It's human nature, innit?

Imagine this:

Scene: The High Courts of Justice, London. On trial is a 30 year-old man, charged with 3 armed robberies, 3 counts of attempted murder, and 12 charges of assaulting police officers and another of incapacitating a police dog. The QC for the prosecution has finished summing up. He sits down, satisfied he had done enough to see this psychopath imprisoned for 350 years, and now the defendant’s barrister approaches the jury, one hand in his pocket and fidgeting with his car keys.

Barrister: Members of the Jury! It’s an open and shut case as far as I can see. It’s human nature, innit? Humans are by nature greedy, selfish and aggressive. We’ve been like this for donkey’s years. Nothing you can do about it, eh? He can’t help it (points to defendant) – he’s naturally predisposed to be a violent robber. I, therefore, urge you to find my client not guilty on account of this ‘ere human nature thing.

The jury retires and the judge adjourns. Five minutes later the jury returns. The foreman of the jury hands the usher a note which is then passed to his Lordship Justice Fairlaw. The judge looks at the slip of paper, raises an eyebrow and puts the note to one side.

Justice Fairlaw: Have the ladies and gentlemen of the jury reached a verdict on which you are all unanimous?

Foreman of the Jury: Yes, M’Lud.

Justice Fairlaw: And it is?

Foreman of the Jury: We find the defendant not guilty, M’Lud. We’re all agreed it’s not really his fault. Like his barrister said, it’s human nature, innit?’

Justice Fairlaw: In that case you’re free to go Mr Stabbemall If you read this account of a trial in a newspaper you would be flabbergasted. You’d think this some huge joke or, if not, that the judge, barrister and jury were completely and utterly bonkers. Your faith in the criminal justice system would be shattered into a billion pieces.

This, however, is just the kind of logic socialists come up against when trying to convince people of the benefits of a socialist society. People will hear us out, agree that capitalism is insane and that our vision of a future society sounds perfect, and then wallop you with their evolutionary psychological analysis of human society, saying:

“Yeah, I agree with everything you say. But it ain’t gonna work, is it, coz of human nature? At the end of the day, humans are greedy selfish and aggressive. Always have been, always will”

Which immediately puts your socialist on the defence: “Are you greedy, selfish and aggressive?”

“No, but…err…I’m…”

“Good to hear it. Neither am I. Hold on a sec, I’ll ask this guy here.” And the socialist holds out an arm and attracts the attention of a passer-by. “Sorry to bother you. I wonder if I could ask you a question.”

“Yeah, why not?” The passer buy joins the socialist and his critic.

“Right, would you consider that you are greedy and selfish?”
“Most certainly not.”

“Maybe aggressive?”

“No.”

“Thanks. That’s all.”

“That it?”

“Yes, thanks. Have a leaflet.” The socialist turns back to the evolutionary psychologist. “I’ll ask this woman crossing the road.”

The evolutionary psychologist walks off, muttering under his breath that the socialist is distorting his words.

The ‘human nature’ objection to socialism manifests itself in numerous ways, though it is more frequently the human nature of others, the wider society, which is acting as the barrier to socialism, never that of the model citizen and objector.

Let’s look briefly at the argument that humans are “by nature greedy, selfish and aggressive.”

So are humans naturally aggressive?

Well, if this is so then why do government s have to bring in conscription to force young men and women into their armies during times of war? At previous times, in Britain’s history, people have woken up from a drunken night to find themselves clutching the ‘king’s shilling’, turned into cannon fodder overnight, having been tricked into the army, and others have woken up in the holds of war ships which had already put to sea. Here, in Britain, where there is no conscription, very few people join the army with a view to killing others. Most join because they see it as an alternative to the dole queue or because they seek adventure or believe the army can teach them a valuable trade.

Moreover, one real problem armies have is that of desertion. In the Vietnam War, 50,000 US soldiers deserted. In other wars the army hierarchy has had to introduce the death penalty for deserters in an attempt to prevent so many fleeing the front line. So much for innate aggression.

Again, if humans are naturally aggressive, then why is there so much opposition to war? Surely our inborn aggressiveness compels us to cheer on “our boys” into battle, but this is not so. The February 2003 Anti War demo in London became the biggest ever demonstration in British political history, with almost 2 million anti-war protestors taking to the streets of the capital, having travelled from all over the country. They were not alone; there were coinciding demonstrations in cities right across the globe. Hundreds of thousands carried placards saying “Not in my name” – determined to make clear their opposition to conflict.

Critics may counter by citing the rising levels of physical violence as evidence of a violent trend amongst humans. But even this can be attributed to the fact that well over 90% of this violent crime is carried out when the perpetrator is drunk or high on drugs. The remainder tend to be violent crimes of desperation, rooted in poverty. When for instance, did you hear of a member of the aristocracy jumping an old lady on her way out of the bingo hall and snarling, “righto, missus, let’s ‘ave yer bag”?

The human aggression argument is looking pretty dubious, so we’ll move on.

So humans are greedy?

Our objector assumes that in a free access society, which socialism would be - where people give freely of their abilities, taking from the stockpile of communal wealth according to their own self-defined needs – that there would be an orgy of consumption. It is assumed that people would simply go mad and grab at anything that did not have to be bought; running home with 20 loafs of bread and five walkman cd players.

Have you ever watched a mother and say a two year old child in a corner shop? The mother will be at the counter, momentarily distracted, paying for her groceries, and her child heads for the confectionary display. The child has no real conception of the buying, selling and exchange game that parents play; one penny might as well be a pound coin – they’re just little fiddly things adults play with. Children simply take so much for granted. The mother will call the child away from the sweet display, and the child, wanting something, brings an item back- a packet of Smarties maybe - to her mother in the hope the parent will approve. Now note, it is just one packet, not ten and six packets of crisps! Just one packet of Smarties! Surely a child would be more predisposed to fill his or her arms with a stash of chocolate than an adult – believing this to be simply for the taking. But no, the child will take what he or she thinks will satisfy his or her immediate needs. For him or her there is always another day and it doesn’t look like all this free access confectionary is going anywhere in a hurry.

What possible benefit could there be to storing goods that were in plentiful supply and freely available? Take more than you need by way of perishables and you’ll end up with a cupboard full of stinking and rotting vegetables. Water is generally considered to be “free” – you can for instance go into a public building and get a free drink at a water fountain – but no one runs in with 10 gallon containers in order to hoard it at home. Air is free, but when did you last hear of anyone extracting it and storing it in warehouses?

In a free society it is far easier, just to take for you immediate needs and to return when you require more.

It is only in class society as exists today, where commodities have two values, a use value and an exchange value, where the profit motive results in artificial scarcity, that people display characteristics associated with greed. But establish as society in which the artificial constraints on production are removed (profit), in which goods have a use value only, and are produced for no other reason than people need them, and people’s approach to obtaining them will change.

Humans are selfish?

Are we really self-seeking, self-centred and egotistical? Well, let’s begin with a few facts.
1) In Britain there are 180,000 registered charities. These charities involve millions of people who give their free time, unpaid, for what they believe are worthy causes that benefit others. 2) According to a survey by Independent Sector, a US coalition of non-profit organisations, the percentage of volunteers in America is the largest of any country - almost 56%. The average hours volunteered per week by an individual is 3.5 hours. According to Charity America, donations to charity for 2002 were $241 billion, 76.3 per cent of this given by individuals.

Now let’s go back to December 26th, 2005, when the Asia Tsunami hit, killing upwards of 200,000. Overnight charities mobilised all over the world to get food, medical aid and other supplies to the millions left homeless in the disaster zone. The generosity shown towards the victims of the Tsunami disaster by, say the people of the USA, were not Bush administration “values”, which Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, seemed to imply during his damage limitation exercise in Indonesia, but rather the basic values of human beings in America, indeed, the world over, who had been motivated by the sorry plight of their fellows overseas.

