Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Aspect: Capitalist education (1970)

The Aspect column from the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have no illusions about the role which institutions like the universities have to play in class society. Like the government and the churches they serve the interests of the ruling capitalist class.

The basis of modern society is the ownership of the means of production by a section only of society and their consequent use to make profits for those owners. The rest of us, cut off from ownership, have to sell our mental and physical energies in order to live. We, who make up over 90 per cent of the population, alone produce all the wealth of capitalist society.

The time has long since past when the capitalists themselves took any part in production. They have long since become redundant parasites, employing specially trained wage-labourers to perform the jobs, in the administration of the State and the management of their businesses, which when capitalism was younger they used to do themselves.

Modern society and industry is now run from top to bottom by paid members of the working class. All the jobs in the administration, planning, production and distribution of wealth are carried out by workers.

The glaring contradiction in modern society is between large-scale social or co-operative production and the outdated sectional ownership of the means and instruments for producing wealth. Class ownership has become an anachronism that is holding back the use of society’s wealth to provide plenty for all.

So what have we got? A modern technology capable of providing abundance. Workers capable of operating this highly-developed industrial system, yet doing this in the interests of a non-working, owning class who want their means of production geared to profit-making. But whether these are used to make profits or to satisfy human needs the technology is the same. Thus, the owners face the problem of training workers to administer and operate modern industry.

At one time the task of schools was merely, by means of religious indoctrination, to break in the children of the working class to the sort of discipline and hard work they could expect when they went into the factories and mills and mines. But with the growing application of science to production the employers required more and more specially-trained workers. In 1870 the State brought in compulsory elementary education. More money was spent on technical schools. Soon, a three-fold division emerged in education: Elementary schools turning out factory workers; secondary schools turning out clerks; and the public schools teaching the children of the ruling class to be the rulers. This division was recognised and enshrined in the 1944 Education Act which made secondary education compulsory.

Compelled by economic necessity to spend money through the State on education, the capitalists came to expect more of schools than mere indoctrination. They wanted to turn out workers who understood what they were doing in the factory or office. They wanted, in other words, an educated or rather a trained working class.

Hence, in capitalist society, money spent on education comes to be seen as an “investment”, the return on which can be calculated in commercial terms. The educational system becomes the “education sector” of the economy or the “knowledge industry”. Thus Lord Butler, former Tory politician now an academic, can write about students “as the type of capital investment which will accrue with every year” and which has “enormous value” (The Times, 20 November 1968). Labour Ministers are not different. Gordon Walker, who used to be Education Minister, wrote in the Financial Times (11 March 1968) about the colleges of education achieving “a striking increase in productivity”, that is, turning out more teachers per £ invested.

People like to think of education as something outside the commercial world where human rather than commercial values are taught and learned. Thus all this talk of “investments”, “industry” and “productivity” in connection with education seems offensive and cynical. But Butler and Gordon Walker are being realistic. They are telling the truth. What is called education is today prostituted to the service of capitalist industry and its profit-making, pandering to its manpower and research needs. Education today really is an industry, a sector of the economy turning out a certain kind of product, whose performance is judged on the rate of return it brings on the capital invested in it.

This, of course, applies equally to the universities—though how they were captured by Big Business is another interesting story.

For universities existed before the rise of capitalist industry. They came into being in the Middle Ages as centres of religious learning where people could study theology, law and medicine. Indeed up until the end of the 18th century nearly all graduates were Church of England clergymen and until 1871 acceptance of the 39 Articles was a condition for going to a university (the poet and revolutionary Shelley was expelled from Oxford in the 1820’s for being an atheist). In the last century Oxford and Cambridge, the main universities, were institutions turning out Anglican clergymen and top civil servants. Since at that time the governing class still managed its own affairs, their role was to train the ruling class to rule.

Capitalist industry was faced with the problem of turning these bastions of aristocratic privilege into the knowledge industry, of driving out leisurely learning for its own sake and replacing it by business and technical training. Many of the early manufacturers were non-conformists and so were barred from Oxbridge. They therefore used their money to set up their own rival institutions—the redbrick universities—where the emphasis was on science and commerce rather than on Latin and Greek. The capitalists denounced the old universities as “a collection of books” and “a place where nothing useful is taught”.

