St. George and the Coloured Rag (2008)

From the Vaux Populi blog:

Things have moved a long way since Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech 40 years ago. Today, all the mainstream parties are against immigration, as long as it's illegal of course. A border police force has even been set up to keep them out. St. George's Day was once celebrated only by fascists. Now the red-and-white coloured rag is even flown on public buildings. The gentlemen of the League of Saint George (see http://www.leaguestgeorge.com/) must be happy.

Yes, unfortunately, St George's Day is upon us again, but what is this mythical saint supposed to have done?

We all know that, according to legend, he slew a dragon but in The History of the Seven Champions of Christendom we are told that, among his many feats of valour, he did away with two.

He was, so the story goes, born in Coventry, son of Lord Albert, High Steward of England. Having been abducted as a baby and held captive by the witch Calyb for 14 years, he tricked her into revealing her magic whereupon he split a rock and imprisoned her in it. This freed not only St George but also St Denis, patron saint of France, St James (Spain), St Patrick (Ireland) and St David (Wales), after which they went their separate ways on great adventures and acts of valour. These included sorcery, battling against incredible odds and rescuing princesses.

George, the legend continues, fought and won many battles, apparently single-handed. In the course of one he also freed St Denis who had carelessly allowed himself to be captured. And, of course, he slaved that dragon.

On his return to England he wanted to turn to a contemplative life but the king asked him to slay one more dragon which was terrorising the people of Dunsmore. This time, although he killed the beast, he also died from the poison spewed on him by it. He was, we are told, buried in the chapel at Windsor Castle and his sons - no mention of a wife - were given high office by the king.

If you believe all this you'll believe anything, including that St George's Day is anything more than an excuse for xenophobia - and for pubs to sell more beer.

We shan't be celebrating today but will continue distributing our leaflets in favour of world-wide socialism where the planet and its resources will have become the common heritage of all humans and the world won't be criss-crossed by frontiers.

ALB

True Levellers (2019)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stand Up Now, Diggers All! The 1649 'True Levellers' Commune at St George's Hill (Past Tense Publishers, London, 2019.)

One simplistic vision of the English civil war has been that it was an early version of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie. It’s an idea that has been especially popular with Leninists. Romantic as it may seem, and intensely brave and admirable as many of those were who opposed that ‘man of blood’ Charles I, it is, unfortunately perhaps, not the case.

Levellers did not want to level, to make everyone equal. As stated in the Leveller document An Agreement of the People (1649): ‘We therefore agree and declare, That it shall not be in the power of any Representative … to render up … nor level mens Estates, destroy Propriety, or make all things Common.’

In the same way that, for example, a term for an Irish outlaw – Tory – was applied to the group that became the British Conservative Party, the Levellers were given that title by their enemies. William Walwyn, considered to be one of the more radical of the Levellers, nevertheless advocated free trade to the Committee for Trade and Common Affairs, opposing monopolies such as the Levant Company (naturally, the government sided with the Company at the expense of small enterprises). This is not to say that their motivation had no class interests, but there was a strong interest of the ‘freeborn’, that is, men (only men) with some property; their platform included a property qualification to have the franchise.

But it was different with the True Levellers, or Diggers. Parts of their manifesto, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced, ring clear to socialists across three and a half centuries. Once the earth returns to being a common treasury,

  ‘Then this Enmity in all Lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a Dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the Earth then another.’

This Past Tense pamphlet takes in the events of 1649-1650, principally around the attempts to cultivate the common land at St George’s Hill. It starts with the first attempts to dig there on 1 April 1649 and finishes the following April with the death threats and final burnings of the dwellings and crops there and in the neighbouring Cobham Heath commune. It details the events between, and includes not only the threats, legal judgements and violence perpetrated against them, but also some extraordinary published critiques. For example, from the royalist publication Mercurius Pragmaticus quoted in the pamphlet:

  ‘What this fanatical insurrection may grow into cannot be conceived for Mahomet had as small and despicable a beginning whose damnable infections have spread themselves many hundreds years since over the face of half the Universe.’

In the end, the attempt at holding property in common was defeated.

The pamphlet is interesting and informative. One criticism is that, although it mentions the religious dimension of the Diggers, it does not reflect how central their religion was to them. These were people in a time when many thought that Christ’s second coming was imminent.

It would also have been interesting to have looked at, in particular, Winstanley’s subsequent writings. The Wigan-born cloth merchant Gerrard Winstanley, one of the movement’s main writers, wrote a piece in 1652, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed to Cromwell, containing ideas not unfamiliar to socialists:

  ‘Shall we have no Lawyers? There is no need of them, for there is to be no buying and selling; neither any need to expound Laws.’ 

  ‘If any say, This will bring poverty; surely they mistake: for there will be plenty of all Earthly Commodities, with less labor and trouble then now it is under Monarchy. There will be no want, for every man may keep as plentiful a house as he will, and never run into debt, for common stock pays for all. ‘ 

  ‘If you say, Some will live idle; I answer, No: It will make idle persons to become workers… There shall be neither beggar nor idle person.’ 

  ‘True Freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the Earth.’

A historic twist: St George’s Hill, just outside Weybridge, is now a gated community. The place where the True Levellers planted their crops is now where a local estate agent can proudly announce:

  ‘From music legend to sporting royalty, St George’s Hill has an impressive list of celebrity residents such as: John Lennon, Tom Jones, Elton John, Cliff Richard, Ringo Starr, Jenson Button, Sue Baker, John Terry’

and applaud the high prices of the properties therein.

Notwithstanding the zeal of the estate agent, the pamphlet begins with the first line of the song The World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rosselson: “In 1649… at St George’s Hill”. The existence of the Socialist Party demonstrates the truth of another line from the song “They were dispersed, but still the vision lingers on”: an egalitarian society of common ownership.

Vincent Jones 

Editorial: David Lloyd George and “dastardly” conduct. (1913)

Editorial from the April 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every age has its representative types, and the type of our time is that sinister figure in politics known as the Right Hon. David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He perfectly reflects the cant and hypocrisy of the psalm singing sweaters who own and control the means of life in this auspicious and happy era.

He comes into the glare of present publicity by his dealings in “Marconis.” Part of the story has been told before the capitalist committee now sitting, but a short survey of the affair will be useful.

Sir Rufus Daniel Isaacs, K.C., the Attorney-General, has a brother, Godfrey Isaacs, who is Managing Director of the Marconi Company. Having made himself responsible for selling 100,000 shares in the company, Godfrey offered Rufus 10,000 shares at £2 each, which the latter bought. Thereby Godfrey Isaacs netted about £9,000 profit, but as Rufus had plenty of money he did not mind this.

Sir Rufus then approached Mr. David Lloyd George, telling him it was “a very good investment,” and that “these shares would undoubtedly rise in value.” The “poor but honest” Chancellor, of course, could not resist the bait of “ninepence for fourpence”—not the mythical ninepence he promised working men under the Insurance Act, but a real, live “ninepence.”

On April 17th, therefore, Mr. Lloyd George “bought” 1,000 shares at £2 each from Sir Rufus, although the issue of these shares was not authorised by the company until the 18th (Attorney General’s evidence, March 25th, 1913). He did not pay for the shares, but within two days he sold 357 of them, and by the third day 500 more, Therefore he sold all but 143 of them and in three days netted a profit of £743 !

Unearned increment ! How the words used to trip from the lips of the “Welsh tribune” at Limehouse and elsewhere in his campaigns up and down the country ! Listen to his denunciation of the wicked, idle landlord : —

“He doesn’t even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks to receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to spend it for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function is stately consumption of wealth produced by others.” (Limehouse, 30.7.09.)

What difference is there between the idler drawing a rent-roll from land he doesn’t make or till land Lloyd George ? The latter buys through a broker or a friend shares in a concern 3,000 miles away. He doesn’t operate the plant, in fact he hasn’t seen it. His chief point is that the company is in far-away America. “He is not concerned with the work or how it is done”—or paid for. His chief concern was expressed by him in his evidence before the Marconi Committee in the statement: “I wanted to know whether it was likely to turn out an investment that would give a fair dividend” (31.3.13). And again on March 23rd of the current year, when he confessed that “I thought it would be a thoroughly good investment.”

