Correspondence: Ought We to Back the “Left-Wing” Labour Leaders? (1931)

From the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Case of Mr. W. J. Brown, Ex-M.P.

A correspondent (“Robbo”) asks an interesting question. He writes : —

“If an opportunity occurs to support a man like W. J. Brown, who though not an S.P.G.B.’er, has done much to expose the hypocrisy of Labour Party leaders, would it not be advisable to do so?”

On the face of it the question probably implies rather more than our correspondent intended, for it suggests that we should support all who expose the Labour Party leaders, which would mean supporting Liberals and Tories. We are therefore no doubt safe in assuming that our correspondent selects Mr. W. J. Brown because he considers the latter’s criticisms to be essentially different from those of Liberal and Conservative opponents of the Labour Party. In other words, we are asked to believe that Mr. W. J. Brown speaks from a Socialist standpoint. Let us examine this.

It is true that Mr. W. J. Brown has often spoken harshly of some of the Labour Leaders, and has urged what he has called a Socialist policy. But obviously that alone is not enough, for there is hardly a single Labour M.P. who has not done the same. Let us probe more deeply. Does Mr. Brown expose the: Labour Leaders and their policy consistently, or only on rare and obscure occasions when it suits him? Does he show up the uselessness of the Labour Party programme? And does he do this from the standpoint of Socialism?

What is his political history? In 1923 and 1924 he fought West Wolverhampton as Labour Party candidate. But there was no criticism then of those who now draw his fire. On the contrary, in 1924 he had Mr. MacDonald on his platform during the election, soliciting votes for him. It was after the general strike that Mr. Brown launched out on his career of “left-wing” criticism of his leaders. In 1928 at the Labour Party Conference he vigorously assailed the programme “Labour and the Nation,” which was under discussion. Much of what he said was true and might have come from a Socialist. Listen to this : —

“I would say this, that if the whole of this document were carried into effect—and that will not be done by one government or many governments—the result would he, not Socialism, but a State-subsidised Capitalism, which is an entirely different thing.

My advice to the Conference would be … above all to make this clear—that we are in earnest about Socialism, not as a thing for subsequent generations, not as a thing for perorations for our speakers, not as a thing for the dim and distant future, but for this generation to achieve.” (Conference Report, p. 207.)

Mr. Brown’s speech showed, that he had a fairly clear grasp of the nature of the Labour Party programme, and was fully aware what the game was the Labour Leaders were playing. He saw, and said, that they were using the discontent of the workers as a means of getting into office, without any intention whatever of doing other than try to patch up the capitalist system. But to what use did he put his knowledge, his undoubted charm of manner, and his gifts of oratory? The subsequent general election, in 1929, shows only too clearly. Instead of using the election to denounce the Labour Leaders and their capitalist programme, he played exactly the same game as they did. Instead of showing that he was “in earnest about Socialism” by fighting on a Socialist programme, he fought on the very programme he had denounced. His election address boldly displayed the announcement that he was the “Labour Candidate,” committed, therefore, to “Labour and the Nation” and “state-subsidised capitalism.” It was full of all the usual capitalist reforms.

Did he expose the Labour Party Leaders? Not at all. A passage of considerable length was devoted to the wonderful things Mr. MacDonald was supposed to have done for disarmament, describing him as the “Peace Leader of the World.” Did he advocate Socialism in his address? Not by a single word. The only reference to anything other than reforms is the smug phrase, “The Labour Party stands for a new and more Christian and Social Order,” intended obviously to catch the religious vote. The dominant note of the whole address is the emphasised assertion, “Labour is the only alternative to another 5 years of Conservative misrule.”

During the subsequent Labour Government Mr. Brown, as General Secretary of the Civil Service Clerical Association, came into conflict with the Labour Ministers owing to the repeated reductions in Civil Service pay. So he resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party, but not from the Wolverhampton Labour Party, or from the I.L.P. But was it in order to support Socialism against the Labour Leaders? Again No. It was to join Mosley’s Party, whose Manifesto he helped to draft, and to which he added his signature. (Published early this year under the title “A National Policy.”) This document expressly excludes from consideration the very question about which Socialists are concerned; “Questions of the ultimate goal of society arc excluded by the very urgency of the problem which confronts us ” (page 6). It was not an appeal to Socialists to work for Socialism, but an appeal to “employers and workers” to “meet the emergency by a common effort.” Underlying it throughout was the policy of workers and employers uniting to attack one section of the exploiting class, the bankers. That policy of uniting with the capitalists would on any ground be dangerous for the workers, but Mr. Brown goes further and preaches the deadly doctrine that workers and employers have interests in common. This, if accepted, would destroy the basis of all working-class organisation.

Having had second thoughts about the expediency of joining the Mosley Party, we next find Mr. Brown, in August of this year, associating with prominent Liberals, Tories, and Fascists to issue a document, “The World Crisis and Unemployment,” on behalf of the “Financial Freedom Committee.” It contains nothing whatever about Socialism, but preaches salvation by means of currency juggling.

“The world’s industrial plight can be relieved within a few weeks if the Governments of all nations agree to destroy the Money Monopoly. . . The Government should nationalise the Bank of England and and put an end to the circulation of the present independent promissory notes and substitute for them Treasurv notes which are backed by the whole wealth of the nation.”

So speak the quacks. And with them Mr. Brown. Can Mr. Brown deny that his associates are frankly determined that what they are pleased to miscall “the national wealth” shall never on any account cease to be what it is now, i.e., private property? In other words, that they are open enemies of Socialism?

On August 22nd, in a speech at Wolverhampton, reported in the “Times” (24th August), Mr. Brown was attacking the Labour Government and still demanding a united front of employers and workers against “the parasites who prey upon both” ; a false but plausible device for misleading the workers.

So far we have not seen Mr. Brown’s 1931 election address, but he repeatedly stated that he intended to fight as an “independent” candidate, as indeed he did, “on the same programme as I fought at the last election.”

The Socialist Party stands for Socialism. Nothing but confusion would result from supporting Mr. Brown or any other of the ambitious politicians who delude the workers into the belief that the social problem can be solved without Socialism.

Besides, if we ought to support Mr. Brown because he exposes the Labour Party Leaders, we should also have to support them for exposing Mr, Brown.

P. S.

The Gold Standard and the crisis. (1931)

From the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Each of the periodic economic crises brings its own particular explanation. Publicists, orthodox economists, and politicians of every shade of opinion, are agreed that on this occasion the nigger in the wood-pile is the “gold standard,” or rather the failure of France and the U.K.A. to operate that standard “according to the rules of the game.” But despite their unanimity our scepticism is reasonable when it is recalled that there have been 16 crises during the past 150 years, and that a different explanation has been forthcoming each time. All of those crises, including the present one, have exhibited, in greater or less degree, the same features, viz., an accumulation of stocks of all commodities, a decline in production owing to the inability to sell the products of agriculture and industry at a profit, bankruptcies and banking difficulties as a consequence of the general fall of prices, falling money wages, growing unemployment, and for the mass of the population want in a time of superabundance.