This was an ironic situation. The mediaeval origins and traditions of these old universities, geared to serving a leisure class, made them value learning as such and resist the capitalist pressures to reduce them to the simple task of training managers, engineers and technicians for capitalist industry.

Traditionally, then, the universities were attended only by the sons of the rich, and especially Oxbridge by the idle sons of the idle rich. This is no longer so. Part of the money invested in education goes to provide grants for children of the working class to go to college. 90 per cent of students are the sons and daughters of workers maintained at college out of local authority grants. When after three or four years training they leave university, they enter the labour market just like someone leaving school at 15. Thanks to the capital invested in them, their ability to work is more valuable and so they can get a higher wage. But wage-workers they still are. The labour market for graduates is conducted partly through the advertisement columns of papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Observer, but now increasingly capitalist firms are entering the universities and trying to sign up students even before they graduate.

Make no mistake about this: students come from the working class and are merely being trained as special high-grade workers who still have to find an employer to live. Most students come from the working class and are being trained to fill the top posts in the State and industry.

Universities are capitalist bodies geared to producing valuable graduates for the employing class to exploit. So it is not surprising that these students who have seen this can only regard as hypocrites those academics who proclaim that the universities are “republics of learning” or “communities of scholars” dedicated to seeking after Truth. Students have every right, like other workers, to protest about being treated as an “investment” and judged merely from a profit-making point of view.
Adam Buick

The Vicious Circle (1970)

From the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

If society is to advance, or progress, or improve, or whatever you like, it is necessary that somewhere along the line men think about it and decide that it is a good idea—not just in an abstract, moral way but in material and concrete terms. The importance of this seemingly unexceptional statement is that the absence of man’s agreeing that a particular bit of progress is useful or necessary will delay or even destroy that progress.

At present, ideas are really the only obstacle to do the great social advance which will end capitalism and all its contradictions and replace it with the saner, more humane society of Socialism. Ideas alone are holding us up—human beings have developed the material necessities, a means of production which can feed and clothe and house us as well as we can want, but at the same time human support for capitalism maintains a social system which is at variance with those means of production. In other words, ideas are lagging behind material conditions.

To bring this down to an everyday, concrete (in more ways than one) example, we may consider what motor transport is doing to our lives. Used in a rational, humane manner, motor transport could bring great benefits to us. In itself, it is evidence of our ability to protect ourselves against our environment and to overcome obstacles to a better organised existence.

But the same people who design and build the motors, and the roads which carry them, also support the social system which imposes on it all an order of priorities based on the need for profitable wealth production. Because of this, those symbols of our abilities — the motor car and the roads, intrude on our environment to an intolerable extent. Very often, this means that a flyover passes within feet of somebody’s bedroom window so that all day, and for most of the night, the noise and the vibration and the smell of traffic is a companion to their lives.

Naturally, the people who suffer this complain bitterly about it but, as the authorities justify it all on the economic arguments which carry most weight in capitalism, the sufferers think that nothing can be done about it and from that assumption it follows that nothing is done. And that brings us to the point of this article, which is the Self-Fulfilling Prophesy.

Among the many ideas which keep capitalism in existence, the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is one of the most potent. In essence, it involves postulating certain conditions and, when these have produced the expected results, accepting those results as the justification for setting the original conditions. It is what is known as a circular process of reasoning. All of this sounds very remote and complicated so perhaps it is easier to take one or two examples.

Take colour prejudice. In this country, whatever the official story, coloured immigrants, no matter what their qualifications or abilities, are confined in their choice of employment. Often, this means that they do jobs which “white” workers have rejected because they are badly paid, or dirty, or arduous. In addition, because they are immigrants, coloured workers find it difficult to qualify for council housing and meet discrimination when they try to buy a house outside certain parts of the town where they live. The effect of this is that some jobs, and some areas, are overloaded with coloured people. It is not difficult to see here the cause and its result. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, however, sees it differently; it sees a majority of coloured workers in certain jobs and certain areas and concludes from this that anyone with a dark skin is only fit to live in a ghetto and to work as a bus conductor or a factory cleaner.

