Are we primarily egalitarian or authoritarian?

In 1987, Harvard primatologist, Richard Wrangham, studying how human behaviour relates to that of our closest primate relatives, noticed that as humans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share a recent ancestor and more than 98 percent of their genes, any behaviours these four species of apes shared today must also have been present in their common predecessor about seven million years ago--their“Common Ancestor”.

Wrangham identified social behaviour shared by the four species like social life and attacking others of the same species. But Bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas had hierarchical societies, with often aggressive dominant alpha males. Yet human hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, apparently lacking innate hierarchical communities and any inclination to dominating leaders. Before 10,000 years ago, only essentially egalitarian human societies seemed to have existed on our planet. Human communities were tiny (no more than about 150) with no strong leaders at all. As genomes take at least a thousand generations to change our nature significantly, most human genes have evolved from the genetic makeup of people living in these small Paleolithic bands. Yet today, not only are there fairly egalitarian human societies in the world, but also some people are ruled by despots. Somehow, primitive communism degenerated into a more hierarchical and unequal world.

How could evolution explain these curious and contradictory facts? Our primate relatives are hierarchical but our own ancestors were not, but we seem to have reverted at least partially in recent history. Discoveries in the fields of anthropology and primatology resolved the puzzle because all apes actually resent authority and being bossed around, and will form coalitions to resist it.

Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, suggested that though we may have a deeply rooted instinct to exert power over others, we also have what may be an equally strong aversion to abuses of power, along with some natural tendencies to punish people who commit those abuses.

Boehm surveyed 48 small, nonliterate societies spread across the globe, ranging from small hunting and gathering bands to more sedentary tribes, to see exactly how egalitarian they were, and why. He suggested that with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals (hunter-gatherers), all human societies most likely practised egalitarianism and most of the time successfully--they maintained political parity among adults. Boehm identified the following mechanisms expressing ambivalence towards leaders, anticipation of domination, and countering the dominance hierarchy:
• Public Opinion
• Criticism and Ridicule
• Disobedience
• Extreme Sanctions.

Males who turned into selfish bullies, or even just tried to boss others around were treated brutally, as moral deviants. Because all hunter-gatherers faced bullies or self-aggrandizing political upstarts, and faced them in spite of their strong egalitarianism, if they had not so diligently worked against inequality, they would have turned hierarchical. Boehm wrote:
"As long as followers remain vigilantly egalitarian because they understand the nature of domination and leaders remain cognizant of this ambivalence-based vigilance, deliberate control of leaders may remain for the most part highly routinized and ethnographically unobvious."

So, an urge to dominate is still present in human nature, meaning that to stay egalitarian hunter-gatherers use ostracism, shaming, rejection by the group and sometimes murder to hold down power-hungry upstarts. In other words, by nature today’s hunter-gatherers still incline towards dominating one another, just like the other three species of living apes, and therefore fall in line with other primates, the Common Ancestor and humans all down the evolutionary line. Why then are these primate species with the common ancestor motivated to share power equally though apparently inclined to domination? Boehm's postulate is simply that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong. It is because the instinct to dominate is accompanied by a natural resentment to submitting to domination.

In a contemporary but undeveloped human hunting band, the upstarts who attempt to dominate the others are dealt with harshly. But both wild and captive male chimpanzees that have been studied extensively are extremely ambitious politically, and will form political coalitions to try to unseat the alpha male. Large coalitions can form in the wild to challenge domineering former alphas and run them out of the community.

Evidence from the other species of apes does not support the notion of inevitably dictatorial hierarchies. A phylogenetic comparison among macaques suggests that despotic dominance styles were likely to have evolved from egalitarian dominance styles. Moreover being the "top dog" is not necessarily enviable. Alpha males suffer from their position. They commonly have higher metabolic rates and higher levels of stress hormones. In wild male baboons, the alpha male experiences high levels of both testosterone and glucocorticoid, causing high-ranking males higher stress levels, reducing health, fitness and life. These two hormones have immunosuppressant activity, permitting increased parasitic infestation and infection risks, thereby lowering survival rates. So alpha males enjoy high rank for a shorter time and accompanied by poorer health from the stress of his position.

Now the lowest ranking males in the hierarchy also have high stress levels from being everyone's "underdog", leaving the intermediate beta males most fit, with less stress yet some reproductive and feeding opportunities. It follows that a society in which all were at the same level has advantages in group fitness.

The main worry of the alpha male is to be ousted by a revolution. A tactic of older, subordinate male savanna baboons is forming alliances to combat higher-ranking males to get reproductive access to females. These lowest ranking males would get no opportunity to copulate otherwise. A fight broke out in Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania between Pimu, the alpha male, and four of his underlings. They killed him.

Captive gorillas, like wild and captive chimpanzees, may attack a dominant silverback. But male bonobos do not form coalitions. They don’t need to. They don’t fight with neighbours, and they can’t really tell when a female is fertile, so there’s little reason to bicker over them. Instead males spend a lot of time with females with the hope that she will mate with them when the time is right.

Two neighbouring troops of baboons had different group dynamics, one near a dump had plenty of food and were generally peaceful. The other lived further into the bush where food was scarcer, and the males were more competitive and aggressive. The aggressive troop would raid the dumps scaring off the local baboons while they fed, but were less picky in what to eat. On one occasion they gorged on some discarded food that was tainted, and that the local primates had learned not to eat. The consequence was that the raiding party of aggressive males all died. But now, with the most aggressive males gone, there were far fewer confrontations among the remaining males yielding a more peaceful culture which lasted more than a decade. Robert Sapolsky said:
“If that can occur in a troop of baboons, you don't have a leg to stand on when claiming the inevitabilities and unchangeability of human societies.”

Chimps often practice infanticide to get rid of rivals’ offspring and to hasten a female’s return to fertility, but this usually doesn’t happen in bonobos. Male bonobos are bigger than the females and have bigger teeth, but unlike male chimps they don’t boss the females around. Bonobos can form quite small female coalitions that nevertheless allow the females to challenge dominant males. Researchers saw an alpha male bonobo, who was also the son of the dominant female, attacking a young female carrying an infant. The females present immediately came to the unfortunate's defence. The doubly privileged male  was driven off and evicted from the band. So the females bond sufficiently to dominate the males, and even powerfully enough to overthrow a male hierarchy. Indeed, primatologist Frans de Waal’s studies with captive chimpanzees show that females, too, can band together to partially control their alphas.

Because Boehm's postulate, common to the apes, seems to stretch back to the common ancestor some seven million years ago, the Common Ancestor must have disliked dominating behaviour, and joined coalitions to trim the power of its alphas or those ambitious to be alphas. Egalitarianism conditioned by punishment for unfair behaviour may allow altruistic traits to spread, as game theory models predict. Based on model simulations, egalitarian punishment may also have been a precondition for adapting tools as weapons.

The extent of our social groups is wide--from quite egalitarian to quite despotic. In his book, "Hierarchy in the Forest", Boehm traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. He examines the group structures of hunter-gatherers, then tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected. Human history has rebuffed political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes who thought strong, authoritarian leaders necessary to rule unruly commoners.

Humans became both anatomically and culturally modern at least 45,000 years ago, and the insistence in today's foraging bands on an egalitarian society is much more distant back. The egalitarian bands arrived at a largely implicit “social contract”, by which individuals yielded any desire to dominate so as to remain equal with other group members. And these hunter-gatherers cooperated effectively because their societies were small. Today, a large nation can aim to limit power and uphold a common justice, but it must take precautions against would-be dictators who will still try to usurp a power over everyone.

The capitalist system is a slow but steady accumulation of power by a tiny minority of uber wealthy people. We are failing to counter the concentration of power and will either become subordinates or slaves, or society will have to be destroyed and rebuilt. We ought not to let either of these happen, but should demand an egalitarian world now!

(This summary primarily indebted to the work of Christopher Boehm)

The End of Democratic Capitalism: Pity they Couldn't Resist the Nuclear War

Sabres are rattling again in Washington towatd Moscow and Beijing. Could nuclear war still happen? The US and Russia possess about 14,000 nuclear warheads, but other countries possess them too, like India, Pakistan, Israel.

According to simulations by Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Michael Mills at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado even a nuclear war between say India and Pakistan could devastate the world. The fires from bombed cities would send about 5 million tonnes of hot black smoke into the stratosphere, where it would spread round the world. This smog would cut solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface by 8 per cent – enough to drop average winter temperatures by a startling 2.5 to 6 °C across North America, Europe and much of Asia, and not just for a few days. It would take around five years for the impacts to peak, and the repercussions would still be felt strongly after a decade.

Near-ice-age temperatures would cause frosts capable of reducing the growing season in the world’s mid-latitude bread baskets by up to 40 days. This, combined with meagre rainfall and blistering UV, would cause crop yields to plummet. Nuclear winter would deliver global famine. The smoke would also heat the normally chilly stratosphere by around 30°C, unleashing nitrogen chemistry that would destroy much of the ozone layer.