Unlike other animals, humans are endowed with the ability to sympathise and empathise with their fellow humans. Humans derive great pleasure from doing good, are at their best when faced with the worst and will go to extraordinary lengths to help alleviate the suffering of others.

Across the US, as in other countries, there were all manner of fundraising events, in all sections of society, inclusive of nursery schools, prisons, universities and impoverished communities. In some instances people queued for over an hour to put money in a plastic collection bucket.

People raised hundreds of millions of dollars to help people they had never met before, nor knew anything of, and it was the same during the Ethiopian Famine of 1984, with millions around the world mobilising to help the starving of Africa.

Several years ago, when the Yangtze River in China threatened to burst its banks, seven million people came out and began to fill sand bags, pillow cases, anything, to build up the river banks that threatened their community.

Here in Britain, and indeed elsewhere, millions attend donor centres to give blood – usually every 17 weeks. Others put themselves on bone marrow registers and carry donor cards. All of this to help people they know they will never meet.

There have been cases where a small animal, a cat or puppy, sometimes even a child has become lodged in some deep underground pipe. Hundreds of people have mobilised to rescue it – fire crews, ambulance personnel, rescue services of every description. Contractors have freely sent in mechanical diggers. In most cases these people work endlessly, sometimes for days on end, sometimes without sleep, more often than not unpaid, until the cat or dog or even the small child is rescued. You can’t get near the site for TV crews and newspaper camera men – all desperate to capture the ‘human interest’ story, in the knowledge that this makes big news (as well as profits for the newspapers and TV networks it must be said).

So the evidence hardly suggests that humans are selfish, greedy and aggressive. Indeed, if this was the case, if we could just not help ourselves, then we would very much see the type of court case we began this episode with far more often. What most critics of human nature are actually referring to is human behaviour, behaviour exhibited in varying circumstances, and sometimes this reveals humans to be displaying behaviour that is aggressive or selfish.

For instance, if you go to Newcastle on a Saturday afternoon you’ll see thousands of people out shopping, strolling along quietly, minding their own business. Return ten hours later when the pubs and night clubs empty, when the same streets are full of drunks and you’ll see behaviour that is quite blatantly aggressive. This is not natural aggression, but aggression which is arising because the normal functioning of thousands of brains is being upset by an overdose of the chemical alcohol and other drugs. Anti-social behaviour is also influenced by our social circumstances at any given time, i.e., when we are poor, depressed, lonely, afraid, angry or frustrated – sometimes a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion arising from abnormal and unfamiliar circumstances.

Socialists maintain that human behaviour is shaped in general by our surroundings, our circumstances, by the kind of system people are conditioned to live in – that it is not our consciousness that determines our social existence but our social existence which determines our consciousness. Nobody, for example, is born a racist or a patriot, a bigot, or with a belief in gods – this has to be learned. Nobody is born a murderer, a robber or a rapist, and our assumed greed for money is no more a function of the natural human thought process than were slavery or witch burning.For instance, Labour lost the Smethwick, Birmingham seat in the 1964 election to the Tories because of the racist hysteria the Tories had whipped up in the constituency and the false fears they had spread about immigration. Their candidate had as his election logo: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

During the Falklands War, in the early eighties, if was not the people on the streets who wanted to celebrate the murder of thousands of Argentinean soldiers - it was the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who urged us to “Rejoice!” The Sun even printed the words as their headline in support of the Tories’ raw brand of jingoistic patriotism and millions of readers thought rejoicing at death was thus acceptable.

Ordinarily, the reactionary ideas the common people hold have been acquired second-hand, passed down from the ruling class above us. This is because, as Marx observed, the class which owns and controls the productive process also controls the intellectual life process in general. .In most cases, those who produce the world’s wealth (some 95 percent of the world’s population) have had that second-rate education that makes free-thought difficult – an upbringing that conditions us to accept without question the ideas of our betters and superiors. Indeed, the education system is geared to perpetuate the rule of an elite, insofar as it never encourages children to question and take issue with the status quo. Children may well cite that 8 times 8 equals 64, but how many will ask about the cause of wars or query the destruction of food? Moreover, the master class is allowed to hold onto power by controlling exactly what we think to the point that we imbibe a false class consciousness and readily acquiesce in our own exploitation. They control the TV, the radio, the newspapers, the schools. They perpetuate ideas that become so ubiquitous many people accept them as their own, uncritically. Many of these ideas are reactionary and, once imbibed, provide fertile soil for other reactionary ideas. A young man, who might have had no interest in politics, may well find himself regurgitating the racist remarks he has read in an election leaflet. He may find himself boycotting the local “Paki shop” and then joining the BNP or the National Front. Before you know it he is shaving his head, donning a black windcheater and Dr Marten boots and going out with his fascist mates for as spot of aggro.

Socialists hold that because we can adapt our behaviour, the desire to cooperate should not be viewed as illogical. We hold that humans are, “by nature”, cooperative and that we work best when faced with the worst and that our humanity shines through when the odds are stacked against us. Today, world capitalism threatens the human race with extinction. The reason this obnoxious system survives is because we have been conditioned to accept it, not born to perpetuate it. Rest assured, no gene inclines us to defend the profit system.

TOO YOUNG TO HANDLE THE TRUTH?

Saturday gone, I took my son to see the Holocaust Exhibition located on the third floor of the Imperial War Museum in South London. I was stopped at the door by a member of the museum staff and asked how old my son was.

“Eleven,” I replied.

“I’m sorry, but the exhibition is unsuitable for under-fourteens,” he says, apologetically.

“This is his fourth visit here. He’s been coming here for two years.” I answered and, before he could reply, said: “you can’t go setting an age limit on the truth.”

He waved me in.

I wasn’t lying. This was his fourth visit and just how old is a child supposed to be before they can be exposed to the harsher realities of history? Was his school erring in selling him his copy of the Diary of Anne Frank at a bookfair two years ago? For the record, the law would have it that a child reaches the age of criminal responsibility in this country at 10, so just how old do you have to be allowed cognizance of the more heinous crimes of your fellow humans?

Each time I have taken him he has viewed the exhibits and used the interactive material with the required solemnity and with an adult’s empathy. Of course he is a child, so naturally impatient to get on to the next exhibit. But, the exhibition is punctuated with video monitors. set into the walls at strategic points, playing looped film of Nazi leaders poring fourth their foul cant to cheering crowds, Jews being rounded up in Warsaw, lines of nameless victims being stood against trenches and machine gunned, and these I’m determined to talk him through, again:

“That’s Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.”

"Who?”

I repeat the name and explain his function within the Nazi heiarchy.

Goering he can identify and already knows the final solution was given his nod.

We stop in front of a display highlighting the fact that the Nazis killed something like 170,000 people with physical and mental handicaps – Hitler’s way of ridding the ‘master race’ of impurities – and I explain, again, just who was included.

He asks why the framed post card poem in our passage-way at home does not refer to this fact – it’s the famous Pastor Noeller one - “First they came…” - and shares a wall with a dozen other such hangings.

“I reckon he hadn’t heard of these crimes when he was writing the poem. a lot of them were carried out hush-hush”

“Would they have come for you?”

“Probably – but more likely because of my politics.”

He gives me one of his frequent frowning looks of incredulity. It comes across his face when you tell him a blatant huge porkie, but also when he hears something that challenges his conception of the world around him.