Coloured people are not the only ones whose responses are judged in accordance with pre-arranged prejudices. One of the big problems facing intending reformers in the field of crime is the simple fact that treating a criminal or a delinquent like a social deviant will produce deviant behaviour in him. Yet a person is bound to be treated in that way, once they have offended against capitalism’s laws. What it boils down to is that capitalism's reaction to crime does little more than produce repeated crime, which is then assumed to prove that a greater, stronger reaction is needed. Sentences are escalated, the offender is rejected even more emphatically and finds it harder and harder to adjust. He is part of the hard-core problem which baffles them all—the recidivist.

Such prejudice need not be confined to colour, nor indeed to class. It is only just over fifty years ago that women in this country won the vote, after a long struggle against the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. In this case, women were excluded from almost every activity except the most menial — were excluded, in other words, from all opportunity of proving themselves. Well-to-do women sat at endless hours of needle work, the less fortunate struggled with the job of governess or slaved as domestic skivvies. The very fact that women were kept out of certain jobs was used as evidence in support of the idea that they were incapable of doing these jobs. This opinion was supported by many highly qualified men — scientists, philosophers, politicians — and by not a few women as well. It took a massive act of defiance by a minority of determined women to dent this idea, which is now considerably shrunken in popularity.

Although this prejudice is not confined to class, it does operate in this field. At present, society is divided into two classes, one of which owns the means of production while the other does not own them. The first class (the capitalist class) employs the other (the working class) to work the means of production and distribution, which means that the working class really run society; without them the modern world simply would not be possible. They produce our food, build our houses, operate our transport system and design and conceive everything that is needed for this to happen.

But the working class, white collar and blue, high salary or low wage, are convinced that their rulers hold their superior social position by virtue of some innate, almost supernatural, abilities. They fall for the myth of the man who built an economic empire all on his own, who did it because he is millions of times more brilliant than the rest of us. They believe in the fraud of leadership and spend a lot of whatever time they devote to thinking about politics in searching for another myth — the honest, capable, effective leader who will deliver them to the promised land. Thus the working class condemn themselves to think, and to act, like a subject class. They proceed from this to accepting their own behaviour as confirmation that they should remain in subjection.

This can be seen most clearly, when a worker is confronted with the socialist alternative. Here is an idea which represents nothing less than an historic step to end the problems of capitalism. Yet when this idea is put to workers, their reaction often amounts to no more than objecting that, as it is a solution to their problems, it must be impossible. A society without leaders? We must have leaders, say workers, for the simple reason that we have them now. Without money? The world would stop without it, simply because money is so necessary to capitalism. Without war? Wars are unavoidable — simply because capitalism has conned them into thinking that war is a distasteful necessity.

Now so long as the working class think that Socialism is impossible, then it is impossible. And as they accept the very existence of capitalism, and the priorities and fundamentals of the system, as evidence in favour of keeping it in being, they continue to think that Socialism is impossible, undesirable, insane . . . Even when capitalism does its best to show them just what an impossible, undesirable, insane system is like — when capitalism sticks a flyover outside their front door, or herds people into stinking slums, or beats us all down in an obscene armed conflict — they are not convinced.

The Labour Government: Are they bunglers? (1970)

From the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent ad. (Sunday Mirror, 4 January) the Tories contrast what Labour promised they would do with what they have in fact done. Under the heading "Bunglers or liars?" they say:
  It’s easy, isn’t it, to dismiss the whole lot of them as a bunch of liars who will say anything to save their faces and stay in power.
  Is that the truth? We don’t honestly believe it is. We think that when these people said these things, they believed them.
  But the extent to which they have failed to live up to their promises reveals an incompetence which is quite staggering. You appointed these people to run the affairs of the country so that everyone living here should prosper. That is what Governments are for.
  You gave these people their power. You pay them with your money. You hoped that by doing so you would enjoy a better life, and that your children would enjoy a better future. You can see what they promised you. And how dismally they have failed.
   Isn’t it time we set to work to undo the damage they have done ?
It is true that people voted Labour in the hope that this would bring them a better life. But it is not true that Labour has failed because they are utterly incompetent: nor that governments exist to “run the affairs of the country so that everyone living here should prosper”.

We are living in a class society in which there is no common social interest. The government’s job is to look after the interests of the propertied few who own Britain. This job involves all governments in conflict with the other class in society, those who have to work for a wage or salary. In managing the affairs of the capitalists governments have to ensure that profit-making can go on as smoothly as possible and are, from time to time, forced to take measures aimed at restoring profit levels by reducing workers’ living standards. The Tories have done this as well as Labour.

