Tuesday, July 21, 2015

The Thirteen Derry Dead (1972)

Editorial from the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard






The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that the present political division of' the working class there reflects yesterday's divisions amongst the Irish capitalist class, divisions which now have no relevance even for capitalism since both Britain and Ireland are about to join the Common Market and since the same international companies have investments both sides of the Border. 





The divorce of the decayed (1993)

Editorial from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

With no small amusement we have watched as one of the most sacred symbols of British ruling-class power has imploded ignominously. The farcical proportions of the Royal Soap Opera has reduced the pomposity of Great British nationalism to its rightful place in the gutters of tabloid gossip. In recent months we have been invited to scrutinise the topless Duchess, listen to tapes of a suicidal Princess and her secret boyfriend Squidgy, and read daily accounts of matrimonial infidelity within the family of the woman who is the head of the Church of England. If capitalism is a circus the Royals are its hapless clowns. 

The ruling class owes its subjects a big apology. In 1981 they had wage slaves dancing in the streets to celebrate the wedlock of their two parasitical Royal dummies. Royal mugs were sold to Royalist mugs. The mass media offered workers non-stop news of a fairy tale marriage made in Heaven. When the Socialist Party ran a street meeting in Glasgow to expose the reality of the Royal facade it was attacked by patriotically wound-up loyalists. 

Now the wedlock has become official deadlock. The dream marriage has concluded in bitter separation. The mighty have fallen. All that is left are the Charles and Di mugs. The whole of British Royalty is currently surrounded by scandal, disgrace and ridicule. By the reasoning of their own defenders, who claim that those who rule were "born superior", we could be forgiven for concluding that there is some defective Windsor gene which makes these people "born" to have failed relationships. But we do not accept the reasoning of those who say that some are "born" to rule or to fail; indeed, as good materialists, our best recommendation to the, Windsors would be a long course of intensive family therapy. 

In fact, socialists could not care less what happens to the Royals. They are of no practical importance to our lives. They are pointless scroungers, but so is the entire class to which they belong. We seek to abolish more than the monarchy. The entire parasite class must go. The social system whereby privileged idlers are free to enrich themselves by robbing the wealth producers of the fruits of our labour must go. And it is we, the workers, who must consciously and democratically put an end to it. 

Socialism, the next stage in human history, will be a stateless, leaderless society of free and equal men and women. There will be neither monarchs nor Presidents; there will not be cabinets or politburos. Socialist democracy will mean that people, globally and in local communities, control a society commonly owned by all of us. To those who say that we need men and women of superiority to look up to, we say - Look at them; Laugh at them; and Learn to live without them on our backs. 

The Roots of Roots (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his closing words to the Author's Foreword of Foundations of Christianity (dateline Berlin, 1908), Karl Kautsky wrote: 
. . . with the aid of the materialist conception of history . . . the study of the past, far from being mere dilettante antiquarianism, will become a powerful weapon in the struggles of the present, in order to hasten the attainment of a better future.
The future that the Socialist pioneers outlined is not brought any nearer by the widespread employment of Marxist terminology by self-styled socialist or communist governments in the world today. But the Kautsky statement remains sound, nevertheless. A clear understanding of social forces, by the working class, will help enormously in clearing away obstacles to the movement for world Socialism. As it is now, prejudices of many kinds keep workers of varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds apart. The Marxist admonition: "Workers of the world, unite!" is difficult to heed when workers do not understand the significance of the forces that divide them. It is an all-important duty of Socialists to spread knowledge and understanding on this subject. One of the latest examples, in America, of mass confusion is that phenomenal best-seller historical novel and TV extravaganza, Roots

Now, this is not intended as a review of the book. Suffice it to say that Mr. Haley had set out on a prospecting adventure to unearth his personal roots—a tricky business at best, as we shall see, presently. But if the soundness of his genealogical research is questionable there is no doubt that he has found gold—a veritable gold mine. For, according to press reports, the book has earned him a cool 3 million bucks thus far, with no end to the profits in sight. And even if most who buy the book never actually read it (many blacks, even illiterates from backwater areas, seem to regard it as another Book of the Bible—their personal Gospel), an estimated 130 million people have seen at least a portion of the twelve hours of TV presentation and black Americans now know—or think they know—their roots. This fact, some writers believe, may serve as a spark to kindle a programme of black vengeance against "whitey." The "Establishment" (white and black) can go only so far of course in dispelling the mythology of roots. In this instance a lot of knowledge can be more dangerous than little. Consider: 