Moreover, climate models predict that rainfall would be reduced as weather systems lost energy. The Asian monsoon would collapse... that’s two billion people with as much as 80 per cent less water. The Amazon basin and the already arid Southwestern US and western Australia would scarcely do better. All from a small regional but nuclear war.

Steven Starr of the University of Missouri has calculated that a nuclear exchange between the major nuclear powers, US and Russia (and perhaps China), could throw 150 million tonnes of smoke into the air. That would block 70 per cent of sunlight and cool much of the world by 20°C or more. Unable to grow food, most people would starve to death. Those who hope to hide from the starvation in deep bunkers or whatever will have a long wait for the radioactice fallout from such a massive nuclear exchange to reduce--thousands of years, and it is unlikely anyone could survive. One of the greatest geopolitical achievements of the past 60 years was to avoid a nuclear war. The next 60 look just as gloomy.

(Adapted from Fred Pearce, New Scientist)

Socialism, a US View

Sixty years after McCarthyism made socialism “un-American”, Bernie Sanders has placed it back on the agenda. “Back” because socialism has a long history in our country, with such prominent advocates as Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. In the Sanders era, advocates of socialism are challenged to think and talk about what socialism really is, its essential promise, how it fits the American experience, what it might look like for the US, and how it’s a goal every American can embrace and help make a reality. But first, here’s what Bernie Sanders had to say about socialism.

Bernie Sanders showed how socialism makes sense for America

Sanders made a powerful case for his vision of socialism in a speech at Georgetown University on 19 Nov. In the New Deal of the 1930s, Sanders said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted “against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists”: “Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combatted cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country. And that is what we have to do today.”
Sanders noted both FDR and Lyndon Johnson, who enacted Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, were assailed by the right wing as socialists in their day. He did not mention the enormous mass movements of the 1930s and 1960s that pushed both Roosevelt and Johnson to act. But he acknowledged it implicitly when he declared that today:

“We need to develop a political movement which, once again, is prepared to take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation. The billionaire class cannot have it all. Our government belongs to all of us, and not just the one percent”.

“A ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation”, Sanders didn’t say it specifically, but that is the essence and logic of capitalism. Defeating this ruling class, according to Sanders, means bringing about “a culture which, as Pope Francis reminds us, cannot just be based on the worship of money”.
Sanders cited calls by Roosevelt in 1944 and Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s for an economy that serves the people. In their view, he said, you cannot have freedom without economic security—as Sanders put it:

“The right to a decent job at decent pay, the right to adequate food, clothing, and time off from work, the right for every business, large and small, to function in an atmosphere free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. The right of all Americans to have a decent home and decent health care”.

Getting to that freedom means reshaping political power in our country, Sanders said, because “today in America we not only have massive wealth and income inequality, but a power structure which protects that inequality”.

“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote”.

How socialism can transform our society to serve the people

The connection between our economic and political structures is stronger than Sanders indicated. They are not two parallel systems. We have a political power structure that maintains, protects and preserves an economic system that fuels inequality and injustice. Our economic system based on greed drives (in many ways or in important ways) our political system. The right-wing-dominated Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United ruling is just one illustration of the role of Big Money—Big Capital—in politics. This is why it’s called “capital”-ism.
Socialism is simply about rebuilding our society so that working people of all kinds, all colors, all languages, all faiths—the car worker, the nurse, the computer technician, the McDonald’s worker, the teacher, the gay family farmer and the farm laborer, the musician, the truck driver, the scientist, the customer service rep, the college student, the teenager trying to land a first job, the Muslim, the Jew, the Catholic, the Methodist, the Anglican, the Quaker, and so too many others. The people who make this country run, not a tiny group of super-rich corporate profiteers, are the deciders, the planners, the policymakers. The driving force is not the ruthless quest for ever-larger individual profit, as it is under our current capitalist system, but pursuit of the common good, equality, freedom from want and fear, expanding human knowledge, culture and potential, providing a chance for everyone to lead a fulfilling life on a healthy planet.
Sanders showed how socialism is rooted in American values. Socialism is about deep and wide democracy. It is not about an all-powerful central government taking over and controlling every aspect of life. It is not only about nationalizing this or that or especially every company. But it does mean that the public will have to take on and take over a few key “evil-doers”.

Taking on Big Oil and Big Finance

1. The giant energy corporations, Big Oil, the coal companies, the frackers. This section of corporate America plays a central role in the US economy, but also in its politics—and it’s a dangerous and damaging one. People know that they not only ravage our environment and worker health and safety, and hold communities hostage with the threat of job loss if they are curbed, while at the same time blocking progress on a green economy, but they also back and fund far-right policies on a whole range of issues. (It’s not just the Koch brothers.) This sector of the economy will clearly have to be restructured in the public interest.
2. The giant banking and financial companies—commonly known as “Wall Street” although they are sprinkled around the country. We’ve seen how they wrecked our economy and destroyed lives and livelihoods. For what? Simple greed. They will need to be returned to their socially needed function—to protect ordinary people’s savings and to fund investment in the social good, driving a thriving economy and society:
   • new technologies to save our planet from climate change disaster, flood protection for example
   • a 21st century public education system rich in resources to enable the next generations to flourish
   • expanded medical research and a national health system that serves every American with top quality, humane, state of the art care from one end of life to the other
   • exploration of space and our own planet to enrich human society
   • and so many more.

You may have a few others to add to the list of key evil-doers that will probably be on top of the list to be challenged and taken over. But aside from that, socialism can mean a mix of:

• Worker and community-owned co-ops
• Companies democratically owned and run by local or state entities. This is not new—we already have, for example, more than 2,000 community-owned electric utilities, serving more than 48 million people or about 14 percent of the nation’s electricity consumers. Then there’s the state-owned Bank of North Dakota
• Privately run companies
• Individually owned small businesses.

For socialism to work, public expression and participation will have to be mobilized and expanded, in the economy and in all other areas of life, for example, by measures like:

• Strengthening and enlarging worker-employee representation and decision-making
• Expanding the New England town hall meeting concept
• Implementing proportional representation and other measures to enable a wide range of views to be represented in our government at every level.
• Taking money out of political campaigns
• Making voting easy.

Obviously there’s a lot more to think about and figure out—these are just a few suggestions.

Shedding stereotypes about socialism

Bernie Sanders and others take pains to call themselves democratic socialists. That’s because the concept of socialism—in essence, a society based on the “social” good—has been tainted by what happened in the Soviet Union, and some other countries, and its exploitation for propaganda purposes by the capitalist media. But there’s nothing in socialism that equates to dictatorship, political repression, bureaucracy, over-centralization, commandism, and so on.
Those features of Soviet society arose out of particular circumstances and personalities. But they were not “socialist”. As events have shown, in fact, socialism requires expanded democracy to grow and flourish.
Socialism does not mean a small group “seizing power”. It doesn’t mean radical slogans either. Red flags and images of Che or Lenin not required. Socialism means an energized, inspired, mobilized vast majority from all walks of life, from “red” state and “blue”, coming together to make changes, probably one step at a time.
Socialism is not a “thing” that will “happen” on one day, in one month, one year or even one decade. History shows that vast and lasting social change rarely happens that way. It will be a process of events, many small steps and some big ones—and elections will play a big and vital role—creating transformations that perhaps we won’t even recognize as “socialism”. Perhaps it will only be in hindsight that we will look back and say, “Oh yes, we’ve got something new”. And it’s not an end product. There is no “end of history”.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels became famous for analyzing capitalism and how it exploits and oppresses the 99 percent—OK they didn’t use that term, but that’s what they were talking about. Capitalism started out as a productive and creative force, they wrote, but it contained the seeds of its own decline. It has created a massive and ever-widening working class but most of the wealth this class produces and sustains goes into the pockets of an ever-smaller group of capitalists—that’s called exploitation. It creates so many problems that eventually it will have to be replaced. Change is on the agenda. Thank you Bernie Sanders.

Slightly Adapted from Susan Webb, People’s World

Why Socialism is Effectively Impossible in the EU

It is because the EU Treaties not only contain procedural protections for capitalism, they also entrench substantive policies which correspond to the basic tenets of neoliberalism. 

The EU is based on two core functional treaties, the Treaty on European Union (TEU, originally signed in Maastricht in 1992) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, originally signed in Rome in 1958 as the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community). These lay out how the EU operates, and there are a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. Mostly they have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the years since they were first signed, so a consolidated version of the two core treaties is regularly published by the European Commission. The EU can only act within the competences granted to it through these treaties and amendment to the treaties requires the agreement and ratification (according to their national procedures) of every single signatory.

