Finance and Industry: What is an incomes policy? (1966)

The Finance and Industry column from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is an incomes policy?

Last month we examined the wealth of people at the time they leave this world and found, in the majority of cases, that they had little to leave. Could it be that working on the basis “you can’t take it with you" they had the wealth at one stage, but had frittered it away on a merry-go-round of solo, scotch and sex? Alas, the answer, as they say in the best American war films, is negative.

For our evidence on this point we again turn to the report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for the year 1964-65, where we find the table of personal incomes for the year ended 5 April. 1964, on page 82: —

It is difficult to understand how so many people enjoy such affluent pursuits as Continental holidays and motor cars, until it is realised that of 12,780,900 married men included in the above table 36 per cent of them send their 4,592.000 wives out to work.

We do not intend to join the argument here as to whether the place of a wife is in her home. But the evidence does suggest that there is a large number of families who might be homeless if the wife did net bring home that additional pay packet.

There arc some ladies of course who are not even bothered by the thought of losing their job because of the Selective Employment Tax as they are already in the £20,000 per year class.

What can a government armed with an “incomes policy" do about such incomes? If words were the answer it would all be resolved by now. But the words have to be translated into actions that are consistent with capitalism. And the only thing consistent about capitalism is that the few will continue to exploit the many—just as long as the many are prepared to stand for it.

Them and us

One thing abundantly evident from the previous item is that we still live in a world of them and us. The wide disparity of incomes coldly tabulated in columns of figures can be confirmed upon examining the dual quality of commodities produced, even those satisfying such basic human requirements as a house to live in.

The latest occasional bulletin issued by the Co-operative Permanent Building Society is an analysis of the 2,802 people to whom they advanced mortgages, during the quarter December, 1965-February, 1966, to purchase new dwellings. From the survey Mr. Average emerged as 28 years of age, producing a deposit of £846 toward a house costing £3,864; and earns £24 14s. 0d. per week from which to pay a mortgage of £20 9s. 0d. per month for approximately 25 years.

As two-thirds of these workers were buying homes for the first time they were probably pleased to get them before the increase of “hundreds of pounds” threatened by the National Federation of Building Trade Employers in response to the government's proposals to raise the standards required of building and house equipment.

If this is how some younger members of the working class are trying to acquire a piece of the property-owning- democracy—and you will notice there is a prejudice against the older ones—how does the enemy fare?

The London Evening Standard carries a property news page, and on July 7 it had items on the following which might be of interest to you. A fifth-floor flat overlooking Hyde Park; the owner. Val Parnell, only asks £37,000. Are you a top executive fed up with commuting and want to move back into London? Your solution is in course of erection at Enismore Gardens, price range £35,000-£68,000. Perhaps you are only a younger executive, then unfortunately you must commute to the riverside at Chiswick, mooring fees are £13,000-£I8,000. Did you enjoy canvassing for the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Hampstead at the last election? Then you will be sorry you missed the eight bedroomed house sold recently for £40,000 by Sir Arthur Porritt, the Queen’s surgeon.

Do you still think there is an equality in poverty?

146 Shopping days to Christmas

Most newspapers make claims on the earnings of their readers in the scramble to attract advertising. And although many products are advertised in most newspapers there are some which only appear in those papers generally thought to be read by the higher income groups.

In case you missed the Sunday Times of July 3, we would like to bring the following to your notice, which might be of some help when preparing your present list for Christmas.

Firstly, Dupont have a new range of lighters selling at £10 I5s.-£165 and they even boast that “a few people can afford a Dupont."

Secondly, if you are fed up with the old plastic salt and pepper pots used  by your mother-in-law, nip along to Gerrard, the crown jewellers; they have a silver set for £44 10s. Or perhaps she would prefer the sauceboat for £24 10s., the sugar dredger for £25 or the coffee pot for £101 10s.

When you go, please don’t show your working class origin. Don’t ask for trading stamps.

Ray Guy.

The Passing Show: The Lady and the Tramp . . . and all that (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lady and the Tramp . . . and all that

Ryde on the Isle of Wight on one of the many disappointingly wet and blustery days of an English summer. Holidaymakers sit disconsolately in the numerous Egg and Chip cafes, or gaze gloomily from the seedy seafront shelters at the unfriendly grey sky, bored stiff.

But there is one man who seems quite indifferent to the weather or to the unfriendly stares of some, who no doubt resent the smell that clings about him. He is a tramp, a caricature of a human being, with a mane of iron-grey hair and big blue eyes, whose battered clothes are secured about him with strips of tape and lumps of coarse string. There on a low wall he sits in the open, doggedly reading an old copy of The Times.

In a pub that evening, a brassy haired woman expresses her disgust at the mere existence of such people, and listening to the talk, you learn that this one is always on the island, wandering from place to place throughout the year. Unlike many tramps, though, he is by no means penniless because (or so the story goes) his family pay him enough money to keep him out of their way.

But what the lady in the pub overlooks is that there are a few thousand like him in Great Britain alone (and the number is growing) and she probably never stops to ask herself why this is so. Perhaps she feels that he is an affront to her meagre dignity, or perhaps he is an uncomfortable reminder of the loneliness that is always stalking in the background for all of us under capitalism, so that no one knows just when it will engulf him.

Tramps, it has been said, are what they are because they cannot face the harsh realities of everyday life in the modern world. So they take to the road and go on the run from it all, rarely staying long in one place, alone with their rags and their thoughts, objects of a mixed pity, fear and resentment from the population in general, and condescension from the “do gooders" in particular.

There’s certainly something to be said for such a theory, though of course it does not go far enough, and misses out a very important fact. Our man in Ryde notwithstanding, the mass of tramps are very poor—a lot of them from the very lowest income groups in the working class—and it is one of the big factors which makes them turn and run. For them, loneliness is not new by the time they start their wanderings, and in many cases it is a choice of near-destitutions, static or mobile. To sleep under a hedge with newspapers for bedclothes, or alone in a damp and dingy room with crumbling walls and vermin for company— and the worry of finding next week’s rent. The loneliness of their lives is theirs in ample measure, of course, but as one vagrant said to a survey interviewer, “it’s not so bail when you're out in the open . . . Four walls bring it home to you . . .” 

But don’t go making the mistake that loneliness is for tramps only. It is fast becoming a really big problem of the sixties. Armand Georgés in a little booklet Modern Loneliness has estimated that there are over four million lonely people in Britain and it is a terrible fact that it affects all age groups, from children to “senior citizens”.

This booklet is not a very satisfactory work and barely skims over the problem, but it does at least touch on the causes, such as: —

The uniformity of council house estates . . . the demands of work and economic difficulties produce a feeling of boredom and boredom is the first symptom of the the disease . . . 

Seventy years of age, he lived in digs. When he became ill he went into hospital, but although he recovered he still remains there because his landlady will not take him back. She has let his room . . .

Mr. Georgés admits that loneliness “cannot penetrate useful work and emotional stability" but further than this he doesn’t go, perhaps because he is vaguely aware of the difficulty of attaining these conditions in the world of today. So he contents himself with suggestions of more clubs, meeting places, etc., and a government “ministry for the aged".