The central hero, "Kunta Kinte," according to oral "historian" who gave him the "facts", was Haley's grandfather seven generations back. Now, "Kinte" may have been real and a direct ancestor of Haley's but it is a safe bet that not even Kinte's roots were all black, let alone Alex Haley's. For remote as Kinte's village may have been it was obviously not that remote and white traders, particularly slave traders, were frequent visitors to the area as long and longer ago than seven generations. But Haley, as do militant "Afro-Americans" generally, prefers to disown—or least not acknowledge—his "white" genes. (In that department, of course, he is no worse than "whites" who prefer not to contemplate their "black", or "yellow" or whatever ancestors). The fact is, that one need do is estimate the number of one's ancestors ten or fifteen generations back to burst bubble. Only through a practice of strict in-breeding through the generations could any of us, today, be considered "pure"! There can be no question about it: we all have the same roots. Migrations and invasions throughout history, have assured that. 

But there is more to the confusion surrounding Haley's opus than one's genealogy. "Kunta Kinte", in the Haley chronicle, epitomizes the resistance which modern black-oriented historians prefer to believe black chattels gave their masters. That this was actually the case remains, at best, debatable. What is unquestionable, however, was the callous brutality of the slave trade. But even here is confusion because it is difficult, indeed, to surmount the morals of one's times. Trading in human chattels was legal (in varying degrees) for centuries and in pre-Civil War America some of the most highly respectable families were engaged in one or another facet of it. The morals of a society are established, generally, by the ruling class. Chattel Slavery was Big Business and, therefore, respectable. It was the Abolitionist, who was the non-conformist and trouble-maker, not the slave owner or slave trader. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Philips have schools named after them, today, but it was a different matter when they were flaying Slavery and its beneficiaries in pre-Civil War United States of America. 

And ponder, for a moment, on how few in our times see anything abhorrent about the relationships of wage-labour and capital, how few see it as a "higher" form of slavery. The chains are figurative but nonetheless real. Most of the population is bound for life to a class that owns the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution. An end to all slave relationships, including capitalism in all its forms, is possible but not without unification of the working class for the express purpose of establishing world socialism, immediately. And the dispelling of the mythology of roots will be a big help toward that goal. 
Harmo, WSP Boston.

War, history and revolution (1989)

From the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago a cold sense of apprehension was creeping over Europe. The first feelings of relief following the 'peace in our time' agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain had passed. By March 1939 Hitler had already moved to crush Czechoslovakia. On 1 September his victim was Poland. The Second World War had begun. 

It does, of course, serve the interests of capitalism to deflect the blame for the horrors of war on to the actions of particular individuals such as Hitler. So, in this fiftieth anniversary year of the outbreak of the Second World War, beware the rush of books, articles, films and television documentaries in which historians and journalists will, no doubt, concentrate on the personalities and motives of key individuals. They will be following the traditional view that history is somehow determined by the personal whims of caesars, kings, queens, prime ministers and führers. 

Not Made by Great Individuals 
If it is simply the personalities and motives of leading individuals that make history, then historians face the practical impossibility of knowing these personalities and motives with any degree of certainty. Some might claim authority for their fanciful speculations by resorting to Freudian psychology, but it is hard enough to be sure of the personal motivations of close acquaintances without trying to understand the psychological complexities of someone who is long dead and buried. 

Those taking this approach can only fill in a lack of knowledge from their own bias and imagination. By arbitrarily giving the power to shape events to a few 'men of destiny', they exclude the vast majority of men and women from a role in history. With the materialist conception of history, on the other hand, Marx and Engels showed how we must look behind people's conscious aims, intentions and motives to the economic development of society in which everyone is involved. As Engels wrote: 
When it is a question of investigating the driving powers which lie behind the motives of men who act in history, it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes. To ascertain the driving causes which are reflected as conscious motives in the minds of acting masses and their leaders . . .  is the only path which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway both in history as a whole and at particular periods in particular lands. (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical-German Philosophy, chapter IV). 
For Marxists, history is about what the whole of humanity has done, not just a few "great men". It is in the economic development of society that we discover the laws of history which regulate the changes in the material circumstances within which people make history. Marx's historical materialism reveals the social and economic causes of history for all to see. What is important is objectively decided by its bearing on economic developments, not by the prejudices of writers who interpret history in the interests of the ruling class. 

