socialiststandard-2006-1225-sep

Y M C 50%M 50%Y 50%C C&Y Y&M C&M C M Y K C M Y K 10%C 10%M 10%Y 10%K C K C M Y K C M Y K C M BD&H COLOUR CONTROL YSeptember 06.qxd 24/8/06 09:49

Socialist Standard September 20062

website: www.worldsocialism.org

6 September 11, 2001: reflections on a somewhat unusual act of warOn the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington,we reflect on this act of war and try to place it in its true political and moral context.

8 After Hezbullah, war with Iran? Was Israel's attack on Hezbullah part of preparations for a coming US attack onIran?

10 Globalisation - what does it mean? The second part of our article analysing capitalist globalisation. Last month welooked at how this affected capital. This month we examine its impact on theworld's population at large.

12 Death of a TendencyThe recent death of Ted Grant at the age of 93 has been a landmark, albeit aminor one, in British political history.

15 Political ideas in AfricaA brief look at the history of leftwing ideas in Africa.

16 Desperate liesThe man who faced the choice of dropping dead while waiting on the NHS listor bluffing.

contents3 Editorial

Transatlantic airliner plot

4 PathfindersOdds uneven

5 Letters Nuclear power; questions andanswers

5 Contact Details

11 Cooking the Books 1Doing Business, the World BankWay

14 Cooking the Books 2“Mass Unemployment”

17 ReviewsGlasshouse; A Rebel's Guide toGramsci; Coriolanus

18 Meetings

18 50 Years Ago The Suez crisis

19 Greasy Pole Peter Hain

20 Voice from the BackConned, kicked, abandoned, andmore

20 Free Lunch

REGULARSFEATURES

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THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAINThe next meeting of the Executive Committeewill be on Saturday 2 September at theaddress below. Correspondence should besent to the General Secretary. All articles, let-ters and notices should be sent to the editori-al committee at: The Socialist Party, 52Clapham High street, London SW4 7UN.TEL: 020 7622 3811E-MAIL: [email protected]

SEPTEMBER 2006

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Editorial

Was there really a plot to blow up transatlanticairliners or were the police just using a pretextto fish for information by rounding up andquestioning people they suspected were up tosomething without knowing precisely what?Will ministers eventually say, as they did afterthe killing of Jean Charles de Menezes andafter the raid on that house in Forest Gatewhen another innocent man was shot, that it'sbetter to err on the side of safety? Better a fewinnocents are shot than a terrorist act in whichhundreds die?

Whatever the truth, the "security alert"last month in which a terrorist attack was saidto be "imminent" allowed the state to projectitself as the defender of the public. It is nosuch thing. The state is controlled by pro-cap-italist politicians who pursue policies theyconsider to be in the general interest of Britishcapitalism, even to the extent of putting thelives of the general public at risk.

The present government, led by Blair,has decided that it is in the best interest of theBritish capitalist class to tag along behind theUS government's global pretensions, especial-ly its so-called "War on Terror", which is real-ly a struggle with certain Middle East statesand disaffected Arab elites and their support-ers for control of that oil-rich region.

The US government is committed to fur-thering the interests of US capitalism, whichdon't necessarily coincide with those of Britishcapitalism, and there are pro-capitalist politi-cians in Britain, some apparently within thecabinet, who think that Blair might have gonetoo far in his pro-US stance. But it is not up tous as socialists to judge which politicians bestrepresent the interest of the British capitalistclass.

It is this pro-US capitalism policy optionthat has put the "British public" in danger bymaking them legitimate targets in the eyes ofthe Islamist opponents of US domination ofthe Middle East. It is just plain ridiculous forgovernment ministers to try to deny this. Whatmakes it worse is that neither the attack onIraq nor (even less) giving Israel more time tobomb Lebanon enjoyed majority popular sup-port.

But no government can leave such avital decision as to whether or not to go to warto a popular vote. This is because the role ofgovernments is to be "the executive committeeof the ruling class" and, as the interests of thecapitalist ruling class are at variance withthose of the rest of us, such a decision cannotbe left to us as there is no guarantee that ourdecision will coincide with what the rulingclass judge to be in their interest. In fact, in thecase of war, people spontaneously tend to beagainst it.

It is true that, as most people do supportcapitalism, if a government launches an effec-tive enough propaganda barrage it can gener-ally persuade people to support a war. But thistakes time and decisions about war cannotwait. Blair is on record as saying that as aleader it is his duty to give a lead on going towar, even against majority popular opinion. InBritain, until recently and still formally, goingto war was a government decision that didn'trequire even parliamentary approval.

Democracy and war are in fact incom-patible. States have to have a minimal degreeof popular support to function, but this neednot extend much further than allowing thepopulace to decide every few years whichgroup of pro-capitalist politicians are to staffthe state and, exercising "leadership", use it tofurther national capitalist interests.

Truth may be the first casualty of war,but civil liberties come a close second.Whether real or manufactured, "terror plots"and "security alerts" provide a pretext for astate to further erode civil liberties inheritedfrom a more liberal past, as the string of lawsintroduced by the Blair government toincrease the powers of the state bears witness.

It can't be denied that there is a conflictgoing on involving attacks on innocent civil-ians on both sides. In Iraq, Afghanistan andLebanon the US and/or its allies bomb villagesand villagers. In America on 11 Septemberfive years ago and in Britain last 7 July, theother side killed innocent workers at or ontheir way to work. Socialists condemn bothsides. And we don't swallow the propagandathat the state is there to protect us.

Socialist Standard September 2006 3

IntroducingThe Socialist PartyThe Socialist Party is like no otherpolitical party in Britain. It is made up ofpeople who have joined togetherbecause we want to get rid of the prof-it system and establish real socialism.Our aim is to persuade others tobecome socialist and act for them-selves, organising democratically andwithout leaders, to bring about the kindof society that we are advocating inthis journal. We are solely concernedwith building a movement of socialistsfor socialism. We are not a reformistparty with a programme of policies topatch up capitalism.

We use every possible opportunity tomake new socialists. We publish pam-phlets and books, as well as CDs,DVDs and various other informativematerial. We also give talks and takepart in debates; attend rallies, meet-ings and demos; run educational con-ferences; host internet discussionforums, make films presenting ourideas, and contest elections whenpractical. Socialist literature is avail-able in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch,Esperanto, French, German, Italian,Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkishas well as English.

The more of you who join the SocialistParty the more we will be able to getour ideas across, the more experi-ences we will be able to draw on andgreater will be the new ideas for build-ing the movement which you will beable to bring us.

The Socialist Party is an organisationof equals. There is no leader and thereare no followers. So, if you are going tojoin we want you to be sure that youagree fully with what we stand for andthat we are satisfied that you under-stand the case for socialism.

War, Plots and Civil Liberties



Odds UnevenThe Centre for Economics and Business Researchis predicting that there will be a million millionairesin Britain within a decade, leading to a bonanza ineconomic growth, marketable wealth and houseprices (The Business, 13 August). "The thinktank isforecasting a 71 percent rise in house prices over2006 to 2020…"

Whoa, whoa, stop! Stop right there.That's it. Enough predictions already.There is something fundamentallywrong with this sort of newsreporting, even though thepapers are full of it andwe base our lives on it.Whether it's futureprosperity, the priceof oil, life on Mars,England's chancesin the next WorldCup, the winner ofBig BrotherXXXXVIII, or tomorrow'sweather, the only really reli-able prediction that anyone canmake is that the predictions willprobably be wrong. And there is a good reason why that is.

Statisticians refer to ordinary random events, such as theexact number of cornflakes that fall in your bowl, or the precisetime that your bus turns up, as Type 1 events. The randomness ofType 1 events tends to disappear when you average them out overtime, which means that they are measurable, and thus amenable toprediction with an acceptable margin of error. You can predict thatyour bus will turn up at exactly 8.31 if that's what it does on theaverage, and you won't be far wrong. But applying this predictivelogic to complexities like the climate,science, the future or the economyjust doesn't work, becausewhen you introduce greaterlevels of complexity, oreven if you extend thetime frame, youinevitably introduceType 2 events.

A Type 2random event isa unique inci-dent which it isnot possible toforesee, andone which cancause seismicchanges in thedaily routine.Being run overis one such event,as is a lightningstrike, a win on thelottery, or falling inlove. There is no mech-anism for predicting suchevents because the marginof error would be laughablygigantic, and history is litteredwith unprecedented events, such as thetelephone, the computer, the internet, AIDS, economic crashes,and many wars. History, the economy, and society, are crammedwith so many Type 2 random events, argues the statistician Nas-sim Nicholas Taleb, that it is sheer self-indulgent folly by anyone,government politician or horizon-tech scientist, to imagine theycan predict anything at all (New Scientist, 1 July). Worse, he says,

we are not smart enough to realize how dumb we are, and we - orrather governments - persist in basing all kinds of plans and poli-cies on these bogus social predictions, sometimes with disastrouseffects.

So why do we like to imagine that the world is a predictableplace, even though we walk about with expres-

sions of amazement permanently pasted toour faces? The explanation, he thinks, is

that we can't stand randomness, so wetry to create meaning out of random-

ness by revising the past withinvented and deterministic narra-

tives. Instead of admitting that,'bugger, we never saw that com-ing', we pretend that 'all the

signs pointed to this happening,it's obvious with hindsight'. We

comfort ourselves with our owncleverness, after the event, forgetting

that we were jumping like jackrabbitsjust before it.

This may sound like another application of that populargame of applying the logic of one scientific principle to fieldsoutside its domain, in this case chaos theory. However there areuseful nuggets to be mined from this perspective, especially bysocialists.

One is the undoubted fact that capitalism does indeed repre-sent itself as a stable and predictable process when in fact it isn't,and that people need to be aware of the illusion of permanence inwhich it wraps itself, like the Emperor's new clothes. If peopleunderstood that social change could be minutes, rather than mil-lennia away, the motivation to get up and do something might bea lot stronger in a working class presently browbeaten into sub-mission by the weight of history and the endless blank horizon ofthe present.

The other point relates once again to Pathfinder's ownfavourite theme, which is the easy assumptions that scientiststhemselves often make, especially in fields outside their own area

of expertise. Are wars really Type 2 random events, 'blackswans' so bizarre and unexpected that they boggle the

mind as they appear out of nowhere? Do we reallyoverlay an essentially chaotic world with a veneer of

rationalized narrative, merely to comfort ourselvesthat there is an underlying logic when in fact

there is none? Physicists have wrestled for yearswith the desperate and intractable problems ofuniting all the known laws of cosmology andquantum mechanics under one roof to createa single, elegant Theory of Everything.They clearly believe that there is an under-lying logic, even if they are buggered ifthey know what it is. Meanwhile in theexternal earthly realities of economics andsocial change we are expected to heed thepost-modernists and the chaos statisticians,and abandon any thought of a grand narra-tive, an intrinsic pattern that makes sense of

much, if not all, that goes on around us.

In fact, when you look at it like that, farfrom being a scientific proposition, this appeal

to chaos seems like an unhealthy invitation toreturn to a world where gods and goblins roamed

the earth and ideas of social progress could not beginto gain a foothold. If scientists believe that the great

developments of history, both bad and good, were entirelyunpredictable and that the human condition is a random

cacophony of the cosmic absurd, Pathfinders suggests that theyhave been spending altogether too long staring down the micro-scope, and ignoring the elephant standing in the room next totheir elbow.

Nostradamus - correct-ly predicted that peo-ple are gullible



Nuclear PowerDear Editors,I would like to take issue with the Pathfind-ers article "Radioactive Days" (AugustSocialist Standard). The anonymous author -shouldn't articles that do not express a con-sensus of socialist opinion be signed? -argues that continued reliance on nuclear fis-sion as a major source of energy may beunavoidable, even after the establishment ofsocialism. However, no account is taken ofthe widely recognized fact that the supply notonly of oil, but also of uranium and plutoni-um for fission reactors, is likely to run out inthe course of the present century.

Conceivably, development of a closedfuel cycle might solve this problem, as wellas that of radioactive wastes. It is also con-ceivable that nuclear fusion will become aviable alternative sooner than some peopleexpect. Or perhaps a way will be found tostore solar energy, enabling us to rely on themain fusion reactor in our vicinity--the sun.

Nevertheless, it is quite possible thatnone of these solutions will materialize intime to avert a real energy crisis. If thisproves to be the case, it will not necessarilybe because the technological obstacles areinsuperable. The most likely cause will bethe short time horizons used in capitalistprofit calculations.

