hard times ahead”, to be followed, if the wage slaves behaved well, by a higher standard of poverty; the Labour Party offered a relative capitalist paradise, where unemployment would be brought down to “acceptable levels”, nuclear weapons would be removed to foreign soils and the exploited would be legally robbed with humanitarian administration. The workers have tried the utopian recipe before and concluded that if the governments of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan — not to mention Mitterrand, Andropov and other Leftists — is what the reformers have to offer, then they would stick with the more accomplished thieves of the Tory Party. The fact is that the Labour Party has no alternative; it never did have a remedy for the ills of the profit system, and it never will, because capitalism is an inherently anti-social system which continuously throws up more problems and contradictions than the reformists can solve.

The Labour Party, which was formed after the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has always claimed that it is impossible to persuade a majority of workers to understand and want socialism. The advocates of reform politics have persistently argued that workers must be drawn to “radical politics” by the carrot of reform and then led to the new system without them knowing it. Socialists have heard this elitist, patronising drivel from Labour politicians for a long time: “leaders” like Tony Benn who saw himself as a man who would win the masses to Labour by making promises to change capitalism which could not possibly be fulfilled; like Joan Lestor who argued that it was only in the Labour Party that real social change could begin; like Ossie O'Brien who, in a debate against the Socialist Party, admitted that the socialists may be right, but the Labour Party would get more votes come the elections. These deposed leaders, and the others who received the message from workers they had expected to follow them, can contemplate where their opportunism got them on 9 June. Our candidate was defeated because the workers rejected the revolutionary socialist ideas which were clearly stated in our manifesto, and which we urged workers not to vote for unless they agreed with them — the "populists" of the Labour Party lost despite their opportunist grovelling for votes.

As usual, the vast majority of sects and factions on the non-Labour Left abandoned their opposition to both the Labour Party and elections in order to work like horses for the election of a Labour government of British capitalism. As usual, they all had plenty of small-print qualifications, lumps in their throats, "no illusions”, “conditional” backing and the rest of it, but when the campaign opened and sides had to be taken, the Left chose the side of capitalism with a red rosette.

The Socialist Workers’ Party is as good an example as any of the absurd twisting of these 'reformist hypocrites. Consider the words of Paul Foot in Socialist Worker on 5 December 1981:

Again and again, since the war the hopes and ideals of hundreds of thousands of people who have worked for Labour governments have been frustrated. . .

A good enough reason for not voting Labour. Alex Callinicos. in the same paper on 28 May 1983, gave an even better one:

Labour’s is a programme aimed at harnessing and controlling capital, not destroying it . . . Labour in office would attack the living standards of its own supporters in an effort to restore profits.

Quite correct. So did the SWP urge workers to reject this party which frustrates the hopes of those who support it, exists to defend capital and would attack workers’ interests in order to restore profits? On the front cover of Socialist Worker of June 4 the headline said it all: “STOP THE TORIES — VOTE LABOUR". Such hypocrisy is not something to be ignored; to urge workers to waste the power of the vote on a party which they know to be anti-working class shows just what contempt the SWP’s leaders have for their dwindling flock of followers.

The Workers' Revolutionary Party manages to carry out the Oppose Labour — Vote Labour political somersault within the course of the four pages of its turgidly written manifesto:

They (the Labour Party) have capitulated to every attack by the Thatcher government on the working class. Labour’s leaders unconditionally support capitalism and its state machine.

Therefore it follows, does it not, that:

In constituencies where we are not standing we call for a massive turn-out by the Labour and trade union movement to vote against the Tories by casting a critical vote for Labour.

Why did they not be more clear and tell workers to “critically" vote for the party which “unconditionally support(s) capitalism and its state machine"?

The Communist Party, as usual, advised workers to vote Labour where its candidates were not standing. The Militant Tendency, like guests who are thrown out of the party and run around the houses telling everyone what a great time they had, strained every muscle for the election to state power of the party which devoted a day of its last conference to passing overwhelmingly a resolution to kick them out.

At the end of the day, the leaders looked behind them to see that the sheep were flocking in their thousands to follow other shepherds — or to follow none. The Trotskyist logic of electing your enemies to power was swallowed by the gullible fools who think they are a vanguard; but the rearguard, once again, was not there. The Labour Party is one step nearer to the political grave which its record of broken promises has dug for it. Of course, the working class followers of the politically bankrupt Labour Party opted not for socialism, but to abandon their futures as sacrifices to Thatcher’s god of Profit. In the days to come socialists will be working with all the force at our command to show the workers that there is an alternative to the corpse of Left reformism and the viciousness of naked capitalism. The election is over, but the struggle goes on.

Steve Coleman

Voices in the wilderness (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More than half of the workers we canvassed in last month’s election campaign were cynical about the promises of all the main parties standing. For three weeks every five years, the British ruling class expects us to think about “politics”, that is, about which band of professional liars will administer our poverty for the next period. We attended all of the main parties’ meetings in order to sell socialist literature, as part of our campaign in Islington, and at each meeting we saw the same few faces, sadly devoted to the empty rhetoric of their indistinguishable leaders.

In Islington South and Finsbury, where the only genuinely socialist candidate was standing, the Tories kept quite a low profile. Thatcher’s talk of Victorian Values had been dropped for the duration of the campaign, since for most workers, the only way in which hard work and thrift prove profitable is when our bosses profit from our hard work and thrift. The Tory leaflet spoke of “the quality of our armed forces”, “controlling secondary picketing” and “larger export markets”; all matters only of interest to those who own and control the wealth of Britain, not the millions who produce it.

