Socialist Sonnet No. 145

Human Relations

 

All the hot air in parliament inflates

Small boats wallowing over the Channel

Into problems, fetching those who might steal

Low paid jobs from Saint George and his mates,

Foreign fathers and mothers recklessly

Risking drowning their children to evade

Regulations. So, a stand must be made

To staunch this dire influx, especially

If there are votes to be quite cheaply won

By cultivating old prejudices,

Any visceral view that dismisses

Common humanity, once reason’s gone.

Should heated rhetoric be deflated,

Revelation! We are all related.

 

D. A.

Chernobyl

 

On the 26 April, 1986 the number four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded.

The following is from the Socialist Standard Editorial, June 1986.

‘Among the more obvious and immediate dangers of Chernobyl one which went unpublicised was the possibility that the disaster will be regarded as in some way exceptional and unique - the result of some human fallibility or secretiveness by the Russian authorities. In fact, there is more to be said about it.

The Green lobby, as might have been expected, seized on the disaster as ammunition for their attack on the policy of building nuclear power stations. This attack is extremely effective, backed up with impressive evidence, but it has one vital defect. It encourages the belief that nuclear power stations, like other threats to the environment, are peculiar acts of blind folly on the part of governments. The conclusion from this is that if we change the governments, or persuade them to change their policies, the problems will disappear. We will still be able to breathe the air. eat vegetables, drink milk, without going some of the way to committing suicide. So the Greens campaign to keep capitalism in being, while hoping to make it alter course in some respects.

The facts are not encouraging to their case. There is nothing exceptional or surprising about states acting in ways which are known to have perils for human life. Every state, for example, has its armed forces whose object is to destroy things and kill people. Every state is responsible for assaults of pollution on the environment killing off forests. lakes and seas, creating dust-bowls, wrecking scenic peace with dams, power stations, motorways and the like. Governments press on with these crimes in spite of the apparent cogency of the environmentalist case against them.

This is how it has been with nuclear power stations. These are not confined to the big industrial powers, there are nearly 400 of them in operation around the world, including Brazil, Argentina, South Korea and India, and more are planned. Their existence is justified by the governments concerned on the grounds that there is no real choice. France gets 65 per cent of its energy from nuclear power. Japan 26 per cent; in both cases the official line is that the lack of any other resources makes reliance on nuclear plants unavoidable. Russia draws 11 per cent of its power from atomic energy and plans another 34 nuclear stations as part of a drive to build up the economy into a stronger competitor - a policy spurred on because of doubts about the extent of Russian oil resources. So the questions are: why do governments argue that there is no alternative to nuclear power stations and what is nuclear power essential for?

Some answers to these questions are provided, in the case of Britain, by extracts from the diary of Tony Benn. published in the Guardian on 3 May. Benn was, of course, once Minister of Technology and then of Power in a Labour government, which made him not only a supporter of nuclear power plants but also gave him an insight into the motivation behind them. (On this, as on other issues, he has recently undergone a somewhat tardy change of mind). In December 1969, worried about the safety of the Magnox reactors, particularly the one at Bradwell in Essex where there had been some ominous problems. Benn called two officials from the Atomic Energy Authority and the Central Electricity Generating Board to his office. Both men were reassuring about the safety of the plant, where there had been corrosion of bolts holding the core restraint, caused by high operating temperatures. This was no minor problem for, according to Benn, it threatened an incident (it could hardly have been called an accident) which " . . . would kill many thousands of people in the area of Bradwell and would send a radioactive cloud that might kill people in London". That risk did not prevent Bradwell station raising its operating temperature, and so increasing the danger - a gamble which was taken "In view of the problem of the fuel situation this winter and the fear of a strike and cold weather . . . " But there was more to it than a concern to supply cheap power to British industry and forestall a strike: "The thing that worried them was the possibility that this might do damage to our nuclear exports . . . "

This concern for profits before people is perfectly acceptable, indeed necessary, under capitalism. That is why there was such a determined effort to suppress news of failures in British stations and to issue soothing reassurances about their safety. A letter in The Times of 5 May reveals:

In my 25 years at, first, Windscale (now Sellafield) as a research and development officer, then Harwell as a senior principal scientific officer. it was more than anyone's career was worth to talk to the Press or write a letter about what went on inside the nuclear establishments. Radioactive spills and leaks did happen at times, but they were hushed up. Every scientific paper declared for publication had to be submitted to a most rigorous declassification rigmarole.

That is why even now. with the mounting evidence from Chernobyl that nuclear reactors are desperately dangerous, things which no social system with any concern for human welfare would contemplate, the spokespeople for the industry and the government continue to insist that they are really good for us.

