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Our most noted judges, our most eloquent lawyers, our most skillful physicians, are frequently men of this blood; the lists of the yearly examinations of our Cape University are largely filled with Dutch names, and women, as well as men, rank high in the order of merit. It would sometimes almost seem as if the long repose the people has had from the heated life of cities, with the large tax upon the nervous system, had sent them back to the world of intellectual occupations with more than the ordinary grasp of power. In many cases they go home to Europe to study, and doubtless their college life and English friendships bind Britain close to their hearts as to ours who are English-born. The present State Attorney of the Transvaal is a man who has taken some of the highest honors Cambridge can bestow. Besides, there exist still our old simple farmers or Boers, found in the greatest perfection in the midland districts of the Colony, in the Transvaal and Free State, who constitute a large part of the virile backbone of South Africa. Clinging to their old seventeenth century faiths and manners, and speaking their African taal, they are yet tending to pass rapidly away, displaced by their own cultured modern children; but they still form a large and powerful body. Year by year the lines dividing the South Africans from their more lately arrived English-descent brothers are PASSING AWAY. Love, not figuratively but literally, is obliterating the line of distinction; month by month, week by week, one might say hour by hour, men and women of the two races are meeting. In the Colony there are few families which have not their Dutch or English connections by marriage; in another generation the fusion will be complete. There will be no Dutchmen then and no Englishmen in South Africa, but only the great blended South African people of the future, speaking the English tongue, and holding in reverend memory its founders of the past, whether Dutch or English. Already, but for the sorrowful mistakes of the last years, the line of demarcation would have faded out of sight; external impediments may tend to delay it, but they can never prevent this fusion; we are one people. In thirty years' time, the daughter of the man who landed yesterday in South Africa will carry at her heart the child of a de Villiers, and the son of the Cornish miner who lands this week will have given the name of her English grandmother to his daughter, whose mother was a le Roux. There will be nothing in forty years but the great blended race of Africans. * * * * * * * These South Africans, together with those of English descent, but who have been more than two generations in the country and have had no–or very little–personal and intimate knowledge and intercourse with England, may be taken as standing on one side of us. They are before all things South Africans. They have–both Dutch and English–in many cases a deep and sincere affection for the English language, English institutions, and a sincere affection for England herself. They are grateful to her for her watch over their seas; and were a Russian fleet to appear in Table Bay to-morrow and attempt to land troops, it would fly as quickly from Dutch as English bullets. Neither Dutch nor English South Africans desire to see any other power installed in the place of England. Cultured Dutch and English Africans alike are fed on English literature, and England is their intellectual home. Even with our simplest Dutch-descent Africans the memories of THE OLD BITTER DAYS had almost faded, when the ghastly events, which are too well known to need referring to, awoke the old ache at the heart a few years ago. But even they would see quietly no other power standing in the place of England. "It is a strange thing," said a well-known Dutch South African to us twenty-one years ago, "that when I went to Europe to study I went to Holland, and loved the land and the people, but I felt a stranger; it was the same in Germany, the same in France. But when I landed in England I said, 'I am at home!'" That man was once a passionate lover of England, but he is now a heart-sore man. There have been representatives of England in South Africa who have been loved as dearly by the Dutch as by the English. When a few years ago there was a talk of Sir George Grey visiting South Africa on his way home from New Zealand to England, old grey-headed Dutchmen in the Free State expressed their resolve to take one more long train journey and go down to Capetown only once more to shake the hand of the old man who more than forty years before had been Governor of the Cape Colony. So deeply had a great Englishman, upholding the loftiest traditions of English justice and humanity, endeared himself to the hearts of South Africans. "God's Englishman"–not of the Stock Exchange and the Gatling gun, but of the great heart. But great as is the bond between South Africans, whether Dutch or English, and England, caused by language, sentiments, interest and the noble record left by those large Englishmen who have labored among us, the South African pure and simple, whether English or Dutch, cannot feel to England just as we do. Their material interest may bind them to England as much as it binds us, but that deep passion for her honor, the consciousness that she represents a large spiritual factor in our lives, which, once gone, nothing replaces for us; that her right-doing is ours, and her wrong- doing is also ours; that in a manner her flag does not represent anything we have an interest in, or even that we love, but that in a curious may it is ourselves–this they cannot know. Therefore, while on our side we are connected with them by our affection for South Africa and our resolute desire for its good, our position remains not exactly as theirs. Our standpoint is at once broader and more impartial in dealing with South African questions, in that we are bound by two-fold sympathies. On the other hand of us, who are at once South Africans and Englishmen, stand in South Africa another body of individuals who are not South African, in any sense or only partially, but to whom from our peculiar position we also stand closely bound. Ever since the time when England took over the Cape, there has been slowly entering the country a thin stream of new settlers, English mainly, but largely reinforced by people of other nationalities.

Eighty years ago, in 1820, a comparatively large body of Englishmen arrived at once, and are known as the British Settlers. They settled at first mainly in Albany, and certain of their descendants are to-day, in some senses, almost as truly and typically South African as the older Dutch settlers. THEIR LOVE FOR AFRICA is intense. Some years later a large body of Germans were brought to the Kingwilliams town division of South Africa. They, too, became farmers, and their descendants are already true South Africans. For the rest, for years men continually dribbled in slowly and singly from other countries. Whether they came out in search of health, as clergymen, missionaries, or doctors, or in search of manual employment, or as farmers, they almost all became, or tended to become almost immediately, South Africans. They settled in the land permanently among people who were permanent inhabitants, they often married women born in South Africa, and their roots soon sank deeply into it. They brought us no new problem to South Africa. They have settled among us, living as we live, sharing our lives and interests. It is said that it takes thirty years to make a South African, and in a manner this is true. Even now, more especially in times of stress or danger, it is easy to distinguish the African-born man from the man of whatever race and however long in the country who has not been born here. But in the main these newcomers have become South Africans with quickness and to an astonishing degree, and coming in in driblets they were, so to speak, easily digested by South Africa. But during the last few years A NEW PHENOMENON HAS STARTED up in South African life. The discovery of vast stores of mineral wealth in South Africa, more especially gold, has attracted suddenly to its shores a large population which is not and cannot, at least at once, be South African. This body is known under the name of the Uitlanders (literally "Foreigners"). Through a misfortune, and by no fault of its own, the mass of this gold has been discovered mainly along the Witwatersrand, within the territory of the Transvaal Republic, and more especially at the spot where the great mining camp of Johannesburg now stands, thus throwing upon the little Republic the main pressure of the new arrivals. To those who know the great mining camps of Klondike and Western America, it is perhaps not necessary to describe Johannesburg. Here are found that diverse and many-shaded body of humans, who appear wherever in the world gold is discovered. The Chinaman with his pigtail, the Indian Coolie, the manly Kafir, and the Half-caste; all forms of dark and colored folk are here, and outnumber considerably the white. Nor is the white population less multifarious and complex. On first walking the streets, one has a strange sense of having left South Africa, and being merely in some cosmopolitan center, which might be anywhere where all nations and colors gather round the yellow king. Russian Jews and Poles are here by thousands, seeking in South Africa the freedom from oppression that was denied that much-wronged race of men in their own birth-land; Cornish and Northumberland miners; working men from all parts of the earth; French, German and English tradesmen; while on the Stock Exchange men of every European nationality are found, though the Jew predominates. The American strangers are not large in number, but are represented by perhaps the most cultured and enlightened class in the camp, the mining engineer and large importers of mining machinery being often of that race; our lawyers and doctors are of all nationalities, while in addition to all foreigners, there is a certain admixture of English and Dutch South Africans. In the course of a day one is brought into contact with men of every species. Your household servant may he a Kafir, your washerwoman is a Half-caste, your butcher is a Hungarian, your baker English, the man who soles your boots a German, you buy your vegetables and fruit from an Indian Coolie, your coals from the Chinaman round the corner, your grocer is a Russian Jew, your dearest friend an American. This is an actual, and not an imaginary, description. Here are found the most noted prostitutes of Chicago; and that sad sisterhood created by the dislocation of our yet uncoordinated civilization, and known in Johannesburg under the name of continental women, have thronged here in hundreds from Paris and the rest of Europe. Gambling, as in all mining camps, is rife; not merely men but even women put their money into the totalisator, and A LOW FEVER OF ANXIETY for chance wealth feeds on us. Crimes of violence are not unknown; but, if one may speak with authority who has known only one other great mining center in its early condition, and whose information on this matter has therefore been gathered largely from books, Johannesburg compares favorably, and very favorably, with other large mining camps in the same stage of their existence. The life of culture and impersonal thought is largely and of necessity among a new and nomadic population absent; art and science are of necessity unrepresented; but a general alertness and keenness characterizes our population. In the bulk of our miners and working men, of our young men in banks and houses of business, we have a large mass of solid, intelligent, and invaluable social material which counter-balances that large mass of human flotsam and jetsam found in this, as in all other mining catnps; while among our professional men and mining officials is found a large amount of the highest professional knowledge and efficiency. Happy would it be for the gallant little Transvaal Republic, and well for South Africa as a whole, if the bulk of this little human nature could become ours forever, if they were here to stay with us, drink out of our cup and sup out of our platter. But in most cases this is not so. The bulk of the population, and especially its most valuable and cultured elements, are here temporarily;

The bulk of the population, and especially its most valuable and cultured elements, are here temporarily; as persons who go to Italy or the south of France for health or sunshine, who, even when they go year after year, or buy villas and settle there for a time, yet go to seek merely health and sunshine, not strike root there; and as men go to Italy for health and sunshine, the bulk of us here come to seek gold or a temporary livelihood, and for nothing more. Even our miners and working men in Johannesburg, the most stable and possibly permanent element in our population, have, in many instances, their wives and families in Cornwall or elsewhere; and when they have them here they still think of the return home for good in after years; while with the wealthier classes this is practically universal. Not only have our leading mining engineers and the great speculators not the slightest intention of staying in Johannesburg permanently; most have their wives and families in England, America, or on the Continent, and project as soon as possible a retirement from business, and return to the fashionable circles of Europe or America. Even among South African-born men the large majority of us intend returning to our own more lovely birthplaces and homes in the Colony sooner or later; and the only element which will probably form any integral part of the South African nation of the future and become subject to the Transvaal Republic is the poorer, which, from the larger advantages for labor here, will be unable to return to its natural home. The nomadic population of Johannesburg undoubtedly consists of men who are brave and loyal citizens in their own States and nations. To-morrow, IF AMERICA WERE IN DANGER, probably almost every American citizen would troop back to her bosom, and spend not only life, but the wealth he had gained in South Africa from South African soil, in defending her. Every German would go home to the Fatherland; every Englishman, every Frenchman, would, as all brave men in the world's history have done, when the cry arises, "The birthland in danger!" The few Spaniards here trooped back to Spain as soon as the news of war arrived. One of the most brilliant and able of English journalists (a man whose opinion on any subject touching his own land we would receive almost with the reverence accruing to the mall who speaks of a subject he knows well and has studied with superior abilities; but who had been only a few months in our land, and, therefore, had not full grasp of either our people or our problems, which from their complexity and many-sidedness are subjects for a life's devotion) that man, three and a half years ago, when brave little Jameson–brave, however mistaken–was sent in to capture the mines of Johannesburg for his master, and when the great mixed population of Johannesburg, Germans and French, English and Jews, Arabs and Chinamen, refused to arise and go to aid him, and when hundreds of Englishmen, Cornishmen and others fled from Johannesburg, fearing that Jameson might arrive and cause a disturbance – said that Johannesburg would be known forever in history by the name of Judasburg! and that the Cornish and other Englishmen who fled from the place were poltroons and cowards. But he was mistaken. JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG, and the Englishmen who fled were not poltroons. There ran in them blood as brave as any in England, and if to-morrow a hostile force attacked their birthland, those very Cornish miners and English working men would die in the last ditch defending their land. Those men were strangers here; they came to earn the bread they could with difficulty win in their own land; they were friendly treated by South Africa and made money here; but were they bound to die in a foreign land for causes which they neither knew nor cared for? One thing only can possibly justify war and the destruction of our fellows to the enlightened and humane denizen of the nineteenth century; the unavoidable conviction that by no other means can we preserve our own life and freedom from a stronger power, or defend a weaker state or individual from a stronger. Nothing can even palliate it but so intense a conviction of a right so great to be maintained that we are willing, not merely to hire other men to fight and die for us, but to risk our own lives, A LIFE FOR A LIFE. This the Englishmen in Johannesburg and foreigners of all nations could not possibly feel. They were not more bound to die to obtain control of the gold mines of Johannesburg for a man already wealthy or his confederates, than to assist South Africans in defending them; or than we who visit the south of France or Italy for health should feel ourselves bound to remain and die if war breaks out between the Bonapartists and the Republicans, or the Pope and the King. If by a process of abstract thought we have arrived at a strong conviction of a right or human justice to be maintained by a cause with which we have no practical concern, we may feel morally compelled to take a part in it; but no man can throw it in our teeth if we refuse to die in a strange land for A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS. The Englishmen and others who refused to fight in Johannesburg, or fled rather than run the risk of remaining, pursued the only course open to wise and honorable men. Had they resolved to remain permanently in South Africa, and to become citizens of the Transvaal Republic, the case might have been otherwise. As it was, they could not run a knife into the heart of a people which had hospitably received them, and attempt to destroy a land in which they had found nothing but greater wealth and material comfort than in their own; and they could also not enter upon a deadly raid for a man whom personally the workers of Johannesburg cared nothing for, and with whom they had not a sympathy or interest in common. In leaving Johannesburg and refusing to fight, they pursued the only course left open to them by justice and honor. Rightly to understand the problem before the little Transvaal Republic today, it is necessary for Englishmen to imagine not merely that, within the space of ten or twelve years, forty millions of Russians, Frenchmen and Germans should enter England, not in driblets and in time extending over half a century, so that they might, in a measure, be absorbed and digested into the original population, but instantaneously and at once;

not merely, that the large bulk of them did not intend to remain in England, and were there merely to extract wealth; not merely, that the bulk of this wealth was exported at once to other countries enriching Russia, France and Germany out of the products of English soil; that would be comparatively a small matter–but, that the bulk of the wealth extracted was in the hands of a few persons, and that these persons were opposed to the continued freedom and independence of England, and were attempting by the use of the wealth they extracted from England to stir up Russia and France against her, that through the loss of her freedom they might the better obtain the command of her wealth and lands. When the Englishman has vividly drawn this future for himself, he will hold, as nearly as is possible, in a nutshell an image of the problem which the people and government of the Transvaal Republic are called on to face to-day; and we put it straightly to him whether this problem is not one of INFINITE COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY? Much unfortunate misunderstanding has arisen from the simple use of the terms "capitalist" and "monopolist" in the discussion of South African matters. Without the appending of explanation, they convey a false impression. These terms, so familiar to the students of social phenomena in Europe and America, are generally used in connection with a larger, but a quite distinct body of problems. The terms "capitalism," "monopolist," and "millionaire" are now generally associated with the question of the forming of "trusts," "corners," etc., and the question whether it is desirable that society should so organize itself that one man may easily obtain possession of twenty millions, while the bulk of equally intelligent and equally laborious men obtain little or nothing from the labor of humanity. This question is n world-wide question; it is not one in any sense peculiarly South African; it is a world-wide problem, which, as the result of much thought, careful consideration and many experiments, the nations of the civilized world will be called to adjudicate upon during the twentieth century; but it is not the question with which South Africa lands face to face at this moment. The question before us is not: Shall one South African possess twenty millions, live in his palace, live on champagne, have his yacht in Table Bay, and deck women with a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewels, while the South African next door has nothing? This is not our question. Our problem is not the problem of America. In America there are many individuals possessing wealth amounting to many millions, but when the United States in their entirety is taken the £40,000,000 of the richest individual sink to nothing; and, were it the desire of the richest millionaire in the States TO CORRUPT AND PURCHASE the whole population for political purposes, he could not pay so much as £1 a head to the 80,000,000 inhabitants of the country. Further, the bulk of American millionaires are American! They differ in no respect, except in their possession of large wealth, in interest or affections, from the shoemaker in the alley or the farmer at his plough. They are American citizens; their fate is bound up with that of the land they live in; their ambitions are American. If a great misfortune should overtake America to-morrow there is no reason to suppose that the heart of a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt would not ache as that of the simplest cowboy in the States. When they die, it is to American institutions that they leave their munificent donations, and the colleges and public institutions of America are endowed by them. The mass even of that wealth they expend on themselves is expended in America, and, whether they will or no, returns to the people of the country in many forms. The millionaires of America are and remain Americans; and the J. Gould who should expend his millions in stirring up war between the North and South, or in urging England to attack and slay American citizens, would be dealt with by his fellow-subjects, whether millionaires or paupers, with expedition. The question whether the conditions which lead to such vast accretions of fortune in the hands of private individuals is a desirable one and of social benefit is an open one, and a fair field for impartial discussion; but, whatever decision is arrived at with regard to millionaires and private monopoly as they exist in Europe or the United States, it has little or no bearing on the problem of South Africa, which is totally distinct. South Africa is a young country, and taken as a whole it is an arid, barren country agriculturally. Our unrivalled climate, our sublime and rugged natural scenery, THE JOY AND PRIDE of the South African heart, is largely the result of this very aridity and rockiness. Parts are fruitful, but we have no vast corn-producing plains, which for generations may be cultivated almost without replenishing, as in Russia and America; we have few facilities for producing those vast supplies of flesh which are poured forth from Australia and New Zealand; already we import a large portion of the grain and flesh we consume. We may, with care, become a great fruit-producing country, and create some rich and heavy wines, but, on the whole, agriculturally, we are, and must remain, as compared with most other countries, a poor nation. Nor have we any great inland lakes, seas, and rivers, or arms of the sea, to enable us to become a great maritime or carrying people. One thing only we have which saves us from being the poorest country on the earth, and should make us one of the richest. We have our vast stores of mineral wealth, of gold and diamonds, and probably of other wealth yet unfound. This is all we have. Nature has given us nothing else; we are a poor people but for these. Out of the veins running through rocks and hills, and the mud-beds, heavy with jewels, that lie in our arid plains, must be reared and created our great national institutions, our colleges and museums, our art galleries and universities; by means of these our system of education must be extended; and on the material side, out of these must the great future of South Africa be built up–or not at all. The discovery of our mineral wealth came somewhat suddenly upon us.

The discovery of our mineral wealth came somewhat suddenly upon us. We were not prepared for its appearance by wise legislative enactments, as in New Zealand or some other countries. Before the people of South Africa as a whole had had time to wake up to the truth and to learn the first GREAT AND TERRIBLE LESSON, our diamonds should have taught us the gold mines of the Transvaal were discovered. We South Africans, Dutch and English alike, are a curious folk, strong, brave, with a terrible intensity and perseverance, but we are not a sharp people well versed in the movements of the speculative world. In a few years the entire wealth of South Africa, its mines of gold and diamonds, its coal fields, and even its most intractable lands, from the lovely Hex River Valley to Magaliesberg, had largely passed into the hands of a very small knot of speculators. In hardly any instances are they South Africans. That they were not South African-born would in itself matter less than nothing, had they thrown in their lot with us, if in sympathies, hopes, and fears they were one with us. They are not. It is not merely that the wealth which should have made us one of the richest peoples in the world has left us one of the poorest, and is exported to other countries, that it builds palaces in Park Lane, buys yachts in the Mediterranean, fills the bags of the croupiers at Monte Carlo, decks foreign women with jewels, while our citizens toil in poverty; this is a small matter. But those men are not of us! That South Africa we love whose great future is dearer to us than our own interests, in the thought of whose great and noble destiny lies the source of our patriotism and highest inspiration, for whose good in a far distant future we, Dutch and English alike, would sacrifice all in the present–this future is no more to them than the future of the Galapagos Islands. We are a hunting ground to them, a field for extracting wealth, for BUILDING UP FAME AND FORTUNE; nothing more. This matter does not touch the Transvaal alone; from the lovely Hex River Valley, east, west, north, and south, our lands are being taken from us, and passing into the hands of men who not only care nothing for South Africa, but apply the vast wealth they have drawn from South African soil in an attempt to corrupt our public life and put their own nominees into our parliaments, to grasp the reins of power, that their wealth may yet more increase. Is it strange that from the hearts of South Africans, English and Dutch alike, there is arising an exceedingly great and bitter cry: "We have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage ! The lands, the mineral wealth which should have been ours to build up the great Africa of the future has gone into strange hands! And they use the gold they gain out of us to enslave us, they strike at our hearts with a sword gilded with South African gold! While the gold and stones remained undiscovered in the bosom of our earth, it was saved up for us and for our grandchildren to build up the great future; it is going from us never to return; and when they have rifled our earth and picked the African hones bare as the vultures clear the carcass of their prey, they will leave us with the broken skeleton!" I think there is no broad-minded and sympathetic man who can hear this cry without sympathy. The South African question is far other than the question: Shall one man possess twenty millions while his brother possesses none? It is one far deeper. Nevertheless, there is another side to the question. Nations, like individuals, suffer, and must pay the price, yet more for their ignorance and stupidity than their wilful crimes. He who sits supine and intellectually inert, while great evils are being accomplished, sins wholly as much as he whose positive action produces them, and must pay the same price. The man at the helm who goes to sleep cannot blame the rock when the ship is thrown upon it, though it be torn asunder. He should have known the rock was there, and steered clear of it. It is perhaps natural A GREAT BITTERNESS should have arisen in our hearts towards the men who have disinherited us; but is it always just? Personally, and in private life, they may be far from being inhuman or unjust; they may be rich in such qualities; at most they remain men and brothers who differ in no way from the majority of us. We made certain laws and regulations; they took advantage of them for their own success; they have but pursued the universal laws of the business world, and of the struggle of competition. It was we who did not defend ourselves, and must take the consequences. As long as any of these men merely use the wealth they extract from Africa for their own pleasures anti interest, we have not much to complain of, and must bear the fruit of our folly. The speculators who rule in Mashonaland were wiser than we; they ordained that 50 per cent of all gold mining profits should go to the government, and they retained all diamonds found as a government monopoly. We were not wise enough to do so, and the nation must suffer. But poverty is not the worst thing that call overtake an individual or a nation. In that harsh school the noblest lessons and the sturdiest virtues are learnt. The greatest nations, like the greatest individuals have often been the poorest; and with wealth comes often what is more terrible than poverty–corruption. Not all the millionaires of Europe can prevent one man of genius being born in this land to illuminate it;

Not all the millionaires of Europe can prevent one man of genius being born in this land to illuminate it; not all the gold of Africa can keep us from being the bravest, freest nation on earth; no man living can shut out from our eyes the glories of our African sky, or kill one throb of our exultant joy in our great African plains; nor can all earth prevent us from growing into a great, free, wise people. The faults of the past we cannot undo; but THE FUTURE IS OURS. But when the men, who came penniless to our shores and have acquired millions out of our substance, are not content with their gains; when they seek to dye the South African soil which has received them with the blood of its citizens–when they seek her freedom–the matter is otherwise. This is the problem, the main weight of which has fallen on the little South African Republic. It was that little ship which received the main blow when eighty thousand souls of all nationalities leaped aboard at once; and gallantly the taut little crait, if for a moment she shivered from stem to stern, has held on her course to shore, with all souls on board. We put it, not to the mall in the street, who, for lack of time or interest, may have given no thought to such matters, but to all statesmen, of whatever nationality, who have gone deeply into the problems of social structure and the practical science of government, and to all thinkers who have devoted time and study to the elucidation of social problems and the structure of societies and nations, whether the problem placed suddenly for solution before this little State does not exceed in complexity and difficulty that which it has almost ever been a necessity that the people of any country in the past or present should deal with? When we remember how gravely is discussed the arrival of a few hundred thousand Chinamen in America, who are soon lost in the vast bulk of the population, as a handful of chaff is lost in a bag of corn; when we recall the fact that the appearance in England of a few thousand labouring Polish and Russian Jews amidst a vast population, into which they will be absorbed in less than two generations forming good and leal English subjects, has been solemnly adverted upon as A GREAT NATIONAL CALAMITY, and measures have been weightily discussed for forcibly excluding them, it will assuredly be clear, to all impartial and truth loving minds, that the problem which the Transvaal Republic has suddenly had to deal with is one of transcendent complexity and difficulty. We put it to all generous and just spirits, whether of statesmen or thinkers, whether the little Republic does not deserve our sympathy, the sympathy which wise minds give to all who have to deal with new and complex problems, where the past experience of humanity has not marked out a path–and whether, if we touch the subject at all, it is not necessary that it should be in that large, impartial, truth seeking spirit, in which humanity demands we should approach all great social difficulties and questions? We put it further to such intelligent minds as have impartially watched the action and endeavors of the little Republic in dealing with its great problems, whether, when all the many sides and complex conditions are considered, it has not manfully and wonderfully endeavored to solve them? It is sometimes said that when one stands looking from the edge of this hill at the grant mining camp of Johannesburg stretching beneath, with its heaps of white sand and debris mountains high, its minings chimneys belching forth smoke, with its seventy thousand Kafirs, and its eighty thousand men and women, white or colored, of all nationalities gathered here in the space of a few years, on the spot where fifteen years ago the Boer's son guided his sheep to the water and the Boer's wife sat alone at evening at the house door to watch the sunset, we are looking upon one of the most wonderful spectacles on earth. And it is wonderful; but, as we look at it, the thought always arises within us of something more wonderful yet–the marvelous manner in which a little nation of simple folk, living in peace in the land they loved, far from the rush of cities and the concourse of men, have risen to the difficulties of their condition; how they, without instruction in statecraft, or traditionary rules of policy, have risen to face their great difficulties, and have sincerely endeavored to meet them in a large spirit, and have largely succeeded. Nothing but that CURIOUS AND WONDERFUL INSTINCT for statecraft and the organization and arrangement of new social conditions which seem inherent as a gift of the blood to all those peoples who took their rise in the little deltas on the northeast of the continent of Europe, where the English and Dutch peoples alike took their rise, could have made it possible. We do not say that the Transvaal Republic has among its guides and rulers a Solon or a Lycurgus; but it has today, among the men guiding its destiny, men of brave and earnest spirit, who are seeking manfully and profoundly to deal with the great problems before them in a wide spirit of humanity and justice. And, we do again repeat, that the strong sympathy of all earnest and thoughtful minds, not only in Africa, but in England, should be with them. Let us take as an example one of the simplest elements of the question, the enfranchisement of the new arrivals. Even those of us, who with the present writer are sometimes denominated "the fanatics of the franchise," who hold that that state is healthiest and strongest, in the majority of cases, in which every adult citizen, irrespective of sex or position, possesses a vote, base our assertion on the fact that each individual forming an integral part of the community has their all at stake in that community; that the woman's stake is likely to be as large as the man's, and the poor man's as the rich; for each has only his all, his life; and that their devotion to its future good, and their concern in its health is likely to be equal; that the state gains by giving voice to all its integral parts. But the ground is cut from under our feet when a large mass of persons concerned are not integral portions of the State, hut merely temporarily connected with it, have no interest in its remote future, and only a commercial interest in its present. We may hold (and we personally very strongly hold) that the moment a stranger lands in a country, however ignorant he may be of its laws, usages, and interests, if he intends to remain permanently in it, and incorporates all his life and interest with it, he becomes an integral part of the State, and should as soon as possible be given the power of expressing his will through its legislature;

but the PRACTICAL AND OBVIOUS DIFFICULTY at once arises of determining who, in an uncertain stream of strangers who suddenly flow into a land, is so situated ! I may go to Italy, accompanied by two friends; we may hire the same house between us (to use a homely illustration); there may be no external evidence of difference in our attitude; yet I may have determined to live and die in Italy; I may feel a most intense affection for its people and its institutions, and a great solicitude over its future. The first man who accompanies me may feel perfectly indifferent to land and people, and be there merely for health, leaving again as soon as it is restored. The second may be animated by an intense hatred of Italy and Italians; he not only may not wish well to the nation, but may desire to see it downtrodden by Austria, and its inhabitants destroyed. By enfranchising me the moment I arrived, the Italian nation would gain a faithful and devoted citizen, who would sacrifice all for her in time of danger, and devote thought in times of peace; in enfranchising immediately the second man, they would perform an act entirely negative and indifferent without loss or gain either way; in enfranchising the third man, they would perform an act of minor social suicide. Yet it would be impossible at once, and from any superficial study to discover our differences! THE GREAT SISTER REPUBLIC across the water has met these difficulties by instituting a probationary residence of two years, after which by taking a solemn oath renouncing all allegiance to any foreign sovereign or land, more especially to the ruler of England and the English nation, and declaring their wish to live and die citizens of the United States, the new comers are, after a further residence of another three years, fully enfranchised, and become citizens of the American Republic. In this, as in many other cases, it would appear that the great Republic has struck on a wise and practical solution to a complex problem; and in this matter, as in many others, we, personally, should like to see the action of the great sister Republic followed. But thoughtful minds may suggest, on the other hand, that, while in America, at least at the present day, the newly enfranchised burgher receives but one-sixteen millionth of the State power and of governmental control on his enfranchisement, in a small state like the Transvaal each new burgher receives over eight hundred times that power in the government and control of the country, and that this makes a serious difference in the importance of making sure of the loyalty and sincerity of your citizen before you enfranchise him. We see this, and there is something to be said for it. It has been held by many sincerely desirous of arriving at a just and balanced conclusion, that, in a Republic situated as the Transvaal is, a longer residence and the votes of a certain proportion of the already enfranchised citizens are necessary before the vast rights conferred by citizenship in a small purely democratic State are granted. The terms for the enfranchisement for foreigners in England yield us no instructive analogy; for, in a country with an hereditary sovereign and an hereditary Upper House the enfranchised foreigner receives only a minute fraction of the power conferred on the elector in a pure democracy. The little Russian Jew who has a vote given him in London can never become the supreme head of the State, can never sit in or vote for members of the Upper House, and receives only the minute fractional power of voting for members of the lower. It is IN A PURE DEMOCRACY where the people are the sovereign and represent in themselves the hereditary ruler, the hereditary Upper House, and the Lower House combined, that the personnel of each accredited citizen becomes all important. The greater the stability and immobility at one end of a State, the greater the mobility and instability which may be allowed at the other end, without endangering the stability of the State as a whole, or the healthy performance of its functions. Even on this comparatively small question of the franchise it is evident that the problem before the little Transvaal Republic is one of much complexity, and on which minds broadly liberal and sincerely desirous of attaining to the wisest and most humane and most enlightened judgment may sincerely differ. Of those other and far more serious problems which the Republic faces in common with South Africa, there is no necessity here to speak further; the thoughtful mind may follow them out for itself. Time and experiment must be allowed for the balance of things to adjust themselves. South Africa has need of more citizens leal and true. Whoever enters South Africa and desires to become one of us, to drink from our cup and sup from our platter, to mix his seed with ours and build up the South Africa of the future–him let us receive with open arms. From great mixtures of races spring great peoples. The scorned and oppressed Russian Jew, landing here today, vivified by our fresh South African breezes, may yet be the progenitor of the Spinoza and Maimonides of the great future South Africa, who shall lead the world in philosophy and thought. The pale German cobbler who with his wife and children lands today, so he stays with us and becomes one with us, may yet be the father of the greater Hans Sachs of Africa; and the half-starved Irish peasant become the forerunner of our future Burkes and William Porters. The rough Cornish miner, who is looking out with surprised eyes at our new South African world to-day, may yet give to us our greatest statesmen and noblest leader. The great African nation of the future will have its foundations laid on stones from many lands. Even to the Coolie and the Chinaman, so he comes among us, we personally should say: Stretch forth the hand of brotherhood. We may not desire him, we may not intentionally bring him among us, but, so he comes to remain with us, let South Africa be home to him. "Be not unmindful to entertain strangers, for some have thereby entertained angels unawares." * * * * * We, English South Africans of to-day, who are truly South African, loving THE LAND OF OUR BIRTH, and men inhabiting it, yet bound by intense and loving ties, not only of intellectual affinity but of personal passion, to the homeland from which our parents came, and where the richest formative years of our life were passed, we stand to-day midway between these two great sections of South African folk, the old who have been here long and the new who have only come;

between the home-land of our fathers and the love-land of our birth; and it would seem as though, through no advantage of wisdom or intellectual knowledge on our part, but simply as the result of the accident of our position and of our double affections, we are fitted to fulfil a certain function at the present day, to stand, as it were, as mediators and interpreters between those our position compels us to sympathize with and so understand, as they may not, perhaps, be able to understand each other. Especially at the present moment has arrived a time when it is essential that, however small we may feel is our inherent fitness for the task, we should not shrink nor remain silent and inactive, but exert by word and action that peculiar function which our position invests us with. * * * If it be asked, why at this especial moment we feel it incumbent on us not to maintain silence, and what that is which compels our action and speech, the answer may he given in one word–WAR! The air of South Africa is HEAVY WITH RUMORS; inconceivable, improbable, we refuse to believe them; yet, again and again they return. There are some things the mind refuses seriously to entertain, as the man who has long loved and revered his mother would refuse to accept the assertion of the first passer-by that there was any possibility of her raising up her hand to strike his wife or destroy his child. But much repetition may at last awaken doubt; and the man may begin to look out anxiously for further evidence.* * * We English South Africans are stunned; we are amazed; we say there can be no truth in it. Yet we begin to ask ourselves: "What means this unwonted tread of armed and hired soldiers on South African soil? Why are they here?" And the only answer that comes back to us, however remote and seemingly impossible is–WAR ! To-night we laugh at it, and to-morrow when we rise up it stands before us again, the ghastly doubt–war!–war, and in South Africa! War–between white men and white ! War!–Why?-Whence is the cause?–For whom?–For what–And the question gains no answer. We fall to considering, who gains by war? Has our race in Africa and our race in England interests so diverse that any calamity so cataclysmic can fall upon us, as war? Is any position possible, that could make necessary that mother and daughter must rise up in one horrible embrace, and rend, if it be possible, each other's vitals?.. Believing it impossible, we fall to considering, who is it gains by war? There is peace to-day in the land; the two great white races, day by day, hour by hour, are blending their blood, and both are mixing with the stranger. No day passes but from the veins of some Dutch South African woman the English South African man's child is being fed; not a week passes but the birth cry of the English South African woman's child gives voice to the Dutchman's offspring; not an hour passes but on farm, and in town and village, Dutch hearts are winding about English AND ENGLISH ABOUT DUTCH. If the Angel of Death should spread his wings across the land and strike dead in one night every man and woman and child of either the Dutch or the English blood, leaving the other alive, the land would be a land of mourning. There would be not one household nor the heart of an African born man or woman that would not be weary with grief. We should weep the friends of our childhood, the companions of our early life, our grandchildren, our kindred, the souls who have loved us and whom we have loved. In destroying the one race he would have isolated the other. Time, the great healer of all differences, is blending us into a great mutual people, and love is moving faster than time. It is no growing hatred between Dutch and English South African born men and women that calls for war. On the lips of our babes we salute both races daily. Then we look round through the political world, and we ask ourselves: what great and terrible and sudden crime has been committed, what reckless slaughter and torture of the innocents, that blood can alone wash out blood? And we find none. And still we look, asking what great and terrible difference has suddenly arisen, so mighty that the human intellect cannot solve it by means of peace, that the highest and noblest diplomacy falls powerless before it, and the wisdom and justice of humanity cannot reach it, save by the mother's drawing a sword and planting it in the heart of the daughter? We can find none. And again, we ask ourselves WHO GAIN BY WAR? What is it for? Who is there that desires it? Do men shed streams of human blood as children cut off poppyheads to see the white juice flow? WH0 GAINS BY WAR? Not England ! She has a great young nation's heart to lose. She has a cable of fellowship which stretches across the seas to rupture. She has treaties to violate. She has the great traditions of her past to part with.

She has the great traditions of her past to part with. Whoever plays to win, she loses. WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not Africa ! The great young nation, quickening to-day to its first consciousness of life, to be torn and rent, and bear upon its limb, into its fully ripened manhood, the marks of the wounds–wounds from a mother's hands! WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not the great woman whose eighty years to-night completes," who would carry with her to her grave the remembrance of the longest reign and the purest; who would have that when the nations gather round her bier, the whisper should go round, "That was a mother's hand; it struck no child." WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not the brave English soldier; there are no laurels for them here. The dying lad with hands fresh from the plough; the old man tottering to the grave, who seizes up the gun to die with it; the simple farmer who as he falls hears yet his wife's last whisper, "For freedom and our land!" and dies hearing it–these men can bind no laurels on a soldier's brow! They may be shot, not conquered–fame rests with them. Go, gallant soldiers and defend the shores of that small island that we love; there are no laurels for you here! WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not we the Africans, whose hearts are knit to England. We love all. Each hired soldier's bullet that strikes down a South African, does more; it finds a billet here in our hearts. It takes one African's life–in another it kills that which will never live again. WHO GAINS BY WAR? There are some who think they gain! In the background we catch sight of misty figures; we know the old tread; we hear the rustle of paper, passing from hand to hand, and we know the fall of gold; it is all old familiar sound in Africa; we know it now! There are some who think they gain! Will they gain? * * * But it may be said, "What matter who goads England on, or in whose cause she undertakes war against Africans; this at least is certain, she can win. We have the ships, we have the men, we have the money." We answer, "Yes, might generally conquers–for a time at least." The greatest empire upon earth, on which the sun never sets, with its five hundred million subjects, may rise up in its full majesty of power and glory, and crush thirty thousand farmers. It may not be a victory, but at least it will be a slaughter. We ought to win. We have the ships, we have the men, and we have the money. May there not he something else we need? The Swiss had it when they fought with Austria; the three hundred had it at Thermopylae, although not a man was saved; it goes to make a victory. Is it worth fighting if we have not got it? I suppose there is no man who to-day loves his country who has not perceived that in the life of the nation, as in the life of the individual, the hour of external success may be the hour of irrevocable failure, and that the hour of death, whether to nations or individuals, is often the hour of immortality. When William the Silent, with his little band of Dutchmen, rose up to face the whole Empire of Spain, I think there is no man who does not recognize that the hour of their greatest victory was not when they had conquered Spain, and hurled backward the greatest Empire of the world to meet its slow imperial death; it was the hour when that little band stood alone with the waters over their homes, FACING DEATH AND DESPAIR, and stood, facing it. It is that hour that has made Holland immortal, and her history the property of all human hearts.

It is that hour that has made Holland immortal, and her history the property of all human hearts. It may be said, "But what has England to fear in a campaign with a country like Africa? Can she not send out a hundred thousand or a hundred and fifty thousand men and walk over the land? She can sweep it by mere numbers." We answer yes–she might do it. Might generally conquers; not always. (I have seen a little muur kat attacked by a mastiff, the first joint of whose leg it did not reach. I have seen it taken in the dog's mouth, so that hardly any part of it was visible, and thought the creature was dead. But it fastened its tiny teeth inside the dog's throat, and the mastiff dropped it, and, mauled and wounded and covered with gore and saliva, I saw it creep back into its hole in the red African earth.) But might generally conquers, and there is no doubt that England might send out sixty or a hundred thousand hired soldiers to South Africa, and they could bombard our towns and destroy our villages; they could shoot down men in the prime of life, and old men and boys, till there was hardly a kopje in the country without its stain of blood, and the Karoo bushes grew up greener on the spot where men from the midlands, who had come to help their fellows, fell, never to go home. I suppose it would be quite possible for the soldiers to shoot all male South Africans who appeared in arms against them. It might not be easy, a great many might fall, but a great Empire could always import more to take their places; we could not import more, because it would be our husbands and sons and fathers who were falling, and when they were done we could not produce more. Then the war would be over. There would not be a house in Africa–where African born men and women lived–without its mourners, from Sea Point to the Limpopo; but South Africa would be pacified–as Cromwell pacified Ireland three centuries ago, and she has been being pacified ever since! As Virginia was pacified in 1677; its handful of men and women in defence of their freedom were soon silenced by hired soldiers. "I care that for the power of England," said "a notorious and wicked rebel" called Sarah Drummond, as she took a small stick and broke it and lay it on the ground. A few months later her husband and all the men with him were made prisoners, and the war was over. "I am glad to see you," said Berkely, the English Governor, "I have long wished to meet you; you will be hanged in half an hour! and he was hanged and twenty-one others with him, and Virginia was pacified. But a few generations later in that State of Virginia was born George Washington, and on the 19th of April, 1775, was fought the battle of Lexington–where once the embattled farmers stood, and fired a shot, heard round the world,"–and the greatest crime and the greatest folly of England's career was completed England acknowledges it now. A hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand imported soldiers might walk over South Africa; it would not be an easy walk; but it could be done. Then from east and west and north and south would come men of pure English blood to stand beside the boys they had played with at school and the friends they had loved; and a great despairing cry would rise from the heart of Africa. But we are still few. When the war was over the imported soldiers might leave the land–not all; some must be left to keep the remaining people down. There would be quiet in the land. South Africa would rise up silently, and count her dead, and bury them. She would know the places where she found them. South Africa would be peaceful. There would be silence, the silence of a long exhaustion–but not peace! Have the dead no voices? In a thousand farm houses black robed women would hold memory of the count, and outside under African stones would lie the African men to whom South African women gave birth under our blue sky. There would be silence, but no peace. You say that all the fighting men in arms might have been shot. Yes, but what of the women? If there were left but five thousand pregnant South African-born women, and all the rest of their people destroyed, those women would breed up again a race like to the first. OH, LION-HEART OF THE NORTH, do you not recognize your own lineage in these whelps of the South? We cannot live if we are not free! The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men who lay under the stones (who will not be English then nor Dutch, but only Africans), will say, as they pass those heaps: "There lie our fathers, or great-grandfathers who died in the first great War of Independence," and the descendants of the men who lay there will be the aristocracy of Africa. Men will count back to them and say: My father or my great-grandfather lay in one of those graves.