So let us say what we think of the problem. Loneliness, boredom and emotional strains are a product of private property society, and modern capitalism has brought them to a terrifying pitch. It has been said that we are all on our own in capitalism and it is not difficult to see why. In such a set-up, we are all thrown into ceaseless competition with each other so that satisfactory contact between human beings is a rarity.

The problem is accentuated in the big towns, of course, where the narrow and unfulfilling lives of workers is so much in evidence, like the couple above. And for those who are lonely, the very bigness of the towns, crammed to capacity with other humans (mainly workers) though they are, restricts their chances of ever belonging anywhere. It is a poverty in human friendship and contact, a direct result of poverty in the means of life from which most or us suffer.

Sing something simple

An old copy of the Gibraltar Chronicle dropped out of a file the other day and promptly found its way into my pocket. It's dated Nov. 9th, 1949 and what do you think appears on the front page? Well, among other things is a bold headline: “T.U.C. leaders will fully support Govt’s policy". There follows a report of the T.U.C.’s decision in London “after seven weeks of anxious discussion” to “give full support to the Labour Government’s policy of greater production at less cost". This, by the way, was after the devaluation of Sterling—with its effect of price increases—yet still the T.U.C. was prepared to recommend an "even greater effort to keep demands for higher wages under restraint . . .”

Well, it's old news now. but it does us no harm to look back a few years and see the similarity between ideas then and now. The T.U.C. seems to have learned precious little in the past seventeen years, if a statement by their general secretary George Woodcock is any guide:

If in the early days you can emphasise increased productivity or prices or social justice as the main objectives, you are just kidding yourself. You can, as we are doing, get some degree of incomes restraint, rough and ready and unscientific though it is. You can expect to do that quickly. The other things will take time.

Did 1 say that little had been learnt? If a minus quantity, of knowledge were possible, Mr. Woodcock and the T.U.C. would certainly have it.

Bigger and better bedbugs

When we were kids my parents waged a long and largely futile battle against bedbugs in our poky terraced house in London. Fumigation, creosote, and even blow-lamps all had a temporary effect only, and there they were as thick as ever in a week or two. Wc got rid of them eventually because for some months during the blitz, we didn't use the bedrooms. I suppose they all died of starvation, or went looking elsewhere.

Now what do you think of a Guardian report of June 6th? The U.S. is planning to use bedbugs against the Vietcong. But these will be specially bred for the purpose and won’t be starved to death so easily. Just look at this revolting account.

". . . Plans are based on the fad that bedbugs scream with excitement at the prospect of feeding on human flesh. So what Mr. McNamara's whizz-kids are up to is trying to produce a sound amplification system which would enable the G.l. . . . to hear the anticipatory squeals of a captive bedbug as it detects the Vietcong lying in ambush ahead . . . A large and hungry bedbug will . . . register the presence of a man some 200 yards to its front or side while ignoring the person carrying it in a special capsule".

When we have pointed to the brutality and degradation of capitalism’s wars, understandably we have tended to stress the bigger horrors like nuclear bombs, but it is perhaps the so-called smaller things like this which illustrate the depths to which men sink their dignity in the cause of the profit motive.

Gaspers

Comrade Mao Tse Tung is the greatest genius of our lime. Rarely has history seen such a revolutionary leader as Mao Tse Tung . . . (Peking People's Daily 15.6.66). '

There is not and never was a man in the world of so varied, so rich, so fruitful and so omnipresent a genius . . . (Tribute to Stalin, by Moscow Radio. May Day 1951),

Mr. Robinson said . . . he would prefer a bigger building programme for the (hospital) service . . . but the amount of money available had to depend on the economic progress of the country. (Guardian 25.6.66).

The very idea of auto sales and auto profits has been built on a pile of corpses. (Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe At Any Speed, Guardian report 15.6.66).

In the foreseeable future, the only alternative future to an incomes policy is higher unemployment. (Guardian editorial 5.7.66).

I have never fell humiliated (T .U.C. General Secretary George Woodcock 5.7.66).

Eddie Critchfield

Manchester Evening News and an oddment (1966)

Party News from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the war the Socialist Party of Great Britain has contested the 1945 (1 candidate), 1950 (2), 1959 (1), 1964 (2) and 1966 (2) General Elections as well as four by-elections. We feel that this justifies our claim to be a serious political party and to be treated as such. For a time the papers used to describe our candidates as “Independents" when reporting results. After our protests this practice has now died, out as far as the national dailies are concerned but it still appears to exist in some provincial backwaters.

In reporting the results of the last election the Manchester Evening News described our candidate in Hampstead as an "Independent". A member living in Manchester immediately wrote to the editor pointing out this mistake only to get the reply that "we classify all sorts of ‘oddments' under the general title of "Ind." Our comrade wrote again. This time the reply suggested that a news agency was responsible. The matter was then taken up by our Executive Committee.

As it appeared that the news agency had in fact ’referred to us not as “Ind" but as "SPGB" a letter was sent to the editor of the Manchester Evening News demanding a correction. The letter for publication read:

"When publishing the General Election results on 1st April you stated that H. Baldwin was an Independent in the London Constituency of Hampstead. This, of course, was not correct. Mr. Baldwin stood as a candidate for the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB), an old established political Party, founded in 1904 and is, in fact, the only Socialist Party in this country”.

The letter was published on 8 June minus the “of course” and the last eleven words.

Letters: Russia & China (1966)

Letters to the Editors from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia & China

Dear Sir,

You state in your journals that China and Russia are state capitalist countries but this is different to what Engels had to say on capitalist countries:—

Active social forces work exactly like natural forces, blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them . . . and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders . . . With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community, and of each individual (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).

With Russian and Chinese plans for production this would surely mean that they are in no way capitalist.

Harold Brown, 

Carshalton, Surrey.

Reply:

It is true that we deny that Russia and China are socialist and describe them as state capitalist. We say this because we see in these places the basic features of capitalism, namely, class rule, production for sale and the wages system.

We don't of course believe that a quotation from Engels can settle anything. Even so we can't see how Mr. Brown's quotation helps this case at all. In the passages he quotes Engels is saying what socialists have always said: under capitalism where production is for sale anarchy reigns as it is the market and not society that controls production. As soon as the means of production are commonly owned production for sale is abolished and replaced by production for use. Production for use, by its very nature, involves planning for the various needs of people, both as individuals and as a community.

Mr. Brown implies that in Russia and China "social anarchy of production” has been replaced by the "social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual". We must ask him to prove this since what socialists mean by anarchy of production is the results of production for sale. And production for sale has most certainly not been abolished in Russia and China.

In fact in the passage following where Mr. Brown ends his quotation, Engels, discussing distribution in a socialist society, makes it quite clear that he is talking about the abolition of production for sale:

Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production—on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.

Direct appropriation means what it says: people (and society) get what they need not by buying them but by taking them directly.

Is this so in Russia and China?

In a later passage Engels is just as explicit:

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization.

Has commodity production (that is, production for sale) been done away with in Russia and China?

We think we have shown that the passage Mr. Brown quotes from Engels does not mean what he takes it to mean. We can only suggest that he reads the excellent socialist pamphlet that Socialism, Utopian and Scientific is once again, this time more carefully.

Editorial Committee.

Religion

Dear Sir,

I believe Socialists who attack religion are acting against the interests of the people and against the establishment of Socialism.