The two favourites in the race for power in Islington South were the Labour and SDP candidates. The Labour Party relied almost entirely on the “lesser evil" myth. Realising that capitalism under the Labour varnish is quite unsavoury to many of the workers it exploits, they told us that we had to vote Labour, to avoid the greater horror of capitalism tarnished by the leadership of Thatcher. The idea that to get rid of Thatcher’s capitalism the only possibility is to support Foot’s capitalism is as stupidly dogmatic as the Tory claim that there is no alternative to their policies. Tactical voting is based on the assumption that sheep must follow one another on to a limited number of bandwagons, then shuffle around until the least obnoxious compromise can be found. It denies any kind of clear principle or aim, and any possibility of real social change through democratic persuasion.

The election was taken over, especially in Islington, by the most cynical slander and manipulation on all sides. The social system represented by all the major parties has become bankrupt of ideas. They have almost run out of ways to secure workers’ loyalty to the system which exploits us. Consequently, more time was spent attacking their opponents than claiming any positive merits for their own policies. Many people we canvassed said they agreed with the revolutionary alternative we were standing for, but would vote Labour through an almost religious, irrational attachment to traditional loyalties. When they start to act more in accordance with their real disgust at the Labour Party’s cynical running of the profit system, what is regarded as possible and impossible will rapidly change. Perhaps the most ludicrous example of this contradictory attitude came from the misnamed Socialist Workers Party. Some of their members passionately attacked the Labour candidate at a public rally, shouting out that Labour had always inevitably betrayed the workers because it was running the capitalist system. Finally, they were told from the platform, “No, no. You should be campaigning for a Labour victory”. They replied, to the audience’s bewilderment, “We are" and, sure enough, their paper told people to Vote Labour, even though the Socialist Party of Great Britain was posing the revolutionary socialist alternative.

We were faced with three well-oiled machines, prepared to stop at nothing in their desperate vote-catching. The Labour candidate even referred at a public meeting to the SPGB campaign slogan, "Vote for Yourself for a Change”, and claimed that the Labour Party embodied this no-leaders democracy! Their confidential instructions (from above, of course) tell a different story:

DO NOT ASK: "Will you be voting Labour?" That is bad canvassing. Voters say yes to get rid of you/make you happy/ deliberately confuse you . . . If person says "I never vote”, mark on card. We do not wish to antagonise by calling again. Sometimes people tell the truth!

One of the most infamous careerists in the constituency was the sitting MP, George Cunningham. He was elected through the Labour Party in 1979 and then transferred to their Old Boys’ Club, the SDP. In some circles he is known as George Conning’em, since that’s what he’s been doing for the past five years. Most people wouldn’t mind a pound for every baby he’s kissed. When we challenged him to a public debate, he arrogantly replied that we would have to find someone to give us publicity elsewhere, he was too busy proclaiming his commitment to democracy and free speech to mess about with petty things like public debates. Now that he has lost his job at Westminster, we plan to offer him the publicity he once denied us, by repeating our challenge to debate.

One leaflet contained compliments about Cunningham from the Daily Mail, The Times, Observer, Guardian, BBC and Punch. In other words, he is a model capitalist politician, expert at persuading people to leave control in the hands of a minority. Another shows a cartoon of him with a big, tightly-clenched fist, and another with a foot stamping on the neck of an alligator marked Creeping Extremism. The local SDP campaign was based on the "left extremist" scare, traditionally popular with the fascists. SDP Agent Chris Pryce was quoted in the Islington Gazette as saying:

Make no mistake, Chris Smith is one of the most extreme Labour candidates in the country. His constant harping on gay rights, his open support for punks and squatters and other fringe groups is now common knowledge.

Of course, at the time Pryce was not aware that the SDP were soon to join the fringe groups in Islington; on the other hand. Smith is now at Westminster, and there has been no revolution in the conditions of the workers in Islington or anywhere else.

One day, while leafletting in Chapel Market alongside the SDP, one of their members explained to us that they only had short leaflets there, since the people wouldn't understand a more detailed manifesto. It was claimed that Labour posters were displayed in the windows of empty flats by the Labour Council because there was so little genuine support for them on many of the estates. Some Labour canvassers were reported to have resorted to telling people that Cunningham was ill or not standing, and that it was illegal to display his posters. All of this vicious in-fighting among politicians standing for the profit system took the place of real debate over policies. It was not just Cunningham who refused to debate with us; we had also been refused by the Labour candidate Smith, and by both the SDP and Labour candidates in the Islington North constituency.

Islington CND planned and advertised a public debate between the candidates on the question of nuclear weapons, but this had to be abandoned since they refused to comply with the regulations which demand that all candidates be invited to such meetings; they did not want to give a platform to the candidates from the National Front and the British National Party. They even tried to use a legal loophole by asking if we would formally put the costs of running the meeting on our election expenses, which would have allowed them to leave out the fascists. We refused, pointing out the illogicality of opposing somebody because they are against free speech, and then denying them the chance to air their ideas. If the NF and BNP had to explain themselves on a public platform, most workers would be quite capable of rejecting their vicious and divisive racism, without having CND to censor it for them. Moreover, the NF, like CND. is against the American nuclear bases and missiles because they are nationalists. Indeed, the manifesto of the NF, with its support for import controls and getting out of the Common Market, shares with much of the Left the nationalist, anti-working-class policy of British state capitalism.