Given all these uncertainties, we needto think about a wide range of scenarios forenergy policy in socialism. A guaranteedabundance of safe and non-polluting fusionor solar energy is one scenario. But humani-ty may have no choice but to adapt to a low-energy way of life.STEPHEN SHENFIELD, Providence, USA

Reply: Actually, the Pathfinders columndoes not necessarily express a consensus ofsocialist opinion on every issue, as many ofthe scientific issues discussed are very muchopen for debate and development by social-ists and others - Editors.

Asked and answeredDear Editors,I've spent some time over the past fewmonths reading a lot about political and socialstructures, for no purpose other than my owninterest. I, like many, am discontented withthe situation as it stands. The solution pro-posed by your organisation resonates withme, as few others have. As a result, I haveread Marxist works, and much about variedforms of left-wing politics like Leninism andMaoism, etc. I do, however, keep comingback to your site. I have read all of the avail-able information but still have a few ques-tions I was hoping you could answer. I sin-cerely hope you can find the time to assist.

1. In a practical sense, how wouldlabour be distributed in a socialist society?I'm not suggesting some jobs are any lessimportant than others, but how would per-sonal ambition (not ambition for materialreward, but ambition of a personal nature, toachieve and feel accomplishment in a partic-ular field) be matched with the needs of soci-ety? Could I, for example, say 'I want to bean electrician' and get trained? And what if,for example, nobody wanted to be a cleaner?Would people be assigned jobs on a take it ortake it basis or is there an element of negoti-ation? If so, how much?

2. What would happen to people whorefused to work/contribute?

3. What is your position on the punish-

ment of serious criminals?4. How are the creative arts perceived?

As a necessary part of a healthy society, or asunnecessary? Could someone be, for exam-ple, a full-time writer, in a socialist society asyou describe? Even if they were no good atit? BEN I. (by email).

Reply:1. The general principle of socialist societyof "from each according to their abilities, toeach according to their needs" clearly recog-nises the obvious fact that different peoplehave different abilities. How will these indi-vidual abilities be matched with the socialneed for particular jobs to be done? We can'tgive a blueprint (and don't want to, since thiswould be to try to dictate to the future whenthe details can only be decided democratical-ly at the time), but we can imagine some-thing like the "job centres" of today, onlycompletely freed from any trace of coercion,monetary considerations and stigma. In otherwords, places where jobs to be done could beadvertised and where people could go to vol-unteer to do them. Or maybe the whole thingcould be done via the internet. If there is ashortage of people taking up a particular job,then a special effort would have to be madeto encourage people to train for and take upthese jobs. We are confident that socialistsociety will be able to find a practical solu-tion to a practical problem such as this.

2. We don't think that, in the context ofsocialist society where a real community andcommunity spirit will exist, there will bemany people, if any, who would refuse tocontribute. After all, there is nothing moreboring than lying around all day trying to donothing. Humans are social animals who

Letters

continued on page 18

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Contact Details



As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attackon the Pentagon and the WorldTrade Centre was somewhat unusu-al, though not unprecedented, in

three respects. First, the method used was non-stan-

dard. Standard military practice is to blowthings and people up by dropping bombs orfiring shells and missiles on them. But flyingplanes right into the target has been donebefore. Japanese kamikaze pilots used thetechnique against US warships in the Pacificduring World War Two.

Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor.Such actors rarely have the capacity to carrythrough such a complex and costly opera-tion. Therefore al-Qaeda must have hadfinancial backing from wealthy sponsors -Osama bin Laden himself comes from anextremely wealthy family - and the support,or at least complicity, of one or more power-ful states. In general, arranging wars is apastime for members of the capitalist class,though they get hirelings to do the dirtywork for them. Working people don't com-

mand the necessary resources. Finally, it is a little unusual for the US

to be on the receiving end of a militaryassault from abroad. For a comparable attackon the continental United States, you have togo back to 1814, when the British armyentered Washington and burned down theWhite House and the Capitol.

In other ways the attack was notunusual in the least. As an atrocity it was parfor the course. The death toll, initially esti-mated at 6,500, was later revised downwardto about 2,800. Atrocities on a similar orlarger scale are committed routinely by theUS in other countries. To take just oneexample, 3-4,000 civilians were killed in theinvasion of Panama in December 1989. Evenif we start the reckoning with September 11,we find that the US was quick to even thescore. According to an independent study,3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of themconnected with al-Qaeda) had been killed inbombing raids by 6 December, 2001. Thisfigure does not include the far more numer-ous indirect casualties resulting from the cre-

ation of refugees and the disruption of foodand other supplies.

BetrayalThe attack should not have been a total sur-prise, a bolt out of the blue. After all, it wasmerely the next step in a war that Osama binLaden had formally declared on the UnitedStates in August 1996. He had built up a far-flung network of front companies, banks,"charities," and NGOs (e.g., the WorldUnion of Moslem Youth) to raise funds andrecruit young fighters for the war. He hadalready attacked American assets abroad,notably the embassies in Kenya and Tanza-nia in August 1998, and there was ampleintelligence warning that a major attack onUS soil was in the offing. So the parallelwith Pearl Harbor is pretty weak.

And yet September 11 clearly did comeas a shock to Bush. That was because theattack came from forces that the US, its side-kicks Britain and Israel, and the Bush familyin particular had long regarded as friends,allies and partners. This explains why Bush

On the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack onNew York and Washington, we reflect on this act ofwar and try to place it in its true political and moralcontext

September 11,2001:

Reflections on aSomewhat Unusual Act of War



ignored the warnings - just as Stalin ignoredwarnings of impending attack by Nazi Ger-many in 1941 and felt "betrayed" by Hitlerwhen the attack came.

American, British, and Israeli rulingcircles saw the main threats to their econom-ic and strategic interests in the Moslemworld as coming from "communists" andsecular nationalists backed by the SovietUnion (e.g. Nasser in Egypt, Ghaddafi inLibya, the PLO). When Khomeini's theocra-cy took power, Iran was added to the list ofenemies, together with associated Shi'iteIslamist movements in other countries. SunniIslamist movements, however, were encour-aged - largely on the principle that "theenemy of my enemy is my friend," althoughalso because they seemed more interested inimposing ritual conformity on their owncommunities and in fighting "communism"than in challenging the substantive interestsof the "infidel" powers.

The Islamists were also beneficiaries ofthe "neo-liberal" economic policies ofWestern institutions. In Pakistan, for exam-ple, the secular state schools collapsed in the1980s as a result of IMF-mandated publicspending cuts. This left the Saudi-financedreligious schools (madrassas) as the onlyeducational option available to boys whowere not from wealthy families. (Girls, need-less to say, didn't even have that option.) Itwas from these madrassas that the Talibandrew its recruits.

Moreover, relations with the leadingSunni Islamist power, Saudi Arabia, wereand still are vital to Britain and the US ineconomic terms. The Saudi capitalist class,led by the royal family and influential fami-lies like the bin Ladens, not only sells thesecountries' oil but uses much of the proceedsto buy arms from them and invest in theireconomies. There are close and long-estab-lished personal and business ties betweenwealthy Saudis and British and Americancapitalists and politicians, including thefather of the current US president and sever-al members of his administration.

The Saudi-US alliance also entailedclose military cooperation, above all in thefight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan in 1979as an official of the Saudi intelligence serv-ice to finance, organize, and control the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in collaborationwith the CIA. It was here that Osama, whohad trained as an engineer and economistwith a view to taking part in the family busi-ness, acquired his taste for war.

Osama fell out with the Saudi royalfamily in 1991 when they allowed the US toset up military bases on the "holy" soil ofArabia following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.But even in exile Osama received frequentvisits from relatives, who provided a channelof communication between him and the royalfamily. An understanding appears to havebeen reached. Osama would abstain fromattacking targets inside Saudi Arabia and inreturn no action would be taken against hisSaudi supporters, who included variousmembers of his own and of other wealthyfamilies (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz, the"banker of terror") and even certain royalprinces. And the Saudi authorities did protectthese people, refusing to provide US intelli-gence agencies with any information thatmight compromise them.

So September 11 originated in a"betrayal" by the Saudi capitalist class oftheir American friends, allies and partners.How can we account for such strange ingrat-itude to those to whom they owe their vastriches? It probably has to do with the cir-

cumstances in which the Saudi capitalistclass came into being. It did not make itselfthrough independent entrepreneurial activity.It was made when oil was discovered in Ara-bia (in 1938) and property rights in that oilwere vested in the pre-existing royal house.It is a class of bedouin patriarchs turned ren-tiers who became capitalists by investingtheir revenue. As a result, it retains to someextent a pre-capitalist mentality that itexpresses in religious terms, and has adeeply ambivalent attitude to the capitalistworld in which it now operates.

The endless "war on terror"Despite the shock effect, US ruling circlesdid not necessarily regard September 11 asan unalloyed evil. In his book The New Cru-sade, anti-war analyst Rahul Mahajan draws

attention to a document entitled RebuildingAmerica's Defenses, issued in September2000 by the Project for the New AmericanCentury, a neo-conservative think tank withlinks to the Bush administration. The authorscall for increased military spending to pre-serve US "global preeminence," but add thatsuch a programme will be politically impos-sible unless there is a "catastrophic and cat-alyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor".

The purposes for which the fear gener-ated by the al-Qaeda attack was exploitedsuggest that it filled this bill. The threat of

"terrorism" has been used to push throughmilitary programs ranging from anti-missiledefence to germ warfare. Thus, a vast lab isbeing built near Washington called theNational Biodefence Analysis and Counter-measures Center, where in violation of the1972 biological and toxin weapons conven-tion the most lethal bacteria and viruses areto be stockpiled (Guardian Weekly, 4-10August, 2006). What a tempting target it willmake for terrorist infiltration or attack!

The "war on terrorism" unleashed inthe aftermath of September 11, against firstAfghanistan and then Iraq, is not - so Maha-jan argues - a war on terrorism, just as the"war on drugs" is not a war on drugs. Com-bating terrorism and drugs are both low pri-orities, and the "wars" against them are cov-ers for the pursuit of higher-priority interests.

In Afghanistan the US had turnedagainst the Taliban (previously welcomed asa force for "stability"), mainly because they

were unwilling to host oil and gas pipelinesfrom Central Asia to Pakistan, and was look-ing for a pretext to overthrow them. Captur-ing Osama was that pretext, for it was obvi-ous that the chaos of war would create idealconditions for him to escape.

Iraq was invaded to secure control overits oil and in the hope of establishing a newstrategic beachhead in the Middle East. Sad-dam had no ties with Islamic terrorism, justas he had no nuclear weapons. To the likes ofOsama he was not even a genuine Moslem.Bush demanded of his experts that they findties between Iraq and terrorism; when theyreplied that there were none, he pretendednot to hear and reiterated his demand.

In October 2001 Vice President DickCheney declared that the war on terrorism"may never end -- at least, not in our life-time" (Washington Post, 21 October, 2001).Am I alone in finding this suspicious? Ordi-narily in a war it is considered important formorale to hold out some prospect of victory,however remote. Does Cheney want andneed the "war" to go on forever?

The torture systemTo sustain the facade of the "war on terror" itis necessary to arrest lots of people. As thereis no real evidence against them, they areheld without trial in secret facilities through-out the world, where - like the victims ofStalin's purges - they are tortured to extractthe non-existent evidence. In her book TheLanguage of Empire, Lila Rajiva describesfor us the sickening tortures at Abu Ghraib,the prison complex outside Baghdad that theUS occupation authorities took over fromSaddam. The accounts and photos (sometaken as exposés, others as souvenirs) aremonotonous in their sameness. This is a clue:it strongly suggests that the torture is not aspontaneous practice of jailers and interroga-tors but a system designed by governmentexperts and approved at the top.

The system goes by the code name R21and is taught to British and American mili-tary intelligence personnel at the BritishJoint Services Interrogation Centre at Gilber-tine Priory, Chicksands, near Bedford(Guardian, May 8, 2004). It is designed toshock Moslem cultural sensibilities. Victimsare stripped naked and hooded, savaged bydogs, and forced under threat of beatings tomasturbate and simulate sexual acts in frontof sniggering female soldiers (another tri-umph for sexual equality). That's just forstarters, of course; it gets worse. I leave it tothe reader to ponder what this means for therelative merits of Western and MiddleEastern "civilization."

And yet the people who authorize allthese horrors know very well who is respon-sible for terrorism (the Islamist variety, thatis) and where they are to be found. But nobombs have been dropped on the wealthysuburbs of Riyadh. No scions of the binLadens and bin Mahfouz, no princes of theHouse of Saud have been stripped naked, setupon by dogs or sexually humiliated. That'sclass justice for you! A few incidents, how-ever regrettable, can't be allowed to spoilBritish and American relations with a vitalally and business partner.¢STEFAN

“Combating terrorismand drugs are coversfor the pursuit ofhigher-priority interests ”

Artist’s impression of the NationalBiodefence Analysis and CountermeasuresCenter


8 Socialist Standard September 2006

As we go to press, a serious andalready escalating crisis can beexpected to go into overdrive theinstant the Iranian government, at

the moment under a UN deadline to stopuranium enrichment by 31 August, tells theUN what it can do with its resolution.