Men from East to West, from San Francisco to St. Louis, will toil, building stations, operating instruments, sending messages ; men will be sweated and risk their lives as operators in ocean liners, and all the time David Lloyd George will wait at Downing Street to see the “divi” come rolling in. He can’t always wait for “divi,” and so he gambles on “Change”—but please don’t call it gambling : it is simply investment !

On both grounds he is condemned as a canting hypocrite. He spends his time denouncing unearned increment when it takes the form of the plunder collared by the absentee landlord, but never a word against the swag filched by the absentee shareholder. While he is rousing the workers against the parasite landlord, the equally parasitic industrial capitalist is left in peace to continue his sweating system.

Lloyd George has, indeed, done good work—for the factory owners.

When he sat in “opposition” he bitterly denounced monopoly. The American ones came in for his special condemnation. Yet the wily Welshman readily invests his money in one of the latest American monopolist concerns, and one that has already started fighting its competitors in the courts and buying out the most dangerous, just as Pierpont Morgan fought Carnegie in the Steel Trust.

Lloyd George lives in a nice house in Downing Street, full of the comforts associated with a capitalist Minister’s lot. He has another house at Criccieth in Wales, and, still not satisfied, he looks around for further quarters, and negotiates for yet another house, at Walton Heath, in Surrey, where golf links and other luxuries of an expensive kind can be revelled in. But with tears in his voice he pleads before the Committee, “Cannot a man fifty years of age have one house to call his own ?”

A man of fifty ! Pity the working man who reaches that age ! What bitter disappointment awaits the toiler who looks forward to having a house to call his own worth £2,000 (like Lloyd George’s) when he reaches fifty !

What does Lloyd George care about the aged worker ? Should a toiler be so unfortunate as to reach fifty, then, under David’s Insurance swindle, he suffers to the extent of 3s. each week for his misfortune in living so long !

A little insight into George’s past will show how callous he is to the lot of the workers in the December of their days.

During the life of the last Tory Government a Commission was appointed to investigate the cost of Old Age Pensions. Lloyd George was chosen from the “Opposition” to sit upon it. What did he say ? Listen to his confession made at Newcastle, April 14th, 1903, and quoted in his own book, “Better Times” (p. 6).

“I sat as a member of an old age pensions Committee—appointed by a Unionist Government. … In the evidence we heard we found a greater difficulty than giving old age pensions. We found amongst the workmen, especially in the unskilled trades, that men rarely even approached the confines of old age. They are exhausted by the way, still in the prime of life. When we came to fix our pensions at sixty-five we found that large masses of the workmen would, never live to benefit by it.”

Seven years after that startling confession Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he brought in an Old Age Pensions Bill. No longer on the Opposition side, but occupying now a seat in the Government, he was faced with his own statement that it was no good giving pensions to men at sixty-five because most men are crushed out whilst still in the prime of life. So this oily-tongued time-server brought in a Bill fixing the age for pensions, not at sixty-five—that was too high—but at seventy, as there would be more dead by that time, and less money to pay out !

In spite of this fine example of the mean and contemptible actions of this lawyer advance agent of his party, workingmen still follow at his call.

The man who, at the desire of the exploiters, framed an Insurance Bill which, in his own words, “is framed in a way to completely protect them” (the employers); the man who, in in the interest of the wealthy ship-owners, raised the load-line for cargo and thereby sends seamen to their death ; the man who, for his actions during the “All Grades” railwaymen’s dispute earned the praise of the employers—this man is he who complains of “dastardly” conduct against him ! Who has really been guilty of “dastardly” conduct ? With the hollow and mocking results of nearly seven years power before them it should be no difficult task, in spite of Lloyd George’s oily tongue and Stock Exchange cunning, for the smitten and spat-upon working class to decide. Will they ? We shall see.

A Red Herring. (1931)

Editorial from the April 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent election in St. George's raises a few interesting questions.

In the first place, there seems little doubt that Tory, Labour and Liberals were allied in supporting the Conservative candidate against the Rothermere-Beaverbrook nominee. But the first question that strikes one is, Why all the bother and mud-slinging? What is behind the Rothermere-Beaverbrook attempt to run the Conservative Party? And, further, why the comparative unanimity between Conservatives, Liberals and Labour on the Indian Question? Is it all a game of bluff?

That Rothermere and Beaverbrook desire to wield the balance of power in the Conservative Party, and that Winston Churchill (who up to the present seems always to have changed his political colours too late) desires the position of Prime Minister, may all be true, but yet not the main object behind the trouble.

Ireland was for decades a useful blind to keep the English workers from taking too close an interest in their own political circumstances. After Ireland had passed out of the picture, Russia stepped in, and now India is in the limelight. But in the meantime Liberal, Tory and Labour have been drawing closer together and the Labour Party have given ample evidence of their ability to steer accurately in the interests of capital. There is a danger of the workers getting restive and dissatisfied with the Labour Party's meek acceptance of capitalist conditions. What better method then of heading off dangerous restiveness than by putting up a sham fight with a new brand of capitalist political parties. The hazier and more indefinite the object and programme, the larger the number of people likely to be attracted.

The way Gandhi has been manoeuvred into such a position that many of his followers are now repudiating him, suggests the nature of the bluff.

The Daily Mail and the Evening News have been publishing furious articles about the surrender to Gandhi, but Gandhi has now discovered that there are certain reservations relating to safeguards in the British Government's agreement that were (purposely?) not made clear to him at the time of signing.

In the meantime, mass protest meetings are being held in India by Hindus who threaten to withdraw their support from Gandhi if he agrees to certain demands of the Moslems. It looks very like the old game of “divide and conquer."

To the worker the issues raised at St. George's were of no concern, as the interests engaged were capitalist interests. Self-government for India, like self-government for Ireland, is only a question of which group of capitalists will rule. The dinners to Gandhi given by the rich Bombay mill-owners are suggestive of the meaning of Indian self-government to the mass of the population of India.

For over a century the population of India has been exploited for the benefit of European capitalists who broke up the old communal village system of production that had flourished there for ages. In the meantime, native capitalists have amassed wealth and own much of the recently developed instruments of modern production. The latter now want political domination in order to secure a greater share of the fruits of the labour of the Indian workers—hence the movement for self-government.

Indian working men and women are exploited in mills, mines and on the land, like their English brethren, and, like them also, their only salvation lies in the international movement for Socialism. In this movement no help is to be expected from Indian mill-owners nor from the parties in this country that are united in demanding the continuance of present conditions, whether they fly the colours of Tory, Liberal, Labour or United Empire Parties.

50 Years Ago: A Red Herring (1981)

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

The recent election in St. George’s raises a few interesting questions.

In the first place, there seems little doubt that Tory, Labour and Liberals were allied in supporting the Conservative candidate against the Rothermere-Beaverbrook nominee. But the first question that strikes one is, Why all the bother and mud- slinging? What is behind the Rothermere-Beaverbrook attempt to run the Conservative Party? And, further, why the comparative unanimity between Conservatives, Liberals and Labour on the Indian Question? Is it all a game of bluff?

That Rothermere and Beaverbrook desire to wield the balance of power in the Conservative Party, and that. Winston Churchill (who up to the present seems always to have changed his political colours too late) desires the position of Prime Minister, may all be true, but yet not the main object behind the trouble.

Ireland was for decades a useful blind to keep the English workers from taking too close an interest in their own political circumstances. After Ireland had passed out of the picture, Russia stepped in, and now India is in the limelight. But in the meantime Liberal, Tory and Labour have been drawing closer together and the Labour Party have given ample evidence of their ability to steer accurately in the interests of capital. There is a danger of the workers getting restive and dissatisfied with the Labour Party’s meek acceptance of capitalist conditions. What better method then of heading off dangerous restiveness than by putting up a sham fight with a new brand of capitalist political parties. The hazier and more indefinite the object and programme, the larger the number of people likely to be attracted.

The way Gandhi has been manoeuvred into such a position that many of his followers are now repudiating him, suggests the nature of the bluff.