Reforming the EU to make Socialism Possible

The methods of Treaty amendment are laid down in Article 48 TEU. Under the ordinary revision procedure, Member States must agree by common accord the amendments to be made to the Treaties. Under simplified revision procedures (used to revise Union policies), the European Council also must act unanimously. In each case, changes must be confirmed by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. Crucially, irrespective of which procedure is used, only one national government can veto treaty change. All 28 governments would have to want to give up capitalism simultaneously to change the Treaties such that socialism is possible. In other words, the treaties are designed to make socialist change impossible

Privatising Public Utilities

The socialist position would be that Member States should determine how big their own public sectors are. But EU liberalisation legislation consolidates privatisation. Nationalising sectors such as gas, electricity, telecommunications and postal services is prevented by giving corporations the right of accessing any market. The sort of extension of public ownership brought in by the 1945 Labour government could therefore be prohibited because the new public enterprises would have to compete with private firms in a capitalist market, and that is not socialism! It is the “competitive public ownership” sought by Labour right winger, Anthony Crosland, trying to undermine the efforts of the Attlee government and the welfare state it introduced after 1945. The EU makes publicly owned companies act like private companies--eg run for profit not for public benefit like the NHS--particular when the Treaty provisions on state aids are taken into account. Similar legislation on railways is presently going through the EU institutions.

All legislation in the EU has to come from the EU Commission and be submitted to  the Council and Parliament. Supposing that a socialistic national government sought to introduce EU legislation to allow all Member States a free choice over the public or private ownership of their energy, postal, telecommunications and rail sectors, it has to rely on the Commission to make and submit the proposal. Under Article 352 TFEU the Council must act unanimously, so a single national government can instruct its minister in the Council to veto the proposal, and ALL 28 must therefore agree from the outset their support. Once again it is impossible.

TTIP

Assuming TTIP is agreed before the next UK general election, the prospects of the EU discarding it are even less likely. Assuming withdrawal is permissible, the TEU and TFEU do not make provision for how the EU actually does it. On the face of it, Article 352 TFEU with its unanimity requirement would have to be used, again allowing a single government to stop withdrawal from the TTIP. Again it is easier to do for a single independent state.

Facing up to the Constitutional Obstacles to Socialist Advance

Campaigners claiming it is possible to make the EU more left-wing, have the duty to explain it can be done in the face of EU treaty requirements of unanimity and common accord. At present, these requirements make socialism within the EU nigh on impossible. Those pretending there is a way forwards within the EU like Yanis Varoufakis, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 2025), and “Another Europe is Possible”--have to show what the practical means are they propose to use to make progress against the EU constitution without tearing up the treaties which amounts to all 28 Member States rejecting the EU as it is.

Let us leave now, while we have a reasonable chance.

D. Nicol, ‘Is Another Europe Possible?’ U.K. Const. L. Blog (29th Feb 2016) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/

People’s Assemblies: Norfolk’s Experience

Re-posted from The Morning Star.

Norfolk People’s Assembly has been at the forefront of the battle to beat the Tories. David Peel explains how the group has had such an impact

Look around. Our country is being torn apart. People are suffering and dying. Lives are being wrecked. Public services destroyed. Changes we never believed possible are being forced through against our wishes. They call it "austerity forever"—the idea of a handful of arrogant, aloof Eton public schoolboys and their rich friends.

However, as Karl Marx once said about capitalism, they are creating their own gravediggers. The British people, true to centuries of tradition, are rising like lions. We are on the move and our movement is called the People’s Assembly. Our message is simple—no cuts, no austerity, and if it won’t listen, no coalition government.

Since we launched in June last year around 100 assemblies have sprung up across Britain, rooted in local communities. This is our movement’s great strength, and why we are here to stay. We have united thousands of activists and campaigners with ordinary people, many of whom have never been involved in this kind of “politics” before. And we don’t get together to bemoan austerity. We plan and take action.

In Norfolk, this has been particularly successful—but why? And what drives us?

Here’s one reason. People with severe mental health needs in this county and in Suffolk are taking their own lives in utter despair as a direct result of cuts in services.

When Norfolk People’s Assembly was told about these deaths from comrades in the mental health services we took action straight away and occupied the constituency offices of “Care” Minister and local MP Norman Lamb. We filmed a statement from inside his office, rightly blaming him and his coalition for the deaths, and uploaded it to the internet. The minister was dragged kicking and squirming onto the media to answer the charges. Thousands saw our angry message and witnessed his discomfort. Today the campaign against mental health cuts which have plunged the service into crisis is one of the biggest, most active and successful we have seen in years. Mental health staff, patients and carers have been given the confidence to blow the whistle and fight back. They now have the mental health trust board of directors by the balls, and their campaign is saving lives. It was kick-started by a People’s Assembly initiative.

Here’s another reason. Today in Norfolk, no coalition cabinet minister dares breeze in, make a few sham announcements and breeze out again. They are met with vigorous protests. When Prime Minister David Cameron visited, demonstrators crowded round every entry to the TV studios where he was to be interviewed. Those who later saw the broadcast said he looked rattled. I didn’t see it. I was inside a police station, under arrest for attempted criminal damage to his armoured Jaguar car having thrown a small cardboard placard at it—allegedly. The Crown Prosecution Service recently dropped their case. On local radio, listeners calling a phone-in about the incident backed our action, criticising the media for its craven attitude to coalition ministers. When Chancellor George Osborne came his car was surrounded and stopped by our activists. It disrupted his speaking engagement. We were interviewed by the media, catapulting the People’s Assembly onto news bulletins watched by tens of thousands. No coalition minister—or shadow minister who supports austerity—should be able to visit any People’s Assembly area, anywhere in Britain, without protests.

Here’s a third reason for our success. When Norwich City Council threatened to evict families for bedroom tax arrears, we put down a public question, then turned up the volume with a highly visible Spanish-style pots and pans protest outside. Inside the chamber we were verbally abused by ruling Labour group councillors, but we extracted a precious and very public promise from the deputy leader. No tenant would be evicted for bedroom tax arrears. It put us—and the council pledge—on the front of Norwich evening news.

We are not fools. If the council betrays its pledge, we will have a "stop evictions network" of activists around any home threatened by bailiffs. They shall not pass. We have marched, occupied banks like Virgin, shops like Primark, stood on picket lines with firefighters, handed out leaflets at schools supporting striking teachers and hassled local MPs like Brandon Lewis, Chloe Smith and Simon Wright. We are the self-appointed official opposition to austerity in Norfolk where every mainstream political party is implicated in hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts.

Our activism never ceases, as readers of the People’s Assembly house newspaper the Morning Star will know. Every local assembly in Britain planning action should be telling the Morning Star. This is the only daily newspaper on sale round this country which is fighting austerity tooth and nail. In Norfolk, we have a sympathetic newspaper too, the Kett Gazette, named after home-grown rebel leader Robert Kett. We always warn visiting coalition ministers that they will get "a robust Kett county welcome" if they come here.

In just six months Norfolk People’s Assembly has transformed the best activists in the county into a force to be reckoned with. We spoil coalition PR opportunities, put anti-austerity on the agenda and inspire others to join us and fight back. Action is the life of all. People join us because we take action. We have courage and commitment, but don’t get us wrong—we are not hotheads. Our actions are thought through. Campaigners come to us because we have experience. We can organise demonstrations, liaise with police, set up and speak at public meetings, lead occupations, ambush ministers, hold councils to account, lobby charities and churches and build networks which are broad and strong.

Our media profile is strong. We pour out information, shaping the debate and thinking around austerity. We never get defensive when criticised but stay upbeat, positive, and proactive. Our campaigns are creative and imaginative. We cannot be ignored. We have earned respect.

We are led by women, most of our officers are women, the majority at our meetings are women. Women alongside the disabled are hardest hit by this austerity. We are inextricably bound to trades councils and trade unions fund us. We go to union meetings. They come to ours. It gives us a militant, organised edge. For the first time in years, we are bringing members of the public to strikers’ picket lines.

The People’s Assembly is about to step up several gears. Perhaps here in rebellious Norfolk we have blazed a trail. Here might be one strategy for growing this movement in our communities, taking it to a place in our national life where we can turn the tide of austerity, and history, and bring this unelected coalition down.

Corporations are not People!

For a long time companies and corporations have been legally able to claim they are a legal entity, they can be regarded as a person. People however have emotions but a corporation is an abstract entity. In no way can they be actually be considered as equal to a living human being. Yet the law says they can. It is a dangerous notion that needs to be changed, all the more urgently as corporations get granted additional legal power after additional legal power, powers that give them immense legal advantages over the entities the law was intended to defend.

Here is a reminder of the power of corporations and their increasing ability to make the law an ass, especially in the USA, supposedly the fount of democracy in this world. It plainly is not. Corporations cross national boundaries with ease, and so are able to avoid censure and sanction from nations, simply by moving wherever the conditions and the incentives are best for them!

Wealth Distribution in the USA:Worse than we Imagine... Much Worse!

A revealing video with only the fault that its dismissal of socialism as equality of income is propagandist and not true. Socialism means "from each according to their ability to each according to their work", but with a much more equitable distribution of wealth than under capitalism, and so approximating more to what the film depicts as the average US citizen's idea of an ideal distribution.

A Practical Marxism and Communism in Short Sentences

Our Society and Why We Want to Change it: Capitalism

The aim of the Communist Party is to achieve a Socialist Britain in which the means of production, distribution and exchange will be socially owned and utilised in a planned way for the benefit of all.

Rule 2 of the Aims and Constitution of the Communist Party

Britain, And Its People

Whoever travels through our land must be struck by its beauty. Despite over 200 years of industrial development, Britain’s varied loveliness is world famed. But, in addition to great natural beauty, Britain is rich—rich in natural resources, in the skill of her workers, in her capacity to produce everything necessary for a good life for all.