This general similarity between one crisis and another points to there being a general explanation for all of them. Instead of which the explanations are always changing. This time we are told that the trouble has been caused by the attempt to operate the gold standard in a world split up by tariff walls and burdened by war debts. Can this explanation be accepted? To answer the question it is necessary to consider what the gold standard is and what its history has been.

First of ail it must be noticed that while the gold standard implies a monetary systen based on gold, it does not require that gold coins shall actually circulate. For all practical purposes there is no difference between a country whose monetary unit consists of a gold coin which circulates and is used as money in ordinary commercial transactions, and a country in which there is a paper currency convertible into gold. Both are on the gold standard. Before the war this country had, as its monetary unit, the sovereign, which passed freely from hand to hand in every-day transactions. Between 1925 and September of this year monetary settlements were effected in paper pounds which (above a minimum value of £1,700) were exchangeable into gold at a fixed rate. At both periods Great Britain was on the gold standard. What is necessary for a country to be on the gold standard is, then, not that there should actually be gold coins circulating, but that the unit of currency must, if it is a paper unit, be exchangeable on demand at some central institution, whether a bank, mint, or Government department, without charge to the holder, for a known and fixed amount of gold. Conversely any holder of gold must have the right to exchange it for currency, either coin or paper, at the same rate. Finally free importation and exportation of gold must be permitted so that a holder of currency who has to settle a debt abroad may do so by exporting gold obtained at the central institution in exchange for his currency at the fixed rate; while anyone having funds abroad must be able to convert them into the currency of his own country by importing gold and exchanging it for the currency of his own country at the central institution. In order to avoid complicating the question later it should be pointed our that free importation and exportation of gold is not necessary for this purpose provided that the central institution is compelled by law to buy and sell gold-backed foreign exchange, i.e., the currencies of other gold standard countries, at fixed rates corresponding to the amount of gold in the monetary units of the respective gold standard countries.

Given that these conditions are observed the country is on the gold standard, the significance of which is twofold. The first is that the value of the currency is the same as, and is dependent on, the value of gold. In other words, the amount of commodities that can be bought with £1 will be determined by the amount of commodities that will exchange for 113 grains weight of gold, that being the amount of gold for which £1 can by law be exchanged. Movements in the value of gold will be accompanied by corresponding changes in the purchasing power of the currency unit. As the value of currency reflects itself in the form of prices this is the same as saying that, under the gold standard, if the value of gold falls, prices will rise, and the amount of commodities which can be purchased with a £1 will diminish. Conversely if the value of gold rises, prices will fall. The second significant feature about the gold standard is that the general level of prices in two gold standard countries must be in equilibrium. This follows from the fact that, as has been pointed out, gold moves freely between the two countries. The price levels will not be exactly the same in the two countries for reasons which, however, are of no importance from the point of view of the present article and can therefore be ignored. The two price levels will tend to move up or down together, in accordance with changes in the value of gold.

So much for the value of a currency in terms of commodities, i.e., its internal value. Now let us consider the value of one currency in terms of another, usually referred to as its external value. Under the gold standard the value of one currency in terms of another, expressed in what is known as the foreign exchange rate, is fixed within narrow limits. For example, when this country was on the gold standard £1 was exchangeable by law for 113 grains of gold, and the American dollar was exchangeable by law for 23.22 grains. If 113 is divided by 23.22 the result is approximately 4.86. So that, apart from certain small variations that can be ignored here, the value of £1 was automatically fixed at 4.86 dollars. The exchange rate with francs, marks, etc., was similarly fixed.

To sum up the argument to this point we see the following consequences of an international gold standard :—

1. The value of the currencies of all gold standard countries is determined by, and fluctuates with, the value of gold.

2. Prices in all gold standard countries tend to move up or down together.

3. Exchange rates between gold standard countries remain stable.

After this brief survey of the principles of the gold standard now let us turn to its history.

As soon as division of labour resulted in individuals and social groups ceasing themselves to produce all the articles they consumed, a system for exchanging the products of various forms of human activity became necessary. In the first place recourse was had to simple barter. Cattle, for example, would be exchanged direct for corn or some other article. In the course of time direct barter became too cumbersome and a “universal equivalent” was evolved for the purpose of effecting exchanges. For a variety of reasons the universal equivalent that ultimately came to be generally adopted was a given weight of metal. In Western Europe this metal was silver. It soon came to be realised that it was more convenient to have coins of a known weight of metal instead of having to measure out quantities of the metal for each transaction. Gold coins were introduced in the 15th century, and finally this country led the world in making gold the basis of its currency, relegating silver coins to the position of “token” money, their value being fixed by law as a proportion of that of the gold coin. During the second half of the 19th century most of the leading countries of the world also abandoned the silver standard, and reorganised their currencies on a gold basis. When the war broke out in 1914 all the leading commercial countries were on the gold standard, and their currencies were gold coins winch actually circulated. At the same time there were in circulation bank notes which were redeemable into gold coin or bullion. The war saw the collapse of the old gold standard and the replacement of gold coins, as circulating media, by paper money. After the war, when the gold standard came to be restored, certain countries, including Great Britain, did not restore gold coins to circulation. Instead they retained their paper currencies, but made them convertible into gold, and permitted the export of gold. The notes, therefore, had the character of gold.

Another significant difference between the post-war and pre-war systems was that after the war certain countries did not revert to the simple gold standard, but to a developed standard known as the “gold exchange standard.” Under the pre-war system it had been the rule for each country to keep its own separate gold reserve for cashing notes. Under the gold exchange standard a country—Austria is an actual example— keeps part of its reserves not in the form of actual gold in the vaults of its own Central Bank, but in the form of balances with the Central Banks in other gold standard countries. As these balances could always be withdrawn in gold and taken back to the country of origin, it was thought that they were “as good as gold”; as indeed they were, so long as conditions remained normal. But the system had one important consequence. Gold deposited, say, by the Austrian National Bank with the Bank of England, was not only the basis of currency issued in Austria, but also provided the Bank of England with funds which it proceeded to utilise in this country. Under the pre-war system the withdrawal of gold from the Austrian National Bank would only have affected, directly, that bank. But under the new system the Bank of England would aiso be affected. In other words, under the “gold exchange system” events affecting the credit situation in one country would be likely to have immediate consequences in other countries, because the credit structure of more than one country had come to be based on the one lot of gold.

There remains another aspect of the post-war situation to be examined. The gold standard was never intended, as is so frequently alleged, to provide for the liquidation of an adverse balance of payments between two countries by the shipment of gold. Under the gold standard the function of gold shipments is to produce conditions in which an adverse balance of payments is eliminated. To reduce the matter to its simplest terms, the position can be explained as follows :—If people in country A are buying more goods and services from country B than B is buying from A, it must be because commodities are cheaper in B than in A. As the currencies of both countries are based on gold this is equivalent to saying that the purchasing power of gold is lower in A than in B. Consequently, gold will be sent from A to B. The gold for shipment will be obtained by changing notes into gold in A, and sending it to B. When it reaches B this gold will be converted into the currency of that country. The result will be to cause monetary stringency and a probable rise in the bank-rate in A, thereby lowering prices there. While in B the monetary situation will be eased and prices will rise. This will tend to discourage people in A from buying goods in B, and will encourage people in B to buy goods in A. This will continue to the point where A’s exports are increased and its imports diminished, sufficiently to eliminate the former adverse balance. From the foregoing it will be seen that under the gold standard the function of gold shipments is to cause adjustment of prices in the countries between which gold shipments take place, such that their international payments and receipts shall balance by the exchange of goods and services.