Men will count back to them and say: My father or my great-grandfather lay in one of those graves. We shall know no more of Dutch or English then, we shall know only one great African people. And we? We, the South Africans of to-day, who are still English, who have been proud to do the smallest good so it might bring honor to England, who have vowed our vows on the honor of Englishmen, and by the faith of Englishmen–what of us? What of us? We, too, have had our vision of Empire. We have seen as in a dream the Empire of England as a great banyan tree; silently with the falling of the dew and the dropping of the rain it has extended itself; its branches have drooped down and rooted themselves in the earth; in it all the fowl of Heaven have taken refuge, and under its shade all the hasts of the field have lain down to rest. Call we change it for an upas tree, whose leaves distill poison and which spells death to those who have lain down in peace under its shadow? You have no right to take our dream from us; you have no right to kill our faith! Of all the sins England will sin if she makes war on South Africa, the greatest will be towards us. Of what importance is the honor and faith we have given her? You say, we are but few! Yes, we are few; but all the gold of Witwatersrand would not buy one throb of that love and devotion we have given her. Do not think that when imported soldiers walk across South African plains to take the lives of South African men and women, that it is only African sand and African hushes that are cracking beneath their tread: at each step they are breaking the fibres, invisible as air, but strong as steel, which bind the hearts of South Africans to England. Once broken they can never be made whole again; they are living things; broken, they will be dead. Each bullet which a soldier sends to the heart of a South African to take his life, wakes up another who did not know he was an African. You will not kill us with your Lee-Metfords: you will make us. There are men who do not know they love a Dutchman; but the first three hundred that fall, they will know it. Do not say, "But you are English, you have nothing to fear: we have no war with you!" There are hundreds of us, men and women, who have loved England; we would have, given our lives for her; but, rather than strike down one South African man fighting for freedom, we would take this right hand and hold it in the fire, till nothing was left of it but a charred and blackened bone. I know of no more graphic image in the history of the world than THE FIGURE OF FRANKLIN when he stood before the Lords of Council in England, giving evidence, striving, fighting, to save America for England. Browheaten, flouted, jeered at by the courtiers, his words hurled back at him as lies, he stood there fighting far England. England recognizes now that it was he who tried to save an Empire for her; and that the men who flouted and browbeat him, lost it. There is nothing more pathetic than the way in which Americans who loved England, Washington and Franklin, strove to keep the maiden vessel moored close to the mother's side, bound by the bonds of love and sympathy, that alone could bind them. Their hands were beaten down, bruised and bleeding, wounded by the very men they came to save, till they let go the mother ship and drifted away on their own great imperial course across the seas of time. England knows now w:hat those men strove to do for her, and the names of Washington and Franklin will ever stand high in honor where the English tongue is spoken. The names of Hutchinson, and North, and Grafton are not forgotten also; it might be well for them if they were! Do not say to us: "You are Englishmen; when the war is over, you can wrap the mantle of our imperial glory round you and walk about boasting that the victory is yours." We could never wrap that mantle round us again. We have worn it with pride. We could never wear it then. There would be blood upon it, and the blood would be our brothers'. We put it to the men of England. In that day where should we be found; we who have to maintain English honor in the South? Judge for us, and by your judgment we will abide.

Judge for us, and by your judgment we will abide. Remember, we are Englishmen! * * * * Looking around to-day along the somewhat over-clouded horizon of South African life, one figure strikes the eye, new to the circle of our existence here; and we eye it with something of that hope and sympathy with which a man is bound to view the new and unknown, which may be of vast possible good and beauty. What have we in this man, who represents English honor and English wisdom in South Africa? To a certain extent we know. We have a man honorable in the relations of personal life, loyal to friend, and above all charm of gold; wise with the knowledge of books and men; a man who could not violate a promise or strike in the dark. This we know we have, and it is much to know this; but what have we more? The man of whom South Africa has need to-day to sustain England's honor and her Empire of the future, is a man who must possess more than the knowledge and wisdom of the intellect. When a woman rules a household with none but the children of her own body in it, her task is easy; let her obey nature and she will not fail. But the woman who finds herself in a large strange household, where children and step-children are blended, and where all have passed the stage of childhood and have entered on that stage of adolescence where coercion can no more avail, but where sympathy and comprehension are the more needed, that woman has need of large and rare qualities springing more from the heart than from the head. She who call win the love of her strange household in its adolescence will keep its loyalty and sympathy when adult years are reached and will he rich indeed. There have been Englishmen in Africa who had those dualities. Will THIS NEW ENGLISHMAN OF OURS evince them and save an Empire for England and heal South Africa's wounds? Are we asking too much when we turn our eyes with hope to him? Further off also, across the sea we look with hope. The last of the race of great statesmen was not put into the ground with the old man of Hawarden; the great breed of Chatham and Burke is not extinct; the hour must surely bring forth the man. We look further yet with confidence, from the individual to the great heart of England, the people. The great fierce freedom-loving heart of England is not dead yet. Under a thin veneer of gold we still hear it beat. Behind the shrivelled and puny English Hyde who cries only "gold," rises the great English Jekyll, who cries louder yet "Justice and honor." We appeal to him; history shall not repeat itself. Nearer home, we turn to one whom all South Africans are proud of, and we would say to Paul Kruger, "Great old man, first but not last of South Africa's great line of rulers, you have shown us you could fight for freedom; show us you can win peace. On the foot of that great statue which in the future the men and women of South Africa will raise to you let this stand written: 'This man loved freedom, and fought for it; but his heart was large;he could forget injuries and deal generously."' And to our fellow Dutch South Africans, whom we have learnt to love so much during the time of stress and danger, we would say. "Brothers, you have shown the world that you know how to fight; show it you know how to govern; forget the past; in that Great Book which you have taken for your guide in life, turn to Leviticus, and read there in the 19th chapter, 34th verse: 'But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.'" Be strong, be fearless, be patient. We would say to you in the words of the wise dead President of the Free State which have become the symbol of South Africa, "Wacht een beetje, alles zal recht kom." (Wait a little, all will come right.) On our great African flag let us emblazon these words, never to talk them down, "FREEDOM, JUSTICE, LOVE"; great are the two first, but without the last they are not complete. Olive Schreiner, 2 Primrose Terrace, Berea Estate, Johannesburg, South African Republic. June, 1899. Schreiner main page | Women and Marxism main page | Marxists Internet Archive

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake Solidarity with South African workers (September 1985) From Militant, No. 767b, 27 September 1985, p. 15. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Over the past five years many Labour Party and trade union branches have shown appreciation of the work of the Southern African Labour Education Project (SALEP). SALEP produces vitally needed socialist education materials for the workers and youth movement in South Africa. It also helps to build links between the growing trade union and youth movement in South Africa and other workers throughout the world. But on 27 March this year, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) resolved to direct that “Regions, CLPs and affiliates have no contacts with SALEP, do not use its materials or allow it facilities”. In effect a ban has been introduced. The NEC said SALEP were outside “mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa”, for among other things linking the end of apartheid with the end of capitalism and for building links between workers in South Africa and elsewhere. During the British miners’ strike, striking Staffordshire miner Roy Jones was invited by the South African NUM to visit South African miners. The black mineworkers gave a generous donation to the British miners’ strike and Roy met SA NUM leaders, conference delegates, stewards and rank and file. The NEC report claimed that SALEP were not building links at all levels and that Roy was a “white unrepresentative member” of the British NUM. The South African NUM on the other hand made him their first white member. The NEC also claim that SALEP’s expenditure is diverting resources from the liberation movement. The claim is nonsense. The African National Congress (ANC) receives big grants from a number of governments including a million kroner a year from the Swedish government, dwarfing SALEP’s £5,000 a year spending. New federation The NEC report echoes the view put forward in the Stalinist SA Communist Party through the ANC and South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in exile. Instead of taking organisational action against SALEP on the advice of a body dominated by the SA Communist Party, the Labour Party should look to the new federation of independent trade unions being formed this November, which, drawing together up to half a million black workers, will constitute the most powerful organisation of black workers in South Africa’s history. The unions making up this ‘super union’ all advocate direct links between workers internationally and particularly between organised workers in the same multinationals. How can the NEC now justify its statement that “it is the duty of the international trade union movement to consult and accept the advice of SACTU” when the organised black workers have their own directly elected representatives? SALEP makes no apology for advocating direct links and direct support for the non-racial trade unions in their struggle against oppression and the capitalist monopolies. At the same time it supports the ANC and the United Democratic Front (UDF) whose leaders are on trial for treason. Both these organisations endorse the Freedom Charter which calls for the nationalisation of the monopolies and banks. While the leadership of the ANC fudges this question and talks of ‘breaking the monopolies’, SALEP supports the full implementation of the ANC’s freedom charter as do the hundreds of thousands of activists in the country. As a group carrying out socialist education, SALEP is helping to prepare black workers for the task of leading their unions, community organisations and the UDF on a programme of national liberation and socialism. As a FOSATU speaker said at a May Day rally this year: “Capitalism is our enemy!” (Star, 2 May 1985). It is these ideas of the mass movement, strengthened and explained in SALEPs material, which the NEC has condemned in banning SALEP and the campaigns for direct links. Delegates should read the letter of protest from left-wing members of the NEC available from SALEP and oppose the right wings suppression of socialist education. Speakers from SALEP should be invited to the GMC, regional parties, wards and trade unions to hear their reply and report on the exciting developments in the Labour movement in South Africa, which dooms apartheid and capitalism to destruction. Nimrod Sejake (Former organiser of Transvaal steelworkers) Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake The power of the workers (September 1984) From Militant, No 716, 14 September 1984, p. 11. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). NIMROD SEJAKE, a black South African union activist for many years will be speaking at Militant’s 20th anniversary rally at Wembley on 20 October (see page 13 for details). In this article he tells of some of his experiences in the 1950s. I was the secretary of the iron and steel union in the Transvaal, in Johannesburg. We faced a vicious law, the Bantu Labour Settlement of Disputes Act which stipulated if Africans went on strike, the strike was immediately illegal, and their trade union movement not recognised. There was no law that we could use as a channel for negotiations with the employers, but we had to face the employers all the time. So we organised workers to strike, not only to improve the terrible wages and conditions, but also in particular to disobey this Act. Fight for our rights We always made it clear to the workers that we should not face the employers from a position of weakness; the law was not on our side. To succeed we had to organise say a section 100% first and then tabulate the demands of the workers, and approach the employer. At one factory, called African Lamps, where a strike was organised the employers told me that according to the law I had no right to put forward the workers demands. I said ‘OK, I know there is a law to that effect, but the crux of the matter is that you have entered a contract between management and the workers you employed but who are now members of a union even if you do not recognise it. You have to pay the wages for what they give you in exchange for these wages, which is essentially their labour power.’ Management felt insulted that I could talk like that to them when I was an African so I said: ‘If workers feel that you don’t pay them the wages commensary with their labour power they have the right to withhold that labour power’. This infuriated the management even more. They threatened to call in the police because I was ‘illegally’ on the precinct of the factory even though I had gone asking them to have negotiations. After management had called the police and told their story the police told me, ‘Nimrod you are under arrest for trespass’. But our workers were properly organised and the law could not stand in their way. The police took me to the charge office and the workers came out on strike. While I was trying, despite police opposition, to telephone our lawyer informing her I was arrested, a telephone call arrived from the factory management, asking the police to bring me back to the factory because there was a strike! Causing a commotion ‘Look Nimrod’, they told me, ‘you’ve caused a commotion at the factory!’ For some time I said I would not go back to the factory unless I was properly charged but the police begged me to go. At the factory, management begged me to ask the workers to return. I spoke to the workers but in their own language, saying they should carry on with the decision they had taken and I would go on with the mandate to negotiate but that I was still under arrest. Management expected workers to meekly return to work but one worker who had been mandated to speak told management they would do nothing until my arrest had been explained. Already the white workers had been sent home showing that the whole factory depended on the power of the black working class. When they saw the workers were determined to go on striking, the police suddenly discovered there was nothing they could do, they could not arrest me for trespass because I was there for a legal purpose even though the Disputes Act and other laws were on their side! In reality it as because we had used the power of the working class. Nimrod Sejake will continue the lessons of the African Lamps dispute and others in a future issue. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake “Sabotaging machinery” is not the workers’ method (February 1988) From Inqaba ya Basebenzi, No. 18/19, February 1988, pp. 86–7. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). A broadcast by the ANC’s Radio Freedom has called on workers to “intensify their strike actions by sabotaging machinery, destroying documents, and making sure that commodities coming off assembly lines are useless ...” (quoted in Anti-Apartheid News, September 1985) “By so doing we will force the capitalists to realise that ours is a country at war, and that their profits are in danger,” the broadcast said. NIMROD SEJAKE, a founder member of SACTU, secretary of the Transvaal Iron and Steel Workers’ Union and an ANC Treason Trialist in the 1950s, explains why this call by the ANC leadership is wrong and cannot advance the liberation struggle of the working people. It is dangerous to the revolution, self-defeating and an act of desperation for the ANC leadership in exile to exhort the working class in South Africa to “sabotage industry”. Destruction of machinery is not the working-class method of combat against the capitalists who exploit them. Sabotaging machinery was a method of resistance attempted by workers against their employers in Europe when the workers’ movement was in its infancy and workers lacked a sense of their collective power to take strike action. Machine-breaking (e.g. by the ‘Luddites’ in England) died out well over a century ago because it was ineffective. Engels explained that such actions were inevitably isolated and, “When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart’s content ...” (Collected Works, vol. 4, p. 503) In Capital (vol. I, ch. XIII) Marx wrote: “Time and experience were needed before the workers could ... come to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production (machines), but against the particular social form in which these instruments are used” – namely capitalist exploitation itself. Strike action The classic method of such a struggle, developed by the working class, is to combine in large numbers and use their power as the producers of wealth to halt production through strike action. When workers doing forced labour under fascist regimes in the past have smashed machinery, this was in a situation where their organisations had been destroyed and they could not take collective action. Does anyone still think that is the situation in South Africa – after more than a decade of successfully rebuilding strong democratic organisations in the factories and townships, and after the launch of COSATU uniting half a million workers? Does “sabotaging machinery” or “making sure that commodities coming off assembly lines are useless” in any way add to or “intensify” strike action, as the ANC broadcast claimed? The answer is no. The very moment that strike action is effectively mounted there is an absolute cessation of production. Absolutely nothing is produced through the assembly lines at that point in time and for so long as the condition lasts. How can “commodities” be “coming off assembly lines” when labour is at a standstill? Sabotaging machinery, rendering commodities “useless” etc., would be a sign of the weakness or ineffectiveness of strike action – of the inability of workers in that place or at that time to unite and use their collective power. Far from “intensifying” strike action, sabotage is the method of individuals or isolated groups who divert attention away from the real task – which is to organise and mobilise the working class to use its full social power in mass actions. Once that mass power is asserted, once labour is withheld by the workers as in the case of strike action, sabotage of factories only introduces confusion and division into the ranks of the workers because it adds nothing to the strength of the action while threatening the very existence of the workers’ jobs. If machines are damaged, obviously the employers would be given the excuse of simply calling in the police to arrest the workers nearest to the broken machinery. The workers involved would easily be replaced and production soon continued. The aim of sabotaging machinery, according to the broadcast, would be to “force the capitalists to realise ... that their profits are in danger.” Effective strike action forces the capitalists to realise precisely that. Mass action is what terrifies them. Why should industrial sabotage, which has historically proved ineffective, achieve more than that? Besides, the point is not to frighten the capitalists but to prepare the working class to take power and end both apartheid and capitalism. Sabotage of machinery etc. does not advance but obstructs that struggle. The capitalists are rich and own factories because they exploit the working class. They pay the workers less than the value which the workers’ labour produces. Their profits are the unpaid labour of the working class. When they accumulate capital, investing profits in factories and machinery, they are accumulating value stolen from the working class. This they use to sustain their power and exploit the workers further. The workers’ task is to organise to take power and seize the means of production. Unfortunately, over the years, the ANC leadership has failed to understand the enormous power of the working class and its tasks in the struggle for national and social liberation in South Africa. Hence the leadership, backed up by the so-called ‘Communist’ Party, clings with amazing bulldog tenacity to the erroneous two-stage theory of struggle.

Hence the leadership, backed up by the so-called ‘Communist’ Party, clings with amazing bulldog tenacity to the erroneous two-stage theory of struggle. They believe it will be possible to “achieve national liberation first” while postponing a workers’ revolution and socialism to some unknown future period. State power That is a wrong approach to revolution flowing from ignorance of the science of Marxism. The nature of our struggle in South Africa is unequivocally a class struggle – a struggle that must be led by the working class for the conquest of state power, the elimination of apartheid, the achievement of democracy and national liberation by the black majority, and the overthrow of capitalism. National liberation will only be won by using the method of class struggle. Since the dissolution of the primeval communistic (early tribal) society, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”. (Marx) If one advocates the destruction of machinery, that can only amount to a senseless act of vandalism. It is a blow against the working class itself, devastating their property, namely, the means of production: factory plants, machines, etc., which are absolutely necessary for the production of the means of consumption to sustain the people – without which any “liberation” would be meaningless. They are the very foundation on which a healthy, well-planned socialist economy must be constructed. The means of production are the workers’ inalienable legitimate property, which they and they alone have created and must retrieve intact. They have been stolen by the capitalist ruling class through exploiting workers. The need therefore arises for a socialist revolution spearheaded by the working class, in the period ahead to recover their property. The speech delivered on the occasion of the launching of COSATU by its first President, comrade Elijah Barayi, that “COSATU will nationalise the mines and even take over some of the big businesses,” has a mighty echo in the ranks of the revolutionary working class of the world, who are flexing their muscles to retrieve their stolen property. Comrade Barayi’s speech is a barometer indicating the unfolding events of the new era of socialist ideas. The launching of COSATU is the crossing of the Rubicon. The way forward now is through a clear direction of Marxism, the building of direct links on an ever increasing international scale to overthrow world capitalism and all the evils of apartheid starting with the immoral pass laws. Forward to Socialism! Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake The best traditions of socialist struggle (December 1985) From Militant, No. 778, 13 December 1985, p. 10. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). The formation of COSATU, uniting half a million trade union members, takes up the workers’ struggle for democracy and socialism that SACTU was forced to leave off after the 1950’s. The big difference is that COSATU has ten times the forces. The fact that the workers have now rejected the name South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) for their new federation is not a rejection of the past traditions of SACTU. But it is a rejection of a link to an exiled “leadership” which has failed to build inside the country. The leadership has opposed international workers’ links with the unions making up COSATU and denigrated the workers’ leadership emerging in the country. COSATU now embodies all the best traditions of SACTU. All sections of the workers to whom SACTU could historically lay claim are now in COSATU. The use of the word “Congress” in COSATU shows the workers want to build the ANC as a force for transformation of society. The exiled “SACTU” leaders have now served their time and can no longer lay false claim to leadership of the movement in the country. They should now give unqualified support to COSATU as the recognised trade union body of South African workers nationally and internationally. SACTU is now dead: long live COSATU! Nimrod Sejake was a founder member of SACTU, an ANC treason trialist, and secretary of Transvaal Iron and Steel Workers’ Union in the 1950s. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake Defying apartheid laws (September 1984) From Militant, No. 717, 21 September 1984, p. 11. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). IN MILITANT, 14 September, a leading member of the steelworkers union in South Africa in the ’50s, described how workers who were denied by law the right to trade unions organised at the African Lamps factory. Here he takes up the story after he had been arrested for “trespass” while negotiating with management. The workers had downed tools on his arrest. When it became clear that the workers were not going to end their strike, the police decided they could not take any action against me. My arrest was dropped even though I was breaking the Bantu Labour Settlement of Disputes Act 1953. The next week, the workers met and we discussed strategy and tactics for the new offensive. We then received an indictment. I was accused number one. But we found out a very funny thing; every time we went to court, the factory stopped because everyone was in the union. The Rand Daily Mail which covered our court case said that the iron and steel workers were the first African union to break the 1953 Act, so we felt our tactics were right were convicted nonetheless and fined £3 each. We had decided the day before to go to jail rather than pay the fine. We would say we had no money, because we knew we would have no scabs in our workplace so the factory could not work. The employer was forced, not by the law, but by the conditions we had created to pay our fines himself! We knew he couldn’t raise the same number of workers with the same skill and expertise overnight. But the employer thought it was all right to deduct a certain amount from our pay packet every week until the £3 was paid back to him. He did that but we appealed to the Supreme Court in Pretoria, which found against the employer who had to refund every worker their £3! What is more, wages went up, only by a penny an hour but by the standard of wages for black workers in South Africa then it was something to be proud of. We had beaten the bosses in their own court, the Supreme Court, after conviction in the magistrates court. But more importantly we had won with our own weapon, the strike. We learnt that when workers were properly organised, they were strong; they could beat the bosses at the factory, they could get an official out of the clutches of the police so the law was not all powerful. Nimrod Sejake will be one of the speakers at Militant’s 20th anniversary rally on 20 October. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake & Fergus Cassidy Irish workers strike to support boycott of SA goods (June 1984) From Inqaba ya Basebenzi, No. 14, June–August 1984, p. 20. Transcribed by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Dear comrade, The Dunnes Stores empire in Ireland is recognised as having anti-worker and anti-union bosses. On July 19, a worker in the Henry Street store in Dublin was indefinitely suspended for refusing to handle South African goods. The majority of union members – a total of 11 – then began an official strike. It is the policy of their union, the Irish Distributive and Administrative trade union, to boycott South African goods. The strikers are young workers and 10 of them are women. So far they have been intimidated and harassed by scabs and on at least two occasions vans have been driven at them. Indeed management have resorted to bringing in food in trucks used for dumping rubbish! Public support is very good and business is down 56%. Over IR£80 (R128.00) a day is collected in buckets at the entrances. The workers are aware of the conditions faced by their class brothers and sisters in South Africa. They are absolutely determined that their bosses will be taught not to stock South African goods. A number of fellow union members in other stores are refusing to handle the goods and the bosses are afraid to do anything. The strikers hope that workers in South Africa will learn of their struggle. They are determined to show their solidarity in the face of their own vicious bosses. Messages of support can be sent to: Karen Gearon (shop-steward), c/o I.D.A.T.U., 9, Cavendish Row, Dublin 1, Ireland. Fraternally, Nimrod Sejake (Irish Labour Party) Fergus Cassidy (Irish Labour Youth) Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Obituaries for Nimrod Sejake (2004) Copied from http://redlug.com/LabHist/NimrodObit2.htm by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Black South African workers’ leader and fighter for socialism The CWI is sad to announce the death of Nimrod Sejake, a life-long fighter against apartheid in South Africa, and a committed socialist. Nimrod died on 27 May 2004, aged 83 years. During the 1950s, Nimrod was a black workers’ leader in South Africa under the former apartheid regime, a leading member of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and of the ANC in the Soweto Township. Forced into exile, Nimrod eventually arrived in Ireland in the 1980s. He became a supporter of the ‘Militant’, the forerunner of the Socialist Party (CWI affiliate), and joined the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC. Nimrod was a well-known and loved figure on the left in Ireland. He regularly travelled across the country, south and north, to speak at public meetings on the struggle of the black South African working class. Nimrod also regularly attended international meetings throughout Europe. At all times, he was an inspiration, particularly to youth. Following the removal of the apartheid regime in the 1990s, Nimrod was eventually allowed to return to South Africa. But for Nimrod the struggle was not over, once back in South Africa he continued to campaign for a socialist society. The following is an obituary article on Nimrod that recently appeared in the Irish Times newspaper. It indicates the stature Nimrod has in Ireland, amongst the anti-apartheid movement and the left. Tireless activist who spent 30 years in exile From the Irish Times, 19 June 2004 Nimrod Sejake: Nimrod Sekeramane Sejake, who has died aged 83, was a South African political refugee in Ireland during the 1980s, when he became widely known in trade union and socialist circles for his campaigning work to raise the profile of the new South African unions. Born in August 1920 in Evaton, south of Johannesburg, to Basotho parents, he attended mission school in Evaton, worked as building site clerk, trained as a teacher, married, and settled in Jabavu, Soweto. As the National Party came to power in 1949 and sought to impose unprecedented racial discrimination under the rubric “apartheid”, Sejake joined the opposition. Noted for his ability as a union organiser, he became secretary of the non-racial, though mainly African, Iron and Steel Workers Union, affiliated to the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). His militant, uncompromising approach is recorded in Organise or Starve, the history of SACTU. Sejake joined the African National Congress (ANC) and was active throughout the 1950s in its increasingly radical Defiance Campaign of demonstrations, strikes and burning of the hated pass books. He was active also in the Congress of the People of 1955 when the ANC proclaimed the Freedom Charter at Kliptown. Sejake shared a cell with Nelson Mandela, when they were both arrested with 156 leaders of the ANC, SACTU and the Communist Party (SACP), accused of treason in the famous treason trial of 1956–61. The NP government sought the death penalty for treason and, as oppression intensified, limiting the possibilities for legal political work, Sejake and others left the country through the then Basutoland for training in the Soviet Union. The treason trial accused were acquitted but the die was cast and Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing, was founded to begin armed struggle against the apartheid regime. Sejake spent a period studying Marxism in the USSR. He had been influenced by a teacher in Evaton in the 1930s, Johannes Nkosi, a leading member of the Communist Party. Nkosi had been sent to the Soviet Union where he fell foul of the Stalinist teachers and died in suspicious circumstances. Like others of the ANC and similar liberation movements, Sejake found that only the “communist” states were prepared to provide arms and training, whatever criticisms they had of the system were not voiced then. Sejake returned to Africa as political commissar in the ANC training camp in Morogoro, Tanzania. He was convinced of the central role of the organised working class in the liberation of South Africa, and insisted their priority should be to send trained activists back to organise militant trade unions to bring down the regime. Such views led to a clash with the more conservative exiled leadership which prioritised the armed struggle and appeals to the United Nations. Sejake was removed from his post. The President, Julius Nyerere, ordered his expulsion from Tanzania, a decision probably influenced by Mr. Sejake’s involvement in a Marxist circle at Dar es Salaam University which was critical of Nyerere’s “Ujaama”, or African Socialism. Participants included Zanzibarian A.M. Babu, later jailed by Nyerere, and Walter Rodney, author of the influential How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and assassinated by the CIA in Guyana in the 1970s. Exiled to Zambia, Sejake worked with the South African Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and travelled to China and Albania, seeking support for the organisation, before being deported to Egypt, where he lived in poverty while appealing for political asylum in Europe. In these difficult times, he was greatly heartened by the uprising of the South African school students in Soweto, 1976 and by the rapid growth of the independent trade unions.

In these difficult times, he was greatly heartened by the uprising of the South African school students in Soweto, 1976 and by the rapid growth of the independent trade unions. In the late 1970s, Sejake was offered asylum in three European countries and chose Ireland, remembering that his sister worked for an Irish family as a domestic servant. They treated her well and he was impressed when they told her Ireland was a country oppressed by the British Empire! Living in the Red Cross Hostel in Ballsbridge, Sejake loved Ireland and never experienced racial abuse. He attended AGMs of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement but was disappointed to find no recognition of the now hugely significant independent unions. He found kindred thinkers in the Militant Tendency of the Labour Party [forerunners of the Socialist Party] which had direct links, through South African exiles, with these rapidly growing unions. A “retying of the knot”, he would say, after 25 years in exile. He devoted himself energetically to solidarity work with the struggle in South Africa, speaking at meetings the length and breadth of Ireland and Britain, taking particular pleasure in engaging with young people. He made speaking tours throughout Europe, the US and Brazil, and during the 1984/85 anti-apartheid strike at Dunnes Stores, was regularly found on the picket line. In 1989 he spoke by phone to his wife and family with whom he had not been in contact for 30 years. The ANC was legalised, Mandela walked free, and the exiles returned, although his own return was delayed for months when he refused to complete the application for indemnity. He complained, “they are asking me which crimes I wish to be indemnified for!” Eventually he returned to South Africa in November 1991. Reunited with his family, though 71 years of age, Sejake again threw himself into the struggle and was elected secretary of the Soweto ANC Veterans League and led delegations from Evaton to Pretoria to seek compensation for land seized during the 1950s. He also re-established links with the workers in heavy industry through the Metal and Allied Workers Union. Although he voted for the ANC in the 1994 election, he insisted that the massive vote for the party would not be enough to transform life for the poor in South Africa. He remained a committed socialist and marxist, believing that only the overthrow of capitalist economic relations would end inequality and he was involved in campaigning for the Congress of South African Trade Unions to build a mass workers party. Nimrod Sejake: born August 8th, 1920; died May 27th, 2004. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake No Retreat from the Freedom Charter (September 1988) From Militant, September 1988. Copied from http://redlug.com/LabHist/NimrodFC.htm by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). On the 18th of September 1955, members of the African National Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, met in the Trades Hall, Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, to discuss the Freedom Charter and the way forward. On 26th June 1955, we had all gathered at Kliptown to formulate from aspirations gathered door-to-door all over our country, our constitution for a Liberated South Africa. We called it the Freedom Charter. Since 1955, this document has been an inspiration to millions of oppressed Black people in South Africa and to some whites who supported us. In the past two years in South Africa, it has been accepted by trade unions representing a million workers in COSATU, the Congress of South African Trades Unions, as the minimum programme of the workers' movement. Our Freedom Charter is specific. “The banks, all monopoly industry, mining and mineral wealth shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole ... the land shall be owned by those who work it.” For me, and for millions since 1955, this has always meant a socialist South Africa. In the Trades Hall during the debate, I argued that the Freedom Charter could only be implemented by action, that signatures on petitions were inadequate to force the state to concede freedom. While I was speaking the South African Police broke up the meeting and seized my written notes for my speech. Later when I was on trial with Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and Oliver Tambo in the Treason Trail, this speech was one of the major exhibits used by the state to try to hang us. I have just received this speech from South Africa after 33 years and reading it again after more than three decades I can see how relevant it still is. I have been shocked, but not surprised, by the retreat of the ANC leadership from the Freedom Charter, which is clearly demonstrated now by the proposed 'guidelines for a port-apartheid constitution' which have been produced by the ANC. Our Constitution, our Freedom Charter, for three decades a beacon for the oppressed masses of downtrodden black people, is being abandoned by the exiled leadership. It is not surprising because we had to struggle all through 1955 to get them to accept it in the first place. I defended the Freedom Charter than as Secretary of the Iron and Steel Union and Secretary of the White City, Jabavu branch of the African National Congress and what I said in the Trades Hall, Johannesburg is as relevant today as it was 33 years ago. “One million signatures alone are not enough. Action is the correct dose. Our one million signatures must be one million blows, that will shake apartheid a million times to pieces and bring South Africa and its enslaved people a million years of prosperity and freedom ... “It is all very well to say: 'The state shall recognise the right and the duty of all to work, and to draw unemployment benefits,' but it is quite a different story to make the state do these things ... “It requires hard practical work and sacrifice of the noblest order. One must be prepared to clash with the state, namely the police, and if the struggle assumes very large countrywide dimensions one will clash even with the armed forces. That is the test we must pass before there can be work and security ... “The working class understands. The working class is ready. The necessary conditions have arisen. Time is becoming more and more opportune.” [Treason Trial Transcript, Witwatersrand University, pages 7577–8428] The leadership in exile may be disheartened after many blows. They have capitulated believing that the Botha regime is too strong. The workers inside South Africa will not accept it. I am heartened by a letter from a Johannesburg worker printed in the August 25th South African Weekly Mail, headed 'ANC neglecting workers' in which the worker writes: “(the proposed constitution). In practical terms it offers workers nothing that they have not won for themselves over the last twenty years within the framework of apartheid capitalism ... It is no accident that the document is welcomed by the representatives of big capital like Zach De Beer.” P.W. Botha's government tried to claw back the gains this worker refers to when they tried to force through the Labour Bill, three months ago. From the 6th to 8th June, three million workers in a general strike used their industrial muscle to say No! They have not allowed Botha to take back their hard won rights and they will not allow the ANC leadership in exile to abandon our Freedom Charter. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Laurence Coates South Africa: Interview with Nimrod Sejake “The ANC has sold out!” (February 2000) From Offensiv, No. 385, 10th February 2000. Copied from http://redlug.com/LabHist/Nimrod.htm by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). Nimrod Sejake is something of a living legend. At 79 years-old, the former leader of the metal workers’ union in South Africa, is still fighting for socialism as an active member of the CWI’s South African section, Socialist Alternative. I met Nimrod at his small house in White City, Soweto. The same house that the police raided early one morning in December 1956, to arrest Nimrod for “high treason”. He was placed in a cell with a young lawyer by the name of Nelson Mandela! “155 others were arrested that day” he explained, “Nelson was the only one I knew, ‘Nimrod, are you here too?’ he said when they brought me in.” “Even before this time I was active in the trade union movement. I was a founder member of SACTU (South African Congress of Trade Unions) in 1955. I organised the workers into the union, that was my job. The employers asked me ‘who is a member of your committee?’, I said the whole factory are members, at that time we called our union the Non-European Iron and Steel workers’ union.” Trade union organisation has never been a picnic, but Nimrod’s comrades faced severe problems for which special methods and tactics had to be improvised. “I had my differences with the ANC leadership, for not following the class struggle. They criticised me because I advocated breaking the law, which even stated that ‘black workers have no right to strike’. The ANC leadership didn’t back me up, they said: ‘Nimrod, you must negotiate’, they didn’t approve of the fact that there were strikes every week in the Iron and Steel sector – that was my sector.” The trade unions played a decisive role in the struggle against apartheid, especially the formation of Cosatu in the 1980s. Today this is an incontestable fact. But South African marxists, like Nimrod, argued this many years ago while the ANC leadership placed their faith in a completely different strategy – a combination of guerilla warfare organised from camps outside the country, and international diplomacy. Nimrod was forced to go into exile in 1962. I first met him in Liverpool, England in the 1980s when he made a visit during the famous struggle against the Thatcher government. He spent many years as a refugee in Ireland. “I’ve been battling all my adult life”, he told me, “When I came back to South Africa in 1992 I found that many comrades I knew had left the country or died. The ANC branches had collapsed.” Up until the early 1990s the CWI in South Africa supported the ANC and was known as the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC. But the sharp rightward shift of the ANC in the 1990s led them to a total break and to raise the call for a new workers’ party. Nimrod is active in his local community Everton, in Soweto, fighting for the restoration of land which was illegally sold by the apartheid regime. He launched the Everton Forum for Reconstruction and Socialism, whose office also serves as a centre for the comrades of Socialist Alternative. So, after over six years of ANC government, what does he think of the way things have turned out? “It’s a sell out. A straightforward sell out!”, he says angrily, “The ANC’s Freedom Charter states explicitly that all the mineral wealth beneath the earth belongs to the people-Nelson did away with it! It’s been undemocratically thrown into the dustbin and replaced with naked capitalism, the so called GEAR programme, privatisation etc. That’s a sell out! We didn’t fight all those years to retain apartheid.” There are people whose life has involved far fewer sacrifices, for whom the betrayals experienced by Nimrod and his comrades would have produced cynicism. But not him! After a lifetime of struggle he and his wife live on a pension of 750 kronor a month. He still speaks enthusiastically of battles to come: “All we have to do is see to it that we organise the workers – internationally – to see to it that we bring about a socialist alternative. There’s more and more talk about the need to create a workers’ party – that’s what’s going on!” Within days of talking to Nimrod, major class battles erupted in the country. Cosatu’s leaders launched a programme of rolling strikes, threatening a general strike on 10th May. The alliance between Cosatu and the ANC – they sit together in the government – is under the most severe strains ever. President Mbeki, under orders from the stock exchange and international speculators, is attempting to impose wage restraint, attack employment rights and central bargaining. Last year saw more strikes than at any time since the ANC took power in 1994. This year could see a further increase. “One thing has always been in my mind,” Nimrod had told me, “we will never become free without the class struggle. I’ve fought for fifty years with this idea in mind. The ideas of Karl Marx, our ideas, have stood the test of history. Now it’s time for a new generation of youth to take up the struggle.” Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Nimrod Sejake Workers’ Power and the crisis of leadership (November 1983) From Inqaba ya Basebenzi, the journal of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress, No. 12, November 1983–February 1984. Copied from http://redlug.com/LabHist/Nimrod1983.htm by Iain Dalton. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). It was from my organising work on the Reef that I came to see the enormous power of the working class. During those days African trade unions were not recognised and strikes by African workers were illegal. But this was no barrier to the workers, if they were properly organised. Our motto in the Iron and Steel Union was that we should never go to an employer with our demands unless we know our power, and that power was to be found only when the workers were fully organised with an understanding of how to go about a strike. Then they can beat the employers in their own field. Even though there are laws which are barriers, the workers break them, and with intent. Even if the police are called in they cannot put into effect their powers because the workers can make their powers ineffective. Through our union experience we understood that only when you face the employers from a position of strength can you change society in South Africa. And if this was done all over the country, with clear sense of direction, no power can impede the forward march of the working class. White workers There is an important thing that we learned in the Iron and Steel Union. We said to the black workers when they went on strike to talk with white workers and tell them why we are striking. They should explain that we are underpaid, discriminated against as a nation and oppressed as a class. He laws dehumanise us, and make us mere chattels of society. Look, we would say to the white workers, you have the law on your side, you have people you elect to of to the parliament to legislate, and they legislate against us. You do skilled work, but according to the law we are not allowed to do it. Our struggle is not only about wages, but it is a political question. We want to destroy the laws in this country, to make it fit for workers of all races. And we are showing today that we can stop this factory. We said this, for example, in the strikes at African lamps and at Phoenix Foundry. “As you can see,” the African workers said to the white workers, “we stopped management from doing anything. We are the bosses today. You can see you are being told to go home and not work precisely because of our power. We can make you redundant” – this is the word the workers used. We were aware that the racist regime gets a great deal of support from white workers. But we wanted to break down this granite wall. We were saying to the white workers, look, we want to show you we can penetrate the barriers put before us, we can pull them down and make the laws ineffective. As a result, during these strikes, some white workers began to say: “Look, if you succeed, we are going to succeed as well”. Many of them voiced the correct view that there is really no difference between black labour and white labour; we should all be striking for workers’ rights. White workers say this behind closed doors because they know the repercussions. As far as my experiences show, the social support the regime is enjoying from the white workers can be broken if the African workers are strongly organised along the correct lines. ISCOR Often what the state and the employers think is impossible is made possible by the working class! Let me give the example of huge concerns like ISCOR. It was said in the 1950s to be impossible to enter ISCOR, because it was always guarded. These large state concerns are guarded precisely because if the workers could get a grip on the, and stop production, the capitalists would be greatly affected. But that impossibility as again proved by the workers to be a paper tiger. Through the workers I entered ISCOR in Van der Bijl Park. I organised the workers there first, not by going to the factory, but by going to their homes. Through tem the other worker could be brought into the movement. Another strategy was making feasts or tea parties in the locations – where we would meet and discuss. Through that I organised to go in and distribute leaflets. It is such a huge concern that you would not know which side of it you entered and which side you came out, unless you were lead by the people working there. So I took leaflets in a suitcase from Jo’burg. At the bus stop a worker was there to guide me. Inside the plant the workers showed me there we could unpack the bundles of leaflets. Before I knew it, other workers were placing them in vantage points for workers coming in on the next shift to find them. Then, when they knew the bus was about to leave, they led me out to it and I left the place. Here again the mighty power of the working class demonstrates itself. Not only is it a power as far as stopping work is concerned, but because the understanding, the creativity, the grasp of strategy and tactics of the workers is so powerful, one they are properly organised there is noting to fear in South Africa. In fact anywhere in the world that the workers are properly organised with an understanding of their tasks, they have nothing to fear.

In fact anywhere in the world that the workers are properly organised with an understanding of their tasks, they have nothing to fear. So all these and many other experiences convince me that through the power of the working class it is possible to bring SA to a standstill, and overthrow that powerful regime. What we have to do first is to organise the workers. Then we shall be facing battle from a position of power, where we can tell the employers there are two things existing here – you own the means of production, but we own the labour-power, and if you don’t agree, we fold our hands and your industry will be paralysed. I came to see that the power of the working class was so enormous that even if you compared it with the police, the army, the air force, the prisons and magistrates court and judges, etc. – that all the power cannot stand in the way of the struggle of the working class to overthrow the state. The power lies in the working class, if it is organised and given a direction, and that direction can only be found in Marxism. Marxism Marxism is a scientific theory, based on the experience of the working class. That is why fro the workers Marxism s easily accepted, because their lives prove it – their hard lives, cruel oppression, brutal handling in the factory, in the locations, at home – with low wages, high rents and high prices. From this angle the worker understand theory. And when revolution comes they grasp in a day what would otherwise take years to grasp. In the Iron and Steel Union we used to say that the very thing that is called law in South Africa is illegal, that there is no ‘law’ as far as Africans were concerned, because the majority of the people take no part in making it, but it is made by the capitalists to oppress the workers. The only answer to that is for the workers to organise to take political power into their own hands with the specific aim of ending capitalism and achieving socialism. That is what Inqaba is saying: the workers must build the trade unions and transform the ANC. I support this view to the hilt. Because, in the 1950s I already found, unfortunately, that this was not the position taken by the leadership of SACTU, or of the ANC, or of the South African Communist Party. They did not have confidence in the power of the working class. As an example, I will mention a time when I had organised nine metal factories along the Rand, with the aim that when the workers came out on strike, they would all come out simultaneously. When they were all organised and ready I went to the SACTU leadership to make sure of their support for the action. There would be a lightening strike spreading along the Rand – and factories where the workers had experience of strike action like Africa Lamps, Phoenix Foundry and Benoni Foundry were ready tom come out in support. In Iron and Steel we saw this as a great step forward for the trade union movement. But the SACTU leaders told me (and I am quoting them): “Nimrod, that is too much!” Or again, there was the time in 1958 when the ANC called off a tremendous three-day strike on the first day! Called it off! I remember buying a newspaper and seeing the headline: “Secretary General of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, calls off strike.” I was furious. Because, at that time, we were on bail from the treason Trial, and one of the conditions was that we did not attend meetings or organise in any way. But, nevertheless, we had risked organising the workers to make the strike a success. Crisis of Leadership The leadership of the movement was lagging far behind, out of touch with developments. That is why I support Inqaba because the present situation requires a journal like this which puts forward clearly the manner in which the struggle in South Africa must be handed. We lacked that in the 1950s. Inqaba puts forward a theory and a strategy which can guide the working class movement in the struggle for power something the ANC leadership has not done – something we can say the South African Communist Party has failed to do. I say “failed” because time and time again it has been advised by workers to change its methods and has failed to do so. The Communist Party leaders still refuse to put forward that the task of the working class will be to take power in the revolution that is coming in South Africa. These leaders have put forward the position that we must struggle for a bourgeois democracy in South Africa – and the South African Communist Party has said over and over again that we must wait until getting that before struggling to overthrow capitalism. Workers want democratic rights of course. When in Europe I see I can stand right next to a policeman and sell a socialist newspaper, and he doesn’t turn a hair, it amazes me. The workers in Europe have struggled for and won these rights – although the capitalists are now trying to whittle them away. And I think: “If the workers in SA had those rights just for a month, or even 24 hours, what would they begin to do with them.” But the point is: it will take a revolution in South Africa – a revolution made by the power of the working class – to achieve full democratic rights. And I ask: when the workers in South Africa push back the state to that point, why should they stop there? Why should they stop just because their leaders are then scrambling for positions in the bosses parliament? The workers will then have the power to take over the factories and mines and so on, and to take on and destroy the bosses’ state. That is what they will demand that their leaders carry through. I came to the conclusion in the 1950s that we were faced with a crisis of leadership. Subsequently I have discovered that the reasons for this crisis were explained by the Russian Marxist, Trotsky. Trotsky had already explained that in Russia the basic problems of the masses could not be solved unless the working class took power. It is the same in South Africa – race discrimination even cannot be ended short of that. It was proved in Russia when the working class came to power in 1917 under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, headed by Lenin and Trotsky. Later Trotsky also explained how the workers’ democracy which came into existence in the Soviet Union was crushed by the coming to power of Stalin and the bureaucracy- how this led to the degeneration of the workers’ state and the degeneration of the Communist International, so that Communist Parties no longer stood for the interests of the working class internationally.