Britain’s greatest single asset is the British people, who in their long history have often been foremost in the fight against tyranny and oppression:

• the British people were the first in the world to fight and end the absolute power of kings in the English Revolution of 1640
• the British working class pioneered trade unionism and the Co-operative movement
• the struggle of the English Chartists in the forties of the last century is an inspiration to the workers of all countries

Britain could be a paradise for the people—its skilled working people could build a new and better life as rapidly as any other people in the world. But Britain is not a paradise for the peqple. On the contrary, there is:

• massive unemployment and part time working
• continually rising prices, and bitter resistance by the government and employers to wage increases
• a vicious programme of cutting our social services to the bone
• starvation and hypothermia among old working class pensioners, starving on miserable pensions, and desperate hardship for our disabled people
• cultural domination of our country by the US
• a continuous history of wars, the result of Britain’s membership of NATO and other war alliances, on behalf of the US
• a constant waste of taxpayer pounds to finance costly nuclear submarines, though the ostensible reason for them, the Soviet Union, has disintegrated.

…to be selective! All of this is the consequence of policies supported largely by both the Tories and right-wing Labour leaders. But why? Who and what is responsible?

Underlying it is the fundamental cause of all the sufferings and tribulations of the people, namely, that Britain is a capitalist country, ruled for and by capitalists for their profit and interests. It is the capitalists and those right-wing leaders of the Labour movement who support their policies, who are responsible for the position we find ourselves in. What is wrong with Britain is the way society is organised, the “system of society” which prevails. Some of the main features of this society are:

1. It is divided into rich and poor—a tiny handful of rich (1 per cent of the population own more than half the nation’s wealth) who do no work and the overwhelming majority who work their whole lives through:
   • Large fortunes comprise a quarter of this country’s wealth. This is owned by about 5,000 people—one-fifth of 1 per cent of the nation. There are hundreds of thousands of capitalist firms, but only a few hundred of them take half the total yearly profit made in Britain.
   • Millions of people can exist in this country only by drawing public assistance. But there are roughly 100,000 big bosses, 300,000 small employers and 650,000 managers—a total of around 1 million who live off what the rest of us, the twenty or so millions of the working population, produce.
   • These working people produce everything and own very little. The million produce nothing, own practically everything and dominate everything—the Government, Parliament, the press, the courts, book publishing, the films, ITV and the BBC.
2. Wars—involving incalculable suffering to the people—are a regular occurrence. There have been two terrible wars within the lifetime of elderly adults in Britain, and continuous wars backing US imperialism, especially in the Middle East.
3. Empire—Britain is the centre of a huge empire, now called “the Commonwealth” covering a quarter of the earth’s surface and containing a quarter of the world’s population. This empire was acquired by brutal conquest, just as the US is now acquiring its empire. It brought huge profits to British capitalists and financiers. It cost the lives of thousands of British soldiers and hundreds of millions of pounds spent in trying to keep the colonial peoples down. While many of these peoples have now won their political independence, vast profits are still squeezed out of them, for British firms still dominate decisive sections of the economic life of the poorer colonial countries.

These are some of the features of the system we live under which is called capitalism.

What Is Capitalism?

Here we deal with two main aspects only:

1. It is a system of exploitation. Capitalism is a system in which the means for producing the wealth—the land, the mines, factories, the machines, etc—are in private hands. It is true that in Britain some industries—mining, the railways, electricity—have sometimes been taken out of private hands and have been nationalized. But the first charge on the nationalized industries is compensation for the old, private shareholders. Nationalised boards are manned overwhelmingly by ex-directors of the industries concerned. In any case only around 20 per cent of industry at most has ever been nationalized. The remaining 80 per cent stays in private hands. Thus a tiny handful of people own these “means of production” as they are called. But they do not work them. The immense majority of the people own nothing (in the sense that they can live on what they own) but their power to work.

   By exploitation we mean living off the labour of other people. There have been previous forms of exploitation. In slave society, the slave owners lived off the labour of the slaves who were their property. In feudal society, the feudal lords lived off the forced labour of the serfs. In capitalist society, the worker is neither a slave nor yet a serf, that is, forced to do free, unpaid labour for a master. But he is exploited just the same, even though the form of this exploitation is not so open and clear as was the case with the slaves and the serfs.

   The essence of exploitation under capitalism consists in this—that the workers, when set to work with raw materials and machinery, produce far more in values than what is paid out by the capitalists in wages, for raw materials, etc. In short, they produce a surplus which belongs to the capitalists and for which they are not paid. Thus they are robbed of the values they produce. This is the source of capitalist profit. It is on this surplus, produced by the workers, that the capitalist lives in riches and luxury.

   Let us take actual examples of this using werll established historical data. Official figures show that in 1955 the value added by labour to the raw materials, etc. in the cement industry came to £1,870 per worker. Average wages and salaries came to £620. Thus there was a surplus value of £1,250 produced by each worker. This is 200 per cent exploitation—a lot of workers got one-third and a few capitalist got two-thirds.

   Capitalism is a system in which the means for producing wealth are owned by a few who live by exploiting the workers, that is, by robbing them of the values they produce over and above the value of their wages.

2. It is a system of booms and slumps. From the earliest days of its existence—at the end of the eighteenth century—until today, capitalism has been marked by periodic slumps, or “economic crises” as they are called, which cause mass unemployment and untold misery for the great mass of the working people. These are very special crises. They are caused because there is too much of everything and are therefore called “crises of over-production”.

   In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that in all earlier epochs would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production…

   Marx-Engels, Communist Manifesto

   The great world economic crisis of 1929-31, which really lasted until the beginning of the Second World War, is the yardstick for more recent crises, including the present one. At that time there were over 40 million people unemployed throughout the capitalist world. In Britain, in the autumn of 1930, the figures of registered unemployed exceeded 2,300,000 and never sank below 1 million until 1940, after the beginning of the Second World War.

Capitalist Crises of Over-Production

Capitalism is a system based on competition. There are many capitalists each producing the same kind of commodity. Each hopes to sell all that he has produced and thereby to realise a profit. He has to compete with his rivals in the attempt to sell his goods. The quantity of goods produced therefore bears no relation to the real demand. Capitalism is thus by its nature an unplanned, anarchic system. Each capitalist tries to produce as much and as cheaply as possible to grab as much of the market and as much profit as possible. To do so more effectively, to defeat their rivals, the capitalists constantly seek to cheapen production by introducing new machinery, speeding up the workers, etc. Thus more and more goods are being produced. At the same time they seek to drive down the wages of the workers to increase their share of the wealth produced.

There thus arises a constant gap between the quantity of the goods produced and the ability of the mass of consumers—in all countries, workers and peasants dependent on more or less fixed wages and small incomes—to buy them. This is the source of crises under capitalism.

So long as capitalism has existed there have always been crises of overproduction.

So long as capitalism continues to exist crises are inevitable. It is impossible to plan continuous unbroken production in the interests of the people under capitalism. Only socialism makes crisis-free production possible.

Capitalism Develops to Imperialism

So, capitalism is a system where each capitalist is faced with competition for the market from his rivals. To meet this competition each capitalist tries to produce more and more cheaply than his competitors. This results in the enlarging of the units of production as individual capitalists enlarge their plant, introduce more modern machinery, speed-up, etc. By this competition, the bigger and stronger capitalists ruin the smaller and weaker ones, and a stage arises when whole sectors of production are dominated by a few giant concerns. These are called monopolies and they are able to regulate production in their own interests, charge high monopoly prices, and maximize profits.

This is a new stage in the development of capitalism—the domination of economic life by monopolies—monopoly capitalism—and began to develop in most European countries at the end of the nineteenth century. Monopoly is the essence of imperialism, and imperialism is the highest and last stage of capitalism.

Imperialism

Competition leads to monopoly in each capitalist country. But monopoly does not eliminate competition. Within each country the big monopolies engage in fierce conflict with one another. Competition is particularly violent between the monopolies of different countries for world domination. One result is the scramble for secure, exclusive, competition-free markets, for sources of raw materials, for spheres for the most profitable investment of capital. This is found in the technically undeveloped parts of the world. These are seized and transformed into colonies, whose whole economic and political life are forcibly dominated by imperialist governments to meet the needs of the big monopolies for maximum profits.

But the world has only so many colonial areas. And by the beginning of the twentieth century the available colonies were parcelled out between a few older imperialist countries—Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal—especially Britain. The British Empire, by 1914, covered 12.7 million square miles of territory with a population of 431 million people. 3,700,000 square miles of the British Empire were acquired between 1884-1900, the period of the rise of imperialism as a new stage in the development of capitalism.

Imperialism Causes War

In this situation, developing monopoly capitalism in Germany and the USA driving outwards and eager to acquire colonies could secure them only by taking them from those powers who already had empires, that is, by war—especially from Britain.