The Daily Mail and the Evening News have been publishing furious articles about the surrender to Gandhi, but Gandhi has now discovered that there are certain reservations relating to safeguards in the British Government’s agreement that were (purposely ?) not made clear to him at the time of signing.

In the meantime, mass protest meetings are being held in India by Hindus who threaten to withdraw their support from Gandhi if he agrees to certain demands of the Moslems. It looks very like the old game of “divide and conquer.”

To the worker the issues raised at St. George’s were of no concern, as the interests engaged were capitalist interests. Self-government for India, like self-government for Ireland, is only a question of which group of capitalists will rule. The dinners to Gandhi given by the rich Bombay mill-owners are suggestive of the meaning of Indian self-government to the mass of the population of India.

For over a century the population of India has been exploited for the benefit of European capitalists who broke up the old communal village system of production that had flourished there for ages. In the meantime, native capitalists have amassed wealth and own much of the recently developed instruments of modern production. The latter now want political domination in order to secure a greater share of the fruits of the labour of the Indian workers—hence the movement for self-government.

Indian working men and women are exploited in mills, mines and on the land, like their English brethren, and, like them also, their only salvation lies in the international movement for Socialism. In this movement no help is to be expected from Indian mill- owners nor from the parties in this country that are united in demanding the continuance of present conditions, whether they fly the colours of Tory, Liberal, Labour or United Empire Parties.

(Editorial from the April 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

Editorial: The fruits of reformism’s failures (2025)

Editorial from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 13 September an estimated 110-150,000 people demonstrated on the streets of central London waving Union and St. George flags to ‘Unite the Kingdom’. This followed a campaign of painting the cross of St. George on roundabouts and bridges and attaching the flag to lampposts which no car driver or bus traveller could have failed to notice. Meanwhile the Reform UK party tops polls of voting intentions and is winning local council by-elections up and down the country.

Some, like the organisers of the much smaller — only some 5,000 — counter-demonstration ‘against fascist Tommy Robinson and his Far Right supporters’, see it as the beginning of the rise of a fascist movement that needs to ‘smashed’. Certainly, the organisers were demagogic rabble-rousers peddling prejudice and hate, starting with Robinson himself. Some are indeed fascists. Others seem to have been Christian Nationalists as evidenced by some demonstrators waving crosses. But that’s the organisers.

Most of those taking part in the demonstration can’t reliably be called fascists, but are people who had been misled into believing that immigrants and asylum-seekers are somehow being given priority over people born here. They aren’t, but the rabble-rousers encourage the mistaken belief that they are. The socialist response is not to smash such demonstrations but to argue all the more forcefully why all workers, native or immigrant, should unite to end the capitalist system that treats them both as second class.

What we are witnessing is not fascism, which arguably belongs to a different era and different political conditions, but what political philosophers have called ‘nativism’ — the view that the established population of a state should be given priority over incomers. ‘Nativism’ is one end of the spectrum of nationalism, distinguished by insisting that measures should be taken against immigrants, from making it difficult for them to become citizens to stopping more coming to deporting those who have come.

Part of the socialist case against trying to reform capitalism to make it work for all is that the rise of reactionary parties — including in its day fascism — is a result of the inevitable failure of reformist politics and parties to do this. Those excluded from the ownership and control of society feel (correctly) that their problems are not being solved and (mistakenly) expect politicians to solve them. Traditionally either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party have been elected to do this. At the moment, the Tories are still discredited by the failure and antics of the previous government while the Labour Party, given a chance after last year’s election, has very quickly — more quickly than would normally be expected —become discredited too. This has left an opening for a different set of politicians to bid to have a go.

Reform UK, too, will fail as the problems are not caused by what governments do or don’t do but by the workings of the capitalist economic system, which both causes the problems and prevents their solution. The excluded majority are treated as second class because under capitalism making profits for those who own the resources on which society depends comes first. As long as capitalism persists, and as long as people put up with it, the needs of the excluded majority will come second — and some of that majority will be duped by far-right demagogues.

Tony Blair – Big Business, Big Dictators, Big Money (2016)

From the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blair’s successful career of getting people to vote for him and make him Prime Minister, 1997-2007, meant he was able after leaving 10 Downing St to move into the very remunerative world of advising wealthy companies and foreign governments.  

He made a good start. J. P. Morgan, the American investment bank, hired him to advise them for a fee of about £2.5 million a year.  He got other deals from Zurich Insurance, Bernard Arnault (part of a luxury goods conglomerate), and the International Sanitary Supply Association (Times, 2 March). His main firm, Tony Blair Associates, has been doing very well ever since.  Not only rich businessmen, but autocratic rulers round the world, can count on Blair’s support, at a price.  

Egypt

In 2013 Egypt’s first ever elected government (like every other government round the world, it was disreputable and unscrupulous – but it was elected) and its President Mohamed Morsi were overthrown by an army coup, a thousand ‘dissidents’ being killed, and thousands more arrested. Blair hurried over to Cairo to see the new army leader, Abdel al-Sisi, and went on Egyptian television to give his support.  ‘We can debate the past and it’s probably not very fruitful to do so, but right now I think it’s important the international community gets behind the leadership here.’  Previously Blair had given his backing to an earlier Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, and to the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi (Guardian, 30 January 2014).

Blair keeps up a high moral tone.  In 2007 he went to China (in a private jet, naturally) and told a meeting of philanthropists (who paid £1500 a head – more than a Chinese production worker then got in a year) that you should be judged not on what you do for yourself but on what you do for others.  He made $500,000 for that speech.

Kazakhstan

One of his main clients is Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, who pays Blair at least $13 million a year (some say twice as much as that).  In the days when the country was part of the Soviet Union, Nazarbayev rose to become First Secretary of the local state-capitalist party (for propaganda purposes it was deceitfully called the ‘Communist’ Party); that is, he was the local ruler.  Then when the Soviet Union broke up, Nazarbayev held an election for a new President, and (believe it or not) easily won with 91.5 percent of the vote.  Unlike rulers in countries with a bit more free speech, he gets more popular the longer he rules.  He’s been re-elected several times, and was able to announce that he had won the 2015 contest with 98 percent of the vote. The Human Rights Watch perhaps helped to explain this, when it pointed out that ‘Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion . . .  Torture remains common in places of detention.’  Nazarbayev was anti-religious in the Soviet days when that was the party line, but since then has become an enthusiast for Islam (most Kazakhs are Muslims), and has done the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.  There was an awkward business in 2011 when government forces killed fourteen unarmed protestors at a demonstration. Blair was able to advise Nazarbayev how to deal with the public relations angle, and sent him 500 words for his next speech to explain it all away.  All this goes down very well with other governments: Russia has given Nazarbayev six medals, and other countries have handed over another twenty-seven – including the dear old United Kingdom, which made him an ‘Honourable Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George’.  So no one could object to Blair’s giving (or rather selling) a helping hand to a knight backed by a couple of saints.  (What saints George and Mick really think of Nazarbayev hasn’t yet been disclosed.)

Azerbaijan

Another of Blair’s clients is Azerbaijan.  Heydar Aliyev was the KGB chief when Azerbaijan was in the old Stalinist Russian empire, and soon after independence he became president, until he died in 2003.  They know how to handle these matters in dictatorships, and (as with Assad in Syria) Heydar’s son – Ilham Aliyev – was immediately installed as ruler.  Ilham has a nice little family, two daughters and a son, and they all soon found themselves owning large Azerbaijani companies, not to mention valuable real property.  Ilham’s son, another Heydar, actually bought some luxury mansions in a Dubai development when he was only eleven years old.  Clearly a promising lad.  No prizes for guessing who will be groomed to succeed his father in due course as Azerbaijan’s freely-elected leader.  (In fact the family spent $44 million altogether on Dubai mansions, despite the fact that Ilham’s official salary is only $228,000; they must have been saving their pennies.)  Blair went to Baku (Azerbaijan’s capital) in 2009 and made a speech boosting the regime, in return for a fee of nearly $150,000.  ‘Journalists and human rights activists have been intensely harassed and savagely beaten’ (Guardian 6 January 2015), and opponents find themselves in jail; the security forces have arrested demonstrators ‘in order to protect citizens’ constitutional rights’ (which is one way of putting it).