Today it is more clear than ever that the working class can change society, if it is organised with the correct policy and leadership. The concept is held by people outside South Africa and even inside that the regime cannot be conquered. But the working class is proving today that it can remove it: soften it up first and then destroy it. This is happening through the workers, not through the so-called ‘armed struggle’. Armed Struggle One thing I must make explicitly clear. You can change nothing in space outside the influence of force. You can’t move anything say, from this table to that table, unless you use force. To change society from one state to another, like we want to do in South Africa; to remove racism and establish democracy, to remove capitalism and build socialism – we need force. And that force in my conviction is in the working class. It is a question of the workers using force and violence in their proper place. There will come a stage when, to eliminate a highly-armed regime like the South African regime, the workers will have to be ready militarily, trained themselves. That is inevitable. The Russian workers in the October Revolution were not empty-handed – they organised themselves in an armed workers’ force. In anticipation of such a situation, the workers must be prepared. The ruling class must find that they cannot spread their army all over the country, because the workers are organised everywhere. Then, when we are physically attacked in any area of the country, we will be able to hit back and they will find they can no longer control us. In the 1960s the ANC made me ‘political commissar’ in the camps in Tanzania. My task was to provide political education for the workers there. I call them workers because many of them had been trade unionists and, even though they were militarily trained, they still had the standpoint of workers, to overthrow the South African regime and capitalism. I put the position among these comrades that only the working class could overthrow the state because who else could do it in isolation from the workers. Therefore trained people infiltrated into the country should not start to initiate battles, because they would only be exposing themselves in front of a powerful regular army which would just destroy you if it discovered you. The proper thing to do, I said, when you enter the country is to organise the workers – and, through them, the masses as a whole – and to explain that only the organised working class had the power to defeat the state. And to prepare, only, for when it would be effective to use arms. The guerilla methods put forward by the ANC leadership do nothing more than frighten the enemy from time to time. Later on I have been to China. I have seen the cave in Yenan which was Mao’s home and command centre in the guerilla war in China. The situation in our country is quite different. It is a very industrialised country, where there is no real force of opposition other than the working class. The method of guerilla war is not the method of working class struggle. After a time in Tanzania the ANC leadership told me that I should no longer teach Marxism. In fact the person who initiated this was none other than the late Moses Kotane, then the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. It astounded me that when he said we must teach instead the ‘African image’. This is ludicrous. Right back in the Communist manifesto it was explained that “All hitherto existing history is the history of class struggle.” Of course national oppression is central in South Africa, but that does not make the struggle against it any less a class struggle Because I would not accept the position of the leadership, it was decided to get rid of me. I was removed from the camps, and the Tanzanian government gave me seven days to leave the country! I heard later that at the Morogoro conference, ANC comrades asked, “Why did Sejake leave the ANC?”, and the leadership said, “He just left ... just like that” – which is a thing serious comrades do not believe to this day. After that I was for a time in the Pan African Congress, because the youth there were keen to study Marxism. But the same crisis revealed itself: the nationalist leadership felt threatened by working class ideas, and I was expelled. When I look back now to the 1950s I see that the major problem was that we, the workers, who supported and built the ANC, did not control it. Even SACTU was under the control of middle class ANC leaders, rather than the other way around. Everywhere the working class movement has – must have – two arms: “an industrial arm and a political arm” as the great Irish Marxist, James Connolly, once said. Both these arms are necessary. They go together. The one without the other will not succeed. The workers, on their own account, have rebuilt a powerful trade union movement in our country – more powerful than we ever had in the 1950s. This is a tremendous achievement, even though there is still a long way to go in organising the unorganised workers. I have been inspired by the workers organised in the Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU), who have taken forward with courage and success the work which we began in the 1950s. I regard myself as a member of MAWU. These achievements must never be compromised or sacrificed. It is now vital that they are taken forward in creating a new united trade union federation, to strengthen our ability to organise and to use the strike weapon, very intensively, all over the country. Wherever there is a working concern, a factory, anywhere in the country, there is the revolution – provided the working class is organised and knows its power. At the same time I agree fully with Inqaba when it says that the trade unions should join and play their part in the United Democratic Front (UDF), transform the UDF into a mass working class movement, able to give a lead to all the oppressed – and to white workers too.

At the same time I agree fully with Inqaba when it says that the trade unions should join and play their part in the United Democratic Front (UDF), transform the UDF into a mass working class movement, able to give a lead to all the oppressed – and to white workers too. The laws of history work in peculiar ways. In the 1950s, the workers turned to the ANC as the political organisation which they felt it was necessary to support and strengthen. Today we see the response which just the launching of the UDF gained from the unorganised and many others. This is because workers saw here a sign of the ANC reborn in the country, a sign of the return of nation wide organisation around the Freedom Charter. It is true that the leadership of the UDF as was the case with the ANC, in the 1950s (and is still the case today), is in the hands of the middle class. But the workers must go into the UDF – and later into the ANC when it returns openly to South Africa – no to bow down to the leaders’ policies, their hesitations and twists and turns, but to transform the UDF and transform the ANC. I appeal particularly to the workers in MAWU, the union to which I belong, to press this task on their leaders and on the leaders of FOSATU and all unions. It is only by the workers going into the UDF at every level, in an organised and united way, that we can get rid off the influence of the middle class leadership. We must simply tell them openly that they must accept the programme of the working class or else it is time they left their positions. There is no problem in that. If the organised working class can take on the big bosses and the state, there is no problem in dealing with individuals who are an obstacle to the movement. This is in the interests of the majority of the middle class too. Only the working class can liberate them from their oppression by racism and capitalism – by overthrowing the state and taking power. The majority of the middle class will follow a determined lead from the workers. History will not allow us to postpone this task while we sort out merely our own ‘trade union affairs’. In fact by transforming the UDF we will strengthen the whole workers’ movement, the trade unions too. With the UDF under working class leadership, campaigning for demands like a minimum wage, it will win the enthusiastic support of many of the most oppressed whoa re still unorganised. On the other hand, if the trade union movement remains divided on the question of the UDF, this can become a barrier to forming the strongest possible trade union unity in action. But because from my experience I am confident in the power and the understanding of the workers, I am sure we are bound to succeed in building our two arms; the industrial arm and the political arm. The success will be so tremendous and vibrant that it will shake the whole of this globe! The South African regime is one of the worst in the world, and if the African working class understand and apply Marxist theory correctly they will give some meat to the working class of the world and gain tremendous support. I have found that Europe, and the whole of the capitalist West, is no longer what we thought it was. Conditions are getting worse, in every country, because of the grip of capitalism. Therefore the workers are struggling against it. So workers in South Africa should not look at the West simply as a place from which imperialism exploits them, without anybody struggling to put a stop to this. Struggle is going on! But I have also found the same crisis of leadership of the workers’ movement. Take Ireland, for example: the Labour Party is in a coalition government with a capitalist party that has nothing in common with the workers. It is like the SACP calling for ‘an alliance of all classes’ – how can workers be in alliance with their bosses? Or take the example of Britain, where the Labour Party leadership has been trying to expel Marxists. It reminds me of the action taken by the ANC leadership against me. But I find in these countries a growing enthusiasm for Marxist ideas, especially among the youth and young workers, but among older workers also. Recently I went to a Young Workers’ Assembly organised by the British Labour Party Young Socialists, where I heard many youth and others speaking. Some were real youngsters, even one ‘small boy’ (I use this with no disrespect) whose speech made me feel that at his age I had no idea of struggle. This is because of the change that is taking place in the working class today. In Soweto, too, four-year-old children are confronting the police. It’s the development of a new period in the world. We have reached the stage of the advent of world revolution. I can see this is no longer a theory. It is a reality. I can safely say that world revolution is approaching the doorsteps of the homes where we live and the sooner we wake up to the occasion the better. Top of page Nimrod Sejake Archive | ETOL Main Page Last updated: 9 August 2016

Zo d’Axa 1900 He is Elected Source: La Feuille; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. Listen to the edifying story of a pretty little white ass, candidate in the capital. It isn’t a Mother Goose rhyme, or a story from Le Petit Journal. It’s a true story for the old kiddies who still vote: A burro, son of the country of LaFontaine and Rabelais, an ass so white that M. Vervoort gluttonously ate it, aspired – in the electoral game – to a place as legislator. The day of the elections having arrived this burro, the very type of a candidate, answering to the name of Worthless, pulled off a last minute maneuver. On this hot Sunday morning in May, when the people rushed to the polling places, the white ass, the candidate Worthless, perched on a triumphal wagon and, pulled along by voters, traversed Paris, his good city. Upright on his hoofs, ears to the wind, proudly emerging from his vehicle gaudily painted with electoral posters – a vehicle in the shape of an urn – the head high between the water glass and the presidential bell, he passed through the anger, the bravos and the gibes. The ass looked on a Paris that gazed on him. Paris! The Paris that votes, the crowd, the people sovereign every four years...the people sufficiently foolish to believe that sovereignty consists in naming its masters. As if they were parked in front of the town halls were flocks of voters, the dazed, fetishists who held the little cards with which they say: I abdicate. Mr. Anyone will represent them. He will represent them all the better in that he represents no ideas. And it’ll be fine. We’ll make laws, we’ll balance the budget. The laws will mean more chains; the budget will mean new taxes... Slowly the ass went through the streets. Along the way the walls were being covered with posters by members of his committee, while others distributed his proclamations to the crowd: “Think carefully, dear citizens. You know that your representatives are fooling you, have fooled you, will fool you – yet still you go to vote. So vote for me! Elect the ass!...I’m not any dumber than you.” This frankness – a little brutal – wasn’t to everyone’s taste. “We’re being insulted,” some of them said. “Universal suffrage is being mocked,” others more accurately cried out. Someone angrily brandished his fist at the ass and said: “Filthy Jew!” But a sonorous laugh broke out. The candidate was being acclaimed. Bravely, the voters mocked both themselves and their elected representatives. Hats waved, canes. Women threw flowers... The ass passed. He descended from high in Montmartre towards the Latin Quarter. He crossed the Grands Boulevards, le Croissant where, without salt, the stuff is cooked that the gazettes sell. He saw the Halles where the starving – the Sovereign People – glean piles of rubbish; the quays, where the voters choose bridges as lodgings... The heart and the brain! This was Paris! This was democracy! We are all brothers, old vagabonds! Pity the bourgeois! He’s got gout... and he’s your brother, people without bread, man without work, worn out mother who, tonight, will go home tonight to die with the little ones... We are all brothers, young conscript! It’s your brother the officer down there, with his girl’s corset and forehead covered with bars. Salute! Fix bayonets! In line! The Code awaits you – the military code. Twelve bullets in your skin for a gesture. It’s the republican tariff. The ass arrived before the Senate. He rolled alongside the palace, where guards pushed each other on leaving. He continued along the outside (alas!) of the too-green gardens. The he reached the Boulevard St-Michel. On the caf� terraces people clapped. The crowd, ceaselessly growing, grabbed copies of the proclamations. Students hooked themselves to the wagon; a professor pushed the wheels... And as three o’clock sounded, the police appeared. Since 10:00 am, from post to commissariat, the telegraph and the telephone signaled the strange passage of the subversive animal. The order to bring him in was issued: Arrest the ass! Now the city watchmen blocked the candidate’s route. Near the Place St-Michel Worthless’s faithful committee was summoned by the armed forces to bring the candidate to the nearest commissariat. Naturally, the Committee passed over this order: right over the Seine, where the wagon soon stopped in front of the Palace of Justice. More numerous, the policemen surrounded the unmoved ass. The Candidate was arrested at the gate of the Palace of Justice from which Deputies, swindlers and all the great thieves exit as free men. The wagon lurched from the movements of the crowd. The agents, the brigadier in the lead, seized the shafts and put on the breast-harness. The Committee didn’t insist;

The Committee didn’t insist; they harnessed up the policemen. It was thus that the white ass was released by his most fervent partisans. Like a vulgar politician, the animal went in the wrong direction. The police re-attached him, and Authority guided his route...From that moment on, Worthless was nothing but an official candidate. His friends no longer knew him. The Prefecture opened wide its doors, and the ass entered as if it were his home. ...If we speak about this today it’s to let the people know – the people of Paris and the countryside, workers, peasants, bourgeois, proud Citizens, dear lords – that the white ass Worthless has been elected. He has been elected in Paris. He has been elected in the provinces. Add up the blank and the voided ballots, add the abstentions, the voices and the silences that normally gather to signify disgust or contempt. Do some statistics, if you please, and you can easily verify that in all districts the monsieur who is fraudulently proclaimed deputy didn’t receive a quarter of the votes. From this flows the imbecilic locution “relative majority.” You might as well say that at night it’s relatively day. And in this way the incoherent, brutal Universal Suffrage, which is based on number – and doesn’t even have that – will perish in ridicule. In speaking of the elections in France the gazettes of the entire world, without any malice, brought together the two most notable facts of the day: “In the morning, around 9:00, M. Felix Faure went to vote. In the afternoon, at 3:00, the white ass was arrested.” I read this in three hundred newspapers. I was encumbered with clippings from The Argus and the Courrier de la Presse . There were reports in English, Wallachian, Spanish... which I nevertheless understood. Each time that I read Felix Faure, I was sure that they were speaking of the ass. Editor’s note: During the electoral period the poster-program was really pasted up on the walls, and the day of the vote the satirical candidate really traversed Paris, from Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, cutting through the enthusiastic or scandalized crowd that loudly demonstrated. Boulevard du Palais, the ass was duly apprehended by the police, who set themselves to drag him to the pound. As the newspapers of the time reported, if there wasn’t a fight between the ass’s partisans and the representatives of order it’s thanks to the editor of La Feuille who cried out: “Don’t carry on; he’s now an official candidate.” Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1895 A Road Source: La Revue Blanche. First Quarter 1895; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2010. Foreigners everywhere! There aren’t many fewer of them in Paris than in this London where I have vegetated in the vacation of an outlaw for the past three months. Here, for example, you don’t become acclimated, not even superficially. You can’t overcome the natives’ absolute reserve; you don’t in any way penetrate the surrounding environment. You feel you are materially pushed to the side. Isolation weighs on you in the compact sadness of the fog. You frequent the international clubs in vain: they’re disappointing. The solidarity of certain revolutionary groups has the ostentation of charity: it is nothing but a distressing spectacle. And what is more, bad tempered suspicions fly, giving any enthusiasm a cold shower. Accusations are exchanged. Argument and invective win out over discussion. Mistrust rules. You have to return to your room and your solitude. But the little room facing onto the courtyard on the top floor of a gloomy house is cause for nostalgia. You could count the number of exiles who enjoy a comfortable home. The rest unconsciously drag their feet to the area around Whitechapel, down there behind the Tower of London. They wander the poverty-stricken alleys, coming out onto the main streets when the scurrying crowd is leaving the factories and docks and then rises in a tide it would be pleasant to drown in. In the big cities you pass though it’s not the wealthy boulevards or the communal buildings that are the most interesting. You rarely halt during museum visits, since rare are the works of yore that still move us. Monuments only have the beauty of their harmony, and when this proud totality no longer exists they stand there like old stones that a historic memory doesn’t suffice to magnify. But it is still fascinating to seek out the salient traits of a race by making contact with the soul of the people. And you go to the poor quarters, among the shops of the lower professions, in the streets where kids run barefoot, down streets where here and there the vast buildings – popular barracks – looming over leprous mounds, look like giant hives for the wretched. The cells of these hives are narrow, the walls of these hovels are close to each other and have no fireplace. The compressed life of these dumps overflows onto the muddy sidewalks, sometimes livened by a ray of sunlight. When this happens the rushing about is like a commotion of an anthill. Outdoors in the daylight there’s endlessly renewed labor. Pale women wash coarse linen. Potatoes are cooking on heaters whose fire is fanned by for the meal that will later be eaten, seated on wobbly chairs in front of the door. And these people all know each other, they call out to each other, moves, exist in a special lifestyle, with its characteristic usages, determined customs, an original spirit and morals whose brutal side evokes the primitiveness of a type. In London I commonly felt hostility in the gazes that fall on you as if to forbid you from approaching: “Go away!” Every Englishman strangely symbolizes his country. These island dwellers are so many unapproachable islands where the sap of warm colored plants sleeps. It’s so monotonous, it’s so neutral, it’s so gray... and I’ve had enough of it! To leave! It’s not that you delude yourself by dreaming of a fraternal reception under other skies. The outlaw knows that every asylum is uncertain. He knows that he will be as suspect in Geneva as he is in Brussels, in Spain as in Italy. But when you’re tired of sojourning it’s true that you don’t need a goal to set out on the road. To leave, to go anywhere... The voyage! To go, fleeing spleen. In the beginning, every place has its charms. Everything is beautiful for an hour at least. Wisdom resides in not staying. To pass, gleaning impressions, tasting new sensations and the savor of the earth. And then go back on the road, no doubt towards some unreachable fatherland. Vagabond, pilgrim, beggar on a voyage of exploration, of conquest. Unsatisfied, like Don Juan, but with a higher love. The dress you want to tear is the veil on the horizon. The green, deep Thames carries so many adventurous desires along on its waters. After Westminster, after the Tower, after the docks, beyond Blackwell it opens up. The ships glide towards the sea and their whistles are calls you hear with a start. It was in Blackwell that one morning, without any real plan, I took the boat to Holland. If I would have had a few more shillings I would just as well have embarked to see Sweden or take a look at Calcutta. * The crossing from London to Rotterdam lasts a day and a night. The price isn’t very high, fifteen francs for third class. And for a short sea voyage the lowest class is not noticeably worse than first. You enjoy standing contemplating the battle of the waves, and on the open sea watching the sky sink into the waters. All places are the same for this infinite spectacle, forward as well as aft. In any case, third class is imposed on you when all you have is a few louis. This is my case, and my baggage is light and the velvet of my suit is rustic.

This is my case, and my baggage is light and the velvet of my suit is rustic. In third class you meet few people travelling for pleasure. There are nothing but poor people being repatriated, workers hoping to find work far from their city. No tourists. The latter want to be pampered and comfortable. Even the most modest among them. They prefer to wait and swell their savings so they can travel in second class. They embark with their wallets full, holding a roundtrip ticket and coupons for pre-arranged hotels. Not having to rub elbows with them is the immeasurable advantage of traveling third class. The insipid chatter of mighty is nowhere more pitiful that in the majesty of the open sea. It’s as if you’re being pursued... You’re better off with the puerile talk of the passengers in steerage, of the penniless who are free of poses and aren’t afraid to express their na�ve sentiments. None of the irritating drone or the mannered recitation of triumphant commonplaces. They speak of hope and difficulties. And according to the weather and the hour, they give free rein to colorful language. And it also happens that in third class chance gives birth to camaraderie. I went down the Thames in the amiable company of some needy troubadours who paid for their transport by singing the waltzes of their country. Dark heads on supple gypsy bodies of gypsies with boisterous violins. They were returning from a tour around the Scottish countryside. They were emigrating, fleeing winter. Some of them spoke French and told me of their nomadic life. There was beauty and seductiveness in its carefree nature. They simply kept going forward, nothing but sun, fresh air, and music. I wasn’t with them long enough. Seated in the front of the ship, camped on valises while their violins rested in their cloth cases, we distractedly watched the sure-handed functioning of the tugboats and the whimsicality of the sailboats. Fewer factories along the river, lagoons of red earth where sheep grazed on the sparse grass. The Thames widened again. It was Greenwich, and in the evening we felt the waves’ backwash. We’d reached the sea. I didn’t know the strange melody my companions saluted it with. But their instruments, their voices, and the sound of the water harmonized in the rhythm of a lullaby. At night, having had an aperitif of salty air, we were hungry , and they sliced off large chunks of ham and fraternally circulated a whiskey gourd. Upon arriving in Rotterdam we went the next day to an inn at the port. And while they improvised a concert, I went to see the old houses with their stepped roofs, squeaky clean on the canals of this vulgar Venice. The musicians soon told me they were going to stay there for two weeks. That was more than I could do. Good wishes, farewell, handshakes. Not faraway, at its mouth, the Rhine sent me the clean reflection of its old castles. The same pressing desire that had caused me to go down one river pushed me to go up another. The Thames, the Rhine! Isn’t it as if they were the prolongation of a seductive highway? * From the light steamship, sparkling under the sun, we see Patras at the foot of the mountain opposite Missolonghi. On the small square near the port, not far from the market, the scurry of a Sunday. Brightly colored European garb, timeless fashions. Church services were ending. The women’s beautiful faces, lost under the edifices of their hats. Old Greeks in national costumes, the short pleated skirt of a female dancer. And the polychromatic, shimmering crowd, turning like a merry-go-round on the square with its three dusty palm trees. On the terrace of a Moorish caf�, where anisette and “mastic” were served amidst saucers of olives on small, low tables, I piously gave myself over to my first hookah. The light tobacco is slowly consumed in the red clay chimney under the scented coal, while in the carafe with its copper armature the water purrs its strange gluggings. The hookah stands hieratically and the long tube with its triangular amber tip unfurls like the rings of some sacred serpent. It’s quite a change from rotgut whiskey. And I have to say that from the decorative point of view there is an analogous difference between the men of that country and the inhabitants of ours. These Greeks show signs of their pedigree. The least turkey farmer has the inbred distinction that our swells seek in vain. With his delicate features, even the peasant preserves the aristocratic imprint that imperiously expresses the glorious line of his ancestors. Their proud bearing and this whimsicality in attire explain the laisser-aller that you note in the carrying out of daily tasks. Commerce doesn’t enthuse them, and their agriculture is strange. In fields I saw potatoes and lilies mixed together in the barbarous furrows. The train I took to Athens on a bright sunny morning stopped at every single station. Constantly getting on, getting off, renewing themselves, there were peasants snacking on coarse bread and eating goat cheese to pass the short trip. Priests and longhaired beggars filling their pockets travel from here to the next village, along with poorly dressed soldiers singing strange nasal tunes. Tourists in their sleeping cars have no idea how well you get to know a people through a prolonged stay in a vulgar passenger car, and to what extent it allows you to enter into contact with them. A klepht [1] goes to the city to stock up on gunpowder. Seated in a corner of the wagon he seems to isolate himself, his pistol butts forming commas on his leather belt. He has both the burnoose and the hardiness of a Kabyle.

He has both the burnoose and the hardiness of a Kabyle. You see more and more similarities between Arabs and Greeks. The free mountain man – shepherd, hunter, perhaps “collector of indirect taxation from strolling rich men” – possesses the tranquil majesty of a qadi [2] after a razzia [3]. Here, on the arid plains of Megara, where the houses are cabins of red clay, you would almost think you were under the scorched trees of a Saharan oasis. The d�cor changes. Having gone around a hill, Athens is in view. Standing over the styleless buildings of a provincial city geometrically sliced up by the layout of the streets, stands the rock of the Acropolis, the pedestal of the Parthenon. The Parthenon stands out in the impeccability of its serene columns, and the Acropolis looks like the final entrenchment of a haughty past, disdainful of the modern effort eating away at its base. It’s not that I exalt the vestiges of a vanished world. It’s that I tell myself that our world will leave nothing but refuse. I am a stranger to the emotional respect of archeologists before antique stones. The stadium led me to reminisce. Illisus made me think less of the Argonauts than of college, of homework, of teachers. College. The first prison. Academic Procrustean bed, a training for the barracks, a miniature society so ugly that it is the seed of Society. And anyway, how can you isolate yourself, bring the past back to life, imagine warriors and chariots in these arenas alongside the tramway? How can you dream of paganism in these temples rising from archeological digs where Orthodox tapers have religiously daubed Holy Virgins as their vestals? I don’t accompany the Englishmen who stroll with their Baedeker, swooning at the sight of shapeless blocks for the sole reason that this debris is catalogued in their guidebook. They don’t miss a single piece of debris, not a single mutilated drawing. They drag their hands over the mosaics in the baths: Socrates passed here! I don’t frequent clinical museums: venerable pieces of statues, arm of Venus, leg of Apollo, labeled torso: all of surgical Greece. As much as I appreciate those primitive works in which the essential is harmonious, which are triumphant in the esthetic of synthesis, to the same extent the race of amateurs digging into piles of illustrious crumbs appears to me grotesque. Amphora handles, brick shards, poor crumbs under glass... The sight of a stone floating down a stream in its eternal vagabondage inspires more thoughts in me. I had arrived in Athens in distress. I hoped to find a letter at the post office. Nothing. I had to wait several days. At the doors of restaurants I melancholically contemplated the little suckling pigs grilling in the most joyful poses and satisfied myself with small portions in suburban greasy spoons. Did I get to eat the finest foods of Greek antiquity? In any case I remembered the philosophers who once slept on the temple porch. One evening I went to the Parthenon and only came down the next morning. I will say in support of the renown of this client-free asylum that for morning soup we enjoyed a unique feast: the awakening of a golden countryside at the feet of Mount Hymette. 1. Greek bandit 2. Muslim judge 3. Raid Zo d'Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1895 Without a Goal Source: Zo d’Axa, De Mazas a J�rusalem. Chamuel, Paris, 1895; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. “Wait a minute then,” people say, “what is their goal?” And the benevolent questioner suppresses a shrug upon noting that there are young men refractory to the usages, laws and demands of current society, and who nevertheless don’t affirm a program. “What do they hope for?” If at least these nay-sayers without a credo had the excuse of being fanatics. And no, faith no longer wants to be blind. They discuss, they stumble, they search. Pitiful tactic! These skirmishers of the social battle, these flagless ones are so aberrant as to not proclaim that they have the formula for the universal panacea, the only one! Mangin had more wit... “And I ask you: what they seeking for themselves?” Let’s not even talk about it. They don’t seek mandates, positions or delegations of any kind. They aren’t candidates. Then what? Don’t make me laugh. They are held in the appropriate disdain, a disdain mixed with commiseration. I too suffer from that underestimation. There are a few of us who feel that we can barely glimpse the future truths. Nothing attaches us to the past, but the future hasn’t yet become clear. And so we carry on, as misunderstood as foreigners, and it’s both here and there, it’s everywhere that we are foreigners. Why? Because we don’t want to recite new catechisms, and we especially don’t want to pretend to believe in the infallibility of doctrines. We would need to possess a vile form of complacency to admit a group of theories without reserve. And we are not that complacent. There has been no Revelation. We are keeping our enthusiasm virgin for a fervor. Will it come? And even if the final term escapes us, we won’t skimp on our work. Our era is a transitional one, and the free man has his role to play. Authoritarian society is odious to us, and we are preparing the experiment of a libertarian society. Uncertain of its results, we nevertheless long for the attempt, the change. Instead of stagnating in this aging world where the air is heavy, where the ruins crumble as if to bury us, we hasten to the final demolition. To do so is to hasten a Renaissance. Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1892 A Sure Means to Pluck Joy Immediately: Destroy Passionately Source: L’En-Dehors; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005. The Bourse, the Palace of Justice, and the Chamber of Deputies are buildings of which there has been much talk these past few days. These three buildings had been especially threatened by three young men who were fortunately stopped just in time. Nothing can be hidden from messieurs journalists; they revealed the triple conspiracy, and their colleagues in the prefecture immediately apprehended the conspirators. One again the men of the press and the police have earned the gratitude of that part of the population that doesn’t yet appreciate the picturesque charm of palaces in ruin, and the strange beauty of collapsed buildings. The public won’t be sparing in its thanks. The services rendered will be recognized with solid cash. Civic virtues must be encouraged. Secret funds will dance, and the cotillion will be led by society’s saviors. All the better! For it is edifying to note that if there are, among our adversaries, a small number of clever exploiters, the great mass of them is made up of imbeciles who push the limits of naivet� to the horizon. How could these uncouth ones believe that the anarchists thought to blow up parliament at this moment? At a time when the deputies are on vacation! You have to be lower than the low to think that revolutionaries would choose such a moment. If only for the sake of common courtesy, we would wait for everyone’s return after the vacation season. Nevertheless, the other morning the storekeepers of Paris, while straightening up their goods, said to themselves, with their robust good sense: “There’s not the least chance of error. They want to undermine the foundation of our centuries-old monuments. We are confronted with a new plot.” Come, come, brave storekeepers! You wander on the plains of the absurd. This conspiracy you speak of isn’t new. If it’s a question of tearing down the worm-eaten edifices of the society we hate, well, this has been in preparation for a long time. This is what we have always plotted. The temple of the Bourse – where the faithful Catholics and the fervent Jews hold their meetings for the rites and things of petty commerce – the temple of the Bourse must, in fact, disappear, and soon. The money-handlers will in their turn be handled by the heavy caress of the crumbling stones. Then the game of the Bourse will no longer be played; those skillful strokes that bring millions to corporations – whose reason for being is to speculate on wheat and to organize famines – will be no more. Those who work behind the scenes: the brokers, all the bankers – gold’s priests – will sleep their last sleep beneath the ruins of their temple. In this reposeful position the financiers will be pleasing to us. As for the magistrates, it’s well known that they are never so handsome as when they march towards death. It’s a real pleasure to see them. History is full of striking sketches in honor of prosecutors and judges who the people, from time to time, made suffer. It must be admitted these men had a decorative agony. And what a superb spectacle it would be: a commotion at the Palace of Justice. Quesnay constrained by a column that will have broken his vertebrae, trying hard to assume the look of a Beaurepaire struck down during the Crusades; Cabot, quoting Balzac with his dying breath; and Anquetil, next to the witty Croupi, crying out: “Nothing is lost...we lay below our positions.” The scene would have such grandeur that the good souls that we are would sincerely feel bad for the defeated. We would no longer want to remember the ignominy of the red robes – dyed with the blood of the poor. We will forget that the judiciary was cowardly and cruel. It will be the ineffable pardon. And if Atthalin himself – this specialist in political trials – his head slightly cracked, were to ask to be taken to a rest home, we would gallantly accede to this sick man’s wish. In truth, it isn’t indispensable to feel oneself an anarchist to be seduced by the coming demolitions. All those who society flagellates in the very intimacy of their being instinctively want vengeance. A thousand institutions of the old world are marked with a fatal sign. Those affiliated with the plot have no need to hope for a distant better future; they know a sure means to pluck joy immediately: Destroy passionately! Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1896 Us Source: L’En-Dehors 1896; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. They talk of anarchy. The dailies are roused. Comrades are interviewed and “L’�clair” among other things, says that there is a split among the anarchists. It’s on the matter of theft that opinions are divided. Some, it is said, want to build it into a principle; others irrevocably condemn it. Well! It would be impossible for us to take a position on such a question. This theft could seem to us good and should be approved; that one we could find violently repugnant. There is no Absolute. If the facts lead us today to specify such and such a way to see and be, every day, in the lively articles of our expressive collaborators, our determination has been clearly affirmed: Neither in a party or a group. Outside. We go our way — individuals, without the Faith that saves and blinds. Our disgust with society doesn’t engender in us any immutable convictions. We fight for the joy of the battle, and without any dream of a better future. What do we care about tomorrows that won’t come for centuries! What do we care about our grand-nephews! We are outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories — even anarchist; it’s from this instant — right away — that we want to surrender to our pity, our outbursts, our gentleness, our rages, our instincts — with the pride of being ourselves. Up till now nothing has revealed to us the radiant beyond. Nothing has given us a constant criterion. Life’s panorama changes without ceasing, and the facts appear to us under a different light depending on the hour. We will never react against the attractions of contradictory points of view. It is simple. The echo of vibrant sensations resounds here. And if impetuosity disorients by its unexpectedness, it’s because we speak of the things of our time as would primitive barbarians who have suddenly fallen among them. Theft! It would never occur to us to pose us judges. There are thieves who displease us : that’s certain; and that we’d attack : that’s probable. But that would be for their allure rather than for the brute fact. We will not put in play eternal Truth — with a capital T. It’s a matter of impression. A hunchback could displease me more than an amiable recidivist. Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1896 The Case of the Dog Source: L’En-Dehors, 1896; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. It almost happened that the Commissariat of Clichy – this police office that has served as the backdrop for legendary cases of the third degree – met its end in an apotheosis of dynamite. Two cute little bombs of red copper had been placed in a corridor leading to the Superintendent’s office; the fuses had been lit ... everything was going along beautifully, from the special point of view of the depositor arguing for the purification of the place, when a dog, the dog of the dog of a Superintendent, noticed the al giorno lighting and began vociferating. It was thus that the alarm was sounded. He barked; he barked and someone came in enough time to extinguish the threatening illumination. It should be noted that, since the geese of the Capitol, there have always been animals that get involved in things that don’t concern them. The vile beasts – this is an image – always cry out: “Watch out!” at the least tumult. In all fairness, I’d like to specify that the dog’s case can be pleaded: whatever the dishonorable function of his master, this faithful quadruped seeks to protect him. One should appreciate a devotion so total, and not cast solemn blame on the puppy who prevented things from totally blowing up. In any case, it’s optional to fear that that the people of the commissariat of Clichy – those worthy representatives of authority who, on May 1 and July 14, conquered a bloody reputation as executioners in the suburbs- only stepped back in order to be better blown up ... Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1898 The Honest Worker Source: La Feuille, No. 24, 1898; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2007. It’s the amazing fattening of the mass of the exploited that creates the increasing and logical ambition of the exploiters. The kings of the mines, of the coalfields, and of gold would be wrong to worry. Their serfs’ resignation consecrates their authority. They no longer needs to claim that their power is be based on divine right, that decorative joke: their sovereignty is legitimated by popular consent. A workers’ plebiscite, consisting of patriotic adherence, declamatory platitudes or silent acquiescence assures the boss’s hold and the bourgeoisie’s reign. In this work we can recognize the artisan. Be it in the mine or the factory, the Honest Worker, that sheep, has given the herd the mange. The ideal of the supervisor has perverted the instincts of the people. A sports coat on Sunday, talking politics, voting...these are the hopes that take the place of everything. Odious daily labor awakens neither hatred nor rancor. The great party of the workers hates the lazybones who badly earns the money granted him by the boss. Their heart belongs to their job. They’re proud of their calloused hands. However deformed the fingers, the yoke has done worse to the brain: the bumps of resignation, of cowardice, of respect have grown under the leather with the rubbing of the harness. Vain old workers wave their certificates: forty years in the same place! We hear them telling about this as they beg for bread in the courtyards. “Have pity, ladies and gentlemen, on a sick old man, a brave worker, a good Frenchman, a former non-commissioned officer who fought in the war...Have pity, ladies and gentlemen. It is cold: the windows remain closed. The old man doesn’t understand. Teach the people! What else is needed? His poverty has taught him nothing. As long as there are rich and poor the latter will hitch themselves up so as to fill the service demanded. The worker’s neck is used to the harness. When still young and strong they are the only domestic beasts to not run wild in their shafts. The proletarian’s special honor consists in accepting all those lies in whose name he is condemned to forced labor: duty, fatherland, etc. He accepts, hoping that by doing this he will raise himself into the bourgeois class. The victim makes himself an accomplice. The unfortunate talks of the flag, beats his chest, take of his cap and spits in the air: “I’m an honest worker.” And it falls right back onto his face. Zo d'Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1895 In the Wings Source: De Mazas � Jerusalem, Paris 1895; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. The police roundup of April, [18]92 will remain historic. It is the earliest among the cynical attacks on freedom of thought in modern times. We now know the behind the scenes story of the affair. The government wanted to take advantage of the emotions stirred up by the explosions at the Labau barracks and on the Rue de Clichy in order to include all revolutionary militants in one gigantic political trial. The ministry and its docile procurators claimed that certain opinions constituted complicity: The writer explaining that the fact that there are those who are disinherited fatally leads to theft became a criminal himself; a thinker explaining the reasons behind propaganda of the deed became the secret associates of the lighters of the tragic fuses. The philosopher no longer has the right to preach indulgence and to conceive facts without vertigo. Society rid itself of those of its members who are so corrupted as to want it to be better than it is. Ruling reaction could finally enjoy in peace and lets its remorse sleep- or at the very least its doubts, which will no longer be kept awake by the words of party-poopers. The moment was carefully chosen. The dynamite attacks terrorized the capitalist bourgeoisie, more frightened perhaps for its real estate than for itself. It was the eve of the threatening demonstrations of May. They were afraid. And the cowardly crowd would surely have applauded every summary execution. The roundups took place. Particularly aimed at the anarchists, these arrests also fell on men so independent as to reject every label, even that of anarchist. And so it was that I was apprehended, though I’ve never set foot in a public meeting or frequented any groups. Though I wasn’t part of any sect or school, was ON THE OUTSIDE, i.e., isolated, a seeker of the beyond, a shaker-up of ideas, that was enough. If lack of respect was truly combative, that sufficed. All agitation had to cease. One evil-doer the less: I was arrested. Perfidiously conducted, the affair was cloaked in a legal appearance. The code is so elastic that they applied to us article 265 and those that follow it, aimed at associations of malefactors. “Art. 266. This crime exists by the sole fact of the organization of bands or the correspondence between them and their chiefs or commandants, or of conventions tending to account for or distribute or share the products of crime.” Now do we understand the insinuations of the judge who spoke about a “list of addresses” and “the sending of money?” “Art. 267. Even if this crime is not accompanied by any others the authors, directors of the association and the commanders in chief or the subaltern of these bands shall be punished with forced labor.” The delightful prospect of the penal colony opened before us. It is obvious that we couldn’t count on the impartiality of the judges. The orders had been given. Even if we could prove not only that we weren’t cut-purses, but that no organization among us existed – not even from a political point of view – the tribunals would strike us without a care. One point alone was put in doubt. In order for the operation to succeed it was indispensable that the other nations put their refractory nationals through an analogous trial. But what the French Republic premeditated, Holland, England and Germany were too ashamed to do. The old monarchies didn’t cede to the incitement of a young republic that dreamed of reconstituting the International in reverse. There were unsuccessful negotiations. The hunt of the free man wasn’t decreed throughout Europe. Our fallen democracy felt that it couldn’t do worse than the worst autocrats. The opportunist government hesitated, became embarrassed, like a poorly hardened rogue – and didn’t dare push things to the bitter end. That day it said to itself: game postponed! Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d'Axa Archive Any Opportunity Written: Unknown. Source: Text from RevoltLib.com. Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021 When you go your own way, alone, you take any opportunity to delight in saying what the average person wouldn’t dare. Concern for edifying neighbors or gossips is over. No more morality! No more games! Enough of partisan-traps...To the argument of the masses, to the catechisms of the crowds, to all of the community’s national interests: to these are opposed the Individual’s personal interests. Which interests? To each their own. The isolated one is careful not to preach a common rule. The defiant makes no place for a doctrine. Think for yourself! What is your situation? Your age? Your desire? Your strength? Do you need the crutches religion offers you? If so, go back to your church, from now on by your own choice, validated. Do you prefer, still a disciple, the sociologists’ dream? Fine then, tell us your plans for the year two thousand. Or rather, are you feeling insolent? So you want to live? Are you ready? Well quit waiting on somebody, go where your hatred, your joys, carry you—the joys of complete openness, of dangers and of dignity. One marches, acts, aims, because of a combative instinct, a nostalgic sleep makes you prefer the fight. Fully aware of the limits of the code, you poach the big game: officers and judges, deer and carnivores; you flush out the herds of politicians from the forests of Bondy; you’re happy to grab a ravaging financier by the collar; at all the intersections; you release the domesticated tribe of authors and writers, furry and feathered alike, defilers of ideas, terrors of the press and the police. With the quarrels between sects, races, and parties, every day, by the chance of events and shots to be taken, it becomes clear: Dreyfus Affair![1] Read all about it! or the way of describing the Magistra-ture and the Army as they deserve it.... Let us celebrate the ermine and the madder! The conscious destroyers don’t specialize: in turns, according to the situation, they point right or they point left. At the same time, l’esprit de corps will produce great results: the magistrates, the military, the suits, the liveries, all of the servants of Society badmouth the old madam. An office full of rumors goes sour. The robes,[2] rabbis and curés, the officiators, the officials and the officers, the accomplices in the antechamber juggle objects of worship. They scandalize the believers. Doubt will unstitch their eyelids. In a few months the child-people will be shocked to find that they hid “things” from them... Now confidence is dead: the bad shepherds killed it. Near the smashed flagpole, the scales of justice lie there like scrap iron next to the wood pile... It’s in vain that, with the crisis over, the junk traders of the Fatherland try to fix anything. This practice will become increasingly rare. The farce of a France signifying, among nations, prog-ress or generosity won’t fool too many onlookers: never has there been a tribe more persistent in keeping mankind at the whipping post. Moreover, it’s only with contradiction that one buys the legend of Dreyfusism any more—such a spectacle of real Truth. The nude woman before the mirror sees far too little in her glass. She sings the praises of legality, forgetting that they legally shoot conscripts convicted of a simple gesture; and that also legally, in our streets, on winter nights, men and little children die in front of closed doors. Down with these closed doors—the worst! As for these necessary revisions, the beautiful lady won’t say a word about them. Always the big words: law, duty, honor, public safety—ring out in every clan, under oppos-ing banners. They use sensationalist words. It’s military music, a church song, the various couplets of a public gathering. Those men who don’t get enlisted turn their nose up at sensationalist words.Not serving in the camps, they save their passionate loyalty in the fight for the right word and the precise blow. One leadership can’t count on them any more than another. They despise diplomacy, tactics, hesitations. They are suspect: in every camp, naturally, they are viewed as loose cannons. They leave the soldiers’ pay, the stripes, and the new lies to others. It’s a lie to continue to promise, after so many promises. The prophets and the pontiffs, the preachers, and the utopians hoodwink us and show us, off in the distance, an era of love. We’ll be dead: the promised land is the one in which we will rot. What reason, what motives are there to hypnotize ourselves? No more mirages! We want—and by all possible means, disrespectful by na-ture of laws and prejudices, we want—immediately—to conquer all the fruits and flowers that life has to offer. If later a revolution results from scattered efforts—so much the better! That would be good. Impatient, we will have preceded it. So continue to declaim, good sirs, if it pleases you. And you, professionals, if it pleases you, cry over Society. But another grown-up, France, it seems, is also sick. Let’s not doubt it, it’s serious. Two abstractions are better than one. So go on then! Into the face of peril! Conspiracy here... cor-ruption there!