Hitler and Economic Necessity 
The important thing to recognise about the Second World War is that it was fought between rival groups of capitalist states over trade routes, markets and sources of raw materials. It was not about good or evil, democracy or fascism. Certainly, no single individual can be held responsible. 

The sad fact is that while even fifty years ago the productive forces were such that the needs of the world's population could have been satisfied, the irrational and competitive nature of capitalism prevented this. Seeing no alternative to capitalism, workers were led to believe genuinely that they could only satisfy their needs or protect their 'way of life' by war. 

It is true that the decision to invade Poland, which started the Second World War, was Hitler's. But it is also true that as early as 1932 the German capitalist class and their political representatives had decided that Germany's only real way out of economic crisis was to gain control over Central and Eastern Europe. 

Once such a course was set in motion two things made war inevitable. First was the rearmament of Germany's main capitalist rivals, Britain and the United States, who sought to prevent Germany's rise as a world power dangerous to them. Second, the deepening financial crisis in German capitalism caused by its massive rearmament. It was impossible to continue the rate of arms spending, and public spending in general, without additional material resources from outside Germany. Hence the need to plunder the surrounding economies and to seek continental scales of industrial organisation. 

So, while the decision to unleash war was Hitler's, the unstoppable collision-course towards war was determined by economic necessities. On the one hand, Germany had, like Japan and Italy, developed too late to acquire a 'place in the sun' which corresponded to its importance as an industrial nation. On the other hand, the capitalists in the established colonial powers, Britain and France, as well as the US with its huge population and natural resources, profited from their privileged access to markets and raw materials. In 1931 Japan had already used armed force to set up a trading monopoly in China. Italy had used force to get an overseas market in Abyssinia in 1935. German capitalists saw the only way out in the conquest of an empire of their own in Europe. 

As an historical figure Hitler was the product of social and economic developments. Even his mania about the Jews must be seen in the context of widespread theories of subversion, pernicious and ridiculous as they were, which held Jews responsible for an international conspiracy to undermine the economic stability of whichever country they lived in. 

The Case of Churchill 
Almost all historians see Churchill's rise to the head of the coalition government in May 1940 as a major turning point in the war. Churchill might indeed have represented the determination of the British capitalist class not to give another inch to their German rivals. But by romanticising his personal qualities, rather than starting from an analysis of the larger economic and social forces, historians continue to fall into the trap of having to guess and explain his personal motivations. 

The central question is not what made Churchill, as an individual, more decisive than Chamberlain but why Churchill was suddenly able to unite most of the capitalist and working class behind him years when he had been a political outsider. After all, until 1939 the policy of appeasement followed by Chamberlain had been widely accepted. Britain, as an international trading power, had far more to lose from world war than Germany, but capitalists could not go on indefinitely a blind eye to the actions of their German rivals. Once war had been declared, and at a time when Germany winning, Churchill was the ideal choice to carry out the new policy of combatting German capitalism by military rather than diplomatic means. 

No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain the economic and social determinants behind the rise of leaders. In capitalist society the institutions that mould individuals include the patriarchal nuclear family, the education system and the organisations which selectively promote politicians (political parties of the right and left, businesses and companies, old-boy networks, employers' associations, and the like). These are the forces of social conformism which produce individuals to suit the needs of the dominant class at any particular moment. 

To recognise that the rise of individuals such as Hitler and Churchill is socially shaped is to acknowledge a scientific fact. Value judgements about their actions are unnecessary. Marxists do not cloud the issues with blame: they explain. 

The Necessity of Socialism 
As these examples from the Second World War show, the materialist conception of history demolishes idealism which seeks to explain history from the ideas held by prominent individuals, directing us instead to developments in the material world of wealth production and distribution. It is this which gives historical materialism its contemporary significance. It is applicable to the here and now. It enables us to understand not only the causes of past events, but the causes of events now taking place and therefore how the real needs of the majority of people today can be satisfied. 

Always when the capacity to produce has outstripped what the productive relations allow, it becomes necessary to change those relations in a social revolution. Such necessity impelled the bourgeoisie to sweep away feudal obstacles to the development of capitalism in revolutions like the French Revolution two hundred years ago. Such historical necessity is an objective fact, independent of anyone's desires or intentions. It has nothing to do with mere aspirations, but is an actually existing state of human relations. 