The real local issues were hardly dealt with at all by the six parties who stood against the SPGB and world socialism. One in five workers in Islington are unemployed. Over ten thousand are on the housing waiting list, despite there being many empty homes. An increasing number of young people there are turning to heroin, despite having friends who have died on it. On certain housing estates, violent racist attacks constantly threaten thousands of people. Since 1975, under Labour and Tory governments, the number of hospitals in Islington has been reduced from five to two. The Labour Party has failed again and again to live up to the expectations of its supporters, because it operates within the confines of the anti-human system which lies at the root of all these problems. When challenged about the possibility of a genuine socialist alternative, the Labour candidate told us, as would any Tory, about the need for “realism”. In other words, keep a system of war, poverty and institutionalised misery, rather than end the sacred rights of property.

The contradictions of the present social system cannot be reformed away by the rhetoric of individual politicians. In health, housing and so on. profit comes before need, accumulation before consumption. In the week of the election, houses in Islington (Barnsbury and Canonbury Square) were advertised costing £130,000, £154,950, £197,500 . . . The people buying these properties do not suffer the housing problems for which the area is notorious. As long as this class division remains, the majority will be in an inferior, insecure position. The Labour Party’s Plan for Jobs was just a policy to retain profits for a minority and wage-slavery for the rest. As the local community paper, the Islington Gutter Press explained:

None of these (Labour) objectives will be possible without the co-operation of the trade unions . . . Yes. the trade unions will have to show restraint and they will have to abide by the National Economic Assessment. But we believe in them and we believe in the future of this country.

As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent burning on somewhere. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. Workers won the vote in the late nineteenth century but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease, sometimes through Labour governments which have understandings with the unions. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stood in the election on a uniquely different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is. like the problem it solves, world-wide despite the nonsense spoken about the Socialist Republic of Islington and despite the fact that one of the local candidates was the Islington and Finsbury Party.

85 more nails . . .

In our manifesto, we asked people not to vote for us unless they were fully in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority were prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. The little media coverage we received during the campaign thought this was quite a joke, since to them democratic elections must involve not open persuasion and consistency but slander, vote-catching and opportunism. The electorate of Islington South and Finsbury were happy to oblige with our request not to vote for us if they were still suffering from capitalist conditioning and prejudice: we polled 85 votes, against 13,460 for the Labour Party, 13,097 for the SDP, 9,894 for the Tories, 341 for the National Front, 94 for the British National Party and 102 for the Islington and Finsbury Party. But as many as two in five voters in Islington abstained, sick of the failed promises of these political leaders.

Abstention, however, is in its effect little different from acceptance of the status quo. We are gradually building a separate political force which will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way. The local Socialist Party branch in Islington has multiplied its membership more than five times over since its formation about five years ago, without admitting to membership anyone who is not a socialist, fully aware of the nature of the change we propose. Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene or suspend canvassing for five years. The debate between production for the profit of a few and production for the use of all is now more pressing than ever. We will be stepping up our activities of street-selling, canvassing and running meetings in Islington in the months ahead. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a classless, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism.

Clifford Slapper

World hunger — why? (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population suffer from malnutrition while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why is this? Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for so many people?

Some would deny that we live in a world of potential plenty and claim that the cause of world poverty and hunger is natural scarcity. That, in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced. Certainly today sufficient food is not produced, but this is beside the point. What we need to know is whether or not, in the present state of scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the whole population of the world.

There can be no doubt about the answer to this question: agronomists and other scientists who have studied the problem are all agreed that the world has the potential to produce enough food to adequately feed its present population, and more.

Here, for instance, is the view of one of the contributors to a special issue of the Scientific American on Food and Agriculture in September 1976. In his article on “The Development of Agriculture in Developing Countries" W. David Hopper writes:

  As one considers the tropical farming world and the technology now available or soon to be available, there can be no grounds for pessimism about the latent potential of the world to feed increasing numbers of people for a long period ahead. Whether that latent potential will be harnessed to the benefit of man is the question.

  It is important to recognise that the world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the “environment". The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends on the will and the actions of men.

World malnutrition and starvation, then, is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised.

World society everywhere rests on the basis of the monopoly of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by minorities, either privately as individuals (as generally in the West) or collectively through the state (as generally in countries like Russia and China). As a result the world’s resources are used to produce wealth, not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

Each economic or political unit (enterprise or state) into which the world is divided is in competition with every other such unit, both to acquire raw materials as cheaply as possible and to sell its products as profitably as possible. This economic competition brings into being economic forces — the world market — which are beyond the control of any of the competitors and to which in the end they must submit.

It is in fact the world market that rules the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control it has much more power than any national government and forces governments to comply with its economic laws whether they want to or not. At the moment the world market is in the depression phase of its economic cycle, an economic fact about which governments can do nothing and to which they must adapt their economic policies. In other words, as the French Minister for Economic Affairs, Jacques Delors (who speaks from first-hand experience) has put it. the world "is in the grip of forces which nobody masters" (Club de la presse, 19 December 1982).

It is this anarchical world market system of artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law which governs production everywhere is “no profit, no production”. Which means that if there is no profit to be made from producing and selling a good then that good will not be produced, even if people desperately need it. As the mass of the unemployed or underemployed in the so-called Third World do not have any money incomes and therefore do not constitute a market, they do not count for the present system of production geared only to meeting profitable market demand. Their very real human need for food is not “effective”, to use the jargon of modern economics, so they are badly fed and, in many cases, starve to death.

What makes matters worse is that under the present system every year, despite mass hunger, food is destroyed: fruits are left to rot, milk is poured down mines, coffee is used to fuel trains, and so on. From a human point of view this is quite scandalous but we are dealing with a system that has a logic other than the satisfaction of human needs, as is also shown by the well-established American policy of paying farmers not to grow food. The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe too has paid farmers to pull up trees and to slaughter cattle as a way of maintaining price and profit levels. But giving away these alleged "surpluses" is no solution. Quite the reverse, for within the context of a market system giving food away free makes matters worse by narrowing even further the market and so discouraging production.