Rwanda

Among numerous other clients is the ruler of Rwanda.  Blair is ‘an uncritical friend and well-paid adviser to the likes of Paul Kagama of Rwanda, a violent authoritarian’ (Economist, 5 March).  In that auspicious country, those who speak against the leader would do well to make their wills.  A number of politicians who opposed Kagama have come to a sticky end, while more than one who hoped to baffle Kagama’s strong-arm boys by fleeing abroad has met with a violent and unexplained demise even in a ‘safe haven’.

Blair’s wife Cherie is in on the act.  She has founded a firm to provide ‘strategic counsel to governments, corporates and private clients’.  One of her customers is the president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yazmeen, who has put the leaders of three opposition parties in jail, along with another 1700 opponents.

Providing help to despotic potentates round the world certainly pays off.  Blair’s personal fortune is now estimated at £70 million.  Windrush Ventures (which advises foreign governments; Firebush Ventures looks after affluent companies and sovereign wealth funds) –has just trebled its annual profits to £2.6 million, and the average pay of its forty-eight staff is now over £100,000 (Daily Telegraph, 6 March).  A tax specialist professor at City University said Blair when prime minister used to favour ‘accountability and transparency’; now he is ‘embarrassingly silent about his sources of income’.  Blair’s London home is a capacious house in Connaught Square (once owned by John Adams, later the American President), near Hyde Park, along with a substantial mews house behind, both guarded round the clock by armed policemen.  His country residence, which he bought in 2008, is a Queen Anne mansion in Buckinghamshire, complete with tennis court and swimming pool.  In fact Blair is now believed to own thirty-six properties.

Blair is keen to keep on good terms with the other world, and has founded ‘Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation’ to support all the major religions (with its main office in Grosvenor Square, just across from the US embassy); so perhaps he feels that in return the various supernatural rulers of the universe are supporting him, however dubious his activities.  Blair’s excuse for joining in the invasion of Iraq (which kickstarted the total chaos across the Middle East today – Syria has 250,000 dead, and half the population are ‘displaced’, i.e. refugees) – his excuse was that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator (as indeed he was).  He keeps saying he will defend the assault on Iraq ‘till my dying day’.  How ironic it is that Blair is now making his fortune by supporting other equally brutal dictators.

Socialists have always pointed out that Labour governments, and Labour Prime Ministers, can do no more than attempt to run capitalism more efficiently, and pretend to make people better off.  Tony Blair is now apparently engaged in an earnest effort to prove socialists right – at least he’s doing his best to make at least one ex-Prime Minister better off.

Alwyn Edgar

Editorial: A Genuinely Radical Movement (2012)

Editorial from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The history of capitalism is also, inevitably, the history of radical movements that have resisted the exploitation and conflict upon which the system rests.  Working people, men and women, have always felt the inequality and oppressiveness of capitalism’s class ownership and class power.  They experienced at first hand the lack of freedom of the propertyless labourer, forced to work in another’s man’s fields and factories, in his warehouses and offices, and they understood more-or- less clearly how their lives were being used up for the benefit of others.  From that experience and understanding they repeatedly challenged capitalism’s institutions of privilege and power.   They called for justice and for democratic accountability.  They cited scripture, natural law and the universal declaration of human rights in support of their cause. They fought and are still fighting for their dignity as human beings in the streets, on public platforms and on the internet, often summoning resources of great courage and determination. They have left behind them a record of frustration, indignation and anger.

Working class history records these individuals and movements: Gerrard Winstanley who in 1649 led his Diggers onto St Georges Hill in Surrey, seeking to turn the world into “a common treasury for all”;  the London crowds of the 1770s, roaring for, ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and denouncing the monarchical government of George III; the Luddites of the early 1800s smashing machinery to protect their livelihoods, and thirty years later, the massed meetings of Chartists attentive to speakers like firebrand, Feargus O’Connor, and voicing their demand for parliamentary representation.  In the 20th century, innumerable radical movements have emerged:suffragists; liberationists; anti-war and anti-nuclear groups; environmentalists; and ‘anti-capitalists’ among them, and already in the new century, we hear, unmistakably, that same frustration, indignation and anger from Occupy as it searches for an adequate response to the banking crisis of 2008 and the current recession.

A few of these movements, like the Diggers, were truly radical and visionary. They attempted to create a new way for human beings to relate to each other, a way that was not based on property and exploitation.  The Diggers failed, because they were few, and the forks and hoes they used to cultivate St George’s Hill belonged to a technology that could not yet feed or free the world.  In later centuries, most radical movements, like the Chartists and much of Occupy, have searched for ways to make capitalism work on behalf of the working class.  They failed, or will fail, too, because social conflict and exploitation of workers is built into the body of capitalism itself – it’s part of the system’s DNA – and cannot be eliminated by modifying institutions or changing a few governments or laws.  But technology has moved on, and what was beyond the grasp of the 17th-century Diggers is well within ours.  Our message then to fellow members of the working class is to act together in a genuinely radical movement, not to prune back the system of exploitation, but to grub it up wholesale by its roots and turn the world’s resources into a common treasury for all.

Sting in the Tail: Working Lunch (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working Lunch (1)

Boots the Chemists recently commissioned research about office workers taking lunch and came up with some alarming figures:

  The survey found more than 25 percent of office-based workers take a break of 30 minutes or less and 20 percent regularly skip lunch altogether. Four out of five regularly eat lunch at their desk. Of these, more than 70 percent continue to work while they eat, and almost 90 percent still answer the phone (Independent, 7 August).

So much then, for those opponents of socialism who claim that socialism won't work because it is “human nature to be lazy”!

Plain Speaking

George Orwell in 1984 speculated about a language called “Newspeak” that would make clear thinking impossible. This allowed those in power to describe the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Peace.

In the Herald (1 November) we learn of a Mr Marcus Harrison sending out electronic mail messages supporting the Gun Lobby against the views of the Snowdrop group. It is a prime example of Ncwspeak in action:

  As a professional communicator. I know how to distort information and manipulate facts . . . Of his offer ‘to distort facts' he argued that was no different from what the media, political spin doctors, or PR people do. 

Mr Harrison describes himself as “a writer/director/producer with 20 years experience in marketing and PR”. He may describe himself as a "professional communicator” and liken himself to “spin doctors and PR people”. but, like the rest of that media circus, he is just a bloody liar.

Working Lunch (2)

A photograph on the front page of the Herald (25 October) depicted the Queen and a rather elegant lady in designer clothes. The caption explained all:

  The Queen and Mrs Jolanta Kwasniewski, wife of the President of Poland, prepare to go into a working lunch at Buckingham Palace, Prince Edward was also present. The Queen later made President Aleksander Kwasniewski a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. 

The last working lunch Scorpion attended the gaffer threatened us all with the Order of the Boot and the P45.

It is about time the Queen, Prince Edward, the Polish President and his elegant wife were given the same Order by the working class.

Papal Progress

The Roman Catholic Church has a dreadful record of scientific suppression. Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th century Polish astronomer, was threatened by the Inquisition because of his heresy of proclaiming that the earth orbited the Sun. instead of the other way about. Indeed less than sixty years after Copernicus' death, the Italian scholar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for similar ideas.

The modern RC church is very adaptable. It now embraces the Copernican view, and a hundred years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species it even accepts evolution!

  The Pope has lent his support to the theory of evolution, proclaiming it compatible with Christian faith. It is likely to cause controversy among the religious right.
  His recognition that evolution is 'more than just a theory' came in a written message he sent to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body of experts that advises the Roman Catholic Church on scientific issues ”

(Herald, 25 October).

Wow. what next! A papal endorsement of Marx’s Labour Theory of Value or The Materialist Conception of History? We think not!

Criticism

Let’s face it, critics are an unloved bunch. With hindsight, everyone can look back at those critics who sneered at Van Gogh. Stravinsky and Darwin. They got it all wrong.

But criticism is a very important social function. Everyone should criticise everything. The basis of all progress is criticism. All of those critics who got it wrong were frightened of change. The socialist critic embraces change and says that we live in a society that must be changed.