Nuclear power could be safe. It menaces our life now because we live in a society of class ownership of the means of production, in which wealth is turned out for sale and profit. In this system human interests have a very low priority; if something is profitable then it happens, whatever the risk to people. The Greens attack this as if it were a form of madness when by the standards of capitalism it has a deadly sanity and logic. If anyone should doubt this, they might ponder on a certain reaction to the speculation, soon after the explosion at Chernobyl, that a total meltdown was imminent. If that had happened, the consequences for the world would have been incalculably horrific. For everyone, it seemed, this was dreadful news. But not quite everyone. The prospect of the destruction of the Ukraine sent grain and livestock prices soaring in Chicago. When there is extra profit to be made, even out of human misery, the capitalist class are keen to do so.

If Chernobyl illuminated one thing it is that human society is at present organised in the interests of a small minority and that, short of dealing with that basic condition any efforts, however sincere or thoughtful, are futile. Anyone who has been frightened by nuclear "accidents" or who is concerned for what is happening to our environment can now have no reason for standing aside from the case for the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a social system where people are the priority,’

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/search?q=chernobyl

SPGB Annual Conference Saturday 27 April Zoom

 

SPGB ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Event Details

• Date: April 27, 2024 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

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Head Office
52 Clapham High Street
London SW4 7UN

To connect to this meeting, click https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 (or type the address into your browser address field). Then wait to be admitted to the meeting.

No more slaves

The news that Tory MP Richard Drax is set to make £3 million  by selling his family’s former slave plantation will raise righteous wrath among Barbadians and many others who think today’s heirs should not benefit from their ancestors’ barbarity.

But look around you. Little of the world’s wealth belongs to you, because by a whole series of acts of barbarity, the ancestors of today’s rich grabbed control of the land all around the world, leaving your ancestors starving and desperate. Desperate enough to become factory fodder, wage slaves, whose sole job was to make the rich richer. And now you are part of the new generation of wage slaves, while inequality has gone stratospheric.

Let’s abolish the barbarity of capitalism!

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Munich 1972

 

In July and August the Summer Olympic and Para Olympic games will take place in Paris. We shall be returning to this subject nearer to the time.

At the 1972 Munich Olympics the Palestinian Black September group accessed the Olympic Village and took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostages. Two Israelis were killed and in the failed rescue attempt nine hostages also died. Since then there have been many instances were innocent bystanders at public events have also lost their lives. This has also been the case with airline hijackings.

These insane murders, whether political or religious, are to be condemned no matter what “vindication” the perpetrators use as justification for their heinous actions.

It is to be sincerely desired that no such iniquitous monstrosity's happen in Paris.

‘A Socialist Standard article from September 1984 with the apposite title 'Billion-dollar games' concerns the Olympics. The athlete Carl Lewis who won four gold medals said that "the Olympics are about money and not much else". US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher disagrees: for him they"..represent the noblest elements of humanity.. a beacon of light shining upon mankind's higher aspirations.."This is so much global warming, as is his call for the United States to boycott the Beijing Olympics. Perhaps there will be a boycott, and like reformism in general, it will serve to distract workers from their true interests. No, the Olympics are"..a further example of the way capitalist rivalries and priorities pollute and distort every aspect of life under the present social system."

Such rivalries often lead to workers murdering others in their masters' interests, and this was true at the Munich Olympics on this day in 1972. The Socialist Standard of October that year carried the following comment.

"Since it has never happened before, the killing of the Israeli Olympic athletes helped foster the idea that we are living in times of special cruelty and disarray, and that guerilla tactics are something of an innovation. It needs only a little effort to recall many examples of similar tactics, sometimes by small bands of killers and sometimes by larger, more organised groups. If the Arabs showed great courage in their raid, it was not the first time that bravery has been used to murderous ends. Capitalist States are always organising the courage of their peoples in a massive effort of destruction. At such times they use any weapon they can, including that of the ultimatum. The famous demand for unconditional surrender in the last war was no more that a threat to murder and destroy on a savage scale, if the other side did not give way - and it was a threat the Allies carried out. The men who plan and implement such ultimata are not called terrorists and murderers but there is nothing to choose between them and those who did the killing at Munich, or indeed the Israeli nationalists who waged so ruthless a guerilla campaign against the British occupation in the years after the war. Capitalism is a mass of conflict, springing from the competing economic interests of many rival groups both national and international. In one way or another, force is always applied in these conflicts and capitalism continually conditions its people to accept the use of force, often on a terrifying scale and intensity. The Arabs at Munich acted as they have been conditioned to. The outcome of violence is never pleasant, whether it is eleven dead bodies at Munich or a hundred thousand at Hiroshima. But if the working class are not clear on the issue, if their ideas on it are confused by the illogicalities and the violence of nationalism, they can have no hope of ending a victory of which bloodshed is so integral a part."’