Labour has failed not because they are bunglers nor because they are liars, but because the capitalist system just cannot be made to work in the interests of wage and salary earners. In expecting Labour to do this, the voters set them an impossible task.

This is why a change of government from Labour to Tory would make no difference. Even if the Tories were as clever as they claim, they still could not ensure that everyone benefited from capitalism. If they are elected and when they fail (as on previous occasions) we shall not call them liars. Nor shall we suggest they are bunglers. We shall simply point out that no government. Labour, Tory, Liberal or a coalition, can make capitalism work in the interests of all. Capitalism is a class system that can only work for those who own the means of production. Until these means are commonly owned the problems facing wage and salary earners can never be solved.

Those who are going to vote Tory in the hope of getting a better life will be as disappointed as those who voted Labour last time.

Government by Labour (1970)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

A question which has recently aroused considerable controversy is, “Can Labour Govern?”

Socialists not so much concerned with the question of whether Labour can govern as whether is should, or, to put it a better way, whether Labour need govern. And on examination of the facts the only possible conclusion we can arrive at is that it need not—and should not.

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The word “govern" means (according to Blackie's Concise English Dictionary): “to direct and control; to regulate by authority; to keep within the limits prescribed by law or a sovereign will; to keep in subjection; GRAM., to cause to be in a particular case, or to require a particular case.—v.i. To exercise authority”.

The italics are mine.

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Seeing that the spokesmen of the Labour Party are all so greatly concerned to maintain their ability and their right to govern (when they get the chance) it is natural to ask “Who is it that the Labour Party wish to ‘keep in subjection’?” Seeing that the Labour Party, both officially and in the utterances of its representatives, has no conception of politics other than the capitalist view, and seeing, further, that there is no class beneath the working class to be oppressed, obviously it can only be the workers themselves that the Labour Party desires to "keep in subjection”.

Now. in asserting that Labour need not govern, it is necessary to submit an alternative. That alternative is Administration . . . The same dictionary says that to administer is "to manage or conduct as chief agent . . ." and states that the word is derived from the Latin ministro, to serve. The difference, then, between Administration and Government is that the first serves the people and the other represses them. 

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Real Administration can be born only when the proletariat, having seized political power, use it for the purpose of making the means of production the common property of the whole of society, and proceed to administer them for the common welfare of all. Then the need for the State, for government—“Labour” or other, wise— and the "keeping in due subjection", will vanish, and mankind will at last be free.
(From an article by Hutch., Socialist Standard, February 1920).

The Myth of fair wages (1970)

From the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are many rocks appearing among the stormy waters which the Wilson government are trying to navigate and one of them is called pay. Fair pay for nurses, for dustmen, bus drivers, postmen. Fair pay for miners, sailors, policemen, even for Members of Parliament.

Everyone in fact seems to be in favour of "fair” pay from which it follows that hardly anyone is asking the essential question of what the word means. It seems to be generally accepted that somewhere there is a magical formula which can fix a fair wage — a wage exactly adjusted to the skills, dangers, usefulness, responsibility, unpleasantness of each and every job. Of course this would be a beautiful excuse (as if one were needed) for a government to set up another of those Royal Commissions which could spend a lot of time gathering enough material to fill up very thick, big, books, which they will eventually produce as their report and which will very probably be quickly forgotten by everyone. But in the absence of a high powered commission, perhaps we could launch our enquiry.

What are we going to take as our standards for a fair wage? If we start with skill we shall soon run up against the problem that different skills are acquired in different ways. Some can be learned at university, others handed down from one generation to the next. In any case, is it ‘fair' to pay for skill in itself, rather than the way in which it is applied?

Then there is the question of danger. But if wages were based on the dangers involved in the job. airline pilots would be paid no more than the rest of their crew, who obviously are all in equal danger — and the whole lot of them would be paid a great deal less than miners, or trawlermen, or scaffolders. And how much would stock brokers and insurance men get, under a danger-regulated wages system?