Sanctions will no doubt be announced,but to what effect and with what responsefrom Iran remains to be seen. Iran hasalready intimated it would spark a global oilprice crisis in response to UN sanctions, andit is unclear whether China and Russia -each with vested oil interests in Iran - willgo along with any sanctions. The worst-casescenario is that the US will express feignedfrustration at Iran's unwillingness to cooper-ate and use the rejected resolution as a che-quered flag to attack Iran militarily.

It is against this backdrop that we canbegin to set the present Middle East crisis incontext, particularly the recent Israeli attackupon Lebanon. This latest act of Israeliaggression was not about capturing back thetwo Israeli soldiers kidnapped on 14 Julybut was rather, it would seem, about oil andthe securing of other resources and aboutpreparing for any wider conflict againstSyria and Iran.

Planned in advanceThere are numerous claims that the war inLebanon had been planned in advance byIsrael. Reporting from Tel Aviv for the SanFrancisco Chronicle (21 July), MatthewKalman wrote: "More than a year ago, asenior Israeli army officer began givingPowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats,journalists and think tanks, setting out theplan for the current operation in revealingdetail."

Speaking to CNN, veteran investiga-tive reporter Seymour Hersch said: "Julywas a pretext for a major offensive that hadbeen in the works for a long time. Israel'sattack was going to be a model for theattack they really want to do. They reallywant to go after Iran." (Guardian, 14August).

In bombarding Lebanon and the Gazastrip (Gaza is still being bombed) the objec-tive was to neutralise two opponents ofIsrael - and the US - Hezbullah and Hamas.Hezbullah's fire power and missile capabili-ties needed to be tested. Israel was unsureof the number of rockets in the hands ofHezbullah (some said 20,000) or indeedtheir range. Now they know. The Israelibombardment of key roads and bridges andpassage to Syria can serve no other functionthan to cut of the weapons supply route toHezbullah. By striking pre-emptively Israelseems to have planned to destroy as manyHezbullah weapons as possible in advanceof any rocket attack on Israel resulting fromany US-allied bombardment of Iran.

Oil and waterWidely unreported in the Western popularmedia and brought to a wider audience byMichel Chossudovsky, a Canadian econom-ics professor, on the Global Research web-site (http://www.globalresearch.ca/), was theinauguration of the Ceyhan-Tblisi-Baku(BTC) oil pipeline. This links the CaspianSea to the Eastern Mediterranean, and wasopened one day before Hezbullah's kidnap-ping of the two Israeli soldiers that ostensi-bly started the recent war in Lebanon.

The BTC pipeline is anticipated tocarry a million barrels of oil a day toWestern markets. In attendance at the inau-

guration ceremony were BP's CEO LordBrowne and senior officials from the UKand USA, along with Israel's Minister ofEnergy and Infrastructure Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, accompanied by a delegation of topIsraeli oil officials.

The BP-dominated pipeline skirts theRussian Federation, cutting through newpro-US states Georgia and Azerbaijan,countries allied with NATO and with astanding military pact with Israel. Israelalready gets 20 percent of its oil from Azerioil fields and this new pipeline is set to

increase Israeli imports from the Caspianbasin. Israel is now tipped to be a key play-er in the East Mediterranean oil transportprotection racket.

Officially, the BTC pipeline will bechannelling oil to Western markets. What isnot admitted, however, is that some of thisoil will be redirected towards Israel via aproposed underwater pipeline from Ceyhanin Turkey to the Israeli port of Ashkelon,and from there via a pipeline system to theRed Sea.

The plan not only seems to serveIsraeli oil consumption needs, but also playsa part in the US's wider game of global-pol-itics. Oil channelled from Ashkelon to theRed Sea will then be re-exported from theRed Sea port of Eilat to Asian markets. Thiswill help undermine the inter-Asian energymarket eventually weakening the position ofRussia in Central Asia and cutting off Chinafrom Central Asia's oil reserves.

In April of this year Ankara and TelAviv publicised their intention to create fourpipelines which would bypass Syrian andLebanese territory. As the Jerusalem Post(11 May) reported:

"Turkey and Israel are negotiating theconstruction of a multi-million-dollar ener-gy and water project that will transportwater, electricity, natural gas and oil bypipelines to Israel, with the oil to be sentonward from Israel to the Far East."

The scheme further envisages apipeline to carry water to Israel fromupstream Anatolian rivers Tigris andEuphrates. Not only is this plan catered forin the recently-announced military pactbetween Israel and Ankara, its implementa-tion will be devastating for Syria and Iraq.The execution of this joint Israeli-Turkishventure requires that land and sea routesbetween the Ceyhan border, through Syriaand Lebanon, and to the Lebanese-Israeliborder, be militarised.

Michel Chossudovsky asks in his arti-cle The war on Lebanon and the battle foroil:

"Is this not one of the hidden objec-tives of the war on Lebanon? Open up aspace which enables Israel to control a vastterritory extending from the Lebanese bor-der through Syria to Turkey."

Israel is keen to play a more dominantrole in the Middle East and seeks to achievea degree of economic autonomy by becom-ing a key player in oil politics. Its militaryprogramme is increasingly looking likebeing tailored to the region's strategic oilpipelines and by the Western oil companiescommanding the pipeline passages. Ofcourse to punch above its weight it needsoutside help, hence alliances with the USand more recently with Turkey and NATO.

Chossudovsky's oft-cited piece "TripleAlliance": The US, Turkey, Israel and theWar on Lebanon details the alliances andagreements which apparently underpin the

Was Israel's attack on Hezbullah part of preparationsfor a coming US attack on Iran?

After Hezbullah, war with Iran?

“Tel Aviv announcedit was in for a "longwar" - clearly notwith Hezbullah ”

Beruit airport after an Israeli attack



war with Hezbullah: "We are not dealing with a limited

conflict between the Israeli Armed Forcesand Hezbullah as conveyed by the Westernmedia. The Lebanese War Theatre is part ofa broader US military agenda, whichencompasses a region extending from theEastern Mediterranean into the heartland ofCentral Asia. The war on Lebanon must beviewed as 'a stage' in this broader 'militaryroad map'."

Significant, for Chossudovsky, is theTurkey-Israel alliance which involves mili-tary and intelligence sharing on Iraq, Iranand Syria, as well as joint military exercisesand training.

Pepe Escobar, writing for Asia Times,stresses Israel's water needs as partly behindthe recent war in Lebanon. :

"There's also the all-important matterof the waters of the Litani River in southernLebanon. Israel might as well prepare theterrain now for the eventual annexation ofthe Litani. Beyond Lebanon, Israel is most-ly interested also in Syria. The motive: theall-important pipeline route from Kirkuk, inIraqi Kurdistan, to Haifa. Enter Israel as amajor player in Pipelineistan. So Israelwants to grab water (and territory) fromPalestine, water (and territory) fromLebanon and oil from Iraq. This all has todo with the inevitable - the 21st-centuryenergy wars."(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG26Ak02.html)

Seeking greater independence and anenhanced role in the Middle East, the smellof profits all around, Israeli aggression nowbecomes more understandable

Long warTel Aviv recently announced it was in for a"long war" - clearly not with Hezbullah. Ithas been stockpiling weapons for severalyears and was re-supplied throughout thewar with Hezbullah by the US. On top of itsarsenal of 200 nuclear warheads it has inexcess of 500 bunker-busting bombs, only afew, by all accounts, used recently inLebanon. Clearly Israel is preparing for a

widening and intense conflict. Speaking of the Israeli-Hezbullah con-

flict, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said:"We need to make clear to Syria and Iranthat there is a choice: come into the interna-tional community and play by the samerules as the rest of us, or be confronted."Can this hypocritical statement be interpret-ed as anything other than a serious threat ofviolence to those Middle Eastern countriesthat would stand in the way of profit-hungrymasters of war and their ambitions for glob-al domination of the planet's vitalresources?

Seymour Hersh has repeatedly assert-ed that President Bush ordered all-out waragainst Iran shortly after his re-election in2004. Pat Buchanan's American Conserva-tive, amongst other sources, sides withHersh in arguing that vice-president DickCheney has drawn up a war plan for Iraninclusive of the possible use of nuclearweapons.

US Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeldhas placed US forces on alert and Lieu-tenant-Colonel Bruce Carlson, commanderof the 8th Air Force acknowledges: "We'renow at the point where we are essentiallyon alert. We have the capacity to plan andexecute global strikes in half a day or less."

Dan Plesch (Guardian, 8 August) sug-gests President Bush has at his disposal:

"200 strategic bombers (B52-B1-B2-F117A) and US Navy Tomahawk cruisemissiles. One B2 bomber dropped 80,500lbbombs on separate targets in 22 seconds in atest flight. Using just half the availableforce, 10,000 targets could be attackedalmost simultaneously. This strike poweralone is sufficient to destroy all major Iran-ian political, military, economic and trans-port capabilities."

Dangerous timesWe live at a dangerous stage of human his-tory, in which the greatest crime a countrycan commit is to have more than its fairshare of resources in a world in which theleading superpower is seeking full-spectrumdominance. Iran's real and unforgivable

crime - leaving aside its refusal to halt itsuranium enrichment programme - is to haveenviable oil and gas reserves, to controlaccess to the Persian Gulf , which is a vitaloil and gas transhipment route to Europe,Japan, and the rest of the world, and to havecontemplated oil deals with a serious rivalfor US supremacy, China. With Chinaexpected to have oil demands similar to USlevels within 20 years, already consumingvast resources of coal, iron and steel, not tomention almost 70 percent of the world'scement supplies on a single dam project,the panic button has clearly been pressed.

As Socialists we are naturally fearfulas we watch events unfold; fearful for ourclass, our fellows throughout the world andfor whom we hold no ill feelings. Asalways, we refuse to take sides in conflict,seeing all war as rooted in the desire tomake profit, and viewing workers, whereverthey are, united as one class with the samebasic needs and common interest, diametri-cally opposed to the interests of those whowould urge them to kill each other.

Before the slaughter begins again, weonce more take the opportunity to declareour heartfelt solidarity with the workers ofall countries, and their true common cause.We appeal to workers to organise con-sciously and politically and to use thepower at their disposal to head off thethreatening bloodshed, and secure the spacewe need in order to build a world of peaceand stability. As ever, we appeal to theworkers of all lands to join with us in cam-paigning for a system of society where thereare no leaders, no classes, no states or gov-ernments, no borders, no force or coercion;a world where the earth's natural and indus-trial resources are commonly owned anddemocratically controlled and where pro-duction is freed from the artificial con-straints of profit and used for the benefit ofall; a world of free access to the necessariesof life. A world without waste, or want, orwar. ¢JOHN BISSETT

Clockwise from top: The BTC oil pipeline; Hezbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah; Hamasspokesperson Khaled Mashaal



The second part ofour article analysingcapitalist globalisa-tion. Last month welooked at how thisaffected capital. Thismonth we examineits impact on theworld's population atlarge.

The continuing surge in globalisa-tion has had profound human andsocial effects on vast numbers ofpeople, the fundamental nature of

these effects depending on their classposition in society, i.e. whether they arecapitalists or workers. On the one handthe opportunities for the capitalist class toaccumulate wealth has increased multilat-erally with, for example, politicians andcivil servants in the poorer states quitehappy to find the funding for trade fairs,economic surveys, development studies,and visits by heads of state in an effort toincrease the profits of that class from theglobal market.

On the other hand this global frenzyis resulting in upheaval for whole commu-nities, while the transition from rural to

urban living is in turn altering humangeography radically with rural areas eitherbecoming human deserts or concentratedindustrial sprawl. Likewise most globalhousing areas resemble one another tosuch an extent that even the shantytownsare becoming uniform in the type of build-ing materials used.

When these social transformationsare combined with factors like theincreasing mobility of labour - mobilityfrom the peasantry to the modernity ofwage slavery - they come with well-known costs for the disempowered major-ity: misery, destitution, family breakdownand homelessness. The most visibleaspects of this are to be seen with thou-sands of families living on the streets ofCalcutta, or those families forced toscrape an existence by living on a wastetip in San Paulo, or perhaps a PhD fromAddis Ababa University driving a cab inNew York city, let alone those staffing acall centre in New Delhi alongside a wallfull of useless diplomas.