RS

https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2007/09/5th-september-1972.html

Cry havoc

 

Shouldn’t someone check out little Rishi and little Volodymyr for a Napolean complex?

‘RISHI Sunak has given a chilling warning that Putin will not stop at the Poland border should the despot defeat Ukraine in the war.

As the West heads for a nuclear showdown (this isn’t showdown at the OK corrall) gunboats, lethal missiles and armoured vehicles will be sent to repel Vlad under Britain’s largest-ever tranche of military aid for Ukraine.

The Prime Minister is set to announce the power package along with an extra £500million for President Zelensky’s war effort.

The immediate funding is to support "the highest priority capabilities", a Downing Street spokesperson said.

Including further ammunition, air defence and drones, the cash boost will take the UK’s support for Kyiv to £3billion this financial year.

Mr Sunak is then heading to Poland and Germanyfor urgent security talks where he will warn Russia will invade NATO f it is not stopped.

Poland already gave the green light as they're ready to host nuclear weapons on their borders if needed.

Ahead of his two-day trip, Rishi Sunak said last night: “Defending Ukraine against Russia’s brutal ambitions is vital for our security and for all of Europe.

“If Putin is allowed to succeed in this war of aggression, he will not stop at the Polish border.”

A Downing Street spokesperson said that the PM spoke this morning to President Zelensky to assure him of the UK’s steadfast support for Ukraine’s defence against "Russia’s brutal and expansionist ambitions".

Meanwhile, Polish President Andrzej Duda said his country will take up nuclear arms if they are asked to by NATO as they look for somewhere to deploy weapons and respond to Putin’s latest chilling threats.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/27481212/rishi-sunak-warns-vladimir-putin-poland-border-ukraine-war

They’re straining at their leashes aren’t they?

‘Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.’

Julius Caesar William Shakespeare

Some Russian's birthday

 

The Socialist Party, formed in 1904, has, from its inception eschewed leaders. This date, 22 April, marks the birthday of an individual who is, understandably, loathed by many but who still carries a fascination for more amongst whom are those who would like to recreate the USSR past.

From the January 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘When Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was sixteen his brother was hanged for complicity in a plot to assassinate the Tsar. Later, he himself got involved in anti-Tsarist revolutionary activity, was arrested and spent three years in prison in Siberia. In 1900 he was exiled, eventually settling in Switzerland and adopting the pseudonym “Lenin”. He founded and was the leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. After the revolution of February 1917 Lenin returned to Russia and in October he led the Bolsheviks to power in a coup. When he died in January 1924, most of the main feudal obstacles to capitalist development had been removed, together with all effective political opposition.

The socialist analysis of Lenin and his legacy is different from the Cold War propaganda which can still be found in books such as Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, published in 1996, which depicts Lenin and the Bolsheviks as forerunners of Hitler and the Nazis. The socialist argument against Lenin is based on the evidence that he distorted what Marx claimed and thereby damaged socialist theory, pursued political action that was against the interests of the working class and dragged the name of socialism through the mud.

Starting with What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin said: “the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness.” Lenin argued that socialist consciousness had to be brought to the working class by professional revolutionaries rather than a parliamentary party, drawn mainly from the petty-bourgeoisie, and organised as a vanguard party. But in 1879 Marx and Engels issued a circular in which they declared the opposite:

“When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois”

It must be noted however that Lenin's elitism was consistent with the outlook of the Second International. As Hal Draper has written: “The fact is that Lenin had just read this theory in the most prestigious theoretical organ of Marxism of the whole international socialist movement, the Neue Zeit. It had been put forward in an important article by the leading Marxist authority of the International, Karl Kautsky.” (The Myth of Lenin's Concept of The Party, The difference between Kautsky and Lenin here was over who was to lead the workers beyond “trade-union consciousness”, though historically Lenin's interpretation that this should be a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries has been more influential. By contrast, when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1904 it repudiated leadership as a political principle and insisted that the emancipation of the working class really had to be the work of the working class itself.