Capitalism has long contained such a necessity—the necessity of advancing to socialism. The Second World War was a tragic symptom of this need for change. Within capitalist society the working class is the only force that can carry out the task. This too is a fact, whether it is recognised or not, whether socialists are many or few, or whether anyone does anything about it or not. Marx and Engels did not invent the need for revolution; they discovered it. 

Today's historical task of advancing to socialism is simply waiting to be fulfilled and the working class must win political power to fulfill it. This will only be achieved when a majority of workers are informed by a scientific knowledge of the need for change; a majority that refuses to be excluded from history, a majority that puts back into history the countless millions of individuals who slaved to produce the surplus that allowed the "men of destiny" to operate outside the productive system. It will, above all, be a majority with self-respect and confidence, gained from a scientific socialist understanding, to control its own destiny, making sure that catastrophes like the Second World War can never ever happen again. 
John Dunn

Mixed Media: Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be (2015)

The Mixed Media column from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, the comedy play with music by Frank Norman and Lionel Bart was revived in 2014 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in London, directed by Terry Johnson. The original 1959 production by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop was described by Littlewood as 'Guys and Dolls but with its flies undone.' The music and lyrics were written by Lionel Bart, a gay Jewish East End boy, or in his own words 'a working-class homosexual Jewish junkie commie.'
Fings depicts a world of the 'lumpen proletariat' of gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, razor gangs, and crooks in a struggling 'schpieler' (a mix of gambling joint and knocking shop) in a 1950s Soho reminiscent of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. The play is performed in cockney rhyming slang, thieves cant, and Polari, the slang in gay subculture until the late 1960s. Paul Baker in Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men writes 'Polari flourished in the repressive 1950s, where the regulation of post-war sexual morality was viewed as a priority, and prosecutions against gay men reached record levels.' The play includes a song Contempery (sic)sung by Horace, a gay interior designer while the title song includes the line 'poofs in coffee 'ouses'

In the 1950s the police's image was projected by BBC TV's cosy Dixon of Dock Green, and it was not until 1963 that police corruption became public knowledge when Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor was charged with corruption offences at the Old Bailey: 'Soho sounded like Chicago when Challenor described it, he believed that fighting crime in Soho was like trying to swim against a tide of sewage' (James Morton Bent Coppers).
In Fings the 'schpieler' is handed over to the bent copper. Before the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act it was 'fahsends of pounds passing across the baize' but the Act legalised gambling in the UK, betting shops opened, and the government hoped to take gambling off the streets and end the practice of bookmakers sending 'runners' to collect from punters. The Act 'knocked their street-based competitors out of business at a stroke, a lot of them found that the capital required to set up premises, pay staff and 'go straight' was beyond them' (The Independent 5 April 2008).
In the 1950s there was concern about the visibility of prostitutes in London, and the Wolfenden Committee recommended a crackdown on street prostitution, and these were put into effect in the 1959 Street Offences Act: 'It shall be an offence for a common prostitute to loiter or solicit in a street or public place for the purpose of prostitution.' The song Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be is Bart's satirical ode to the good old days of unchecked prostitution: 'I used to lead a lovely life of sin, dough! I charged a ton, now it’s become an undercover game... there used to be class doing the town, buying a bit of vice, and that's when a brass couldn't go down under the union price... I've got news for Wolfenden, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be.' The Act forced the majority of prostitutes off the street. In Fings the prostitutes are skint. Helen J Self in History Repeating Itself: The Regulation of Prostitution and Trafficking writes 'the essence of the scheme was not to abolish prostitution, but to push women off the streets . . . off-street outlets for prostitution multiplied . . . other unwelcome side-effects was an increase in kerb-crawling.'
The Socialist Standard of October 1957 wrote 'the Committee's aim is simply to brush the dirt under the carpet' and 'the real causes of prostitution are the economic and social conditions in which it lives and flourishes. It is, in fact, a product of the monogamous marriage system within the framework of buying-and-selling societies' which reflects Marx and Engels view that 'the bourgeois family finds its complement in public prostitution' (Manifesto of the Communist Party). Lenin in an interview with Clara Zetkin argued that prostitutes are 'victims of bourgeois society, accursed by two concepts; firstly of its accursed system of property and secondly of its accursed moral hypocrisy' (The Women's Question).
The English Collective of Prostitutes established in 1975 seeks the decriminalisation of prostitution which is supported by trade unions such as the CWU and GMB, but 'sex work' has divided the trade union movement. In 2009 the TUC Women’s Congress voted against the decriminalisation of the sex industry and the unionisation of sex workers. The 2009 Policing and Crime Act, by targeting brothels for raids drove prostitution further underground, increasing the vulnerability of sex workers, and preventing women from reporting violence.
Fings concerns Rosie, an innocent young woman on the run from a violent partner, who goes on the game. Bart's Where Do the Little Birds Go, and The Ceiling's Coming Dahn are 'two of the best songs written for women in post-war English musical theatre' and makes Bart 'the uncrowned King of composing the English Whore's lament: give him a brass, and he'll expose the pain and doubt and fear and love in her' (The London Bluebird, 30 August 2012).
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be is vibrant working-class theatre devoid of bourgeois moralising.
Steve Clayton