Such potential human resourcesbeing wasted to further the interests ofprofit maximisation cannot but have animpact on rising social expectations andaspirations. These then come into conflictwith people's sense of achievement.Consequently, we are witnessing a sharprise in the incidence of mental health. Andthe resulting increase in cases of anxiety,depression, insomnia, mood swings andstress, are to be evidenced in the packedwaiting areas of the mental health clinics,along with the expanding appointmentsfor the services of psychotherapists. Add

this to the overcrowded waiting lists forthe physically sick in the developed anddeveloping countries and many globalhealth services there are in crisis man-agement mode.

InequalityWhilst this human tragedy unfolds

our political masters are still chanting themantra that some of the wealth createdwill eventually 'trickle down' to those 2.8billion people living on less than $2 a dayand also to those 1.3 billion living in evenmore extreme poverty. Unable to solvethe problem of absolute and relativepoverty, the global politicians have nowagreed in their misguided wisdom to tryand tackle the problems and issues ofextreme poverty only. By this they meanthose 1.3 billion people who have to theircost found that the system of wage slav-ery holds no guarantees of the provisionof a living wage, and subsequently findingit impossible to exist on less than a dollara day. And where the material differencebetween relative, absolute and, and if youso wish extreme poverty, is so profoundlystark that it creates a sense of inevitabilityand disempowerment, it is invariablyaccompanied by disillusionment. This isespecially so in cultural terms, with mil-lions being forced from the rural povertyof subsistence living into becoming alandless peasant within an urban environ-ment dominated by the tyranny of wagesand surrounded by the advertising ofmass consumerism.

The WHO, UN, World Bank, andJubilee 2000 have reported many of theindicators of global inequality in recentyears, and summarised they are:- One-fifth of the world's population is liv-ing in extreme poverty.- 100 million children live or work on thestreet.- Half the world's population are lackingaccess to the most essential medicines. - The combined wealth of the world's 200richest people reached $1 trillion in 1999;the combined income of 582 million livingin the 43 least developed countries is$146b.- 70 per cent of the world's poor and two-thirds of the worlds illiterate are women. - An estimated 827.5m people are under-nourished. Of which 647m, or over one-

third (37 percent) consist of theworld's children. - More than 30,000 children dieeach day from easily preventablediseases.- The top fifth own 86 per cent ofthe world's wealth, while the low-est fifth own just one per cent.- The wealth of the world's threewealthiest billionaires is more thanthat of the GNP of all the leastdeveloping countries and their 600million people.- When Argentina defaulted on itsdebts, 300,000 people wereforced to live off the garbagedumps surrounding the city ofBuenos Aires.- The number of people living inextreme poverty has actually risenby 28m.Yet it is not only developing andundeveloped countries who areexperiencing issues of inequality;even in the major developedcountries, like the US, incomeinequality is now on the increasewith one report claiming:

"The gap between rich and

Globalisation -what does itmean?



DoingBusiness,the WorldBank WayThe World Bank existsto oil the wheels ofcapitalism: to make

funds available for investment and variousinfrastructure projects. Basically it tries toensure that things run as smoothly and pre-dictably as possible, and always in theinterests of the currently rich and power-ful. Of course, this being capitalism, thingsdo not always go as planned.

One of the ways in which the WorldBank seeks to serve capitalism is by pro-viding information about investment indifferent countries. It runs a website,http://www.doingbusiness.org/, whichgives "objective measures of business reg-ulations and their enforcement", so makingit easier for capitalists to know the pitfallsof investing in various parts of the world.The data on the site cover everything fromstarting a business to paying taxes, enforc-ing contracts and procedures for bankrupt-cy. One of the topics dealt with is employ-ing workers, where the indicators, as theyare termed, are how difficult it is to hire anew worker, restrictions on expanding orcontracting the number of working hours,the difficulty and expense of dismissing aredundant worker and their costs(expressed in weeks of wages).

So we learn that the USA gets ascore of zero for difficulty of hiring andrigidity of hours, and a redundant workercosts nothing (!) in terms of firing costs.The UK has higher scores, including 33weeks' wages as the cost of dismissing aredundant worker. Germany has muchhigher scores on all these, and 66 weeks'wages as the cost of dismissal. Note that inall cases a higher figure means 'more rigidregulations', so low scores are good as faras the World Bank is concerned - forinstance, the US has little to stop anemployer cutting or increasing workinghours. Russia has a mixture of scores: zerofor difficulty of hiring but nearly as highas Germany for rigidity of hours.

From a working class point of view,however, the real issue is not how reliablethe scores are or how they differ amongcontinents and countries. Rather, the cru-cial thing is what they reveal about howthe bosses view you and me. We aren'tpeople with families and needs, rather weare just another aspect of doing business.The ease of acquiring a license or obtain-ing credit is put on a par with how easy itis to alter our working hours or how easyand expensive it is to dismiss us if webecome redundant, i.e. no longer able toproduce profits in the way that is required.

For capitalism, members of theworking class aren't really human beings,just costs of production, cogs in the greatwheel of making a profit and keeping thebosses in the style to which they havebecome accustomed. A society which isbased on production for use will be cen-tred around people, around satisfying ourneeds as both producers and consumers, asparents and friends. Then we can saygoodbye to the World Bank and theiroffensive economic scores.

Cooking the Books (1)

poor in America is the widest in 70 years,according to a new study published by theCenter for the Budget and PolicyPriorities. The research, based on newlyreleased figures from the non-partisanCongressional Budget Office, shows thatthe top 1 percent of Americans - who earnan average of $862,000 each after tax (or$1.3m before tax) - receive more moneythan the 110m Americans in the bottom40 percent of the income distribution,whose income averages $21,350 eachyear. The income going to the richest 1percent has gone threefold in real termsin the past twenty years, while the incomeof the poorest 40 percent went up by amore modest 11 percent" (BBC NewsOnline, 25 September, 2003:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/busi-ness/3138232.stm ).

Much the same picture is painted inthe UK with the figures from the NationalStatistics Office and Inland Revenue for2002/3 showing that the richest 5 percentowned 43 percent of the wealth, while thepoorest 50 percent owned just 6 percent;similarly the top 2.4m households ownedassets worth around £1,300b, while thebottom 12m owned assets of around£150m. Also according to a PolicyInstitute report last year, 22 percent ofthe UK population are still living below thepoverty line, including 3.8m children (or30 percent of all children), 2.2m pension-ers, and 6.6m working age adults. Ineffect a total of 12.6m people in the UKpopulation are confronted with highermortality; lower education outcomes; lessdecent homes; and financial exclusion,due to surviving on, or below 60 percentof median income after housing costs.

On a much more local scale theChild Poverty Action Group revealed intheir publication 'Poverty - the Facts (5thedition)' that over 80 percent of the chil-dren living in the Townhill district ofSwansea were defined as poor; benefitsmake up a larger proportion of totalincome in Wales than in England orScotland, with a higher proportion of chil-dren living in households claiming incomesupport - 18.9 percent - compared to theUK-wide figure of 13.5 percent; and 32percent of pensioners in Inner Londonwere affected by income poverty, and chil-dren in London are even worse off thanthose in Wales with 24 percent of house-holds in receipt of income support, orother means tested benefits.

Socialist OutlookThese are just some of the facts and

figures that are considered normal to themodern workings of capitalism. They helpto serve the purpose of illustrating that theglobalisation of capitalism has masked agrowing polarisation both within andbetween countries and that local circum-stances are merely a reflection of theglobal situation where 'trickle-down' eco-nomics has in reality turned into a flood ofinequality, destitution and instability. Thisconfirms what Marxists have consistentlystated that the prosperity for the few isdependant on the deprivation of themany. Indeed, despite the huge amountsof abundant wealth created by workerswithin capitalism, the system is incapableof accounting for the fact that the cases ofmillions of people dying through malnour-ishment, or because they lack cleanwater, adequate shelter, and health careis on the increase. This alone serves as adamning confirmation that there hasn'tbeen any fundamental shift in the owner-ship of wealth. It also reaffirms our posi-

tion that this state of affairs is likely tocontinue, besides endorsing the con-tention that the capitalist class will useeither system of trading - protectionism orfree trade - when it suits their purpose toaccumulate wealth.

Failure to grasp the revolutionarychallenge this analysis poses has led tothe formation of the anti-globalisationprotest movement which campaigns onthe issues of extreme poverty, world debtand the adoption of protectionist meas-ures for those developing and undevel-oped countries who have found that thereality of 'free trade' only applies primarilyto the G8 nations. Whilst there is nodenying that such campaigns have madetremendous strides in highlighting theeffects of globalisation, when it comes tooutlining proposals for viable alternativesto capitalism, their mindset is locked ontothe belief that a 'fairer' global society ispossible within the framework of capital-ism. Their main tactic is to bring massprotest to bear on politicians and on insti-tutions like the G8, WTO, IMF and WorldBank, despite the fact that such a mindsetof working towards a 'fairer' global societyhas a long history of failure, based as it ison the false assumption that capitalismcan be made to work in the interest of all- rich and poor alike.

Although the effects of globalisationwith the human suffering it brings canlead to bleak and negative conclusionsabout the future, it is also possible todraw different conclusions, ones that arefar more positive and meaningful. Forwhat comes out of this rather gloomy pic-ture is the certainty that capitalism hasoutlived its usefulness as a progressivemode of production. For it reached itsearly retirement at the turn of the 20thCentury - once it had established itself asa global system consisting of integratedand interdependent productive units. Assoon as it reached this point it had fulfilledits purpose and turned into a global mon-ster of uncontrollable destructiveness.

With capitalism failing to deliver forthe majority it has become more obviousthat now is the time to move on to a sys-tem of common ownership that is capableof meeting the self-defined needs of thegreat majority and not just the interests ofa wealthy minority. In order to attain sucha system of free access an essential pre-requisite is for a majority of the globalworking class to reach an understandingthat their sense of social achievement canonly be fulfilled by becoming conscious inclass terms that capitalism can never bemade to operate in their interests. Oncethey have reached this revolutionary con-clusion - and only then - will capitalismlose its basis of support and be replacedby socialism. ¢BRIAN JOHNSON



Grant was the last of the three greatgurus of the British Trotskyistmovement and the eminence griseof what became known as the Mil-

itant Tendency. Along with his two mainTrotskyist rivals, Gerry Healy (of theSocialist Labour League/Workers' Revolu-tionary Party) and Tony Cliff (of Interna-tional Socialism/the Socialist Workers'Party) he had a considerable input into whatbecame - with the decline of the CommunistParty - the most significant political trend tothe left of the Labour Party.

Born Isaac Blank just outside Johan-nesburg, he changed his name to Grantwhen he came to Britain during the turbu-lent mid-1930s with a small band of otherSouth African militants, convinced that itwould be more fertile political territory thanhis country of birth. Attracted to the politi-cal ideas of the exiled Russian revolutionaryLeon Trotsky, this small group of SouthAfrican émigrés had already been influen-tial in the founding of South Africa's firstTrotskyist organisation, the Workers' Inter-national League, and soon made a mark onthe fledgling British Trotskyist movement.Of the two small British Trotskyist group-ings of the time, the Balham Group and theRevolutionary Socialist League (later to becalled the Militant Labour League, selling anewspaper called Militant), Grant and hiscolleagues were attracted towards the latter.In what became a tradition of the Trotskyistmovement not only in Britain but interna-tionally, they soon split from it though toform their own organisation, this time a Bri-tish version of the Workers' InternationalLeague they had left behind in South Africa.Among those joining them was the Scottishorator Jock Haston and a voluble Irish mili-tant, Gerry Healy.

Fourth International In 1938 Leon Trotsky and his followers setup an international organisation intended to

rival the worldwide Communist ('Third')International. This 'Fourth International' castaround for a British section, but the tinygroup around Grant, Haston and Healy wasignored and the franchise went instead tothe larger Militant Labour League. For thiskey event in Trotskyist history then, Grantand his comrades were shunned and Granthimself never got to meet Trotsky before the'Old Man's' assassination by Soviet agentsin Mexico in 1940.

During the Second World War, Grant'sWIL was active on the industrial front andsoon began to eclipse its parent organisationin both membership and influence - somuch so, that by 1944 the Fourth Interna-tional persuaded the two organisations tomerge, in what was effectively a WILtakeover. The new organisation created wascalled the Revolutionary Communist Partyand was the first (and last) time the BritishTrotskyist movement was united in the oneorganisation.

Grant became editor of the RCP'spaper, Socialist Appeal, and Grant and Has-ton were the organisation's first delegates tothe Fourth International. The RCP existedfor three years and grew to 500-600 mem-bers, being a thorn in the side of the Com-munist Party before, in true Trotskyist fash-ion, internal strife led to decline and a split.