The various powers “gang up” in combination against other groupings of imperialist powers. Thus the First World War of 1914-18 took place as a conflict between two groups of powers—one led by Britain (the Entente) and the other by Germany (the Central Powers). It was a brutal imperialist war between Britain and Germany for colonies, markets and European domination. The Second World War arose out of the drive of Hitler Germany for world domination. Today the danger of a third world war arises out of the drive of US imperialism to subjugate the entire world.

Socialist Revolution

Imperialism is not only the period of world wars. It ushers in the era of the world socialist revolution.

The workers in the imperialist countries, faced with increased exploitation, the peoples of the colonial countries, subject to even greater oppression, the people of the whole world, faced with a succession of terrible wars, awaken to the need to end imperialism. New revolutionary Marxist parties—Communist Parties—arise to head this struggle. Where these parties have the leadership of the working class and of their allies, imperialism is smashed, as was the case in Russia in 1917 after the First World War, and China after 1945. These countries take the path to socialism, which will see the ending of the exploitation of man by man.

The Class Struggle

The Class Struggle arises from Capitalism itself. It is not Imported.

Capitalism is a system in which there are different classes, exploiters and exploited, rich and poor. The interests of these two classes are clearly opposed. The exploiters try to increase the exploitation of the workers as much as possible in order to increase their profits. The exploited try to limit this exploitation and to get back as much of the wealth as possible of which they have been robbed.

This is one aspect of the class struggle which arises inevitably out of the whole character of capitalism as a class system based on exploitation.

In the fight against monopoly capitalism, the working class needs allies, and can secure them. Monopoly capitalism attacks not only the working class but threatens the interests of other sections of society, including those of the smaller capitalists—small businesses like sole traders and self employed craftsmen. The whole home and foreign policy of monopoly capital threatens the existence of the overwhelming majority of the people. This is seen particularly in the policy pursued by the Tory Government on behalf of the big monopolies. Thus monopoly capital can be isolated and the whole forces of the people organised against it. It is the task of the working class to unite around itself the majority of the nation in common struggle for peace, national independence, defence of living standards, East-West trade, etc.

The working class has to fight both immediate and long-term struggles. The immediate struggles are those that are fought out on different aspects of struggle within the existing capitalist order. Such struggles are those for wages, in defence of living standards, for peace, etc. These struggles can be victorious without a fundamental change of social system. Organisations for waging these particular struggles are established, for example, trade unions, peace organisations, old age pensioners’ organisatiops, etc.

But for a lasting solution of all these problems, working people have to end capitalism altogether and replace it by a new system of society in which the working people rule. For this purpose, the working class creates the Communist Party to draw together the most advanced and progressive sections of the working class and of other sections of the people. The Communist Party is dedicated to the task of ending the capitalist system and replacing it by a socialist system. The Communist Party participates to the full in all the immediate struggles facing the working class and its allies, for it is impossible to talk about fighting capitalism unless one takes part in all aspects of that struggle. But the special task of the Communist Party is to link the struggle on the immediate questions with the struggle to develop consciousness and understanding of the need to end the capitalist system as such and replace it by socialism.

Capitalist society gives rise to fierce class struggles which are sharpened enormously in the period of monopoly capitalism—imperialism. This period provides the most favourable possibilities for the securing of allies for the working class. Imperialism puts the task of ending capitalism on the agenda of the day. Communist Parties are created by the working class to lead this struggle. The main task of the Communist Party is to combine participation in the day-to-day struggle with the spreading of understanding of the need to end capitalism and establish socialism.

Socialism—Our Aim

Ending Exploitation

The ending of the exploitation, of cruelty and injustice caused by class society in its various forms, has long been the dream of men. It found expression in the teachings of the early Christians, in the writings of men like John Ball, Sir Thomas More, Robert Owen, the early English Chartists and the pioneers of the British Labour movement.

But so long as modern, large-scale factory production did not exist, socialism—which alone can end the exploitation of man by man—could only remain a dream. It was capitalism, in the search for greater profits, which mastered natural forces, expanded the production of goods on an enormous scale, united the scattered, individual production of men into highly developed, large-scale factory production, thus establishing the basis on which socialism can be built.

But capitalism by itself does not “evolve” into socialism. It has to be transformed into socialism by the conscious action and struggle of men. Capitalism creates the living social force which, by its very position in capitalist society, is compelled to change capitalism into socialism. This force is the working class and its allies. The age-long dream of the thinkers and the fighters of the past can only be transformed into reality when the working class, supported by its allies and led by the Communist Party, wages the struggle to take political and economic power from the capitalist class and, having succeeded in this, sets about building a socialist society.

Features of a Socialist Society

What will such a socialist society look like? How will exploitation and oppression be ended? We can get an idea of the general features of a socialist society when we examine the experience and achievements of the Soviet Union, the country where socialism was entered for the first time. Ultimately the Soviet Union failed, partly because it was harassed for its whole existence by hostile capitalism, but also through deviations from Marxism and democracy in its internal organization. But despite the problems the Societ Union faced, it did achieve much, enough to show what socialism would be like in better circumstances.

1. The first and most important feature is that political power, that is, control of the apparatus of government—of the state—is now in the hands of the majority of the people led by the working class. This means that control of the armed forces, the police, the foreign office, education, radio and television, etc, is in the hands of the working class and its allies. It is this power which makes possible the taking over of the main means of production, distribution and exchange, the transformation of the country, from capitalism to socialism, and the defence of the new socialist state from attempts to overthrow it either from inside or outside the country.

2. The means of production—the factories, mines, land, banks and transport are taken away from the monopoly capitalists. They are transformed into social property by socialist nationalization. This means that they belong to and are worked by the whole of the people, that the fruits of production likewise become social property, used to advance the standard of life of the peoples.

3. Exploitation of man by man is ended. No longer can some men—the capitalists—by virtue of the fact that they own the means of production, live off—exploit—the labour of others—the working class. No longer are the workers compelled to sell their labour power to the capitalists to live. The workers are no longer property-less proletarians. They now own the means of production and work them in their own interests and in the interests of society. For society is now composed of workers by hand and brain, that is, of an associated body of wealth producers.

   What is produced is no longer divided between the workers’ wages and the surplus taken by the capitalists. The whole of what the workers produce comes back to them in various ways. The achievements of the Soviet Union have been ignored and denigrated by western propagandists, but, its national income belonged to the working people. One part—about a quarter—went to the further expansion of socialist production and for other public needs, and the remainder—approximately three-quarters—was used for the satisfaction of the working peoples’ material and cultural requirements… This figure included wages and salaries and the income received by collective farmers. It included the money spent by the government on pensions and other forms of social maintenance, social insurance, and free education and medical services and on other cultural services and amenities.

   Since production under socialism is still insufficient to give everybody all that they need, the direct return in money—or “wages” as they are still called—is based on the individual contribution made. The distribution principle of socialism is therefore: “From each according to his ability to each according to the work done”.

   What is produced comes back in other ways as well as in wages. The whole immense system of social services—health, social insurance, pensions, education, etc—are free and non-contributory, available to all. The expenses of state administration, of defence, above all, the money for expanding socialist production—the guarantee of a constantly improved standard of living—are financed from the values created by the workers in production. All these serve the immediate and future interests of the working class.

4. Production is planned to meet the constantly rising material and cultural needs of the people. This is only possible because the means of production have been taken out of the hands of competing private owners whose only concern was to produce what was profitable, not what was needed by the people. Thus there is an end to crises, slumps and unemployment, of poverty in the midst of plenty. For what is planned is both an increase in production and in consumption by the people through increasing their purchasing power. The many price reductions in the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War, alongside a great increase in production, are examples of how this works out in practice.

5. Socialism means the ending of the oppression of nation by nation, the end of imperialist exploitation of colonial peoples. It is impossible to build socialism on the basis of imperialist oppression—a point which right-wing Labour leaders cover up. Imperialist exploitation is the policy of monopoly capitalism and benefits it. A socialist society eliminates monopoly capitalism. There is therefore no social basis for imperialism in a socialist society. On the contrary, socialism alone ends imperialism, frees formerly backward colonial peoples, and by fraternal assistance brings them into the front ranks of industrial and social development. The development of the former colonial peoples of the Tsarist Empire since 1917 is one of the most inspiring proofs of the truth of this statement.

6. Socialism means peace. Within the country there are no longer capitalists who profit by war, who see in war the way to secure more colonies, markets and a chance to dominate the world. On the contrary, in a socialist society everyone loses by war not only in terms of personal suffering but also by the diversion of resources from socialist construction and the advance to a better life. The last war cost the Soviet people the equivalent of two Five-Year Plans—as well as 25 million dead.

7. Finally, socialism means a new, higher type of democracy—a wider, more purposeful life for all. It is the only system in which the old definition of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” becomes a reality. Capitalist democracy is government of the people by the capitalists in the interests of the capitalists. The basis for socialist advance is the development of the initiative of the people, their enrolment in the active processes of government and social life. Without this the building of socialism is impossible. Socialism cannot be imposed on the people from above. It develops from below, from the new opportunities which socialist society provides to men and women to develop all their capacities in their own interests and in the interests of society as a whole. The great advances made against forbidding odds in the socialist countries show this.