Later, downstairs, he sits at one of a dozen or so desks that has a monitor built into it, the touch-screen interactive type that allows you to ask questions or hazard a guess at a question. I watch on as he takes out a piece of paper and a pen and begins to jot down figures that he prompts on to the screen and pertaining to numbers killed in the concentration camps by category. I ask what he’s doing.

“Working out how many were killed.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll be there all day. There are millions from every section of society not even listed on there.” And I try to explain it is far more important to try and understand what made people think these were their enemies, why they hated them and treated them so. History is not just facts.

The latter is a statement not lost on him – he can readily rebuff the popular misconception that wars are fought for freedom and democracy, countering it with an infantile Marxian recognition that military conflict has its root in disputes over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth or the strategic points from which the same can be defended.

The model of Auschwitz is the exhibit he spends most time at. It’s a huge display, a scale model, painted white, perhaps in excess of 30 feet in length. Every detail has been accounted for. There are thousands of minute figures – no two seemingly alike - alighting from their cattle trucks on the sidings just inside the gates of this hell – and many more walking, heading to the far end of the display, descending the steps to the gas chambers and certain death. There are the barbed wire fences, the barracks and the camp guards. We both can’t help but wonder at the dedication, passion and love that went into making this magnificent model. And at the end of this display there is a glass case housing a rusting canister of Zyclon- B pellets and just round the corner a couple of the ill-fitting, striped pyjamas concentration camp prisoners wore, right next to a display case with a mountain of ageing shoes.

When we leave the exhibit, he’s quiet, though not subdued, and not at all interested in the other displays, the sundry tanks and military vehicles and the fokke-wolfes hanging from the rafters, though the word "fokke" makes him smile. These are only part of the story of the insanity of war. We leave and go for lunch and the continuation of the history lesson over sausage, egg and chips.

Call me a sick, insensitive bastard, but this is one kid that is not going to wear a soldier’s uniform, or wave a flag, or ridicule another because of their skin colour, race or religion. I am preparing him for war, though - the class war. He and his school mates have been neck-deep in it since birth; they just don’t know it yet.

More on the Holocaust Exhibition:

The Holocaust Exhibition commences with the tumultuous political scene in Europe just after World War One, looking at the ascendancy of the Nazi party, how anti-Semitism as a Europe-wide phenomenon became fertile in Hitler’s Germany, giving birth to twisted anti-Jewish beliefs, the distortion of science to shore up Nazi race supremacy theory, the isolation of German Jews, the refugee crisis and the introduction of so-called 'Euthanasia' policies in 1939.

The exhibition contains eye-witness accounts, written and oral, and all manner of documents. There are photographs, diaries, newspapers and artefacts of every description and film from most every country the Nazis occupied. The exhibition contains a funeral cart, a deportation railway truck – that could have carried victims to Auschwitz – concentration clamp clothing and much more.

Hey, and if you do go, take a few tissues!

Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road London SE1 6HZ United Kingdom. Email: General enquiries: mail@iwm.org.uk Telephone: +44 (0)207 416 5000General enquiries: +44 (0) 207 416 5320Fax: +44 (0) 207 416 5374http://london.iwm.org.uk/

The Landlord Wore a Dressing Gown

A certain Glaswegian - and a fellow barricadist (nah, not him on the left) - has suggested I recount the night we held a branch meeting in Sunderland (‘we’ being the North East Branch of the Socialist Party). Well, here goes.

About 6 years ago, when the North East Branch of the Socialist Party was quite an active branch, the toast of their southern comrades and the envy of less formidable lefty groups in the region, we boldly decided to commence holding meetings around the borough - taking the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak (in those days we met regularly at The Swan, just off the Heworth by-pass, a pub that backs onto the cemetery that contains the grave of legendary 1832 miners’ strike leader, Thomas Hepburn). The branch contained a mixture of Geordies*, Makems**, monkey hangers*** and exiled Scots; the Makems forming perhaps the largest contingent.

We decided at one branch meeting, on a member’s advice, to hold a meeting in Sunderland, in a public house in Roker and not far from the famous black cat football ground (long since replaced with the Stadium of Shite****). The comrade who suggested the pub – buggered if I can remember the name of it – used it as his local and was a friend of the landlord and offered that there would be a decent turn-out there.

The night of the meeting came and I set off early for the venue – unsure just where it was and a slight apprehensive, as the last time I had ventured through the area a gang of nutters were ripping the scaffolding from a building that was being renovated, and hurling it each other for a laugh, and some little gobshite, no more than seven-years-old, asked if I could light his fag. Anyway – I digress – I eventually found the pub, or should I say ‘pothole’?

There are messy pubs and there are right bloody dives and then there are pubs like this one. This one was unique in so far as not two tables or chairs in the entire place matched. The tables clearly hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, there were fag ends on the floor and fish supper wrappers and empty crisp packets stuffed down between and at the back of the seating where it met the wall, and the wallpaper was in the kind of condition you would expect if you had been scraping it off for an hour. And sitting amidst this detritus was the oddest looking bunch of people I have ever seen assembled in one spot.

When I walked into the bar at about 7 pm the place went deadly silent, just like in that scene in the film An American Werewolf in London when the two young Yanks venture into the Slaughtered Lamb pub on the Moors to escape the encroaching evening. Even the juke box paused and looked at me. And then everything returned to normal and the locals carried on their conversations.

I knew I looked strange to them – I do to everyone and am always guaranteed a second, third and even fourth glance – but as I looked around me I knew I just had to be at a convention of Last of the Summer Wine***** fanatics, and at which some members had decided to come as Eli Duckett (pictured above - the short-sighted old guy with the jam jar glasses, who wears the long white mac and shuffles along, and who’ll stand for half an hour talking to a post box, thinking it’s a woman in a red coat and saying something like: “Eee, missus, you’re on wrong side of road for bus stop.”) There were ‘Compos’ there as well as a few dodgy looking characters who could successfully have auditioned for walk-on parts in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

The landlord came out of a back room to serve me, looking like he’d just got out of bed – hair ruffled, unshaven and clad in a blue dressing gown, open and untied at the front and revealing boxer shorts and a pot belly.

“Is this where the socialist meeting is being held?” I asked, half hoping he’d tell me I was in the wrong pub and that someone had stuck the meeting’s advert to the entrance for a laugh.
“Aye, mate, upstairs,” he replied, as he looked me up and down.

I chatted to him as he poured me a half glass of lager and mixed it with a half pint glass of lemonade, and the Eli Ducket Appreciation Society occasionally looked over and wondered why a man was drinking a girl’s drink.

My host eventually directed me to the stairs for the “function room” above and off I headed in that direction, with a glass of shandy (I’m teetotal) and my heavy hold-all of party literature which I was now regretting having brought – I was thinking a flare gun, commando knife and 24 hour survival pack would have been more appropriate for this night exercise.

The upstairs room was no different – resembling someone’s attempt at furnishing a room from stuff found in skips. It was a lot brighter than downstairs, however, being painted sky blue, but more cluttered with assorted junk piled up and filling one half of the room.

The meeting was not due to commence until about 8pm, but there was already a few comrades there, chatting with a couple of locals who had spied the home-made A4 poster advertising the meeting - ‘All Wellcome’ - and wishing to investigate. The former were pleased to see me – it being evident that their company were giving them a hard time – and thought maybe I, with experience of speaking in daunting settings, could explain the party case to them in a way they could understand.

Like any battle-hardened socialist worth his or her salt, I was again and, for the thousandth time, defending ‘the case’ against charges that “socialism had already been tried and had failed,” that “socialism was dead” and that nobody would want to “live in the Soviet Union” and how “human nature” would always be a barrier to a system of society based on cooperation. But, like making an omelette with one arm tied behind your back and without breaking the eggs, there are something you just can’t do – like converting people with a reformist, Labour Party mentality, their only source of information being The Sun and Sky TV, to ‘the case’. These guys were not having it and proved just as confrontational as the trio of BNP****** members who once came over to the Party stall one afternoon in Jarrow to show off their neo-Nazi tattoos. So I told them just to wait until the evening’s talk was over and there would be a discussion on the same and that maybe they would have a different slant on what I was saying by then.