I am referring specifically to your article "Catholics In Confusion" in the April Socialist Standard. Of course there was much in that article which is true—where it describes the evil doings of some clergy— but evil doings are not religion they are just evil doings.

The point is that true religion is pro-Socialism and anti-capitalism. The Bible is very anti-usury which is the corner stone of capitalism.

Did not Jesus knock the rich money-lenders? He was in fact a Socialist as every decent religionist must be.

By all means knock bad religionists but praise the Socialist principles in true religion—such as brotherly love and compassion. There are many good Socialists who believe in God—for example the Rev. Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean. Indeed I would go so far as to say that to be a sincere believer in God one has to be a Socialist.

To be an out-and-out materialist is getting a bit old-fashioned. Universities (even in Russia) are devoting part of their efforts to research into such things as telepathy and prediction and even survival of the human soul after bodily death. 1 have had cast iron proof of such things as telepathy, prediction, yes and even survival.

There is no irreconcilable conflict between Socialism and religion.

H. Horwood,

London, N.W.9.

Reply:

Mr. Horwood claims that his is the true religion but so do the clergy whose "evil doings’' he condemns.

Usury is not the cornerstone of capitalism; it is only one branch of capitalism's structure which derives its unearned income from the surplus value produced by the working class. The basis of the workers' exploitation is not usury; it is private ownership of the means of wealth production.

Even if we accept the Bible story of Jesus turning the money-lenders out of the temple it does not alter the fact that the basis of religion belief in the supernatural and a life after death is directly opposed to Socialism.

The religious person accepts the conditions in this life because he thinks that there is a better life coming. His philosophy explains society in terms of "good" and “evil"; the Socialist explains it in means of society's economic development.

Dr. Hewlett Johnson is a well-known supporter of capitalism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. These countries are run by dictatorships which show little brotherly love and compassion to their political opponents.

Universities have been studying telepathy, life after death and so on for a very long time. Up to the present, despite all the investigations, there is no scientific proof whatever to support the claim that such things exist.

There is no reason to believe in the existence of a supernatural. This is the only life which we know of and Socialists work to make it the best possible, by establishing a humane world: In this, one of the barriers we meet is religion.

Editorial Committee.

Then and now

Recently I was presented with a bound volume of the Socialist Standard for 1911/1917. Reading of the events of those far-off days gives one a weird feeling of having been here before.

Of particular interest is the leading article of July 1911, which stated the attitude of the SPGB to the strike of the British Seamen's Union. The tangible and known enemies of the seamen were clearly the Shipmasters (the owners), the Liberal government and all their agencies. But their intangible, unknown enemies were their own leaders, officials. Labour M.P.s who were knifing them from behind.

Now the 1966 strike of the National Union of Seamen was certainly not premature—the last one, 55 years ago, seemed to have dispirited them thoroughly and laid them under a spell which lasted right through two major wars, through two “Brave New Worlds" and through all the intervening years of "good" and bad times.

From Australia it appears the seamen again had the usual open enemies to face as well as the Labour government and the TUC. Yet it must be conceded that this is the very set-up the seamen in particular, and the working class in general, so vigorously support.

Peter Furey, 

Melbourne, Australia.

New pamphlet on racism (1966)

Party News from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new Socialist Party pamphlet, entitled The Problem of Racism, is published this month. The previous pamphlet on this subject The Racial Problem, published in 1947 has been out of print for some time. The Problem of Racism is not just a revision it is a completely new pamphlet. In 1947 it was the Jewish Question that was prominent. Today it is the Colour Question. This change is taken into account in the new pamphlet which examines the colour question in Britain, America, South Africa and Rhodesia. There are chapters too on the scientific theory of race, the historical origins of racist theories and on African nationalism.

There is an unfortunate error. The reference on page 41 to Guyana should, of course, be to Guinea.

Pamphlet obtainable from Socialist Party (Dept. SR), 52 Clapham High St, London, SW4. Price 1/6.

Correction (1966)

From the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our attention has only just been drawn to an error in the Socialist Standard for October 1965 (Page 155) where the total increase of production since before the war was wrongly printed as “5 per cent”. This should have been "60 per cent”, the figure already given in the Socialist Standard for January 1964. (Page 10).

Voice From The Back: House hunting (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

House hunting

As young working class couples contemplate marriage and start looking for a house or flat that they can afford to buy or rent, it might be worth them considering how members of the capitalist class deal with their “housing problem”:

“This mansion in Surrey cost £70m. It has 30 bedrooms, five swimming pools and its own cinema . . . By American standards, of course, the Surrey mansion is at the mean end of the scale. This is a country where Larry Ellison takes on Bill Gates for the title of top cheese by building a bigger house than him. (Gates recently announced that he was extending his lavish $100m home near Seattle, to which Ellison replied with a $150m Japanese style mansion in California, twice the size of the White House and complete with artificial lakes, waterfalls and 3,750 tons of hand-chiselled Chinese granite for the retaining walls.) The world’s largest private house is believed to be the New York industrialist R.A.Rennert’s mansion Fair Field, which is 100 miles east of Manhattan and boasts 29 bedrooms, 42 bathrooms, a 164 seat theatre, two bowling alleys and an English-style pub.” (Guardian, 15 June.)

A cancerous system

Commenting on an article in a previous issue two letters to the editor in Time magazine (25 June) show that workers as far apart as Istanbul and Massachusetts have a pretty good idea about how capitalism operates :

“If there really is a war against cancer, as you contend then why not attack this disease on the battlefield? Why not go after its supply lines of tobacco, food additives and pollution? The drive for corporate profits generates many of the products that can cause this illness, and even more profits are made in treating it. Meanwhile, cancer victims fall by the wayside as collateral damage. Chris Glover (Istanbul)”. “Finally, the breakthrough in cancer drugs that we have long been searching for! Too bad that few of us will be able to afford them. David Chesterton (Massachusetts)”.

Touchy, feely socialists

We are often accused of class bias, of being nasty individuals who are only concerned about the working class, with never a thought for the plight of the capitalist class. Not so, we were almost moved to tears when we read the following :

“Ronit Lami, a London psychologist who treats people suffering from affluenza or ‘sudden wealth syndrome’, says her patients are highly motivated perfectionists who will do anything to achieve their ends. She says: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money there is in the bank, there is never enough. There is a huge fear of failure. If they suddenly lose their money, they suffer deep depression. Many identify themselves through their possessions, so their whole identity collapses’“ (Sunday Times, 24 June).

This “affluenza” is an awful disorder, one that we fortunate members of the working class will never suffer; so we think it only right to comfort these sufferers with the news that there will be no money or banks inside socialism. Another good reason to organise for socialism, you can relieve these poor souls from their insecurity fears and leave Ronit Lami free to get a real job.

Mao’s afterthought

Chinese state capitalism is desperate for foreign investment; so much so, that at its 80th anniversary celebrations the Communist Party revealed its long held admiration of capitalism :

“Liu Jingfeng, a history professor at the party school, told an on-line forum run by the official People’s Daily newspaper: ‘Mao Zedong did not oppose capitalism all the time. At the Seventh Party Congress, Mao Zedong fully endorsed the idea that China should develop capitalism.’” (Times, 5 July)

Science in fetters

Capitalism was once a progressive force in the field of science. The discoveries of chemistry and physics were essential for the advance of the new society. But now capitalism has entered its restrictive phase, where, because of copyright and information ownership, scientific investigation is being restricted. Immense publishing firms like Reed Elsevier zealously guard the copyrights that earned them profits of £231 million last year :

“More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months. ‘Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain’, said Michael Ashburner, professor of Biology at Cambridge University and one of the leading signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Sciences. ‘In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science shouldn’t be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits’“ (Guardian, 26 May).