Significantly, in the late 1940s threemain factions had begun to emerge whichwere to be the main tendencies within theTrotskyist movement in Britain in thedecades thereafter. Those around the Pales-tinian émigré Tony Cliff developed a dis-tinctive version of the theory that whatexisted in the Soviet Union was a form ofstate capitalism (though only after Stalin'saccession to power in 1928) and thereforecouldn't be supported by socialists, whilethe groups around Grant and Healy held onto Trotsky's own belief that what existed inRussia was a workers'state, albeit a degener-ated one. Indeed, the Grant and Healy fac-

tions had much in common politically, andit was mainly the bitter personal hostilitythat developed between the two men thatkept their groupings separate.

Secret organisationIn the early 1950s, Grant and his smallnumber of followers started a magazinecalled International Socialist. Grant lived inLondon and worked as a night-time tele-phone operator, which left him free to pur-sue his political work as a Trotskyist duringthe day. At this time he began to build up aclose political relationship with a Trotskyistfrom Birkenhead called Jimmy Dean, whowas the driving force behind Rally, a paperpopular with the youth section of theLabour Party in the North West of England(and soon edited from Liverpool by ateenage Pat Wall, later one of the Militant-supporting Labour MPs).

By 1955 Grant and his supportersdecided that the time was right to found anew organisation. Harking back to thegroup Grant first joined on his arrival fromSouth Africa, it was called the Revolution-ary Socialist League and its first GeneralSecretary was Jimmy Dean. It effectivelyfused two small Trotskyist bases in Londonand Liverpool where Grant had an influ-ence, and was a tightly-knit organisationbuilt on the Leninist principles of the van-guard party, being hierarchical and secretivein almost equal measure, operating likeother Trotskyist groups before it as a clan-destine faction within the Labour Party.

Coincidentally, two years earlier theTrotskyist Fourth International had split.Healy's faction had the UK franchise butwent off with the splitters, leaving a vacan-cy for a British Section which the leadershipof the FI allegedly tried to fill by placing anadvertisement in Tribune, which Grantanswered. By 1957, the RSL was given theBritish franchise by the FI but advancedonly sporadically, starting a new paper

Death of a TendencyThe recent death of Ted Grant at the age of 93has been a landmark, albeit a minor one, inBritish political history

Grant atSpeakers’ Corner,

London, 1942



called Socialist Fight, but otherwise beingeclipsed by other Trotskyist groups, particu-larly Healy's. At the time the Healy, Cliffand Grant factions were all building up sup-port by working inside the Labour Party assecret parties within a party, focusing espe-cially on the Labour League of Youth, butGrant's faction was so unsuccessful that theFI forced it to merge with an up-and-com-ing young group of Trotskyists in Notting-ham around Ken Coates called the Interna-tional Group. When this marriage of con-venience led to the inevitable divorce withina year or so, the FI took the opportunity torescind Grant's franchise altogether, givingit instead to the Nottingham faction whichby then had turned itself into the Interna-tional Marxist Group (IMG), a currentwhich went on to develop a strong studentbase under the leadership of Tariq Ali.

MilitantThe loss of the Fourth International fran-chise was an understandable blow to Grant,but around the same time his group hadbegun to take steps which were to provemore fruitful, the most significant of whichwas the creation of a new publication to becalled Militant - for Labour and Youth. It'seditor was a young Liverpudlian with strongorganisatiuonal abilities called Peter Taaffe,who became Grant's lieutenant-in-chief,while Grant himself was political editor.The striking design of the paper was createdby Roger Protz, later of the Campaign ForReal Ale, but who was a notable activist atvarious times in each of the three mainTrotskyist factions in British politics (later,in Cliff's International Socialists, he becameeditor of Socialist Worker). It was to begrowing sales of Militant, combined withsystematic, organised activity in the LabourParty, which was eventually to bear fruit forGrant's faction.

By 1966 they were the only one of thethree main Trotskyist factions still inside theLabour Party. Healy's group had, by theearly 1960s, almost completely taken overthe (now renamed) Labour Party YoungSocialists and after several attempts theywere eventually expelled, with Grant per-sonally refusing at one stage to vote to keepHealy-ites in the Party. Cliff's faction disen-gaged from Labour in the mid-1960s, seeingpropaganda opportunities in disassociatingitself from Wilson's Labour government,leaving the field free for Grant. By 1970Grant's RSL had a majority on the LabourParty Young Socialists Executive and from1972 onwards always had one of its mem-bers on the Labour NEC as the LPYS repre-sentative.

Throughout the 1970s, the influenceof what by this time was becoming knownas the 'Militant Tendency' grew apace, bothin the Labour Party and trade unions.Grant's organisation moved from being theleast well-known of the major Trotskyistssects to becoming the most well-known,with something of a 'workerist' face, placingless emphasis on building up student sup-port than most Trotskyist groups and moreon recruiting the skilled and semi-skilledworking class, especially local governmentworkers.

By the 1980s Militant's growth andinfluence was such that it could claimscores of Labour councillors across Britainas 'supporters' (when in reality they wereRSL members who couldn't publicly admitto being a 'party within a party'). In addi-

tion, they could claim several Labour Par-liamentary candidates - three of whom(Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall)eventually became MPs, and - most contro-versially of all - they took effective controlof Liverpool City Council, with Derek Hat-ton as the council's Deputy Leader and TonyMulhearn (a long-time RSL member moretrusted by Grant) as his aide de camp.

The mid-1980s, when the Tendencyclaimed over 8,000 'supporters', was thepeak of Militant's influence on British poli-tics and the nearest Grant came to fulfillinghis dream of creating a mass Trotskyist basewithin the Labour Party. But its size, influ-ence and the notoriety attached to it by themainstream press led to the first systematicattempt to deal with Trotskyist infiltration inthe Labour Party since the expulsion of theHealy-ites. Earlier, in 1975, Lord Underhillhad written a report on Militant's activitiesin the Labour Party for a left-wing dominat-ed Labour NEC that chose at the time to donothing about it. But in the 1980s theLabour leadership acted, first under MichaelFoot and then under Neil Kinnock, with hisfamous attack on the Militants on LiverpoolCity Council at the 1985 Labour Party con-ference, after they had deployed the tactic

of refusing to set a rate, issuing 30,000council workers with redundancy notices.

Labour initially started by picking onthe most obvious candidates for expulsion,the five members of Militant's EditorialBoard, including Grant and Taaffe, whowere expelled in 1983. After this, large andincreasing numbers of their comrades weresystematically put outside the Party theyclaimed was 'the mass party of the workingclass'.

Political positionsThroughout the lifetime of the RSL, 'entry-ism' into the Labour Party was one of itsdefining characteristics as a Trotskyist cur-rent. Others used entryism as a tactic,including Cliff and Healy, but for Grant'sgroup it appeared to amount to more thanthis - it was a defining political position.Sometimes called 'deep entryism' it was notsimply about a Trotskyist organisationgoing into the Labour Party, building upsupport and effectively raiding it for newmembers before emerging into the outsideworld stronger and fitter. For Grant, as Mili-tant's main theoretician, the task of his ten-dency was to 'win the Labour Party tosocialism' on the grounds that a unitedLabour and trade union movement under aTrotskyist leadership was unstoppable.

The means for achieving this goal wasdeep entryism plus a particular variety ofTrotsky's 'transitional demands' programme,a strategy developed from Lenin's premisethat the working class in capitalism was notcapable through its own efforts of develop-

ing a socialist consciousness. This transi-tional programme was a carefully calculatedlist of demands - such as massive publicworks programmes, the nationalisation ofthe top 200 monopolies, and an implausiblygenerous minimum wage - which would besuperficially attractive to supporters ofreforms in the wider Labour and trade unionmovement, and which Militant thought con-tained the seeds of a future socialist society.The intention was a dishonest one, for Grantand Militant's other leaders knew that thesedemands were not generally capable of real-isation within the normal politics of capital-ism - indeed, that was the very point ofadvocating them. The resultant anger theyexpected within the working class whenthese demands were unmet would lead, theyhoped, to a lurch towards the left under theleadership of the Trotskyist vanguard itself -the RSL.

The desire to stay in the Labour Partyat all costs coupled with distinctive transi-tional demands that could lead to a Trotsky-ist leadership introducing 'socialism' (reallystate-run capitalism based on nationalisa-tion) via an Enabling Act in parliament -and supported by workers' councils in theindustrial field - was what really definedMilitant in relation to the other Trotskyistsects. Also, and uniquely, the RSL quicklyidentified the arena of local government asa means for criticising traditional, piecemealreformist politics (saying they would alwaysoppose rent and rates increases), raising itsprogramme of more radical transitionaldemands instead as the 'bridge to socialism':

"To lift the horizon of the local parish-pump politicians on to the broader nationaland international field - this is the first taskof the revolutionary Councillor . . . It is nec-essary within the Labour Groups and inopen council to point out the limitations ofparticular struggles and reforms and showhow (in theory and practice) reformism(nationally and locally) cannot resolve thecontradictions of capitalism." (RSL 'Noteson Council Work', by Ellis Hillman, 1961.)

These socialist-sounding phrases, inreality masking the advocacy of what were,in effect, just more radical reforms of capi-talism, was typical of their entryist tactic, aslater exemplified in Liverpool. Combinedwith their relentless workerism and disdainfor non-economic issues, this constitutedtheir 'Unique Selling Point' within the Trot-skyist milieu (unlike others, Militant hadrelatively little interest in sexual or studentpolitics, or supporting Third World national-ist movements).

These were the key perspectives hand-ed down by Grant himself, consistently overdecades. Indeed, it was often said by hissupporters and opponents alike that Grantwas saying the same things in the 1980s ashe had been saying in the 1940s, and hisbook The Unbroken Thread: the Develop-ment of Trotskyism Over 40 Years is testa-ment to this. This would have to include hisoft-repeated claim (following Trotsky, andlike his rival Gerry Healy of the WRP) thatcapitalist collapse leading to a Trotskyistleadership of a revolutionary working classwas imminent in 'the coming period' of thenext 10-15 years, somewhat in the perpetualmanner of 'tomorrow never comes'.

Post-MilitantIn the eventually, capitalism outlived Granthimself. Indeed, Grant's end appears to havebeen a rather sad one, in an old people'shome, years after having been kicked out of

“(Grant) rejectedreal socialism forthe type of politicsthat cast him in therole of leader”



the Labour party and then, rather moreremarkably, the RSL itself. The campaign ofthe Labour leadership in the 1980s againstMilitant had been so successful that by 1992the majority of the RSL, led by Taaffe,came to the conclusion that continuing withentryism was pointless and stood 'MilitantLabour' candidates against the officialLabour Party, with mixed success. A grouparound Grant and one of his protégés, AlanWoods, refused to accept this reversal ofwhat the Tendency had always stood for,and were expelled.

Just as Grant had borrowed from earlyTrotskyist groups when founding the Revo-lutionary Socialist League and its paper,Militant, so this expelled rump from theRSL started a new paper called SocialistAppeal, the name of the journal Grant edit-ed while one of the leaders of the RCP justafter the war. Never more than a couple ofhundred at most, this group made littleimpact, while after a period of seriousdecline the slightly larger Militant Laboureventually voted in 1997 to dishonestly turnitself into the 'Socialist Party' (of Englandand Wales - SPEW to its enemies), effec-tively trying to usurp the name of theSPGB. This grouping has since declinedfurther, though its leading elements in Scot-land, such as Tommy Sheridan, were instru-mental in forming the rather more success-ful but equally reformist Scottish SocialistParty.

The modern legacy of Ted Grant is aninteresting one, for in many respects he wasthe most successful of the three main BritishTrotskyist leaders, while still falling wellshort of his ultimate goal. From a socialistperspective, the Militant Tendency (like theother Trotskyist groups) did much to muddythe waters of revolutionary politics in the

UK, posing as socialist while supporting theusual Trotskyist stew of radical reformistdemands with the long-term aim of state-runcapitalism organised by a Leninist vanguardparty, another classic 'dictatorship over theproletariat', with Grant as leader-in-waiting.

Grant knew full well of the real social-ist alternative promoted by the SocialistParty of Great Britain and our companionparties overseas (he debated Socialist Party

speaker Tony Turner in 1945 and was wontto deride us as 'ultra left' sectarians) but herejected real socialism for the type of poli-tics that cast him in the role of leader,manipulating the mass of the proletariattowards a 'revolutionary situation'. But, ashistory proved, the working class were notso easily manipulated by Grant's particularmix of Trotskyist tactics, and his lifetimewas effectively wasted on an ultimately dis-honest political cause.