The present world system is also one of organised waste — the most obvious being armaments — which is directly linked to the competitive, ever-raging struggle for profits. For, although in the end it is a state’s economic strength — its competitiveness — which enables it to succeed, its political strength — its armed clout — is also an important factor.

When a conflict arises (over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes, investments, outlets) it becomes a trial of strength and, even if the matter is settled peacefully by negotiation, the outcome still depends on the relative strengths of the two sides. The Labour Foreign-Minister-who-never-was, Aneurin Bevan, once expressed this fact of present-day life quite well when, opposing CND at a Labour Party Conference, he said that he didn’t want to go into the conference chamber naked. No statesman wants to do this, which explains why each state (including those in the so-called Third World with underfed and starving populations) seeks to have the most powerful armed forces that it can afford. The waste of armaments is immense, not just the arms themselves and military expenditure generally but also the destruction caused by the wars which are always going on somewhere in the world.

If all this waste and destruction were eliminated and the resources involved redirected to constructive ends then the world could more than adequately feed, clothe and shelter its present population. World poverty, hunger and ignorance could be completely eliminated. But this would require the abolition of the present system of minority ownership and production for profit, and its replacement by a new system organised on a completely different basis.

During the early stages of the discussion of the law of the sea-bed. President Nixon (of all people) referred to the oceans as "the common heritage of all mankind”. The same phrase occurs in the treaties about Antarctica and the moon. These treaties declare that no state can establish territorial rights nor any individual private property rights over these areas — that, in other words, they belong to nobody. What is required is that this same principle should be extended and applied to the whole globe: all that is in and on the Earth should become the common heritage of all humanity.

On this basis there would be nothing to prevent the world’s people organising the production and distribution of wealth simply and solely to satisfy their needs as individuals and as a community. Production would no longer be restricted by the law of “no profit, no production” nor any longer governed by the blind economic force which the world market represents. Instead it would come under conscious, democratic social control and be oriented to what after all is its only rational end — satisfying human needs and wants. In these circumstances production could be rapidly increased to levels which would ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet was adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. The mass hunger and deaths from starvation which characterise the world today would remain only as bad memories of what no doubt will be commonly agreed to have been a barbarous past.

The Earth the common storehouse of all humanity; the production of wealth solely for use not sale or profit; a world without arms — is this an unrealistic Utopia? Not at all. It is the only logical and rational way to run the world given the present high stage of development of the forces of production. Because a solution is so simple and obvious does not mean that it won’t work.

Adam Buick

Prisoners on the roof (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even as prisons go, Albany is especially difficult to get out of — or into, for that matter. The high outer wall is topped by a cylindrical cowling, black and smooth, which would throw off a grappling hook or a rope, or anyone determined enough to get up there. Behind that is a sensitive ground zone, where an intruder would set the alarms going. Then another high wall, made from concrete sprayed onto a strong steel mesh. Dogs are on patrol along the walls and all movements are watched by cameras strung high above on slim steel posts. Other posts hold lights which spread a deathly orange, shadowless glow over the prison; when dark falls Albany can be seen for miles around.

Keys do not rattle in Albany as pervasively as in other prisons. Most of its doors are remotely controlled from a central security block. This has some advantages for the prisoners; after lock-up they can ask to be let out of their cells and, provided the central control approves, a man can be allowed to go to the lavatory, take a shower, or whatever. Albany does not, then, endure the noxious routine of slop-out, the emptying of chamber pots brimming with urine and faeces with which the older prisons begin their day.

Albany was built in the sixties, originally to hold men of low security category. It was converted, after the Mountbatten Report and then the Radzinowicz Report, into a dispersal prison, which was an official compromise with Mountbatten’s recommendation to build a fortress prison on the Isle of Wight to hold the hardest, most determined criminals in the country in relatively humane conditions behind an impregnable perimeter. The concept of dispersal meant that men serving very, very long sentences — life several times, perhaps, or with a judge's recommendation that they stay inside for twenty or thirty years — share a prison with others doing only a few years.

Albany began its life with the declared intention of being a place where prisoners existed in what was called "constructive tension”, the meaning of which was obscure but fuelled many a seminar on enlightened penal measures. In any case the policy could not survive the prison's change of role and in place of “constructive tension" Albany offered other things. It was a clean, modern prison with good sports facilities — a “proper" prison where “you know where you stand — you get nothing so you don't ask for anything". Outside the cell blocks it has an open aspect, with views of distant green hills, unlike other prisons where grey walls loom over everything. But at the same time it was regarded as the end of the road of the prison system; men went there with little hope of even the gestures towards “rehabilitation” which the Home Office feels obliged to make.

There is another way in which Albany differs from the older British prisons. In those stark, crumbling, often verminous, relics of Victorian moral correction it is common for three men to have to live in a cell barely big enough to accommodate one for nearly twenty-three hours out of every day. The tension caused by such overcrowding is often assumed to be the cause of much of the trouble in prisons. Certainly, it provides a handy excuse for the Home Office, who can represent it as a problem not of their making; there are so many people in prison because they commit offences and because the courts send them to prison rather than applying other sentences.