Owing to conditions arising out of the war gold shipments in recent years have been resorted to for the purpose of adjusting unfavourable balances of payments. What these conditions were can only be referred to here very briefly. Among the more important are the post-war system of tariffs, particularly in America, which prevented debtor countries from liquidating their indebtedness in goods, and compelled them to pay in gold; the flow of international payments in one direction, principally to U.S.A. and France, owing to Reparations, etc. ; and finally deliberate action by Central Banks to neutralise the effects that gold shipments would otherwise have had on the credit structure and the price levels. So that the adjustment of adverse trade balances by means of goods and services, in the manner discussed earlier, was impeded. In Great Britain, for example, the Bank of England consistently counterbalanced withdrawals of gold by what is known as its “open market” policy. In other words, when gold was withdrawn, and credit as a consequence became scarce, the Bank of England restored the position by buying securities, so that the funds that the money market lost as a result of the gold shipments were restored to it by the payments made by the Bank of England for the securities it bought. One of the main reasons why the Bank of England did this was probably that it was seeking to keep interest rates as low as possible in order that the Treasury should not have to pay more interest on its large floating debt. Whatever the reason may have been, the important fact is that Central Bank action frequently operated to make gold shipments of no avail, so far as concerns the adjustment of international balance of payments, by means of alterations in the relative amount of commodity imports and exports. This means that the gold standard in recent years was called upon to achieve purposes it was never designed to fulfil and which it was incapable of achieving; gold was used to liquidate adverse balances instead of operating to promote conditions in which adverse balances would disappear. Finally the inevitable happened. The gold standard broke down.

What will happen in the future to the gold standard need not be discussed here. For us the problem is, “Was the crisis caused by the failure of the gold standard ? Can it be overcome and economic welfare assured to all by a re-establishment of the gold standard, as we have known it or in some revised form, or by its supersession by some other currency system?” The answer to both questions is an emphatic “No.” The reasons for this answer must be reserved for a later article. Here it will suffice to point out that the recent acute world depression started, and has been most pronounced, in U.S.A. If gold is the cause of all the trouble this is rather strange seeing that U.S.A. was crammed with gold. Secondly, it is hard to see how the world in general,, and the working-class in particular, would have benefited if, before the crisis, there had been another £100 million, or even £1,000 million, of gold available in the world. What could have been done with it that would have overcome the fact that world stocks of all kinds, and especially of raw materials, were so high tthat they could not be disposed of at prices which would yield a profit ? The plain truth is that capitalism had again run up against its permanent and insoluble problem of being unable to distribute all the goods produced, because capitalist production is for sale at a profit and not for use. Therein is the cause of this, as of every other economic crisis of the past 150 years.

B. S.

SPGB Meetings. (1931)

Party News from the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Correction. (1931)

From the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article "The Founding of the Socialist Party" in the October issue it was stated that the inaugural meeting took place in the Painters' Hall. This should have been the Printers' Hall, Bartlett's Passage, Fetter Lane, E.C.

Correspondence: Socialism for Great Britain only. (1931)

From the November 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent (W. Langham, W. Ealing) asks how this country will obtain food supplies from abroad after the establishment of Socialism here. It is, of course, inconceivable that Socialism could exist in Great Britain alone while the rest of the world remained capitalist. But this presents no special problem, since it is equally inconceivable that capitalist development and Socialist propaganda could convert a majority to Socialism in this country without comparable progress having been made in the rest of the capitalist world.

When Socialism has been established on an international basis, the problem of producing and distributing goods will naturally call for organisation, and society will set up administrative machinery for that purpose. The organisation of production and distribution will not be fettered by the present national frontiers, and the problem of moving goods from one country or continent to another will not be different in kind from the problem of distribution within these areas. The world already shows many instances of smoothly-working international machinery, such, for example, as the Universal Postal Union, which co-ordinates the international transport of postal matter.

Editorial Committee.

Voice From The Back: The rich get richer (2005)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rich get richer

"The US's richest tycoons increased their personal wealth in the past year, with the top 400 worth $1.13 trillion (£640bn), says Forbes magazine.... To make this year's list of the top 400 fortunes in the US a minimum net worth of $900m was required — up from $750m last year." (BBC News, 23 September) The old popular song "Aint We Got Fun" cynically stated "The rich get rich and the poor get children", but it is no laughing matter.

Your two cents worth

An analysis of the gap between the rich and poor in Manhattan by Dr Beveridge of the City University of New York is revealing. "Income Disparity in City Matches Namibia. Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses, a public housing project in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomise the highest and lowest earning tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than any county in the country. . . .  The top fifth of earners in Manhattan make 52 times what the lowest fifth make — $365,826 compared with $7,047 — roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia. . . .  Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents." (New York Times, 17 September)

Big Spender

"The minute he walked in the joint, they could tell he was a real big spender. . . .  By the time he left the Aviva bar in the five-star Baglioni Hotel in Kensington,West London, on Thursday night, he had spent nearly £36,000. He bought 851 cocktails, emptied the place of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne, and gave a waitress a £3,000 tip. (Times, 1 October) This hedge fund manager from New York spent £16,500 on champagne and £6,000 on a variety of cocktails. It can be safely assumed this high-roller does not live in the Wagner housing project in East Harlem.

Doublethink

According to George Orwell in 1984, doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. This spectacular mental gymnastic feat seems to have been accomplished by Karen Hughes, a public relations spokesperson for President Bush in her recent trip to the Middle East. Trying to sugar the pill for her Turkish listeners she came out with this classic of Doublespeak. "To preserve peace, sometimes my country believes war is necessary." (Observer, 2 October)

Progressing backwards

Some years ago the press and TV was full of conjecture about the wonderful leisure-based life we would have inside capitalism. Futurologists and other media pundits speculated that with the advance of technology we would all be working fewer hours and fewer days per week. The big problem of the future would be how to spend all our leisure hours. Such scenarios have proven completely wrong with many of us now working longer hours and now it seems probably working for many more years. "The state pension age should be raised to 70, the Confederation of British Industry says in light of new figures detailing extended life expectancy." (Times, 4 October)

The dignity of labour

In an edited extract from Maxwell's Fall: An Insider's Account by Roy Greenslade we learn something of the contempt the owning class feel for the working class. When Maxwell took over The Daily Mirror he wanted to speak to Kelvin MacKenzie then the editor of The Sun but his secretary reported that MacKenzie would not accept his call. "Maxwell demanded that the secretary relate the conversation in full, but she was hesitant. "No, no, no," screamed Maxwell. "Tell me everything he said." She said she would prefer not to, but Maxwell shouted: "You will not get into trouble, Patricia. But if you refuse, you will be in trouble. "Well, Mr Maxwell, he said, "I don't want to speak to the fat Czech bastard." Two weeks later Patricia left in tears, escorted from the building by a security man (Times, 6 October).