They would obviously be in favour of some other criteria being applied. Perhaps usefulness in some strange way the Stock Exchange and the insurance firms manage to convince themselves that their dealings are necessary to society. Yet the world manages to tick over when the Stock Exchange is shut, and people who don’t take out insurance policies seem as happy and healthy as those with a trunk full of the things. It would be a different story if, say, the electricity generating stations took the day off or if bakery workers decided they had had enough of their job. By those standards, people who do jobs which society could not do without— people like dustmen—should earn a lot more than stockbrokers.

Anyone who is not left completely bemused by that beautiful notion may care to pass on to considering the next standard, which is, responsibility. This is, in fact, one of the arguments used by air-line pilots to justify their relatively high pay—which is, they say, no more than due recognition of the fact that they have in their hands the lives of many people and a lot of very expensive hardware. Yet this argument is not extended to other workers in similar situations — train drivers and bus men, for example, are not expected to get anywhere near a pilot’s pay, nor even that of people like salesmen (one advertisement in The Times recently offered salesmens’ jobs for men of between 25 and 35 with a basic wage of between £2000 and £2500 which, with commission could reach £5000 per year whose failures would not destroy any equipment nor endanger any lives.

Should wages, then, be based upon how unpleasant a job is? Anyone who has spoken to a nurse, and who has heard of the sort of jobs they have to do for patients who are in the last stages of diseases like cancer, will know that no wage could possibly be high enough to reflect the unpleasantness of their job. Then what about mortuary attendants, ambulance drivers, who have to pick up what’s left of people after road accidents? Sewer men? they should all be getting far, far more than the Royal Family.

It is possible to labour this point almost indefinitely. The plain, simple fact is that there is no such thing as a fair wage, nor is there any method of estimating one, nor is there any profit in trying to find one. Wages are not governed by fairness. They are not a moral issue, to be influenced by arguments of danger or skill or usefulness or anything else.

Because wages are paid by one human being to another (or, to be exact, by one class to another), the fact that they are no different from the mass of other payments in capitalist society is obscured. Yet wages are as much the price of a commodity as what we pay for apples, or bread, or a hair cut, or a ride on a bus. What is it that fixes how much we pay for apples or a haircut ?

In the short term, it is whatever price is settled after a tug-of-war between the opposing forces of supply and demand. In England in the summer, apples fetch a pretty high price in the shops, but as the autumn comes, and apples from English orchards flood into the shops the price comes down abruptly. This same situation applies to wages. If employers are short of a particular type of worker, or if they are competing with other employers for his working ability, or if they desperately need workers to produce goods to cater for an inviting market, then wages for that worker will tend to rise. If the opposite is true they will end to fall, or rises will be harder to get and the employer will be in a strong position to exert a downward pressure on pay and working conditions.

The whole point about the nurses’ campaign for higher pay is that it is not backed up with any force. Nurses would not use the strike weapon, which is another way of saying that they would not use their bargaining power— which means that in the end their employer has the pull over them. Appeals to fairness and public sympathy have only a limited value — and the government exploits this situation to the full.

When the forces of supply and demand have extended their pressures, they cause a fluctuation in the price of the commodity but the line about which this fluctuation takes place is fixed by something other that market forces. This line is the value of the commodity and, in general terms, this consists of what is need of socially necessary labour to produce the commodity. Thus the fact that a great deal of social effort is needed, in both training and equipment, to get a pilot into the air and bring him back safely, means that his labour-power has a high value. But the same cannot be said of a dustman.

The reduction of labour-power into terms of value, implying as it does an unequal social relationship between human beings, is one of capitalism’s most degrading effects. It flows directly from the debasement of human ability, to be costed and evaluated, bought and sold, hired and discarded. It causes directly the separation of man from his work, it is the hinge of exploitation, in which our lives are regarded as fit subjects for probing to discover ever more intense methods of extracting surplus value from us. It means a life-time of servitude for the mass of the human race.

This issue, which has nothing to do with justice, is always ignored by the seekers after a fair wage. Yet anyone who really wants to make sure that human beings get what they work for is illogical not to look at the social system which denies them this. A long time ago, Marx pointed out the futility and conservatism of those who pine for fair wages. He knew that the answer was a revolutionary one - abolish the wages system.

Hey, Mr. Speaker: Socialism can work (1970)

From the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

How can we do without money, runs one objection to Socialism, it would mean we'd have to go hack to barter.