cor-ruption there! Let’s hunt down the jew “who is bringing us ruin and dishonoring us.” Let’s expel the congregationalists. Flamidien! Dreyfus! What’s next? For the République! For Society! Long live Loubet! yada, yada, Panamada.[3] The more French the merrier. I say that in fact a fifteen year old boy who recruitment officers, hall monitors, and headmas-ters haven’t yet stupefied would be more upright than any voter. It’s all so clear. What’s happening? Nothing. A toppling society, a people drowning itself... this is of no importance: The individual will reach the riverbank. Standing on the solid ground that his efforts can achieve, the Escapee from social drudger-ies no longer falls into old dreams. The experiments have all been done. We’ve all seen that, barely freed from the kneeling folly of the priest, men accept the duperies of patriotism en bloc. In the name of new principles, they take that age-old yoke right back. Slavery was secularized, the yoke painted in three colors. No matter the dogma! In truth, it’s just a government procedure. They slightly adjust it to the people’s taste. But the colors quickly fade. They speak of humanity, of one family... Watch out! In honor of this family, they prepare to rig it again! And this individual I refer to, the one who knows, the one who thinks, the Escapee of social drudgeries, the one who no longer boards the bedecked ships of religion and fatherland, will not heedlessly disembark on the humanitarian rafts of the Medusa.[4] Have you understood, citizen? The notion of revolt, in this way, is not just some mania, a new faith meant to again trump your appetites and desires. It’s the individual energy to defend oneself against the masses. It’s the willful arrogance to live. It’s the art of going on one’s own— Endehors—you only have to dare! At every opportunity, in these feuilles, such a way of feeling and being emerges. The sparking events, clashing like flint, shed light on facets of the question along the way. And lighthearted or serious, these feuilles follow, cohere, and complement, in accordance with the formal scenario of Life, ever-vivid. [1] Tr—The Dreyfus Affair is discussed in introductory materials elsewhere in this volume. D’axa makes frequent references to (and word play on) various scandals and events of the time. [2] Tr—Robins is derogatory slang for the magistrature, meaning ‘robed ones. [3] Tr—D’Axa uses a bit of wordplay here; in place of the phrase et patati et patata, meaning ‘etc.,’ he writes et patati et Panama. This is a reference to the Panama scandals of the 1890s, in which the French government wasted nearly a billion francs. Newspapers used similar nonsensical wordplay during the scandals. [4] Tr—“The Raft of the Medusa” is a famous painting depicting the tragic wreck of the Méduse. It became a symbol of French Romanticism, dramatically featuring desperate passengers crashing onto a rocky shore atop a dilapidated raft. Leading the boat is a man waving a handkerchief, suggesting a flag. Zo d'Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1898 You Are Nothing But Suckers Source: La Feuille; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004. The following is a document from La Feuille’s campaign to run a ass named Worthless for the Chamber of Deputies VOTERS: In presenting myself for your votes, I owe you a few words. Here they are: I come from an old French family – I dare to say – and am a pedigreed ass, anass in the good sense of the word: four paws and hair all over. My name is Worthless, which is what my competitors in this race are. I am white, as are many of the votes that have been cast and not counted, but which will now belong to me. My election is assured. You will understand that I speak frankly. CITIZENS: You are being fooled. It is said that the last Chamber, made up of imbeciles and thieves, didn’t represent the majority of voters. This is false. On the contrary, a Chamber made up of deputies who are ninnies and thieves perfectly represents the voters you are. Don’t protest; a nation has the delegates it deserves. Why did you elect them? Amongst yourselves you don’t hesitate to say that the more things change the more they remain the same; that your representatives mock you and think only of their own interests, of vainglory, or of money. So why would you elect them again tomorrow? You know full well that the whole lot of those you would send to the legislature would sell their votes for a check, and would sell jobs, functions and tobacco offices. But who are the tobacco offices, positions and sinecures for if not the Electoral Committees that are also paid? The shepherds of the Committees are less na�ve than the flock. The Chamber represents the whole. Idiots and crafty devils are needed; a parliament of old fools and Robert Macaires [1] is needed to embody at one and the same time professional voters and depressed workers. And that’s what you are! You are being fooled, good voters, you are being deceived and fawned over when you are told that you are handsome, that you are justice itself, law, national sovereignty, the people-king, free men...Your votes are bought like at a candy store, and you are the candy...Suckers. You continue to be fooled. You are told that France is still France. This isn’t true. With each passing day France loses all meaning in the world, all liberal meaning. It is no longer a hardy, risk-taking, idea-spreading, cult-smashing country. It’s Marianne kneeling before the throne of autocrats. It’s corporalisme reborn more hypocritically than in Germany: a tonsure under the kepi. You are being fooled, fooled without cease. They talk to you about fraternity, and never has the struggle for bread been sharper or more deadly. They talk to you – you who have nothing – about patriotism and our sacred patrimony. They talk to you about integrity, and it’s the pirates of the press, the journalists ready to do anything, the master deceivers and blackmailers who sing of national honor. The supporters of the Republic, the petit-bourgeois, the little lords are tougher on the “rogues” than the masters of the former regimes. We live under the supervisors’ eye. The weakened workers – the producers who consume nothing – content themselves with patiently sucking at the bone without marrow that is thrown to them, the bone of universal suffrage. And it’s only to tell stories, to engage in electoral discussions, that they move their jaws, the jaws that no longer know how to bite. And when, on occasion, the children of the people shake themselves from their torpor they find themselves, like at Fourmies,[2] face to face with our brave army...and the reasoning of the Lebel guns puts lead in their heads. Justice is the same for all. The honorable thieves of Panama travel in carriages and don’t know the cart. But handcuffs squeeze the wrists of the old workers who are arrested as vagabonds. The ignominy of the present moment is such that no candidate dares defend this society. The bourgeois-leaning politicians: the reactionaries, the liberals, the masks, the false noses, the republicans, cry out that in voting for them things will work better, things will work well. Those who have already taken everything from you ask for still more. Give your votes, Citizens! The beggars, the candidates, the thieves, the vote-squeezers all have a special way to make and re-make the Public Good. Listen to the brave workers, the party quacks; they want to conquer power...in order to better suppress it. Others invoke the Revolution, and they fool themselves while fooling you. Voters will never make the Revolution. Universal suffrage was created precisely to prevent virile action. Charley has a good time voting... And even if some incident drew men onto the streets; and even if by some strong act a group went into action, what could we wait and hope for of the crowd we see swarming about, the cowardly and empty-headed crowd? Allez! Go ahead men of the crowd! Go ahead, voters! To the urns...and don’t complain. It’s enough. Don’t try to inspire pity because of the fate you imposed upon yourselves. Afterwards don’t insult the Masters that you gave yourselves. These masters are your equals as they steal from you. They are doubtless worth more: they’re worth 25 francs a day, not counting their small profit. And this is very good. The voter is nothing but a failed candidate. The little people – of small savings and small hopes, rapacious small merchants, slow-moving domestic folk – need a mediocre parliament that will mint and synthesize all that is vile in the nation. So vote, voters! Vote! Parliaments emanate from you. A thing is because it must be, because it can’t be otherwise. Put in place a Chamber in your image. A dog returns to its vomit. Return to your deputies.... 1. Character of a bandit in a popular play by Frederic Lemaitre. 2. Site of a May Day rally in 1891 that was brutally put down by the army. Zo d’Axa Archive

Zo d’Axa 1895 Little Girls Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005. Little girls were judged this afternoon in Milan. And it wasn’t the sad trial – in absentia, of course – of a child caught on a bench with a stiff magistrate. I watched the questioning as it unfolded. It concerned an anarchist demonstration where, among resolute men and hardy women, two young girls of fourteen and fifteen were arrested. The dark Maria had a strange charm, with her decisive air of a rascally young man, with her short curly hair, and her dark, fiery eyes. She had a way of looking at these messieurs of the court that was a form of silent, indefinable insolence – it worked better than throwing a shoe. And when she spoke it wasn’t at all in a way that would make one smile. Her short phrases had meaning and were accentuated by sure gestures. “How can you talk about anarchy?” the judge muttered, “You don’t even know what it is.” “And you have studied anarchy more closely? So it exists. Will you teach me about it?” No, little one, they won’t teach you anything! Revolt is instinctual. And theory is too often puerile. You know everything if you feel how filthy it is too live this bestial life. Ernesta Quartirola, a year younger, has an equally characteristic beauty. Her nascent beauty is serious, enigmatic. And she could be a proud statue of the future signifying...who knows what. Her silence is haughty. She makes it seem as if it has nothing to do with her. A yes, a no, a shrug of the shoulders and that’s all. But the dark Maria, Maria Roda, with her defiant attitude, doesn’t allow the parade of prosecution witnesses to continue their uninterrupted march. Her replies indicate the halts. She set loose a chain of insults about the shameful informers and professional squealers. She has a riposte for each of them. A riposte that reaches its mark. An agent of the Pubblica Sicurezza recites his learned lesson against her. Miss Roda encouraged the demonstrators to rush the police, she carried on like she was possessed, she shouted at everyone, she even insulted the brigadier! “What is your answer?” the president admonished her. “I pity this guard. I pity him because he barely earns his bread, because he’s a poor devil. But it impresses me to see him go after other poor devils, his brothers...let him think about this.” And with a gesture of grace towards the miserable one who had just accused her, she perhaps had just thrown a first revealing ray upon this dark spirit. This is how the sisters of our companions showed themselves, they who are of an age when others have barely stopped playing with dolls, or when the daughters of bourgeois begin to amuse themselves in games of love with little cousins or some elderly friend of the family. Prison was imposed. The men of the court were generous. Ernesta and Maria will know three months of jail – and the little ones must also pay a fine to these messieurs. Three hundred francs demanded from poor little girls! It’s cynical, but that’s the way it is ... A moment before the Tribunal retired to consider the condemnation, the man in red said to Maria: “Do you have anything to add?” “Nothing, since it would be pointless.” And that was the final word. Not gay, but flagellant. It is said over and over that Milan is a little Paris. The magistrates of Milan prove this, at least on one point; they are every bit as repugnant as their Parisian confreres. And anyway, isn’t the magistracy the same everywhere? And could it be otherwise? And this is probably even the reason that wherever you go the memory of the fatherland follows you. It comes upon you like nausea when you see the vileness of a judge. Zo d'Axa Archive

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Birmingham Six Injustice seen to be done (April 1991) From Socialist Worker Review, No.141, April 1991, p.14. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. YOU HAVE to go back to Cromwell to find a precedent for last month’s astonishing House of Commons motion calling for the sacking of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane. The motion, which was signed by several Tories, and former leaders of the Liberal and Labour Parties, caused a predictable uproar, but even the most ardent defenders of Lord Lane were a trifle embarrassed. They pretended that the judges throughout the Birmingham Six case had been impartial. A glance at Mr Justice Bridge’s summing up in the first trial of the six quickly disposed of that argument. He openly bragged about his bias against the defence, and his onslaught on the unfortunate forensic expert who dared to point out that the Greiss test for explosives was riddled with doubt has become legendary. Another glance at the summing up of the six’s appeal in January 1988 shows Lane and his two colleagues judging the case by the simple device of believing prosecution witnesses and disbelieving witnesses for the defence. The crude and offensive way in which this was done led to the ferocious counter-attack on the judges by liberal journalists like Robert Kee and Ludovic Kennedy. The defenders of the judges were therefore driven back to their last redoubt: the ‘independence of the judiciary.’ ‘Upon this rock,’ said the Lord Chancellor, ‘rests the entire rule of law.’ This is so often accepted without argument that it is worth asking: exactly what are the judges independent from? The answer comes back that they are independent from the government. The most formidable barriers are erected round the judges to protect them not just from the government but from society as a whole. They are paid enormous salaries, spiced with every kind of perk, from free transport to free lodgings when they are ‘out of town.’ They work a 25 hour week (at most). They don’t have to retire until 75 and even then they can come out of retirement to judge important cases in their dotage. They are recruited exclusively from the Bar. When the Lord Chancellor recently suggested that this monopoly might be broken, he was greeted with a storm of abuse and even a judges’ strike. Lord Lane told the House of Lords that proposals to end the monopoly were the worst threat to British freedom since Hitler. The world in which the judges live and converse is more exclusive than the most ridiculous gentleman’s club or the most secretive Masonic Lodge. Their ‘independence’ from society and parliament thus assured, the judges remain deeply dependent and loyal to their class – those that aren’t are swiftly trained to behave as if they are. They are almost all deeply reactionary people for whom the slightest whisper of challenge or dissent – or even of an investigative solicitor – calls up phantoms of Wat Tyler. The judges’ deep sense of class makes them quite absurdly loyal to the hierarchical system which operates under them – and particularly to the police force. It is not simply that the word of a police officer is always in their eyes preferable to the word of a citizen. It is that, in the interests of the judges’ justice, where the police go wrong it is far better to uphold the behaviour of the police than it is to expose the fact that they have gone wrong. Lord Lane and senior judges have warned the Tory government that if they give an inch to the protesters after Birmingham and Guildford, they will be ushering in the revolution. The judges will fight to the death to preserve every inch of their ‘independence’ (irresponsibility). But wiser class warriors are urging caution. It is not a good thing for ruling class stability if everyone to the left of Bernard Levin (about 80 percent of the population) think the judges are incompetent and that police evidence is likely to be fabricated. Nor is it healthy for their class that so many judges were involved in the long string of recent celebrated injustices. The crusted Tory Donaldson (Master of the Rolls) was deeply implicated in the Guildford Four scandal. Lane, O’Connor, Stephen Brown – the three judges who just three years ago said the Birmingham Six were obviously guilty – are all senior men. New judges like Igor Judge and Stephen Mitchell are also implicated in injustices. Judge prosecuted the four men wrongly convicted of killing the newspaper boy, Carl Bridgewater. Lane refused leave to appeal in that case, and, seven years later, his close friend Lord Justice Russell dismissed the men’s appeal despite a huge mountain of new evidence which plainly exculpated the convicted men. A Royal Commission is a convenient way to push the boat out into still waters for several months while the argument goes on. In the interim Lane and some of his henchmen will slip quietly from the scene to be flattered and eulogised into retirement. The Commission, which has some clout, may recommend some changes in the administration of justice to pull down some of the barriers behind which the judges have done such terrible deeds. The Bar’s monopoly may finally go. There will be a few minor reforms, as there have been, for instance, in the field of confessions. But the aim of the reforms will not be to democratise the judiciary or to make it more responsible to the public. The ‘independence of the judiciary’ and the ‘rule of law’ will be kept firmly in the hands of the ruling class. The basic prejudices in favour of the police and against the people they arrest, especially if those arrested have in any way threatened the property rights of the rich, will be as fiercely protected as ever. The principle behind the Royal Commission reforms will be that injustice must go on being done, but it should not be seen to be done quite so clearly. Top of the page Last updated on 30.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Labour Left’s Brightest Star (March 1980) First published in Books and Bookmen. Reprinted in Socialist Review, 1980 : 3, 22 March–18 April 1980, pp. 18&ndash:19. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. As this issue of Socialist Review is being printed, the contradicting claims of revolutionary socialism and left reformist socialism are due to be argued out in London at what its organisers have called The Debate of the Decade. Leading off for the reformists will be Tony Benn and for the revolutionaries, Paul Foot, of the SWP. As a prelude to the debate Paul has looked at Benn’s latest book, Arguments for Socialism (edited by Chris Mullin. Cape £5.95). Rich and powerful people have always cherished their bogeymen. They like to reduce what Marx and Engels called “the spectre of communism” to human shape: to a personality who can be pilloried in their Press and patronised at their table. For the unfortunates who get singled out for this honour, life is hard. The assailants are well-practised in the art of character assassination and blackmail. Every public statement of their prey, however harmless, can rapidly be translated into the language of someone who rapes nuns on Fridays and nationalises a bank every day before breakfast. Tony Benn has played the role of chief bogeyman for the rich men of Britain for a good time now. He has been treated perhaps more shamefully even then his predecessors in the Parliamentary Labour Left, men like John Wheatley. George Lansbury and Aneurin Bevan. In the past year, the abuse has risen to a crescendo, deafening even his most tenacious attempts to argue back. Yet its effect is not all as intended. For as the society splits wider apart, so the abuse from the halls of the powerful boosts their bogeyman’s radical and socialist credentials. The more the Press yelp at Tony Benn. the more sympathy he gets from shop stewards and workers. This support can be seen not so much in the votes at Labour Party conferences as in the enthusiastic receptions which Tony Benn gets at shop stewards and combine committee meetings. Arthur Scargill, for instance, is very quickly prepared to forget his war of words with Benn over the productivity dealings in the pits in 1977. and has called on all his considerable support to throw their weight behind Benn as the next leader of the Labour Party. This support will grow still further as the Tories continue their victory march through working class Britain, slashing and stabbing as though they were an invading army. As people get more angry they will turn to the man the Tories hate the most – Tony Benn. The very fury which is vented on Tony Benn in the Press throws him higher and higher up the political spiral. It is worth saying at once that Tony Benn’s credentials for Chief Bogeyman of the Tories are a little difficult to understand. For eleven out of the last fifteen years he has been a loyal and for the most part silent member of a Labour government which has systematically torn up the pledges on which it was elected. In the first Wilson administration from 1964 to 1970. Benn was counted as a force for the Right in the government. When he was promoted to the Cabinet in a senior post in charge of Technology, he was celebrated chiefly for his observations about the advances of science which were based on the 1963 visions of his leader Wilson (“the white heat of the technological revolution”). In two areas in which Benn later became known as a hysterical Leftie, he behaved in a way which can only have brought a smile of approval to the Tory benches. In 1967 he set up the Swallow Committee to preside over the shipbuilding industry, and personally insisted on carving up the shipyards in the Clyde between the old shipbuilding families. When even extreme Labour right-wingers such as Andrew Cunningham begged him to take full notice of an experiment at Fairfields yard in worker participation. Benn had nothing to do with it. Instead, he capitulated entirely to shipbuilding’s “old gang”. When, without telling the Cabinet, the Atomic Energy Authority signed a deal for the manufacture of uranium under South African control at Rossing. South West Africa. Benn meekly gave the deal his approval. At that time, no one thought he would do otherwise. Nor is the record of his time in office from 1974 to 1979 much more impressive. In the summer of 1975, with the Common Market ‘Yes’ vote safely in the bag. Prime Minister Wilson bowed to demands in the city to move Benn from the Industry Ministry and push him off to some more harmless area (in this case the Department of Energy). If Benn ever meant a word about the need to fight in the country for what was Labour Party policy, that was the time for him to resign – as, to his credit, his colleague Eric Heffer did – and try to raise rank and file Labour opposition to the Wilson drift (as Heffer, by the way, did not do). Instead, Benn accepted the move and, as far as the ordinary Labour Party member was concerned, shut up. Still, this is all in the past, and, as Tony Benn himself is always saying, he has learnt from his mistakes. If so, there could not have been a better time than the present to publish a clear account of his ideas and his programme. Some people are asking the question: ‘What went wrong with Labour?’ Many more are asking, what is the argument for socialist advance and how can we best ensure that things don’t go so wrong next time? These are the questions which tony Benn is better placed to answer to more people than anyone else in the country.

These are the questions which tony Benn is better placed to answer to more people than anyone else in the country. And it is here that this little book is such a terrible disappointment. I did not expect to agree with Tony Benn’s conclusions, but I did expect to get a clear and coherent account of where he stands. But the book is not clear or coherent in anything. It is not even intended to be. Chris Mullin, a journalist for Tribune who edited the book explains in his note at the beginning: ‘The first five sections of this book, are based on speeches, lectures and articles by Tony Benn taken mainly, but not exclusively, from the last five years.’ Goodbye, then, to the hope that this might be a new account, forged perhaps in the white heat of experience of the last Labour Government. The vast majority of the book is made up of extracts from Tony Benn while still a Minister. And most of these are awful Olympian pronouncements at Ministerial functions. On page 83 (just to let the reader off with one example), while explaining his belief in the future of nuclear power, Benn the Minister says: ‘In my view the most powerful argument is the argument about proliferation of nuclear weapons as an accidental by-product of the uncontrolled spread of sensitive nuclear technology intended solely for civil purposes. We are doing everything possible to prevent this by international agreement, supervision and control.’ Now, who is this “we”? It cannot be anyone now connected with Tony Benn. He is doing nothing whatever to prevent anything in the nuclear field. He is a politician in Opposition. No doubt he means, when he was in office, he did what he could. But that is useless now. The fact is that for most of the last five years from which these extracts were taken. Tony Benn was a cautious Minister making cautious pronouncements. These pronouncements can help us in no way to any understanding or action for the future. There were once occasions when Tony Benn could make an excursion, for instance, to a conference of the Institute for Workers Control: or to a church at Burford where Cromwell’s soldiers murdered Leveller mutineers. Then he could argue about radical forms of change. He could not, of course, say that the miners or engineers today should act according to the principles of the Levellers. To do so would be to court disaster, and run the risk of being sacked from the Callaghan Government. He could talk about the wonders of workers’ control, provided only that they were envisaged in the distant and Utopian future. So the most striking characteristic of this book is the gap between the airy assertions of socialist aims and the dry and half-hearted programmes of a failed Minister. For instance, on page 60, he writes: ‘We should be talking about the transfer of power within industry ...’ In the same mood, on p. 162 ‘We should be moving from a situation where capital hires labour to a situation where labour hires capital.’ But when it comes down to the programme which is going to achieve all this transferring of power and hiring of capital we find (on p.72) ‘The whole purpose of the planning agreement is to introduce that democratic tripartite element into industrial policy.’ The troika which is to make up this tripartite element is of course “government, trade union movement and management”. And so we are staring at the familiar pictures of the “two sides of industry” sitting down and making plans under the watchful eye of the benign Labour Minister. That may or may not have any effect – almost certainly not but it is a very far cry from the visions of “transferring power” with which Mr Benn excites his supporters at the Institute of Workers Control. Then there is another contradiction of the same type which is even more serious. Of all Tony Benn’s views, none has been more consistently slated than his belief in a widening democracy, and in more initiatives and control from below. ‘I think we will have to be sure’ he says (p.73) ‘that the impetus for change comes continually from the movement itself.’ And the book ends with a quotation from a Chinese philosopher who says: ‘When the best leader’s work is done, the people say: “We did it ourselves”.’ Other sections of Tony Benn’s book are full of praise for the workers at the Upper Clyde in 1971 and in take-overs and sit-ins since. All this does represent, it seems, a huge conversion from the Tony Benn perched on his peak at the Technology Ministry planning and ordering the workers into position. And the suspense for the reader of almost unbearable. Will he now tell us what sort of “action from below” is needed, how best to “inspire” the “impetus of change” from the “movement itself”? Will he even tell us, however briefly, what sort of organisation is required to further that impetus and that change? No, he will not. I have scanned his book with a lot of care for any ideas as to new forms of organisation to fit Tony Benn’s new commitment to workers’ democracy. But I am afraid (apart from cliches such as “progress must be made towards workers’ control” – p. 39) that we are back with some old simplicities. There is nothing for it but the Labour Party. Tony Benn doesn’t mind how many Marxists are in the Labour Party provided only that “they commit themselves to advancing socialism through Parliamentary democracy”. Here at once is another paradox. In one part of the book. Tony Benn states his faith in the “power of the vote”. The very welfare state itself, he says, came “directly from the power of the ballot box”. And it is that power, he suggests, which is to take us on to the “fully democratic and socialist system” of which he dreams. And then there are other passages more sceptical. For Tony Benn knows as well as anyone that the power of the ballot box is open to the most terrible subversion by the rich. As early as page 17 he is writing: ‘I discovered how the immense power of the bankers and the industrialists in Britain and world-wide could be used to bring direct and indirect pressure again backed by the media, first to halt and then to reverse the policy of a Labour government that both the electors and the House of Commons had accepted ...’ He knows that from bitter experience.

He saw Wilson’s pledge for ‘no incomes policy’ overturned by a run on the pound in the summer of 1975, with Benn’s job going into the bargain. He watched helplessly as the bankers moved again, in 1976, through the IMF, to force Labour to cut the welfare state which (according to Benn) the power of the ballot box had first created. He fought a desperate battle with the nuclear industry and the oil companies, without winning either. All in all, his own experience, even as it is set down in this badly-conceived and woodenly-presented book, shows clear as day that the ballot box and parliamentary democracy are not strong enough to reach even the miserable objectives of the British Labour Party let alone the dreams of Tony Benn. The problem is extra-Parliamentary – the “power of the bankers”. Benn’s remedies, however, are parliamentary: a planning agreement here and there, a new hunk of something or other taken into public ownership: a tighter exchange control or Treasury regulation. The gap yawns on almost every page. And properly so. For it is this gap between aspiration and practical achievement which marks the career and politics of Tony Benn. It is nothing especially new. Two weeks before the general election of 1970, for instance, Press and television headlined a fantastic speech by Tony Benn about Enoch Powell. ‘The flag which fluttered over Dachau,’ he intoned to a handful of surprised constituents ‘is now fluttering over sections of the Tory Party ...’ This was the first statement about Powell made by Tony Benn, though Powell’s infamous race speech at Birmingham had taken place two years earlier. Moreover. Tony Benn had sat without a second’s objection while his Government banned from British Kenyan Asians who had been promised free entry. Once again, the. language of the extremist had come from the mouth of the moderate. As I read this book for the second time, in February 1980. I pondered the effect of Benn’s interventions in the past few weeks. There have been scores of speeches, many of them peppered with images as florid as that of the flag which fluttered over Dachau. But in defence of the “impetus from below” which has started to shake “the movement” once again: the steel strike; the sacking of the convenor in Britain’s largest plant; the desperate action of men and women threatened with a future which throws them fifty years into the past, where has Tony Benn been speaking or agitating? More importantly, what of the future? For all (he comments here. Benn in person, especially on the television is a convincing figure to many workers. He is so obviously more sensible and more humane than the monster he is made out to be that people come easily round to his point of view. It is by no means certain that he will always be doomed to defeat in Labour leadership election. The actual proposals will not,. I believe, be very much more dramatic than they were in 1974. But the effect of Benn’s use of rhetoric will be to make them seem more radical by far. But if a Labour government ever is returned committed to such policies, it will be able, since the crisis will be deeper, to deliver less. Then the gap between Tony Benn’s language and what he can achieve by his methods will loom not simply as a logical lacuna in a second-rate book, but as a threat to very parliamentary institutions and trade unions which remain Tony Benn’s only instruments of change. Top of the page Last updated on 21 September 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot At last Crows peck the eagles (27 June 1992) From Socialist Worker, 27 June 1992. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 39–40. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. For 30 years I have been searching for a performance of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus which understands what the play is about – and now I have found it. The Renaissance Company’s production with Kenneth Branagh as the tyrant and Judi Dench as his mother Volumnia has got it right at last. The simple point which was missed in every single one of the 12 productions I have seen plus one I acted in – as the second senator, who had one and a half lines – is that the play is about the class war. The scene is set in the Roman Republic, where the patricians and their senate concede to the people a couple of their own kind to act as ‘tribunes’. But no one in the English audience of 1608 could have missed the parallel, as an arrogant and ambitious king, James I, started to challenge the growing influence of the merchants and, beneath them, the angry cry of the common people. William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary. His instincts and sympathies were with the patricians, and even with the king, though almost all his history plays about English kings show how rotten the kings were. To that extent, Nigel Lawson’s classically imbecilic comment that Shakespeare was a Tory’ had some truth in it. But Shakespeare was not just a ‘Tory’. His greatness came not just from his command of the English language, unrivalled before or since, but from his ability to listen to how and why the language was used to express people’s fears and hopes, doubts and certainties. ‘The people’ might well be a rabble, fickle in their choice of favourites and easily moulded by a skilful orator. But they had a point. The arrogant kings who ignored them might be high and mighty, even honest and admirable characters. But if they ignored their subjects they were tyrants. Coriolanus is a patrician who believes so passionately in the right of his class to rule over the masses that he refuses to compromise. He would rather drag his class into open civil war with the ‘rabble’ than address a kind word to them. His pride, his valour in war, his glorious use of language are all so dominant that director after director has fallen into the trap of reducing all the other characters in the play to foils to the Great Man. Coriolanus becomes just another personal tragedy, a tragedy of a great man done down by the stinking mob. The excitement of the play, the ebb and flow of the class struggle, is entirely missed. In this awful directional censorship the victims have been the tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus. Now at last the balance is struck right. Kenneth Branagh is a wonderful Coriolanus, but the reason he is the best yet – better by far, for instance, than Laurence Olivier – is that he and the director, Tim Supple, understand and, I suspect, sympathise with what the crowd represent. The crowd, many of whom have been picked from the Sussex unemployed, are magnificent. As the initiative shifts from the oppressed to the oppressors and back again, the excitement never stops. The scene in which the tribunes, Jimmy Yuill and Gerard Horan, gently but forcefully persuade the people to resist the dictator, a scene traditionally ignored or gutted by patrician directors, is one of the most exhilarating pieces of theatre I have ever seen. I hope this production will soon move from the unlikely surroundings of Chichester so that all socialists can go to see it and enjoy it. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Battle for the NUM (January 1988) From Socialist Worker Review, No.105, January 1988, pp.9-11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Arthur Scargill’s dramatic resignation from, and then candidacy for, the post of President of the NUM is of major importance for miners. Paul Foot went to South Yorkshire in the week before Christmas to talk to rank and file militants in the pits. Here he gives his impression of the situation. WHEN THE NUM branch at Bentley pit, South Yorkshire, met to nominate Arthur Scargill in the election for NUM President, there wasn’t a quorum. The nine committee members were there, but there had to be nine more present to put the meeting in order. They weren’t there – and indeed by the time the Scargill nomination came up, many of the committee members had left. So the nomination for President went through solely because the committee had recommended it, and there was no opposition. Bentley is by no means a passive pit. But its miners’ passive response to the dramatic resignation and re-nomination of their President is not uncommon. Throughout the area I was struck by the total absence of any campaign for Arthur Scargill. Many rank and file militants were worried by it. “Here we are in the fifth week after Arthur’s resignation”, said one. “The fifth week – and there’s been not a pamphlet or a leaflet from the area on the Scargill campaign. “He’s holding one meeting in Doncaster towards the end of his campaign – but none of the waverers will go to that. There are waverers, and they need to be won back to Scargill’s camp at canteen meetings, welfare meetings and pit discussions. Of course Arthur can’t go to every pit, but his leading supporters like Heathfield and Thompson can, and they should.” Of course, there are still a few weeks to go, and all supporters of Arthur Scargill in the union had better use them to the maximum. For even the briefest survey of the most political miners in Arthur Scargill’s heartland uncovers a serious threat to him: abstentionism. Few miners in South Yorkshire believe that John Walsh, Scargill’s opponent, will get a big vote. They know very well where he stands: four square in the old right wing Labour tradition, in an area where right wing Labour still stinks of corruption on the council and collaboration at the pit. Walsh’s declaration that he would, if elected, treat with the UDM is greeted with almost universal contempt. On the other hand, there is this lurking menace of abstentionism. It came up wherever I went – in branch offices, pubs, canteens, miners’ welfare centres. Even here, and even though one miner told me he’d heard it only from “yes-men”, the weasel words reported in newspapers and on television came out of the miners’ own mouths. “What has he done for us?” “What did the strike do for us?” “Why can’t he even negotiate a wage rise?” The words, and the low, grumbling tone with which they are voiced, are the exact opposite of what the same sort of people were saying during the 1984/5 strike. Then, if anyone criticised Arthur Scargill for not achieving anything, the miners’ reply was that he was leading their fight for jobs: that he was only doing what any self-respecting miners’ leader would do; and that if the strike failed, that was a failure of every striker as much as it was a failure of the leadership. The miners’ strike, they would argue, was defeated because the ruling class organised better as a class than did the working class – and that could not for a single moment be blamed on Arthur Scargill. On the contrary, the very forces which closed pits and ransacked the coalfield communities were demanding Arthur Scargill’s head on a charger. He had to be defended, and throughout the strike and for many months afterwards, he was defended unconditionally. Yet now the conditions, the ifs and buts and maybes, have begun to creep into miners’ judgements. Many militants believe that unless some mighty effort is put in during the last few weeks of the campaign, the Scargill majority will be badly dented – and that this could happen despite the groundswell of Scargill support in Durham, and despite the fact that pretty well all the NUM members in Nottinghamshire will vote for Scargill, while in 1981 many many thousands there (now in the UDM) voted against him. This shift of opinion flows directly from the defeat of the Great Strike and the relentless attack on the National Union of Mineworkers ever since. Go to any pit and you will hear the same dismal story of management attacks from the very moment of the marches back to work nearly three years ago. At Armthorpe pit, branch secretary Malc McAdam ticks off the employers’ offensives one by one. Signing money for craftsmen – dropped on day one of the return to work; the eight o’clock installation shift for craftsmen – dropped on day one of the return to work; all water agreements – dropped. There is also a tougher approach from deputies and especially from under-managers about flexibility of work within the pit; and the constant transfer of miners from pit to pit and the attempt by management to set groups of workers against one another. Everywhere there is the insidious influence of the “brown envelope” (the secret deals between men and management for special jobs to be done for special money without the union knowing about it).

Everywhere there is the insidious influence of the “brown envelope” (the secret deals between men and management for special jobs to be done for special money without the union knowing about it). “You see them whispering together with an undermanager in the canteen – and you know they’re at it,” one Bentley miner told me. The secret agreements threaten the union at its jugular, its knowledge and control over everything its members do at work. Once the “brown envelope” arrangements become the norm, a hefty slice of the union’s bargaining power is gone forever. Above all else, there is the constant haemorrhage of jobs flowing out of the pit, disrupting and disorienting the union influence inside it. At Armthorpe 1,500 men marched back to work after the strike. Now there are 1,225. “They want us down to 1,100,” says Malc McAdam, “and they want more production from the same three faces they were working with the 1,500.” These appalling figures are, by national comparison, quite good. Since the strike 66 pits have been closed and 83,000 jobs lost, about 30 percent of the entire workforce. Even in South Yorkshire young people are no longer recruited into coal mining. In the entire South Yorkshire coalfield in 1986-7 British Coal recruited precisely 33 workers. Of course, the redundancies are all “voluntary”. But for the union every voluntary redundancy is another blow. “In this atmosphere, when a good union man says he wants to go and pay off his debts, it’s hard to know what to say to him,” says Malc McAdam. The constant demoralisation caused by all this (and there is much more besides – any hour spent with any group of miners will divulge another series of concessions won from the union by British Coal) has led to a shift in the NUM branches’ attitudes to disputes. One Armthorpe miner put it this way. “Before the strike, if there was a dispute, the whole pit would meet, discuss it, and more often than not come out on strike together while the problem was sorted out. It’s because we did that, we didn’t have that many disputes. “Now the mood is much more: ‘Get back to work while we work it out.’ This can lead to delays, and to no action. More often, there’s some sort of sectional action which splits the pit. During one of the recent craftsmen’s disputes, when the craftsmen were out, we had to picket the lamp room to get the men coming on shift on strike in support of the craftsmen.” The defeats and the demoralisation can be seen at every level. Another Armthorpe miner remembers how things were before the strike whenever a rally or a political demonstration was announced. “You could always fill a bus from Armthorpe,” he said. “Whatever it was – CND, anti-apartheid – there would always be enough to go in the bus and show the banner. Since the strike they’ve only filled one bus, for the biggest of the demonstrations at Wapping. For the others, we had to share a bus with the other pits in the Doncaster area.” But for all the gloom, defeat and demoralisation which anyone can tell you about, the picture is very different from anything which could have been drawn two and a half years after the defeat of 1926. The miners were defeated in 1984-5 – it is nothing but bluster to suggest otherwise. But they went back to work with their organisation in shape, and with habits and traditions for which they were still prepared to fight. TABLE 1: TABLE 2: NUMBER OF DISPUTES IN 13 WKS TO 20/8/87 PRODUCTION LOST IN 13 WKS UP TO 20/8/87 (000’s of tonnes) MARKHAM MAIN 8* BRODSWORTH 7* ELLINGTON 34.5 BENTLEY 7* FRICKLEY 22.8* FRICKLEY 6* MARKHAM MAIN 20.8* ASKERN 5* TRELEWIS 19.0 WISTOW 5** CASTLEHILL 15.5 PRINCE OF WALES 4** ROSSINGTON 14.8* BARNBOROUGH 4* ASKERN 14.8* ABERNANT 4 PRINCE OF WALES 14.5 WHELDALE 4** LADYWIND 12.7 *Denotes South Yorkshire **Denotes North Yorkshire MALTBY 12.1* * Denotes South Yorkshire The concessions mentioned here were not conceded by a disgruntled and browbeaten workforce. The South Yorkshire coalfields since 1985 have been a battleground for almost permanent class war (see above graphs): a war in which the workers have been fighting defensively, it is true, but fighting nevertheless, and occasionally winning. I spent only an hour or so in the cramped union office at Armthorpe – the hour when most of the miners broke for a meal or changed shifts. Hardly five minutes went by without someone coming in with yet another problem: here is a finger cut off at the knuckle – caused by a carrying job which should have had more men on it; here is a man protesting about the new arrangements for working before the Christmas break; here is a surface worker incredulous at his take-home pay for three weeks over Christmas – £309. Though the officials themselves seem to be unaware of it they are standing in the front line of a clash between the classes. The battle is going the bosses’ way but nothing like as fast as they would like. It is not just that the solidarity and the hatred and contempt for the employers are still there in good measure. Worse than that, from the employers’ point of view, is the willingness to do something about it: the instinctive recognition among these miners that they produce the goods: they dig the coal out of the ground. Their readiness to back that knowledge through action, through “standing”, as they put it, removes from the employers their sense of confidence and strength.

You must be careful who you offer a “brown envelope”, in case the man takes the envelope straight to the union office and calls for a strike in protest. You must be careful, as a deputy or an undermanager, if you do a miner’s job – in case the whole pit promptly stops. It is this determination to resist in the face of appalling odds which has persuaded the coal bosses and the government that not enough was won in the Great Strike. Industrial correspondents gossip that there must be yet “another confrontation” in the coalfields before the NUM is broken sufficiently to ensure the real prize: privatisation and the “freedom’’ once more to make personal profit out of coal which other men dig out of the ground. Another open battle looms whose aim will be to knock the National Union of Mineworkers out of existence. All the major issues covered in the Presidential election are formally directed to that. Arthur Scargill stands against the six-day week, against the new British Coal Code of Practice and for no truck with the UDM. Walsh is silent or compromising on all three issues. No NUM member who treasures his union should be in the slightest doubt which way to vote. But a policy without the means to put it into practice is often as bad as no policy at all. This is the curse of all elections, parliamentary and trade union, and has led to the doubts and the abstentionism even in Scargill’s home territory. As my conversations with rank and file militants went on, I was struck by the gap between the day-to-day struggles they were talking about – the water agreements, the secret deals, the deputies doing miners’ jobs, the voluntary redundancies – and the grand policy statements and declarations of trust which emerge from Arthur Scargill’s election campaign. The pace and the rhetoric seem quite different – out of line. No one among the militants I spoke to disagreed with a word of Arthur Scargill’s campaign. But their own talk seemed to clash curiously with his. Last summer at Frickley the miners rose against a peculiarly oppressive interpretation of the new Code of Practice. They “stood” in a strike which spread like wildfire round the county. Pit after pit was shut when miners responded to even the faintest call from the Frickley miners. One miner I spoke to, who was then working at Askern, recalled with amazement and delight how he and a couple of miners from Frickley picketed out the entire pit at Houghton Main – in protest against the Code of Practice. Most Yorkshire militants knew perfectly well what the Code of Practice meant – the end of their union. In a matter of days, thousands of miners were on strike all over Yorkshire. The Yorkshire Area stabbed the strike in the back. As soon as the National Executive announced a ballot throughout the coalfield on action over the Code of Practice, the Yorkshire Area ordered the miners to return to work “in the interests of unity”. Though the striking miners, especially at Frickley, were unhappy with this sabotage, they campaigned for a “Yes” vote in the ballot and for a full overtime ban. An overtime ban can always depend on a majority if only because the majority of NUM members don’t work overtime. But the fullness of the overtime ban was crucial to their decision to go back to work. In the event, the NUM executive, steeped in the “new realism” of the modern fashionable left, backed away even from a full overtime ban and imposed a half-hearted, futile restriction on overtime which has hit some miners in the pocket but has not affected coal production or even productivity. The coal bosses chortle in their newspapers, and militant miners are furious. Resolutions poured into the executive from Yorkshire, Durham and Kent, demanding a proper overtime ban. If a delegate conference had been called then and there a full ban would certainly have been imposed. But then came the announcement of a presidential election, and the vote on the delegate conference on the ban was postponed until the election was over – until February. “The momentum will have been lost by then,” an angry Armthorpe miner exclaimed. “We will have lost the early anger, and the enthusiasm for the action. I couldn’t guarantee to you now how a delegate conference will vote – it’s all so long in the future.” In Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution he discusses again and again the difference in tempo between the ponderous, predictable progress of social democratic politics – elections every so often; conferences every so often; meetings every so often, and everything hammered in to fit that timetable – and, on the other hand, the unpredictable but much more decisive pace of the struggle between the classes. The conference/election cycle seems often the more powerful since it seems in a careful and rational way to gather together the entire force of the party or the union for a particular course of action. In reality, however, the ability of the employers and their class to move at will, in their own class interests, entirely oblivious of any procedure or timetable, enables them to dictate the course of events. It is the ability on our side to do the same which is by far the workers’ most powerful weapon. Thus the wildfire action after the Frickley strike terrified British Coal and the government. The ghost of the 1981 unofficial strikes, which humiliated the government and postponed their whole strategy for three years, rose up to haunt them. As soon, as the Frickley strike was lifted (not by British Coal, but by the National Union of Mineworkers) the employers and the government got their breath back and regained the upper hand. There is a power there which can stop the British Coal offensive and save the union.