The decline of religion

It used to be an argument of supporters of capitalism that socialism was impossible because of the working class's adherence to religion. A recent article by the columnist Magnus Linklater seems to give the lie to that notion. "Whereas in 1851 between 40 and 60 per cent of the population went regularly to church, today that figure is less than 7 per cent. In recent years the trend has accelerated — by 28 per cent in the last 20 years for the Catholic Church, and 24 per cent for the Anglican Church; in Scotland, the fall has been so dramatic that the once all-powerful Kirk reported recently that it could well be extinct as an organisation within the next 50 years." (Times, 13 October) Any other arguments against socialism?

Pathfinders: Bird Flu: how capitalism could make it worse (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. An earthquake kills 40,000 in a few minutes. A tsunami wipes out 200,000 in hours. And now the Department of Health contingency plan for bird flu in Britain is contemplating a ‘not impossible’ 750,000 deaths if the H5N1 virus goes pandemic. The government is buying up 14m doses of Tamiflu, a general-purpose antiviral and probably not very effective prophylaxis against a virus strain that hasn’t evolved yet, which in any case won’t be available until April next year and is only enough to treat 25% of the UK population. Meanwhile the United Nations is facing wildly varying estimates of the death toll, from 150m from its own advisors to a paltry 7.4m from the WHO, while newspapers range from tabloid ‘We’re all doomed’ sensationalism to an ‘It’ll be alright on the night’ conservatism from the better informed but possibly more complacent qualities.

A pandemic may well be on the way. The government Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has announced his estimate of 50,000 ‘excess’ deaths (over and above the average annual death rate of 12,000 each flu season), stating: “We can’t make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, it will come.” However, other scientists dismiss the figure of 50,000 as a complete guess. “It could be worse, it could be better. I think initially it could be worse than that”, says Dr Martin Wiselka, consultant in infectious diseases at Leicester Royal Infirmary. (BBC News Online, Oct 16).

The problem is that everybody is guessing, and governments are not willing to spend money on hunches. Currently H5N1 has an exceptionally high mortality rate of 50%, but is very hard to transmit, especially from one human to another, which is why only 60 people worldwide have so far died. The current guess is that the most likely threat is from H5N1 recombining with ordinary flu during the annual winter flu season. This is known to have happened during the Spanish flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968, when the hybrid strain was much less deadly but spread very rapidly and thus killed more people. On the basis of this guess, a best-case scenario, the government plans to rely on its standard seasonal vaccination programme for at-risk groups including children, old people and asthmatics, with the additional purchase of the Tamiflu antiviral drug just in case. However, new research is showing that the 1918 pandemic, the deadliest ever recorded, which killed between 20 and 40 million people, was a pure bird flu, not a hybrid, and that H5N1 is evolving in ominously similar ways. The 1918 virus infected almost everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance, and without the aid of modern transport and cheap mobility. (New Scientist, October 8). Donaldson dismisses comparison with the 1918 pandemic because antiviral drugs and other advanced medical practices were not available then, yet many scientists are worried that the pandemic could spread so rapidly that it will outrun any attempt to contain it, and the government in any case has rejected plans to curtail population movement as largely pointless.

Capitalism is no more to blame for bird flu than for the recent earthquake in Kashmir, however it can be criticized for its way of dealing with natural disasters and threats. In capitalism, whatever the urgency, nothing can happen until agreement has been reached over money. As one example, the EU is currently unable to spend any money on purchasing vaccines and antiviral drugs because, according to officials, Britain is blocking agreement on the overall EU budget for 2007 to 2013 (Guardian, Oct 15). In another less publicized example, scientists have expressed horror that the team which has recreated the 1918 virus, ‘one of the deadliest viruses of all time’ have been testing it in live mice at only the second highest level of containment, and without wearing protective suits. The obvious question, when it is known that Soviet scientists in the 70’s accidentally released a mild member of the 1918 family of viruses into the environment, is: why not the highest level of containment? The answer can only be cost. If there is a chance to keep cost down, even if it involves a risk, capitalism will exert pressure to take that chance. It would be an incredible irony if H5N1 turned out to be a case of mild sniffles but we all died anyway from an artificially recreated laboratory virus because somebody tried to save a few quid from their research budget.

It could also be argued that capitalism’s peculiar and illogical ways of working can conspire to make a deadly pandemic more rather than less likely. The secrecy of the Chinese state-capitalist regime has already held back study on H5N1 as, like the SARS epidemic before it, China has refused to allow researchers access to samples or to reveal actual mortality statistics. Then there is the incentive for poultry farmers to allow isolated cases of flu to go unreported rather than see their entire stocks destroyed, as has happened in South East Asia, where billions of birds have been culled. The manufacture of an effective antiviral drug, once the infectious strain has been identified, would be enormously accelerated if the drug company making it were to provide the details to other drug companies, but in view of the money to be made by not doing so, we may not be able to rely on such public spirited cooperation. And if the worst happens, and governments give out the useless advice to stay indoors and not travel, how are workers supposed to make a living? Will bosses look kindly on any worker who takes a day off sick every time she sneezes or her kids have a temperature? Will banks look kindly on businesses that curtail activity because of staff absences? Will capitalism look favourably on anyone who falters in their perpetual and relentless pursuit of money because of an altruistic concern for social health and welfare, or will it instead reward those who have no such concerns?

Capitalist governments are gambling that H5N1 won't mutate to humans, or that if it does mutate to humans, it won't be deadly, or that if it is deadly, it won't spread fast, or that if it spreads fast, it will be treatable with an antiviral, or that if no antiviral can be developed in time, that it won't kill anyone rich or important. Workers, as so often in wartime, appear in this calculation in the section at the end, under the heading 'expendable assets'. We're just not worth spending too much money on, provided some of us survive to keep working.

Diseases among social animals are common, and since the agricultural revolution brought humans into close and sustained contact with other social or herd animals, we have acquired many of their diseases (over sixty from dogs, for instance). Many of these now harmless childhood diseases started life as epidemics that brought empires to their knees and destroyed civilizations. A new virus strain unleashed on a virgin population is a more terrible event than any volcano, any earthquake or any tsunami, and yet capitalism is content to gamble that it won't happen, just as it did over the tsunami, or that it won't be that serious, just as it's doing over global warming. Capitalism is always gambling with our lives in this way, without giving us any say at all. If the gamble comes off, the rich win. If it doesn't, we die.

Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. But to fight them and protect ourselves, we need something better than capitalism.

Paddy Shannon

If This Be Treason (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As soon as he could after the bombs went off in London on 7 July Tony Blair came on the TV to address the nation, as is expected of all great national leaders at times of crisis and danger. His message, in the sense that it had already been largely worked out for him by the media, was unexceptional. “This is” he said, “a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to our way of life”. Whether that “way of life” was represented by waging war on a country on the basis of lies about it being an immediate threat to world safety with its massively powerful weapons he did not say. But in case there were any lingering misapprehensions about it he plunged on: “When they [the bombers] try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated”.