This was a shame, because like TonyCliff, Grant had much energy and some tal-ent as a writer and speaker. He was anobsessive analyst of - and collector of infor-mation about - the capitalist economy,though arguably (because of his unsupport-ed belief in capitalist collapse) his bestworks were not in this field. His politicaltract Against the Theory of State Capitalismin 1949, for instance, was a relentlessly log-ical attack on the irrationality of the Cliff(SWP) position from an orthodox Trotskyistperspective, implying that the only coherentstate capitalist theory applied to the Sovietbloc, etc came from those, like the SocialistParty, who rejected Leninist and Trotskyistpolitics altogether. And in more recenttimes, he collaborated with Alan Woods towrite an excellent book called Reason andRevolt: Marxist Philosophy and ModernScience, a history of science and scientificmethods from a general Marxist standpoint. Grant will be remembered, above all elsethough, for founding a political tendencywhich hit the headlines and gained publicnotoriety but which otherwise did thesocialist movement huge amounts of dam-age. His political heirs in Socialist Appealand SPEW fittingly continue to peddle thesame kind of elitist and outdated reformistnonsense now as Grant did when he firstbecame a Trotskyist in the 1930s. Indeed,for years Grant was derided by many forsounding rather like an old, broken record -and today, his surviving political heirs mostcertainly stand out as badly scratched vinylin what is a transparently digital age.¢DAP

"Massunemployment"The government's Wel-fare Reform Bill is cur-rently going throughParliament. It providesfor people on incapacitybenefit and single moth-ers to be harassed totake some crap job or

have their benefit cut. New claimants are tobe treated even more harshly. This is par forthe course. Cutting back on welfare pay-ments has been the policy of all govern-ments, whether Labour or Tory, since thepost-war boom came to an end in the 1970s.

The Green Paper which preceded theBill, bearing the Orwellian title of "A NewDeal for Welfare: Empowering People ToWork", sets out the problem as seen by thegovernment:

"In the 1980s and 1990s the welfarestate failed those who most needed its help,instead of combating mass unemployment,the welfare state alleviated its worst effectsand diverted people onto other benefits.Instead of helping people into work, itlocked them into long-term dependency. By1997, there were almost 5.5 million peopleon benefits, 3 million more than in 1979.The number of people claiming unemploy-ment benefits had risen by 50 per cent,while the number claiming lone parent andincapacity benefits had more than tripled."

This assumes that, if only they hadtried, the (Tory) governments of the 1980sand 1990s could have combated "massunemployment" by somehow creating newjobs as an alternative to paying unemploy-ment and incapacity benefits. But govern-ments can't create jobs at will.

The Green Paper says that totalemployment in Britain is now at a recordhigh "having risen by 2.3 million sincespring 1997" (when Labour took over). Thisis indeed what the statistics show but"employment" doesn't have the meaningwhich the unwary might assume of full-timeemployment. It includes part-time employ-ment however short (even one day a week),the self-employed and family members whohelp them, and people on training courses.

The statisticians divide the populationof working age (16-64 for men, 16-59 forwomen) into three groups: people inemployment, the unemployed and the eco-nomically inactive. The latest figures,released by the Office for National Statisticson 12 July, show that in the three months toJune there were 28.9 million (74.6 percentof working age population) in employment,1.65 million (5.4 percent of economicallyactive working age population) unemployedand 7.85 million (21.1 percent of workingage population) inactive (seehttp://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12 ).

The government has set itself the aimof achieving "an employment rate equiva-lent to 80 percent of the working age popu-

lation". A look at the above figures showsthat this would be the equivalent of reduc-ing unemployment to zero. But this is nothow the government aims to achieve this.Their plan is to reduce the number of eco-nomically inactive by at least 2.3 million:

"To achieve our aim, we will reduceby 1 million the number on incapacity bene-fit; help 300,000 lone parents into work;increase by 1 million the number of olderworkers."

This is all very well but where are thejobs to come from? The latest ONS figuresgive the number of job vacancies in thethree months to June as just under 600,000.Gordon Brown believes that by encouraging"enterprise culture" the Labour governmenthas created the conditions which haveallowed businesses to expand and take onmore workers and that, if it continues this,more jobs will be created.

What is more likely to happen is thatthe employment rate will go up a little (witha contribution from people going on gov-ernment-funded training courses) but not to80 percent. Instead, the unemployment ratewill go up as a result of people on incapaci-ty benefit being transferred to "job seekersallowance". The government won't be toodispleased with this as they will have savedon welfare payments, since unemploymentbenefit is lower than incapacity benefit. Butit will also, unintentionally, reveal that the"mass unemployment" of the 1980s and1990s never really went away.

Cooking the Books (2)

Grant appealing against expulsion from theLabour Party in 1983



A brief look at the history of left-wing ideas in Africa

In the years following independence from colonial rule, left-wingpolitical thinking and activities were not uncommon especiallyin anglophone Africa. There were lots of vanguardist, anarchistand other pseudo-socialist organisations in many countries.

Some of such movements included the Kwame Nkrumah Revolu-tionary Guards, Pan-African Youth Movement, United Revolution-ary Front, New Democratic Movement, (Ghana); Movement forJustice in Africa (Sierra Leone, Gambia and Liberia); AfricanNational Congress, South African Communist Party, Pan AfricanistCongress, etc (South Africa). These were all narrow-minded nation-al pressure groups but whose left-wing leanings nevertheless pro-vided forums where people learned of the existence of an alterna-tive ideology - socialism. In fact that is how some of us later cameto learn about and joined the World Socialist Movement.

However, around the mid-eighties the capitalists shot into ahigher propaganda gear such as the newly independent countriesnever thought of. The free market and private sector idea camedown so heavily that the leftist groupings were virtually swept offthe political scene. Today only the South African ANC, SACP, PAC,etc are still around but they have all capitulated and metamorphosedinto outright right-wing political parties. Even trade union activitieshave almost become non-existent now except of course on Maydaywhen pro-government sections of the working class come out toexpress their loyalty to the system.

This is the situation that accounts for the absence of even suchanti-capitalists demonstrations as are staged in the West and otherparts of the world each time representatives of big business holdtheir summits.

As for socialism (à la WSM), it is yet to be grasped by eventhe few who still see themselves as socialists here. Almost all ofthem understand socialism to mean the state capitalism of the sovietera.

Working class thinkingIt is not surprising then that one can hardly talk of any posi-

tive working class thinking here in Africa. With the intensificationof exploitation through a massive invasion of all sectors of theeconomy by capital, the economic situation of both urban and ruralfolk has drastically worsened. Under the dire circumstances, peas-ants drift to the towns with the hope of escaping from the hungerand lack of opportunities whilst the urban factory and office work-ers are preoccupied devising ways and means of pilfering at theirworkplaces in order to make ends meet. Consequently, many ofthese frustrated people find it difficult to engage in political activi-ties thus reducing the chances of potential cadres deepening their

socialist consciousness.Indeed many, in theirattempts to stay alive,finally abandon thepolitical struggle alto-gether.

On the other hand,the very few who arefortunate enough to findwell paid jobs tend tolive ostentatious life-styles obviously influ-enced by the type ofnegative western mediaoutput that is predomi-nant here in Africa. Agood lot of these people,with an imposed insa-tiable ambition to "makeit", prove more injuriousto left-wing politics thantheir poorer counterpartsin the working classwho cannot afford theluxury of discussing pol-itics.

The mediaAs the dominant

ideas of the day are buta reflection of the viewsof the ruling class so isthe media replete with

information that is as poisonous as it is deceptive. On the one handthe television feeds viewers with adverts and news items whichhave the infectious intention of making ignorant people (and thatmeans almost all Africa) think and harbour illusions of "making it".On the other hand the print media and the radio stations are mostlydevoted to such topics as religion or race-based discussions. Thus,even when serious issues like poverty, hunger, war, etc are touched,they always treat them in the light of "god will work miracles" or"all African hands on deck". Such ill-fated notions as "Africa forAfricans", "African lingua franca", "NEPAD is a winner" etc are allwhat is found in the media. Naturally, the ordinary people pickthem up and continue the misguided debate. That is the part themedia play in formulating opinions.

ObstaclesHowever, in spite of the poverty, hunger and ignorance, the

working class could still have had elements within it who wouldinterest themselves with real political issues like it happenedbetween the sixties and the mid-eighties. Yet such a potential situa-tion is hampered by other factors. Foremost among them is religion.Pushed to the wall by want, many ignorantly flock to religion as thelast resort. Western big business, seeing the opportunity, quicklyseizes it to its advantage. They worsen the already bad state ofaffairs by pumping money into the formation of more religiousgroups; the production of religious material; and the use of food,second-hand clothing, etc as incentives to the religious leaders andbait for the working class. Once captured it becomes an uphill taskto salvage them or even let them see reason.

Another problem is the effectiveness of the capitalist propa-ganda machine. Their ideologues are always at hand to demonisesocialism (citing the famous fall of the Berlin wall and the "collapseof communism") and eulogise the virtues of the free market econo-my. In fact today seminars, workshops, clinics, and other so-calledsensitisation programmes are organised on a daily basis to entrapthe poor and hungry people. The issues on the platform of whichsuch meetings are held include HIV/AIDS, the emancipation ofwomen, child abuse, etc. Participants are lavishly fed and at the endof the day paid a generous honorarium. Such programmes are most-ly channelled through NGOs. This problem also has the dangerousside effect of getting people used to shunning meetings or groupswhere immediate financial gains are not available.

In conclusion, though the picture painted looks so gloomy,that does not mean there is no hope. There are several oases dottedaround this desert of hopelessness. And especially now that somebasic democratic rights seem to be getting the nod from the dicta-torships here (for example the criminal libel law has been repealedin Ghana), we only need to keep up the struggle and to give courageto the already liberated. ¢SUHUYINI

PoliticalPoliticalideas inideas inAfricaAfrica



Early in August, a story broke about retired painter and decora-tor, Roy Thayers, having to lie in order to be free of terriblepain he'd been suffering for years, because of heart trouble.

A cardiac specialist warned the 77-year-old that he needed a life-saving operation as soon as possible, because he was in danger of hav-ing a fatal heart attack at any time. He was told the coronary angioplas-ty treatment he required would not be available from the NHS for ninemonths because of a waiting list, but added that by going private, Roycould have the operation within a week. Being penniless, Roy had theoption of dropping dead while waiting on the NHS list or bluffing. Hechose the latter, and said he'd pay, when he knew he couldn't.

He managed to stall requests for payment by hospital administra-tors, claiming he mislaid his chequebook. His operation took placequickly, he wrote out a "Mickey Mouse cheque" for the £8,500 cost thevery next day, knowing he'd have to face the consequences later.

Speaking of his ploy, Roy said: "I love life, I love my dogs, I lovefishing - why should I die for the sake of money?" Indeed, why shouldbits of paper decide who lives and who dies, or who eats and whostarves, or who has a comfortable home and who has a stinking hovel,and so on? It's sick and idiotic. But seeing how, under capitalism,goods and services are provided to make profit - not meet needs - thissystem has created a universal comparison commodity (a.k.a. money)against which other commodities can be measured. Comprising papernotes, metal discs or mere digital data, this comparison commodityexists in order that those with something others need can make its sup-ply dependent upon receiving a specified amount of this measuringtool. No money, no provision.

When Tony Blair developed a dicky ticker, naturally, he got treat-ed very quickly. No long delay for the likes of him. Not forgetting thatthe Oxford Radcliffe NHS Trust, having provided the PM with his car-diac catheter ablation operation, shortly afterwards decided to denythis treatment to others in order to cut costs and meet the government'ssix-month waiting-list targets.

Of course, Roy hasn't managed to defeat capitalism by writinghis rubber cheque. For a start, as he said himself, "I paid into the NHSfor years to look after me, but the doctors were telling me they would-n't, so who's robbing who?" Furthermore, the Primary Care Trust(PCT) in charge of the hospital that treated him was soon threateningto send in the bailiffs, and he eventually settled on repaying his debt at

£25 a week from his meagre pension. No doubt, private health care enterprises will now do their

utmost to ensure people have sufficient funds before they get treated infuture. So although the money-loving Sun tabloid praised Roy forbeing "canny", and the profit-hungry Mirror said "well done", don'tcount on acquiring desperately needed medical care by the samemethod.

The fact is, no one should have to come up with devious meth-ods to obtain critical health care or any other essential services andgoods. In a decent and rational world these would be available accord-ing to need - not how much money people have depending on howmuch, or little, capitalism has allowed them to have in return for theirexploitation and control by a minority ruling class.

The only reason this appalling and damaging situation continuesis because we allow it. If all those unhappy and irate with the waythey're made to live, work and struggle on pitiful pensions cametogether with the aim of getting rid of the system which allows a super-rich minority and their money mechanism to control, deprive andmanipulate this majority, then capitalism would be in serious trouble.