But these older, overcrowded prisons do not have serious trouble, on the scale of the recent riot and rooftop protest at Albany. Indeed, every major disturbance at British prisons in recent years has been at establishments where there is no overcrowding. This was so at Parkhurst in 1969, at Hull and Gartree and again at Parkhurst and at Albany in more recent times. Even the trouble at Wormwood Scrubs, where there is overcrowding, in 1979 (which is more accurately described as a riot by the prison officers rather than by the prisoners) was in the long term wing, where all the men are held in single cells.

What then caused the riot at Albany? It is a place of instantly palpable tension. Many of the prisoners there are what the Home Office categorises as hardened criminals, who have committed their offences with some deliberation, accepting the risks involved. This applies not just to the likes of professional bank robbers but also to the politically motivated offenders such as the IRA bombers. Between these on the one hand and the prison authorities on the other there exists a state of persistent antagonism. There is communication of a sort between each side but only as shells communicate across No Man's Land. Some of these prisoners will tell you — as they have themselves perhaps been told by a judge — that they are at war with society (we shall return to this in a moment) and that for them society is represented by the prison.

For the most part this war is a matter of sniping or trench raids; only occasionally does it burst out into a full scale battle. Frustration and repression is breathed daily by the prisoner, like gas in shell holes, and prisons are not places designed to relieve tension. When the frustration reaches an explosive level — and when there are enough determined, or desperate, men with little to lose and ready to give vent to it — then there is the material for a battle. The predictable response to a riot is a more stringent application of the frustrations which aggravated it in the first place. When the protesters eventually came off the roof at Albany they were immediately whisked away, in scaled vans with a heavy escort, to other prisons to be punished.

It is expected that all the political parties of capitalism will have a readily available policy on what they call Law and Order. This may entail harsher laws and punishments or some administrative reforms which do little more than shift the official responsibility for dealing with offenders from one agency to another — like the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969, which was never fully implemented and parts of which have now been overtaken by the latest measure, the Criminal Justice Act 1982. It is the same with troublesome prisons — some experts are sure there should be more restrictive regimes such as the infamous Control Units at Wormwood Scrubs and Wakefield, while other experts favour more “rehabilitative” measures by which they usually mean at most short courses in painting or bricklaying. All such theories share a common motivation — the acceptance of capitalism’s class structure and the condition that one class must labour to the benefit of the other as a morality providing all that is needed for a happy, fulfilled human life.

This comfortable delusion is continually undermined by reality. There is no satisfaction in the drudgery of wage slavery. Class society offers no fulfilment — only alienation. It provokes conflict which is often expressed in forcible attempts at breaching the laws of property. Very, very few criminals have any conscious notion of what their offences actually represent. Far from being at war with society — with capitalist society — they are among the most ardent defenders of property rights, with the ambition to quickly gain enough of it to make it worth their while to defend. However complex criminal motivation, it is essentially a reaction to deprivation, to a socially repressed life, to an inability to attain to some norm of capitalism such as a stable family. So the reaction emerges as anti-social. by offending against this social system's most representative, cherished and defended feature — the rights and privileges of property.

Prisons are not, then, simply places where people are confined. They are monuments to the inhumanity of a social system which exists on the repression of the majority by the minority. They bear witness that the majority are deceived into the belief that this repression is so much in their interests that they should themselves work, as police officers, prison officers, servicemen, to impose it. So the sentence which the working class serve under capitalism — to be exploited, degraded, murdered — is self-administered. And there is no time off for good conduct.

Blogger's Note:

This article was unsigned but I'm 95% sure it was written by Ivan who, because of his employment, was unable to attach his name to it  . . . even his 'pen-name'.

Material World: Hamas High Dramas (2021)

The Material World Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

As a result of the recent conflict, many supporters of the Palestinian cause portray Hamas as gallant freedom-fighters up against Israel’s military might. While, in turn, the pro-Israel Zionist lobby depict Hamas as the super-villains. Many readers will be surprised that Hamas exists through the acquiescence and collusion of the Israeli state which appears to adhere to policies of better the foe you know, keep your friends close but your enemies closer and divide to conquer.

The origins of Hamas have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin. Not only was he allowed to openly spread his Islamist message while Israel was conducting assassinations of members of the PLO, but Yassin was also permitted to form Mujama al-Islamiya as an official charity that would eventually evolve into Hamas (on.wsj.com/3wDFzfV).

Yitzhak Segev, the then governor of Gaza, has said he was in regular contact with Yassin, ‘We had no problems with him.’ Segev actually arranged for the Muslim cleric to have hospital treatment in Israel. Segev told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counterbalance to a shared enemy, the secular leftists, hoping Hamas would become an alternative to the PLO, a need that grew greater when the PLO started negotiating the two-state solution. The Islamic militants accused it of treachery and this suited Israel at the time who wished to keep building Jewish-Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Like Baron Frankenstein, Israel spawned a monster over which it lost control. Sheikh Yassin was assassinated in 2004 by missiles from a helicopter.

Old history? Not so. Israel still indirectly facilitates the funding of Hamas to this day.

‘In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 News, former Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman revealed details about a secret visit to Qatar by Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen and the Israeli military’s chief of Southern Command Herzl Halevi to allegedly ‘beg the Qataris to keep pouring money into Hamas’ (bit.ly/2TfCww2).

A process confirmed by the Reuters report:

 ‘Qatar, with Israeli acquiescence, has provided substantial funding to Hamas in recent years, by some tallies, millions of dollars a month, chiefly to pay administrative salaries, some of which can then be siphoned off… A guy from Qatar comes every month with his suitcases of money accompanied by Israeli soldiers to pay Hamas administrative staff…’ said the senior European official (reut.rs/3wFhZiU).