It seems that science is now being restricted by the ownership relationships of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote in January 1859 in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy something that foresaw such a development:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters.”

Editorial: Life’s a riot (2001)

Editorial from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the summers of 1981 and 1985 inner-city areas across Britain erupted in an orgy of violence and destruction as mass rioting returned for the first time in decades. In St Paul’s in Bristol, in Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side and Handsworth, dispossessed and frustrated black and white youths looted shops, attacked the police and burnt down buildings in a sequence of events that shook the Thatcher government. Home Secretary William Whitelaw toured the battle-strewn streets like the Queen Mother during the blitz, only even less popular than she’d been. Michael Heseltine was despatched by Thatcher to Liverpool (when the two of them were still on speaking terms) to sort out a regeneration package for the city and for the riot-torn Upper Parliament Street area. It was a mini-renunciation of her free-market idealism – and was brought about by the sort of pragmatic attempt to buy off social discontent more typically associated with reformers of the centre-left.

The far left at the time – somewhat stronger in those days and certainly taken more seriously than now – liked to call the riots ‘uprisings’. It was wishful thinking of the type they are specialists in, as the disturbances in question did not have quite that sort of focussed, political dimension to them. They were in fact the directionless expression of frustration and bewilderment at rising mass unemployment, inner-city poverty and the type of crushing boredom associated with social decay rather than the stirrings of a potential revolutionary vanguard.

Fifteen, twenty years later, and the riots are back. In truth, of course, they never entirely went away. As violent crime has risen so has serious disorder in towns and cities across Britain. What is most noticeable about the most recent spate of riots though is the numbers of youths involved and the magnitude of the destruction caused. It is the sheer scale of events in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and elsewhere that immediately leads to direct comparisons with the riots of the eighties.

There is another obvious comparison with the riots of the past too: “race”. In 1981 and 1985 the majority of those taking part in the disturbances were black youths from inner-city areas with large black populations. The rioters were not first generation blacks, but second and third generation, born and brought up in the UK but even more powerless and disenfranchised from mainstream social, economic and political life than the bulk of the rest of the working class. Theirs was a rebellion against the police who harassed and intimidated them and implicitly against a culture that still insisted on seeing them as outsiders.

This time around the rioters have been second and third generation UK Asians feeling the same sort of social exclusion and powerlessness felt by black youths in Britain before them and typically residing in some of the most deprived council wards in the country. Their rebelliousness has been given an added dimension by the intimidating presence of fascist and racist organisations – particularly the British National Party – in towns and cities where they are most heavily concentrated. If there was relatively little involvement by far-right groups in the riots of twenty years ago, the same could certainly not be said this time, with the provocative and violent activities of fascist gangs being the catalyst for some of the most serious events, most notably in Burnley and Bradford.

In Burnley it was alleged by elements of the white working class that Asian areas in the town had received preferential treatment from the local council and other agencies responsible for handing out regeneration monies. In Bradford local white youths complained that Asians were treated with “kid gloves” by the police, for fear the police be labelled as racists.

Viewpoints such as these are rarely the product of genuinely held grievances. Asians in Burnley live in the same type of slums by and large as many white workers do in the town; and in Bradford claims of harassment by the police are far more likely to be made by Asian youths than white youths. Instead, these ideas are in essence the product of a situation where the existing poor fear being made even poorer through the close presence of even more of their number. If the ‘new poor’ in question have a different colour, different religion and different culture from the majority, the suspicion and distrust is all the easier to justify.

One thing is certain: whatever the precise causes, the rioting that has been taking place is unlikely to get either the Asian or white youths involved very far (unless a police cell for the night is the extent of their ambitions). If New Labour do what Thatcher did and throw a little money in the direction of the affected areas as a token gesture, that will be something (as it was in Liverpool); but the laws of the market dictate that just as one hand gives so the other takes away – probably in the form of lost investment and business shut downs (again as happened in Liverpool).

Tony Benn has said that rioting is the oldest form of social protest and in that he may well be right. But there is no point in white and Asian youths protesting about the other’s allegedly preferential treatment and conducting running battles in front of the TV crews each evening. Any meaningful action has to be democratic and organised and based on the recognition that white and Asian youths have far more in common than they have that divides them. They would both do well to recognise that as the poor and excluded they are kept poor because the rich are rich. For it is only then that they can formulate actions based on where there interests truthfully lie – and in fundamental opposition to those who have really gained from keeping them in their subject, inferior position all along.

The politics of madness (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Provisional IRA’s guns have been almost silent now for some seven years. The spin doctors of republican terrorism have now got their snouts in the political trough – two of them government ministers mouthing the same sort of nostrums and excuses as their erstwhile unionist opponents. The power of Sinn Fein over their paramilitary first cousins in the IRA has been demonstrated by the fact that, despite the opportunist manoeuvrings of their political wing, their cease-fire has held largely intact.

It would have been a bold political prophet who would have predicted in 1970, when a few die-hards of the pure faith of Pearse and Connolly established the Provisional IRA – in contradistinction to the more quiescent policies of the Leninist “Official” IRA – that the new movement would achieve such lofty peaks in the small range of Northern Irish politics.

Today, the mouthpieces of the Provos have become the epitome of political respectability. People like Adams are welcome guests of the Irish government. They can speak man-to-man with Blair and they are been in the White House. Now, internationally recognised political celebrities, they can be heard arguing the case for what they contend is the road to a permanent peace.

Slaughter of the innocents

Of course, there was a price to pay. Thousands of people have died, most killed by the Provos. The lives of many young men and women have been marred by years of imprisonment. Still others have been tortured and murdered on the authority of kangaroo courts. Additionally, the quite fearsome atmosphere of hatred and division that stalks Northern Ireland at present is in no small way the product of the IRA’s violence – the alleged purpose of which was to establish unity between the people of Ireland irrespective of religion.

In the recent elections that division was emphasised: Most of the Catholics who voted did so for Sinn Fein, allowing the republicans to claim that they were now the larger of the two nationalist parties. Sinn Fein celebrated with an orgy of flag-waving triumphalism remarkably reminiscent of the behaviour of their traditional enemies. Adams and his political cohorts are astute enough to know that a resumption of IRA violence would dramatically reduce their electoral fortunes and scupper their strategy for becoming an effective all-Ireland political force. There was another vital point that might have made some thoughtful republicans see their electoral victories as somewhat Pyrrhic. What they had done to the moderate nationalists of the SDLP, the virulent forces of Paisley’s miscalled “Democratic” Unionist Party had done to the more accommodating representatives of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party.

The leader of the traditional Unionist Party, David Trimble, is an Orangeman with a past. In the early seventies he was associated with the neo-fascist Vanguard Unionist Party. A few years ago he danced a victory jig with Paisley on the Garvaghy Road while the police forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen to march. But Trimble is a lawyer with strong political aspirations and, as the leadership of Sinn Fein were becoming aware that there was no real future in violence, Trimble was coming to the view that there was political kudos in the politics of accommodation.