Socialism—the First Stage of Communism

Socialism is the first stage of transition of mankind from class to fully classless society. Marx and Engels visualised Communism in two stages—socialism, the lower stage, and Communism, the higher stage. There are many differences between these two stages. The main difference is that under Communism production has been developed to such an extent that there is an abundance of goods of all kinds. Society can now advance from the watchword on which socialism is organised, that is, “From each according to his ability to each according to the work done”, to that of Communist society, which is, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. This means the greatest advance in human history of all time.

Socialism for Britain

The steps necessary to advance Britain towards socialism are outlined in the Communist Party programme The British Road to socialism. On the basis of the building of an alliance of the working class and other oppressed social groups, a socialist government will be set up. Resting on the power of the majority of the people and on their continued struggle, this government will take over all the means of production at present in the hands of the monopolies and turn them into social property. Production will be planned in the interests of a continually rising standard of living for the people. The state apparatus which served capitalism will be transformed and replaced by one which serves the interests of the people. The people will begin more and more to play a decisive part in the running of their country.

A Socialist Britain will greatly strengthen the new advancing world of socialism which already exists and will speed up the final overthrow of imperialism all over the world.

The Path to Socialism in Britain

A fundamental problem of the Labour Movement is how to achieve socialism. Within the movement controversy has raged for a very long time as to the best way to do it. There are two main outlooks:

The Right-wing View

There is a powerful group in the Labour movement composed mainly of the leaders of the Labour Party and a majority at the TUC, which propagates a “right-wing” or “Social Democratic” view on achieving socialism.

It is based on the idea that the way to socialism is through capitalism and its institutions—that capitalism is transformed peacefully and gradually into socialism through the “introduction” of socialist measures by a Labour Government, for example, nationalization. The two Labour Governments of 1945-51 are held up as examples of this gradual transition to socialism. This “theory” is false and dangerous:

1. It avoids the central issue of real power—political and economic power, which under capitalism is in the hands of the capitalist class and which must be taken out of their hands if the advance to socialism is to be made. Power in the sense of a parliamentary majority must not be confused with real power. A parliamentary majority in British conditions is of importance in beginning the advance to socialism, but, by itself, it cannot bring about socialism.

   Economic power means ownership of all the means of production—the factories, mills, mines, land, banks, etc. So long as these remain in the private hands of the capitalist class, society remains capitalist society, irrespective of the character of the government in power. The workers continue to be exploited. Production continues to be production for profit. Planned production for socialism is impossible. Finally, the capitalists can use this power to sabotage and disorganise the economy.

   Political power means control of the state apparatus, which is more than Parliament. The state apparatus is the machinery of coercion and government established by every ruling class to maintain its rule over the subject classes. Essential positions in the capitalist state, in the armed forces, the police, law and the judiciary, education, media, etc, are, by careful process of selection, concentrated in the hands of trusted defenders of capitalism. Control is a powerful weapon in the hands of capitalists, used whenever their basic interests appear to be threatened by any progressive government.

2. It teaches that the state is neutral. The right-wing leaders proclaim this state apparatus is “neutral” and carries out the orders of whichever government is in power. This is a fatal and dangerous idea. Experience in the past has shown that whatever the government in power, however large its majority, the defenders of capitalism in the state apparatus are ready to use their power to thwart any move which might be disadvantageous to the capitalist class as a whole or to any individual section. This was proved in the case of the Liberal Government of 1913, which had passed a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. Landlords of big estates in Ireland and Tory imperialists were bitterly opposed to this measure. They organised a mutiny in the armed forces, called the Curragh Mutiny, and compelled the Government to withdraw the Bill.

   Experience in pre-Hitler Germany, Austria and Spain, and the present experience in the Arab states, in South America, particularly Chile and now Venezuela, where the US backed capitalists constantly harass the legitimately elected government, all emphasise the same point, that is, that control of the key positions in the state when left in the hands of capitalist supporters results in the overthrow of the elected parliamentary majority—where such a government is regarded as a menace to capitalism.

3. It confuses nationalization with socialism. The right-wing leaders assert that any economic activity by the state constitutes socialism. But capitalism often resorts to nationalization. It depends on the kind of state which does the nationalising and the kind of nationalization undertaken. In a number of countries—Germany, Canada and a number of European countries—the railways were nationalized long before the British nationalized theirs. State dockyards, arsenals, etc, have been a feature in many countries for a long time, but nobody would call them socialist measures—served a predominantly capitalist economy to benefit capitalism, not the people.

   In Britain some important industries were nationalized—coal, railways, electricity, steel. This was not socialism, for these industries serve the big monopolies, providing them with cheap steel, fuel, power, and transport at the expense of the workers in the industries and of the consumers. The nationalized industries continue to be administered by the former managers and directors with a few retired generals, admirals and old trade union leaders thrown in. The industries nationalized constituted 20 per cent of industry, 80 per cent still remained in private hands. The economic power of the capitalists is not threatened by this kind of nationalization.

4. It teaches that the working class have no need tp fight for socialism. In essence, right-wing Labour theory reduces the role of the working class in the fight for socialism to that of “voting fodder”. All the workers need to do is to vote every so often for a Labour Government in sufficient numbers. Then socialism is handed down from above, from the magnanimity of Labour politicians, even though many are careerists and opportunists looking for the chance to aggrandize themselves by serving capitalists' interests. In practice, they disarm the working class and prevent them organising and mobilising for the greatest struggle of all—the struggle for socialism.

5. It turns experience upside down. This theory is most dangerous because it flies directly in the face of the experience of the international working class. No country has achieved socialism on the basis of this theory. On the contrary, in all cases right-wing Labour Governments have been replaced either by fascists, near-fascists, or Tory Governments—Germany, Austria, Britain, Australia.

The Marxist View

1. General principles. The essence of the Marxist view of the transition to socialism is that unless political and economic power is taken out of the hands of the capitalist class and transferred into the hands of the majority of the people, led by the working class, no advance to socialism is possible.

   This means that the state apparatus is transformed into one which serves the majority of the people. The leading positions in the state—army, police, judges, etc—are taken by representatives of the people and defenders of their interests. It means, in the economic field, that monopoly capitalists’ control of the means of production is eliminated by socialist nationalization. This is the general essential content of the transition to socialism in all countries.

2. Concrete circumstances. While the essential content of socialism applies to all countries, the form in which the transition takes place varies according to the differences of time, place and the relation of class forces in the world, and in the particular country. In various places, we have seen socialism appear in several different ways, some of which were fundamentally non-violent, but turned violent by external interference, mainly from the USA and its allies, such as Korea, Chile, Cuba, Syria, Vietnam. In Britain again the form will be different. In our programme The British Road to socialism our party outlines the specific British forms of advance to socialism.

The British Road to Socialism

Only socialism can solve the problems facing the British people. The British people can only secure peace, national independence, better social provision, the end of imperialist domination over colonial peoples, when monopoly capitalism is ended. Britain can only advance and finally solve its problems when it takes the path to socialism.

Unity

The development of unity and of the immediate struggle are the foundations for the advance to socialism. The fight for socialism is not something separate from the fight for the immediate and urgent interests of the people, that is, the fight for wages, peace, social standards or national independence. On the contrary, the greater the level of activity on these issues, and above all, the greater the unity in action of the working class and its allies in the fight for these interests, the more speedy and effective will be the fight to end the Tory Government, to eliminate right-wing influence from the Labour movement.

Action in unity, now, lays the basis for the wider unity which is essential if we are to achieve a Socialist Government and to advance to socialism in Britain.

Alliance

The alliance of the majority of the people, led by the working classn is the force that can end monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capital, whose political representatives are the Tories, pursues a policy opposed to the interests of the overwhelming majority of the British people. It has tied Britain to the United States, with resulting loss of independence. The continuation of this policy threatens the British people with economic, political, military and national destruction.

The way to prevent this is to build a broad, popular alliance of the workers and their allies—the small shopkeepers, farmers, professional people, who between them constitute the large majority of the nation, and all of whom are oppressed and threatened by monopoly capital. But this alliance must be led by the working class, the class most blatantly exploited, and so with most to gain from socialism, and therefore the most determined and decisive class in capitalist society, once the capitalist propaganda veils are lifted from its vision. It is the guarantee that the outcome of the struggle will be to advance to socialism. Such an alliance would unite to defeat the Tories in a General Election and return a government which, through constant agitation and relentless pressure would begin a programme to take Britain to socialism.

The Role of Parliament

Parliament is rooted in British history. Through it, the British people have expressed their aspirations for social advance for centuries—the English Revolution founded Parliament 1640, Chartism 1840, General Election 1945. Parliament could play a positive role in the development of socialism in Britain, but it would not be a Parliament resting on a passive people whose task was ended with voting it into power. It would rest on and be impelled by a politically active people whose struggle for socialism would continue and be part of the activities of Parliament. In short, it would be a Parliament reflecting the will of the people and giving the sanction of its authority to their struggle.