Moshé Machover, a close observer of events in the region, wrote in the Weekly Worker how Netanyahu explained why Israel permits the financial support of Hamas:

  “…whoever wishes to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy – to separate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria…” (bit.ly/3i2KsLw).

A common refrain is that it is for the Palestinians themselves to determine the methods of resistance, not ourselves, and they have chosen Hamas as their representatives.

Has Hamas ended the 14-year long siege? Has it provoked Israel to invade with ground forces for Hamas fighters to inflict heavy casualties upon the IDF? Has it overcome Israel’s defences when several hundred rockets fizzle out before even reaching Israeli territory and of those that do, 90 per cent are shot being down by Iron Dome? Has Israel’s ‘self-defence’ been a financial cost to it considering that the USA pays Israel’s bills?

What Hamas rockets did do was to distract from East Jerusalem and the Palestinian-Israeli protests across Israel. Some critics suggest it was a power-play by Hamas, not an act of solidarity. They want to present themselves as the leadership of the Israeli-Palestinians and protectors of the holy places.

Hamas could have revived the March of Return to the fences as a non-violent alternative to the very clear suicidal strategy of armed struggle, although even that tactic was not without a likely cost in lives from past experience of Israel army snipers. Regardless, Hamas wanted a media event of Israeli bombings and mass misery and Israel, for its domestic politics, obliged them.

Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has said, referring to the Israeli bombing, ‘Air strikes in such densely populated areas resulted in a high level of civilian fatalities and injuries, as well as the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure’. If deemed to be indiscriminate and disproportionate in their impact on civilians ‘Such attacks may constitute war crimes’.

Equally pertinent, Bachelet went on in her statement to say the Hamas tactic of locating rocket launchers in densely populated civilian areas, and firing rockets which were indiscriminate and failed to distinguish between military and civilian objects, ‘…constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law…’

Both sides in this war caused innocent civilians to die and the only difference being that Israel killed far more than Hamas.

People have taken to the streets for the cessation of violence and ‘Boycott, Divest and Sanction’ has become a popular policy for campaigners, but in many situations, there are problems in this capitalist world that have no solution. The Israel-Palestine deadlock may well be one of those where we have to await the creation of a cooperative commonwealth. In the meantime, for the sake of stopping the killings and destruction, there is an opportunity for the Palestinians and Israeli government to agree to the Hamas offer of the hudna, an Islamic form of a long-term and renewable armistice where both parties mutually accept the pre-1967 borders.

But even that is also a very distant hope according to many informed commentators.

ALJO

Cooking the Books: The Tories and Free Trade (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defending the proposed Free Trade deal (no tariffs, no quotas) with Australia in spite of the harm to British farmers, Boris Johnson told a meeting of Tory MPs ‘We are the party of Peel’ (Times, 21 May). Sir Robert Peel was prime minister in the government that brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. These laws, by imposing tariffs on the import of wheat and other cereals, benefitted the landlord class since the high price of wheat encouraged the use of less fertile land, so increasing the rent on all wheat-producing land.

Peel was a Tory but his move split the Tory party and the Peelites eventually became part of the Liberal party. Most Tories followed Disraeli in opposing repeal on behalf of the landlord class. In the early 1900s the Tories were campaigning for Tariff Reform, i.e., the imposition of tariffs on imported manufactured goods.

Johnson’s historical ignorance is bad enough, but that of Liz Truss, the International Trade Secretary, is appalling. She invokes not just Peel but John Bright and Richard Cobden. On 3 June last year she tweeted ‘Today is the birthday of Richard Cobden, champion of free trade, manufacturing and founder of the Anti-Corn Law League’. Last October, she declared that she wanted the Board of Trade ‘to become the Cobden, Peel and Bright of the twenty-first century’. In an article in the Sunday Express (14 February) she quoted Cobden as hailing Free Trade as ‘the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history’.

Bright and Cobden were the political leaders of the industrial capitalists in their struggle against the landlord class for political and economic supremacy. They were implacable opponents of everything the Tories stood for (imperialism, military preparations, aristocratic privilege). The repeal of the Corn Laws was a key event in British economic history but hardly the greatest revolution in world history. In any event most Tories opposed it.

Marx lived through these events and naturally commented on them. In January 1848 he gave a speech in Brussels on free trade in which he said:

  ‘The repeal of the Corn Laws in England is the greatest triumph of Free Trade in the 19th century. (…) Cheap food, high wages, this is the sole aim for which English Free-Traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm has already spread to their brethren on the Continent. Generally speaking, those who wish for Free Trade desire it in order to alleviate the condition of the working class. But, strange to say, the people for whom cheap food is to be procured at all costs are very ungrateful. (…) The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell.’

He ended by stating that he was in favour of free trade but only because it would bring about a more rapid development of capitalism and the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class and so hasten the social revolution. ‘It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade’.

Johnson and Truss are not justifying the Australia trade deal on the grounds of ‘Cheap Food, High Wages’. The deal is essentially only symbolic and any reduction in food prices that it might bring would be very slight. But we can expect this argument to be used to justify other trade deals, especially that with the US. But it will be as invalid as it was in the 1840s. Cheaper food will mean cheaper wages, leaving workers no better off.

Proper Gander: Another Problematic ‘Class System’ (2021)

The Proper Gander Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Paralympics. 