Well researched, knowledgeable and practical criticism is a pre-requisite for a better society. But even an artist such as Van Gogh can rage against the inequalities of property society. Read his letters to his brother; you may then appreciate just how valid some of his criticisms were whatever your view of his paintings.

A Modern Tragedy

We understand, from those who know such things, that politicians seldom write their own speeches. Recognising this, and being of a kindly disposition towards the beleaguered in our midst, we offer the following lines to the leader of the Tory Party:

"Friends, Tories and Countrymen
Give me your vote
You did love me once
Whence this most foul calumny ?
Have sudden lost you. sweet reason?”

A reference to anything as flattering as reason appertaining to his Tory supporters may convince them to support Honest John again—however briefly.

If we were given to prediction we imagine a nice comfy seat in the House of Lords for John Major. Meanwhile, beyond this farce, continues the tragic reality of workers working for wages and heaping up profits for the owners.

Winstanley, Marx and Henry George ( 2012)

From the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Occupy movement has led to the ideas of these thinkers being discussed again at public meetings.

To mark the first anniversary of the Occupy camp at St Paul’s London Occupy organised a series of ‘New Putney Debates’ in October and November. Some took place in the same church in Putney as the original 1647 debates in Cromwell’s army. Two were devoted to the question of land.

The first, on 1 November on ‘Land and Democracy,’ was billed as:

‘Nearly 400 years ago the Diggers described the Earth as a ‘common storehouse for all’ and objected to land being kept in the hands of a few. Are landowners still oppressing the people today, and how should we respond?’

One response was given by Natalie Bennett, the new Leader of the Green Party, who argued her party’s case for a tax on land values. She quoted Churchill (when he was a Liberal Cabinet minister before WW1) and Henry George as favouring this.

Not being a product of labour, the price of land is determined entirely by demand and can command a higher price the more fertile it is or the more favourably it is situated (for example, in a city centre or near a railway station). Land prices rise whenever the land’s situation becomes more favourable (as when a town expands), the benefit of which is reaped entirely by the landowner without having to lift a finger. The idea of a Land Value Tax (LTV) is to tax away this windfall benefit.

Henry George (1839-1897), author of a widely-read book ‘Progress and Poverty,’ was hugely popular in America and was once nearly elected mayor of New York.  He advocated that a LVT should be the only tax. Hence the other name of the Georgist movement: ‘Single Taxers.’ Natalie Bennett, while favouring a LVT, didn’t go that far. She was challenged by a Liberal Democrat in the audience who said that it was her party’s policy too. She added that it had also been supported by Karl Marx.

This is true. One of the ten immediate measures (the first in fact) advocated in the Communist Manifesto by the Communist League of Germany for implementation had it come to win political control in 1848 was: ‘Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.’ Marx later explained (in a letter to F. A. Sorge in 1881) that, as a separate measure on its own, this was contradictory and criticised Henry George and others for ‘believing that if ground rent were transformed into a state tax all the evils of capitalist production would disappear of themselves’.

In the 1880s and 1890s Georgists and Socialists were rivals for working-class support, the Georgists arguing that to solve working class problems it was enough to tax away the rents of landowners while Socialists argued for the common ownership not just of land but of industry too.

It seems that this rivalry is being revived today, with many in the Occupy movement attracted by ideas of Henry George. This became evident at the second meeting on 9 November entitled: ‘A New Economy.’ The announcement for this started off well enough:

‘The foundations of the New Economy are: the means of life (water, food and housing) for all as a right; land and resources held in common and the benefits share,’

before petering out with ‘alternative currencies to foster greater equality and societal cohesion’.

It soon became clear that the organisers did not envisage ‘land and resources held in common’. What they wanted was a single tax on land values.  According to their handout, one of the ‘alternative currencies’ they had in mind was:

‘land backed interest free currency –spent into the economy to create infrastructure, rental income to fund citizens income and public services.’

In other words, the government would get money by taxing away the rental income, real or notional, of landowners (which these days includes not just the Duke of Westminster but those who own the leasehold or freehold of their homes) and using this to pay everybody a basic income as well as to finance its own expenditure. It is not clear that this is actually an ‘alternative currency’ since the existence of rental incomes to be taxed away assumes that there already is a currency. What they seem to mean is ‘land based interest free government financing,’ which would allow the government to dispense with borrowing money.

Whatever it is, it is not ‘land and resources held in common’. This was, in fact, specifically rejected by the speakers as unnecessary and leading to what happened in China under Mao during the period of the rural communes. This is the standard Georgist position, that common ownership of land would lead to tyranny and dictatorship, so private ownership of land is to continue in their scheme. They are not really opposed to capitalism either. (Henry George certainly wasn’t.) They even defended profit, saying that it was justified in that an element of risk was involved in contrast to interest which was a certain income. They cited Sharia Law as making this distinction too. Basically, what they are against is rent and interest but not profit.

Karl Marx came up at this meeting too when one of the speakers claimed that Marx agreed that landowners exploited both capitalists and workers. Actually, Marx’s position was that the capitalists exploited the workers but then were themselves exploited by the landowners. This is not at all the same, since it means that end exploitation by landowners would benefit only the capitalists and not the workers. Marx also looked forward to the time when: “from the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men” (Capital, volume 3, chapter 46).

It is rather surprising that pro-capitalist ideas should be advocated within the Occupy movement which even the new Lord Mayor of the City of London, Roger Gifford, recognised started off as anti-capitalist. As he told the ‘i’ newspaper (10 November), ‘What they were basically saying was: “We don’t like capitalism as it looks today, we want another system.”’ What the Georgists in the Occupy movement are saying, rather, is, ‘We don’t like capitalism as it looks today. We want to give it a new look.’

What this shows is that it is not enough merely to have an anti-capitalist gut reaction. You need to know what capitalism really is and how it works. Otherwise you are going to be confused and misled, whether by currency cranks or by land reformers.

At the first meeting, Gerrard Winstanley was favourably mentioned many times, even if he was misunderstood as merely advocating setting up agricultural communes. In fact he was far more radical than this, advocating the common ownership both of the land and of products made from it to which everyone would have free access without money –what the announcement for the second meeting called ‘the means of life (water, food and housing) for all as of right; land and resources held in common and the benefits shared’. In this, even though three centuries earlier, he was far in advance of Henry George and his single tax on the rental incomes of land that would be left in private ownership.

It is good that people are discussing the ideas of past thinkers such as Gerrard Winstanley, Karl Marx and even Henry George. It shows that they are looking for an alternative to the capitalist production-for-profit system. It is disappointing, though, that at the moment it is ideas that are not really anti-capitalist which seem to have the upper hand in discussions within the Occupy movement, at least in London.

Adam Buick

On the Platform (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A man who could have made his fortune in the halls" - "Manchester Guardian" reporting a Party speaker at Trafalgar Square.

The Socialist Party has always been renowned for its quite remarkable speakers. As a political Party wedded to the democratic idea, and "persuasion" of the soundness of its case, it was bound to produce a number of outstanding orators.

Side-by-side with its insistence on propagandist educational methods, went the refusal to countenance any sort of personality cult. The Party was what mattered; "leaders" were OUT. So here was the paradoxical position of, on the one hand, a number of quite exceptionally outstanding characters, while on the other personal grandeur had no place in the Party.

From 1904 onwards, until the great technical revolution, the "mass media" was the outdoor platform—or to use the Americanism, the "soap-box". In this, the Socialist Party was no different from the others claiming to be Socialist. The most notorious Labour politicians, in their day, were all soap-boxers. For years, many of them, George Lansbury (who was an ex-SDF paid propagandist), Jack Jones, Herbert Morrison, Tom Mann, John MacLean, John Burns and scores of others, continued their regular street-corner meetings. It was the usual thing for any energetic young ILPer or member of the BSP to mount the street-corner platform. The main activity was the "meeting".

Despite its frequently much smaller membership the Socialist Party could and did, meet the pseudo-Socialists here on level terms. When all the public parks had three or four meetings running, the SPGB took its chance with the others, and the best man won—the biggest audience. In the school of fierce competition and deadly debate were trained some of the most brilliant exponents ever to hold audiences in sway.