Protection

This use of the words “us” and “we” was designed to create the impression that Blair was facing the same dangers, of being blown to pieces on the London Tube or buses, as the rest of us. In fact he made his defiant speech on a brief break from the G8 at Gleneagles, where the participants were protected by a high, impenetrable metal screen backed up by a few thousand police officers. When, back in London, he travels the quarter mile or so between his home in Downing Street and his workplace in the Houses of Parliament he does not face the same risks as working Londoners because he is whisked on his journey in a bullet-proof car, among a swarm of police on motor bikes, through streets which have been swept clear of other people. By most reasonable standards anyone who behaves in that way can be described as “intimidated”. Not that Blair lives by the same standards as the rest us, who are merely expendable members of the working class.

But after his intimidated bravado Blair had to give some attention to tracking down the bombers’ organisation and being seen to be actively working against another such incident. During this it leaked out that in future our “way of life” may be subject to the decisions of secret “anti-terror” courts, ruled over by “security cleared” judges with the accused being represented by “special advocates” who had also been vetted for “security”. Other news revealed that some of the defendants before such courts, if British subjects, may find themselves charged with the offence of treason. It seemed fairly obvious that these proposed changes, in the panic after 7 July, were designed to induce a retributive thrill among those whose enjoyment of our way of life made them grateful for the protection of such a stoutly unintimidated government.

Treason

Treason is defined as a violation or betrayal of allegiance which is owed to a sovereign or a country, usually through joining, or giving support to, enemy in a war or attempting to overthrow the government. This definition is more comprehensive and more complex than it may at first seem to be. There have been cases when the person accused of treason has argued that they were not of the alleged nationality and so did not owe allegiance to that country or its sovereign. Anyone who regards the world’s population as a mass of human beings may marvel at capitalism’s need to disastrously complicate what are essentially simple matters – for which many a lawyer is grateful. It may be taken as an example of this that of the four categories of treason remaining from the Treason Act of 1351 there is still the offence of “violating” the wife of the king’s eldest son, which may have caused some lost sleep among the men who consorted with Princess Diana while she was still married to the Prince of Wales.

For a long time treason was a capital offence and to satisfy the thirst of the population to witness that traitors had got their just deserts the sentence was often to be hung, drawn and quartered in public. (In fact this sentence was not formally abolished until 1947 – one of the reforms for which the Atttlee government did not, for some reason, claim any credit.) After capital punishment was abolished in 1965 treason remained as one of the few offences which could still “attract” (as lawyers are fond of putting it) the death penalty. Wandsworth prison in London, just in case anyone was in need of being hanged, kept a scaffold in good working order.

Casement

One of the more famous examples of treason trials, which came to its appointed grisly end on the scaffold in 1916, was that of Roger Casement. He was an Irish man who at the turn of the century had been employed as a consul of the British government in what was then the Belgian Congo. There he was appalled by the slave conditions and the butchery imposed on the Congolese people by the Belgian rubber companies, under the authority of King Leopold II. Casement’s character was summed up by his manager, who complained that “He is very good to the natives, too good, too generous, too ready to give away. He would never make money as a trader”. He retired in 1911, with a knighthood and a British government pension and two years later he returned to live in Ireland where, not entirely justifiably, he drew parallels between what he had seen in the Congo and Irish problems. In the cause of Irish nationalism he helped to form the Irish Volunteers, an armed militia.

When the First World War began he advised Irish men against joining the British Army, on the grounds that the war with Germany was no concern of theirs. On a false passport he went to Germany with the intention of persuading Irish prisoners of war to fight against Britain. This was not as welcome as he might have hoped; the Germans found him an embarrassment and hastily shipped him, in a submarine, back to Ireland where he was quickly captured. At his trial he tried to argue that he was an Irishman, a case which was fatally weakened in law by his accepting employment as a British consul, a knighthood and a pension. He was quickly convicted and executed at Pentonville on 3 August 1916. After his death his diaries came to light, providing evidence that he was not only a traitor but also a homosexual, which was enough to provoke popular satisfaction that it was entirely appropriate to do away with him. It was not a time notable for rational assessment of such issues.

Joyce

There were similarities between that case and of William Joyce, whose broadcasts from Germany during the Second World War eventually earned him the name of Lord Haw Haw and a death sentence at the Old Bailey. Joyce was accustomed to dazzling people with his somewhat undisciplined knowledge and his oratory. Organisations found it difficult to cope with him and he had to leave the Army, the Conservative Party and then the British Union of Fascists. All of this was expressed in his virulent anti-semitism; typical of his descriptions of Jews was as “submen with prehensile toes”. But for this he might have done well in the Tory Party (he was once close to being their parliamentary candidate in Chelsea) and in the BUF he held a position only a little below that of Oswald Mosley. Joyce was ejected from the BUF in what Mosley described as an economy drive; he went on to form the National Socialist League, which was closer to the Nazis (their meetings ended with shouts of “Sieg Heil”) but the NSL never made any headway and was about to be wound up when Joyce went to Germany just before the start of the war.

Although there is little evidence that Joyce’s broadcasts had any significant effect on the war morale in Britain, he did provoke a kind of bemused fascination and became the stuff of myths and rumours. At all events his pro-German activities were enough to ensure that when the war ended he would be arrested and brought to England to be tried for treason. Anticipating by some 60 years the Blair government’s manipulation of the legal system, Parliament rushed through the Treason Act of 1945, which replaced the elaborate and prolonged trial procedure which had been in force in cases of treason with a simpler and brisker style, similar to that of a murder trial.

It soon emerged that Joyce had a serious defence against the charge. He had been born in the USA of Irish parents who had become naturalised Americans in 1894. But as a young man he had come to England and had applied for a British passport by lying about his place of birth. His defence argued that, however he had described himself, he was in fact not British but the prosecutor – handsome, brilliant Hartley Shawcross, Attorney General in the 1945 Labour government – persuaded the jury, with a little help from the judge, that “common sense” should override procedure. The long queues which had formed overnight to witness Joyce’s trial were hungry for a guilty verdict and it took the jury only 23 minutes to agree. A little over three months later Joyce, having exhausted all the avenues of appeal, was executed at Wandsworth prison. Popular revenge had been satisfied.

Class and Patriotism

Among his admirers Joyce had a reputation as a relentlessly logical thinker. It was a strange kind of logic which accommodated his support of Germany’s war effort against Britain with his rabid British nationalism. (“The white cliffs of Dover! God bless old England on the lea” he exclaimed to his guard when he was being flown across the Channel to his trial). At the end he tried to escape the hangman by claiming to be an “alien”, which was the kind of accusation he was accustomed to make, in suitably contemptuous invective, about Jewish people. There was – and still is – nothing exceptional about such inconsistencies, which expose the fallacy of patriotism, with its essential creed of “my country right or wrong”. Workers, who make up the majority of capitalism’s people, have no country; however the system arbitrarily divides them according to ruling class rivalries, the workers are united in their poverty. For example it was not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane was clearly related to the degree of their poverty. If you could afford it you got out in time; if you could not afford it.