A prestigious opportunity for people to challenge themselves and, through hard work and determination, prove what they are capable of, smash records and win tournaments. But in reality? A cynical opportunity to make money by exploiting the way athletes are ‘classified’, which is ‘flawed, easily manipulated and lacking credibility’. This is the claim made by a recent edition of BBC1’s Panorama: Paralympics: The Unfair Games? Presenter Richie Powell competed as a wheelchair racer in the 1992 Paralympics, only three years after being paralysed from the chest down in a road accident. He speaks with athletes who, like him, have found sport to be a way to empower themselves and not be held back by the conditions they are living with. One of them is para-swimmer Levana Hanson, who explains how her confidence grew after joining a swimming club whose other members ‘didn’t see the disability, they saw me as a person’. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm was later dented by her experience, echoed by the other interviewees, of being a victim of the Paralympics’ system of classifying its competitors.

Taking place soon after the Olympics, the next Paralympic Games are due to start in Tokyo in August, having been postponed from 2020. The event began as the International Wheelchair Games held at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire, timed to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics. Its founders aimed to use sport as therapy for ex-armed forces personnel with spinal injuries inflicted during the Second World War, and to integrate people with disabilities into wider society. The games as we know them today began in 1960, becoming larger and grander with each event. As more athletes with a wider range of medical issues participated in more tournaments, the process of deciding who should compete against who became more complicated. The current system of ‘functional classification’ was introduced in the 1980s, regulated by the International Paralympic Committee. Robert Shepherd, the former British Head Classifier explains that this system is based on testing and categorising ability, so athletes with similar capabilities compete against each other. Richie Powell was classified as a ‘T53’ for track athletes unable to use their core muscles. The lower the number, the greater the level of impairment. Some athletes and coaches manoeuvre their way round the system to get classified as a lower number than they should qualify for, so that they have the advantage of competing against people with more severe impairments.

One tactic is to get assessed by classifiers with a reputation for basing their decisions on negotiation rather than by medical tests. Another technique, apparently widespread among Australian Paralympic wannabes is to have cold showers or over-exercise before a classification assessment in order to emphasise their disability. The ex-Paralympians interviewed on the programme describe how they noticed that they were increasingly competing against, and losing to, athletes with less serious conditions. Hand cyclist Liz McTernan says that her sport is now ‘for the least disabled people that can get in the lowest category possible and win as many medals as possible’. In a bland response, the International Paralympic Committee said it found no instances which ‘could reasonably allege intentional misrepresentation’.

Of course, the motivation for those who manipulate the classification system to increase their chances of winning is money. Athletes and their associated staff rely on funding from lottery and government grants, and the more medals they win, the more funding they get. Their incomes are boosted by sponsorship and endorsement deals, which again hinge on how successful a sold-out athlete is. Ex-Paralympian Bethany Woodward argues that the drive to make athletes more marketable leads to more able-bodied people participating and winning in the Paralympics, ‘cleansing the sport of those very people that it was built for’. She adds that when she and others complained, the authorities told them not to speak out about classification and repeatedly threatened them with legal action. In a bland response, the International Paralympic Committee said it recognised that some athletes have concerns about classifications but ‘sports classes can feature athletes with different impairments’ where there is a ‘similar impact on … ability to practice’.

The ‘greatest scandal ever to hit the Paralympics’, as Richie Powell tells us, was what the Spanish basketball team did in the 2000 games. Shortly after the team won the tournament for people with intellectual disabilities, one of its members revealed himself as an undercover journalist. And his scoop was that most of the team had not undergone medical tests to ensure they had a disability (which in this category meant having an IQ of 75 or less) and were therefore faking their conditions. Following investigations, the team was stripped of their medals and all Paralympic competitions for people with intellectual disabilities were temporarily suspended.

However many bland responses the International Paralympic Committee dishes out, and however the classification process is regulated, the Paralympics, like any institution, can’t escape being moulded by the money system, and nor can the athletes taking part. The classification system itself involves reducing people to numbers, appropriately. The lure of financial gain is bound to push some people to find underhand ways to win. Methods such as exaggerating or inventing a disability are particularly dismissive of athletes genuinely striving to prove themselves, a reminder of how capitalism’s priorities alienate us from each other.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: The Common Market. In or Out. Does it Really Matter? (2021)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

It seems that the government will not have an easy ride into the Common Market, whatever happens at the negotiations. In this country there is a strengthening lobby which is pledged to fight the British entry. One theme which this lobby is playing is the fact that the people have not been consulted on the issue. This is not, of course, entirely true; anyone who voted for either Labour or Tory in the last election thinking that he was opposing Britain joining the EEC must have a serious mental blockage. More to the point, when were the people ever consulted on this kind of issue? When was there a referendum on a declaration of war? When did we have the chance to vote on issues like racist immigration Bills? Anti-trade union laws? So why make an exception over the Common Market? Could it be that the Labour Party are seeing in the issue the chance to grab quite a few votes and know that a middle line policy will grab them all the more and all the quicker? It is not unknown for issues like the Common Market to be obscured by a propaganda smokescreen behind which a capitalist party makes its attack. And the talk about a referendum is no more than a smokescreen put out to hide the essential fact that workers have no interests in the issue; whether Britain goes in or not will have no fundamental effect on our standing as workers.

(….)

How would you suggest we vote in any referendum on the Common Market?

The government don’t want to risk one in Britain for fear that the anti-German and imperialist prejudices stirred up in the past might result in a vote for “NO”. But in Ireland there’s got to be one. We suggest abstention, or rather rejection of the false choice by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across the ballot paper.

(Socialist Standard, July 1971)

Editorial: Neither London nor Dublin but World Socialism (2021)

Editorial from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Northern Ireland statelet, also referred to as the North of Ireland, the ‘occupied six counties’ or Ulster depending on your point of view. In April, this anniversary was greeted with serious rioting in Protestant working-class areas of Belfast. Three causes were given – anger at the new hard border established in the Irish Sea by the Northern Ireland ‘Protocol’ as part of the final Brexit agreement with the EU, resentment at Sinn Fein politicians not being prosecuted for allegedly breaking Covid rules while attending a funeral of an IRA man, and the young rioters allegedly being put up to it by local loyalist gang leaders who wanted cover to protect their criminal activities. There are fears of further rioting during this month’s marching season.