John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein were already working on the detail of that accommodation. At the same time, while declaring in the House of Commons that talks with republicans would upset his digestive system, John Major’s emissaries were in secret talks with the Provos – without Adams advising Hume or the British telling their “peace partners” in the Irish government.

Eventually, the various strands of a possible agreement was arrived at and presented jointly by the British and Irish governments as a framework for peace. Weeks of frenetic discussions ensued in which the real social problems of the majority of the people were never mentioned. The discussions were about flags, about the religion of the members of the police force that enforces capitalism’s laws, and about reflecting the close co-operation at governmental level already existing between capitalist enterprises north and south of the border.

There was much talk by the republican side about “equality of esteem” but it was pure political vapour, the same absolute rubbish that Sinn Fein’s military wing thought justified the slaughter of the innocent for nearly thirty years. It was wholly unrelated to the lives of working class people irrespective of religion or whether they lived north or south of the Irish border. Inequality is a vital part of the mechanics of capitalism; Sinn Fein’s perception of equality of esteem simply means that they want workers who are Catholics or nationalists to share equally in the inequalities of capitalism as it exists in Ireland.

Hotchpotch of ambiguities

The so-called Good Friday Agreement was a hotchpotch of ambiguities written in convoluted language calculated to deliberately obfuscate disagreements and placate the more threatening opponents of compromise. Worse, it was a sectarian charter, institutionalising the very bigotries that has traditionally helped to feed conflict and division in the province. Both sides would give a little and take a little and life would go on with the majority of the population still enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism. There were to be rewarding political positions for yesterday’s hard men and women with all the trappings of low-grade power and a generous modicum of economic affluence. For some, the struggle was paying off.

But there were those who felt aggrieved either because they had been left out, or wanted more or were so poisoned with hatred of their opponents that they disdained the idea of any compromise even if it contained the possibility of ending the killing. Paisley, the bellowing fundamentalist firebrand, and his “Democratic” Unionist Party were outraged. Theirs is a peculiar conception of democracy in which the majority, always providing it is a Protestant majority, has the right of absolute political domination over the those who are not Protestant and Unionist. The calibre of the DUP can be gauged by their silence when, during the recent election campaign, Paisley put his sanction on line dancing, making us aware that God didn’t like it and that it was the road to eternal damnation.

Still, the DUP went to the Assembly, sat in the Chamber with members of Sinn Fein, took the generous salaries, in some cases substantially incremented by local Ministerial salaries and in others by the generous salaries of Westminster MP’s. Being a party of principle, however, they refused to sit at the cabinet table with Sinn Feiners but did sit with them on Assembly committees and, of course, in many local government chambers.

Paisley, as always, was demanding the political head of anybody who would countenance the remotest idea of co-operation with republicans. Together with the Orange Order and the majority of Trimble’s own Westminster MP’s, they were frantically engaged in promoting the idea that Protestants were being increasingly denied their traditional “rights”. The “rights” referred to are mainly areas of largely cosmetic privilege or blatantly sectarian discrimination designed to kid working class Protestants that they were a privileged section of the community. The main stumbling block, however, was the failure of the IRA to decommission its weapons.

The weapons issue was, and is, a vital ploy in the power struggle between the Paisley Unionist and the Trimble unionists for the hearts and minds of the Protestant community. IRA guns are, in the main, silent; some of their arms dumps have been inspected and sealed by the body of international commissioners established to oversee paramilitary arms decommissioning and there can be little doubt that most of the rest of their arsenal in the Republic has been compromised.

On the threshold of the last election, in the hope that his action would forestall advances by the Paisleyites, Trimble announced that if the IRA did not show some evidence of actual decommissioning by the end of June he would resign his position as First Minister of the Assembly. Obviously Trimble was not really concerned at the trickle of arms the IRA might have conceded in order to allow him to retain his post. The gesture was intended to save him from his erstwhile supporters and, since he is the most accommodating Unionist leader, it might have seemed reasonable for the IRA to throw him a political lifeline in the shape of a few kilograms of Semtex or some ageing guns.

But just as Trimble is the prisoner of his backwoods supporters, so are Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership hostage to those wilder elements in the IRA who see any act of decommissioning as an act of surrender. Trimble must know that the IRA guns are a threat now only insofar as they might get into the hands of the political nutters of the Real IRA who want to continue killing and dying “for Ireland’”. He must be aware that Sinn Fein’s ambition is to win sufficient seats in the Republic’s Dail to enable the Party to become a participant in a future coalition government in the Republic. Ensconced thus, in government in the South and remaining a major player in the North, would extend Sinn Fein’s influence and power to a point previously undreamed of.

If the Northern Ireland Assembly is killed by the decommissioning issue, it will be a major impediment to the plans of the Sinn Fein leadership and a death knell to the political ambitions of the Trimble Unionists. Ironically, both parties need each other in the further pursuit of their disparate objectives. It is a need that underwrites the madness of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland.

Paisley has won a resounding victory, another one! The difficulty with Paisley’s victories is that each one seems to reverse the fortunes of his cause. It is more than thirty years since he and his bigoted cohorts started the battle to “save Ulster”. Over the years his party has gathered strength and now boasts that it is the true representative of the Unionist. But as the party progressed, the cause regressed because it is a throwback both in religious and political terms to the grosser lunacies of the sixteenth century.

Richard Montague

Anti-capitalism or just anti-capitalists? (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has been widely proclaimed as a manifesto for the anti-capitalist movement. Klein herself disclaims any notion that she has written a manifesto, but the book is still well worth examining. It deals with the development of enormous global corporations and some of the resistance to this; the title reflects a general anti-corporate attitude.

It is common to observe that all high streets look very much the same nowadays, with Next, Virgin, Pizza Hut and McDonalds being found more or less everywhere, and not just in the UK. This illustrates the rise of the brand or superbrand, which is constituted by an image or a logo much more than just a range of products. Marketing gurus see the brand as crucial – companies should create a brand, not just sell a product. For instance, John Grant’s The New Marketing Manifesto argues that a brand is “a popular idea or set of ideas that people live by”. Brands “add value to people’s lives”, and are the new traditions (now that older traditions such as a sense of community have decayed). This kind of celebration of brands shows an uncritical acceptance of capitalism’s values.

In contrast, Klein looks behind the logo and the label to expose the darker side of branding. The logo has expanded in size and importance with items of clothing just being empty carriers for the brand. She quotes the boss of Nike:

“For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

Companies such as Nike, Gap, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks are not simply multinational corporations (which would mean they have different brands and products in different countries), but are truly global corporations (with the same brands and marketing wherever they operate). Nike in particular has emerged as a real superbrand: its swoosh logo is an immensely popular tattoo in the US, among both customers and workers. Imagine flaunting your status as a wage slave by having your employer’s logo tattooed on your leg. Some American teenagers are quoted as saying that Nike is more important to them than their girlfriend is.

One theme of No Logo is the way in which advertising, sponsorship and the market have expanded into areas of life which were previously free of them, thus resulting in the loss of what Klein calls “unmarketed space”. A blatant instance of this is in schools, where companies sponsor lessons and TV programmes and all manner of equipment. Sponsorship of sporting and cultural events is now far wider than it has ever been.