Roy Thayers is also quoted as saying: "The real working classesof this country - the ones who have very little money - have been aban-doned by their own government." From his own experience, Roymight well now accept that this government (and those before it) hasnever had the needs of the electorate as its priority. The main concernhas always been looking after British capitalists, not the working classmajority.

The answer isn't more money for the NHS - since in a competi-tive world, there'll always be pressure on all governments to keep cut-ting back on state funding, and increasingly make people pay directlyfor what they need. No. The answer is a society with no money at all.That's the only way to end the idiocy where, these days, NHS hospitalemployees are being told by PCTs to stop "overperforming" by provid-ing treatment too quickly, because the government then financiallypenalises the Trusts for not adhering to minimum waiting times (as aresult, one gynaecologist said he now spent more time doing sudokupuzzles than treating patients). And a moneyless society is also theonly way to end the obscenity of driving people to desperate lies anddeceit to obtain vital life-saving treatment that should be available toall - not just those sufficiently well off or powerful.¢MAX HESS

The man who faced the choice of dropping dead while waiting on the NHS listor bluffing.

Desperate lies

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Book ReviewsFuture humansGlasshouse. By Charles Stross. AceHardcover. 2006. 352 pages. ISBN:0441014038 (published in US)

If you go to the Science Museum in Kens-ington, up to the top floor, to the aviationgallery, you can discover a sign on the wallthat informs us that the technology for flighthas existed for hundreds of years, but thatthe obsession with flapping prevented anyactual heavier than air flight until welltowards the close of the nineteenth century.

This highlights the importance ofexploring ideas and technological changes -and being bold and speculative. Contempo-rary science fiction performs much of thatrole today - dreaming up new technologiesthat seem impractical now but will soonbecome everyday. In a real sense, com-pared to the founders of our party, we areliving in a science fiction world now - sadlyit's a dystopia.

Charles Stross has recently beenawarded a prize for his fiction by the tran-shumanist association (they hold thathumans whilst they have evolved techno-logically are still the basic animals theywere half a million years ago, but that soonthe technology will exist to change our bod-ies and begin a new technology drivenphase of biological evolution - the capacityto re-write our bodies). His book,Glasshouse, is an examination of the effectsof technological change on our society -starting from the fact that within the lasthundred years alone that human life hasbeen fundamentally altered by technologi-cal innovation, and that the rate of changewill increase dramatically within our life-times.

Set several hundred years from now, itfeatures Robin, a historian who has wipedhis memory agreeing to take part in an his-torical re-enactment of late twentieth cen-tury life as part of an experiment. He findshimself in the role of a woman, trapped bothin her own biology and the social roles thatcome with that.

The participants in the experimenthave to live in a panopticon - their everyaction potentially observed - with ruleswhich they gain or lose points by following- and have to ensure that their 'team mates'(their local community) don't lose thempoints. It thus forms a useful device forexamining the construction of social lifeand power. Some players - the scorewhores - unreflectively play the game aspresented to them but Robin (renamedReeve) tries to find ways of breaking out ofthe restrictive role given her by reading therules sideways.

She cannot, however, escape the rulesand the inertia of the score whores; and shehas to stand by and witness the horrors ofthe rules of the game which she objects tobut cannot escape from. As such it is anacute depiction of dissidence in society.

The book is thus both an examinationof social power and the power of ideas, aswell as a meditation on the importance ofmemory and history for understandingwhere we are and where we are going. Aflight of fancy that depicts the present in adeeply realistic way.PIK SMEET

Western vanguardistA Rebel's Guide to Gramsci. By ChrisBambery, Bookmarks, 2006. 60 pages.£3.

This is a short introduction, from an SWPviewpoint, to the life and ideas of AntonioGramsci, the Italian Communist Party leaderwho died from natural causes in a fascistprison in 1937 . Gramsci appeals to the SWPand Western Leninists generally because ofhis more sophisticated version of van-guardism than Lenin's.

In his Prison Notebooks he distin-guished the situation in Tsarist Russia andsome other parts of Eastern Europe fromthat in the West. In Tsarist Russia, he argued,

the state wase v e r y t h i n gand the rulingclass relieddirectly onrepression tomaintain itselfin power; inthis situationthe task ofrevolutionar-ies was (inB a m b e r y ' ssummary of

G r a m s c i ' sviews) "to lead

a direct assault on power when the opportu-nity arose", as the Bolsheviks had success-fully done in Russia (only to install them-selves, we would add, as the embryo of anew ruling class)..

In Western Europe, on the other hand,the ruling class ruled mainly through the"hegemony" it exercised over the workingclass rather than through direct force. InBambery's words again:

"In Western Europe . . . the ruling classrested mainly on consent and was able torely on a variety of institutions within civilsociety which organised and reinforced this.Gramsci described these as acting like acomplicated series of earthworks surround-ing a great fortress - the state. So institutionslike the church, the media, the educationsystem and political parties helped securethe consent of the masses allowing force tobe used sparingly and only in the last resort. . . So these networks of support for the rul-ing class and the ideas they helped to rein-force had to be undermined first through along ideological struggle before a directassault on the ruling class was possible . . .Communists had to set themselves the taskof undermining the consent, however grudg-ingly given, which allowed capitalism torule."

This is an analysis we can accept andindeed had made ourselves. But the conclu-sion Gramsci drew from it was not the sameas ours. We concluded that, as socialism toocould only exist with the consent of theworking class, the task of socialists was todirectly, incessantly and exclusively cam-paign amongst fellow workers against capi-talism and capitalist ideas and for socialism.Gramsci concluded that a vanguard partyshould seek to establish its own "hegemony"over the working class, by assuming theleadership of the workers' day-to-day strug-gles.ALB

Coriolanus at the GlobeThis play features the citizens of Rome, aswas customary for Shakespeare, as a fickleand foolish lot, shifting wind under thepower of the words of their rulers and bet-ters. The performance of it at the Globeleads to the intriguing twist of bringing theaction into the audience (most of whomstand as a crowd before the stage for threehours of more).

We were thus cast as part of the mob,the mob despised by the title character -Gaius Marcius (given, during the play, thename Coriolanus for his part in the captureof the city of Corioli). As Coriolanus rant-ed how he hated the mob, he moved withinthe audience, speaking to placed actors inperiod costumes. The sentiments towardsthe mob must have jarred with the general-ly democratic instincts of the modern pop-ulation.

The play centres on his being appoint-ed Consul (leader) of Rome, and beingcompelled by the plebeians to gain theirvotes - for which he must plead and showhis war wounds. He believes that consul-ship is his by right, and resents asking thescum for their voices.

The action then focuses on what isessentially a revolution. The play beganwith the people in revolt for more bread -which won them tribunes - a representationin government. The tribunes then organiseto bring down Coriolanus - as a fierceopponent of democracy.

This leads to him being banished -only to return at the head of a rival powers'army - much to the consternation of the rev-olutionary tribunes. Eventually, he is per-suaded by the entreaties of his wife andmother not to wage war on Rome, and hereturns with his army to be murdered as atraitor to the rival power.

Coriolanus himself is presented as autopian idealist. He fights for glory, revel-ling in war. He actively refuses a share ofthe spoils, claiming only glory motivateshim. At war with the world, he wants to be'the author of himself', without any bondstrying him, living only for his glorious leg-end. His defeat is organised by moreworldly Machiavellian politicians.

This raging anti-democrat still man-ages to hold our sympathies because of hisidealism and his proven abilities. He standsas the ultimate individualist - who scowlslike a schoolboy when chided to behave byhis mother.

The play is littered with corporealimagery - the state is a body with hands,feet and head. The common people arereduced to mere voices, as airy as Cori-olanus' own glory. It is this sense of pow-erlessness and insubstantiability that beingin the crowd conveys. Audience memberscould easily recognise the regret of thecrowd in making Coriolanus' the consul formuch the same way that most modernpoliticians - like Tony Blair - are appointedto disappoint by our simple voices.PIK SMEET

SOCIALIST STANDARD INDEXAn index to articles in 2005 can beobtained by sending 2 postage stamps to:Socialist Standard, 52 Clapham HighStreet, London SW4 7UN

17

Theatre Review

Gramsci


This declaration is the basis of ourorganisation and, because it is alsoan important historical documentdating from the formation of theparty in 1904, its original languagehas been retained.

ObjectThe establishment of a systemof society based upon the com-mon ownership and democraticcontrol of the means and instru-ments for producing and distrib-uting wealth by and in the inter-est of the whole community.

Declaration of PrinciplesThe Socialist Party of GreatBritain holds

1.That society as at present consti-tuted is based upon the ownershipof the means of living (i.e., land,factories, railways, etc.) by thecapitalist or master class, and the

consequent enslavement of theworking class, by whose labouralone wealth is produced.

2.That in society, therefore, there isan antagonism of interests, mani-festing itself as a class strugglebetween those who possess but donot produce and those who pro-duce but do not possess.

3.That this antagonism can beabolished only by the emancipationof the working class from the dom-ination of the master class, by theconversion into the common prop-erty of society of the means of pro-duction and distribution, and theirdemocratic control by the wholepeople.

4.That as in the order of social evo-lution the working class is the lastclass to achieve its freedom, theemancipation of the working class

will involve the emancipation of allmankind, without distinction of raceor sex.

5. That this emancipation must bethe work of the working class itself.

6.That as the machinery of govern-ment, including the armed forces ofthe nation, exists only to conservethe monopoly by the capitalistclass of the wealth taken from theworkers, the working class mustorganize consciously and politicallyfor the conquest of the powers ofgovernment, national and local, inorder that this machinery, includingthese forces, may be convertedfrom an instrument of oppressioninto the agent of emancipation andthe overthrow of privilege, aristo-cratic and plutocratic.7.That as all political parties arebut the expression of class inter-ests, and as the interest of the

working class is diametricallyopposed to the interests of all sec-tions of the master class, the partyseeking working class emancipa-tion must be hostile to every otherparty.

8.The Socialist Party of GreatBritain, therefore, enters the field ofpolitical action determined to wagewar against all other political par-ties, whether alleged labour oravowedly capitalist, and calls uponthe members of the working classof this country to muster under itsbanner to the end that a speedytermination may be wrought to thesystem which deprives them of thefruits of their labour, and thatpoverty may give place to comfort,privilege to equality, and slavery tofreedom.

18 Socialist Standard September 2006

The men at the top see more clearly the economic issuesand interests involved but as they need to rouse the emo-tions and win the support of the mass of the people theydress up most of the declarations in the rabble-rousinglanguage likely to move their listeners and readers. Soover Suez we have had from the Westernpoliticians a spate of talk about law andillegality, international rights, and wrongs,Fascist acts of plunder, etc., while fromthe Middle East Nasser and his defend-ers have worked up themselves and theiraudiences with passionate speechesabout imperialism, oppression, insults todignity, sovereignty and nationhood ( . . .).

To the Socialist the world is notcapable of being divided into the goodand the bad statesman and the good andbad nations; they are all Capitalist and all are impelled bythe nature of the social system to struggle for markets fortheir products, for sources of cheap raw materials, andfor control of trade routes like Suez and strategic pointslike Cyprus. These are the things for which they fight, nomatter what the fine phrases and slogans in which theiraims and motives are garbed.

The crux of the Suez dispute is firstly the oil thatexists in abundance in the countries of the Middle East,and secondly the Canal through which much of it, as wellas other cargoes, is transported. Oil is now an indispen-

sable fuel for the motors and tractors, aeroplanes andwarships, merchant vessels and factories of the countriesof the world. With coal production and hydro-electricpower failing to keep up with rapidly growing demand forfuel and with atomic power only a development of the not

very near future, all, countries need oiland many of them, including Britain, havepractically none within their own frontiers( . . .)

At the time of writing the discus-sions between the Powers have not pro-duced a settlement though the evidentlack of war-fever among British workersand the disinclination of otherGovernments to back up Britain andFrance in forcible action against Egypthave had some effect in restraining theEden Government and its supporters.

On the other hand Arab workers,misled by the belief that nationalisation of the Canal Co.(and eventual nationalisation of the oil industry) is in theirinterest, have been vigorously backing their govern-ments.

This is the real tragedy of the Suez dispute, thatthere is no unity among the workers of the different coun-tries in opposing the war-talk of their Governments.

(From front page article, Socialist Standard,September 1956)

Declaration of Principles

What is Behind the Fight for Suez

need to be active as well as appreciated byothers.