I set out the stall – we do this at every meeting, and I tend to go over the top and bring more literature than it is possible to sell – handed out some free literature and sat back and waited for the speaker to show up and generally chatted with whoever came into the room. When our speaker did turn up he was an hour and a half late, which really pissed off everyone there, myself included. I had previously said I could not stay late and we were now 90 minutes behind schedule.

I can’t recall the topic of the talk or what was said; I have heard so many that I focus more on the debate and question and answer session afterwards, anticipating, from what the speaker has said, just which direction the questioning will take. In the event, I had to make my farewells, just after the speaker finished. I packed the stall away – literature sales zilch - and left the comrades to the questioning and ventured out into the cold Wearside evening looking for a bus stop. It had been a disappointing evening, with our speaker turning up late and only half a dozen members turning up in addition to our four visitors, who were really only there out of amusement.

There was only one bus going my way and after almost an hour waiting anxiously for it, standing at a semi-derelict bus stop in the cold of night, the echo of distant drunken screams occasionally sounding as if they were getting closer (it was a half hourly service), I assumed it must have been ambushed somewhere and jumped on the first one heading in a northerly direction. This just happened to be a South Shields bus, which on its way to South Shields market place took us on a tour of Seaburn and Whitburn first. Along the route I kept looking out of the window into the darkness for a familiar landmark, convinced I was miles off target and swearing we’d never venture far from The Swan for meetings again, without having well advertised that meeting and checked out the location properly beforehand and secured some decent transport. But eventually we stopped in South Shields. I’d missed any bus going my way and headed for the Metro to Hebburn and once there I had a half an hour walk home, arriving there just after midnight.In the warmth of my home, relaxing with a coffee, I checked an A-Z of the area and discovered I could have walked it home from Roker quicker and contemplated the evening and the lessons we could learn from it - there is no grand plan for the perfect branch meeting; mostly it’s all part of one long learning curve - and hoped the Eli Ducket Appreciation Society got home safely.

Notes:

*Geordie – someone born on Tyneside.

**Makem – affectionate Geordie term for someone born on Wearside and who speaks the local dialect ( i.e.’You make them and I’ll take them, coming out as “Yee makem ‘n’ aall takem.”) and originating in love the two local football teams - Newcastle United and Sunderland – have for one another.

*** Monkey hangers – affectionate term the above groups of people use to greet people from Hartlepool (it’s a long story, but do a Google search for ‘Hartlepool Monkey’).

**** Stadium of Shite – affectionate Geordie term for Sunderland’s football ground, the Stadium of Light.

*****Last of the Summer Wine – a long running BBC TV comedy series based on the trials and tribulations of three elderly gentlemen in a sleepy Yorkshire village.

****** BNP – British National Party – group of semi illiterates and Neanderthals whose lifetime obsession is the colour of people’s skin, who admire Hitler and speak a strange monosyllabic language. The only claim to fame this group has is that the Conservative Party keep stealing their ideas. Not to be confused with human beings.

THE SISYPHEAN TASK OF THE SOCIALIST

I must be getting touchy in my old age, cantankerous even. Someone uses the word “socialism” out of term and it’s like a red rag to a bull. I can’t help it – the word means something definite to me.

I’ll be talking to someone in the street, a Labour Party member for instance, and he’ll say something like: “We socialists should stick together,” and I’m off on my high horse. Or someone on the letters page of the local paper will advocate some policy which he or she thinks is ‘socialist’, like “let’s renationalise the railways”, and that’s it!

I’m not being an awkward git, confrontational for the hell of it. It’s just that to me if socialism means anything then it is the antithesis of capitalism. If capitalism means commodity production, production for profit, wage slavery, then socialism as a competing political ideology (I hate that bloody word) must stand for something else. And it does. It is everything capitalism is not and everything every mainstream political party does not stand for. The Labour Party certainly has nothing to do with socialism. As Tony Benn said, writing in The Independent not to many years ago: “Labour is not now nor ever has been a socialist party. Individual members do not decide its policy and neither are its election promises meant to be taken seriously.”

Socialism to me means a global system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial resources. It means a world in which each person has a free and equal say in how their society is run. It means a world without borders or frontiers, social class or leaders, states or governments, force or coercion. It means abolishing the money system, releasing production from the artificial constraints of profit and establishing a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. It means a world in which people give freely to society whatever skills or abilities they have, for the betterment of society, and taking in return whatever they need, according to their own self-defined needs, from the stockpile of communal wealth. And I keep referring to “a world” because socialism can only exist on a global scale, just as capitalism, does. It can’t exist in one country, in isolation.
Socialism, you hear!? Not bloody capitalism. Show me when the Labour Party has ever advocated any of the above and I’ll eat this keyboard!

I’ve came across dozens of organisations claiming the socialist title and spreading all manner of reformist gobbledygook. I have a decent collection of their leaflets and publications. I’m damned right to be livid. They spread nothing but confusion and make the job of genuine socialists all that more difficult when it comes to untangling the mess of ideas they have created in people’s minds. I mean, I’ll meet someone who’ll buy a pamphlet from me, or who’ll take a leaflet, and who will then tell you his ‘socialist’ ideas about pulling Britain out of Europe, saying ‘no’ the Euro or nationalising the top one-hundred-and-fifty companies, and when you ask him where he gets these ideas he’ll say, “Oh, the Socialist Party of England and Wales” or “the Socialist Labour Party,” as if there are a set of policies on which all socialists, of whatever hue, agree are‘socialist policies’ - and you wince!

And it’s at this stage you get to realise just what a sisyphean task being a socialist really is.
Put it this way: Back in 1997, we were contesting the Jarrow Parliamentary Seat at the General Election. We had a stall up in Jarrow shopping centre, with a banner attached to the front of it. We were handing out leaflets, selling the Socialist Standard and generally engaging the public in quite friendly discussion as they stopped by our stall. The people of Jarrow are generally affable. We were doing okay and then along come the SWP. They set up a stall 20 feet in front of ours, attach a banner to the front of it advocating support for the Labour Party and then start selling the Socialist Worker, which is also promoting the Blairite cause.

Christ! In 1997 Tony Blair had stolen Thatcher’s clothes and left her stark staring naked. Labour was moving to the right of the Tories and there was this allegedly socialist group urging the workers to vote for Labour, urging them to acquiesce in their own exploitation.
I went across and challenged them. I showed them the editorial of the Socialist Review they were selling – it’s their monthly magazine – which says: “We urge our readers to support socialists wherever they are standing and the Labour Party where they are not.” And I ask what the bloody hell they are playing at.

“Don’t you realise we’re trying to put the socialist case to the workers in this town and that you’re undermining our efforts by urging them to support capitalism?”
The only reply I get is that I am an “abstract propagandist.”

Of course there is logic in the SWP approach. The idea is that: 1) you urge the workers to support Labour; 2) The workers support Labour as asked; 3) Labour gets into power, fucks up and can make no improvements to capitalism; 4) The workers then get disillusioned and turn away from support of Labour’s brand of capitalism and turn to the SWP 5) Who also support capitalism, albeit state capitalism in which the revolutionary hierarchy will manage the exploitation of the workers instead of private capitalists, shooting anyone who will not comply for being a counter-revolutionary.