There is a power there which can stop the British Coal offensive and save the union. The embers of defiance still glow in those perennial disputes about water and secret deals and flexibility and transfers. If the defiance is to grow, those embers need to be fanned. But they cannot be fanned from far away, with a manifesto or a blast of rhetoric on the television. They can be fanned only from below, by rank and file miners themselves who are ready to fight, and who come together to instil in their fellow workers, at branch meetings and in the everyday discussions which still take place more in the pits than in any other workplace, some of their own confidence in their organisation and their power. Such organisation cannot survive only on discussions about water agreements or craftsmen’s signing-on time. Its life-blood is the political discussion – the talk of nuclear power and nuclear bombs and apartheid and Irangate and privatisation – and the way in which all these issues are directly relevant to the miners’ struggle and the survival of the union. “This election seems pretty irrelevant to me,” one ultra-militant miner said at the end of the discussion. “Whoever wins, we’ll still have the same fight on our hands.” A chorus of disagreement greeted him. “We’ll still have the same fight all right, but what a blow to morale if Walsh wins!” Should Arthur Scargill lose, every single miner who believes in his union and retains even the slightest degree of class consciousness will feel worse, much worse. His fight will be more difficult. The new realists, compromisers, splitters and collaborators will have a field day. But the reverse is not the case. A victory for Scargill will strengthen the morale of the militants, but it will not win the fight. All Arthur Scargill’s best qualities, his class consciousness, his fighting spirit, his contempt for the ruling class and their media, his refusal for a single moment to betray the people who elect him – all these derive from his roots, from his experience in political organisation in the miners’ rank and file. His worst qualities, his stubbornness, his triumphalism even in defeat, feed off his isolation from the rank and file, his imprisonment in a world of union elections and executive intrigues. He cannot decide which influence will be decisive in the long run. That will only be determined by the ebb and flow of the struggle. It is the miners’ ability to maintain and strengthen their own organisation, hopefully with the support of a newly-elected president, which will decide whether or not Thatcher and her friends can put an end to their union and all the hope, the decency and the democracy for which it stands. Top of the page Last updated on 26.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Silencing the Nazi threat (May 1994) From Socialist Review, No. 175, May 1994, pp. 9–11. Copyright © 1994 Socialist Review Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Do fascists have the same right to free speech and organisation that other political parties do? Paul Foot explains that allowing them such freedom only results in the destruction of democracy and free speech for everyone else WHY DO socialists deny free speech to fascists? After all, we are in favour of democracy. Socialist ideas flourish best where there are trade unions, public meetings, leaflets and newspapers which express different points of view. Imposing socialist ideas without that democratic debate is the opposite of real socialism. Yet we deny these rights to the Nazis. Is this just the same sort of hypocrisy used by tyrants through the ages who have demanded free speech for themselves but seized the first opportunity to deny it to others? After all, runs our critics’ argument, the fascists are, like you, a minority. They have a ‘point of view’. Why should they be denied the right to put that point of view in the same way that you do? There are two immediate answers. First, there is the connection between saying and doing. If an organised party goes around preaching race hatred against black people, as the British National Party does, that race hatred is bound to overflow into deeds. Every single survey in and around the Isle of Dogs in east London since the BNP won a council by-election there last year has proved the rise in attacks on black people, and the connection between those attacks and the election. It is as though all those who felt like beating up isolated and defenceless black people felt encouraged, from the election, by a surge of legitimacy. This legitimacy is increased by every article and every broadcast which treats the BNP like just another political party. A recent programme in the excellent File on Four series is often quoted as an example of how the BNP can be humiliated by an intelligent interview. It is true that the fascist Beackon was made to sound an imbecile as he revealed that he did not know his party’s policy on social services and indeed did not know what social services are. But the producers of File on Four should hesitate before they congratulate themselves too heartily. For ‘balance’ they felt they had to present Beackon as a serious politician. They quoted a BNP supporter as saying that the best thing to do with Asian people is to ‘kick them in the gutter’. No one says that a fascist gang would be directly inspired by File on Four to go and kick Asians in the gutter. But the effect of broadcasting such a comment is not just to expose the nastiness of BNP support; it is also to legitimise it. The more BNP thugs appear on television trumpeting the master race, the more the few freedoms of the black people they persecute are curtailed. The ‘point of view’ of a fascist party is not only measured by their rights or freedoms, but also by the immediate and consequent curtailing of the rights and freedoms of everybody else. The other answer to the question why deny free speech to the fascists is that the central aim of fascism is to destroy democracy. This is not speculation, as it might have been before Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 or Hitler in Germany 11 years later. Now we know without any shadow of doubt that the aim of fascism is totally to destroy democracy and to remove the rights and freedoms of everyone except themselves. ONE OF THE peculiar obsessions of the new breed of apologists for fascism is to insist on a crucial distinction between German and Italian fascism. This argument has built up to a crescendo since the recent elections in Italy. A good example of the new ‘freedom for fascists’ genre is the Economist, which is run by know-all yuppies with an admiring eye on the new Thatcherite millionaires. Under the heading Fascist Beasts, an Economist editorial (9–15 April) proclaimed that, compared with Hitler, Mussolini was a ‘barnyard rooster’. The editorial concluded: ‘The true mark of fascism, belief in a peculiar variety of one-party corporate state – not, it should be said, a belief shared by this newspaper – is not Nazism or racism. Let the word “fascist” be reserved for those who profess that belief, and today’s neo-fascists be judged for their own ideas, not Hitler’s.’ One curious feature of this argument (repeated in many different forms in the Italian liberal press and even by Martin Kettle in the Guardian) is that it overlooks a very consistent theme in fascism wherever it came to power: the complete destruction of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Since the Economist will warm to the title, I quote from Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action, published in 1939: ‘Every newspaper must have a “responsible” [that is, a fascistic] editor and only journalists congenial to the government may be employed. A Minister of Propaganda undertakes to colour important despatches and to dole out instructions on the treatment of news items ...

A Minister of Propaganda undertakes to colour important despatches and to dole out instructions on the treatment of news items ... Mussolini has said: “Journalism is free just because it serves only one cause and one regime”.’ This unusual definition of press freedom was seized on by the man promoted by Hitler to take charge of the press in Germany after 1933: Dr Goebbels. His press law, declared in a single day in October 1933, made journalism a ‘public vocation’. It stipulated that all editors must be of Aryan descent, not married to a Jew. Section 14 ordered all editors to keep out of the newspaper anything ‘which in any manner is misleading to the public, mixes selfish aims with community aims, tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich, outwardly or inwardly, the common will of the German people, the defence of Germany, its culture or economy.’ In practice this meant the closing down of all journals which were not Nazi, and the sacking, imprisoning or murder of every journalist who refused to toe the Nazi line. Hitler summed up his own and his Propaganda Ministry’s approach with the chilling reminder: ‘The state dare not forget that all media have a duty to serve – a duty which flunkies of a so-called press freedom dare not be allowed to confuse.’ THE WHOLE POINT of fascism, whether under Hitler, Mussolini or Franco, was to expunge all opposition: to purge from the state every voice of protest or criticism. As Robert Brady shows in his Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, published long before the Holocaust, in 1937, the purpose of the National Press Chamber under the Nazis was not just to censor all opposition journalism but to spy on the resistance press as well. This determination to wipe out all democratic freedoms was widely trumpeted after fascism seized state power. In the run up to the seizure of power, the fascists were more circumspect. To themselves in their private meetings and handpicked rallies, they denounced the ‘communist doctrine of democracy’ and promised the book burning to come. At election times, on the other hand, they were more constitutional. For as long as they thought it necessary, they promised to stand by the constitution and safeguard the freedom of the press and speech. Again and again they declared that they would extend to other parties and newspapers the freedom enjoyed by their own. They were especially eloquent on this subject when Social Democrats and Communists demanded that the fascist literature, which was leading among other things to the systematic violence against Jews, should be suppressed. No, no, the fascists objected. We do not approve racial violence. We respect the rights of others. Today the Italian and French fascists and, even in their own pathetic way, the British National Party all protest that they don’t really know who Hitler was, and that all they seek is to put their point of view to the electorate as other parties can. Their hypocrisy is sometimes embarrassingly obvious. Fini, the Italian fascist leader, followed up his insistence that there is ‘all the difference in the world’ between what he stands for now and what Mussolini stood for in the 1920s and 1930s with an interview describing the butcher Mussolini as the ‘greatest statesman of the century’. His supporters too know what he stands for. They greeted his election success with cries of ‘Duce, Duce’, the same cry which brought Mussolini to power in 1922 and sustained him there for nearly 20 years. Here in Britain a reckless television programme shows a ‘respectable’ fascist urging his supporters not to be violent, hardly commenting on the absurdity of the fact that the same ‘non-violent’ propagandist had just come out of prison after a long stretch for beating up a socialist on the tube. The strategy of the fascists then and now is to use the freedoms won by fighters for democracy to gain respectability and electoral support so as more relentlessly to pursue their single purpose: to smash democracy and freedom to pieces. These two arguments – the connection between words and deeds and the real purpose of fascism in the first half of this century – can be understood by everyone. Anyone who cares about free speech or democracy, whether a socialist or not, can understand the danger of applying the same democratic rules to an organised party which seeks to abolish all those rules and establish a totalitarian dictatorship. But the argument does not end there. Members of the National Union of Journalists, for instance, who seek a ‘no platform for fascists’ policy, are often asked: well, if you’re against a party whose words might turn to violence, why do you oppose the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein (as the NUJ has always done)? Is not Sinn Fein committed to violence indistinguishable in logic from that of the fascists? Here the answer must go deeper. Sinn Fein represents something quite different from the aims of the fascists. Their aim is a democratic republic of Ireland. Gerry Adams, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, supports the use of force as part of a wider struggle for freedom. Fascists use force as part of a wider means of denying elementary democratic rights. THE DISTINCTION brings us to the core of the argument: the real reason for fascism and the master it serves. To liberals, fascists appear as a clutch of racist thugs with no real power who can, as a recent Independent editorial pretended, easily be seen off by liberal responses of fair play, a fair hearing and (perhaps) a fair crack of the whip. Certainly, the tiny numbers of fascists in Britain at present hardly seem a threat comparable to the major organisations in France or Italy. As long as this is the face of British fascism, runs the argument, as long as the fascists at the height of their popularity can muster only 30 candidates for 3,000 seats, who cares? The answer is that the history of this century proves only too clearly that fascism can grow very quickly in periods of social and economic upheaval. In 1928 Hitler’s Nazis gained just 2.5 percent of the vote in Germany.

By 1930 their vote had risen to 6.4 million, an increase of 800 percent. Today the Thatcher experiment of the 1980s is in ruins. So is the Social Democratic experiment in France, Germany and Italy. Everywhere capitalists are losing confidence in the resilience of their system. Organised labour, weakened in the 1980s, is still on the defensive against the capitalist attacks. The single common aim of fascism in the 1930s was to break the strength and spirit of organised labour: to pave the way for uninterrupted profiteering by the people who own the means of production. Though its shock troops were the lumpen proletariat and the lower middle class, fascism’s real master was capital. When at least sections of the capitalists lost all hope of proceeding through the democratic system and the trade unions it had conceded under pressure in the past, it looked round for a battering ram to dispose of both. Big financiers and capitalists don’t like the thought of a civil war, such as the one which brought fascism to power in Spain, or the slaughter of 6 million Jewish people in circumstances of unimaginable barbarism in the Holocaust. Yet, deep in the pit of economic crisis, they will tolerate, arm and finance anything, however horrible, to defeat their competitors and keep their coffers full of their ill-gotten gains. This certain knowledge – that fascism is the last resort of big business in crisis – utterly destroys the complacent rhetoric of the Independent, the BBC and others about the menace of fascism today. It is not just that they ignore the hideous advances of fascism in France, Italy and Germany in recent years. There is the same sort of peril too in Britain, which has none of the imperial fat which sustained its rulers and their free speech and democracy in the 1930s. Those rulers are not committed to democracy. Nor are their media. In the 1930s large hunks of the media championed the fascists who were determined to destroy it. In the United States the huge combine of papers run by William Randolph Hearst campaigned enthusiastically for fascism. So did the Rothermere press in Britain. In August 1938, just after Mussolini had promulgated his own special law banning Jews from public office, Ward Price, special correspondent of the Daily Mail, wrote: ‘Mussolini is an Elizabethan. Allowing for the altered conditions, he stands to modern Italy as Raleigh and Drake did in Queen Elizabeth’s day. He incarnates the new spirit which has possessed his nation, and between the Italy of the early 20th century and the England of the early 17th there is much spiritual resemblance – the same internal national pride, the same unbounded optimism, the same fierce sense of opening opportunity, the same quick sensitive temper, the same tendency to recklessness, the same full-blooded heat of a nation that feels its youth and strength.’ When Mosley’s anti-Semitic thugs organised in 1934, they were cheered on by the same Daily Mail, whose headline read: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’! Today the Daily Mail is owned by the same Rothermere family. Those of us who see the world from the bottom up, and care most about the freedom of the press, understand the danger from fascism far more than the millionaires who own the newspapers. Free speech for fascists is an awesome threat to free speech. That is why we have to treat the blackshirts of today with the same implacable opposition that they met when they tried their intimidatory racist marches in London’s East End in the 1930s. BUT THE ARGUMENT cannot end there. In his book Fascism and Big Business, the French socialist Daniel Guerin warns against simply being ‘anti’-fascist. On its own, opposition to free speech for fascists will not rid us of fascism. The roots of the argument ‘the blacks are taking our jobs’ are buried deep in mass unemployment; the roots of the argument ‘the blacks are taking our homes’ in the monstrous priorities of a society which builds millions of square feet of empty office space round the corner from mass homelessness, overcrowding and slums. We are against arguing with organised Nazi parties, whose aim is to take away our right to argue, but we are very much in favour of arguing with those who may prove susceptible to their propaganda. The Nazis turn desperate people’s anger onto other desperate people with different coloured skins. The anger turns into racial violence and then to more despair. Socialists’ aim is to turn that anger against the landlords and tycoons and their dupes in the town halls and parliaments. Black people build homes just as white people do. In a sensible society both white and black would build the houses they need and there would be homes for everyone. In the 1930s, as in the 1970s, the opponents of the British fascists confronted Mosley’s marches, picketed their meetings, hassled their appearances on the media, and, at the same time, campaigned against landlords, tycoons and media moguls. The combination worked both times, and it can work again. Top of the page Last updated on 15 April 2017

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Remembering the miners’ strike (1985) Introduction to Blood, Sweat and Tears, photographs of the miners’ strike, London 1985. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 146–150. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. On 1 March 1984 Margaret Thatcher and her ministers embarked on a class battle. It was to be as tough and crude a class battle as had ever been attempted – even by Margaret Thatcher’s beloved Victorians. The Tories were taking on their most formidable and feared enemy: the National Union of Mineworkers. Coal stocks had been built high. The police force had been reorganized and retrained to break strikes. Oil-fired power stations were taken out of mothballs, and oil ordered far ahead. Secret public opinion polls reassured them that a ballot among all the mineworkers for a national strike would almost certainly be lost (as had ballots three times in the last three years). Ian MacGregor, a grisly class warrior whose life had been devoted to breaking unions all over the world, had taken up office as Chairman of the National Coal Board. After three years spent halving the workforce of the British Steel Corporation and reducing its unions to quivering servitude, he was ready for his most ambitious mission, to bring the miners to heel. This was to be the final victory over a trade union movement already cowed by the horror of four million unemployed. The closure of Cortonwood, in Yorkshire, was the gauntlet flung down by the government. It was the first pit with coal in it to be closed since the signing of A Plan for Coal in 1974; the first of twenty pits to be closed in direct contravention of the agreement; 20,000 jobs were on the line, four million tons of coal capacity was to be taken out. Reaction was swift. Flying pickets from Cortonwood brought the rest of the huge Yorkshire coalfield to a standstill. Kent followed. Before long the traditionally militant coalfields of South Wales and Scotland were silent. But in the big Nottingham coalfield, and in most of the smaller, weaker areas where ballots were held, the vote went against. The strike was deprived from the very first day of the unity and solidarity which won the day in the seventies. Some 30,000 miners had decided to work. At least 165,000 miners were out on strike, and were clearly determined to stay out for tar longer than the most pessimistic Tory had ever imagined. In the early days, the pickets set out as confidently as they had in 1972 and 1974. They found a different police force, controlled from one ‘reporting centre’, using powers which even they did not believe they had, to stop pickets’ cars and turn them back, to cordon off whole villages and areas, to arrest at will and finally to break the pickets by weight of numbers and by force. Press and television joined enthusiastically in the fray. Their tactic was based on the old demonology. They turned the miners’ president, Arthur Scargill, into a devil incarnate. Even A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader in the lock-out of 1926, had not had to endure the violence and malevolence of the attacks on Arthur Scargill. The strikers soon discovered that they were much poorer than they had been in 1972 and 1974. The Tories had deducted £15 per week from the already desperately low benefits that their wives and children were entitled to. It seemed as though they must soon break under this pressure. But they didn’t. Indeed, as the miners fell back from the battles on the picket lines of Nottinghamshire and Orgreave to protect their own heartlands, the strike seemed to gain a new spirit, a new strength. Walking down a road in Upton, Yorks, in September I stopped to talk to a large miner whose battered car had stopped beside me. I had heard, I said, of the sadness and the wretchedness of the mining areas, so why was he beaming from ear to ear? ‘I’ve enjoyed it, me,’ he declared, and started to explain. Of course he and his family had very little money, of course they were worried by the cold, of course, of course. But life was different. The daily grind had been removed. Decisions, about picketing, about welfare, about the political ebbs and flows of the strike which were on television every day had to be taken not by someone else, some high-up somewhere, but by themselves. He did not put it quite like this, but he was in charge of his own destiny, and he enjoyed it. There was change all about. People were changing. In the strength of their collective action they felt a new confidence in themselves and the people around them. Ideas and prejudices which had been grafted into them like barnacles were suddenly blasted away. The change in themselves was quickly translated into changes in the way they behaved towards one another. In tradition and in fact, the miner had been the master in his home. The role of the miner’s wife was to feed her man, bring up her children, and keep her mouth shut. Suddenly, in the most unlikely area, the ideas of women’s liberation became reality.

Suddenly, in the most unlikely area, the ideas of women’s liberation became reality. Whole communities were suddenly run by women. The strongest, most energetic and most forceful of the support groups were made up, almost exclusively of women. This led to new relationships in the community and in the home – to new uncertainties, perhaps, but also to new respect. In the j same way, the socialist ideas which inspired people’s brains were suddenly resurrected in physical reality. An injury to one was an injury to all. The strong did help the weak, the able-bodied did help the disabled. The seeds of a new society founded on co-operation, common interest and human effort bent to human need were sown in the struggle against the old one. These changes burst out of the mining areas. Through the summer and autumn of 1984 they started to infect and inspire hundreds of thousands of people who had called themselves socialists but had begun to give up hope. Into every crack and crevice of the Labour movement came the black-and-yellow slogan coal not dole, waking and inspiring all but the most somnolent and sectarian fossils. At the start of the strike, all donations were collected by the union officials and sent off to the areas or to the national solidarity fund. By the late autumn, the vast mass of individual donations went to individual pits, through the ‘twinning’ of union branches, Labour Parties, even street committees with pits and villages. The miners and their families moved out of their areas, while supporters from outside moved in. New friendships sprouted, spawning new solidarity. In August, September and October, the strike held; utterly and incredibly solid. For a time, the government wavered, only to realize that another defeat by the miners, when all the odds were for the government, might threaten ‘civilization as we know it’. New pressure was brought on the stumbling MacGregor to stand his ground. Tim Bell, personal adviser to the Prime Minister and managing director of Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency which had spurred the Tories to office in 1979, joined a new advertising agency which was promptly granted the entire anti-strike account of the National Coal Board. David Hart, an imbecile property tycoon and right-wing fanatic, was authorized by MacGregor to start up and fund a ‘Working Miners Committee’ from the dregs of the strike-breakers. In four days of advertising in Tory papers, Hart’s ‘Committee’ raised more than £100,000. Newspapers, television, police, even Special Branch joined the growing campaign to push the miners back to work. As miners started to go back in big numbers, in November, Coal Board executives predicted an end to the strike by Christmas. The ratchet slipped a notch; then held again. The support groups mobilized a huge effort over Christmas. Every miner’s child enjoyed their Christmas – some say more than ever before. As the New Year started after nine months of strike there were still 130,000 miners out. Still the miners held out. The bitter cold of January did not bring the power cuts. The oil-fired power stations, at full blast, could light, heat and power the homes and industries of Britain as long as the crucial 50,000 tons of coal a week came in from Nottingham. Instead the cold was just another new misery to add to poverty and hunger. The Coal Board and the government had been certain that the strike would peter out in January. But it went on and on. Each week cost the government another forty or fifty million pounds in unbudgeted spending. When, in the first week of March 1985, the flow back to work had become too strong to resist, and the miners were finally starved back to work, together, without formally conceding surrender, their heads held high, they had been on strike for a full year, the longest mass strike in all British, European or American history. One of the most remarkable pictures in this book shows the faces of the miners in the cage on the first day back. It shows how quickly the change which had worked such wonders in the strike worked the other way as soon as the strike was over. The men are, once again, caged. Their expressions are depressed and bored. The miners were subject once again to the Coal Board’s commands and its instructions. The cage was bad enough, but worse would probably follow. There was only one thing worse than having a job; not having one. Outside the pits, the mood shifted in the same sudden way. The end of the strike led to a collapse of aspirations and morale among its supporters. Neil Kinnock, who had been attacked in almost every Labour Party in the country for his weasel words about the strike, suddenly became ‘the only hope’. Labour and Communist Party members returned to their party organizations and their enervating or ideological priorities. People who had supported the strike to the hilt, deluding even some miners’ leaders, started to say that the strike had been a mistake, that it would have been better if it had never happened, that it was all the fault of Scargill and Benn, that it would have been better to have had a ballot and lost than to have gone through a ‘year’s hell’ for nothing. These arguments were enthusiastically rehearsed by the trade union leaders who had spouted great rhetoric at the TUC but had organized nothing to campaign for the miners in the places it mattered most: the power stations, the haulage depots and the docks; by local miners’ leaders, who showed such lack of confidence in their own rank and file, and hugged the strike close to their short-sighted strategy, never once unleashing the potential for leadership which was there in the newly awakened rank and file; and by the Labour politicians who never missed a chance to fasten on the weakness of the miners’ case, rather than its strength, for rotten long-term electoral advantage. Such people were delighted to greet so many converts from direct action to the pillars in the cloud in the shape of a possible Labour government at least three years away.

As the ranks of the doubters grow, as their arguments become more and more fashionable, the real friends of the miners must fight all the harder for the memory of the strike. We must remember that it was a hundred million times better to have fought, even if the strike’s aims had not been achieved, than not to have fought at all. For the first time in five years, Thatcher’s government was stopped in its tracks for a full year. It was forced to fall back on the crudest class bludgeons in its ‘objective’ state machinery. We must remember the potential for change which the great strike represented. We must remember that the strike fell short of its aims not because it happened nor because it was led by extremists nor because a ballot wasn’t held but because the other side was better organized and better prepared than ours was; and that therefore next time we must be better prepared. Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Treated for health or for wealth? (November 1995) From Socialist Review, No. 191, November 1995, pp. 16–17. Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. ‘The National Health Service is the envy of the world.’ Who said that? Enoch Powell, minister for health in 1962. ‘The National Health Service is safe with us.’ Who said that? Margaret Thatcher, prime minister in 1983. When a drugs company-financed commission produced a recent report calling for more private money in the National Health Service, who leaped into the media to defend the NHS against the report? Stephen Dorrell, secretary of state for health. The Tories have always been equivocal about the NHS. Even when it was set up, they did not oppose it very forcefully. In office from 1951 to 1964, they left it pretty well intact. In 1960, Enoch Powell raised prescription charges by a shilling – 5p – and was very apologetic. Stephen Dorrell recently expressed the basic argument for the NHS very forcefully. He argued only slightly disingenuously that Britain leads the world in health care. Naturally, Mr Dorrell does not want to surrender that reputation. His problem comes with the main reason for it – that Britain’s NHS treats people according to their health, not according to their wealth. The success and popularity of the NHS, in other words, is entirely attributable to the fact that it bucks the market. The priorities of the NHS have no bearing on what patients can pay – only to what they need. This is not merely philanthropic. It doesn’t just mean that sick people get treated more urgently than anywhere else. It is also more efficient. Capitalist ideologues who tell us that buying and selling with money is the best way of matching demand and supply are utterly confounded by the NHS, whose central principle is that nothing is bought or sold, that everyone insures themselves against sickness according to their means (income tax etc) and get treated according to their needs. Largely because of the capitalist world in which it survives, the NHS is very far from perfect, but it works far better than in the US, where almost all health care is bought and sold in the market place. Unfortunately, while the NHS may indeed be the envy of the world, the market system in the US and other countries is the envy of lots of top people in Britain who work in health. They can’t help admiring the basic efficiency and fairness of the NHS – but most of them can’t help salivating at the huge sums of money which disappear into the pockets of so many physicians, drug peddlers, private health providers, quacks and charlatans that prey on rich people’s legendary hypochondria. Aneurin Bevan, who was minister of health when the NHS was set up in 1948, recognised this contradiction at once. Indeed, the doctors’ organisations, then linked much more closely to the Tory Party, never stopped telling him about it. He compromised by allowing top consultants to practise privately. From the beginning of the NHS leading surgeons and physicians were able to get the best of both worlds: to have access to outstanding equipment in the NHS and to the money of private patients who consulted with them in Harley Street. The attack on the NHS today takes two forms. The first is the outright demand for privatisation of the entire health service and a return to market barbarism where people who can’t afford medical fees don’t get treated. This propaganda is peddled by the Thatcherite think tanks, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs, but it cuts little ice. The NHS is so popular and works so well that outright privatisation is not a credible political option. More insidious and effective is the apparently equivocal propaganda which pretends to favour the principles of the NHS and then argues for the gradual erosion of those principles. This has been the line of successive Tory secretaries of state, of whom Kenneth Clarke was the most energetic and the most destructive. More recently the erosion arguments have seeped into the left, and now reach right into the Labour leadership. The Social Justice Commission, under Sir Gordon Borrie, for instance, which pretended to be independent of the Labour Party but effectively sought to lay down new principles for new Labour, snapped at the heels of the basic principle of the NHS: its universality. The commission arguments were extended by the Healthcare 2000 report. The two commissions had in common Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour candidate, who was chief aide to Neil Kinnock (1983–1992). Hewitt was deputy chair of the Borrie Commission and deputy chair of Healthcare 2000. The arguments of both borrow heavily from the new right. Health care must be rationed, and the obvious and sensible way to ration health is to throw more services into the money market and make people pay more for what they want. All this is stated as though it were perfectly obvious, and that anyone who doesn’t accept it is living in an old world of cloud cuckoo land. The inference is that this dream ‘old world’ was somehow better and richer than the stark, realistic new world, and that in those soft days of yore much more could be afforded. Yet in 1948, when the NHS was set up, and when all medical services, even false teeth and spectacles, were free for everyone who needed them, the national income of Britain was only slightly more than a third of what it is today. There was no golden age. A very much poorer country was able to afford a very much more universal health service. Of course, there has to be some system of priority. The point is: how is the rationing carried out? The NHS rations on the basis of need. He or she who needs more gets priority over him or her who needs less. The new health reformers, on the other hand, want to ration by pocket. He or she who can pay more gets priority over him or her who can’t pay more. The more these arguments prevail, the more people go to private hospitals and take out private health insurance; the more resources of skill and technology get sucked into the market, the more the foundation of the NHS is eroded. However equivocal they may sound, the new ‘common sense’ demands for ‘a more realistic’ approach to the National Health Service are deeply subversive of it. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Lionel Starling & Paul Foot How much longer must these people be hounded and humiliated? (June 1977) From Socialist Worker, 25 June 1977. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, p.166. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. SIXTEEN MEN are about to come up in court in Bodmin, Cornwall, charged with ‘serious crimes’ which did no harm to anyone. There are no witnesses – only confessions given to the police that these men had sex with one another. Yes, that’s still a crime. It’s called ‘gross indecency in a public place’. A ‘public place’ includes a car, a party or even a flat to which anyone apart from the accused has access. The Cornish case is not an exception. All over the country, police forces, which constantly complain about overwork are straining at the leash to ‘run to ground’ anyone who can be proved to have had sex with someone of his own sex. All this is happening ten years after the law was changed to allow homosexual relations between adults. Nettie Pollard, Gay Rights officer of the National Council of Civil Liberties, reckons that these prosecutions have ‘doubled at least since 1967, when the law was changed’. Why is this vast battery of repression directed against people because of their sexual behaviour? Why, last week, did the House of Lords vote 146-25 not to allow people of 18-21 to have sex with each other if they are of the same sex? The few apparently rational answers to this question do not stand up for a second. That homosexual behaviour is ‘unnatural’. But what is ‘natural’? Surely what comes naturally to people is what they like or prefer doing. What’s natural to some may be unnatural to , others. What some like, others dislike. Whoever says that one sort of sexual behaviour is unnatural is saying that the sexual behaviour which he or she likes is the only one that is ‘natural’. That homosexual behaviour leads to corruption of children, especially at school. What statistics there are show that the rate of importuning or assaults of children in the streets and at school are more common among heterosexuals than homosexuals. If banning sexual activity by law stamps out the corruption of children, we should ban all sexual behaviour. And then, of course, there would be much more corruption of children, much more secret, ashamed and transient sex, because people would be terrified or conscience-stricken by the law from doing what they want among people they like. There is no rational argument against homosexual behaviour. The society in which we live is founded on the belief that people must behave according to a set of rules imposed from above. These rules lay down what is ‘normal’ and what isn’t. People’s lives can therefore be drilled to conform to patterns; patterns in factories and offices and schools, and patterns at home. Any deviance threatens the power of the people in charge of society to lay down its rules. And therefore minorities who behave differently to the laid-down ‘norms’ are persecuted. When the people in charge of society feel safe, they make concessions to these minorities. That’s why, in 1967, when there was little unemployment and even less economic crisis, laws for homosexual reform (and for abortion reform) were passed. But when the people in charge feel threatened, they insist much more fiercely on the acceptance of their norms. They repress all those minorities who don’t conform to their norms. Everyone knows that Hitler’s fascist regime in Germany outlawed and persecuted Jews. Few know that at the same time Hitler outlawed and persecuted gypsies and homosexuals. We want a socialist society not just to change property forms – but to develop the potential of all the people in that society. In such a society directing sexual behaviour would be unthinkable. And it’s the job of everyone who wants such a society to contest the prejudice against homosexuals, to argue with the preposterous jokes and insults which permeate so much back chat on these matters. Above all, it’s our job to support those people who are courageous enough openly to fight their persecution. Top of the page Last updated on 7 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Waste disposal (February 1996) From Notes Of The Month, Socialist Review, No. 194, February 1996, pp. 4–5. Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Just as a new television series harks back to the great local corruption story of the 1960s and 1970s – the Poulson scandal – a new orgy of local government corruption emerges which reduces Poulson to his proper status as minor hypocrite and crook. Poulson was a Tory who was even-handed in his bribes with Tory and Labour councillors. The new scandal is pure Tory. At its head is Lady Porter, who modelled herself on her heroine Thatcher, and for many years led the Tory council at Westminster, the jewel in the Tory local government crown. The results of the council elections in 1986 terrified the Tories. Labour came within a few votes of taking control of Westminster. At once Porter and her henchmen, who included the current Tory MP for Milton Keynes, Barry Legg, called a series of secret meetings to hatch a plot which would ensure that Labour would never get so close again. The plan was simple: to use the powers of the council in planning, housing and even in street amenities, to move Labour voters out of marginal wards and Tory ones in. Many years later this plan was brought to the attention of the District Auditor, a mild, middle of the road accountant from Touche Ross called John Magill. The historical role of the District Auditor in local government was simple: to control the extravagance of Labour council spending on the poor. Before workers voted, when Tories and Liberals controlled councils, there was of course no problem with extravagance. Tory and Liberal councils were keen to safeguard the rich ratepayers they represented, so if they were extravagant with council money, the extravagance was always showered on the rich. After Labour started winning control of councils and using the rates to help the poor – and especially after 1921 when Labour councillors in Poplar defied the law and went to prison to establish their right to raise money from the rich to spend on Labour voters – the tightest possible control was imposed by central government on such spending. The National (Tory) Government in 1933 passed a local government law which gave the District Auditor, an unelected official, power to supervise and check council spending. Any councillor found by the District Auditor to be overspending was subject to a surcharge, bankruptcy and disqualification. For half a century the District Auditors waged war on ‘wayward’ (socialist) Labour councils. In 1972, when all 11 Labour councillors at Clay Cross in Derbyshire refused to obey a Tory law to put up council rents, the District Auditor surcharged and disqualified them all. In the 1980s a specially vile campaign was launched against the Labour controlled Derbyshire council which refused to put up charges for school meals and other council services as much as the Tory government (and the Derbyshire Tory MPs, led by Edwina Currie) insisted. Once again the District Auditor lined up with the Tories. The climax to this campaign came when the county council, after the media unions were smashed at Wapping, transferred its teachers’ advertising from The Times and Sunday Times. The District Auditor, and eventually the Court of Appeal, declared this democratic and eminently just and proper decision to be ‘illegal’ and the District Auditor promised to surcharge the council leader, David Bookbinder. By one of those curious twists which has characterised the politics of the 1990s, the District Auditor in Westminster, driven by the anti-extravagance logic which defined his job, has turned his full powers on Lady Porter and Westminster Council and has found their gerrymandering to be more grossly corrupt and expensive than all the so called municipal socialism of the century put together. Screaming like a wounded beast, Porter rushed to Tory ministers to tell them to sack the men in charge of the national audit office and get these impertinent officials off their backs. Ministers, full of rhetoric about the ‘waste’ of Labour authorities, could do nothing. Porter hired a host of Labour and even Communist lawyers to put her case to the District Auditor – to no avail. The final attack on her is even more devastating than its predecessors. Porter has fled to Israel. Bookbinder has been suddenly and unexpectedly absolved from any surcharge; and the Tory rhetoric about wasteful Labour councils in this year’s municipal elections will have a hollow ring. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Confessions and repressions (May 1987) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 98, May 1987, p. 22. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE TRIAL of the Broadwater Farm Six for the killing of PC Blakelock seemed to end in a “draw”. Three defendants were unanimously found guilty of murder. Three others walked free from the court. But the draw was, in reality, an outright win for the police. The three juveniles were acquitted on the direction of the judge who said that the confessions which had put them in the dock in the first place were “repressive” for people under age. Since there was no other evidence against them, he ruled, they could not be found guilty. Exactly the same conditions applied to the three older men in the dock. Statements had been extracted from them in the harshest possible conditions – after many hours of intense interrogation in police cells, where none of the three had any access to lawyers or to friends. These statements were the only evidence that the three had had anything to do with the killing of PC Blakelock. They were not even confessions. Indeed, Winston Silcott, the man who gut the brunt of the abuse from the press before, during and after the trial, specifically had not confessed, claiming that there could not be any witnesses against him. This claim, the prosecution alleged, was clear proof of his complicity in the murder! Confessions have been much in the news lately. They were the main evidence against the six men convicted of planting the IRA bombs in Birmingham pubs in 1974; against the four people convicted of the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich in the same year; and of the four men convicted of the killing of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater in 1978. The Broadwater Farm case was worse than all of these. At least, in the Birmingham case, an explosives test (recently discredited) had proved positive on two of the six men’s hands. At least, in the Guildford case, one of the defendants had apparently voluntarily, spilled out the names of the other people who later confessed. At least, in the Bridgewater case one confession led to another, and back to the first one again. The importance of the Blakelock case is that police now know that if the press is on their side and if the crime is dramatic enough, they can get a conviction just by picking on anyone in the street and taking notes of a conversation which can be construed as a confession or a part-confession. It is the random nature of the arrests of all six people who allegedly “confessed” to the Blakelock killing which has the most chilling consequences. The power and confidence of the police has increased hugely since the case. Until the Blakelock case, a jury would have insisted on some corroboration before sentencing anyone effectively to life in prison. Now that a jury has so obliged the police, the police have responded with a renewed public relations campaign to take away the powers of the jury. Even government ministers are being forced to admit that the staggering increase in crime is associated with unemployment and poverty. How else can they explain the impotence of their law and order campaigns; their doubling of the funds available to the forces of law and order; the huge increase in police manpower? Poverty, destitution, alienation have beaten all these hollow – and crime of every kind is soaring. When people at every level of society are taught to take care only of themselves, those at the bottom can only put it into practice by stealing or savaging their neighbours. One of the saddest aspects of the crime statistics is that the poor and lower middle class areas are always the ones most affected by burglaries, assaults and rapes. When five or six million adult people in a population of some 40 million adults are struggling on the very rim of existence, utterly without hope, the people with-property get scared. The greater their property, the more ill-gotten their gains, the more scared they become. They seek for their protection bodies of armed and powerful men who will keep the mob at bay. The more desperate the mob become, the more repressive is the power ranged against them. This explains the recent popularity of uncorroborated confessions. It is quite a simple matter to put a stop to all the doubt about these confessions. Technology for tape-recording, and checking tape-recording is almost infallible. But such devices are unpopular with the authorities. They prefer to leave what they call “the criminal classes” at the mercy of human beings, who know that their role is to protect property. Better by far, therefore, to have police taking down confessions in their own notes, with no way of checking their accuracy. As the old army saying has it: “An acquittal at a court martial is bad for discipline”. The same is increasingly true in what are laughably known as Courts of Justice. Top of the page Last updated on 30 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Mordechai Vanunu Israel’s Whistle Test (April 2004) From Socialist Review, No.284, April 2004, p.21-23. Copyright © 2004 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot hails the ‘whistleblower’ who exposed Israel’s nuclear programme. I have been a journalist for the last 40 years or so, and most of that time I have been exceedingly fortunate in that I have been able to decide what to investigate and what to write about. All that time I have been struck by the ingenious and comprehensive methods by which capitalist society protects itself from the circulation of information. The essence of that society is exploitation, and the facts and figures of that exploitation are wherever possible kept secret from the exploited. This is not to say that there is nothing to discover. Especially in parliamentary democracies like ours, the published documents and broadcast statements provide a wealth of information about what is really going on, but all this is on the surface and therefore not very illuminating. There are however two sides to exploitation – and two sides to the information about it. On one side, the exploiters want to keep things quiet. On the other, from time to time the exploited have the guts to broadcast what they know. The most combustible information comes from the inside, from people who know what is really going on but for various reasons usually keep quiet about it. From the journalist’s point of view, the richest information comes from people contemptuously known as ‘whistleblowers’. The sporting metaphor is typical of the way society sees these champions. They look on them as referees who ‘blow the whistle’ on something they identify as wrong. But they are much more crucial than that. In almost every case they are people who have experienced something monstrous in their workplace and who do their best to bring the monstrosity into public view. The sporting metaphor pretends that because the ‘whistleblower’ is doing the right thing he or she should, and probably will, be protected by society. Hence, for instance, the new act of parliament that protects people from victimisation if they split on their bosses. This act is a great improvement. But it cannot begin to compensate for the fury of employers and important people when their secrets are divulged. The reality of power in our society means that the first duty of the journalist who gets secret information is to protect the source. The sources, and the fact that they are putting themselves at risk, become more important than the information itself. No source in modern times proved this more dramatically than Mordechai Vanunu. He worked for some years at the Dimona plant in Israel, where nuclear weapons were being manufactured. He was shocked by the fact that no one in Israel or anywhere else seemed to know about it. At a time when weapons of mass destruction were very much in the news, and the conflicts in the Middle East constantly covered in the media, no one knew that the most powerful military force in the area was arming itself with nuclear weapons. He took pictures of the plant, and of the nuclear processes, and left his job. In 1986 he came to London and gave his information and his photographs to the Sunday Times. Since the mid-1960s the Sunday Times had established a reputation as a newspaper that printed information wherever it came from and however much damage it did to the government. The Insight team operated independently and published the results of several vital investigations. By 1986, however, this tradition was withering. The paper’s new proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, detested the investigative traditions of the newspaper and appointed a new editor, Andrew Neil, to put a stop to them. Neil duly sacked the editor of Insight and dispensed with the journalism for which it was renowned. At the beginning of 1986 Murdoch had moved his premises to Fortress Wapping and smashed the unions. But even Andrew Neil, the sworn enemy of investigative journalism, could see the significance of the story that Mordechai brought him. No one knew that Israel had nuclear weapons, and the impact of that information on a world where the nuclear powers were striving to maintain their nuclear dominance was incalculable. The information and the photographs were thoroughly checked. The Israeli embassy was bombarded with requests for confirmation, which was refused, and the story was published on the front page. In all the excitement surrounding the publication of the scoop, the Sunday Times managed to lose its precious source. Mordechai was consigned to the loose charge of a couple of journalists who had no instructions as to how they were to keep him safe, and no means to do so. Wandering around disconsolate and lonely, he was approached in Leicester Square by an attractive young woman who befriended him and persuaded him to fly with her to Rome. The woman was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. In Rome the unsuspecting Mordechai was attacked, knocked unconscious, drugged, bound hand and foot, and taken by boat to Israel, where he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to prison for 18 years. That sentence has now been served in full, much of it in solitary confinement, and Mordechai is due to be released this month. The Israeli government, which never stops boasting about its commitment to the rule of law, is threatening either not to release him or to commit him to house arrest. Meanwhile the whole world outside debates whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while the fact that there are such weapons in the most powerful nation in the region is conveniently forgotten. For journalists in particular, but for anyone interested in the free flow of information, Mordechai Vanunu is a hero. He risked his free existence in the interests of circulating free and vital information. He never asked for nor received a penny for his story. The British government and the Sunday Times are both responsible for his appalling treatment, and both should campaign relentlessly for his release, and for his right to spend the rest of his life in freedom. Details of the campaign to free Vanunu can be found at www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Strikes from a sunlounger (13 July 1996) From Socialist Worker, No. 1502, 13 July 1996, p. 11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. NO POLITICIAN more accurately sums up the prevailing values of 1990s Britain than Lady Olga Maitland, Tory MP for Sutton and Cheam. Lady Olga used to have a gossip column in the Sunday Express in which she gloated over the exciting romances of the very rich. She was regarded by most journalists as a bit of a joke, and no one who worked with her imagined she had any political ambitions. As soon as she got into parliament, she changed completely. She turned herself almost overnight into a right wing fanatic, prepared to go to any lengths to protect the government. Almost singlehandedly, for instance, she managed to stall a bill for improving facilities for disabled people – by reading out a series of amendments prepared for her by ministers. Lady Olga has been in action already this week – attacking the strikers on the London Underground for holding the city to ransom by irresponsible behaviour. Preposterous woman Did the strikers not realise, she inquired, that when the tubes were not running there was more traffic on the roads – and this led to more road rage violence? Were the strikers therefore not party to violence? And wasn’t It all the fault of the Labour Party which refused to condemn strikes? Where has she been, this preposterous woman, who imagines that Labour doesn’t condemn strikes? The answer is that she has been in Malta. On holiday? No, holidays for MPs come later. Lady Olga was in Malta on business – on parliamentary business for the Inter-Parliamentary Union which encourages and subsidises constant collaboration between MPs from different parliaments all over the world. Four MPs (two Labour, two Tory) and a Tory peer had flown to Malta as part of this collaboration. They were advised before they left to bring their swimsuits, since bathing in the pools of luxury hotels was as important a part of their itinerary as eating in one of the island’s top fish restaurants. All this took four days and only just got Lady Olga back in the House of Commons to denounce the tube strikers whose weekly wage would just about have covered the bill for a single night plus dinner in Lady Olga’s Maltese hotel. Outside interests That kind of parliamentary business takes Lady Olga all over the world – even to places where the parliaments are not elected. She is a frequent visitor, for instance, to Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, none of whose rulers bother themselves with democratic elections. All this travelling and bathing and eating by MPs on business in foreign countries was meant to have been curbed by the Nolan Commission on Standards in Public Life. Nolan, however, turns out to be one of the great flops of the Major era. The Nolan Commission is not at all opposed to such foreign trips. It requires only that an MP should declare them, which Olga Maitland does with some pride. Lady Olga, of course, is a strong supporter of MPs having outside interests and of a big rise in MPs’ salaries. She takes the view that the only way to ensure we get MPs who understand the intricacies of the arguments about strikes by train drivers, as well as the advantages of sunbathing in Malta, is for MPs to get a rise which in percentage terms is three times higher than the value of the cut in hours sought by the tube drivers. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Arms dealing Will they get off Scott free? (May 1995) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 186, May 1995, pp. 4–5. Transcribed & marked upby Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Two extreme opinions circulate on the left about the inquiry by Lord Justice Scott into the export of defence related equipment to Iraq. The first is that the report has been a shining example of how a liberal parliamentary democracy can check itself when it slides into pusillanimity and sleaze. For such people, the noble Lord Justice has behaved like a knight in shining armour, wielding, to coin a popular phrase, the shining sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play against lying politicians and deceitful civil servants. No doubt, such people hope, the Scott Report will tear aside the veil behind which government pledges and arms embargoes are broken, and lambast the entire corrupt system. Such people are in for a shock. The first section of the Scott Report, which has been widely leaked, deals with the history of arms export control. The judge, who gleefully sequestrated the funds of the South Wales NUM during the miners’ strike, is no socialist or rebel. His attitude to government control of arms exports is that it has been far too strict. He is disgusted that the government has used a short draconian measure passed during the wartime emergency of 1939, which effectively gave ministers complete power over all arms exports. This, the Lord Justice thinks, is an appalling interference with the inalienable right of businessmen to export what they want, including the means of slaughter. He believes that, if the government wants to control such commendable free enterprise, it must move cautiously with carefully constructed statutes which allow enormous leeway for free marketeers. Those who believe that the Scott Report will be an ideologically challenging document which might finally bring down the government are whistling in the wind. There is, however, the second extreme view, even more absurd. This is that the Scott Report is of no significance to the course of modern capitalism, and can be safely ignored by all socialists. This view is a profound misunderstanding of the crisis which brought the Scott inquiry into being. As Britain’s economic role has declined, as Britain has sailed down the world league of manufacturers, shipbuilders and vehicle builders, so its exports have increasingly come to rely on the arms industry. The advantages of arms exports are obvious. They produce a high return, and can be kept utterly secret from the public. They are in constant demand all over the world. Yet their disadvantages lead to equally obvious problems. Arms are needed most where wars are being waged – wars which ‘responsible’ democratic governments such as the British government are usually trying (at any rate in public statements at the United Nations) to stop. The big conflicts which are the real honeypot for the arms exporting industries are almost always subject to embargoes. The Iran-Iraq war was no exception. To keep up its wholly unjustified reputation as a peacekeeper, the British government had to be seen to be discouraging arms exports to either side. Hence the notorious ‘guidelines’ to industry, announced in parliament in 1985, which banned the export of any ‘lethal equipment’ to the warring countries. Against the guidelines were ranged all those who wanted to make money by killing Iranians or Iraqis. These exporters had considerable support in the ministry of defence and the department of trade. Alan Clark, a wild Thatcherite eccentric, served in both ministries from 1986 to 1992, and went on record as denouncing the guidelines. If there was a war between two sets of foreigners a long way away, he argued, why not make some decent foreign exchange by selling both sides as many arms as they wanted? The clash between these two views – the official respectable view represented by the then junior foreign office minister William Waldegrave and the gung-ho view of Clark and co. – constantly tore at the fabric of government. For most of the Iran-Iraq war there was an uneasy truce between the two sides. But when the war ended and the embargo remained, the hawks lost patience and insisted on busting the embargo. Their greed was accommodated by a typical British compromise. Waldegrave and Clark agreed that the guidelines would be changed to allow a flood of defence related equipment especially to booming Iraq – but no one, not even the prime minister and certainly not the public, would know about it. Thus embargoed exports flooded to Iraq while everyone who asked about it was told that the embargo was still in force. This compromise would have continued forever had it not been for another contradiction. Britain is a military power and may have to fight wars itself. Its government must therefore be careful not to allow the export of arms which might be used against it. One of the great tragicomic figures of the whole story is one Lt Col Richard Glazebrook whose job it was to keep warning his colleagues in the ministry of defence that they should not so recklessly agree to the selling of military equipment against which, if it were turned on British troops, Britain would have no answer. Glazebrook was mocked and outvoted, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he had the last laugh. He greatly enjoyed listing the exports which he had warned against but which now were in the hands of an army ranged against British troops. The Gulf War quickly tore the uneasy compromise apart. The embargo had to be imposed more fiercely than ever. All sorts of curious characters were caught up in the process. Three British directors of Matrix Churchill, a Midlands firm owned by Iraqi government supporters which had been happily exporting machine tools for use in Saddam’s artillery factories, suddenly found themselves prosecuted. Their defence was that the government and MI6 had supported them throughout. When their defence was proved by documents wrung from a reactant civil service, the case collapsed – and the government nearly collapsed too. Major survived only by setting up the Scott inquiry and giving it more powers to wrest the facts from the government machine than had ever been given to any public inquiry in British history. As a result, Scott found himself beavering away in the cracks of the system. Since the whole ‘solution’ to the arms for Iran-Iraq problem had been based on lying to parliament and the public, Scott was horrified to discover an enormous network of deceit. There can be no doubt that his report will be a hideous embarrassment to government ministers, law officers and the civil service. Even if, as seems likely, he lets the merchants of death off lightly, he cannot excuse, for instance, serial deception of parliament and blatant contempt for the most basic rules of fair play to defendants. The shortcomings of the whole saga quickly fade beside the altogether exhilarating prospect of at least some official confirmation of what socialists have always propounded: that lying, cheating and double talk are not just incidental to the system. They are essential to it. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Powell’s poison platform (December 1986) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 93, December 1986, p. 13. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. WHY SHOULD anyone want to victimise a 74 year old gentleman who wants to speak to small university audiences on constitutional reform? His set speech, by all accounts, is very boring and not even very reactionary. The gentleman is a former Tory MP (now an Ulster Unionist), but he has a reputation as a bit of a rebel in the Tory ranks. He was one of the first Tories to vote against capital punishment. He has always been sceptical about Britain’s independent nuclear weapons. In 1974, in the middle of an election campaign, he suddenly resigned his Tory candidature and urged people to vote Labour because he was opposed to the Common Market! With such a record, as I say, why should anyone want to discriminate against the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell MP? No one suggests that people should be stopped from speaking just because they are Tories. Surely, socialist students should leave this old gentleman alone. Such is the argument being voiced by the Federation of Conservative Students, whose leadership has just been disbanded by Norman Tebbit because it is too right wing! The FCS are hawking old Enoch round the universities, demanding for him free speech, and playing on his “fine record” as a “distinguished parliamentarian”. In truth, however, there is only one reason why Enoch Powell is popular with the FCS leaders. They like him not for his “maverick” views on capital punishment, Europe or defence. Indeed, they try to stop him mentioning any of these matters. Quite accurately they have singled out the one issue which has made Enoch Powell famous – the issue which he himself has pushed to the fore unceasingly for the last 18 years – the issue of race. At the start of his political career, in times when it seemed that the system he loves, capitalism, appeared to be working, Powell never expressed any interest in race or immigration. During the big boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s when there seemed no end to permanent economic growth, and when black people poured into the country, free of all immigration control, to staff the lower reaches of the burgeoning industries and services, Powell, who represented Wolverhampton, a town of heavy immigration, uttered not a single racialist murmur. When the Tory government finally imposed some controls on citizens of the Commonwealth, Powell supported them. But as minister of health (1960-1963), he sponsored schemes for recruiting black nurses and ancillary hospital workers in the West Indies, especially in Barbados. It was the decline of the capitalist boom which sparked off Powell’s innate racialism. In 1968, spurred by the then Labour government’s capitulation to racialist pressure to introduce special and entirely unnecessary immigration controls on East African Asians, Powell went to Birmingham to deliver a speech which reeked of racialist hate against the black minority. He used the foulest racialist language, referring to black children as “grinning picaninnies”. He gave full vent to all the crudest racialist stereotypes, linking people’s propensity to crime, fecklessness and disorder to the colour of their skins and their countries of origin. He predicted in the most colourful phrases a race war unless the numbers of blacks were cut down. The response was devastating. Powell touched a deep racialist nerve, not just in his own class but in the working class as well. London dockers went on strike and marched to parliament calling for “Enoch for Prime Minister”. All over the country racialists, who until then had felt something shameful about abusing immigrants, shed their inhibitions. Although Powell was promptly sacked by Tory leader Heath from the shadow cabinet, his speech led to a great wave of suddenly respectable racialist propaganda. Much of this found its way, through the post, to Powell’s house. He boasted of “sackfuls of mail” which filled his basement. His boast was soon to turn against him. When the Sunday Times (then a newspaper of some repute) branded his speeches racialist, Powell sued for libel. The Sunday Times won a court order demanding that all the letters sent to Powell be handed over to them. They argued that these letters might prove the real, racialist nature of the support which Powell had stirred up. Almost at once, before handing over the letters, Powell dropped the action. Since then, he has never objected to the word racialist. Indeed, he has seemed to revel in his racialist reputation. Again and again over the last 18 years, every time the relationship between the black and white communities was rocked by some crisis, Powell has intervened to stoke up the flames. None of his monstrous predictions in 1968 have come true. Yet he has persisted with the same racist demagogy, hurling insult after insult at black people. His demands have been unclear, but consistent. First, he demanded more effective immigration control. When he got some more controls (as in the infamous British Nationality Act of 1971) he demanded more. He would not rest, he said, until all black people (including families of people already here) were banned from entry. Gradually, this was conceded. In the 1970s, black immigration into this country was virtually stopped. When there was no more juice in that campaign, Powell turned his attention to the people already here, arguing with greater and greater force that they must be got out of the country if the apocalypse was to be avoided. This logic drove him on, inevitably, to a call for compulsory repatriation.