That its workers should be patriotic is vital to each national ruling class and this, fertilised by official lies, is exploited by all governments. Following the 7 July bombs in London one politician after another rushed to denounce the bombers for killing innocent people, as if the British and American forces in Iraq were not also doing that, on a much larger scale. The response of the Blair government was very much as we have come to expect – distortions of facts, the creation of new offences and the revival of the treason charge, designed to stimulate a panic under cover of which the politicians could feel free to do what they would. The strategy in all this was to cement the workers’ patriotism, their loyalty to British capitalism. But as the smoke of the bombs cleared and the dead were counted the central fact remained that for workers to accept such a weary, discredited case is treason against their class.

Ivan

Letters: Animal testing (2005)

Letters to the Editors from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Animal testing

Dear Editors,

I am pleased to see you state [October issue] that the abolition of the savagery of capitalism will undoubtedly do its part to abolish all unnecessary suffering by non-human sentient creatures. Yet you say that the socialist approach to animal testing is pragmatic. What suffering is necessary? On what grounds? How many animal deaths equal one human life?

Animal testing is anything but scientific. Thalidomide tested safe on animals but when given to humans was a disaster. Drugs for arthritis were harmless to animals but proved to greatly increase heart attacks in people. Blue sky testing where animals are harmed and killed in the vague hope that something useful, and profitable, to humans is both daft and cruel.

I hope a socialist world would be more compassionate with people trying to live in harmony with the environment and animals rather than seeing them as assets to be exploited and plundered for the financial gain of vivisectionists and drug monopolies. Socialism should abolish these as well as the many other horrors of capitalism.

I am sure there are many people suffering from ailments capitalism can’t cure right now (I would be one) who would volunteer to try new drugs and thereby save animal lives while perhaps improving the quality of their own.

Terry Liddle, 

London, SE9

 

‘Health’ system

 Dear Editors,

I become annoyed when I hear of the increasing numbers of retired workers (hence unexploitable) who are being reminded by their GPs that their ailments are age-related and are told “what do you expect at your age?” instead of being offered proper care. Precious ‘health care’ is then devoted to those that capitalism is able to continue to exploit.

But can multi-million profiteers in drug companies be trusted to be more interested in population health than the profit to be made? Who is able to double-check their laboratory tests and results and how can study statistics be guaranteed not to have been exaggerated or distorted? With such vast wealth at stake would even a capitalist government really care about working-class health under such rewarding (for them) conditions? It has to be faced that no capitalist government assists the really needy – that task is left for charities to do and prop up a system that benefits only the wealthy ruling class.

If the health system is unable or unwilling to properly test and cure working-class patients then I personally believe being ignored and left to suffer or being officially kept alive to suffer is not good enough. The obvious third option of being allowed access and advice on how to quickly and efficiently terminate life should be made available.

The utter independence and freedom to choose the time and place of my own demise certainly appeals to me and is a right I am keen on exercising. If you can help out with attractive suggestions on how this can be accomplished it would be appreciated and I can depart – when the time comes – thumbing my nose at officialdom who have dictated in life what I can and cannot do. It would be a great way to go!

Ron Stone, 

Gelorup, Australia

 

Blinkered Nationalist

Why on earth are you standing in a Scottish seat? Smacks a little of imperialism to people up here. “Great Britain” is a state founded for empire — the centre colonising the island — it is outdated so anyone with the slightest knowledge of politics now sees “Great Britain” as outdated, hence supporting independence. You are the only party with “Britain” in the title apart from the BNP!

Anon, 

Livingston, Scotland

 

Reply: 

As far as we are concerned, “Great Britain” is merely a geographical name. And we were the only party standing in the Livingston by-election without “Scottish” on the ballot paper — that’s because we don’t stand for an independent Scotland any more than we stand for an independent “Great Britain” or even “Little England”. We stand for world socialism, a world community, without frontiers, where the resources of the Earth, industrial and natural, will have become the common heritage of all humanity.

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Things can only get worse (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although Labour was elected to office in 1997 to the sounds of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’,  Blair is now singing a different tune. In the past the Labour Party used to argue that the state could, and should, be used to protect people from the worst effects of world market forces, through such measures as import controls, tariffs and subsidies to protect home industries and the employment they provided, and bans on the export of capital so that it was invested at home. Such views are still held by trade unionists, Leftwing reformists and the Green Party (which has taken over the Labour Party’s discarded policies in this area).

Blair now derides this as “the European social model of the past” and is actively campaigning to get other EU governments to abandon it too. In his Leader’s speech to the annual Labour Party Show in Brighton he told the audience (they can hardly be called delegates since the resolutions they pass count for nothing):

“In the era of rapid globalisation, there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive. The new world rewards those who are open to it. … The temptation is to use government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalisation by shutting it out – to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today. Because the dam holding back the global economy burst years ago. The competition can’t be shut out; it can only be beaten” (Guardian, 28 September).

In other words, as the other member of the Thatcher-Blair Mutual Admiration Society used to put in: TINA. And, given capitalism, they are right; there is no alternative. What Marx called the “coercive laws of competition” can’t be overcome; they have to be applied, not just by capitalist enterprises but by governments too.

But at what cost to workers and society in general? It means running fast – in fact, running faster and faster – just to stand still, continually introducing new methods of organisation and production so as to be able to keep down costs and ward off or beat the competition. It’s a race to the bottom, involving, for those who actually produce and distribute the wealth of society, speed-ups, stress, precarious contracts, deregulations, redundancies, retraining, changing jobs – and the scrap heap for those who can’t keep up.

And, despite Blair’s optimism, there is no guarantee that, even with these changes, British capitalism will come out on top – who says competition, says losers as well as winners. Capitalism really is a rat race, or rather a treadmill, from which there’s no relief.

There Are Words for It (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around five thousand languages are spoken at the moment, a number likely to be halved by the end of the twenty-first century. This is partly due to the impact of the world’s ‘major’ languages, such as Spanish, Russian and (above all, of course) English. As English becomes a truly global language, the main language of films, popular music and the internet, not only do its words find their way even into languages like German, but it completely displaces many local or minority languages. The decline in numbers is also caused by the growing role of ‘national languages’, those taught in schools and recognised as a country’s main language of communication. TupÆ, for instance, once widely spoken in Brazil, is now down to a few hundred speakers, pushed out by the expansion of Portuguese (though it will live on in words it has given to English, such as jaguar).

Endangered languages like this have existed throughout history, but are now far commoner than previously. The reasons for this are usually seen as straightforwardly political:

“large centralized political units (both the old-fashioned empire and the all-modern nation state) cause the total number of languages in their territory to decline. In so far as the world goes on being apportioned in such units, the total number of languages in the world will go on falling.” (Andrew Dalby: Language in Danger)

This statement is correct as far as it goes, but it plays down the economic factors behind language death. Languages decline and die when the communities of their speakers are disrupted (by conquest, exile, disease, and so on) or when children grow up speaking in daily life a language other than that of their parents. This can happen for various reasons, one being that the ‘new’ language is seen as a means of economic advancement, perhaps just because it has more speakers and can offer better employment prospects or a bigger market. Languages with a few thousand, or even a few million speakers, can hardly ‘compete’ with English, the language of international business.