Lenin was not the first to describe socialism as a transitional society, but through his followers, he turned out to be the most influential. In Lenin's Political Thought 1981), Neil Harding claims that in 1917 Lenin made “no clear delineation” between socialism and communism. But in fact Lenin did write in State and Revolution (1917) of a “scientific distinction” between socialism and communism:

“What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the 'first', or lower, phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production become common property, the word 'communism' is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism”

The first sentence of this quote is simply untrue and Lenin must have known this. Marx and Engels used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably to refer to the post-revolutionary society of common ownership of the means of production. It is true that in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) Marx wrote of a transition between a lower phase of communism and a higher phase of communism. Marx held that, because of the low level of economic development (in 1875), individual consumption would have to be rationed, possibly by the use of labour-time vouchers (similar to those advocated by Robert Owen). But in the higher phase of communism, when the forces of production had developed sufficiently, consumption would be according to need. It is important to realise, however, that in both phases of socialism/communism there would be no state or money economy. Lenin, on the other hand, said that socialism (or the first phase of communism) is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism, in which there is both a state and money economy. According to Lenin:

“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!… For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.”

But Lenin failed to see what this would involve. In effect, the theory of “socialism” as a transitional society was to become an apology for state capitalism.

In terms of its impact on world politics, Lenin's State and Revolution was probably his most important work. This was derived from the theoretical analysis contained in his earlier work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin's theory of imperialism demonstrated to his satisfaction that the whole administrative structure of “socialism” had been developed during the epoch of finance or monopoly capitalism. Under the impact of the First World War, so the argument ran, capitalism had been transformed into state-monopoly capitalism. On that basis, Lenin claimed, the democratisation of state-monopoly capitalism was socialism. As Lenin pointed out in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917):

“For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly” (original emphasis).

In State and Revolution Lenin claimed that according to Marx work and wages would be guided by the “socialist principle” (though in fact it comes from the Christian saint, Paul): “He who does not work shall not eat.” This was eventually adopted in the USSR Constitution of 1936 and amended to read: “to each according to his work.” as a “principle of socialism.” Marx and Engels used no such “principle” and they made no such distinction concerning socialism. Lenin in fact did not “re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state”, as he claimed, but substantially distorted it to suit the situation in which the Bolsheviks found themselves. When Stalin announced the doctrine of “socialism in one country” in 1936 (i.e. the establishment of state capitalism in Russia) he was drawing on an idea implicit in Lenin's writings.

In State and Revolution, Lenin gave special emphasis to the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. This phrase was sometimes used by Marx and Engels and meant working class conquest of power, which (unlike Lenin) they did not confuse with a socialist society. Engels had cited the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Commune impressed Marx and Engels for its ultra-democratic features, which involved a non-hierarchical structure and the use of revocable delegates. Lenin, on the other hand, tended to identify the term with a state ruled by a vanguard party. When the Bolsheviks actually gained power they centralised political power more and more in the hands of the Communist Party. Modern-day Leninists claim that the rise of Stalin was due to the ravages of civil war and Russian isolation, but the fact remains that “democratic centralism” can allow dictators to rise to power and all openly pro-capitalist political parties have a similar structure which can allow the leadership to act undemocratically.

Lenin's short article The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913) is a concise explanation of the basics of Marxism . But by 1918 the dictatorship of the proletariat had become for Lenin “the very essence of Marx's teaching” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918, It is noticeable however that Lenin's Three Sources article contained no mention of the phrase or Lenin's particular conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Harding alleges that Lenin was the most “doctrinaire” of all Marxists at this time, but here again we see that Lenin was only too willing to distort Marx's arguments in order to fit into the reality of Russia's capitalist revolution. That is, the further development of wage labour, capital, commodity production and the state, which resulted in the exploitation of the working class by the party bureaucracy as the exploiting class.

Lenin's greatest positive achievement was getting Russia out of the bloody futility of World War One, something that the SPGB acknowledged at the time. The SPGB was the only British organisation to publish the Bolsheviks' anti-war declaration during the war. The trouble really started when claims about the “socialist” nature of Russia began to be aired, first within Russia then in the Communist parties being formed around the world. The false claims about Russian “socialism” are largely derived from Lenin's opportunism as he distorted Marxism – working class socialist theory. In this country, The Socialist Party always denied that socialism existed in Russia (or anywhere else) or that Russia was on a transition towards socialism.

For its anti-democratic elitism and its advocacy of an irrelevant transitional society misnamed “socialism”, in theory and in practice, Leninism today deserves the hostility of workers everywhere. Lenin seriously distorted Marxism and thereby severely damaged the development of the socialist movement. Indeed, Leninism still continues to pose a real obstacle to the achievement of socialism.’

Lew Higgins

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/05/lenin-socialist-analysis-2004.html