Why? Who said that barter and money were the only two ways of getting wealth to people? Obviously if that were the choice, money would win hands down. It is a very convenient invention that saves much time and trouble whenever goods are bought and sold. It would not be very sensible to go back to barter anyway, since money developed out of the barter system when it was seen how convenient it was if all goods could be exchanged for one particular one.

It is not quite true that socialists want to "abolish money”. Socialism will not be like today except that there won’t be any money. What socialists want is a society in which, among other things, money will have become unnecessary. That brings us to the third choice: free distribution of wealth, or if you prefer free access to wealth, where people can take from the common store what they need as and when they need it.

But that’s absurd. There’d be utter chaos. People would just grab as much as they could.

Why should they? People don’t grab those things which even now they can have as much as they like of. Take water. Once you have paid the rates, there is no restriction on the amount you can take. Do we find people leaving their taps running all day or filling buckets to hoard away? Of course not. People know what their daily needs of water are. and that there will always be enough to meet them, so they only take what they need when they need it. There is no charge to use some parks or libraries but people still behave normally: they use these free facilities as and when they want to. In some places they don’t charge for travelling on public transport or (after paying the rental) for local telephone calls. Yet still people behave sensibly: they use the trains or the phones only when they want to. This is normal behaviour. In a socialist society, where food, clothing, shelter, travel, entertainment and the other things people need to live and enjoy life will be freely available, why should people suddenly go mad and start grabbing more than they need? Is it not more likely that, as with water today, they will take only what they need?

There wouldn’t be enough to go round anyway.

Oh yes there would. You needn’t worry about that. Scientists and engineers have long known that mankind has the means — the modern industries and farms, the technical know-how and the skilled manpower — to abolish for ever famine, poverty and slums. There is no technical reason why modern industry should not turn out an abundance of the things people need. We can easily grow more and better food; manufacture more and better clothes: build more and better houses, schools, hospitals and other public buildings. It is a question of incentive. Today where production is geared to profit-making, this is not done because the rule is “no profit, no production”. In Socialism where production will be geared instead to meeting human needs, people can go on producing till all their needs are met.

Who's going to produce this abundance of wealth? If people didn’t have to work nothing would get done.

True, people working on materials from nature is the only way of producing wealth, but once again the underlying assumption, that people are basically lazy, is wrong. Most people don’t want to laze around all day doing nothing. It is normal to want to do something — in other words to want to work. For work is simply exercising your mental and physical faculties. Work may be pleasant (as in your leisure-time activities) or unpleasant (as, generally speaking, in your employer’s working time). Most people, quite reasonably, expect the work they do voluntarily to be pleasant. In Socialism, with satisfying human needs (including the need for enjoyable work) as its aim and where all work will be voluntary, people will ensure that they work in safe and pleasant surroundings and that they enjoy what they are doing to help run the society of abundance which benefits them all.

You still wouldn’t find anybody to do the dirty work.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “dirty work”. What work is dirty and what is not is a matter of opinion. The same work can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on why it is done and on how other people think of those who do it. People who wouldn't dream of being a navvy will gladly dig holes in their gardens. And some of the tasks performed by doctors and nurses are not much different from those done by lavatory cleaners.

Machinery could be designed to do nearly all the dull, repetitive jobs which human beings are now forced to do because it is cheaper to employ them than  to install machines. When society is geared to serving human needs, there will be every incentive to design and install machines to eliminate drudgery. If there prove to be some jobs that cannot easily be done by machines, then either they can be left undone or done (perhaps only for short periods) by people who recognise that someone has to do them. That such people will be found is a reasonable assumption since even today the dangerous, but obviously necessary, job of manning lifeboats is done mainly by volunteers.

Is it not so, when you come to think of it, that your everyday experience confirms that Socialism is practical? Common sense of course shows that it is desirable.

Letter: Socialism and Religion (1970)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,

On Sunday 30th November I attended a meeting of the World Socialist Party of Ireland at the branch room, 13 Queen’s Square, Belfast. During this meeting the guest speaker stated that the World Socialist Party is, "atheistic and anti- religious". As an individual the speaker has a perfect right to be an atheist if he so desires but is the profession of atheism a necessary pre-condition of membership of the WSP?