But perhaps the biggest effect of the growth of the top brands is on employment. Increasingly, such companies are moving production to developing countries, especially in East and South-East Asia, in pursuit of cheap labour. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, China and the Phillipines have been happy to provide so-called free-trade zones or export-processing zones, with tax breaks for companies and no right to union organization for workers, as a means ot attracting the global corporations. Sub-contractors are used, so that, when questioned about wages and working conditions, Nike, Reebok and so on can reply that they do not actually employ anyone in Indonesia or wherever. Their production becomes far more flexible, as they don’t need to own land or factories, and can respond more easily to fluctuations in demand. They will also happily move prodution ftom one developing country to another in pursuit of a cheaper and more docile workforce. Young workers are often drawn into these zones with promises of good pay, only to find appalling wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and tyrannical bosses, who may lock workers up if they refuse to do overtime. Some of the descriptions are reminiscent of nothing so much as Engels’ accounts in Condition o/ the Working Class in England in 1844—sweatshop conditions have just been exported to the “Third World”.

Companies such as British Airways and Debenhams have relocated much of their call centre work to India, where wages are a fifth of the UK level. The workers are given crash courses in British culture, everything from soaps to football, so they can chat knowledgeably with the callers, who don’t suspect that they are speaking to someone in Delhi or Bombay

However, while workers in Indonesia or Vietnam can make clothes, shoes or whatever, they cannot sell them in North America or Western Europe. Here, the global corporations have led the way in the notorious Mcjobs – part-time or temporary work often on near-minimum wages. In coffee bars such as Starbucks, workers may have to work two or three shifts a day, to coincide with the busy periods. This gives the company the flexibility to cope with fluctuations in business without having to pay people to just stand around, but for staff it is, to say the least, extremely disruptive. In other companies, Microsoft for instance, jobs are contracted out to agencies who (surprise!) pay far lower wages. Again, this boosts flexibility and the ability to respond to booms and slumps in demand, avoiding such problems as redundancy pay. Many “permatemps” have been employed in this way for years, without gaining proper employee rights.

This, then, is the picture that Klein presents, of a world increasingly dominated by global corporations and their cultural and economic impact, where wotkers slave away in sweat shops for a pittance with little ability to fight back, and where temporary jobs hold sway. Profits soar, while the workers suffer.

The final section of No Logo deals with various kinds of opposition and resistance to the superbrands and the kind of society they represent. This can range from the fun but ineffectual – such as parodying advertisements or throwing custard pies at Bill Gates – to to the more substantive responses of Reclaim The Streets and the wider ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. Such activity Klein describes as “laying the foundations for the first truly international people’s movement”. Here are some examples:

• Exposing sweatshop and child labour, including school pupils discovering who made their uniforms
• Local councils entering into selective purchasing agreements, and refusing to buy from companies that (for instance) trade with Burma
• Secondary boycotts against cornpanics that supply other companies rather than the public directly
• Campaigns such as that against Shell in Nigeria
• Klein is well aware of the limitations of brand-based politics, e.g. that boycotts can be counter-productive and that such campaigns tend to miss the broader economic context. Her argument, though, is that “you’ve got to start somewhere”, so you might as well start with aiming your attacks at one big corporation, normally Nike.

However, the idea of “starting somewhere” naturally implies going on to address other issues in the fullness of time, and it’s here that Klein’s ideas become mundane and just plain disappointing For instance, she advocates enforcement of existing ILO treaties, and that employment codes of practice be drafted by the workers themselves rather than by the corporations. All this of course assumes the continued existence of employers and employed, and offers no vision of the ending of class division.

Global capitalism is not a new creature, it is just capitalism writ large and even nastier. A return to pre-global capitalism would be no altetnative, even if it were practical. But it should now be clear beyond dispute that national-based solutions to humanity’s problems are pointless, and that a world movement, leading to world socialism is urgently needed.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Notes:

Though not listed in the contents of the August 2001 Socialist Standard as a book review let's be honest, to all intents and purposes, this is a book review. No Logo was also reviewed in the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard by Cyril Evans.

Obituary: Michael Gill (2001)

Obituary from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with much regret that we record the death from cancer in June, at the age of 70, of Michael Gill who will be familiar to readers as our theatre critic. Michael originated from Manchester but moved to London as a young boy. He joined Edgware branch in 1950. Later his jobs took him to different parts of the country and then back to the South East, to Braintree. He was a founder member and secretary of the Colchester Branch and one of the driving forces behind the East Anglian group.

Michael was trained as an industrial chemist and worked in the chemical industry before leaving to teach in further education. For a while he was an inspector in this field from which he eventually resigned in protest. Retirement allowed him more time to devote to socialist activity and since the early 1990s he was one of the Party's most devoted and active members. He was several times an Executive Committee member, and was always willing to lend his educational expertise and diplomatic skills to various committee tasks. Among other pieces, he wrote regular theatre reviews for the Socialist Standard, the last one appearing as recently as January. A good play from a socialist point of view would earn his lyrical praise — a bad one his measured wrath.

Kind, considerate and helpful, Michael was a keen advocate, and personal exemplar, of the ways in which socialists should treat each other. As he put it in a message dictated shortly before his died and read at his non-religious cremation:

"My life has been concerned with staff development, education, socialism and change for the better in human lives. Increasingly there seems to me to be a unity between fraternity, equality, and the full flowering of human potential. And in respect of my professional concerns and political convictions, I aspire to a transformation of society to allow for the growth of fulfilled and rounded people, able to be creative, fraternal and empathetic in meeting one another's needs. I hope there is a visible coincidence between my personal, professional life and the nature of socialism. I want people who have known me in different capacities to understand the connections between my aspirations and behaviors and ways of knowing — a gestalt view across all these perspectives . . . go well."

We offer our condolences to his wife, Jan, and children.

Blogger's Note:

A further obituary for Michael appeared in the Guardian. According to the Guardian website, it was published on the 10th July, 2001.

More nationalist madness in the Balkans (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late June and early July saw much tension in Macedonia, threatening once more to ignite nationalist hatreds that have ripped the Balkans apart now for almost a decade.

It was uncannily ironic that as Yugoslavia was sending former president Slobodan Milosevic to stand trial in The Hague on war crimes, a mob of 5,000 Macedonian protestors, including police, soldiers and reservists, stormed their parliament and forced president Boris Trajkovski flee in fear of his life. His crime? He had agreed to a Western brokered cease-fire with Albanian rebels and also allowed NATO to ferry rebel fighters to safety from a village they had captured six miles away from the capital Skopje. Not only was the mob furious that their government had signed a cease-fire with a movement that Nato’s own command had labelled “terrorists” and “murderers”, but here was the West once again coming to the aid of insurgents.

Ostensibly, the Albanian rebels claim to be only interested in winning equal civil rights for Albanians and constitutional changes. This however is no civil rights movement. If so, then why the armed insurgents and why do they call themselves the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA)? The answer is simple, they are nationalists bent on creating a greater Albania. They are after territorial gain and control of the porous borders which show a fair profit in drugs and arms smuggling and the lucrative trade in “illegal” immigrants. Violence and guerrilla warfare as practised by the NLA is not normally the stuff of “civil-rights” movements, which generally pursue a non-violent agenda. It is the remit of liberation forces intent on wresting territory from its present owners. What has prompted the NLA to pass themselves off as a “civil-rights” movement is NATO’s refusal to redraw the borders of the Balkans.