And you wonder why I get vexed over the use of the word ‘socialism’? Okay, I’ll relate another situation.I’ll be standing at the Party pitch at the Annual Durham Miners’ Gala – we’ll have the Gazebo up and a display with literature and banners - and around the field there’ll be half a dozen lefty groups in attendance. I’ll be talking to a visitor to the stall who is querying the number of different ‘socialist’ groups at the event and she’ll say “Why don’t you socialists all get together and form one big Socialist Party?” And I just want to cry.

So you spend quarter of an hour explaining that there are not just little differences that separate, say, ourselves from the SWP, or the SPEW or the SLP or the WRP or the CPB or the RCP or the AWL or the RP, and which stop us from joining forces, but an unbridgeable ocean. They defend capitalism and we support socialism. They all want to reform the system, to ameliorate the harsher effects of capitalism. We are alone in wanting to abolish it. It’s like asking why we don’t get together with the Conservative Party – we, after all, all breathe oxygen. And the poor woman will walk away totally bewildered; under her arm half a dozen newspapers from the various stalls she has visited and which you know she is just not going to read.

This may lay me open to the charge of sectarianism. But we, the SPGB, have been around for 101 years and are the oldest existing socialist organisation in Britain. Most of the leftist groups out there are the result of a split from a split from a split, Johnny-come-lately. We have not compromised out position in those 101 years. Our standpoint is as it was in 1904 - the abolition of the wages system - whereas many leftist groups change their policies more times than they change their underpants, as if the generals of capitalism are forever changing their battle plan prompting them to retreat, regroup and attack again in a different formation. In truth, Capitalism has not changed – it is still the same social system it was 100 years ago and to which the time-honoured Marxian critique still applies.

And yet another anecdote. You’ll be out spreading the message, so to speak, and someone will turn on you and call you an “opportunist” and lambast you for jumping on every bandwagon going. “You’re all the bloody same,” they’ll snap, infuriated at having been offered a leaflet. And, before you get a chance to ask them to explain their criticism, they are off. But you know what it is based on – its based on their experience of having been asked to sign a thousand petitions outside of Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning, in support of everything from a ban on fox hunting and the lifting of immigration restrictions to the legitimisation of cannabis and bringing the troops home. Moreover, they will have seen a hundred demonstrations in which the usual suspects march along holding aloft the same old placards in one hand and their party paper in their other, led by others with loudspeakers through which they encourage the faithful to chant the mantra of the day.

Once more, you are the victim of the confusionists who have sullied the socialist title, guilty by virtue of the fact you call yourself a socialist and to whom some rule-of-thumb syllogism can be applied: socialists latch on to any lost cause; this man is a socialist, therefore he must have latched on to some lost cause.

So I think I’ve a right to be vexed. Your average genuine socialist spends more time explaining who he or she is not than the message he or she set out to impart in the first place:
“No, I’m nothing to do with New Labour….No, I have no petition for you to sign… No, I’m not asking for money from you…No, I’ve no leaflets in support of abolishing student fees….No, I don’t think Che Guevara was the bees knees….No….”

And all of this before you have to regurgitate your explanation of how Lenin and Stalin never established socialism in the Soviet Union and how human nature is not a barrier to a communistic system of society.

Being a socialist means you become a myth shatterer – because you spend the greatest portion of your activity shattering myths, dispelling illusions, setting the record straight. And sometimes its like trying to sweep up leaves in a park on a windy autumn day – sweeping them into a nice pile which is then scattered a moment later – because you go along carefully trying to show people the insanity of capitalism, explaining how a different world can come about and what it might be like, and behind you this whirl-wind of leftist confusion is on its path of destruction, undoing your work.

So forgive me if you hear me scream now and again.

Whoops Apocalypse

The beginning of February saw the world’s top experts on climatic change descend on the Met Office’s HQ in Exeter for a meeting called by Tony Blair and in advance of the coming into force of the Kyoto Protocol two weeks later. They painted a picture of a world not unlike that portrayed in the film The Day After Tomorrow, where humans have destroyed their own planet through their disregard for the environment – melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, global warming and drought.

Evidence was presented by Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, showing that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft. He reminded his audience that 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels.

Other scientists presented evidence that the world’s oceans are turning acidic, threatening marine life and there were many experts on hand ready to present their latest findings on the effects of global warming on ecosystems. Significantly, the number of scientific papers that have recorded changes in ecosystems due to global warming have increased from 14 to over a thousand in just five years.
Blair did not need to call a meeting in Exeter to find about the threat to the environment. Experts from every field have been flailing their arms around frantically for years trying to get governments to sit up and notice.
While Blair pursues policies aimed at securing Britain’s share of Iraq’s oil stores for the foreseeable future, we are warned by scientists that oil production will peak within 10 years; that half of the earth’s available oil is estimated to by used by then, and that within another 20 years countries like China and India will have huge demands that will far outstrip supply. Consider the conflicts this will create!
Far worse than a shortage of oil is a shortage of water. We already know that 500 million people live in regions prone now to chronic drought. Scientists now warn us that within 20 years that figure is expected to increase fivefold to between 2.5bn and 3.5bn people. Already over 5 million people die - including 2 million children - from diseases caused by drinking contaminated water. Again, what desolation does this foreshadow for the human race?
In the oceans, almost 50% of fish stocks are fully exploited, 20% are over-exploited, and only 2% are recovering. On land, soil erosion and degradation mean that half a billion people live in countries whose arable land can no longer support their own crops. The natural habitats of many animal species are being lost on an alarming scale, which with the decline of bird species, plants, forests - on which, ultimately, the human race depends - signals a real crisis for biodiversity.
Back in 1997, to head off some of these problems, governments met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a treaty according to which the industrialised countries each agreed a target to control emissions of six gases know to cause global warming.
The Kyoto protocol, for those countries which have ratified it, came into effect on 16th February this year, with Russia finally signing up after a EU bribe in order for the 55% quorum to be reached before the treaty could come into effect, but minus the support of the USA who, with only 5% of the world’s population produces 36% of carbon emissions. And the reason for US obstinacy? They simply felt that China and other developing countries, not facing the costs of cutting emissions, would gain a competitive edge on them.
The agreement, the first “legally binding” treaty on the environment, gives each of the industrialised and ratifying countries of the world their own limit to the greenhouse gas emissions they can pump into the atmosphere. It is envisaged that this will eventually lead to a situation in which the world produces no more greenhouse gasses than the environment can tolerate.
Will the Kyoto treaty stave off the unimaginable? Well, it would seem that not only are the treaty’s formal greenhouse gas emission reduction objectives infinitesimal compared to what scientists say is actually necessary, the treaty’s corporate-friendly, market-based mechanisms to achieve these reductions appear counterproductive.
To start with, the treaty requires that Annex One countries (the industrialised countries), which have hitherto been the biggest polluters, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions on average to just 5.2% below their 1990 levels by 2012. However, even though a 60-80% reduction is said to be needed by 2050, no additional reduction goals or timetables are in place for beyond the year 2012.

Plenty of opportunity is provided by the treaty’s “flexible mechanisms” for the governments of richer countries to indulge in creative accounting. It is possible for governments, with a bit of nifty handwork, to claim cutbacks in their country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions although actual reductions may not have taken place. Furthermore, a country might even increase its emissions and still be credited with a reduction.

Industrialised countries who find they have in fact made reductions in greenhouse gas emissions below that required of them are moreover entitled to sell on their spare polluter credits to those countries either unable or unwilling to adhere to their own set reduction targets. This arrangement – to sell the right to pollute –also became the privilege of corporations in January when European carbon markets became operational.