The chief fascination of the public meeting was controversy. This it was which attracted thousands to all the local meeting spots. To hear Adolph Kohn, Alex Anderson, Moses Baritz, Charlie Lestor, Groves, Turner and others reduce Labourites, Leninists, Anarchists, Liberals, and religionists to stuttering impotence was sheer mirth-provoking delight.

Since the Party definitely encouraged "heckling" and offered its platform to all opponents, victims were always forthcoming. It was the very success of the Party in demolishing opponents which instigated the decision by the Communist Party to forbid debates with the SPGB. No Party in this country suffered a more devastating attack from the SP than the CPGB.

They were easy meat. One recalls the packed meeting in St. George's Town Hall, Stepney. The entire East London CP there in force, our speaker Adolph Kohn. The local CP organiser requests a (loaded) question.

"Mr. Speaker, do you agree that all political parties are the expression of class interests?"

Kohn: "Yes!"

"Do you agree that separate political parties are the expression of the interests of sections of classes?"

Kohn: "Yes."

"In that case, Mr. Speaker, which section of the capitalist class does the Communist Party represent?"

Kohn: "The Undertakers."

Collapse of CP!

Or Kohn's classic reply to the Hyde Park heckler shouting:

"Tell us when this 'ere Revolution is going to happen then?"

Kohn: "Next Tuesday afternoon at 2.30. Leave your address and we'll send you a post-card." 

During the Second World War, events were relatively favourable to the Party. One platform alone stood in all its solitary glory in Hyde Park on September 3rd 1939—the Socialist Party. The scene, and the impression it made, were described in an article in the magazine Clubman in 1955. 

And from that day on, week in, week out, the Socialist Party doggedly held its ground, against all the threats of assault and violence; against charges of "being in the pay of Hitler". "stabbing our boys in the back", etc. etc. As the war dragged on, the audience grew.  "I'm fighting for the likes of a little yellow-bellied bastard like you," yells a fat uniformed Sergeant-Major on leave. "Then you have my permission to stop now," smiles Turner sweetly. Collapse of heckler.

Events dictated that eventually workers would leave other Parties and join the SP. Among them those who had been prominent in the CP. Week after week, fanatical Communists would shriek:

"YES! but have you been in Russia?!"

Speaker: "No! I haven't been in Australia either."

Heckler: "There you are then!"

Came the day when the same taunt was hurled at a new speaker who replied:

"YES! I lived in Moscow for many years as an official of the YCL."
Same Communist heckler: "What bloody difference does that make then?" 

Who can forget the Conway Hall in London? The occasion, a debate between the SPGB and Mrs. (now Lady) Barbara Wootton. Packed to the doors—the record of that debate on "Federal Union" in pamphlet form speaks for itself. Or Shoreditch Town Hall packed, hanging on the chandeliers; Cliff Groves playing with Sir Waldron Smithers, who told Groves he would pray for him. Groves objected to him preying on him.

The Hammersmith Town Hall packed; SPGB versus the Peace Pledge Union. George Plume, Secretary of the PPU:

"It's all very well the SPGB saying that Pacifists are impotent. I'm the only pacifist in this country who got a month's solitary for striking a sergeant over the head with a chamber-pot."

Or the post-war election campaigns where the opponents trembled at the thought of a Party speaker.

Traffic and television have changed all this. Politics has been plonked right inside the sitting room. A new generation has grown up in ignorance of the old heroic days, Phone-ins, quizzes, TV and radio have replaced the simple, direct, elemental, personal approach.

Who are we to deplore change—we are revolutionaries! Change is our business! Eventually we, too, will win our way to the media. One of the reasons for the high quality of our propaganda is the wise insistence that nobody shall publicly without satisfying the members that he knows—the speakers' test. A fault of our modern propaganda is the inability to answer questions concisely—like Kohn, with one word. The wit was devastating.

Despite traffic and television, public speaking will always be the Party's most valuable activity. Every member who masters it acquires a new dimension. The man (or woman) who knows, who speaks clearly and simply, will always attract and  convince.

On our 70th Anniversary we salute the orators of the past, resolving to carry on their work until its aim is achieved.

Horatio 

Policing the Proles (2012)

From the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

All coppers might be workers but their role is helping maintain capitalist law and order.

“Evening All”. That was the opening catchphrase of PC George Dixon the eponymous hero of the homely television series Dixon of Dock Green that ran from 1955-73. Crime was of the petty variety. The real crux of the show amounted to the perception of Dock Green “nick” as an extension of George’s cosy semi-detached. Each episode ended with a homily about being a good citizen, a dutiful salute and the final vigilant "Goodnight all". Entertainment? Maybe. But the by-product amounted to a masterful PR campaign for the police force, one that nowadays they would swap their tasers for at the drop of riot shield.

The police force is barely a couple of hundred years old, but the Special Constabulary dates back to “Anglo Saxon times, when people policed themselves”. In 1673, King Charles II brought in an Act which deemed that “any citizen might be sworn in as a temporary peace-officer for a specific occasion, in particular when there was a threat of great disturbances”. Essentially the neighbourhood bobby had become politicised.

The existence of private property is why the police exist. As property devolved more and more in to the hands of the few, property owners began to fear for their property. Jeremy Bentham suggested a Ministry of Police, but an 1818 Parliamentary Committee saw it as "a plan which would make every servant of every house a spy on the actions of his master, and all classes of society spies on each other"(E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class). One year later 400 Special Constables joined a military presence of hundreds of armed men to confront a crowd of protestors seeking the reform of parliamentary representation at St Peters Fields, Manchester. Fifteen people were killed and 400-700 people were injured as the Cavalry charged with drawn sabres to disperse the crowd.

In 1829 Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force with 1000 constables. By 1857 all of the UK’s cities had formed their own police forces. Peel is said to have developed the “Peelian Principles” an ethical philosophy that supposedly underpins policing. At the forefront of the code is the principle: “The police are the public and the public are the police”. This could be interpreted as another meaningless slogan like the millionaire David Cameron’s jingle “we’re all in it together”. But the police are workers; just as much a part of the 99 percent as bank workers, dustman, nurses, bricklayers, miners, etc.

Discussing the Police Strike of 1919, the Socialist Standard pointed out that “the policeman is so essentially a member of the exploited class that he cannot get his admitted grievances redressed until he threatens to cease to be a policeman”. And in addressing a point that is frequently made nowadays: "the statement that a policeman is only such to support the State” it commented, “The complement of this half truth is, of course, that the State is only an instrument for keeping the workers in subjection.” (Editorial, June 1919)

The state was busy subjugating workers in 1910 when: “Riotous scenes without parallel in a South Wales Coalfield were enacted last night in mid-Rhondda and at Aberaman. At both places, the police and the mob were in fierce conflict for many hours, charge after charge being made by the constabulary upon the crowd. In the mid-Rhondda alone over a hundred casualties were reported, injured strikers being conveyed to local surgeries for treatment." (South Wales Daily News, 9 November 1910)  The state was at it again in 1919 when the City of Glasgow Police repeatedly baton-charged workers who were campaigning for shorter working hours to alleviate unemployment. On “Bloody Friday” a mass meeting was to be held in George Square, but the state intervened, initially with the police. But by Friday night the police had been reinforced with the state’s military muscle when "10,000 troops armed with machine guns, tanks and a howitzer arrived”. Ruling class paranoia revealed itself when the decision was made that: “No Glaswegian troops were deployed, with the British government fearing that fellow Glaswegians, soldiers or otherwise, would go over to the workers' side if a revolutionary situation developed in Glasgow” (Wikipedia).

The 1926 General Strike demonstrated how all pervading state power can be when profits are threatened. A warship was sent to Newcastle and 226,000 special policemen were recruited. Police baton-charged strikers in Hull, Preston, Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. The government “seized all supplies of paper, which hindered publication of the TUC's paper, “The British Worker”. The Catholic Church declared the strike “a sin”. And the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, declared the strike an attack on Britain's democracy.