Moreover, why do they launch attacks on government forces? Simple – they hope to incur a heavy-handed response from Macedonian forces which would win them support from Macedonia’s Albanian population, who perhaps need a little egging on, bearing in mind their social and economic gripes, and from Kosovo – Albanians and Albania itself. They have further counted on benefiting from a similar situation when their parent organisation, the KLA, incurred such a harsh and brutal response from Serb forces that NATO was forced to intervene on behalf of the Albanians in 1998.

The risk of all-out war is serious enough. It is feared that the mob fury could now be focused on isolated pockets of Albanians in Macedonia (they make up one third of the population) now that Trajkovski has agreed to the temporary EU brokered cease-fire. At present the rebels have captured areas of territory in the west of the country and have cut off water and electricity supplies, further inciting Macedonian hard-liners in Skopje to demand armed intervention – a situation made all the worse with the rebels threatening to descend on Skopje to protect Albanians living there.

Chief protagonists of the Macedonian Slav majority, including Prime Minister Ljubco Georevski still hanker after a ham-fisted solution to the problem and perhaps the fact that the government has recently taking delivery of eight new attack aircraft – doubling the size of its air force – and that Georgevbski’s VMRO-DPMNE political party have recently handed out automatic weapons to 2000 reservists suggests they are not putting much faith in a peaceful solution to the crisis. If Macedonian Slavs, tired at the slow pace of a settlement in their favour, frustrated with the unchecked gains of the rebels, decide to even the score and attack ethnic Albanian areas, this will most certainly witness the beginning of a new wave of civil war.

 A political settlement however is still on the cards, with negotiators from the EU and NATO having set an unofficial deadline for a peaceful solution, which would then pave the way for British, French, Italian and Greek soldiers to take part in a mission to disarm Albanian rebels. The cease-fire, signed by the heads of the Macedonian army and police force as well as the NLA, consists of two linked agreements – one between the NLA and NATO and the other between the Macedonian forces and NATO, with the NLA agreeing to disarm if a political settlement can be reached.

Critics, meanwhile, warn that by acknowledging the NLA as a legitimate protagonist in debates about Macedonia’s future, the West has effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia along ethnic lines – and this is cold comfort for Macedonian nationalists and the paramilitary groups now springing up and arguing for the expulsion of Albanians from Macedonia’s mixed communities. Many Macedonians still remain distrustful of the US, who they see as pro-Albanian following the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and are contemptuous of any Western-designed solution.

Little surprise, then, that Balkan analysts see only a deteriorating situation and one that can’t be solved by further Western solutions that sparked the storming of the Macedonian parliament.

To date the present conflict has not been as bloody as previous Balkan disagreements, but it has nevertheless resulted in 100,000 refugees who represent perhaps 5 percent of the population. It is perhaps too early to predict events in the coming weeks in Macedonia. Whilst nationalism, like the disease it is, can be diagnosed, there remains no immediate prognosis. For it feeds on fear and insecurity, alienation and ignorance which themselves can lead to irrational passions and attempts at quick-fix and spontaneous violent attempts at remedy which always prove counterproductive and detrimental to all concerned.

Nationalist conflict has raged for 10 long years in the Balkans. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the “independence” they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

John Bissett

Mass media and mass politics (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Parliament is a place full of games and flippancies, so what better basis for a new drinking game? The rules are simple, sit down and watch the live-feed television channel BBC Parliament just after the election, and wait (bored beyond tedium by the irrelevancies of the place) for the swearing in of the new MPs. Simply, knock down one drink for each MP who affirms rather than swearing to God, and knock down two for each MP who clearly indicates that they don’t believe a word they’re saying – and its guaranteed after all that you’ll be as sober as a fish.

What sharp-eyed readers will have noticed, is that there is no provision for those MPs refusing to believe in the Queen. Indeed, they are not allowed to not believe in the Queen, and so must swear by her, whether they swear the oath on the Bible or “honestly and sincerely” affirm. Many see such oaths as an irrelevant anachronism, and so take them without caring about the substance. Socialist delegates sent to Parliament, too, would not allow the requirement to swear fealty to the parasite and her family to prevent them taking up their seats.

The reverence to the monarch, though, is all-pervading in Parliament, as when MPs considering “The Queen’s Speech” (i.e. the announcement of government business for the year) debate motions “humbly and gratefully” thanking the Queen for a speech she had no hand in, other than reading aloud (badly). All of which is a throw-back to the times when Parliament was simply a forum for expressing views, which could be conveyed to the person of the absolute ruler of the land, the monarch. Despite the historical changes in power, the superficial forms have been retained.

The historical hangovers, however, go further than in the simple fripperies of the place. When Parliament became open to a general franchise (i.e. read, open to the votes of the capitalist class) after “The Great Reform Act”, the 1832 general election saw 827,776 people eligible to vote. They were voting for some 658 seats, which meant at least one MP per 1,258 voters (although some voters lived in multi-member constituencies, an undemocratic practice which managed to survive until 1950 until the abolition of the University Seat.

This ratio of electors to members is more reminiscent of the ratios on modern local councils, and it would have meant that there was more than a fair chance of actually knowing (at least by sight) the person being elected. As the franchise was generally widened, the number of seats in Parliament was not (at least within the same ratio). What this effectively meant, was a diminution of the effective power of each vote. Obviously, if the number of MPs had risen with the number of voters, it would have meant a corresponding decline in the power of vote for each MP in the Commons. Our current 40 or so million voters would need around 31,000 MPs in order to have that much effective control. The point, though, is not about mathematics, or pragmatic power, but about the “quality” of the vote. In the modern constituency, it takes a huge number of electors to change, to register any sort of shift in the public mind. It also takes huge numbers of people to effect a quantitative change into the qualitative change of having a representative in Parliament.

What this approach encourages is the aggregation of voters into an undifferentiated mass, votes expressing difference or disagreement needing to be lost into the swamp of a high bar majority. This aggregation is furthered by the attempts of politicians to turn the elections into presidential style elections for a government, rather than for representatives, thus making it the sum across the whole country, resulting in one qualitative change, that of the government overall.

It’s no wonder that people feel no pragmatic connection between their voting preferences and the outcomes; and no wonder that people feel so little connection with any of the parties. All these become are technocratic career structures for advancing politicians, a platform from which to project policy ideas to be reflected off the undifferentiated mass, which has no control over what is projected, beyond passive reflection.

This process of “mass culture” has, of course, been assisted by the spread of the mass media. The social relationship is the same, a few technocratic broadcasters/media barons, projecting images and ideas to be passively reflected by a land mass of consumers. Indeed, representative politics follows the same course. Instead of abstractedly measuring response in terms of money, it reads response in terms of flat votes, formally equal but failing to register differences in value or quality.

The politics of mass powerlessness

The mass media, though, has effected another change in the political scene. Where once parliament was intended to function as a forum, representing the views and analysis of “the people”, this can now be achieved by the mass media. Whenever a story breaks, or significant events are occurring, the media produces “community leaders”, and “representatives” of consumers, fishmongers or whatever so-called “interest groups”. Thus, the media can claim to represent the divergent views on a particular topic.