Emission measurements are by and large taken from a starting date of 1990, and the targets for each country must be reached by the period 2008-12. Former state capitalist countries (ie the former Soviet Union) , referred to in Kyoto jargon as "countries in transition", were allowed to chose a different date since, after the collapse of the Kremlin’s empire, a lot of heavy industry closed, resulting in a 40 per cent fall in emissions. This means that countries such as Russia and Ukraine will be in a position to sell other Annex One countries the right to increase their greenhouse gas emissions by that figure.

There are numerous accountancy tricks that help countries reach their Kyoto commitments, without them actually reducing their very own emissions. Little wonder that since 1990 annual greenhouse gas emissions from the Annex One countries have increased overall by more than 7%.

Consider the treaty's ‘Clean Development Mechanism’. This will allow the governments of highly industrialised countries to claim credits if they can prove they have invested in schemes aimed at reducing emissions in underdeveloped countries.

Wealthy countries will be able to finance the planting of fast growing forests in poor countries and then claim credits for the amount of CO2 they claim these will absorb.

Again, corporation’s investing in new technology will be able to palm their decrepit technology off onto poor countries, to whom such technology is an advance on what they currently have, and again demand emission credits. And of course, there is further logic to this – with such outdated technology, factories in poorer countries are hardly going to steal a competitive edge on their western counterparts.
Greenhouse gasses are suddenly commodities to be bought and sold on the world market, a market in which the underdeveloped countries are duped by the richer ones and their corporate elites. And when the time comes for underdeveloped countries to make reductions they will find themselves in a fix, unable to afford the technology needed to curb their own rampant pollution.
Kyoto is hardly going to save the planet as it stands. For one thing it was only ever foreseen as a first step to curb global warming and to be replaced after 2012 with tougher legislation. But even in seven years time there will be trouble. At last year’s climate summit in Buenos Aries, China and India could be found joining the US, the major villain of Kyoto, in an attempt to scupper any post-2012 agreements. Interestingly, and as The Christian Science Monitor recently noted, by 2012 coal-fired plants in those three same countries will be emitting 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, five times the cuts ordered by the Kyoto protocol
Add to this projections from the International Energy Agency that there will be a 60 per cent rise in global energy within 25 years, the bulk of this coming from carbon-emitting fuels and you begin to wonder just what lies ahead.
Currently, global CO2 levels are the highest they have been for 20 million years. Meanwhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change predicts that by the year 2100 temperatures will have risen by anything up to 5.8 degrees centigrade.
Kyoto looks nothing more than some environmental monopoly board on which governments can buy and sell and trade the air we breathe.

Ironically, Whilst the world’s governments will heed calls for such an early warning system that can warn of natural disaster which we have no control over - such as one warning of tsunamis in the Indian ocean - they are somewhat deaf when it comes to those blaring in our ears, the early warning systems scientists have been shouting about for decades: acid rain, soil erosion, poisonous seas, melting glaciers, a hole in the ozone layer etc.

And it’s not as if these are new problems. The world has known about them for so long that the facts seem hackneyed and you feel something of a wally quoting them repeatedly. The point is, these early warning systems are ringing non-stop. Capitalism’s problems are hitting the human race with the force of many tsunamis a day, killing millions, and more, threatening global disaster. Yet governments believe the problem can be traded away, camouflaged by a creative accounting that ‘mother nature’ won’t notice.

And the simple truth is that we place our trust in governments to solve environmental problems within the context of capitalism at our peril. They serve to administer the present system on behalf of a minority for whom environmental protection is an obstacle to profit, to whom any means is legitimate in the pursuit of that profit.

When you consider the future of the planet you are faced with two choices. You can continue to support the defenders of capitalism – they come in many disguises - and acquiesce in the destruction of the natural global environment or stand in their way by joining the struggle for socialism and the destruction of a system that will nonchalantly prioritises profit over not only human well-being but the world we live in. But, hey, don’t wait until your living room is a foot deep in water to make up your mind. Think hard and now. Capitalism, and with it the worsening of every environmental problem we cite, or socialism, a world social system that places control of the earth in the hands of a global majority who will tend to it with respect and without the barriers profit places in the path of production?

Whey's gunna dee the durty wark?

For those unfamiliar with the dialect of Tyneside, this is a common question members of North East Branch hear whilst out with the literature stall, whether it be in Jarrow Shopping Centre, at the Monument in Newcastle or a local political demonstration. Its translation is “Who will do the dirty work?” - meaning what incentive will there be to do dirty work in a communistic society if there are no wages or salaries and everything is free?

Well, it depends what you understand by ‘dirty work’. As a Socialist, what I look upon as dirty work is the killing carried out by the armed forces, or those whose job it is to destroy food in the knowledge that their fellows, thousands of miles away, might be dying for the want of it, or the duties of the bailiff who is sent into the home of a single parent with five kids because they’re months behind with the rent.

Such work is not what my opponents mean by ‘durty wark’. So I can press them:

“Oh, you mean the type of work where a man will go come in from his job, exhausted covered in mud, stinking of sweat, having endured a shift filled with endless insults from people urging him to work harder?”

“Aye,” comes the reply.

“You mean like a Newcastle United football player?”

“Nah, man! They make thousands.”

When this method of Socratic reasoning is pursued it is common to find that my critic is referring to the menial, droning, poorly paid and unpleasant jobs - money seemingly the determining factor. Of course, when asked if sewer work would be classed as ‘durty wark” if the sewer worker earned £100,000 a week, just like a Premier League player, the answer is a definite ‘no’. He’d be a ‘lucky bastard’, the envy of his friends.

The detractor asks who will sweep the streets? Well, even under capitalism street-cleaning vehicles operated by drivers are now in regular use and I would envisage that in socialism people will have a lot more respect for their surroundings when they feel valued and a part of something, and will thus be less likely to litter. And if we can land a man on the moon, does it really take that much more technology to put machines into sewers, operated from the surface?

Of course, in socialism, not everything will be mechanised. Spades, axes, sledge hammers, brushes and the like will still be in use as they are today. People use them today in their spare time, in their gardens, carrying out home improvements, doing charity work. Ask them and they will invariably confess that they enjoy using them, even though they are not to be paid for their toil. Many will say ‘there’s nowt better than a good and honest bit of graft’. Neither would they consider the work they do to be ‘durty wark.’ They’re happy to do it without pay, but the thought of doing it full-time for a minimum wage is unthinkable.

Thousands come home from hours of wage-slave drudgery and pass their spare time pursuing any one of a thousand hobbies, some demanding a lot of energy, patience and expense. None would consider, if asked, that their hobbies and leisure activities were work. They find these activities gratifying, rewarding and relaxing, an escape from the pressures of the office or the harassment of the shop-floor rate-setter with his stop-watch.

It is clear, then that dirty work only becomes ‘durty’ when it is carried out for a pittance of a wage, and set against the backdrop of say an eight-hour day. If a surgeon, standing many hours at a time in an operating theatre, his hands deep inside somebody’s bowels, or his fingers up a patient’s rectum, were to receive £4.50 an hour, the job would be considered degrading, pitiable, and ‘durty work’. Add a couple of noughts to that hourly figure and this is a respectable, worthy and enviable job.

Critics might derisively suggest that if we established a moneyless system of society, with free access to all goods and services, and no coercion, that people would become languid, preferring to ‘sit aroond on their arses aall day.’ In truth very few, even today, take up such a lifestyle. Anybody who did would soon end up overweight and with deep vein thrombosis. Indeed, it is nigh on impossible to find a really lazy person, someone who will not exert themselves in any way. Those we find like this are either suffering from some severe physical disability or a psychological problem that induces in them a state of profound lethargy.

In socialism, there would be no ‘durty wark’, only work that ‘needs deeing’, useful toil, if you like. Menial jobs, in the sense of butlers and servants waiting on royalty and other sundry parasites would disappear. No one would be servile in a society in which all the good things in life are freely available.