This logic drove him on, inevitably, to a call for compulsory repatriation. In a speech and a series of articles in 1985, he outlined his plan for a “repatriation programme” which must cut down the black population by a huge percentage. Since Powell’s own figures show that the black population is growing by about a hundred thousand a year (at the least) this means that every ten years, under his programme, a million black people must be “got back” to the so-called “countries of origin” (though of course many were born here, and know no other country). There is no other way in which this could be carried out except by the cattle truck. Mass expulsions of people because of their race harks directly back to Fascist Germany, Fascist Austria, Fascist Poland, Fascist France, shortly before and during the last world war. “Expel them to save us from the holocaust of racial violence!” was the cry. The result was a racial holocaust on an unimaginable scale – the greatest atrocity in world history. This is the reality behind the apparently friendly face which is being introduced on the campuses by your friendly new storm-troopers from the FCS. It is because of his record on the race issue that the National Union of Students have included Enoch Powell on their list of speakers who should not be invited on any campus anywhere. This list is small. Apart from openly fascist organisations, for instance (who would be the first to put a stop to any free speech at all), it includes only Powell and a couple of spokesmen for the racist dictatorship in South Africa. The argument is simple. Most speech leads to action. Speech which does not lead to action is usually futile and irrelevant. Racialist speech leads to racialist action. Permitting racialist speech, therefore, is permitting racialist action – encouraging the hounding and victimisation of people because of the colour of their skin and the country of their birth, neither of which is a matter of choice for anyone. Thus there are occasions where tolerance of free speech can be tolerance of the very opposite. This is certainly the case with the Rt. Hon. Member for South Down – and the Federation of Conservative Students know that very well indeed. Top of the page Last updated on 29 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Shirley, Shirley, quite contrary, how will your garden grow? (May 1981) From Socialist Review, 1981 : 5, May–June 1981, pp. 18–20. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The ‘old politics’ are dead, according to Shirley Williams. Meanwhile the new Social Democratic Party have attracted 40,000 members in less than six weeks. Paul Foot explores their politics and their appeal. No matter how often we blink our eyes in disbelief, the ridiculous reality is still there. A gang of four former Labour cabinet ministers, each one of them with deeply reactionary records both in government and outside, have broken from the Labour Party to present themselves as ‘a new force’ in British politics. Without spelling out a single policy, they have attracted 40,000 dues-paying members, a seventh of the total Labour Party membership. The public opinion polls put this party without a policy ahead of all others and come to the preposterous conclusion that if there were a general election tomorrow the new ‘social democratic party’ would be able to form a government! The mass appeal of this new party is not, I think, a mirage. It is here with us to stay for some time yet. This has nothing to do with the SDP’s policies, for it has none. As Dr David Owen blurted out to a questioner on the day of the SDP’s birth: ‘Look, love, if you want a manifesto, go and join one of the other parties’. No. The appeal is based, first, and most solidly, on freshness. The ‘old politics’, Shirley Williams ceaselessly tells us in her book, Politics is for People, are dead. By ‘old politics’ she means in particular the politics of Labour. In this, she is on strong ground. Three bouts of post-war Labour governments, two of them with huge majorities, (and two of them with Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins as senior ministers) are remembered without a trace of nostalgia. Who wants to go back to Wilson or Callaghan? They were backward, stale administrations whose few achievements in the field of social reform in the first blush of office were largely rubbed out by the slide into conformity. Yet there is another side to the new party’s appeal which appears to contradict this freshness. It is that the new partly appears ‘safe’. It will not do any thing drastic or revolutionary. It will not upset the balance of the ‘market’ or ‘the mixed economy’, about both of which Shirley Williams writes almost lyrically. ‘The market’ she tells us (p46) ‘matches demand and supply better than the planners do. It responds more easily to changing fashions and needs. It is rather good at getting rid of unsuccessful enterprises.’ There will be no nationalising or intervening from her, we can be sure! The limits for all Shirley Williams’ ‘new, radical policies’ are set by the forecasts of economists and the ebb and flow of booms and the slumps. In Chapter 4, How the World Has Changed, she abandons any responsibility for changing the rules which have brought about the recession. The ‘low or negative growth rate’ is there. It is inevitable. Anything that Shirley Williams can do must he within those boundaries. She toys for a moment with the possibility that the priorities of modern capitalism could be altered by tough economic controls. ‘The only initiative that could radically alter the world’s economic prospects’ she tells us (p. 65). ‘would be the recycling of the oil exporters’ surpluses as well as some of the currency reserves of the industrial countries, in effect the Brandt Commission’s proposals in their most radical form’. Yes, in its most radical moments, the Brandt Commission, which included such well-known revolutionary figures as Edward Heath, former Tory prime minister, and Willy Brandt, former German chancellor, argued that the only way to deal with the huge surpluses (OK word for profits) of the oil companies and the sheikdoms had amassed from the rise in oil prices was to ‘recycle’ (OK word for ‘direct’ or ‘force’) them to where they are really needed, to the starving millions for example. What does Mrs Williams think of this policy? ‘Simply to state such proposals’ she goes on, ‘is to emphasise how improbable their adoption is, despite growing public understanding and support’. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if we could get control of the economic resources and plan them so that the needy benefit and the rich were squeezed a little? But that is ‘improbable’ because it means mucking about with the market, and the profits which are its mainspring. So we have to accept a shrinking capitalism, the end of economic growth, huge oil profits, starving millions – we have to accept all these things and find political solutions in spite of them. From Chapter 4 onwards, these matters are referred to constantly as ‘external circumstances outlined in Chapter 4’ (p. 171) or ‘the changes described in Chapter 4’. (p. 178) What follows in terms of practical ‘radical’ politics, not surprisingly, is thin, if not pathetic. The only coherent philosophy is: ‘small is beautiful’. Shirley Williams argues that industry and trade unions have become obsessed by size, and that smaller units and smaller businesses might prove more successful. She has discovered that there have been more jobs created in America in small business than in large business, and concludes that it’s the job of a new radical government to give more help and encouragement to small businesses. The type of help and encouragement she advocates is rather similar to the proposals in Sir Geoffrey Howe’s last (‘radical’? ‘reforming’?

‘reforming’? ‘new’?) budget, which scooped Mrs Williams’ book by a few weeks. Sometimes. the proposals she advocates for smaller units are plain reactionary. For instance, she advocates greater use of labour rather than machines, in itself, quite regardless of the type of work which is to be done. She completely forsakes the traditional socialist attitude that, for the vast majority of work, which is dreary, soul-destroying work, machines which do the job are in themselves a blessing and are only a curse when they are used for profit to create unemployment and poverty. Control of the machines by people, instead of the other way round as demanded by capitalism, could result in a better life for everyone. Instead, Shirley Williams seriously proposes scrapping machines in favour of masses of people. And because she has also found out that smaller businesses use more labour per machine than do large businesses (usually because small businesses are less efficient, by the way, not more so) she concludes (again) that small are better than big. This is the main philosophical conclusion of her book. And of course it is quite fatuous. It is not the size of the enterprise which determines whether or not it is efficient or even quite pleasant to work for. It is its ownership, its dynamic, its organisation, its purpose. About all these things Shirley Williams has nothing to say, save to echo the conventional Liberal Party call for ‘more participation’ and ‘more democracy’. She lumps industry and finance, where no one in control is ever elected, together with the trade unions, whose control is based on election and choice, however slack and infrequent the elections are. She is for workers and management sharing in the control of their firms, and she seems to favour the basic proposals of the Bullock Report for power-sharing. Yet to the question: how to get even that degree of power-sharing in the teeth of the most hysterical and bitter opposition from the unelected and irresponsible employers? – she has no reply whatever. ‘Governments, corporate powers of industry and trade unions,’ she argues simply, ‘should devolve some of their power downwards.’ (my italics). No doubt they should. But what if they don’t? No reply. Once again, any question which might lead to confrontation is quickly side-stepped. The obsession with ‘safety’ dogs all Shirley Williams’ book, which is, by the way, a series of essays. Most of the essays were written at different times either for American university students or for the shadowy Policy Studies Institute which stepped in fast to sponsor Shirley Williams when she lost her seat in the 1979 general election. Her specific proposals are intended to span the gap between what Dr Owen has called the ‘caring tradition’ of the Labour Party, and the ‘market tradition’ of the Conservative Party. The ‘caring’ side includes a commitment to a wealth tax (which is more than Shirley Williams and the last Labour government could manage in five years) some very useful ideas about employing masses of people to improve older housing; and even a clear statement against all fee-paying education (which prospered so hugely during the last Labour government and Shirley Williams’ three years as education minister). To balance the ‘caring’, there is the usual call to sacrifice. She warns: ‘The industrial countries have been wildly profligate in the booming post-war decades. Their governments and their peoples have enjoyed a material spree never paralleled before. Now, as the late Anthony Crosland said to Britain’s local authorities in 1977 [well, actually, he was dead in 1977, but Shirley Williams is as untidy with her facts as she is with her philosophy], the party is over.’ There we have it. Shirley Williams and her new party represent radicalism and newness on the one hand, safety and caution on the other; the ‘caring’ of the Labour Party and the spirit of sacrifice usually associated with the Tories. The appeal is to all decent people who are fed up with the stick-in-the-mud approach of former Labour governments, who dislike the Thatcher Government’s meanness and class loyalty, but who are also nervous of anything drastic or immediate by way of reform. This, in the period of industrial quiescence in which we now live, is a very powerful appeal indeed. It is easy enough to scoff at the Gang of Four themselves, their own political heritage, their middle class origins, their careerism and their cant. But the appeal remains, and will not be shifted by ridicule. What can shift it is the argument which mounts up relentlessly against the likelihood of the SDP delivering even the most minor reforms. It is not just that their radicalism conflicts with their safeness; nor that their caring conflicts with their dedication to market forces. It is that such is the nature of the society we live in that when the two sets of opposites conflict, the former always loses; the latter always win. Shirley Williams knows all about the inherent inequalities in our society. She cites the figures, and she wants them changed. There is at least one reference in her book to the need for equality. But the figures of inequality describe more than something which is just ‘wrong’. They describe a power structure, in which a class of people control society’s wealth and therefore control society’s political power. We know this happens. We have all those Labour governments and all the efforts of Shirley Williams and her colleagues to prove it. They became ministers of the Crown. They cared about private education, but they did not move to end it. They cared about unemployment, but they presided over the doubling of it. Roy Jenkins cared about racialism, but he was in government when it increased beyond anything he could ever have expected. William Rogers was not in favour of juggernaut lorries, but while Minister of Transport he fought desperately to remove the few controls on them.

William Rogers was not in favour of juggernaut lorries, but while Minister of Transport he fought desperately to remove the few controls on them. The power of the people with properly lays down the law about what happens to all of us. And parliamentary democracy is too slender a connection with the masses seriously to disturb that power. When caring people get to government in the way Shirley Williams intends to do, they find their caring conflicts with the economic reality and their caring is always shelved. A government headed by the Gang of Four would no doubt include most of the ideas in this book in its manifesto. But because there is not the slightest sign of how they are to be carried out, not the slightest moment of doubt about the capacity of parliamentary government to turn back the tide of corporate power, we will not even get Mrs Williams’ wealth tax, her abolition of fee-paying schools, her full employment or her increased social services. We will not get her house improvements or her small power stations. But we will get her bombs, her incomes policy, her stronger Common Market, her increasingly hysterical calls for sacrifice. In other words, all her freshness, and radicalism will take us straight back to the fudged stale capitalism of the last Callaghan government: exactly in the opposite direction, that is, to the one where Shirley Williams is now pointing. There is an alternative; there is a new way of looking at politics. Shirley Williams knows it, and quite deliberately and shamefully refuses even to argue with it. After disposing quite easily with Russia and Russian-style Communists, she devotes a single sentence to ‘revolutionary romantics and Trotskyites’ who are ‘Wedded to an idea of politics which has never been attained anywhere but which in theory might one day be achieved if only revolution could in some way be harnessed to the perfectibility of human beings’. Human nature will not have revolution! It will only put up with the continued stumbling of ‘caring’ politicians who serve the interests of property! ‘Human nature’ offers us the only hope for political advance, a mixture of half-hearted contradictions of the type voiced by Shirley Williams. Human nature demands sacrifice instead of growth; poverty instead of plenty. Human nature presents a social democratic party, peddling the failed dogmas of the Callaghan government as a ‘new radical alternative’. Shirley Williams makes much of a quotation from Immanuel Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made’. She should make that the central slogan of her dynamic and radical appeal at the next general election. Top of the page Last updated on 21 September 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Without a paddle (March 1987) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 96, March 1987, pp. 15–17. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. What will the next Labour government (if elected) be like? What ideas will guide it and will they have any effect on its practice? Roy Hattersley’s new book entitled Choose Freedom is an attempt to explain his view of socialism and the future under Labour. Here Paul Foot reviews the book. * THE Sunday Times organised a Round The World Yacht Race in 1969. An unlikely entrant was one Donald Crowhurst, who left late and ill-equipped. Before he crossed the Atlantic, he realised that he was not going to make it round the world. He had neither the equipment nor the navigational skill. He was reluctant to return to jeering reporters, disappointed family and friends – so he hit on a compromise. He said he was going round the world when he wasn’t. He did in speech what he could not do in fact. For several weeks his brilliant reports of record-breaking sailing through the South Pacific hoodwinked the Sunday Times and everyone else. But as he realised he could never maintain the hoax once he got home, Crowhurst started to go mad. Eventually he walked off the end of his boat and drowned. There is something of the tragic story of Donald Crowhurst in this latest and much reviewed book [1] by the deputy leader of the Labour Party. Not long ago Labour leaders did not even bother to set out their basic socialist philosophy. The very idea was rather vulgar, and likely to put off voters. There was no question of beckoning people to socialism, or even to a new social order. All that was necessary was to show people that Labour had plans for a better, more prosperous Britain than had the Tories. Labour would usher in “a new Britain” or “get Britain back to work”. Ideological niceties were luxuries for cloisters or for sectarians. Then along came the SDP and Alliance to swipe 26 percent of the vote. The Alliance was very pragmatic – full of phrases about a prosperous new Britain and getting Britain back to work. It had hosts of top administrators and economists making detailed plans for every area of social policy. Roy Hattersley and many others like him found it was necessary to remind people of “the ideological foundation” on which Labour stood. Labour, he insists, is not a pragmatic party which just weaves a lot of policies together at election times. It is founded on ideas, and above all on one very simple idea: equality. To explain what he means Roy Hattersley goes back to the hero of his youth. He quotes again and again from the books of Professor R.H. Tawney. And well he might, for Tawney was a wonderful writer, who explained simple socialist ideas perhaps better than anyone else who ever wrote in the English language. Tawney’s great classic, Equality (1931), demolished the protests of capitalist supporters that private enterprise was a guarantor of freedom. “Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows,” he said. Equality of reward was the only real guarantee of freedom, since it ensured that all could equally develop their own characteristics and abilities. Those who wanted the grotesque inequalities of capitalism to continue really wanted the freedom to continue to exploit others, and therefore to limit the freedom of the vast majority. Roy Hattersley, who writes pretty well himself, rehearses these arguments (usually by quoting Tawney). He draws the line down from Tawney through the other theorists loosely described as right-wing Labour who have followed him. He singles out Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin, friends and contemporaries who went into parliament in 1945; and Anthony Crosland, who wrote The Future of Socialism in the year (1956) that Gaitskell became leader of the Labour Party. All three, like Tawney, were intellectuals of outstanding ability. All urged the creation of a new social order founded on equality. None of them belonged to the left in the Labour Party, and for most of their lives engaged in furious argument with the left. They were ideological in that they believed in equality, but they never allowed their ideology to outrun what to them was practical. What was practical was tied to one firm mooring point: the election to parliament of a majority Labour government. Because their ideas were always firmly fixed on this reality, they were easier to read and more credible than their contemporaries on the left of the Labour Party, who drifted in the wide seas of rhetoric and Christian socialism where there was no mooring point. COMMON to all Roy Hattersley’s heroes was the notion of government control of the economy. They were impatient with shibboleths about nationalisation of all industry since it seemed to them irrelevant to the central issue: control. Thus Tawney, writing in 1931, took as his central theme the conversion of a political democracy in which the elected parliament of that democracy had control over the economy. Gaitskell, writing before the 1945 election, put this bluntly: “In a democratic country, the public must be the master of industry.” Durbin, who is normally thought of as very right wing indeed, went even further: “To the centralised control of a democratic community our livelihood and security must be submitted.” Crosland, writing in 1956, based his whole book on the necessity of elected Labour being in control of the economy.

Gaitskell, writing before the 1945 election, put this bluntly: “In a democratic country, the public must be the master of industry.” Durbin, who is normally thought of as very right wing indeed, went even further: “To the centralised control of a democratic community our livelihood and security must be submitted.” Crosland, writing in 1956, based his whole book on the necessity of elected Labour being in control of the economy. All this, for all those 25 years, was persuasive. The ideas struck a chord among millions of people for one basic reason. It seemed quite possible that a future Labour government would be able to seize economic control from the capitalists and create a more equal society. It seemed possible if only because it had not been tried. A road to socialism had been opened up by the franchise: the parliamentary road. Before a majority Labour government was elected (first in 1945) there was no proof of what it could or could not do. Thus Tawney, Gaitskell and Durbin, who wrote mainly before 1945, and, to a lesser extent (because he wrote after 1945) Crosland all seemed credible figures with something important to say. The credibility of their ideas depended on the possibility that they might be carried out. In the 30 years since Crosland’s book there have been two long periods of Labour government, which spanned most of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1966 a Labour government was elected with the highest percentage of the poll ever won by the Labour Party, and with a majority of nearly 100 seats over all other parties in the House of Commons in peacetime, full-employment conditions. Again in 1974 Labour came back to office with a majority, again in peacetime, and again when. there were comparatively (with today) few people out of work. There is no need for me to recite what happened to these governments. Roy Hattersley does it well enough. “On the elimination of poverty and the promotion of equality the evidence is categorical ... we have not become a more equal society. In the ten years since 1976 the number of families below the DHSS poverty line has steadily increased.” Quite true. And in the first three years of that ugly process Roy Hattersley was in the cabinet. This applies to all forms of equality, not just economic equality, as Hattersley again concedes: “The PSI study of 1984 showed that racial discrimination in employment was just as great as it had been before the Racial Discrimination Act was passed ten years earlier.” The same goes for the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act and all the efforts of Labour governments to pass equality through parliament. ROY HATTERSLEY is surprised by this. “If, as socialists believe, equality and liberty are indivisible, it first seems extraordinary that the extension of democracy has not produced a simultaneous increase in both conditions.” Extraordinary indeed. But why? The question must be answered. Hattersley has a shot at it from time to time in his book. For instance: “Society remains unequal and unfree largely because the privileged have held on to their privileges by exploiting their entrenched position.” But that is just a tautology. The rich remain rich because they have hung onto their riches. Later on he tries again: “The status of the City within our society demonstrates the ability of the rich and powerful to subvert even governments.” Here he gives a modest example, citing the commitment given by Tate and Lyle to the Labour government in 1976 that if it was allowed to take over Manbre and Garton (another sugar firm) it would not make any workers redundant. When the sackings followed hard on the commitment, complains Hattersley, who was in charge of these matters in the cabinet of the time, “the government did not possess the power to insist that the promise must be kept.” These are not, as they appear in this book, minor matters to be shrugged off in a sentence or two and left unexplained and undigested. For if it is true that the “rich and powerful” can “subvert” a Labour government and reverse that government’s intentions to make a more equal society, if it is true that such a government “does not possess the power” to bring the monopolists to heel, then the central mooring point on which the whole theory is based is kicked away. Everything Tawney, Crosland or Gaitskell wrote was credible only in so far as it could be put into effect by a Labour government. If a Labour government can’t put any of it into effect, the whole argument, including even the argument for equality, loses its force. In order to maintain the argument, therefore, the upholders of equality have to discover why the Labour governments have failed in the past, and seek a remedy for the future. If Hattersley is to convince people of the case for equality, he must also convince people that measures for a more equal society can be carried out by the next Labour government. His own line of argument demands that he analyse in depth why Labour (at least in 1974-9 and also, arguably, in 1964-70) ended up with a less equal, more unemployed and divided society than when it started. It demands that he explain how the “subversion” of past governments by the rich is going to be stopped next time; how a Labour government in the tradition which he claims to represent – Tawney, Gaitskell, Crosland, no more than that – will take control of the economy and rule supreme over the dark forces which subverted Labour governments in the past. That he will not and cannot do. If he was logical he would conclude from the past failures of Labour governments that the measures required next time must be stronger, more ruthless, more draconian. But he cannot proceed with that logic for two reasons. FIRST there is his immediate problem: to win the next general election. In an atmosphere created by the capitalist counterattack which he so effectively derides, in the stench of defeat and retreat, when labour at every level is paralysed by its enemies’ successes and by its own lack of confidence, Labour voters look less and less for drastic or draconian solutions.

The rage is all for “safe” Labour, for “MPs in suits” who are deferential to their leader, their country and their Queen. So to win the next election the solutions must be soft, easy and nice to everyone. The second reason is more fundamental. It is that Hattersley himself is infected, as all his colleagues are, by the long years of defeat in government and humiliation in opposition. He does not really believe that any of the old remedies can work again, because he knows they did not work last time. An incident at the last Labour conference perfectly illustrates this mood. The old left wing warhorse Ian Mikardo made a speech in which he argued that as soon as Labour is elected it must impose rigid exchange controls, as it did in the past. He argued that if the Labour government lost control of the money in the country, it would lose control altogether. Roy Hattersley replied for the executive. He pooh-poohed the idea of exchange controls. “We all know they wouldn’t work, Mik,” he said. “After all, they didn’t last time.” His solution, therefore, was to abandon all controls and leave the money to the monetarists. In his political solutions he takes a huge step back from the very limited aspirations of the tradition from which he comes. He is far more reactionary even than Gaitskell and Crosland, let alone Tawney. In a key sentence, which is really the conclusion of the entire book, Hattersley writes: “In a more realistic age we have to limit our aspirations to curbing the City’s power and to directing its enthusiasms in a socially desirable direction.” This is the sentence which must be pitted against all the high-flown Tawneyite stuff about equality and a new social order at the beginning of the book. “In a more realistic age” – he means by that an age of consistent victories of British capital over British labour. “We have to limit our aspirations to curbing the City’s power” – how much lower can aspirations fall? And finally, magnificently, he pledges himself “to directing the City’s enthusiasms in a socially desirable direction”. What is the City’s main, indeed its only, enthusiasm? It is, as Roy Hattersley knows perfectly well, to make money for a handful of people. And how does it do that? By gambling in other people’s robbed labour. The very notion “socially desirable” is hostile to everything for which the City of London stands. Yet Roy Hattersley limits his aspirations for the next five years to “directing its enthusiasms” in the direction to which all its enthusiasms are, by its very nature, utterly opposed. This policy is flanked by little else: a murmur about slightly higher taxes for the rich; another National Investment Bank with far less powers even than the ones which were so humiliated in the past; a slightly tougher mergers and monopolies policy which would put the state of the law on such matters rather to the right of where Roy Hattersley, Consumer Affairs Minister, left it in the late 1970s. He has cast away the very central plank of the political platform which he says he represents. When Tawney, Gaitskell, Durbin and Crosland wrote about equality, their words had some meaning because they all believed they would, as Labour ministers, get control of the economy. Their arguments, therefore, had some strength and resonance. Roy Hattersley does not believe he can get control of the economy. He still believes in the egalitarian ideas of his youth. He wants a more equal society. Like Donald Crowhurst he knows he must get round the world. But also, like Crowhurst, he knows he cannot. He has not got the equipment. He is at the mercy of the wind and the tides. So, like Crowhurst, he solves his problem by saying he will do it when he knows he cannot. Crowhurst managed to delude a lot of experts for quite a long time. Perhaps that was because no one had ever tried the trick before. Hattersley is entirely unconvincing. His long passages about equality, coupled with a rhetorical appeal at the end of the book to “recapture the spirit of 1945” are just so much Utopian waffle. He is exposed even before he embarks on what he knows is an impossible journey. At least Crowhurst had the decency to commit suicide rather than be publicly rumbled. I doubt whether Roy Hattersley will go that far. Note 1. Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom, Michael Joseph £12.95 Top of the page Last updated on 30 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Christmas Crackers (December 1993) From Socialist Review, No.170, December 1993, p.20. Copyright © 1993 Socialist Review Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Easily my number one favourite book this year was Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution which I found in Chicago the previous summer. The beauty of the book is not just that it illuminates Milton’s great poems with his enthusiasm for the revolution, but that it brings to life the poet’s political commitment before he even became a poet. His Defence of the People of England is as powerful a defence of what went on in the 1640s as anything ever said or written. ‘You offer an additional reason for your opposition,’ he scoffed at an opponent, ‘things would seem turned upside down. This would be a welcome change, for it would be the end of mankind if the worst situations were unalterable.’ Number two was Tom Bower’s Tiny Rowland, a meticulous detailed, tremendously readable account of quite incredible skulduggery in high places and the third, if I’m honest, was Alan Clark’s Diaries, if only because these Tories so rarely tell the truth about what they feel for each other. Clark’s best story tells how he and Jonathan Aitken reacted when Michael Mates (a fellow back bencher) supported Heseltine against Thatcher. They leaked Mates’s defence business interests to Labour MP Tam Dalyell. Mates was exposed and humbled and the two naughty boys sniggered all the way home to Mother. These are the people who boast all the time of their loyalty. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Why the world is eating less (21 July 1990) From Socialist Worker, 21 July 1990. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 274–276. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. In the Independent newspaper I read the following headline: World Appetite For Grain Still Fading. I expected the article under it to be about diet; about the shifting food fads of the kind of people who read the Independent. Perhaps some homeopathic doctor has been working on the consciences of the rich and persuading them to eat less grain so that there can be more for the poor. Indeed, I recall as a child in a rich home being persuaded by a stern nurse to eat everything on my plate. ‘Think of the starving millions,’ she would say, as though they benefited from my full stomach, or were insulted in some way by my leaving bits of gristle on the side of the plate. But no, this is not an article about diet. This is written by Lisa Vaughan, the Independent’s financial correspondent. Her main point is that ‘growth in world grain consumption may continue to slow this decade’. She produces figures from the International Wheat Council to show that the amount of bread consumed by the world’s population has hardly grown at all during the Glorious Eighties. Indeed, wheat consumption since 1982 has gone up by only 2.4 percent a year, while world population in the same period has gone up by just under 2 percent. Bread Consumption of coarse grain (maize, barley, rye, oats, etc.) has risen even slower than population – 1.3 percent to 1.9 percent. Now let’s go back to that headline, World Appetite For Grain Still Fading. Can it be that all over the world people are sick and tired of eating bread and are turning to a more tasty substitute? In the tortured language of the financial correspondent, Lisa Vaughan gives us the answer: ‘Instead of being driven by demographics, grain use is now primarily determined by financial restraints facing governments.’ She quotes directly from the report of the International Wheat Council: Financial and economic factors are likely to remain the chief influence on grain usage for many years to come. Because of debt repayment or foreign exchange obstacles, many countries have been obliged to restrain grain imports even when prices are low. In plain English, what does this mean? It means that people are eating less because they are poor. It is not, as the Independent so coyly puts it, people’s appetite which is fading – on the contrary their appetite is growing. More and more people, especially children under the age of five, are dying of starvation. Their appetite is growing as rapidly as the capacity of the rich farmers of the world to produce the food they need to keep them alive. It is not their appetite but their ability to pay for the grain which is fading. Flood Their governments, even when food prices are low, are so stuffed up with debt imposed on them by multinational companies and bankers that they cannot buy the food to feed their people. And if they have the good fortune to produce any home-grown food, for the same reason, they must sell that to the rich! Over the last few weeks there has been a flood of reports and statistics about the widening gap between rich and poor. Like Lisa Vaughan, the authors all seem surprised; as though they have come across something which is clearly wrong and must instantly be put right. They dare not draw the conclusion which stares them in the face, namely that the cause of all this totally unnecessary distress and absurdity is their beloved market system. If ‘money talks’, as all these commentators insist it must, then the logic of a society cut into classes will drive all production towards the rich and away from the ever multiplying poor. It used to be fashionable to describe the result of all this as Doomsday. But when we discover the results already – when we discover, for instance, that 72 percent of the babies born in Peru last year are stunted or deformed because of the malnutrition of their parents – we realise that, for four fifths of the world’s population, Doomsday came long ago. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Clay Cross double-crossed (April 1974) From Socialist Worker, 13 April 1974. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.120-1. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. ELEVEN WORKERS at Clay Cross, Derbyshire, who risked their freedom and their livelihood in the fight against Heath’s Tory government, have been snubbed by the Labour government’s first month of office. They are the councillors who refused to implement the Tory Housing Finance Act. They saved the council tenants of their town thousands of pounds in unpaid rents. As a result, they were fined more than £7,000 by the Tories’ Housing Commissioner. The Labour Party Conference rallied to their support. Last October it passed the following amendment: ‘Conference further agrees that upon the election of a Labour government, all penalties, financial and otherwise, should be removed retrospectively from councillors who have courageously refused to implement the Housing Finance Act, 1972.’ The amendment was accepted by the national executive of the party, in the shape of Edward Short, deputy leader. Now Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, tells the House of Commons that the fine must be paid! He says there will be no retrospective legislation to remove the penalties from the councillors. The Tories, who have been harassing the government on the Clay Cross issue for the past three weeks, are triumphant. They have won a notable victory over their hated enemies in Clay Cross. Why is it that Wilson, Short and the seven other members of Labour’s national executive who are in the government have so blatantly ignored their party’s democratic decisions? One answer can be found in a recent book, Socialism Now, by Anthony Crosland, now Environment Minister, who first insisted that the Clay Cross surcharge would not be paid out of public funds. Crosland wrote: ‘Even the rule of law is challenged by some Labour councillors and trade unionists, though historically, and let no socialist ever forget this, the law has been the means by which the weak obtained redress against the strong.’ The law, Crosland argues, is neutral. Labour governments achieve reforms through neutral laws. So they must respect the law above all else. But the law is not neutral. The history of the working class movement over the last 150 years shows the opposite. From the hanging of the Luddites to the persecution of the Chartists to the imprisonment and execution of militants and trade unionists all the way down to the Shrewsbury pickets trial in 1973, the story is one of the law being used to protect the people who own property from the people who produce it. The class which controls property controls the law. 86 percent of the judges, who are not elected, were educated at public school. The entire legal profession is drawn almost exclusively from one class. That class uses its laws for its own purposes. If necessary, as with the recent House of Lords decision on the Immigration Act, it will make law retrospective. In that case, it referred the law back to ‘catch’ illegal immigrants who came in legally before the Act was passed. The Tories make laws, reverse laws, ignore laws, make laws retrospective to protect their property and increase it at the expense of the workers. Labour, on the other hand, respects the law above all other considerations. Its own supporters, its fighters and its martyrs must suffer in the interests of a ‘neutral’ law which imposed the suffering in the first place. Labour behaves in this ridiculous way because its leaders hate the idea of class struggle. Crosland likes to imagine that capitalist society can be checked and changed by well educated Labour ministers giving orders to well-educated civil servants and laying down laws to be carried out by well educated judges. So he and those who think like him have to order their supporters to obey those judges and those civil servants. Any revolt against the law or the civil servants has to be suppressed. As each revolt is suppressed, so the class power of the institutions grow greater until it snuffs out the Labour politicians themselves. In the interests of gradual, legal, constitutional reform, Crosland and his henchmen are digging graves for reform and for themselves. The stand of the 11 councillors at Clay Cross represented the last embers of organised resistance to capitalism within the British Labour Party. The embers have now been doused – by the Labour leaders. We must build a new fire with entirely different fuel. Top of the page Last updated on 17.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Birth of our power (November 1992) From Socialist Review, No.158, November 1992, pp.6-8. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The pit closures demonstrate the madness of a market driven by profit, while millions go cold and hungry. Paul Foot argues that the only solution to the chaos lies in a different sort of society All through the summer, so he tells us, The Rt Hon Michael Heseltine PC MP ‘agonised’ about a problem. He could identify the problem in three monosyllables; too much coal. There was too much coal at the pitheads and too much coal at the power stations. It was beginning to encroach like a vile black plague into the delightful countryside of the type where Mrs Heseltine is inclined to hunt. Obviously this was wasteful and something should be done about it. After a final few days climactic agonising Mr Heseltine came to his lonely decision. Coal mining should cease, preferably altogether. That, he calculated, was the only realistic way to stop the surplus coal menace. Heseltine’s ancestors were South Wales coal merchants, so he knows a bit about the industry. But his thinking on the subject is dominated not so much by his experience as by his belief in the ‘market’. The ‘market’, he believes, is the best way to match what people make to what they need. If nobody needs coal, he calculates, they will not buy it. And if they don’t buy it what on earth is the point of producing it? Let us test that argument against the facts about power supply. With one exception (Drax) every one of the coal fired power stations in Britain is producing less electricity than a year ago. Even Drax is producing at only 75 percent capacity. Every electricity company is distributing less electricity than a year ago. Are people turning to an alternative? No, they are not. Less gas is being distributed too. Are people saturated with heat and light? Are old people, for instance, sweating so much in their homes at the start of winter that they are turning off the heat? Are factories and offices going at such full blast that they are switching off the lights and the machinery? Exactly the opposite. At a time when there is a glut of power capacity, the need for heat and light has never been greater. Miners and power workers are sacked while the old and poor freeze in their homes and yearn for jobs which would drive the factories and light the offices. There is a very simple solution to the problem which tortures Mr Heseltine so. Coal could be given away to the pensioners. Power prices could be brought down especially for the unemployed. Hey presto! Cold people would be warm again and the black threat to Mrs Heseltine’s hunting grounds would be removed in a trice! But no. The market insists that before anyone can get hold of any of these surplus services they must pay the market price. That puts flight at once to the notion that the market matches production with need. For in a society like ours where there are a few rich people, many poor people and some others in the middle, the ‘symmetry’ of the market is twisted and corrupted into the opposite of symmetry. Things are made which are not needed; things that are needed are not made; and even when things are produced which are needed, like coal and power, they go to waste because by the laws of the market there are not enough people with enough money to whom those goods can be sold. Thus the market system which pretends to balance what is produced with what is needed becomes just a mechanism to further extend the imbalances and inequalities which led to its corruption in the first place. NOTHING demonstrates the crude class nature of the market more sharply than the recent developments in the power industry. For 40 years after the war Tories everywhere were infuriated whenever they turned on a light. The light came on, it worked, it served its purpose, and the electricity industry everywhere made a handsome surplus. What enraged the Tories was that no one in their class made a direct profit from it. The profit went back into the industry, which was publicly owned. The same applied to electricity’s main competitor, gas, and to water. The ultimate achievement of the Thatcher experiment in pure free enterprise – the crock of gold at the end of rainbow for innumerable Thatcherite yuppies – was the privatisation of all three utilities. Aeons of parliamentary time were taken up with complicated bills to restore these industries to private enterprise. Millionaire accountants like Cecil Parkinson and John Wakeham, both since ennobled, wallowed in the rhetoric of ‘setting the utilities free’. Nearly half a billion pounds was doled out to stockbrokers, merchant bankers, city solicitors, estate agents and public relations mandarins to ‘advise’ the ministers and the new private companies. What was the result? The old public gas monopoly was turned into a new private gas monopoly. Electricity generation was carefully parcelled out to two huge monopolies, Power-Gen and National Power. The 12 public electricity distribution companies were transformed into 12 private electricity distribution companies, run by exactly the same people and in exactly the same way as before. The regional public water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas have been changed completely into private regional water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas.