The Programme of a Socialist Government

The Socialist Government, based on the continued action and struggle of the people, would lead the British people to socialism by carrying out the following programme:

1. Socialist nationalization of large-scale industry, banks, insurance companies, big distributive monopolies, and the land of the big landowners, to break the power of the billionaire monopolists, and control of foreign trade in the interests of the people
2. A planned economy based on socialist principles and aimed at rapidly improving the people’s living and working conditions, with workers by hand and brain, and their organisations, participating in planning and management at every level
3. Consolidation of the political power of the working people by ensuring that those in commanding positions in the armed forces and police, the civil service and diplomatic services are loyal to the Socialist Government and increasingly representative of the people, and by democratic electoral reform, democratic ownership of the press, and control of broadcasting by the people
4. The strengthening and extension of all democratic rights, and measures to ensure the just administration of the law
5. Recognition of the right of all subject peoples to self-determination, and the necessary measures to guarantee this
6. Making Britain strong, free and independent, with a foreign policy of peace and friendship with all nations.
   British Road to socialism.

The Decisive Role of The Communist Party

It is because monopoly capitalism—imperialism—places before the working class and the whole people the urgent task of ending capitalism that the working class creates the political weapon for accomplishing this task—the Communist Party.

Without a strong Communist Party which has the support of the decisive sections of the working class, no advance to socialism is possible. This is the experience of the working class struggle in all countries. It is in those countries where Communist Parties lead the working class that socialism either exists already or is in the stage of being achieved. In all countries where right-wing Labour leaders dominate the Labour movement, the working class has been led to defeats and the rule and power of the capitalists have been strengthened.

The Communist Party originally formed in Britain in 1920, following on the experiences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, is a party of a new type. It differs fundamentally from the Social Democratic Parties, the parties dominated by the right-wing Labour leaders.

Differences of Theory

The Communist Parties base themselves on the theories of Marx and Engels which were developed further by Lenin and by communist countries. These theories are called Marxism-Leninism. They are drawn from the actual experiences of the working class under capitalism. Marxist theories generalise these experiences and draw scientific conclusions from them. For example, a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism, based on the actual experience of the working class, is the Class Struggle.

Since the dawn of class society, history has been the history of different classes struggling for political domination, for the ownership of the means of production and for the major control of the wealth produced. Marxism-Leninism asserts that the class struggle exists and is developed most sharply in capitalist society. We saw the interests of the capitalists and workers are opposed—they confront each other as exploiter and exploited. The workers can only defend and improve their conditions by struggle. Finally, that the outcome of this struggle must not be limited to the defence and, improvement of existing conditions but to the ending of the capitalist system altogether.

The right-wing Labour leaders accept capitalist theory on all decisive questions of the working class struggle for socialism. They justify profits. They deny the class character of the state and preach its neutrality. They proclaim the Parliamentary transition to socialism within the framework of capitalism. They deny the class struggle and preach the “common interests” and the “reconciliation” of classes.

Their theory is the theory of the capitalists, which they transmit to the Labour movement. The fundamental task of the Communist Party at this stage is to combat this capitalist theory and to infuse the Labour movement with the class theory of Marxism-Leninism.

Differences of Aim

The aim of the Communist Party, clearly stated in Rule 2 of its Constitution, is to achieve socialism in Britain. The aim of socialism is also to be found in the Constitution of the Labour Party and undoubtedly reflects the aspirations of the rank and file for a Socialist Britain.

But the whole practice of the right-wing leaders who dominate the Labour Party has been to strengthen capitalism and thereby to prevent the achievement of socialism.

In words, the Labour Party now stood for common ownership. In fact, the dominant right-wing leaders were able to maintain their alliance with the capitalist class, to hold back the movement in the great struggles of the twenties, leading up to the betrayal of the General Strike in 1926, the collapse of the Labour Government in the 1931 slump, and the disruption of the Labour Party by Ramsay MacDonald’s desertion to the, Tory Party.

John Gollan, Which Way for Socialists?

They supported the first imperialist war of 1914-18. They support the capitalist gulag, the European Union. They sided with reactionaries and diehards in attacking and slandering the Soviet Union, even when we owed our freedom from fascism to the Soviets” defeat of the Nazis. The two post War Labour Governments continued the policy of strengthening capitalism, and tied Britain to US imperialism. Blair kept Thatcherism alive under Labour when the country was sick of it, and subsequent Labour governments have gone from bad to worse, Brown aiding the capitalists by emptying the Treasury of our tax pounds to prop up crooked Bankers, supporting vicious Tory cuts blaming, with the Tories, the feckless working people have to service the debt.

Throughout they have weakened and disrupted the unity of the working class by attacks on the Communists, bans, splits, purges of progressive socialist activists in the Labour movement. It is therefore not surprising that the right-wing leaders today hardly speak of socialism. Instead they speak of the “Welfare State” the “Mixed Economy”, and now even Disraeli”s expression “One Nation”, falsely imagining these mean socialism.

A fundamental task of the Communist Party is to put the aim of socialism constantly before the working class, to raise its political consciousness and fighting spirit, and to inspire all aspects of working class struggle—peace, national independence, against attacks on living standards etc.—with the aim of socialism.

Organisation

1. Because right-wing Labour theory sees a parliamentary majority as a sufficient condition for socialism, its organisation is adapted mainly to electoral activity. The other aspects of working class struggle—the day-to-day fight with the capitalists over wages, working conditions, standard of living—is not regarded as the business of the Labour Party. Indeed to retain the support of capitalist backers, it sides with the Tories in condemning working class action. The “wings” of the Labour Movement are rigidly divided between the trade unions and the party, with the party concentrating overwhelmingly on electoral and parliamentary activity.

   The Communist Party is also interested in the electoral struggle in strengthening the number of fighting, militant MPs of the type in the past of William Gallacher and Phil Piratin, and today Jeremy Corbyn and John McConnell in Parliament. But it rejects the view that Parliament is the sole and decisive form of working class struggle, and emphasises the connection between the developing struggle against the capitalists on all issues and the return of a progressive, socialist parliamentary majority.

   The main body of the Labour Party is now unquestionably the Parliamentary Labour Party, and within this, of the top leaders—the members of the Government, particularly the Prime Minister when Labour is in office—due to the machinations of Blair and his advisers when in power—and of the “Shadow Cabinet” when it is in opposition.

   The Parliamentary Party has become a dictatorial party within a party with an almost presidential leader. It is a law unto itself, outside the real control of the party as such, and now independent of party conference decisions, though it commonly ignored them anyway. Glaring examples are the refusal of Gaitskell and his supporters to accept the decisions of the 1959 Labour Party conference on unilateral disarmament, and their sustained struggle to overturn them. Because the right-wing policy of the leaders comes into constant conflict with the outlook of the rank and file, discipline in the Labour Party is imposed from above, with constant bans and proscriptions from the leadership. The remaining members are content that Labour should be electable, even if all that can be elected is a Tory Party in all but name.

2. Because of the totally different outlook and the aim of the Communist Party, the form and character of its organisation is likewise different. The Communist Party does not isolate one side of the struggle—the electoral fight—as does the Labour Party. It bases itself on the need to encourage and develop all sides of the working class struggle, besides that on the electoral field. This is emphasised especially in Rule 2 of the Party Rules. It sees the working class the decisive, most advanced force for socialism in modern society, the class which is called upon to lead other sections in the struggle against monopoly capitalism.

   Communist Party organisation is based on the idea that the Communists must have contact with all sections of the people, especially the working class, and participate in all struggles, especially the struggle of the workers in large—scale industry. This is why the Communist Party gives such emphasis to factory organisation.

3. The leaders of the Communist Party do not have a conflict of outlook with the Labour Movement and the mass of the people, as does the Labour Party—that of the two trends in the Labour Party—the socialist trend of the rank and file, and the capitalist trend represented by the right-wing leaders.

   The Communist Party is a voluntary union of people who share a common outlook—Marxism-Leninism—and the common desire to work to realise its principles in life—that is, to advance to socialism in Britain. There are not two disciplines in the Communist Party as in the Labour Party, one for the leaders and one for the rank and file, but only one discipline. This is binding on all, leaders and rank and file alike.

   The system of organisation which prevails in the Communist Party and is called “democratic centralism” is the combination of centralised organisation—higher bodies, like the Executive Committee, District, Area, Factory and Area Branch Committees—with the fullest democracy from the bottom to the top. This democracy is expressed in the following:

   • all decisions are based on majority vote
   • all leading bodies are elected by the vote of the membership
   • all members are encouraged to play the fullest part in formulating Party policy.

   Rule 3 of the Party Constitution and Aims explains this process in great detail. Democratic centralism means that:

   1. All leading committees shall be elected regularly and shall report regularly to the Party organisations which have elected them.
   2. Elected higher committees shall have the right to take decisions binding on lower committees and organisations, and shall explain these decisions to them. Such decisions shall not be in conflict with decisions of the National Congress or Executive Committee.
   3. Elected higher committees shall encourage lower committees and organisations to express their views on questions of Party policy and on the carrying out of such policy.
   4. Lower committees and organisations shall carry out the decisions of higher elected committees and shall have the right to express their views, raise problems, and make suggestions to these committees.
   5. Decisions shall be made by majority vote, and minorities shall accept the decision of the majority.