During the NUM strike of 1984-5 Margaret Thatcher speaking to Parliament said (as Stanley Baldwin before her did) that “giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob”; she referred to the striking miners as ‘the enemy within’. Demonising your opponents is a well-worn tactic of the ruling class, made considerably more effective when it is aided and abetted by a tame media. "By the time the strike was over the miners had experienced at first hand the way in which the coercive power of the state can be, and is, used in defence of ruling class interests. The police, the judiciary, criminal courts and civil courts, even the DHSS were all used against the striking miners” (SPGB, The Strike Weapon: Lessons of the Miners’ Strike. 1985).

The NUM strike of 1984 to 1985 was a watershed in the class war. The power of the unions was on the wane. And the “rolling back of the state” was underway. The ruling class was on the offensive in the defence of profits. The Selsdon Group of right-wing Tories was at the centre of the ideology dubbed Thatcherism. And Margaret Thatcher was its public image. Perhaps her speech in May 1988 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland reveals the callousness of the ruling class when she proffered a biblical validation for her view on how capitalism should work. Quoting St Paul she said, "If a man will not work he shall not eat". This ideology has driven state policy ever since and is peddled to workers as part of a divide-and-rule strategy.

The Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, revealed in her autobiography how “counter-subversion” tactics were employed against the striking miners. Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners reveals a great deal more, including phone tapping, forged documents, informers, phoney bank deposits and the use of agents provocateurs. The use of agent provocateurs to infiltrate working class organisations is not new. Marx described how the state spy, Joseph Crémer, was expelled from the German Workers’ Educational Society in 1852.

Baton charges, and the panic created by charging mounted police has been reinforced by the methodical use of surveillance techniques and the controversial policy of kettling. It is no longer just the striking worker that has been looked upon as a threat to ruling class power—any group that might threaten profits is now judged to be the “enemy within”. The use of agent provocateurs is perhaps the most despised of all ploys used by the state. And the police are loath to be exposed as employing such tactics because it undermines their self-image as impartial. The reality though is very different.

In June 2008, in a letter to the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, the then MP George Galloway accused the “Metropolitan Police of engaging in ‘a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder’ during President George W. Bush’s visit to the UK last week."

Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake who joined G20 protestors in London saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. “When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police’” (Observer 10 May 2009).

Mark Kennedy an undercover Metropolitan police officer was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary aired in October 2011. By his own admission he stated that he spent seven years infiltrating, befriending, and informing on peaceful environmental groups in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy and Iceland. He claimed that he “knew of fifteen other undercover police officers operating in protest groups during the last decade” (Ecologist 9 February 2011). A quote from the Channel 4 documentary by Michael Meacher, former Labour Environment Minister reveals the real motivation behind these police tactics “. . .behind it are corporate interests. . .who don’t want interference, and they don’t want public opinion aroused against a product that is extraordinarily profitable for them”. And who are these corporate interests? The Guardian reported on the 14 February 2011 that: “The energy giant E.ON, Britain's second-biggest coal producer Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power, one of the UK's largest electricity-generators, have been paying for the services of a private security firm that has been secretly monitoring activists”.

The Occupy Movement has the potential to become a real threat to capitalism. Theirs isn’t simply a strikers or eco-protestors threat to profits. They can expect the state to employ all its powers and guile to discredit and destroy their nascent movement. New York Police Departments recent raid on the “People’s Library” at Zuccotti Park reveals how frightened our masters are of ideas.  Police “confiscated approximately 4,000 books. . . 1,275 books of the 4,000 books seized had been recovered; of those, one-third was damaged to the point of being unusable. It’s estimated that 2,725 books had been destroyed "(Truth-out.org).

For too long now our class has been lied to, tricked, beaten, tortured and murdered by the ruling class through the agency of the state. It must end. It’s up to you to bring that about?

Andy Matthews

Brave community (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brave Community. The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. By John Gurney. Manchester University Press £55.

Gerrard Winstanley has a prominent place in the socialist tradition. In advocating, in 1648-1652 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution, a new social order where there would “be no buying and selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole Earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the Earth is the Lords’”, he was clearly just as much a forerunner of modern socialism as was Thomas More and his Utopia of 1516. In fact, he went one better than More and tried to put his theories into practice when on 1 April 1649 he and others started tilling and planting crops on (St) George’s Hill, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, on a communistic basis as a first step towards spreading such moneyless communities throughout England.

Gurney’s book is a detailed examination of the social, economic and political situation in the area that led to this as well as of the other individuals apart from Winstanley who were involved. The driving force of the English Revolution has been analysed as the “middling sort”, i.e. those who were neither big landowners nor landless labourers. In the countryside these were mainly tenant farmers; they had their conflicts with the lords of the manor which radicalised some of them in and around Cobham in Surrey. But it wasn’t them who became the Diggers, even if Winstanley himself was a “middling sort”.

The year 1649, as the year in which the King had been executed, was a year when to many people anything seemed possible. The previous year had seen a bad harvest and many poor people were in desperate straits. It was to them that Winstanley – whose clothing business in London had failed – preached (and this is the right word, as his motivation was both religious and practical) that God had given the Earth to everyone to be used as a common storehouse from which to feed and clothe themselves and that they should use it to produce what they needed without working for wages and without any buying and selling.

According to Gurney, Winstanley wavered between seeing this as the result of the Second Coming (in people’s hearts) that would restore the original situation of no ownership and seeing it as a practical solution of the landless poor in post-civil-war England.

The occupation of George’s Hill did not last long, only a few months till August, when local opposition from tenant farmers who wanted the land for grazing forced the Diggers to move to another site at Cobham. This lasted a little longer, but it too was over by April 1650 as a result of both legal and direct action initiated by two local landlords.

This prompted Winstanley to publish his Law of Freedom in a Platform which is a classic of socialist literature. According to Gurney, Winstanley stayed on in Cobham for the next twenty or so years as a respectable member of the local community, but by 1675 had moved back to London, apparently relatively well off and a Quaker sympathiser. He died in 1676.

Adam Buick

The Socialist Party and War (1931)

From the August 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

The threat of war casts a shadow over all who witnessed the last great conflict—civilians as well as combatants. Death and mutilation, the loss of health, the breaking up of homes and the frustration of hopes and plans; years of anguish while the war dragged on, and when it was over a heritage of sorrow which will last for the lives of millions of the present generation. Nearly nine million men killed, with refinements of cruelty unknown in pre-civilised times; 21 million wounded and hundreds of thousands of men and women suffering from permanently impaired health brought about by the aggravated want which war and blockade inflicted upon the working-class. To this appalling list must be added the lies, the hatreds, and the bestiality that are inseparable from modern warfare. In face of the cost there can be few who want war for its own sake. As Mr. Duff Cooper, now Conservative M.P. for the St. George’s Division, has aptly said, “was anyone going to argue that an Englishman or any other human being liked sitting in a waterlogged trench with the prospect of being blown up by a gun fired miles away, and thinking that his home and family might be destroyed by bombs dropped from the sky? Bring him an Englishman who liked that, and he would endeavour to have him certified as insane and placed in a lunatic asylum.”

But if, as is true, men and women of all parties hate war and are sincerely anxious to prevent it, why cannot we all get together for that purpose? What need can there be for a distinctly socialist attitude towards war? The answer is simple and final. The sincere desire for peace shown by the capitalist parties is nullified by their over-riding will to maintain the capitalist system of society. Did they not with equal sincerity talk peace and want peace before 1914? Did they not seek to justify that war by the most hollow of all claims—that it was a war to end war? And do they not now, with protestations of peace on their lips continue to build up still vaster and more destructive forces on land and sea and in. the air? Mr. Hoover, President of the U.S.A., in his speech on Armistice Day, 1929, said :—

   “The men under arms, including active reserves . . .  are almost 30,000,000 in number, or nearly 10,000,000 more than before the Great War.”

Mr. Lloyd George quoted and endorsed President Hoover’s words in a speech in the House of Commons on December 4th, 1929 (see Parliamentary Report of that date), and then said :—

   "The weapons of destruction . . .  in number and in power, are five times more shattering than those which the whole of the armies had when they went into battle on 4th August, 1914."