This claim, however, is undermined by the fact that the media self-selects these “representatives”, and by the fact that more often than not, these representatives are not even vaguely appointed by the people they claim to represent. In selecting who can speak, the media exercises power similar to that of the medieval monarch determining who gets to sit in their parliament. Indeed, the modern mass media presents itself as a forum for the people, as the place for representation and for determining legitimacy. It is effectively a third house of parliament, the House of the Mass.

A clear example of this can be seen from the recent general election. The BBC published their broadcasting guidelines on the internet, boldly stating that Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats and the assorted Nationalists were to be regarded as “major parties”, and thus entitled to technically unlimited national coverage, and anyone else could only be guaranteed the coverage of their manifesto launch if they were contesting over 100 seats. In this way, they effectively determined who was going to do better in the parliamentary elections, who got the all important media coverage.

The eighteenth century Liberal philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (whose thought Marx spent so much time criticising and adapting) postulated the ideal state as one in which an absolute technocratic ruler, freed from social interest, held power, and in which all other classes in society were recognised and represented in a parliament for/by this ruler. For such opinions he has been execrated in the past; however, his analysis finds itself borne out in the genuine movements of liberal society, for that is exactly what obtains today in modern politics.

Advisers and hangers-on maintain a stranglehold on the state apparatus, while the mass media provides a means of identifying and recognising certain interest groups within society, and constructing the playing field on which political battles are fought out. The media, though, always lies within the hands of the ruling elites, and so ensures that representation remains within the bounds of holding the existing social relations together.

Given, though, that these “representatives” only exist by and through the virtual world of the media, and only exist through the recognition of power and not through the active involvement of those they claim to represent, they can only present an abstraction of the views they claim to put forward; akin to the abstract “people” of radical bourgeois politics. As such it is the politics of mass powerlessness.

Unlike some anarchists who claim that democratic decisions represent a tyrannous act against the sovereign individual, we state that a free society can only be one in which people can directly and actively take part in politics, and concretely have their minds known through democratic voting on the ideas, rather than for representatives, to talk in their place. The important point must be that debate on issues is two way, with the full and active involvement of all parties concerned, not a one-way monologue to reflect off the enforcedly passive audience.

This all means that those engaged in political struggle must battle against the media for access and for the opportunity to air views. The opposite response, like that of those anarchists who refuse to deal with the media, leads simply to surrendering the field of political combat to the opposition.

Pik Smeet

Letters: Religion – again (2001)

Letters to the Editors from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion – again

Dear Editors,

I am not sure that I would go along with all you say in your response to Tony Curry and Rachel Pass on the subject of religion (June Socialist Standard).

I would say that our primary purpose as a political movement is the establishment of socialism and that our attitude to religion should be purely governed by this objective. Looked at from this perspective, does that attitude, which seeks to justify the policy of excluding anyone with religious beliefs from membership of the Party, hinder or advance the cause of socialism?

I would say that, on balance, it hinders it. Why? Because it unquestionably turns off a large number of sympathisers who would otherwise join our movement and accelerate its growth. The counter-argument to this which you give in your response is that religion “is a weapon in the hands of our class adversaries” because it (1) acts to “divide the working class” and (2) is based on a world view “totally at odds with the working class perspective of scientific dialectical historical materialism”. I do not feel either of these arguments are sufficiently persuasive to warrant our blanket bar on all applicants holding religious views (though this might be justified in some cases).

As far as (1) is concerned, I do not see this is necessarily the case at all. Certainly one can point to examples where religion is used as a pretext for dividing the working class – look at Northern Ireland or the clash between Sinhalese Buddhism and Tamil Hinduism in Sri Lanka. But how can it possibly be maintained that a vague personal religious belief such as that there is such a thing as a supernatural lifeforce permeating the universe, really be construed as “divisive”? On any reasonable interpretation it cannot be. Surely, if religion is divisive then one way round this problem may be to make a distinction between personal religions and organised religions, so that only individuals adhering to the former may join our movement.

As far as 2) is concerned I don’t find the argument particularly convincing either. It is entirely possible for individuals to hold two theoretically incompatible sets of views without one interfering with the other. There are scientists who are Christians but whose religious beliefs do not in any way interfere with their scientific work. Similarly, one may entertain a personal religious belief (such as the above) and yet be an ardent supporter of socialism. One may wholly accept the materialist conception of history as a paradigmatic model of historical explanation and yet still believe in a supernatural entity. Besides which, I would suggest that, as far as we are concerned as a practical political movement, “metaphysical materialism” (which has to do with deeper questions of why we are here and so on) is completely and utterly irrelevant to our purpose; the only kind of materialism that is relevant to us is historical materialism which is emphatically not the same thing as metaphysical materialism.

In the final analysis, the objection to members holding religious views is that it might subvert in some way the integrity of our socialist outlook. But this objection is wholly superfluous; if it were the case that a religious outlook were antithetical to our socialist viewpoint, then this would soon enough manifest itself by the individual concerned coming in to conflict with one or other of our several principles. These principles act as safeguards to ensure the integrity of our socialist movement; our current policy on religion is redundant to this requirement and as such an unnecessary obstacle to the growth of the socialist movement itself.

Robin Cox, 

Redruth, Cornwall

Reply: 

We still say that socialist understanding is based not simply on a materialist approach to history (no supernatural intervention) but also on a materialist approach to the universe (no supernatural intervention there either), and also to life – this is the only one all of us are going to get, so let’s make the most of it by establishing the best material environment for it, down here on Earth, i.e the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. We readily accept that people can – and do – hold contradictory views but don’t see this as something to be encouraged by opening our ranks to them.– Editors.

… and again

Dear Editors,

The letter from Tony Curry and Rachel Pass, in your June edition expresses a criticism that I have made in the past myself. (In my case, as a Christian.) You overlook the following passage from Alasdair MacIntyre’s summary of Marx on religion, in his book Marxism and Christianity:

“At the same time, by holding before them a vision of what they are denied, religion plays at least partly a progressive role in that it gives the common people some idea of what a better order would be”.

There has always been a stream of Christian thought that stresses the coming kingdom of God and its difference from the kingdoms of this world. It therefore stands in judgment over the established political order, encouraging Christians to live by the values of the coming kingdom as a witness against that order. One example of that stream is condemned in Article 38 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do boast”. There are an increasing number Christians who would see ourselves as heirs of those Anabaptists.

Those, such as myself, who belong within that stream of thought would echo Marx’s criticism of “religion” ourselves, on Biblical grounds, since true Christianity is not a “religion” in that sense. Religion is about humanity creating gods to help them cope with their present state. Christianity is about the true God breaking in on his creation to upset that state. He did this (we believe) above all in Jesus’ death (that of a rebellious slave) and resurrection (God’s verdict on him). You may dispute our claims about Christ, but please do not question my sincerity in saying I am socialist, a believer in common ownership under democratic control, not in spite of, but because of those beliefs.

Bob Allaway, 

London N22

Reply: 

We don’t challenge your sincerity. We just say you’re wrong: there is no evidence for the claims you make about “Jesus” and “God”. But thanks for identifying the article Marx must have had in mind when he said that the Church of England would give up 38 of its 39 articles rather than one-thirty-ninth of its income.– Editors.