The regional public water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas have been changed completely into private regional water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas. Prices of all these commodities have risen almost exactly at the same pace as in the past. The only difference is that the new monopolies are not answerable to any elected authority and provide the most lavish largesse for their top executives and shareholders. John Baker, a bureaucrat who ran the CEGB at £76,000 a year is now an ‘entrepreneur’ who runs National Power for £347,911 a year, plus share options. In the first full year of trading the electricity companies paid out more than £300 million in dividends to private individuals, funds, trusts and banks. Almost at once the market went into another spasm of greed. The new companies, using special powers given to them by Parkinson and Wake-ham (powers which had been specifically denied to the old nationalised companies) started to fund new gas fired power stations. The chief effect of this ‘dash for gas’ was to increase the overcapacity of power supply by a fantastic 25 percent. Was the purpose to make electricity cheaper? All the evidence suggests that the new gas fired electricity will be more expensive than the coal fired kind in the short term and much more expensive in the long term. How, in this disciplined and consumer conscious market, can billions of pounds be spent on increasing power, when there is apparently too much of it already, and into the bargain make it more expensive? First, because the investors in private electricity want to collect a dividend from their share in the new gas stations, there is no dividend from nationalised coal. Secondly, the gas fired stations provide the new power vampires with a source of power supply where the unions are not half as strong as in the pits. So the market works against its own logic, increasing overcapacity and raising prices, solely in order to shift the balance of the fight against the workers. This is also the only explanation for the greatest absurdity of all in the privatised power market; the subsidy for the nuclear industry. If the coal industry had the £1.3 billion subsidy dished out by the government for its unprofitable and dangerous nuclear power stations, coal could be given away free, delivered free and in abundance to every power station and every home, and still make a profit. Why does a free market government dish out such huge handouts to an industry which produces higher prices and which will, as the US developers of nuclear power have discovered, never make a profit for everyone? The answer is that it provides a source of power where the unions are weak and the workers regimented by secrecy laws and an internal police force. All the realities of the ‘market’ contradict the claims made for it. All expose its only purpose; to enrich the rich and to ensure where possible that that enrichment is not spoiled by organised trade unions. IN THE LAST FEW months the last of the claims for the free market has also been exposed. In 1989 Nicholas Ridley, the Tory who dreamed up Thatcher’s highly successful plans to break the unions in steel and coal, boasted that during his time in office throughout the 1980s the free market had worked. The average family in Britain had increased its standard of living. This was due, he said, to free enterprise as promoted by the Tories. Now Ridley says exactly the opposite. ‘Poor people are losing their jobs,’ he moans on television. The great free marketeer casts around desperately for an alternative economic strategy – low interest rates, perhaps even a little government investment. Ridley’s lament is taken up with much more enthusiasm by the forgotten Keynesians of the 1980s. Keynes had a brilliant solution to the free market. He identified the market’s problem as the gap between what people get in wages and the prices they pay. Why not, urged Keynes, employ a lot of people making things they couldn’t buy – like schools and hospitals and weapons? Why not, he asked satirically, pay people to dig holes and fill them in again? The wages they were paid would fill the crucial gap! Capitalism’s problems could be solved by a lot of well meaning and intelligent economists (like John Maynard Keynes) in high office! These views electrified the Labour Party. The three Labour governments after the war based their policies on Keynesian ideas. Each of them ran up against the same problem; rich people were not prepared to pay the taxes for the necessary public works. A mighty class revolt stopped the policy in its tracks. Each successive Labour government achieved less than its predecessor and Keynesianism was discredited. In the Thatcher years the Keynesians were out of fashion. Now they are staggering into the light again; William Kegan of the Observer, Wynne Godley, the Cambridge economist, even Governor Bill Clinton. Spend on public services, they all say. Build up the infrastructure. In the wake of the terrible disaster that was Thatcherite free enterprise some of them get a hearing. In general they are met with the same despair which greets the free marketeers, the same political hunger for an alternative which has not so obviously failed. LISTENING on the evening of Black Wednesday to Labour Party leaders stammering their replies to That Awful Question – what would you do instead? – I couldn’t help remembering the famous Sidney Webb phrase which still, as far as I know, appears on Labour Party cards. ‘The common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.’ The problem with the free market and the Keynesian solution to it is that all economic activity is owned and controlled by a small class whose only purpose is to enrich itself at the expense of everyone else. There is absolutely no ‘solution’ as long as that control continues. There can be no social solution to the anti-social problems of an anti-social system unless die economy is owned and controlled by society. How can an economy be planned? How can a government even decide on priorities of production unless it owns and controls that production? These were the ideas which convinced so many people in the first half of this century about the case for socialism.

In the second half of the century that case has taken some hard knocks. The Labour governments in which so many socialist hopes were invested strengthened capitalism. In Russia a society calling itself socialist was increasingly exposed as a monstrous tyranny, where the workers were exploited every bit as cruelly as anywhere else. Socialism got a bad name. Labourites and Stalinists defined their socialism only in terms of state control and a planned economy. They cut from socialism its essence, its control from below and its accountability to working class democracy. The liberating and revolutionary element of socialism is its ability to unleash and mobilise all the human energies which a class society cramps and corrupts. Without that element ‘socialism’ was no better than what George Orwell called ‘a mean state capitalism with the grab motive left intact.’ The only socialists who survived the collapse of Stalinism and the cretinism of Labour were those of us who opposed and exposed both and linked our socialism inextricably to the struggle for it. For us socialism was not some paradise or Utopia, distant and unimaginable. The seeds of the new society were being sown all the time before our eyes, in the struggle against the old one. When that struggle is weak and low, so is the appeal of socialism. But when, as so miraculously in the last few weeks, the apathy and despondency of the people at the rough end of society are suddenly dispelled, when masses of workers start talking of their anger, their hopes and dreams, then That Awful Question comes again; what would you do instead? Our answer is the same as ever; the same workers’ power which can win a strike or stop a law can seize control of the means of production, distribution and exchange and, by planning them, run society to the advantage of the many, not the few. What seemed idealistic and preposterous only a few weeks ago suddenly doesn’t seem so unlikely. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot For law, read class (April 1978) From Socialist Review, No. 1, April 1978, pp. 23–24. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Politics of the Judiciary J.A.G. Griffith Fontana £1.25 ‘DENNING HITS AT STRIKERS LEGAL BACKING’ shouts the main headline on page 2 of my Daily Telegraph this morning (March 3). Lord Denning (who told a reporter the other day that he normally buys the Sunday Telegraph rather than the Sunday Times ‘because it is cheaper’) is Master of the Rolls, the second most important judge in the country. He is long past the age when most working people retire, but he still gets £22,000 from the taxpayer. He is widely regarded in the legal profession as a ‘bit of a boy’ for some of his ‘unconventional judgements’. But when it comes to the important things in life, Lord Denning is not at all unconventional. He hates strikes, he regards the legal immunity for strikers which has existed on and off since 1906 as a scandal. He would love to be able to put strikers where he believes they ought to be – in prison. And he is not afraid to say so – on this occasion on his inauguration as President of the Holdsworth Club, which is the law society of Birmingham University. As is usual on such occasions Lord Denning made it clear that his views as President of the Holdsworth Society would never, in any circumstances, influence him as a judge from faithfully administering the law which with he so passionately disagreed. Lord Denning has been President of a lot of other things in his time. In 1972, he was chairman of the Marriage Guidance Council. He chose his chairman’s address that year to make a scurrilous attack on Bernadette Devlin, then MP for Mid-Ulster. The noble Lord has nothing against Bernadette’s politics, of course, (judges don’t have political views). What annoyed him about Miss Devlin was that she was about to give birth to a child which had been conceived out of wedlock! The ‘fabric of society’ was being ‘ripped apart’, Lord Denning mused, when elected representatives started getting themselves in the family way, and then openly admitting it right out loud, like an usher farting in court! The judges are not automatons or neuters as they sometimes like to pretend. They are men; men with ideas and prejudices just like anyone else. What sort of men are they? Lord Justice Lawton, who started his career at the bar by joining the politically neutral British Union of Fascists, said in the Riddell lecture in 1975: ‘Judges are drawn from all ranks of society’. By this the Lord Justice meant, of course, that you will find judges who went to many different schools: not just Eton, that is, but Harrow, Winchester and even Repton. Not all went to Oxford or Cambridge either. A few even went to Leeds University, or Birmingham or Manchester. There’s a sprinkling of the nouveaux riches on the bench along with the aristocrats. And that, as far as Lord Justice Lawton is concerned, makes up ‘all ranks of society’. ‘Society’ as far as he is concerned, can’t possibly be said to include the offal and dregs some of whom appear before him from time to time in the courts. All judges, even the ten per cent who didn’t go to public school, are lawyers. That means that they have all passed through the peculiarly constipated education which law affords. They have all been barristers, that is they have ‘done their time’ in chambers, which is still impossible for anyone without substantial private means. They have all ‘eaten their dinners’ and solemnly performed (until it seems almost natural) in the bizarre ceremonial of the Inns of Court. Their class origins and ideas have been nurtured in the sealed hothouse of the British legal system. They are stronger-rooted and more ostentatious than in any other section of the British oligarchy. If there is anyone left who still believes that the judges are ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’, John Griffith’s book will open their eyes. He has collected together a body of case law which proves beyond any shadow of doubt the heavy bias of the judiciary in every part of the law. When the government passes laws which threaten property-owners, the judges go to every length to fight for ‘the right of the individual’. When the government pass laws to keep out immigrants, the illegal immigrant has to prove he is not guilty before he can be released. When squatters claim that their eviction means homelessness and despair for their children, the judges (Lord Denning in particular) declare that that has ‘nothing to do with law’. Yet when prostitutes or editors of radical papers come before the courts on a non-existent charge (’conspiracy to public morals’), the judges make up the charge, and find the defendants guilty on it, in order, as one Law Lord put it, ‘to uphold the moral welfare of the state’. In perhaps the most impressive section of book, John Griffith compares the treatment of expelled students and expelled union members. In both cases, he points out, people have, been expelled or dismissed in a way which could threaten their livelihood. Yet the existing laws, and the judges’ conception of ‘natural justice’ is stained out of all recognition in order both to uphold the dismissal of students and to annul the dismissal of trade unionists by their union.

Yet the existing laws, and the judges’ conception of ‘natural justice’ is stained out of all recognition in order both to uphold the dismissal of students and to annul the dismissal of trade unionists by their union. ‘Why’ asks John Griffith ‘is the expulsion of the union member almost always set aside, and that of the student almost always upheld? The answer lies in the general attitude of the judiciary ...’ Yes, the ‘general attitude’, which supports the discipline of the headmaster or the board of governors, who curb the spirit of protest or rebellion or rule-breaking, but detests the discipline of the trade union, which threatens the property of employers and shareholders. The bias of the judiciary is not changing for the better. John Griffith has not selected a lot of cases from the ‘bad old days’ when judges were monsters, and everyone knew it. Almost all his cases, including some very recent ones indeed, come from the ‘bad new days’ when the judges are monsters, but very few people realise it. The trend, he points out almost incidentally, is for judges to allow more power to the police, a wider use of conspiracy laws, a sharper interference with any progressive legislation by a Labour government, and a more overtly racialist oppression with black defendants or deportees. His little book all points in an obvious direction until its conclusion, which doesn’t point anywhere at all. He makes a desperate effort to free himself from the stigma of Marxism by asserting that the Marxist view of the law ‘takes us only some way along the road’. ‘The function’ he explains ‘performed, by the judiciary in our society is not a peculiarly capitalist function. Some of its manifestations – such as its tenderness towards private property and its dislike of trade unions – may be traced to such a source. But its strong adherence to the maintenance of law and order, its distaste for minority opinions, demonstrations and protests, its indifference to the promotion of better race relations, its support of governmental secrecy and its concern for the preservation of the moral and social behaviour to which ills accustomed, these attitudes seem to derive from a different ideology.’ This is the familiar, unedifying spectacle of the powerful left-wing academic, at the end of a painstaking work, seeking to wriggle off the Marxist hook by inventing a narrow view of Marxism, and dissociating himself from it. All ruling classes have survived by disguising their robbery with a way of thinking which extends far outside the field or the factory. Discipline in the streets and in the home, conformity of ideas, racialism, government secrecy and the ‘preservation of a moral and social order to which it is accustomed’. All these are not incidental but fundamental to the maintenance of capitalist robbery (as they were to the maintenance of any other system of robbery). That is all very clearly explained by Marx and Engels, and John Griffith’s characterisation of Marxism does no one any credit. He will (and has been) denounced as a Marxist anyway by the supporters of the judiciary. And rightly so. For his facts and research lead inexorably in that direction. His second major argument that the judiciary is not pursuing a capitalist role is that the judiciary in Russia and Eastern Europe are equally repressive and reactionary! There is another conclusion to that, which is that the systems of society in Britain and Western Europe have more in common with those in Eastern Europe in Russia than they have in conflict. The wriggling and squirming at the end of the book however has a more serious consequence. ‘Our freedoms’ writes John Griffith ‘depend on the willingness of the press, politicians and others to publicise the breach of those freedoms ‘The Press, politicians and others’. These are the people to whom John Griffith would have us turn for the protection of our freedoms. Yet the Press, by and large, is wound into the same web as are the judges. So are most politicians. If our freedoms depended only on these, there would be less of them even then there are. The people who established the freedom of the press were the people who sold the Poor Man’s Guardian on the streets in the 1830s and established by sheer organisation and weight of numbers the right of papers to be published without the penal ‘stamp’. The people who broke the Combination laws were the weavers and stockingers who went on strike in spite of them. The people who established the right of procession were the hundreds of thousands of working people who marched with the Chartists. The people who wiped the Industrial Relations Act off the Statute book were the dockers and the printworkers who went on indefinite strike and forced the Industrial Relations Court to tree the five dockers arrested for contempt of the legislation. Yet this episode, because it ridiculed the ‘rule of law’, is described by John Griffith as a ‘calamity’. It wasn’t a calamity. It was a victory. The rule of law is the rule of the capitalist class, and the more it is ridiculed, the better. I mustn’t give the wrong impression, John Griffith’s book is first class. It is an unanswerable exposé of judicial hypocrisy and prejudice and it has made him a lot of powerful enemies. All socialists should read it. The waverings and wrigglings at the end are easy to spot, and easier to straighten. Top of the page Last updated on 13 September 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot TUC’s own official part of plots against left leaders (19 January 2002) From Socialist Worker, No.1783, 19 January 2002. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. SOCIALIST WORKER has seen vital documents about the involvement of the Trades Union Congress in the current elections to high office of the RMT rail union. They make it clear that at least one official at the TUC has been plotting with a right wing official of the RMT to improve the vote of right wing candidates and smear rivals from the left. The main documents are: A memo from Mike Power, campaigns officer at the TUC, to Mick Cash, the RMT officer at Watford. Cash is organising the campaign of Phil Bialyk, the centre-right candidate for general secretary of the RMT. The memo says, “Herewith my initial thoughts on why the Western Mail should interview Phil. As you will see there are many points to add and I’m far from an expert on the industry. But I think it is a useful outline from our conversation.” There follows a long screed on the experience and suitability for high office of Phil Bialyk. The Western Mail, which has a long ultra-reactionary tradition, is the only local daily paper that circulates in Bialyk’s area, South Wales. A summary of “notes from discussion on writing Phil’s election address, Monday 12 November”. This includes the passage: “We are talking about a massive potential threat from a fanatic who already holds a key post as AGS. He is therefore on the inside and the attack on him has to be more oblique.” This is followed by a series of demands, such as “we have to prevent a take-over of the union by extreme left-wing fundamentalists”. The phrase “left-wing fundamentalists” is repeated four more times in the document. The AGS referred to is RMT assistant general secretary Bob Crow, the left candidate for general secretary. A document headed Briefing, November 2001 leadership elections in the RMT. This is a classical witch-hunting document directed at Bob Crow and other left candidates. It lists in dreary detail Bob’s political associations, including his former membership of the Communist Party and the Socialist Labour Party. It even cites his appearance at Marxism, an annual event organised by the Socialist Workers Party and repeatedly addressed by many socialists outside the SWP. The final paragraph reads, “The main source of industrial unrest in Britain over recent years has been on the railways and in the post office. “Already the left have made gains in the main post office union. In addition, an unreconstructed Communist – Mark Serwotka – has become general secretary elect of the main civil service union, the PCS ... the direction of unions in these industries could spell trouble for the government.” These documents are similar to efforts in the past, including the work of organised right wing factions in the unions, with their supporters in big business and in mainstream newspapers like the Daily Mirror. Their purpose is not to enquire why the left is so strong in the unions or to argue the political case against them. It is simply to brand them as “extremists” and call for a vote against them. Some of the material in these documents was published last week in the Guardian Diary and London’s Evening Standard. The articles drew an immediate denial from TUC general secretary John Monks. He said the TUC was not in any way responsible for any of this material, and said it does not get involved in the elections of individual unions. Like Bob Crow, Mike Power is a former member of the Communist Party. Last Friday I put a call in to him at TUC headquarters, explained that I was ringing on behalf of Socialist Worker and asked for an explanation of the documents. He rang back immediately and explained that Mick Cash of the RMT was “an old mate of mine”. Cash, he said, had approached him for help and advice about the RMT elections, and he had readily offered both. He denied that he had written any of the main documents, but agreed that he had advised on tone and content. His story was that he, a junior TUC official, had been acting entirely on his own. He said he was “under the cosh” and facing disciplinary proceedings for his involvement with Cash, and was very sorry for the embarrassment he had caused John Monks. This meek explanation clashes sharply with the professionalism and firmness of the documents. If indeed Mike Power was acting entirely on own initiative, he was behaving in a truly reckless manner. A more probable explanation is that he was acting on a “need to know” basis. It is likely that he had a nod and a wink to go ahead on the understanding that, if any of his activities were exposed, the mandarins of the TUC would dive for cover and offer him up for sacrifice. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot No time to make up (December 1998) From Socialist Review, No.225, December 1998, p.9. Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The call to forget the past may seem attractive, argues Paul Foot, but it means accepting that tyrants escape their crimes. From two parts of the world whose people have suffered horribly under recent tyrannies comes a plea for reconciliation, for ‘letting bygones be bygones’. In Chile, some workers protest about the arrest in London of the former dictator Pinochet. ‘We were just getting used to freedom and democracy after the long night of tyranny,’ runs their argument. ‘We don’t want to go back to confrontation in the streets. Pinochet is an old, sick man now. He can’t do any harm. Why can’t you let him go, and leave us in our new found social peace?’ Similarly, there are black people in South Africa who plead to be allowed to forget the nightmare of apartheid and to bask in the new atmosphere of racial tolerance. This was the spirit behind Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose basic theme is that although the apartheid regime constantly resorted to the most ruthless racist oppression of the majority, it has been deposed; and now is the time to forgive, forget and build a new society founded on multiracialism and democracy. This approach appeals to many working class people, who have little or no property, are accustomed to combination and cooperation, and detest harassment. It seems both humane and sensible not to copy the oppressors by hounding and prosecuting them. The argument, however, is founded on a flaw. Essential to it is the notion that oppression is an ugly accident of history, a vile carbuncle on the smooth skin of democratic progress. The norm, runs the argument, is liberal democracy and human progress. Fascism or apartheid occur only occasionally, almost by mistake. It follows that to pick away at the ruins of such an unlikely sore is obsessive and sectarian behaviour which can only revive the sore and make it worse. The history of these tyrannies, however, tells us something very different. There is a pattern to them which reflects the central characteristic of the world we live in: that it is run by a small class for profit; and the source of that profit is the workers who produce the wealth. The class on top much prefers to make its profits without any nastiness from the masses it exploits. The rulers prefer to operate where the people choose their governments, and where everyone in society is subject to the rule of law. If people vote for their government, and are protected by the rule of law, they are much less likely to complain about their exploitation. Hence the ‘norm’ which seems to emerge from the history of the western democracies – a norm of elected governments and a set of laws which at any rate pretend to apply equally to everyone. The problem with this exploitative system, however, is that it does not proceed smoothly. It is subject to crises and slumps, which invariably lead to protests, riots and strikes from the workers. Much of this can be absorbed and tolerated, but every now and then, with surprising frequency, the class which runs the system decides it can no longer tolerate the freedoms it previously sponsored. The crisis grows too intense, the workers grow too strong, sometimes even the entire system is threatened with revolution. In such circumstances, the ruling class reaches for rulers ruthless enough to crush the democracy, and in doing so shatter to smithereens the very rule of law of which they boasted. Such rulers include Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany – and Pinochet in Chile. We now know that Pinochet’s 1973 coup, which overthrew an elected government, rounded up 70,000 of its supporters, burnt their books, raped the women, tortured and murdered at least 10,000 people, was planned in the dear old democratic US by an intelligence agency which was set up ostensibly to protect democracy. The reason for the coup was that investors in Chile had become sick and tired of laws which tried, usually unsuccessfully, to keep prices down. Low prices meant low profits, and low profits for any length of time were intolerable. In South Africa there never was a democracy. The only people who ever voted there were white. Black people had no vote and no civil rights, and could therefore be exploited in an atmosphere of the most revolting oppression. Such a pattern to the oppression exposes the absurdity of the ‘forgive and forget’ brigade. For if the savages who are called up to preside over the destruction of democracy, the mockery of the rule of law, and racist terror can get away with it, if they are never made to answer for their barbarism, let alone be punished for it, then the consequence is absolutely plain. They will do so again, and again and again, confident in the knowledge that if and when their tyrannies run out of steam or are overthrown, their successors will cover them in the milk of kindness, make them senators, put them up in the London Clinic and even allow them to delete their names from the catalogue of their atrocities. The mildest conciliators get trapped in their own argument. In Shelley’s Revolt of Islam the revolutionary forces finally corner the hated tyrant Othman. ‘Blood for blood!’ shout the angry crowd as they prepare to do him in. Laon, the beautiful young revolutionary leader (as Shelley imagined himself), eloquently persuades them, in the interests of human decency and fair play, to let the tyrant go. Off he goes, rallies new forces and returns to wipe out the revolution and burn Laon at the stake. Even more dramatically, the best scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play about the Paris Commune is an argument about whether the revolutionary Communards should march on Versailles and smash the remnants of the reactionary government there. No, no, say the idealist Communards. Why should we spill blood as the tyrants do? Yes, yes, says Brecht’s hero, for we are faced with a simple alternative – the bloody hand now or the severed hand later. In the counter-revolution led from Versailles 20,000 Communards were murdered. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Libel Fund ‘Please contribute to Bookmarks appeal’ (23 October 2003) From Socialist Worker, No.1874, 25 October 2003. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I AM asking all socialists and freethinkers to contribute to a libel appeal on behalf of the socialist bookshop Bookmarks. Bookmarks was sued by Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas, well known figures on the British left. They complained about an article written in 1993 and published in 1999 in the book The Balkans, Nationalism and Imperialism. Through the well known libel lawyers Carter-Ruck and Partners, Hoare and Magas complained about a passage in the book. No attempt was made by the defendants to justify what they had published. They pointed out that in the year before the writ was issued, the book sold less than 50 copies. They made a statement in open court apologising, and agreeing to pay the plaintiffs £1,500 damages each. It is a long tradition in our movement that political differences should not be subjected to libel actions, if only because such actions are likely to cost more in lawyers’ fees than any damage caused. In this case, the £3,000 paid in damages will certainly be dwarfed when Carter-Ruck ask for their costs – likely to be in the region of £10,000. Bookmarks of course have no access to that kind of money, so we are trying to raise as much as we can from well-wishers. Most Socialist Worker readers have gained a lot from Bookmarks, and I appeal to them to contribute to this appeal. Cheques should be made out to Bookmarks Libel Fund. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot United in battle for the class (26 May 1984) From Socialist Worker, 26 May 1984. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. One of the most exhilarating and exciting things about the miners’ strike (and there are plenty of those, as well as the holes in it) is the mobilisation of women. By all accounts, the march and rally of 10,000 women from mining communities all over Britain last Saturday was a most fantastic event. The women from the miners’ communities have not been confined to passive support, or to servicing the strike – they have been out on the picket lines. There was, as far as I can remember, none of this in 1972 or 1974. Then the movement for women’s liberation, which flowered in the 1970s, was in its infancy. As that movement grew, so two arguments sprung up on either side of it to blunt its influence and its growth. The first was that women’s place was in the home, looking after their men. This argument was not confined to the Daily Mail – it penetrated deep into the working class where solid, socialist men argued that the relationship between men and women in modern society was about right, that there was no oppression in it, and that any concern with women’s liberation was ‘bourgeois deviationism’. Poisoned This attitude was quite strong in the National Union of Mineworkers. Arthur Scargill publicly defended the publishing of ‘pin-up’ women in his union journal, and in the process managed to get through a fair amount of sexist drivel. Arguments like the ones he used in that debate served to separate the struggle for the emancipation of women from the struggle for the emancipation of labour. Indeed they poisoned the labour movement at its very roots, by pretending that anyone can free themselves while they are condoning discrimination against others. The other argument seemed to be the opposite, but was in fact the reverse side of the same coin. This was that the central problem in society was the liberation of women, that all woes of modern life stemmed from the oppression of women by men, and that therefore the fundamental battle, far more important than any other, was for women to break the masculine chains which bound them. Obviously, they could only achieve this without men. Obviously, therefore, this cut out any class struggle, since there were even more men at work than there were women. So this argument too served to separate the struggle for women’s liberation from the struggle for workers’ liberation, to set one set of freedom-fighters in bitter battle against the other, and to weaken both. There was, throughout that time, a third argument. This was that the treatment of women in capitalist society was one of the most powerful indictments of it; that women were, plainly, worse off than men in society, and that this discrimination, whether in the workplace or the home, greatly assisted the class in power. Rougher Discrimination and sexism was widespread, even in the working class movement, and had unconditionally to be resisted. But the power to change society could not escape its fundamental economics, its class divisions. The power to change was rooted in the ability of workers to take their own decisions about the work they did, and the wealth they produced, and to act together. It followed from this that the most effective way to change not just wages and conditions, but also discrimination against women, was working class action. Much of this is being worked out before our eyes. The ‘keep women in the home’ brigade have been out in force, especially among the scabs. They have had a rougher time than ever before. The ‘ultras’ who believed only in women’s action, and who denounced the miners’ strike as ‘macho’, have been routed. The combination of the power of working class action and the organisation of women who are part of that struggle, has been electric. It has changed sexism and prejudice everywhere. I haven’t read everything Arthur Scargill said at the women’s rally in Barnsley, but I’m damned sure he didn’t speak up for pin-ups in his union magazine. Top of the page Last updated on 5 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Offensive to the bullies (5 April 1977) From Socialist Worker, No.1539, 5 April 1977, p.11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “BLAIR GOES on offensive over trade unions”. The headline in the Times on Monday shouted out from the newsagent’s and I seized the papers eagerly. “Blair goes on offensive” seemed amazing enough, but on the trade union issue – well, at last, thank heavens, what a relief. Two days previously the Tories had let loose a great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over Labour’s promise to bring in a law to enforce trade union representation in any workplace where the majority of workers vote for it. This was a clear unequivocal pledge made by Blair himself at the 1995 Labour Party conference and repeated, a little shamefacedly, at the start of this election campaign. The pledge in no way makes up for the eight anti-union laws passed by the Tories since 1979. In no way does it provide the unions with legal backing for the sort of strength they have used in the past. But neither is it meaningless. The menace of derecognition which has swept through so much of industry leaves workers utterly defenceless. Where there is no union the Thatcherite chargehand who believes that by some divine right he is empowered to lord it over the workers reigns supreme. A trade union with proper negotiating rights enables the workers to collect together in places and at meetings from which the boss is excluded, and makes it far easier for them to discuss and take action to preserve not only their pay and conditions but their basic dignities as human beings. Come squawking Blair’s 1995 pledge promised the force of law to such union organisation at the point of production. Passed into law, the proposal would enormously increase the confidence of workers and cut down the arrogance of the employers. When Thatcher shrieked that the “bully boys” would now be let off the leash, she was talking about shop stewards and convenors. But to every worker in the country the expression “bully boys” means only one thing: the new management autocrats. Why had Blair stuck to his pledge? Why had he not abandoned it with all the other pledges? No doubt because this one was the absolute minimum condition for the continued support of the trade unions. If Blair had dropped this small promise, he would have lost the union support he so badly needs. So now, as the right wing press sniffed an “issue” with which they could attack the Labour Party, as Thatcher had come squawking with anti-union hysteria into the election campaign, now precisely was the time for an “offensive” from the Labour leader in which he would stand up for the right to organise. Then I read Blair’s Times article. As the sentences unfolded, the headline seemed to stand on its head. Blair’s “offensive” was not against the Tory union bashers – it was against the unions. Blair pledges himself not to roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws but to continue to uphold them. His government, he promised, would be the “most restrictive government against the unions in Europe”. Not a clause of Thatcher’s anti-union laws would be repealed. The “scenes” at Grunwick, Wapping and the miners’ strike – scenes in which workers fought against overwhelming odds for their unions and their jobs – would, he promised, “never be seen again in this country”. He did not (quite) renege on his promise, though he sought to water it down to zero. This is by far the most serious matter of the election campaign, and the whole trade union movement should unite to ensure that Blair sticks to what he said and introduces legal backing for workplace unionisation. Top of the page Last updated on 12.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Vision of a new world (May 1993) Review Article, Socialist Review, No.164, May 1993, p.20. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Frederick Engels’ revolutionary pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has recently been reprinted. It can inspire a new generation of socialists, says Paul Foot Socialism; Utopian and Scientific, price £2.95, is available from Bookmarks. When I first read this little book 32 years ago, the strongest force on the Marxist left was the Communist Party. I expect I read it very much as the Communists presented it. Its main message, I gathered, was that the French writers St Simon and Fourier and the British philanthropist Robert Owen were a lot of footling dreamers who just didn’t understand the basic point about socialism – that it was a science. Utopians were illusionists who dreamed of a better world. Marxists understood politics like chemists or biologists understood science. And the most wonderful thing about understanding the science of socialism was that it was bound to come. It was a bit of a shock to read the book again all those years later and find out that it says just about the opposite of what I remembered. All three ‘Utopians’, especially Fourier, are so brilliantly and enthusiastically presented that I longed to read more of them. None of the three turned out to be the vacuous dreamers I’d imagined. Engels, one of the least sectarian writers in all history, praises them to the skies for their powerful and forceful indictments of the divided societies of their time, and, in Owen’s case at any rate, for the communist alternative he proposed. If ‘Utopian’ just means dreamer or visionary, then no one was more Utopian than Frederick Engels. What about this for instance? ‘The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now conies under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation.’ That’s a vision of a new world, a better world, a world worth fighting for, a world to win. Engels’ socialist conviction didn’t just emerge, like a scientific discovery emerges, from observation and experiment. It arose from a deep sense of outrage at the miseries and exploitations of a society ‘where workers are in want of subsistence because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence.’ But does ‘Utopia’ just mean a better society? No, it means what it says: ‘ou’ (Greek for not) ‘topia’ (Greek for place) – no place. The point about Utopia is that it doesn’t exist. It is a world of fantasy. Engels’ complaint about the Utopian socialists was that they were driven by ‘an “idea” existing somehow in eternity before the world was’. They compared their eternal idea of how society might be to what it is. Engels, by contrast, showed how society could be changed by understanding what it is. For the Utopians, then, ‘socialism conquers the world by virtue of its own power.’ This could happen at any time in history. The history of the Utopians circled around their idea. They had no conception of any historical development. All this changed with the ‘discovery’ of Karl Marx that the motive force of history was the clash between the class which had the property and those who hadn’t. Capitalism, the most modern class society, had for the first time developed productive forces so hugely that everyone in the world could share out what was produced. There was now no longer any need of class society. There could be a better society. That socialist society is not Utopian precisely because it is possible – it can be brought about. How did Marx discover this? Was it just because he was one of the most brilliant intellectuals who ever lived? Not at all. If he had lived at the time of St Simon or Fourier he could have been ten times the genius he was but he would not and could not have put forward his theory of class struggle. What enabled him to do so was the movement of the class struggle itself, from the first general strike, in Lyons in 1831, to the great uprisings of the British Chartists in 1839. These outbreaks of mass working class resistance ushered Marx’s theories onto the intellectual stage – not the other way round. What is the main point about socialism, therefore? ‘Its task is no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism have of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.’ The road to a new society passes straight through the old one. The seeds of the new society are sown in the struggle against the old one. This is essentially what ‘scientific’ socialism means. Engels talks later about the ‘inevitable downfall’ of capitalism. I find that a most unscientific conclusion. If socialism is scientifically inevitable, why fight for it? Engels’ main argument was with the idealists, the socialists who thought their ideas were more important than the real conditions and struggles of the less educated mob. His book concentrates so hard on showing that we cannot get to socialism through having an eternal idea that he devotes only a line or two of generalities on how we do get there. There are plenty of other books (most of them by Lenin) on that point. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a lively and quite beautifully written summary of Marx’s main economic ideas and where they come from. It is far more passionate than the most fanatical Utopian and far easier to understand than the simplest scientist. It’s also, perhaps most importantly, a powerful antidote to despair. If this best-selling expression of revolutionary confidence could be written in 1877, right in the middle of a downturn which lasted 40 years, who are we to complain of a miserable little blip which hasn’t lasted half as long? Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Reaching across the centuries (7 January 1989) From Socialist Worker, 7 January 1989. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 19–21. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The best thing about Christmas was Janet Suzman’s Othello on Channel 4. I have been a Shakespeare freak from a very young age, largely because I never did a Shakespeare play for any examination, and so could read the stuff (and speak it) for pleasure. For years and years I puzzled over Othello. I couldn’t understand why Iago was so keen to do him down. I read the conventional criticism, including a man called Bradley, who wailed on about a ‘tragic flaw’ in Othello’s character, which was mirrored by a ‘tragic flaw’ in Iago’s character. The whole play, said Bradley, was about jealousy. Othello was jealous of Desdemona, and Iago of Othello. Not very convincing. I always thought the play more haunting and overpowering than any other. One cold night about twelve years ago I spoke to a socialist meeting in Nottingham and stayed with a comrade who was interested in drama. The next day, as I was about to leave, he pressed into my hands a Pelican book called Shakespeare in a Changing World. I flicked through it as the train pulled out. It was written by people who were once Marxists or who might (at that time) admit to be Marxists, but on the whole were trying to avoid letting their readers know they were Marxists. I was about to put it down when I came across a chapter entitled Othello and the Dignity of Man by G.M. Matthews. Passion I got to know Geoffrey Matthews later. He was, for all too short a time, a friend and a teacher. I shared his passion for the revolutionary poet Shelley. Geoffrey read Shelley not as a dead poet but a living revolutionary, and so he understood him. He also read and enjoyed Shakespeare, not just as the greatest poet and dramatist of them all, but also as a creature of revolutionary times who took a deep interest in the world about him. Suddenly, I read two sentences which laid Othello bare. Iago hates Othello because he is a Moor. This irrational but powerful motive, underlying the obsessive intensity of his feeling and the improvised reasons with which he justifies it, continually presses up towards the surface of his language. Yes, but what of the ‘tragic flaw’ in Othello? Geoffrey explains: The theory is a nuisance because the potentialities of men are infinite and any number of potential ‘flaws’ can be found or invented to account for his downfall. Yet in all Shakespeare’s tragedies, except perhaps Macbeth, the determining ‘flaw’ is in society rather than in the hero’s supposed distance from perfection. Adultery Tragedy does not occur in Hamlet because the hero has a bad habit of not killing at once, but because the power of the Danish Court is founded on violence and adultery ... The ‘tragic flaw’ theory means that it is a punishable offence to be any particular kind of a man. Moreover it shifts the emphasis from men in conflict to the private mind. Othello all becomes very, very clear in this magnificent essay—but where to see it on stage? Othello is usually played by some fruity-voiced RADA graduate, rather apologetically blacked up. Extracts about racism, ‘human nature’ and prejudice are quietly shoved into the background. I don’t know if Janet Suzman ever read Geoffrey Matthews, but the two seemed to come together most miraculously in her production – which was devised especially for the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and greeted with sustained delight there by packed audiences of every colour, night after night. Othello here is ‘rude of speech’ (though his language is magnificent). He is a South African black warrior marrying the daughter of a prominent white businessman. And Iago, though he recognises the Moor for a decent, generous, brave, open-hearted and friendly man, hates him with a consuming, irrational and all-devouring passion because he is a Moor. The play throws its passions and its problems through 400 years, and means something at last. It is also triumphant. Geoffrey Matthews wrote: All that Iago’s poison has achieved is an object that ‘poisons sight’: a bed on which a black man and a white woman, though they are dead, are embracing. Human dignity, the play says, is indivisible. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Press Private parts (October 1992) From Socialist Review, No.157, October 1992, p.14. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. David Mellor’s resignation marks the latest in a line of scandals that have spurred the government to take measures to curb the press. Everyone hates the tabloids, says Paul Foot, but a law to stop them won’t work Horrified by disclosures in the newspapers about David Mellor and an actress, not to mention pictures of a near-naked Duchess of York, the government has resolved to ‘do something’ about the excesses of the press. The job itself has been farmed out to the Ministry of Heritage where the Secretary of State (and the man who masterminded John Major’s campaign for the Tory leadership) was the aforesaid David Mellor. This has caused some embarrassment so the new ‘Privacy Bill’ (or whatever else it is called) has been passed over to Mellor’s junior, an apparently ‘safe’ gentleman from the shires called Robert Key. As Key drafts his bill, he gets plenty of helpful advice from the Labour Party, whose front-bencher on these matters, Clive Soley, is writing his own bill to protect the general public from the ravages of the gutter press. Soley makes it clear that his aim is not the same as that of the government. Their bill will protect only the rich and famous; his bill will concentrate on protecting ordinary folk who are treated by the media like dirt. All these efforts are widely supported almost everywhere. Everyone hates the tabloid newspapers, especially the 12 million people who buy them every day. The capitalist press is rotten and corrupt. It breeds a specially nasty type of human rotweiler whose peculiar quality is to be as offensive as possible to anyone at all who might in some way assist towards ‘a good story’. It is this offensive behaviour – bursting into peoples’ houses to seize photographs of dead relatives; making up quotations; tapping phones, half-kidnapping children and generally trampling over people, that earns for editors and journalists such universal contempt. It seems obvious that the media do have too much power and that the more preposterous manifestations of that power need to be cut down by law. But what law? As soon as detailed proposals start to be spelt out, the doubts arise. Consider a law to protect privacy. Would it ban any photograph which had not been taken by permission? How would that apply to some of the great pictures – action pictures such as the man defying the tank in Tiananmen Square, or (from the sublime to the ridiculous) pictures of Fergie prancing with her financial adviser in a rich man’s garden? If no photographs are to be published unless they are taken with permission, the whole world would be a duller place. Certainly, the high and mighty (especially royalty) would much easier be able to maintain the consistency of their family values. If such a law is accompanied by a rider insisting that any without permission pictures be ‘in the public interest’, the question arises at once ‘what is in the public interest?’ In a class society, privacy is likely to be defined as important peoples’ privacy; public interest as rich peoples’ interest. Even if the law states specifically that that must not be so, the law will be enforced, as it always is, on class lines. Such a law, then, leaves most of us worse informed and certainly less amused even than we are now. What about the other demand of the press reformers – a right of reply? Isn’t it obviously fair that anyone attacked in the press should have a right to put their own point of view in return? A law like that sounds simple. In fact it would be extraordinarily complex. How much has to be written about a person before he or she has a right to reply? Who decides in each instance whether the right stands or not? How should the reply be framed; how long should it be, what prominence should it have and is there a right of reply to the reply? Once again, the only certainty about the world we live in is that the answers will favour the people who least need a right of reply. The right of reply, whatever the wording of the law, would be used in practise further to shield the big businessmen, civil servants, bankers, bishops, lawyers, peers and spies whose activities are already kept almost secret from the world they rob. The rare instances where the media probe into the dirty work of the rich would be cut down still further by ruthless and prodigious use of the ‘right to reply’. Too often, well meaning busybody politicians (Charter 88 is a glorious example) seek to solve the problems of society by promulgating a law to curb the transgressors. The evidence, however, is overwhelming that the law itself is every bit as corrupted by class as are the media it would be seeking to correct. This is not to say that no reforming laws should be supported. A law designed wholly against the ruling class (like a bill to curb working hours, or a health and safety law) may indeed in practise be reduced to a shadow of what it was in theory, but it is still worth supporting, since it can do no harm and may do some good. But a law to curb the press will not work just one way, just against the moguls and the proprietors. It will work far more savagely against openly challenging and revolutionary papers like this one, and will even further restrict the few independent journalists who attempt to rip the veil away from the secret state and its paymasters. Can anything, therefore, be done about the vile standards and offensive behaviour of the media? Of course. These matters should be the permanent concern of the workers who work in the media and of those who read and watch the media. They should be discussed and acted on where discussion and action can have some effect. The trade unions in the media have always given far too low a priority to the content of what they produce. The ridiculously named Ethics Committee of the National Union of Journalists makes itself a permanent laughing stock by sitting in moral judgement over individual journalists, and castigating them for their transgressions. The unions in the media should combine to set up their own standards committee. They should appoint to it people whose judgements would have a wide measure of respect. Where they find against the media they should direct their fire on the people responsible – the proprietors – and punish them where they hurt most, in the pocket. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Stop press (February 1993) From Socialist Review, No.161, February 1993, pp.20-21. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Nothing can be more discordant than the noise of editors and proprietors of British newspapers howling in unison about their dedication to the freedom of the press. A group of people more dedicated than any other in the country to the distortion and corruption of the truth cover themselves with glory for their truth telling. Loaded down with bias and deceit they proclaim the values of fairness and veracity. Ignoring a million lies, they unearth a rare expose and pretend that it is the norm. From Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun to Andreas Whittam-Smith of the Independent, the editors and their masters stuff their newspapers with frenzied diatribes in support of their right to do just as they please. A perfect example of this hypocrisy was the Daily Mirror leading article of 11 January. It started: ‘The freedom of the press is no more no less – and must never be more or less than the inalienable right of every citizen to speak his mind in public without fear of penalty, prosecution or persecution.’ Five days later Tim Minogue, a subeditor on the Sunday Mirror, who had written a marvellous defence in a letter to the UK Press Gazette of those like him who had been summarily sacked without a word of explanation a few weeks earlier, was told he must swear in writing that he will never again denounce his employers in public – or be sacked. Thus did the Mirror management practise the ‘freedom from persecution’ which it preached. The full horror of the mass hypocrisy of the capitalist press in recent weeks has converted many socialists to the notion of some form of state control of the press. By far the least offensive of the various proposals for such control has come from Labour MP Clive Soley, whose Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill has got wide support in parliament. Soley, of course, is not after protecting rich people’s privacy or the royals’ nakedness as other people are. What sickens him, he says, is the inaccuracy of reports which so often damage the humble and meek. He proposes a Press Authority which can force the bumptious editors to correct mistakes with the same sort of prominence with which the mistakes were made. It seems fair and reasonable. But like so many things which seem fair and reasonable in our society, the proposal does not take account of the fact that the state itself, which enforces every law and would certainly enforce this one, is unfair and unreasonable. A fair and reasonable law will be enforced unfairly and unreasonably. One result would certainly be a restriction on the few miserable advantages which a press unfettered by the state can bring to the dispossessed and to labour. Competition between newspapers and the desire to bring readers new and fresh material occasionally allows a bold spirit or an inquiring mind to break free from the mould. A whole host of exposes even in the last 10 wretched years, even in some of the most Tory newspapers, are evidence that the rich do not always get everything their own way. For all their reaction and corruption, the newspapers do publish a good deal of information which is hostile and embarrassing to ruling class interests. It is this material which is constantly threatened by the oppressive measures with which the ruling class protects its privacy and its purse. The law of libel, more vicious in Britain than in any other industrial democracy, and the associated laws of confidence and even copyright, are a constant menace to anyone who threatens the rich (the poor are not protected, since actions under these heads are not eligible for legal aid). Yes, say Clive Soley and his supporters, we agree – but what has this to do with our idea for a law to force the press to correct their mistakes? The answer is that such a law will simply take its stand alongside the others – and become a threat not to lying editors but to the already shrinking area of challenging and revealing journalism. For what is a ‘mistake’ and what is the meaning of the word ‘inaccurate’? Is it a mistake or inaccurate to repeat the drivelling of generals during a Gulf War? Certainly not. Is it a mistake to devote a front page to a picture of an innocent black defendant in a murder trial? Not at all. The defendant no doubt is black – the trial is taking place. Is it a mistake to hound a gay vicar or a left wing child abuse counsellor or an Irish republican? Not at all. But if a mistake of the slightest degree is made in an article attacking, say, the Kuwaiti royal family or the medicine industry or (worst of all) their lawyers, an enormous pack of lawyers and PR men will descend on Clive Soley’s statutory authority and demand that the mistake be put right. It was instructive that when Clive Soley introduced his bill to a press conference he brought with him a very rich woman called Mona Shabajee. She assured the press that if Clive’s bill had been law, she could not have been hounded as she was. But wait. How was she hounded? She paid for a freebie holiday for a secretary of state, David Mellor. If Mrs Shabajee had not been ‘hounded’, perhaps the freebie holiday would not have been exposed, and David Mellor would still be lecturing us on sexual morality and high principles in office. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that Mrs Shabajee was hounded. But certainly she is right. She, and probably the whole Mellor scandal, would have been well protected by Clive Soley’s bill. Mistakes and inaccuracies are defined by our class society like everything else. A mistake which helps the people who own property is not really a mistake. An inaccurate defence of the fine qualities of British millionaires would not really be considered inaccurate. The right to reply would hardly be relevant. But if there is one mistake in an otherwise accurate expose of those millionaires, then whoever is responsible would, thanks to Clive Soley, have to apologise in the most abject terms. The liberal objection comes at once: surely some control of press inaccuracies is better than none. No it is not, because that control will direct itself not to the great mass of press distortion and corruption but to the very few areas where printed journalism tried to run against the stream. Rotten as the press is, it is better without a law which would still further boost the people responsible for its rottenness. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Business as usual on the Barbican Workers versus management (July 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 85, July 1968, p. 3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. ON THE MASS DEMONSTRATION last November called to declare solidarity with the pickets at Mytons site on the Barbican in the City of London after a strike of more than a year, Lou Lewis, the federation steward on the site, declared: “This strike will not soon be forgotten in the building industry, and it will, I hope, give confidence to building workers everywhere.” Lewis’s hopes have been fulfilled more than he could have imagined. For now, only eight months later, the workers on the Mytons site have come out on strike again. The employers and the union officials hoped to use the defeat of the workers last year as a permanent weapon against their future labour force. They have been confounded not merely by their own arrogance but also by the continuing refusal of the workers to be used as profit-fodder. Last November, after the pickets were withdrawn, the employers blacklisted all the militants formerly employed there. Some of the workers who had worked on the site before the dispute were encouraged back by letters which vilified Lou Lewis and his colleagues. The 15 scabs, who had been brought up from Mytons site at Brighton under heavy Securicor guard and had passed the pickets in police vans, formed the nucleus of the new labour force which was built up to its full complement of 200 men last Christmas. These workers were not allowed to elect their own shop stewards. Instead, the Brighton scabs (or “royalists” as they are known on the site) were appointed to all the shop stewards positions. Allowance From the onset the employers made their position plain. The scabs were “ loyal ” workers, and would be paid accordingly. They were given a £5 a week travel allowance to bring them up from Brighton, and a further scabs. Peter Treacy, the federation steward, for instance, reckons that he will lose a few quid by the new scheme. “But at least we’d be solid when we advance again,” he told me. The demand was rejected outright by the management who realised that the new scheme would vitiate their “ divide and rule” tactics. Accordingly, on Monday June 16, all the 90 carpenters except the six Brighton scabs walked out on strike. They were still out, angry and militant, when I spoke to them on June 20. On that day, each striker received a familiar letter from the management, informing them that their action was “contrary to the site procedure agreement and to the Working Rule [line of text missing] them up from Brighton, and a further unearned “bonus” of 25 hours paid work to compensate for the “long journey.” In addition the Brighton scabs were given the jobs with the best bonus rates, and lowest targets. The bonus rate in the early months was fixed at a standard 4s. per hour for craftsmen, 3s. for labourers. In February, the unions and employers, acting outside the Working Rule Agreement and without even consulting the workers, agreed a bonus scheme which operated on a gang basis. Different gangs got different bonuses and different targets. No sooner had the agreement been reached than the employers made it clear how they were going to operate it. The gang containing the Brighton scabs got all the good jobs and the low targets. The other gangs were given targets which made it almost impossible for any of them to make more than the “ fall-back ” rate of 4s. Bill Jones, the Brighton “Federation steward” appointed by the management, admitted to a meeting of the workers that if he lived in the area he couldn’t afford to work at the new rates. Not surprisingly, the workers soon slung out the Brighton scabs and elected their own stewards. The management replied by threatening to withdraw the “fall-back” bonus, thus rendering most of the workers worse off after the agreement than before. The new, elected stewards threatened the management with a riot if the fall-back rate was withdrawn, and the fall-back rate stayed. Failure The gross favouritism shown to the Brighton scabs, and the continued failure of the management to lower targets or pay more bonus irritated the workers more and more. They pointed out that many of the carpenters’ gangs were working at targets of 15ft. super, while the Brighton scabs were working at 8 ft. super. In Turriffs and many other building sites, the standard target is 8 ft. super, and the stewards argued, quite rightly, that the management were using the Brighton scabs shamelessly to exploit the majority of the workers. Throughout April and May the stewards were constantly arguing with, the management over bonus pay. After several weeks, the various demands in different parts of the site hardened into one : that the bonus rate should be the same for all gangs. This demand did not mean that the management would pay out more money. In fact, on present bonus levels, less money would probably be paid out than under the present scheme. But the “all-in” bonus rate would iron out the arguments between gangs, and enable all the carpenters to argue for rises in a united front, without any chance of being diverted into arguments against the Brighton [line of text missing] agreement, and to the Working Rule Agreement ... Therefore any of these men who fail to resume normal working will be liable to disciplinary action.” It seems that very little has changed on the Barbican pickets from last year. There was the same arrogant management, the same militant workforce, utterly undivided by racial differences (more than half the strikers are West Indian or Indian). Even if. as seems likely, they return to work following the Local Disputes Commission, I do not imagine that the management will be able to push these workers around for much longer. * Hallo to The Hustler WHAT WITH ALL THE FUSS about Black Dwarf, very few people seem to have noticed The Hustler, produced in Notting Hill, which is very much better and more valuable. It’s the first paper produced in the main by coloured people which is militant, un-self-conscious and informative. It costs 1s. a copy and is available from 194 Westbourne Park Road, London, W.11. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Stocking Thriller (December 2002) From Stocking Thrillers, Socialist Review, No.269, December 2002, p.25. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The novel I enjoyed most in 2002 was The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe. I read his hilarious assault on the Thatcher years – What a Carve-Up! – some time ago, and laughed a lot without really believing the author knew or cared much about the reasons for the Thatcher victories. The Rotters’ Club is based on Coe’s native city, Birmingham, in the mid-1970s, and the main characters are connected at different levels to the huge British Leyland factories at the centre of teh industrial disputes of the time. Very slowly and subtly the novel unveils the collapse of the workers’ militancy and confidence, ending in the sacking of ‘Red Robbo’, the Communist shop steward convenor at the Longbridge complex. Apparently incidental, though in essence quite central, is an account of the pickets at Grunwick’s, so brutally beaten back by the police. This was a time when I was working full time for Socialist Worker, and when I stood for parliament for a Birmingham constituency. I never imagined that the loves and hates of ordinary working people during that time would make such rich material for a powerful novel but, in spite of going a bit over the top at the end, Jonathan Coe has certainly produced one. the good news is that there is at least one sequel to come. Top of the page Last updated on 18.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Moonshot moonshine (7 October 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1463, 7 October 1963, p. 11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I WENT to see Apollo 13. The confession over, I now pretend that I did so not for the real reason – a fascination with thrillers – but to draw serious political conclusions. Chief among these is the extraordinary fact that the top American movie blockbuster of the moment, complete with the necessary Tom Hanks, is about an unmitigated disaster – a mission to the moon which never made it. There have been some excellent American disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, complete with the necessary Paul Newman, was about a new tower block in Los Angeles, taller than anything else, which caught fire while a cross section of the city’s great and good were junketing on the top floor. There was an identifiable baddie, a rogue building contractor who had cut corners with the wiring. Then there was The China Syndrome, another very exciting film – complete with the necessary Jane Fonda – about the near meltdown of a nuclear power station. There were baddies here too. Contractors had cut corners on the pipework in the station, and the pipes had started to crack and collapse. Identifiable baddies Neither film is a call to overthrow the capitalist system, of course, but both gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure ana a tot to think about. The mission of Apollo 13 to the Moon in the spring of 1970 was rushed forward to take some of the intense political pressure off the Nixon administration, in desperate trouble with its war in Vietnam and Cambodia. A futile gesture was urgently required to remind Americans of the greatness of their country. The landing of Neil Armstrong on the Moon the previous year had been greeted with wonder across the world. Apollo 13 was a desperate attempt to repeat the glory. No one showed much interest in the mission, however, until it went wrong. The idea that three brave white Americans might die in space gripped the public imagination. In the true story there were, moreover, plenty of identifiable baddies. First there were the political baddies (Nixon and Co) who ordered the mission to go ahead before everything was ready. Then there were the usual bungling contractors. Someone had cut corners with the wiring to the oxygen tanks – a bungle which very nearly blew the entire spaceship to pieces. If the excitement of the battle between life and death had been blended, as it was in the other two films, with the revelation of greed and political opportunism, this film could have been another great. Instead, quite incredibly, all the questions which immediately come to mind as the film unfolds are carefully ignored. The only mention of the crook Nixon is a flattering one. The only mention of the political background is the need to “beat the Russians”. As a result the film is a tremendous flop, a pathetic cliche about decent white American males being brave and brilliant and tense, while their adoring and anxious women and children weep for them at home. It is as though new right wing America, rather like new right wing Labour, has so lost confidence in the system it represents that any possible blemish in it has to be eradicated before it is exposed. The proverbial rotten apple can no longer be plucked out, in case it exposes the whole rotten barrel. Even in disaster movies everything about white America has to be seen to be perfect. That is still happening today. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Jonathan Aitken Weaving a tangled web (July/August 1997) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.210, July/August 1997, p.6. Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. As the celebrations die down for the wonderful victory scored by the Guardian and World in Action over Jonathan Aitken, the question still lingers: why? Why did such a high flying politician, a man named even as a future prime minister, gamble his entire future on a ridiculous lie? So what if he did go to the Ritz in Paris to meet rich Arabs? So what if one of the Arabs did pay his bill for one night? So what if he forgot to tell the cabinet secretary about his visit as he was, by ministerial rules, obliged to do? Wasn’t the incident itself really rather trivial? Could not Aitken, with even half the charm and poise for which he is accustomed, have owned up, apologised, explained that he was always going off to rich hotels with rich friends, some of them Arabs, and that on this occasion, damn it, he just forgot to obey the rules? If he had adopted that approach, how long would the storm have lasted? A day, perhaps two. Anyone who objected would soon find themselves being attacked as a muckraker by the Daily Mail. Aitken would have recovered quickly. So why on earth would he go to such fantastic lengths to weave such an intricate story, and then persuade not just his wife but also his 17 year old daughter to come to court and perjure themselves too? The answer is that the men Aitken met in that Paris hotel were no ordinary Arab friends together for a jovial weekend. They were some of the most powerful men on earth, whose power derives directly from the wealth they have swiped from the cheap oil of Saudi Arabia. The dictators in Riyadh are constantly building up their already enormous armed forces in such a way that they themselves personally benefit. They pay themselves ‘commissions’ over and on top of the cost of the military equipment they purchase. Thus the cost of producing and supplying an average Tornado jet fighter is £20 million and the average price paid to Britain by the Saudi government for a Tornado is £35 million. The difference goes directly into the voluminous bank accounts of the Saudi royals not only in Switzerland but in tax havens all over the world. The chief sellers of arms to the Saudis, the British and French governments, know perfectly well that the whole trade in arms between the two countries is founded on corruption. They are most anxious to keep the details quiet. This explains the curious case of Mr Robert Sheldon, a right wing Labour politician who has represented Ashton-Under-Lyne in parliament for as long as anyone can remember and has for years been chairman of the top ‘watchdog’ House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Sheldon has a reputation for publishing the awkward reports of his committee, and his persistent if mild reformism has won him many admirers. But in the early spring of 1992 he came across something he couldn’t publish. The National Audit Office had produced for the committee a report on arms sales to the Saudi government, and had even dared, mildly enough of course, to open the taboo question of the size of commissions. At once Sheldon agreed that these matters were too sensitive for public consumption and the report was consigned to the rubbish heap of government secrecy. The Saudi government had made it clear that they did not want precise figures and transactions exposed to the British public. So the NAO report was suddenly and inexplicably censored, confiscated and removed where no one could possibly see it. At almost exactly the same time, Jonathan Aitken, for years a paid ‘adviser’ to the arms industry, became Minister for Defence Procurement. At long last, he told his Saudi friends, you have a friend in the place you want him most. At once earnest negotiations started to supply the Saudi government with a heavy consignment of 48 Tornados. The most earnest part of the negotiations was about commissions. This was the debate which took Jonathan Aitken to the Ritz in Paris in 1988 to meet no less than the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. If there is anything which must be kept quiet more than any other it is the paying of commissions on the Al Yamamah arms deal between the British and Saudi governments. For a moment the entire deal was in peril. Aitken felt it was time for him to intervene. He went to Paris to meet his friends to talk about another round of unforgivable commissions. The secrecy of those talks was crucial. Literally nothing mattered more. If word got out about the extent of the commissions or even that a minister was discussing the extent of the commissions in open conversation the result would have been catastrophic. The arms trade cannot be expected to flourish except in circumstances of the utmost secrecy. Aitken had been found out, but it was his bounden duty not to talk to anyone about his hidden fortune. Lie followed lie, hypocrisy followed hypocrisy; and so they always will do as long as the world is competing to buy the best value in the instruments of mass destruction. Top of the page Last updated on 12.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot It’s been a long time coming (May 1997) From Election special, Socialist Review, No.208, May 1997, p.5. Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The sheer extent of the Labour landslide shocked everyone in authority, not least the new prime minister. Addressing the cheering crowds which collected outside the Festival Hall in the early morning of his victory, Tony Blair reacted to the astonishing and unprecedented size of his majority with a word which comes easily to him, ‘responsibility’. He had hoped to win a working majority. He had ‘targeted’ key seats like Gloucester to ensure that majority. He had expected a strong Tory opposition and had anticipated working on key matters with the Liberal Democrats. All this had suddenly and dramatically changed. Seats which no one had ever imagined as Labour had swung to the left in swings far greater even than in the ‘targeted’ areas. Scarborough, Lowestoft, Wimbledon, Harrow, Hastings, Edgbaston ­ nowhere was safe from the relentless nationwide swing to Labour. The Tories were a ridiculous and squabbling rump and the Liberals a profound irrelevance. At once, almost in self protection, the victorious Labour leader sought to explain their triumph. It was, first, a victory for ‘New Labour’, with the emphasis on ‘New’. It was the ‘unshackling’ of the Labour Party from the bonds of Clause Four and the trade unions which had rescued it from the political wilderness. The magical leadership of Tony Blair and the spin skills of his ubiquitous lieutenant Peter Mandelson had created the earthquake in popular opinion which set off the landslide. The analysis led inevitably to the warning about ‘responsibility’. Since the huge majority was the exclusive work of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, nothing should be said or done to threaten their hegemony. This ‘follow the leader’ analysis, the suggestion that the masses who supported Labour in such extraordinary numbers voted for the man rather than the politics of the party, is not just insulting. It is also, by any available measure, entirely wrong. Blair’s high ratings in the polls are no higher than those of his predecessor, John Smith. Indeed, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that Blair has ever been more personally popular than Smith. The huge shift in popular opinion against the Tories does not date from Blair’s election as leader in the summer of 1994. The decisive shift came much earlier. It began with the crises of the pit closures and ERM and continued with the breaking of the Tory tax pledges and the imposition of VAT on fuel. The wipe out of the Tories in the county council elections and in London came before the emasculation of Clause Four or the attack on the unions inside the Labour Party. Every single pointer in the polls suggests that the majority of British electors quickly woke up to the awful mistake they made in 1992 and resolved, whatever the changes in personnel in whatever party, that they would rid themselves of the Tory menace at the earliest possible opportunity. All this happened when Blair was a relatively unknown front bench spokesperson on home affairs, and when Mandelson had been cast into outer darkness. For reasons which are easy to understand, John Smith detested Mandelson. He saw Mandelson’s obsession with media manipulation as corrosive of any social democratic politics, even the right wing social democratic politics which Smith represented. Indeed, Smith held Mandelson partly responsible for the loss of the 1992 election, during which Smith tried to promote the arguments for more egalitarian tax policies and was stopped in his tracks by Kinnock and Mandelson. Nor can it be argued for a single moment that the tone and style of Labour’s election campaign contributed seriously to the result. The real swings to Labour took place in areas untouched by the campaign. Moreover, these swings were positive moves to Labour – not just protest votes. The point about the ‘tactical voting’ which has so absorbed the pundits was not just that voters ganged up against the government. If the fashionable view that the vote was a triumph for right wing Labour were true, then the swing to the Liberals would have been just as great, if not greater. In fact the swing to the Liberals was much less pronounced than the swing to Labour. It is as though the shocked pundits are seeking any explanation for the landslide save the most obvious, repeated over and over again in Socialist Worker and Socialist Review, that there has been a marked and substantial shift to the left in popular political attitudes. The shift has moved most Labour voters, indeed most people, to the left of Blair and Mandelson. All the indicators show that the majority think that the Tory union laws should be repealed, that the utilities and especially the railways should be taken back into public ownership, that there should be more socialist planning. The shift has been accompanied by a popular determination and confidence which pushed the Labour vote to landslide proportions almost in defiance of the Labour leader’s caution and moderation. Blair says interminably that he will act for ‘all the people, not just the privileged few’. But the hallmark of the society bequeathed by Thatcher and Major is the exploitation by the privileged few of the rest of the people. To act for both sides is impossible. To try to do so will result inevitably in acting only at the behest of the rich. If Blair and Co. carry on where the Tories left off they will be ignoring the message from the majority of the electorate, and kicking their own supporters in the teeth. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Margaret Renn & Paul Foot Poor on pioneers (February 1988) From Letters, Socialist Worker Review, No.106, February 1988, p.35. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. WE WERE disappointed with Julie Waterson’s article (Jan. SWR) about the history of the fight for abortion rights. Julie describes the “socialist tradition” on this issue as “studded with flaws, inconsistencies and one which often drew reactionary conclusions”. No one could argue with that, but Julie concentrates so single-mindedly on those flaws and inconsistencies that she overlooks the fighting spirit and the revolutionary significance of the pioneers she describes. Writing about the Men and Women’s Club in the 1880s, for instance, Julie tells us: “It had 20 members but many associate members and held open meetings. All were ‘free thinkers’ – middle class and Oxbridge educated. Included among them were Olive Schreiner and Annie Besant.” What an introduction to these two women! Olive Schreiner came from a poor missionary family in South Africa. She only just went to school, certainly not to university. She was active in the anti-imperialist movement in South Africa, though she was constantly unpopular with Afrikaner leaders because she refused to compromise with racialism. Her books were an inspiration to many thousands of women, including working class women. Annie Besant never went to Oxbridge either (no women could take degrees at any university until the 1880s). Not only did she go to prison for publishing material about birth control, as Julie reports, she also had her child taken away, because a judge thought her views made her unfit for motherhood. She is often remembered as an organiser and inspirer of the match girls’ strike at Bryant and May in East London in 1889. Of course no modern revolutionary socialist with the benefit of hindsight can agree with everything these two women wrote or said. But it is odd for any socialist to dismiss them with a peremptory sneer. Again, Julie writes about Stella Browne: “She was a eugenicist ... she professed that individuals’ characteristics were genetically determined, while Marxism argues that society and its individuals are materially determined”. Stella Browne was affected by eugenicist ideas – though she consistently denounced any “racial or class bias” which might arise from them. But surely the main point about Stella is that she campaigned over a very long reactionary period for birth control and abortion as a means towards women’s liberation. Julie quotes, apparently sympathetically, some men in Glasgow who were “ready to fight the ancient battle of Marx against Malthus”. Malthus argued that the human condition depended on the numbers of people in the world and that the population should therefore be kept down. Marx denounced this quite rightly, as “a libel on the human race”. Many Marxists, however, took refuge in this controversy to oppose (or at least to patronise) the movement for birth control and abortion. In fact, the revolutionary argument for both has nothing at all to do with Malthus – it is founded on the case for sexual emancipation. Julie’s method has been to describe the pioneers for abortion and birth control and then to knock them out one by one as anti-Marxist or “middle class”. This seems to us a negative approach. Margaret Renn Paul Foot London EC1 Top of the page Last updated on 26.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot W. Indies: 20 years of pirates, profits and blood (19 April 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 118, 19 April, pp. 2–3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IN JANUARY 1935 there were what the Governor of the Leeward Islands, Sir R. St. Johnston, called in his report ‘some troubles’ on the island of St.Kitts. Leaders of the newly-formed Sugar Workers’ League, protesting at the rate of pay (one shilling a day), marched around the plantations calling a strike. The Governor found this especially annoying, because he was having a garden party at the time. He summoned up a frigate and a few platoons of infantry were sent out on the streets. Three strike leaders were shot and 50 strikers injured. ‘I also intimated,’ wrote the Governor, ‘without unnecessarily alarming people, that the garden party had better be concluded while there was still daylight for people to get to their homes.’ Slavery Gunboats and infantry platoons have been the stock in trade of the sugar planters in the smaller West Indian islands ever since the first robbers and pirates (most of whose descendants are now sitting in the House of Lords) went to the West Indies. They drove out the indigenous Caribs, introduced African slaves, turned the slaves into wage slaves when slavery became unprofitable, and devoted themselves for nearly 200 years to reaping sugar and profit from the blood of the labourers. The plantocracy of the smaller ‘sugar islands’ – notably Barbados, Antigua and St. Kitts – are one of the most ruthlessly reactionary ruling classes in world history. As sugar has declined in value, as industrial countries have relied increasingly upon beet, and as prices have fallen, so the planters have clung even more tenaciously to their privileges. The full force of their venom was turned on the rising trade unions and their leaders. They forced the British Governors to pass laws dividing the constituencies into seats which they could rig, and, when the rigging failed, passed a ‘law’ banning trade union leaders from sitting in the island parliaments. The law was championed by Moody Stuart, managing director of the Antigua Syndicate Estates, which owned most of the island, and who at the same time was a leading member of both Legislative and Executive Councils. Trade union leaders were bullied, threatened, even murdered. But nothing could stop the unions, and, gradually they formed themselves into political parties. Manley in Jamaica, Adams in Barbados, Bird in Antigua, Bradshaw in St. Kitts, Joshua in St. Vincent, Gary in Grenada – all these men who later became prime ministers started as union leaders in the fight against the planters. This is the background to the situation in Anguilla. For 120 years Anguilla has been ruled as part of a federation - first of the Leeward Islands and then of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. Nowhere in the West Indies were the planters more resistant to change than in St. Kitts. Consequently perhaps, nowhere were the sugar workers more courageous in their support for their trade union and labour leaders. It was the planters who first sowed the seeds of hatred and jealousy between one island and the other – dividing themselves into small island castes, angry and suspicious at any sign of co-operation with anyone else. The hatred between the planters on St. Kitts for their brothers and cousins in Nevis was outstanding. The leader of the St. Kitts Sugar Workers’ Union, Robert Bradshaw, became prime minister of St. Kitts in 1966, winning all seven of the seats in the island. The planters, who had tolerated him under British rule, decided to fight him when Britain pulled out. To procure a base, they financed and organised an ‘independence movement’ in Anguilla, and organised a military coup in St. Kitts on June 10, 1967. Entice The coup failed. But the planters have continued by every means they know to attempt to unseat Bradshaw. All this merely demonstrated the planters’ stupidity, for Bradshaw and his party in power were not committed to an overthrow of the class system, not of the plantocracy. They sought means to pacify the planters, and to entice British and American industry to assist tourist development in Frigate Bay and in Nevis. Despite the victories of the Sugar Workers’ union in the late 1940s, Bradshaw quickly discovered that in his isolated island there was little room even for ordinary trade union reforms. He passed a Minimum Wage Act and an Industrial Injuries Act but in terms of any real encroachment on the plantocracy or the new, ‘dynamic’ tourist-orientated upper class, he made no gains. He could rely upon almost endless electoral support – but the enthusiasm of that support could only be maintained as long as the planters continued playing cops and robbers from Anguilla. Despite heavy subsidies from the St. Kitts government (amounting to twice the island’s revenue) in 1966, the self-styled Anguillan ‘leaders’ declared UDI in May 1967. Bradshaw insisted on some form of federal structure and a series of conferences were held, mainly in Barbados. As the conferences continued it became clear that the men in charge in Anguilla did not want to agree to anything. They wanted an island without government or elections or taxes, a gambler’s and hotelier’s paradise. They wanted another Nassau (Sir Stafford Sands, former Prime Minister of the Bahamas was paid several million dollars in ‘consultancy fees’ by Meyer Lansky of the Florida Mafia). The British government was perplexed. What to do next? As always, they got their answer from America. The policy of the Central Intelligence Agency is not, as sometimes imagined, to support arch reactionaries in every cause. It is concerned primarily to ensure a ‘peaceful environment’ for profit-making. For the CIA, better a helpless majority government than a racialist and reactionary minority one. The CIA gave their orders – smash the Anguillan ‘revolt’. Take sides with Bradshaw against the planters. Seek to settle a dangerously explosive situation with gunboats and diplomats. But the Anguilla operation was ham-fisted. And in spite of appeals by the Antiguan Labour prime minister, Bird, to ‘keep calm’, 8,000 Antiguans marched through the streets to protest at the interference of British troops. Recipe The arrival of British troops in Anguilla replaced one set of gangsters with another. Anguillan nationalism is an abstraction, invented by New York and Florida businessmen, but equally the ‘peaceful environment’ sought by the intervention of the British troops, is a recipe for another 100 years of exploitation. The demand for the removal of British troops must be unequivocal and unconditional – not because ‘Anguilla wants independence’ as sugar-owning Tory MPs would have it, but in the hope that the West Indian working people – one of the most potentially revolutionary forces in the third world – will themselves shake off the shackles of plantocracies and CIA-inspired ‘peaceful environments’ and run all their islands in their own interests. Top of the page Last updated on 13 January 2021