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has nothing in common with the parties that preach peace but continue to prepare for war.

Our opponents defend their actions with talk of the need for security. We must, they say, guard the integrity and independence of the nation. They differ among themselves only as to the amount and kind of armaments necessary, for security. They argue the respective merits and costs of the battleship, the submarine, aircraft and poison gas. There are some who urge that the nations should agree to gradual and mutual disarmament, and there are even pacifists who claim that the best of all guarantees of security is for this country to disarm completely without waiting for the rest of the world.

The Socialist Party does not agree with any of these points of view.

For us it is not a question of deciding which is the. best method of achieving security, but a question of deciding whether the security referred to is of any real concern to the working class. We recognise that the capitalists have a real interest at stake. It is in the nature of the capitalist system to perpetuate conflict between the classes and between the nations.

Commercial rivalries set capitalist states and empires one against the other. The class which has property and privilege must maintain armed forces to protect their property and to make secure the social system which affords them their privileges. They need armed forces at home for use when occasion arises against striking workers; they need armed forces abroad to seize and to hold territories rich in raw materials, to protect merchant ships on distant trade routes, to guard vital links like the Suez and Panama canals, and to defend India, where they have £1,000 millions invested, and similar sources of profit. It is for this that armed forces are maintained and set in motion. In 1914 the German capitalist class sought to improve their commercial position by gaining control of ports on the Channel and by extending their colonial empire. The British capitalists saw that their interests were threatened and were prepared to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of men in order that the danger to British capitalism might be averted. The capitalists and their politicians do not consciously seek war as a means of snatching wealth and power from their rivals but they are driven by the forces at work in the capitalist system to follow policies which bring them into conflict with each other. The employing class in each country strives desperately to sell abroad the superabundant wealth that is surplus to the demands of the home market. The governments are called in to further the interests of the national groups of capitalists. First it is the influence of the trade departments exercised in the form of polite representations to foreign governments. But, ultimately, when commercial rivalry has provoked fierce hostility, there will be charges and counter-charges of “dumping," of unfair discrimination under the cover of taxes or laws, of infringements of “spheres of influence,” and various other resented practices that veil the economic war. Then, when the secret threats of the diplomatists fail to be of use, recourse is had to the armed forces, and war is declared. Under the cloak of patriotism and national defence, with the blessing of the church, the press, the labour leaders and the politicians, millions of workers are thrown against each other in battle. They do not know that they are fighting to defend or to extend the interests of the class that lives by robbing them of the fruits of their labour.

The answer that the Socialist Party gave in 1914 is the answer we shall give to all capitalist wars. What we said in our Manifesto in 1914 represents our views to-day. It is a document of historical interest and is reproduced below:—

The War, and the Socialist Position. 

  Whereas the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the question of the control of .trade routes, and the world’s markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political ignorance and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters’ quarrel, and
   Whereas further, the pseudo-Socialists and labour “leaders” of this country, in common with their fellows on the Continent, have again betrayed the working-class position, either through their ignorance of it, their cowardice, or worse, and are assisting the master class in utilising this thieves' quarrel to confuse the minds of the workers and turn their attention from the Class Struggle.
   The Socialist Party of Great Britain seizes the opportunity of re-affirming the Socialist position, which is as follows:    That Society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
    That in Society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a CLASS WAR, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
    That the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exist only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers.
    These armed forces, therefore, will only be set in motion to further the interests of the class who control them—the master class—and as the workers' interests are not bound up in the struggle for markets wherein their masters may dispose of the wealth they have stolen from them (the workers), but in the struggle to end the system under which they are robbed, they are not concerned with the present European struggle, which is already known as the “BUSINESS” war, for it is their masters' interests which are involved, and not their own.
    The Socialist Party of Great Britain, pledges itself to keep the issue clear by expounding the CLASS STRUGGLE, and whilst placing on record its abhorrence of this latest manifestation of the callous, sordid, and mercenary nature of the international capitalist class, and declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood, enters its emphatic protest against the brutal and bloody butchery of our brothers of this and other lands who are being used as food for cannon abroad while suffering and starvation are the lot of their fellows at home.       Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow-workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

The World For The Workers!

The Executive Committee.

August 25th, 1914. 

Wage Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to win!—Marx,

The consequences of the war have fully justified our attitude of opposition to it. The nations which waged war in 1914 were all of them capitalist nations. The Allied group used their victory to further the interests of their capitalists by seizing colonial and other profitable territories that had belonged to the ruling class in the defeated countries, and by imposing heavy financial burdens under the name of reparations. What difference has this made to the working class? Capitalism remains as secure in 1931 as it was in 1914. The working class are still a subject class. Their economic position in the victorious countries is no better than before, and in the defeated countries no worse. In England and in Germany the workers' standard of living is practically at the same level as in 1914. Prices are higher, but wages have increased roughly in the same proportion. It is the German capitalists who have had to pay the reparations out of their profits. The average rate of profit in Germany is now appreciably less than in Great Britain. Germany’s millionaire class almost disappeared as a result of the war. Victory meant victory for the, British, French and American propertied class. Defeat meant defeat for the German propertied class.

For the working class in all countries every death, every wound and every hour of suffering was in vain. The war solved no working class problems, and from a working class point of view, was a crime.

Let us now compare the attitude of the Socialist Party with the attitude and actions of other parties whose claim it is that they are concerned particularly with the welfare of the workers. Little need be said of the Liberal and Tory parties. They are admittedly prepared to go to war and admittedly uphold capitalism which is the cause of war in the modern world.

But what of the Labour Party?

In the opening month of the war we were told that:

  "The Head Office of the Party, its entire machinery are to be placed at the disposal of the Government in their recruiting campaign." ("Labour Leader," September 3rd, 1914.)

Three years later the position remained unchanged. Mr. W. F. Purdy, Chairman of the Labour Party Executive, in an interview with a correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian" (7th June, 1917), said:

    “As Chairman of the E.C. of the Labour Party I am not going to meet or sit in conference with the representatives of the enemy countries while we are at war. I mean to carry out the policy of British Labour as laid down by our representative gathering. That policy is to pursue the war to a successful termination, which means to a complete victory over the enemy.”

One prominent member of the Labour Party, Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., took an active part in recruiting and was given a post in the cabinet when the Labour Party joined in the war-time coalition government. It was Mr. Henderson who in 1916 urged that the strike leaders be deported from the Clyde area.

The Independent Labour Party in 1914 allowed its members to support the war and engage in recruiting. Mr. J. R. MacDonald and the late J. Keir Hardie both took part in the recruiting campaign, although at the same time criticising the past conduct and policy of the Liberal government which was responsible for the entry of this country into the war. I.L.P. members in Parliament were permitted to vote war credits, and throughout the war the I.L.P. remained a constituent part of the Labour Party. 

It is important to remember that these organisations have not abandoned the beliefs which in 1914 led them to support the war. At the 1925 Labour Party Conference Mr. Arthur Henderson, on behalf of the Executive Committee, opposed a resolution pressing for disarmament. He said :

   "If France continued in the frame of mind she was now in, had they to overlook the possibilities of defence? They could not afford to ignore this question of defence.”—(Report of Proceedings. Page 232.) .

In 1924 and again in 1930 and 1931, the Labour Government continued to maintain and even in some cases to increase the strength of the armaments of this country.

The Labour Government is still prepared in certain eventualities to wage war in defence of British capitalism; if not against the German enemy of 1914, then against Mr. Henderson’s French enemies of 1925, or some other enemies of the future.

It must not be forgotten that in each of the two Labour Governments a considerable number of Ministers as well as a clear majority of the Labour Party M.P.’s were members of the I.L.P. so that the latter body cannot escape responsibility for all that has been done in respect of the maintenance of armaments.

We would place on record the words of Mr. Arthur Henderson, uttered in reply to the charge that he supported the war. Mr. Henderson said (“Daily Herald,” 10th January, 1929) that “he was not in the least ashamed of his war record.”

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is also not ashamed of its war record. But we can add, as Mr. Henderson cannot, that our attitude then and now is in line with the interests of the working class.

Edgar Hardcastle