We would also see the disappearance of countless millions of jobs that today only have a use in capitalist society, a world where buying, selling, exchange and competition, killing and coercion are the norm: bank clerks, supermarket check-out staff, accountants, police, soldiers, prison officers, munitions workers, ticket inspectors – the list is indeed a long one.

Take the above with recent suggestions by economists that within 20 years the total world demand for goods will be provided by 2% of the global work-force (and this is in a capitalist society) and it takes no bold leap of the imagination to picture socialism as a society in which each of us need only contribute to society a few hours of necessary work a week.

Who would then complain about going down a sewer for three hours on a Monday if it meant having the rest of the week free, to pursue their own interests or to travel? Would such workers feel their jobs were degrading if they knew that the money system had been abolished, that the criterion that had once served as the “dirty work” gauge was history, that a society of free access to the benefits of civilisation now existed, and that they were all cooperating freely and contributing to the common good?

‘Durty wark’ would become necessary work. Sewer work, cleaning and all those other unpleasant jobs that had hitherto attached to them negative connotations (in capitalism) would simply become work that needs to be done because society is dependent upon such work.

At present, if the sewers and streets are not cleaned, if bins are not emptied, because of strike activity by those employed in these occupations, disease can spread and the well being of millions is endangered. If brain surgeons were to go on strike a few might die. Yet one worker is highly valued, the other held in low esteem, simply because of the money they earn.

And of course, in socialism, with increased chances of personal fulfilment in various fields, many could learn new abilities in their free time. A sewer worker may well study surgery a few days a week and a surgeon may well, after a his work for the day at the hospital is over, wish to volunteer his spare time carrying bricks or digging a garden - both happy in the knowledge that their species has cooperated to create a beautiful world, and that ‘durty wark’ is now history

THE NATIONAL INTEREST

A hell of a lot has been said of British and American ‘values’, of ‘freedom and democracy’ and the ‘national interest’ in recent months. Tony Blair can often be found making embarrassing conference speeches – any one of which is a rival for the Sermon on the Mount – punctuated with such nauseating terms and George W Bush’s pavlovian addresses to the mind numbed, jingoistic masses serve to remind us to be ever on our guard against the sleazy cant mouthed by politicians in time of war.

The ‘national interest’ is an all time favourite for jingoists, indeed a much bandied about term in any crisis. But what the hll is it supposed to mean?

Well, for one thing, it’s not something the lay person ponders too much. After all, if the politicians think something is in our ‘interests’ then it must be just that. They know best and if we didn't trust them we wouldn't have voted for the buggers, would we? This is, in fact the kind of mind-set politicians count upon before they can come out with such dribble.That politicians continue to use terms like national interest is evidence that they premise their speeches on the assumption that the average person on the street is a bloody imbecile. Moreover, the term is so designed, and used, as to distort our perception of reality. From the cradle to the grave we are discouraged from asking significant and searching questions - the type that might embarrass our betters and superiors. We are nurtured to mistrust our own ideas, to respect the views of the clergy, teachers, parents, politicians, the royals and all manner of counsellors and advisers. Little wonder, then, that so many injustices prevail and that so many can speak in defence of the government line, unwittingly acquiescing in their own exploitation - albeit in the national interest. But this is how it is - so many are prepared to accept that the government embodies the people's “interests”.

The national interest conjures up an image that we are all one big happy family, all pulling and working together for the good of all; that we all have something to be proud of, to defend and to benefit from. It suggests an absence of strife and antagonism and that the real enemy is 'out there'. We're meant to feel good about the national interest, secure in the knowledge that the well-informed are thinking on our behalf. It harks back to the 'bulldog spirit' of the blitz years, when even the king and queen seemed half decent because they had been bombed ('Gawd bless 'em all, Guv.') – even though most Londoners didn’t realise the royal family were shooting off to Windsor Castle, 50 miles away, every night and feasting on swan.In reality, the national interest is anything the master class and their executive, the Blairs and Bushes of this world, deem it to be at any given time, or rather anything that helps perpetuate their ideology and keeps them in power; anything that can undermine the potential for political action geared towards real change.

The national interest is the paternalistic jargon of a profit-hungry elite, trying to rationalise in our eyes the lengths they will go to accrue more profits at our expense. It is used by politicians largely to secure support for a course of action they are finding difficult to promote. It is designed to block serious discussion of an issue - who'll argue against the national interest and risk being denounced as unpatriotic? – and to marginalise opponents, thus stifling deeper understanding of issues.

Thus, the national interest is a Labour government contemplating the selling of arms to Indonesia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, the mobilisation of a Western coalition of 750,000 soldiers to tackle a third-world army of farmers in the Middle East (the First Gulf War). It is a government campaign urging us to shop our neighbors to the state's protectors. It is an army of police wading into a picket line, truncheons swinging. It is the appointment of ‘drug tsars' and the teaching of the benefits of marriage to schoolchildren. The national interest is the Russia army in Chechnya, Israeli troops invading Palestinian settlements and US bombers getting ready for bombing runs over Syria and Iran.

One thing is clear. While all the above can be pushed as national interests, none are in the interests of the working class. The interests of the majority - or the working class - are diametrically opposed to the interests of the master, or capitalist, class. True, we all have basic needs and desires, whichever class we belong to, but talk about shared interests in a two class society is nonsense. The capitalist class have one real interest - and let them deny it - to maximise their investment and to accrue more profit at our expense. How many people get hurt and trod on or slaughtered in the process is of no consequence. Anything is legitimate in the pursuit of profit (just watch the film The Corporation). As Madeline Albright commented when pushed on the issue of the 500,000 Iraqi children who had died as a result of sanctions: ‘It’s a price worth paying’. Neither is much consideration given to environmental concerns. We, the working class on the other hand, own little more than our ability to labour by brain or by hand - an ability we sell to the master class. Our interest under capitalism becomes getting the best price for our labour. Indeed such is the onus on us to sell our labour power at as a high a price as possible that its consequences dominates every aspect of our lives.

Whilst the likes of Tony Blair are all for promoting Britain's 'values of freedom and democracy' around the world, in our interests, you can bet they are quiet on the subject of how this freedom and democracy came about. One thing is certain; it was not handed to us on a plate by an altruistic master class, but fought for over centuries. Workers' blood was spilled campaigning for what miserly rights we enjoy. Even trying to exercise our right to free speech, thousands of us, these past 500 years, were burnt at the stake, hung, drawn and quartered and, more, all of this was passed off as being in the national interest! - a national interest which was in reality the interest of a small elite who held political power.

It has to be remembered that the master class depend on our complacency for their continued survival. Our silence, our willingness to accept everything they say without question, is the victory they celebrate every day.

Our job should therefore be to doubt and question everything they say - if we stand for nothing we fall for anything. For we do have interests. As a globally exploited class, denied so many of the benefits of civilisation in a world of abundance, it is in our interests, our real class interests, to help put a stop to their insane system, not just for the future of humanity, but for the future of our planet. Our real class interests lie in establishing a global system of society, devoid of borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders, states governments, force or coercion, money, wages or salaries, a world in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used to its fullest potential and for the benefit of all. These interests are far removed from the national interest we are supposed to identify and moreover, they benefit all of today's classes.

Filming the man who consumed the most expensive fish supper in history

(I wrote the following a while back but did bugger up with it and decided it needed an airing, if only for the fact that people who eat £1 million fish suppers need exposing)

It’s a chilly mid afternoon, Thursday, 20th November, 2003 and I’m one half of a camera crew that has blagged its way onto the TV media platform on the runway of Teesside Airport to film President George W Bush’s visit to Tony Blair’s Sedgefield parliamentary constituency. We really look the part, with state of the art camera equipment, housed in expensive looking carriers, and permits, okayed the day before, stuck to our coats. We’re there with the teams from the BBC, ITV and Reuters.