Even the way a language is written can be affected by political and economic considerations. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1991, the governments of the new countries of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan decided to switch from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet to write their respective national languages, which are all related to Turkish. This was partly due to anti-Russian nationalism — the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used to write Russian, having been imposed by Stalin in the 1940s. But it is also clearly motivated by a desire to attract tourists and business visitors and to make it easier for people there to learn English. Returning to the Arabic alphabet (which was used in these countries before the Cyrillic) would have been possible, but would not have served the new rulers’ westernising aims.

Besides undermining the status of languages, economic factors can lead to the creation of new languages. In The Power of Babel, John McWhorter traces the origins of Russenorsk, a kind of mixture of Russian and Norwegian, which came into being in the nineteenth century when Russian traders brought timber to Norway every summer to sell. Russenorsk was a very basic kind of language, useful for bartering and various other kinds of social interaction, but not usable for political debate or discussion of any abstract ideas. Languages like this are termed pidgins, and they usually arise when two groups of speakers come together in specific circumstances. Many Native Americans at first spoke Pidgin English when speaking to white people, while maintaining their own languages too. Unlike Russenorsk, which was a genuine mixture, this Pidgin English consisted almost entirely of words from the language of the dominant group — English — since English-speakers rarely had any desire or motivation to learn a local language. This is the usual situation: the language of the conquerors or colonists provides the vocabulary of the pidgin, which the conquered people have to use to talk with their new masters.

Pidgins often die out after a while: the subordinate group may well adopt the language of their conquerors, as happened in North America. Russenorsk ceased to be needed when the Russian Revolution put an end to the timber-trading. But sometimes a pidgin is expanded to become a full-fledged language, not one just used for a few special purposes, but one with its own individual structure and a vocabulary as large as that of any ‘normal’ language. A pidgin which has become a full language like this is called a creole; formation of a creole usually happens when people speaking different native languages and only sharing a pidgin are brought together. McWhorter mentions the case of Sranan, a creole spoken in Surinam, on the northern coast of South America. This was a British-owned slave colony, and slaves from various parts of Africa who were brought there had only Pidgin English in common at first. This eventually expanded to become Sranan, which is widely spoken in Surinam nowadays, alongside Dutch.

In fact the slave trade is the commonest causal factor in the origins of creoles. This appallingly cruel and immensely profitable system of trading in human beings resulted, among other things, in millions of people being uprooted from their homes and families, transported across the world, and set to work in desperate and scarcely-believable conditions. It should come as little surprise to learn that many languages of the West Indies are creoles (Jamaican creole, for instance), as is Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. As creolised forms of pidgin Englishes, these still have vocabularies that are partly derived from English, but they are absolutely not debased forms of English. The languages of other colonising nations have also given rise to creoles, such as a Portuguese-based creole in the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic, and the French-based creole spoken in Haiti. As McWhorter says, “most creoles have arisen amid conditions of unthinkably stark and ineradicable social injustice.”

One, rather controversial, claim is that the development of agriculture about ten thousand years ago led to the wiping out of many languages, as cultivators expanded their territories and settled down, thus overrunning existing groups of hunter-gatherers, who may well each have spoken their own language. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that capitalism, with its globalisation and its tendency to make everything homogeneous, is now killing off languages like nobody’s business. An examination of the current state and historical development of the world’s languages shows how capitalism leaves its ugly footprints everywhere, even in the way we speak.

Paul Bennett

Bushmen and the progress of capitalism (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been estimated that the so-called Bushmen of the Kalahari have lived in southern Africa for at least 20,000 years, but that cuts no ice with the zealots hell-bent on the development of capitalism in that part of the world.

“The Bushmen of the Kalahari – among Africa’s last indigenous peoples – are on the verge of losing their ancestral homeland after the Government of Botswana stepped up a campaign to force them into squalid resettlement camps” (Times, 12 September). The government has sent heavily armed wildlife guards into the Central Kalahari Game reserve – an area that had been promised to the Bushmen “in perpetuity”. Their aim is to remove some 200 to 250 Gana and Gwi who have returned there from the resettlement camps. The Times report continues: “Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, which has been highlighting the Bushmen’s plight, said: ‘The Government seems hell-bent on finishing them off this time. The situation is very urgent. Unless circumstances change through outside intervention, this could very well be the end of these particular people’”.

The plight of the Gana and Gwi people is by no means unique. The development of capitalism crushes all the tribal societies it comes into contact with. In the past we have had the slaughter of the native Americans in the USA, the butchery of the Australian aborigines and more recently of the Yanomami in Northern Brazil. The concept of a tribal society that lives by gathering and hunting with no recourse to capitalism’s markets is anathema to a property-based social system.

The Botswana government has destroyed the tribal wells and banned hunting in its efforts to restrict tribal groups. The growth of farming and diamond mining probably lie behind the government’s recent actions. Some government ministers have hinted that the evictions are needed because deposits of diamonds have been found in the area, although the state diamond company, which is an offshoot of De Beers claim they are uneconomic to mine. “However, De Beers does not rule out mining them at a later date.”

The development of capitalism in Africa must crush tribal communities just as it did in Europe and America . The only hope for a communal life-style is not a return to primitive tribal society, but the transformation of present day private property, profit-producing society into the new social system of world socialism.

Is Marxism dead? (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Surely before we cheer or weep over the bier of Marxism we should clearly identify the corpse. What exactly do we mean by Marxism?

Marxism is a materialist method of interpreting history; an explanation of social class and a labour theory of value. However, rather than getting involved in Marx's rather complicated theories, it is simpler to look at his vision of a proposed alternative to capitalism, which he called socialism (following Robert Owen) or communism — he and the pioneers of the socialist movement used the terms 'communism' and 'socialism' interchangeably.

Marx saw wage labour and capital as two sides of the same relation and affirmed that one could not exist without the other. He advised workers to remove from their banners the conservative slogan of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work and instead inscribe 'Abolition of the wages!' He saw the state — by its nature — as an executive committee of a ruling class and held that in socialism government of people would give way to a simple, democratic administration of things.

In other words, Marx's vision of socialism was of a social system of common ownership of the means of production, the resources of nature and the means of distribution essentially achieved by a conscious democratic process and administered necessarily by the widest possible forms of participative democracy.

It is important to emphasise — however obvious it should be — that the wageless, classless, moneyless and stateless world he envisaged could not be established by other than the conscious democratic action of a majority.

Today Left and Right are meaningless terms; each is one side of the spectrum of capitalism; and, because both accept to take on the political stewardship of capitalism, economic and political necessity frequently means they adopt each other's positions. Always when the Left gains power it creates dissidence within its own outer ranks when its aspirations clash with the requirements of the system and the capitalist ruling class.