Also, the term "anti-religious" is a very strong one. It infers a programme of de-Christianising, Stalinist purges instead of mere indifference or even benevolent neutrality, it is undeniably a positively fascist war-cry.

The speaker went on, with gay abandon, to condemn, as if integral parts of a larger whole, Christianity, Nationalism, and Racism justifying this absurdity by saying that all three alike are sops thrown to the working class to satisfy prejudice and silence dissent. I wholeheartedly agree that Christianity has been used on numerous occasions as a basis for the manipulation of its adherents but this does not condemn Christianity, only those who have thus misused its teachings. Marx himself opposed all strong-arm methods in dealing with religion, in 1865 he condemned French students who advocated militant anti-religious action. Likewise his, "religion is the people’s opium" statement was not meant to infer that the people were drugged by religion but that religion helped them to endure their sufferings and as such was beneficial. Christianity does not call on anyone to be content to live under a yoke with the ‘airy-fairy’ promise of eternal life dangling tantalisingly before them as their sole reward. The improvement of man’s condition, as through Socialism, fulfils rather than contradicts God’s plan. As a Christian, indeed a Catholic, and a Socialist I can see no contradiction between the two.
Stan J. Dempsey, 
Co. Down. N. Ireland.

Mr. Dempsey sees no contradiction between being a Catholic and being a Socialist. We do, and so does the Catholic Church.

First, however, we must establish what a Socialist (properly so called) is, since this word is often used very loosely to include those who advocate only reforms of capitalism (which the Catholic Church has embraced as part of its social doctrine). A Socialist is someone who stands for Socialism where :

  • Land and industry will be owned in common by the whole community.
  • The use of land and industry will be under the democratic control of the community.
  • Buying and selling will come to an end: wealth will be produced solely and directly to satisfy man’s needs.
  • Each individual will have free access to wealth according to his needs.
  • The wages system will be replaced by voluntary work.
  • All frontiers will be abolished and all armed forces disbanded.

If Mr. Dempsey endorses this revolutionary, socialist programme then he is in conflict with his Church. We ask him three leading questions :
  • Does the Catholic Church support the private ownership of wealth, including the means of production?
  • Does the Catholic Church accept the wages system?
  • Does the Catholic Church condemn the view that all the fruits of industry should go to the producers?
We suggest the answer to all three questions is "yes". Which is why in 1931 Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, pronounced :
   No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a Socialist properly so called.
There are a number of other aspects of socialist theory — on human nature, education. marriage, the class struggle, for instance— which the Catholic Church denounces. Then there is, of course, the socialist attitude to religion which explains why we say that nobody who still hits religious views is eligible to join the World Socialist Party.

Acceptance of scientific materialism — that the origin and development of the universe, of life, of man, of human society and of religion itself can be explained adequately without recourse to the so-called supernatural — is an integral part of socialist theory. A socialist party is made up of fully convinced socialists. To admit people who merely want Socialism because they think it is morally right or because it fulfills “God’s plan" would be to run the risk of eventually ceasing to be a socialist party at all.

This was one of the mistakes made by the old Social Democratic parties of Europe, which had a paper commitment to Marxism, when they proclaimed that religion was a "private matter" and refused to engage in anti-religious education. A mistake which, by the way, which is being repeated in Ireland — and for the same opportunist reasons — by the Peoples Democracy. We have always held this position to be mistaken and dangerous.

Religion is a social question which Socialist must face openly. Like nationalism and racism it is one of the delusions held by workers which stands in the way of the spread of socialist understanding. Opposition to religious ideas and institutions must be a part of socialist education.

Mr. Dempsey has obviously missed Marx’s point. Marx did regard religion as a social question. It was, he said, a kind of drug but to criticise it, while accepting the social conditions that gave rise to the need for it, was pointless. A criticism of religion, said Marx, must be tied to a criticism of society; only Socialism in fact would end the need for religion. This is what we say too and is the basis of our criticism of Atheists, Freethinkers, Secularists and Humanists. It is absurd to suggest that Marx regarded religion as “beneficial”.

We can assure Mr. Dempsey, however, that we are not in favour of persecuting Christians and other religious people. Quite apart from the fact that there will be no means for coercing people in socialist society, our aim is to convince people of the need for Socialism since it cannot be established until and unless a majority of the world’s workers want and understand it.
Editorial Committee