3. Since over 90 percent of crimestoday are crimes against property and sinceproperty and poverty will disappear insocialist society where everybody will auto-matically be able to satisfy their materialneeds, the main "crimes" that would remainwould be such things as breaking traffic reg-ulations or hosepipe bans. But by "seriouscriminals" we assume you mean people whokill or harm other people. Any such behav-iour is likely to be highly exceptional but,should it occur, the person responsible wouldhave to be stopped and, if need be, detained.We are not sure that "punishment" is the rightword since most such instances are likely tobe medical cases.

4. Yes, of course the "creative arts" area necessary part of any society, but in social-ism won't be confined to such things as operaand poetry. We go along with William Mor-ris in saying that the everyday work of pro-

ducing something useful can also be creativeand art. And we would imagine that mostpeople will want to take advantage of thepossibility socialist society will offer them ofbeing able to do a variety of jobs (even in thesame week) rather than being tied to thesame job, day after day, year after year - Edi-tors.

letters continued

ManchesterMonday 25 September, 8.15 p.m.'WHY SOCIALISTS OPPOSETHE LABOUR PARTY'Hare and Hounds, Shudehill, City Centre(This meeting will take place during theLabour Party Conference inManchester, and Labour Party membersand others are invited to attend)

ChiswickTuesday 19 September 8pmFREE SOFTWARE:DOT.COMMUNISM?Speaker: Tristan MillerCommittee Room, CHiswick Town Hall,Heathfield Terrace, W4.(nearest tube: Chiswick Park)

British troops in Port Said

Meetings

East AngliaSaturday 23 September, 12 noon to 4pm12 noon: Informal chat.1pm: Meal.2pm to 4pm: Discussion.

The Conservatory, back room ofRosary Tavern, Rosary Rd, Norwich.


19Socialist Standard September 2006

Peter Hain - a case of mistaken identity

With things as they are anyonewanting to lead the Labour Partymust be driven by such pro-nounced tendencies to self-harm

as to classify them as, if not certifiablymad, then clearly unsafe to be let out bythemselves at night. So what can be saidabout anyone whose ambitions run, not tothe leadership, but to election as DeputyLeader? How can we take seriously anyonewho is willing to work so hard to get a jobwith so bitter a history of crushed ambi-tions? A job held by the likes of Morrison,Brown, Healey, Hattersley, Prescott? Wellthere is reason to think that politicians cansurvive only through a stubborn ability todistort reality, which would explain whyeven now, with the Labour Party in suchdisarray, there is no lack of candidateseager to take over as second-in-commandof the party's ragged army when, eventual-ly, Blair steps down and presumably takeshis Deputy Prescott with him.

Among this hopeful, if hopeless,assembly is Peter Hainwho, taking the longview, has busily fer-tilised his campaign withsupport among the partygrass roots and thetrades unions. Therehave been a variety ofdescriptions of Hain. Inhis book The Rise ofPolitical Lying PeterOsborne exempts him,with some other Labourministers, from "…lyingor deceiving the publicin a serious way". How-ever a blogger on 11

July, who may be closer to public opinion,referring to his policy on Northern Irelanddevolution, described him as "a duplicitoustosser". David Blunkett thought that "Ifthere's anyone who upsets colleagues morethan I do it's Peter (Hain)" - a characteristicwhich in August seemed to extend beyondHain's colleagues when he fell asleep dur-ing an interview with a man who had cometo see him about the investigation of hisson's murder in Northern Ireland. Hain

upset Robert Mugabe - whom he once sup-ported in the struggle against white minori-ty rule in Zimbabwe - by backing the whitefarmers in that country. But of course all ofthis is common currency among politicians;what may recommend Hain to the voters ishis presentation, in the words of AndrewRawnsley (Servants of the People) as"Curly headed and perma-tanned, the for-mer anti-apartheid activist …a member ofthe soft left trusted by Number 10".

RobberySo is it to be another case of mistaken

identity, of the voters misreading a politi-cian's future intentions through disregardingtheir past? Hain is no stranger to identityproblems. In 1976 he was on trial for theattempted robbery of a bank near his homein Putney. The prosecution case was thatHain had gone into the bank, snatched £490and ran off, chased through the local streetsbut got away. The bank cashier involved inthe snatch identified Hain, if with somereservations. In any case Hain had someconvincing alibi evidence, which persuadedthe jury that he was not the robber. It wassuspected that the case had been an attempt-ed frame-up by the South African securityservices, in reprisal for Hain's stand againstthe apartheid laws. (A few years before therobbery he was sent a letter bomb).

Hain was born in Kenya but broughtup in South Africa where his parents wereactive campaigners against apartheid; hegrew up accustomed to his home beingraided by the police and to a system whichlegally banned his parents from speaking toeach other. The family came to London, tocontinue their campaign; Hain was the lead-ing light in the protests aimed at stoppingthe England cricket team touring SouthAfrica and to disrupt the Springbok Rugbytour to England (the pitch invasions byshaggy youths certainly upset the boozyblazers and duffle coats in the stands atTwickenham). For a time he was in theYoung Liberals - who were then rated asmore "radical" than Labour - and was elect-ed their president before he switched to theLabour Party, in which his career has beenmore notable for conformity than for dis-ruptive protest.

In GovernmentHain was elected in 1991 as MP for

Neath, in South Wales - one of those con-stituencies where Tories have been some-thing of an endangered species. His majori-ty climbed to over 30,000 in the heady daysof Labour's 1997 triumph; since then it hassteadily fallen with the Blair government'sdecline in popularity but he still holds morethan half the votes cast. He is Secretary ofState for Wales as well as for Northern Ire-land and has held other jobs such as LordPrivy Seal and Leader of the Commons. Sohe has been firmly in position to live up tothe promise of his early days as a deter-mined, principled "radical" who would jus-tify the expectations of his admirers. Andnow, how has it turned out? Has it been acase of mistaken identity, has Hain beenwrongly assessed as someone he is not? Oris he guilty of gross deception?

As an opposition back bencher heshowed that his talent for being disruptivehad not deserted him when, as the Majorgovernment was approaching its final daysin power, he tried to unseat some Tory MPsby getting them declared bankrupt after los-ing money as underwriters at Lloyds, whichwould have forced them to resign theirseats. The government had just lost two for-

merly rock solid seats at Christchurch andNewbury and they were understandablynervous about the prospect of having toface any more by-elections. The Speakerobstructed Hain's scheme but the details ofindividual losses were published in theIndependent. One of the MPs was EdwardHeath, who furiously denounced Hain forhis "…sleazy desire to get Tories out". Hainalso managed to upset the Labour Party inBlaenau Gwent, a seat once held byAneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. TheWelsh Assembly Member there, Peter Law,was keen to be the next MP for BlaenauGwent but the party insisted that the Labourcandidate would be selected - foisted on thelocal party - from an all-female list, whichhe opposed. So he persisted in standing asan Independent. In an attempt to get roundthis awkward situation Law was offered apeerage in return for not standing - accord-ing to reliable evidence, Peter Hain was theperson who did this particular piece of dirtywork. In the event Law defeated the officialLabour candidate; he died earlier this yearand at the by-elections in June his wifestood for the Assembly and his agent forWestminster. Both won, again as Indepen-dents. (Not surprisingly, in spite of the evi-dence, Hain has always denied having beeninvolved).

IraqBut Hain's betrayal of his reputation

has extended far beyond Wales. During histime he has been a strong supporter of thegovernment on many issues which at onetime, consistent with his record, he shouldhave opposed. He has been a strong sup-porter of ID cards which, according to thegovernment, are essential to prevent suicidebombers blowing up aircraft or tube trains.There is little evidence to support this butwhat is known is that the cards will be use-ful in chipping away what civil liberties areavailable to us. He was firmly in favour ofthose same student top-up fees which TonyBlair trumpeted as vital in the struggle tomake the very best in education available toeveryone, rich and poor but which will infact lead to workers emerging from univer-sity under an enormous burden of debt. Andof course he has been an ardent supporter ofthe war in Iraq, which was justified on thegrounds that it would usher a parliamentarydemocracy into that ravaged country butwhich has resulted in a chaos of strife andslaughter, all in the cause of American capi-talism taking a grip on that vital area. AndHain has justified this abominable attitudewith typically sickening Blairite verbiage:"Sunday will be a historic day for Iraq, andthe extent of Iraqi participation in the elec-tions is enormous, with 8,000 candidates,150,000 officials and thousands of pollingstations" (27 January 2005) and later "Thefuture of Iraq is about building democracyand not succumbing to terrorism…"(17March 2005).

Perhaps Hain will become the nextDeputy Leader of the Labour Party or even,against precedent, the party Leader andPrime Minister. If any of this happens weshall be subjected to the customary drivelabout a different, radical way of organisingthis segment of the capitalist system. Thismay impress the voters for a while, as it didwith Blair, until capitalism itself unmasks itand there will be no more mistaken identity. IVAN

Could anyone bemore irritatingthan Blunkett?


Blinded By Capitalism The following news item appeared in theGuardian (17 June): "Drug firm blockscheap blindness cure. Company will onlyseek licence for medicine that costs 100times more. A major drug company isblocking access to a medicine that ischeaply and effectively saving thousandsof people from going blind because itwants to launch a more expensive producton the market." People with wet masculardegeneration, a common condition amongthe elderly, have previously been treatedwith Avastin, which prevents impairedeyesight and blindness. The manufacturerGenetech have not presented it to theNational Institute for Clinical Excellencebecause they are putting Lucentis forwardinstead. This treatment costs 100 timesmore. This is good business practice butbad news for the elderly workers sufferingfrom the condition.

Conned By Capitalism An example of how capitalism threatenslives is given in the Guardian (26 June):"Drug companies are accused today ofendangering public health throughwidescale marketing malpractices, rangingfrom covertly attempting to persuade con-sumers that they are ill to bribing doctorsand misrepresenting the results of safetyand efficacy tests on their products. In areport that charts the scale of illicit prac-tices by drug companies in the UK andacross Europe, Consumers International -the world federation of consumer organi-sations - says people are not being givenfacts about the medicines they takebecause the companies hide the market-

ing tactics on which they spend billions."

Kicked By CapitalismSport according to most dictionaries is a"pleasant pastime; amusement or diver-sion", but inside modern capitalism it is nosuch thing. It has become, as most otherhuman endeavours have become - a ruth-less competitive business. In the businesspages of the Observer (16 July) we learnthat Leeds United borrowed over 25years' future earnings, were relegated andhad to sell all their good players; we alsolearn that Leicester City borrowed onfuture earnings to the extent of £26 mil-lion, and by the way they were relegatedtoo. So while supporters on the terracessing their songs of devotion and undyingsupport the banks, investors and othermoney lenders count their gains.

Disgusted By Capitalism In a world where 8 million kids die everyyear through lack of clean water and sani-tation the following news item disgusts us,how aboutyou? "Forgetthe salt andlime, you'llneed a mintto enjoy thistequila.ProducerTequilaLey.925announcedSaturdaythat it hadsold a bottleof Mexico'sbest-knownbeverage ina gold andplatinumcasing for a whopping $225,000. This is areally unique bottle of tequila and ourclient, a US based collector of fine winesand spirits, will treasure this prize to addto an already impressive collection"(Associated Press, 23 July).

Abandoned By Capitalism President Nixon's praise for the US moon-landers was a cynical vote-catching ployas can be seen by the following pressreport. "America was so eager to beat theSoviet Union to the moon it launched its

1969 mission before it was ready, a docu-mentary claims. The documentary revealsthat the crew had to use a pen to fix abroken switch on their lunar module toreturn to earth, the Daily Mirror reports.Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrinhad accidentally snapped off acircuit breaker switch. Accordingto Apollo 11: The UntoldStory, US president RichardNixon prepared anaddress announcing thedeaths of Armstrong,Aldrin and MichaelCollins. The USordered NASA to cutlinks with the astro-nauts if disaster wasimminent, not wanting the world to seeimages of astronauts spinning off intospace" (Herald Sun, 25 July).

Shunned By Capitalism "Las Vegas councillors have made it ille-gal to give food to homeless people. In aneffort to curb charity that is said to be hav-

ing unintendedconsequences,the city councilhas decided toban food hand-outs to thehomeless. Thelaw targets so-called mobilesoup kitchens. Itcarries a maxi-mum penalty of

a $500fine and

six

months in jail."(New York Times,July 31). It is all sological, isn't it? Youare trying to con workers into the fantasythat capitalism is a wonderful society andthat they can become capitalists too,when some poor worker in Las Vegastries to ask for something to eat. Solution?Ban the soup kitchen.

Produced and published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UNISSN 0037 8259

Genetech - robbing you blind

by Rigg

Y M C 50%M 50%Y 50%C C&Y Y&M C&M C M Y K C M Y K 10%C 10%M 10%Y 10%K C K C M Y K C M Y K C M BD&H COLOUR CONTROL YSeptember 06.qxd 24/8/06 09:49

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