ISJ 2 Index | Main Newspaper Index Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive International Socialism, Spring 1991 Alex Callinicos, Paul Foot, Mike Gonzalez, Chris Harman, John Molyneux An open letter to New Left Review From International Socialism 2 : 50, Spring 1991, pp. 101–103. Transcribed by Camilla Royle. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL. We write as socialists who have read NLR regularly for the last 20 years or more. We have reacted to individual articles sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with strong criticism. We may have disagreed with the stance of some articles – especially those which presented the regimes of Russia and China as somehow left wing-but we always felt that the magazine was produced by people who could be relied to be in the trenches alongside us in the battle against Western imperialism. They had, after all, taken an unequivocal stand against the wars waged by France in Algeria, the US in Vietnam, the British in Aden and Oman. For this reason we have been horrified by your most recent issue (184). As it came out the American government of George Bush was preparing a massive military onslaught in the Gulf – an onslaught which the great mass of the left on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Third World see as a defence of oil interests and an attempt to reassert the US’s global hegemony in a way not possible since the Vietnam defeat. Yet the major article on the Gulf in New Left Review is by Fred Halliday, a supporter of American military action in the Gulf. Readers in Britain will know that in the autumn of 1990 he repeatedly appeared on radio and television to urge the sending of British and American forces to the Gulf. He told Marxism Today (October 1990): ‘I would not think that at a future juncture, if sanctions fail, that military action to oust Iraq from Kuwait would be unjustified.’ The appearance of an article by such an apologist for the American and British action might be tolerable if it were countered by a powerful polemic opposing imperialism. Unfortonate1y, it was not. Instead, there was a rather mild editorial statement which contained not one word of criticism of Halliday and itself went halfway with the American-British position. It began by telling us, correctly, that ‘It is the West’s thirst for cheap oil ... which renders it suddenly sensitive to the viciously repressive regime that yesterday it was arming against Iran.’ But it then went on to argue: The initial UN resolutions against Iraq offered an appropriate and justified response to the occupation of Kuwait-though they would have been better if they had included a clear commitment to democracy in Kuwait. There should also have been UN sanctions against Israel as strong as this, instead of the lavish US aid that has been forthcoming. This is either naivety or a conscious desire to cover up the acquiescence of some of those around NLR in the plans of US imperialism. Everyone knows the original UN resolutions were drawn up mainly by the US, which used arm twisting and bribery (such as promising to help finance perestroika and to restore to China aid cut off after the Tiananmen Square butchery) to push it through the Security Council. Everyone should also know – if only because Fred Halliday often made the point on British radio – that sanctions could only work if enforced by a military blockade. The sanctions resolution was, in fact, used by America and Britain to build up the bandwagon for war. And the same security council states which voted for one went along with the other. The task of socialists was to speak out against the whole manoeuvre. Unfortunately, your editorial statement did not. NLR justified its stance by referring to the fate of Kuwait. But Kuwait only came into existence as a state because of Western oil interests. Only 4 percent of the population ever had a vote, for a parliament which the ruling Sabah family arbitrarily dissolved, and the majority of its population were denied any citizenship rights at all. No wonder Halliday himself, in his better days, subtitled the Kuwaiti section of his book Arabia without Sultans The New Slavery, telling that ‘its internal reliance on a class of imported helots is mirrored by its international role as a steward of capital’. Now he claims socialists should support military action by the Western powers to restore such a state because the enemy is Iraqi ‘fascism’. But the US sustains dictatorships every bit as bad as the Iraqi one elsewhere in the world – just think of Zaire, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Somalia, or, in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Its coalition allies include the Turkish hangmen and the Syrian symmetrical twin of Iraq. Anyone should be able to see that an American victory would give the Bush team – veterans all of the Contra terror campaign against Nicaragua and the invasions of Grenada and Panama – the confidence to impose such dictatorships elsewhere in the world. Of course, there should be no question of socialists giving any political support to Saddam Hussein. His Ba’ath party willingly collaborated with the CIA in the 1963 coup against Qassim, tried to ingratiate itself with the US through its attack on Iran in 1980 and, using Western supplied poison gas, collaborated with NATO member Turkey in a murderous campaign against the Kurds. Socialists should see that a successful struggle against imperialism will require the revolutionary overthrow of such a regime. But that is not the same as supporting Bush’s coalition, as Halliday does, or even as saying, as your editorial statement does, ‘the left should not support the military ambitions of any of the predators now confronting one another in the desert’. This equates the little bully, Saddam Hussein, with the much greater bully, US imperialism, as if a victory for one would be as bad for the peoples of the world as a victory for the other. There is more than a whiff of August 1914 in Fred Halliday’s sudden conversion to the belief that an American led coalition should enjoy support from the left. And there is more than a hint of compromise with such views in NLR’s own present position. All those who have campaigned against Western imperialism in the past should insist the main enemy is in Washington, and act accordingly. Top of page ISJ 2 Index | Main Newspaper Index Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive Last updated on 1 April 2016

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Corruption Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay? (June 2003) From News Review, Socialist Review, No.275, June 2003, p.5-6. Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The last time there was a crisis in the international stockmarket they made a film about it. It was called Wall Street. Michael Douglas played Gekko, the intended villain of the piece, a greedy gambler who had made a fortune on the stockmarket chiefly by buying and bribing inside information, and then betting on it, knowing it to be true. The film was such a realistic indictment of the market and its values that it quickly became a cult movie for thousands of yuppies swarming like bees round the honey of the stock exchange. When Gekko is finally captured by the regulators of the Securities Exchange Commission, most of his admirers felt sorry for him. The film was a close portrayal of the rise and fall of the stock market gangsters and insider dealers of the time. Those critics who saw it as a fair rendering of what really went on in Wall Street were told that the scandal it revealed was exceptional, the old story of the rotten apple in the otherwise unblemished barrel of Wall Street and the City of London. It took a decade for the market to start falling again, and for the same sort of scum to rise to the surface of the barrel. In 2001 came the Enron scandal, in which a massively hyped international trading company duped the wealthy world by the time-honoured process of fiddling its accounts. Huge profits recorded in the accounts simply did not exist. The company went bust and the accountants who fiddled the accounts and shredded the evidence – New Labour’s close friends Arthur Andersen – were disgraced, bankrupted and quickly absorbed by other big accountants such as KPMG, which has a similarly questionable record. Apologists for capitalism argued that Enron was a ‘one-off’ – an unfortunate slip of the regulators that was unlikely to happen again. Now, less than two years after Enron, comes a scandal every bit as shocking. For years the US regulators have been investigating the role of the country’s top investment banks, the very core of the capitalist system. Of special concern was the method used by the banks to prise investment out of the US bourgeoisie. Their technique was to hire ‘analysts’ who circulated ‘research studies’ on the value of various stocks, recommending whether or not they were worth buying. The regulators soon discovered that the ‘analysts’ were not at all interested in the value of the stocks they were ‘researching’. All they were interested in was getting more money for the banks who hired them. So thousands of gullible investors were conned out of many billions of pounds by bogus research that the analysts knew to be bogus, solely in order to drum up more business for the banks who paid them. In one of the hundreds of incriminating e-mails unearthed by the regulators, an analyst from the big US bank Lehman summed up the whole scam: ‘Yes. The little guy who is not smart about the nuances, may get misled. Such is the nature of my business.’ Like Gekko, like the millionaires who played the market in derivatives, hedge funds, split capital investment trusts, it was the ‘nature of his business’ to lie and cheat in the interests of his paymasters. The names of the liars and cheats in this area are the household names of modern finance capital: Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Salomon, Piper Jaffray, UBS Warburg (a special favourite of the New Labour government in Britain), Lehman, Bear Stearns, etc, etc. The total fines against these banks comes just short of a billion pounds, but the banks coughed up in huge relief. They will not be prosecuted and even when disgruntled investors sue for compensation, the banks can unleash their unimaginably expensive lawyers to defend every suit. Gekko went to prison, but none of these professional liars and cheats need lose a night’s sleep. Socialists who study this story (and that in itself is difficult – the newspapers and commentators of the ruling class are reluctant to expose the fraud of those who feed them) are inclined to pass by on the other side, their noses in the air. The whole sty stinks, they argue, so why worry about the smell of any particular pig? Who cares about the swindling of the petit bourgeoisie by the big bourgeois? That approach is easy to understand, but it misses the point. The point attacks the root of the argument that capitalism is the best available system to sort out the problems of supply and demand, to ensure that the right things are made to fit people’s needs and aspirations, and that the proceeds are fairly distributed. The fantastic scandal of the investment banks (like all the other similar scandals of modern capitalism) proves exactly the opposite. It proves that the people who run the system couldn’t care less about the real value of anything, but will take any course, twist any figures, tell any lies and engage in any amount of cheating so long as their already comfortable nests are further feathered. Gekko rides again, and this time he rides free. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Labour Millionaires’ welfare (January 1998) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.215, January 1998, p.5. Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The vocabulary of New Labour, which before and during the election seemed so benign, is being translated into real language faster than anyone could have dreaded. ‘Compassion with a hard edge’ was the phrase of the hour. Compassion was taken to mean a feeling of concern from government for the growing ranks of the desperately poor, especially the low paid, the single parents, the disabled. The hard edge would presumably be reserved for those who had helped themselves to the bounty of the Thatcher/Major years, the share option guzzlers, the pension swindlers, the growing army of arrogant billionaires. It took only a few months for the real picture to emerge. There was compassion all right, but it was reserved exclusively for the rich. The manifesto promise not to raise a penny extra in tax on the rich was scrupulously observed. But the new ministers were not satisfied with mere compassion for the rich. They were appalled at how few of them were rich enough to make the big decisions of the hour. There was only one millionaire among them – a fourth rate MP for Coventry whom no former Labour prime minister had even considered for office. There was nothing in the political career of Geoffrey Robinson which was even remotely impressive. But he was enormously rich. He had been left a fortune by a Belgian tax exile whose name inevitably was Madame Bourgeois. The very thought of a real millionaire with a real fortune evading tax in the Channel Islands was enough to shoot Robinson into the government as minister in charge of tax evasion. One millionaire, however, was not enough. Into the highways and byways of the City of London went the new Labour leaders searching for Tories and union busters to take part in the new government: Lord Simon from Shell, Peter Davies from the Pru, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, even the crusted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Amstrad and Tottenham Hotspur – all these and many more like them were ushered into Whitehall to help the new government with its social and economic policies. The policies flowed quite naturally. The few election promises which were unpalatable to the rich were quickly jettisoned. To the manifesto pledge, ‘We shall ban tobacco advertising’, was added a proviso: ‘except for millionaires who donate to the Labour Party’. From Blair’s election promise, ‘We have no plans to introduce tuition fees’, the word ‘no’ was deleted. The real social problem quickly emerged. Too much was being spent by the ‘feckless poor’, and, it was claimed, people sat at home looking after children or pretended that their disablement prevented them from working. These people could be driven off the dole registers by denying them the pittance they got in extra benefit. The ‘Welfare to Work’ programme was launched with a sharp attack on the poorest people of all, the people who because of their poverty were the least organised and the least able to defend themselves. Many, if not most, Labour voters were astonished at the speed with which the Labour Party cast off its old commitments to the dispossessed. This sense of shock was palely reflected in the House of Commons where 47 of Labour’s 411 MPs voted against proposed cuts in benefits for lone mothers. The 47 came mainly from the old left. Not a single one of ‘Blair’s babes’, the new women Labour MPs who preened themselves for the media on 2 May, managed to vote against the cuts or even to abstain. But the vote against the government is the first real sign of dissent from New Labour capitalism, the first indication that even in parliament there are people who recognise the true course of their government: a course plotted for them by their hated predecessors, the Lilleys, the Redwoods and the Howards. The only recognisable difference between this government and the Tories is in its support. New Labour came to office on the votes of people, many of them poor, who wanted a change in political direction and had grown to detest the Tory priorities which now commend themselves to Labour ministers. A revolt is smouldering. It should be fanned into flames. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Obituary Ross Pritchard – dedicated socialist (20 January 2001) From Socialist Worker, No.1731, 20 January 2001. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Socialist Worker and all its readers owe a tremendous debt to Ross Pritchard, who died of cancer last week at the age of 62. Ross joined the socialist movement in Glasgow at almost exactly the same time as I did. Ross had just come out of the armed forces (he was one of the last to be caught in the conscription net, as I was), and was trying to find a decent job in Glasgow. He came to the socialist movement as though he had been waiting for it all his life. Ross and Anna, whom he married not much later and with whom he spent the rest of his life, were permanent fixtures at all the Young Socialists meetings, including the periodic excursions to CND demos and other protests. He rapidly became a part of the growing band of young worker-intellectuals who led the Young Socialists at that time. Like many others he was drawn to London by the prospect of decently paid employment. He got a job in the print trade and, at a time when our organisation hardly existed, kept up his association with the International Socialists. In 1968 we yearned for a weekly paper, which was to become Socialist Worker. Roger Protz was to be the editor and Jim Nichol the business editor, but what we really needed was an expert in the print who would dedicate his life to the project. Ross agreed to fill this post at once, though the move meant a huge increase in work and a drop in salary of at least 50 percent. Somehow this tiny crew managed to get the paper out. Ross was utterly irreplaceable. He was the opposite of the token manual worker, and from the outset he was an essential part of the political process. He took a keen and critical interest in what the paper was saying, and how the organisation was growing. Ross became more and more central to the entire project, a learner turned teacher. None of those who worked on the paper at that time will forget his dedication and encouragement. When Ross finally left the printshop in the mid-1970s, he became a militant in the merged NGA print union, and very soon was elected to the executive. He stayed a rank and file militant all the way through to the awful defeat of the print unions by Murdoch at Wapping. Like many other militants after Wapping, he drifted away from active involvement in the socialist movement, but remained on the union executive. Without the sacrifice, determination and spirit of Ross Pritchard, the weekly Socialist Worker could not have come out when it did, and the enthusiasm around the paper could not have been sustained at such a high level. He has no finer epitaph. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010