But these explanations fail to consider the wider context in which this social unrest is taking place. The new statelet was born in 1921 in the aftermath of the Irish war of independence. In the North, pogroms were incited against the Catholic population leaving over five hundred dead, mainly Catholics. Thousands of Catholic workers were expelled from their workplaces in the engineering and shipyard industries. The Northern Unionist capitalists, anxious that the Northern industries centred around Belfast and Derry stay within the markets of the then British empire, agreed to a separate state in the North remaining in the UK. Not all unionists envisaged a state that marginalised its Roman Catholic minority. Edward Carson declared ‘from the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority’. James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had other ideas when he stated ‘All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state’. Under his watch, constituencies were gerrymandered to create Unionist majorities, the state forces, the notorious B-Specials and the RUC, were set up to keep the Catholic working class in their place. The Unionist ruling class reckoned that they needed to secure the support of the Protestant working class, by ensuring that the best paid jobs in the shipbuilding and engineering industries went to Protestant workers.

Although Northern Ireland has since been reformed, the religious sectarianism imprinted on its political DNA has not been fully erased.

It has often been pointed out that the Good Friday Agreement assumes a frictionless border between the North and South. Another less visible assumption was that the capitalist economy which was booming at the time in 1998 would continue to do so generating more jobs and higher incomes for the working class. However, this was never going to be the case. The capitalist economy tanked in 2008 with the resulting austerity and again with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Many workers have been plunged into greater poverty. Given the poisonous mixture of systemic sectarianism and economic insecurity, it is no wonder that violent clashes have occurred where workers turn on each other.

The truth is that Protestant and Catholic workers have more in common with each other than they have with the capitalist class. Protestant workers have no interest in a Northern Ireland linked with the UK and Catholic workers have no interest in a united Ireland. They both have an interest in establishing socialism.

Editorial: This Fearsome World (1960)

Editorial from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in a fearsome and threatening world.

A world in which the two dominant capitalist Powers, Russia and the United States, compete frenziedly with each other to pile up huge stocks of guided missiles and atomic warheads. A world of four-minute “count-downs” and weapons which can be projected even from under the sea to land on targets thousands of miles away with pin-point accuracy. Rivalling these in frightfulness are other abominations—chemical poisons and bacteria, as well as viruses capable of carrying diseases hitherto unknown. Some of these are so virulent, according to recent reports, that one speck would suffice to wipe out the world’s population.

Vast sums of money are spent on armaments of all kinds, only for these to be superseded in a matter of years by others even deadlier and more costly. Some weapons, such as missiles and aircraft, can be out-of-date by the time they become “operational,” or even before. Millions and millions of pounds are wasted by the smaller Powers such as Britain on fiascoes like the Blue Streak, or by France in setting off insignificant atom-bombs in the middle of the Sahara. In such ways are Mankind’s capacities for scientific achievement perverted and mis-used under capitalism.

Apparently unmoved by all these signs of a society gone mad, the peoples of the world go about their daily business, seeking to forget or ignore the grim dark shadow that hangs over their lives.

But capitalism will not allow them to forget or ignore its terrible realities. As though to drag them willy-nilly to face these realities came the news that the Russians had shot down an American plane caught spying over their territory. Denying the story at first, the Americans admitted the accusation when they realised the Russians had captured the pilot alive. And then gradually the details came out—not from the Americans, be it noted, who still took refuge in saying as little as possible—but from our newspaper pundits who had been so quiet previously.

The Observer proceeded to tell us that it was not a weather plane, as the Americans had first contended, but a specially-built Lockheed jet with abnormally large wings (presumably for gliding long distances with the engine cut off) and capable of cruising at 550 miles an hour. Such planes, it added, had been mapping Russian territory for months and this one was not the first to have been hit.

The Guardian took up the story to recall that there hud been similar incidents in 1958 involving the shooting-down of American planes over Russia. This incident in its opinion was “much like the affair of the British frogman who was presumably sent to have a look at a Russian cruiser at the time of the Bulganin-Khruschev visit to Portsmouth—a reference to the ill-fated Commander Crabb whose disappearance caused so much speculation but which was never cleared up.

It was left to Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express, however, to brush aside all the hypocrisy by quite bluntly saying that ‘'though Intelligence is a dirty game every nation plays it. Why, we even spy on our allies.” According to Pincher, British reconnaissance planes had only recently been briefed to fly over French territory to monitor their atom-bomb tests. And as for Britain’s own tests in the Pacific, he added, they had been monitored by both the Americans and the Russians, the latter from submarines.

Of the few who reflected on the possible serious consequences of all these manoeuvrings. Paul Johnson in the Evening Standard noted the significant fact, that it was Khruschev himself who had given the order to destroy the aircraft. It was for Khruschev personally to decide, according to Johnson, whether the plane was just another intelligence mission or really the harbinger of a full-scale nuclear attack. In the event, “his nerve seems to have held, and he chose merely to destroy the aircraft rather than unleash the retaliatory deluge.”

Over-dramatic—and quite possibly an exaggeration of the situation. But the essential warning is there. Nobody can be certain that one day someone might not press the button, even in error, and “unleash the retaliatory deluge.”

A fearsome, threatening world, indeed—which only Socialism can transform info a secure and peaceful one.