The Passing Show: The Aucas (1963)

The Passing Show column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard








Alwyn Edgar

From a Russian prison camp (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Soviet novelist, is a "prophet without honour" in his own country, while in the West his magnificent novels are bestsellers and one has received the ultimate accolade: it has been made into a film.

We are not concerned here with his stature as a writer but rather with the way he adds to our sketchy knowledge of Soviet society. 

In 1945 he was sentenced to 8 years for comments he made about Stalin. His first year he spent working on construction sites around Moscow. He was then transferred to a secret research establishment—which he describes in The First Circle—but in 1950 he was transferred to a camp for political prisoners at Karaganda, in Central Asia till his life in 1953. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published in Russia in '62 in Novy Mir, but his other novels only circulated in manuscript form among friends till they reached the West,

His three novels dealing with the Soviet scene are One Day . . . , The First Circle and Cancer Ward. Respectively they describe the world of the manual worker, the intellectual and the chronically sick.

In One Day we learn how starving and frozen prisoners labour on a construction site (temperature minus 39 degrees), queue for fuel, munch their ration of dry bread and try to wangle a smoke or an easy job. As in the outside world, "you feathered your own nest as best you could". You knew that you were cheated of your rations by all who handled them. Graft was everywhere, and so were the informers. But prisoners spared their energy, needing it for survival.

In The First Circle, he describes an expensive top-secret research institute in Moscow where class enemies, saboteurs and other top scientists, imprisoned in the Thirties and Forties, enjoyed relative luxury. Yet the State is cruelly oppressive here too: the cruelty is of a different type, that's all. At Karaganda it was physical cruelty—hunger, cold and overwork; at Mavrino it is psychological—pressure to meet impossible deadlines successfully, dread of a transfer back to labour camps and fear for their persecuted families. As at Karaganda, and as in all parts of Russia, informers abound—the hallmark of a police state. 

If you ever wondered what has happened to ordinary Russians, these books will tell you much. In the two books together, Solzhenitzyn has covered a lot: from the lowest camp drudges, the wives at home on the collectives, ex-Party members who helped collectivize the countryside at gunpoint and their wives, unable to get work without disowning their husbands, right on up through the secret service rat-race to the Minister, Abakumov, and the Immortal One himself.

Finally in Cancer Ward he underlines the idea that his real subject is not a prison society but Soviet society. The whole of Russia is a sick society, all alike are sick—doctors and patients, jailers and prisoners. All Russia is a prison where every fifth man is an informer.

For all Russians, he says, life is an endless sentence without amnesty, measured by months of deprivation and humiliation. The proletarian is everywhere a prisoner of the system: we are all doing time. Some prisons are plush like Mavrino "the first circle of hell." Others are unspeakable. His explanation of the lush conditions at Mavrino applies equally to the so-called middle-class here: "It has been shown that the better sheep are fed and looked after, the higher their yield of wool."

Solzhenitzyn earned the right to claim: "I've got an advantage no spy can make me lose: what I've been through, and seen others go through, should give me a good idea of what history is about, don't you think?"

Any who doubt the existence of these camps is welcome to try to organise a Socialist Party of the Soviet Union: the only Socialists he will meet there will be in the camps, the special prisons and the psychiatric hospitals. And it is no more safe to talk in prison, than it is outside.
Charmian Skelton

Report on Mau Mau (1960)

Book Review from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Security Forces: Killed 167. Wounded 1,582.








Pieter Lawrence