   The Rights and Duties of members are dealt with in Rules 15 and 16. Members have the duty to take part in the life and activities of their Party branch and to equip themselves to take an active part in the working class movement. The rights of Party members are:

   1. To take part in their Party branch in the discussion and formation of Party policy and the carrying out of such policy, in accordance with the procedure defined in Rule 17
   2. To elect and be elected to all those leading Party Committees defined in Rule 6
   3. To address any question or statement to such leading Party Committees up to and including the Executive Committee
   4. To reserve their opinion in the event of disagreement with a decision, while at the same time carrying out that decision.

   All these features taken together constitute the Communist Party as a party of a new type, able to fulfil the role of advance guard and leader of the working class struggle for socialism. In short, the role of the Communist Party can be summed up as follows:

   1. To give the Labour movement a socialist consciousness, a scientific socialist theory, a perspective of advance to socialism
   2. To lead the workers and their allies in all the struggles which confront them—from the immediate struggles under capitalism right up to the struggles for political power and the building of socialism
   3. To provide the organisation for the vanguard of the working class and working people capable of carrying out these two tasks.

Towards Success

The building of a mass Communist Party is the key to immededlate advance and ultimate victory for those dubbed “the 1 per cent”, more precisely the ruling class of capitalists.

More and more the rank and file of the Labour Party and the trade unions are fighting the policy of the right-wing Labour leaders. More and more they are fighting for the policies originally outlined by the Communist Party. The decisive task facing the Communist Party is to build unity in action with the best elements of the Labour movement in the struggle to save Britain from aiding warfare, for national independence, and for the defence of the living conditions of the people.

This unity of the socialist forces of the working class is essential if the working class is to lead the majority of the British people against monopoly capitalism. In the course of building this unity of action, the most determined effort must be made to win understanding of the need for and role of a mass Communist Party and to increase the numbers of participants many times over. It has been the consistent struggle, propaganda, Marxist explanation and leadership of the daily struggle undertaken by the Communist Party over the years which has helped maintain a principled Left movement in the Labour Party. The stronger the CP, the stronger will be the struggle for a socialist policy in the Labour Party.

Build the Communist Party

While the task of building unity with the Left of the Labour movement is of central importance, it is no substitute for the building of a mass Communist Party. Unity itself can only be strengthened if in the course of it ever new recruits are won for the Communist Party. A mass Communist Party, based on widespread unity of action with the best socialist forces in the Labour movement, is the only guarantee that the magnificent prospect of a Socialist Britain will be realised in our lifetime.

Only the Communist Party, because it is based on Marxist-Leninist theory, can point the correct way to the working class, and link immediate struggles with the ultimate fight for socialism. The Communist Party alone has applied Marxist principles to the concrete problem of the advance to socialism in Britain in its programme The British Road to socialism.

The task of building a mass Communist Party is one of the greatest importance to the whole Labour movement. A mass Communist Party is the key which will open the door on a socialist future for the British people.

Adapted from, Our Aim is Socialism, CPGB (now CPB), 1962

 

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Rob Griffiths: Address to the Cambridge Union, 4 October 2012

Cambridge Union debate, Thursday, October 4

Posted 9 Oct 2012 13:02 by phil katz

Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths spoke at the Cambridge Union as the third speaker of three in support of the motion that This House believes that capitalism has failed. A nineteen year old engineering student who is secretary of the University Communist Society also spoke in favour.

The motion was lost by a margin of 253 votes to 193 with 90 recorded abstentions. Rob Griffiths delivered the following speech:

"Comrades, or at least those whom I can call that after this evening’s vote.

Most of the mass media are in the hands of capitalist monopolies or the capitalist state, and they promote the capitalist system 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. I have 10 minutes to put the opposite case and so I hope you will forgive me if, Mr President, I don’t take take any interventions or points of information from the floor.

The motion before you is clear enough. ’This House believes that capitalism has failed’. It doesn’t ask you to abolish capitalism next week or next year. It doesn’t require you to support any alternative form of society. It doesn’t advocate socialism or communism, still less the feudalism which Mr John Longworth [President of the British Chambers of Commerce, speaking against] seems to be so worried about.

You will, therefore, have noticed the shoals of anti-Red herrings launched by the opposition during the course of the debate. They are intended to divert your attention from the sole proposition under consideration.

In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels recognised how capitalism had revolutionised the face of the earth. But they also warned that:

Modern bourgeois society ... [which] has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether-world whom he has called up by his spells.

Could there be a more apt description of today’s economic and financial crisis, the longest and deepest for 80 years? And how does today’s sorcerer and his apprentices look to overcome this crisis?

By exploiting labour more intensively, cutting jobs, wages, pensions and public services, and seeking new markets in the former Soviet Union, China, India and the Middle East, doing whatever it takes. But no serious steps will be taken to control the powers of the nether-world. The bankers will mostly escape the consequences of their actions.

Meanwhile, the world’s banks and financial markets have, so far, received public subsidies and pledges worth close on £20 trillion of public money to bail them out. That is enough to feed the 800 million people on this planet, in the capitalist world, who suffer malnutrition, including the 6 million children who die every year as a result.

It is enough to educate the 114 million children who, in the capitalist world, have no schools and the 584 million women who are illiterate.

And, by providing basic sanitation and safe drinking water for almost half of the earth’s 7 billion people, it is enough to eradicate preventable diseases which—in this capitalist world—kill 11 million children and 6 million adults every year.

In Britain, the bail-out bill so far is £1.3 trillion, about six times the total cuts in public spending planned over the next five years.

The banks have been handed £375 billion in Quantitative Easing—enough to keep open every closing Remploy factory for disabled workers or every shut-down Post Office for the next 10,000 years.

In reality, capitalism’s vast wealth and productive forces are not devoted to solving the most desperate, basic problems of billions of our fellow citizens. The giant monopolies which dominate every sector of the capitalist economy are driven by one over-riding goal: to maximise profit.

(By the way, I hope nobody has fallen for the myth of the ’free market’ being peddled by opposition this evening. There is no such thing because, in the modern capitalist economy, every sector of the economy is dominated by five, six or seven giant monopoly companies).

Ah, but the sorcerer’s well-rewarded apprentices say, that profit is needed to expand investment. So how true is this in, say, the vital pharmaceutical industry?

In the British Medical Journal this August, two eminent American academics reveal that the world’s seven biggest drugs companies spend around 80 per cent of their budget on sales and marketing, 12 times more than on innovative research. Their profits have grown six times more than their spending on research and development since 1990. They mark up the prices of drugs by as much as 569,000 per cent. They mainly develop products for their lucrative clients in Western markets. They use the patent system to deny cheap drugs to poorer peoples and then they lie on a massive scale about their operations.

I’ll skip over the cess-pit that is the armaments industry, with its corrupt deals with tame Arab dictators and its rampant profiteering at public expense, because I must mention that giant casino, the City of London, and the giant financial corporations which:

• Mis-sell loan insurance and pension schemes, robbing more than 10 million people of £21 billion.
• Fiddle the interest rates and make billions as a result.
• Launder money for dictators and big business throughout the world.
• And help monopolies and the super-rich in Britain stash more than £3 trillion in secret banks accounts and some 28 tax havens under British jurisdiction around the world.

Al Capone got 13 years in prison for fiddling his tax returns. Why aren’t Britain’s financial gangsters in the dock?

Capitalism’s well-paid propagandists plead that their system promotes democracy.

• There was nothing democratic about slavery and the slave trade, which provided much of the capital, the raw materials and the markets for Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
• There was nothing democratic about empires that imposed oppressive rule and cruel exploitation on subject peoples.
• There was nothing democratic about the crucial support of Krupp, Thyssen, the Deutsche Bank and I G Farben who put Hitler into power or profited from his rule.
• Nor was there anything democratic about the installation of dictators and their death squads across large parts of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East for most of the 20th century.

Democratic rights have been fought for and won by the people, never willingly granted by their rulers.

This is also true of progressive taxation, the welfare state, comprehensive education, employment and trade union rights and many other measures to combat capitalist privilege and inequality.

Now, we see the monopoly corporations and their paid-for politicians rolling back those democratic and social gains, telling us that we should obey the bond markets, the Bank of England, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation and all those unelected, unaccountable bodies that represent big business interests in our society.

• Capitalism is failing the people—especially the young people—of Britain and Europe today.

• Capitalism has failed and continues to fail billions of people around the world.

• Capitalism is failing the planet and its whole eco-system.

Why? Because most of the power and wealth is in the hands of a small minority of the population, who take their decisions on the basis of private and corporate self-interest.

The sorcerer’s apprentices tell us that nothing else is possible because of ’human nature’ which, they say while looking in the mirror, is predominantly selfish, greedy and short-sighted—like capitalism, in fact. The opening speech from the representative of this evening’s corporate sponsors talked of the ’greed, selfishness and ignorance’ of human nature.

Really! Does that describe you?

Can we not build a society based on hard work and human ingenuity, but also on the principles of coordination, cooperation, solidarity, democacy and environmental sustainability?

If you think we can, then you will support the motion."