In Britain today, 'Old Labour' — with a very short memory of old Labour governments! — bemoan the activities of Blair, Brown, Straw, Blunkett and Clarke. We should remember that most of these men were Lefties and CNDers and that none of them invented 'Blairism'. Blairism and its outcrops are simply the logical application of the illogical reformist thesis that capitalism can be made to function in the interests of the working class; a bit like saying that the slaughterhouses can function for the benefit of the cattle.

Socialism/communism has never existed anywhere, nor could it exist in just part of the world, because it is the global alternative to a decadent global system. Socialists in open debate with upholders of capitalism will shatter their arguments and throw its philosophers to the wind. But the political agents of capitalism have learnt never to attack socialism as Karl Marx envisaged ; instead they attack a perversion of Marxism which they call Marxist- Leninism — a contradiction in terms — or the limping incompetence of Left reformism in government,

Those who want to see socialism must first unequivocally delineate what they mean by the term, as all scientific practice calls for. Once this is done, it can be seen that socialism as advocated by Marx is still very much alive.

Doubtful Benefits (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s another day with a ‘Y’ in its name, so the government must be attacking benefits scroungers again. The routine pieties of the modern political age are to talk about ‘helping people’ out of ‘the benefits trap’ and ‘back into work’ – joining the perennial political duties like cutting red tape and reducing government spending. The reason why these problems never go away is because they are problems caused by the very system which puts the politicians in power, and which they cannot resolve without destroying themselves and their own elevated statuses.

David Blunkett – now returned to the cabinet after resigning last year for abusing his office for personal gain in helping his lover’s nanny get a visa quicker – has been making loud noises about the ‘crackers’ Incapacity Benefit system. It is Blunkett’s role to sound like a bruiser, to talk tough and act tough, seen by many as appealing to Labour’s core constituency – former Tory voters on council estates. He bemoaned the continuing rise of people on incapacity benefits (many driven there by previous efforts to try and cut benefits claimants, helped by staff driven by targets to reduce certain types of benefits).

There are currently 2.7 million people on incapacity benefit in the UK, with something like 29 million people in employment (possibly the highest UK figure ever). According to the BBC, that is four times the number of IB recipients compared to 30 years ago. Of course, many things have changed since then, not least the structure of the benefits system as a whole.

Blunkett, however, still wants to drastically reduce the numbers on incapacity. Revealing his new status as a medical doctor, Blunkett pronounced that getting out to work is a better cure for depression than staying at home watching daytime telly.  This startling revelation must have shocked his fellow healthcare professionals who had been labouring under the impression that depression is a medical ailment of the brain as much as a break is a medical condition of the leg. Perhaps

Blunkett will now advise a brisk walk as a cure for that. Behind the tough rhetoric, though, as ever with the modern Machiavellian Labour Party, is some old-fashioned Old Labour style reforms: plans to make the benefits system ‘a ladder to self-reliance’ and to give assistance with training and finding jobs to people who are on IB. Simplification of the system may actually help people who are supposed to be too ill to work but have to be well enough to run from pillar to post to fill in their 2,000 page benefits claim form signed in triplicate in blood. Or something like that.

This is cut from the same cloth as the New Deal and all their previous schemes to ‘help’ the unemployed back to work by badgering them and managing them into being full-time professional job seekers. Of course, this runs counter to any notion that they can quickly cut costs. This month also saw the National Audit Office reveal that only 5% of people on IB were able to access back to work schemes. To assist more people through such structures will actually increase the cost of managing the benefits, not decrease it, as massive expansion would be required.

This is the central conundrum for governments: caught between a real problem beyond their control, trapped by their own eternal propaganda of cost cutting, they cannot pursue their eternal propaganda of getting people off benefits. Instead, all we have is a Groundhog Day of pronouncements and denouncements as the Ministers try to be seen doing something, usually by trying to portray the people who are dependent on benefits as somehow culpable and at fault for the whole of the costs of the benefits system.

Politicians are struggling to define the typical benefits recipient, to legitimise the idea of welfare so they can attack it and reduce costs and also increase downwards pressures on wages and the labour market. Most people in the UK are probably only two pay cheques away from needing to call on benefits, but rather than portray it as a system to help people and prevent catastrophe it is universally presented as a location of cheats, frauds and scroungers, riddled with layabouts and other undeserving poor types. Benefits and being on benefits is to be despised and feared.

Despite this, though, people are compelled to claim them because of the wages system, because they are too ill to work or because work is not available. The benefits system actually benefits employers who otherwise would face the costs and disruption of having to keep on people whose illness makes them turn up to work irregularly, who would lie in desperation to gets jobs about their illnesses, and push much of the cost currently borne generally through taxes directly onto capitalists who employ many workers.

Herein is the rub of the £3 billion lost from the system by fraud and ‘error’ – much of it will have been small sums given to people which will have made their lives easier. Some of it will have contributed to the real living needs of claimants. The real tragedy is not the fraud or the overspend, but that much of the £109 billion budget is wasted assessing people, categorising people and cheeseparing their entitlements.

There is enough food, clothing and housing to go round. The world today is not short of wealth. In order, though, to maintain labour discipline, to keep the labour market in existence, a massive welfare budget must be expended to deny access to the things people need.

The simple fact is that we live in a society overripe for socialism. The material possibility has been around the corner for years. When we remove the barriers to the access of wealth, we also remove the barriers that make some people unemployable, that make socialising and community a cost that has to be scraped out of local authority and social services budgets. We would remove the binds, the need to support a restrictive welfare system but simultaneously to attack it and try to reduce its budget, by the principle of producing freely together.

Socialists, unlike leftists, do not support the welfare state, do not see it as a way to socialism, but as an inevitable part of capitalism, of administering poverty. The abolition of poverty – not in far-flung imagined foreign fields where poverty is vividly drawn by the masters of propaganda, but on the very streets where we walk and it is painted out by those same illusionists – will mean an end to the welfare ideology. With luck, it will also mean seeing less of David Blunkett’s face revelling in his own ‘stern compassion’.

Pik Smeet

The Measure of All Things (2005)

Book Review from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Postmodern Humanism. By Jack Grassby. TUPS books. 2005. £9.95

Until the 1960s Secularists, Rationalists and Free Thinkers as they were variously called had a reputation, rightly or wrongly, of being negative god-killers, bible-debunkers and priest-baiters. Then, in 1963, a group which felt the need to appear more positive set up the British Humanist Association. They still seem to be working out what their positive case is beyond promoting a non-religious but still ethical approach to life. Recently they set up a working group to examine their core values. Jack Grassby is a member of the North East Humanists and his book is intended as a contribution to this debate.

It is not certain that it will appeal to his fellow Humanists as he embraces two approaches most of them would not normally like any more than we do: sociobiology (with its biological determinism) and postmodernism (with its rejection of any universal human values). Also, it contains a number of embarrassing howlers, such as stating that homo sapiens emerged from the Neanderthals and that Socrates preached that "man is the measure of all things" whereas this was the view of the Sophists that Socrates set out to rubbish. Come to think of it, "man is the measure of all things" could well be the core-value that the Humanists are searching for.

Adam Buick