I’ve been there since early morning and I’m busting for a pee and shivering with the cold, so much so my knees are aching. But it’s worth it – I have some great footage of Bush arriving on board Airforce One* and we may well find a buyer and I hope my numbed hands can operate the fidgety camera controls when Marine One (a helicopter) is spotted approaching the airport for Bush’s departure. Christ, I’m cold. I wish I’d put on a decent coat.

The airport staff have generally been very accommodating. Their PR man was welcoming and his colleagues led us (me and my co film maker Carol) to a waiting area, upon our arrival, where we were offered refreshments. Even the police inspector standing next to me on the platform is on real friendly terms. Not so the paranoid security staff who have twice searched our equipment and bodies in a manner which, if I had have done it to another, would have been classed as sexual assault. Every bit of our equipment is thoroughly searched and X-rayed and our clothing scanned for explosives residue with some expensive piece of gadgetry. The bastards even demanded a look under my eye patch, I shit you not – Usama bin Laden has to be somewhere! Still, not to worry; I get through security without having to bend over and endure an internal. But the episode made me think that if you’re into touching people up and want to do it without getting arrested and imprisoned as a filthy perv, then go into security or customs.

As we wait for Marine One and the accompanying Black Stallion helicopters to arrive, the police inspector informs me that he has learned that Blair and the presidential party had a meal of fish and chips at the Dun Cow pub in Sedgefield.

“Christ on a bike,” I chirp, remembering the cost to Durham Constabulary for the day’s security operation, “a million quid for a fish supper? He could have stayed on the plane and I’d have got him fish and chips for a tenner, tip included.”

The sun is going down as Bush arrives back at the airport and there is much cheering and the usual sycophantic shouts of “Mr President!” from onlookers who will proudly tell their grandchildren that the gloopiest president in history looked their way.

In front of me a dozen local cops reach for their cameras and behind and to the right of me a dozen black clad snipers, perched on the roof of the airport terminal, drop and assume the position. I zoom in on the door of Marine One and await Bush’s descent, hoping to get footage of Dubya tripping or a close-up of a bit of fish batter sticking to his chin. And then:
“Fuck!” The camera battery has died on me. “Twat!”

I hastily remove the battery and squat, fumbling about in the camera case that is steadying the base of the tripod for the spare. I look up, smiling embarrassingly at the police inspector, who suddenly looks worried – maybe he thinks I’m going for a gun – and then directly in front of me where a sniper’s silhouette suggests he has his sights on me. I make it clear to anyone watching that it is only a battery, not a grenade, before fitting it and refocusing on Bush, who is now shaking hands with his ‘guard of honour’.

Lined either side of the steps up into the plane, and at right angles to the steps, are a few dozen members of the police, the local territorial army and US airforce staff. This is a last minute change to the schedule and the friendly police inspector standing next to me is happy his boys are being involved. And it suddenly occurs to me that this is not so much a last minute guard of honour but, with the airport widely exposed to the countryside on its southern side, Bush’s short walk from his helicopter to his plane exposes him to sniper fire. These mugs are a human shield for Bush against a sniper’s bullet.

I keep the film running, getting a mixture of close-ups and long shots of the scene, and when he’s aboard and the plane begins to taxi to the runway I zoom in on the front wheel of the plane and do a slow pan out to reveal the blue and white presidential plane in all its magnificent glory as it rolls along and film it until it is so far in the distance it is indistinguishable from a distant sparrow.

I’ve got some great footage – an assortment of shots and some clever stuff too and feel chuffed to bits. We pack our gear away and hurriedly head for the airport’s toilets and then a coffee and chat about the day’s shoot.

Aboard Airforce One and heading back to Washington DC, President Bush was given some distressing news. A fire at the White House earlier that day had destroyed the President’s personal library. Both of his books were lost in a blaze thought to be caused by an electrical fault. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer later said at a press conference the president was devastated, as he had not finished colouring the second one.

*Airforce One is actually two planes - identical planes – the logic being presumably that an attacker would target the first, which contains mostly entourage - press, secret service agents and sundry Republican arsewhipes.

Some 500 Secret service agents had been in the country for weeks, posing as American tourists, and could been found sitting alone in pubs and cafe’s, looking somewhat conspicuous with their square jaws, crew cuts, long coats and well-thumbed copies of “Larn Yerself Geordie” (this being the nearest White House researchers could find to a ready translator for the North East accent.)

Off With their Heads?

It must have been not long after 10 am, Saturday, September 6th, 1997, that I left my comrade’s house – he lived near Stockwell tube station in South London and I’d been staying there overnight – and headed down Clapham Road, which leads on to Clapham High Street and to the head office of The Socialist Party.

Anyone who has seen the film 28 Days Later will know what a lifeless London looks like. From my comrade’s home to the SPGB Head Office is a half hour’s walk, yet during that journey I spied perhaps only two other humans and not one car passed me on that generally congested 4 lane road.

London had not been evacuated; nor had some neutron bomb disintegrated every piece of organic matter for miles around and neither had some super-bug wiped out the South London population overnight. No. Today, in fact, was the funeral of ‘Princess’ Diana, the “Queen of Hearts” and the country was in mourning. Londoners were either watching the event on TV or lining the route of the funeral procession.

Every shop along my route was closed. Everywhere were hung posters of Diana, in shop windows and in the front windows of a thousand homes. The only door open for business at that sacred hour was the outer door at The Socialist Party’s head office -announcing to the world, that the revolution was not on hold for the funeral of a parasite – I had opened it and I entered at perhaps the same time Diana was entering Westminster Abbey.

There was no doubt in my mind how important an event this was to the brain-numbed masses. I had seen the wailing crowds on my comrade’s TV as Diana’s funeral procession left Kensington Palace and I had travelled down to London the day before aboard a National Express coach (a mobile violation of human rights) full of ageing royalists whose flowers packed the coach’s hold and saw the thronging crowds, some of whom had been there for days to secure a decent vantage point, as the coach (the 525 service from Newcastle) neared Victoria station.

Yet despite all of the grief, the Windsor ascendancy was not secured that day. Indeed, the popularity of the royals had plummeted to an all time low in the week after Diana’s death – she wasn’t one of them, she was “one of us”, was the popular misconception – and if Tony Blair had have stood up in the House of Commons that week and demanded a republic the country would have handed him one on a plate.

I had been watching the film Reds – based on John Reed’s book 10 Days that Shook the World – on BBC 2 when Diana’s car crash was announced. It was late at night and the film was interrupted with a news flash and I just knew she was dead and her death was indeed confirmed an hour later. “They’ve got her,” I told my wife as I woke her up in the early hours, to tell her of the hit. I still have the video recording of the film with that special announcement of the Paris tragedy.

I wasted no time in writing an obituary the next day – not the sycophantic, fawning variety, that would increase the weight of many a national newspaper by a few kilograms in the coming days – but the ‘tell it like it us’ kind, about how she courted the media when it was to her advantage and avoided them like the plague when it was not.

She was popular for many reasons. She had poured her heart out in a TV interview in which she imparted she had contemplated suicide, bemoaned her relationship with Charles and spilled the beans on the three-way marriage – the other partner to this ‘manage a trios’ being Camilla Park Your Balls – and was seen as a friend of the sick, filmed comforting cancer and Aids sufferers and clearing land mines in less fortunate countries. Moreover, she was quite bonny and coy and had a motherly grace about her.

But she was still a bloody parasite and for all her ‘good work’ was not noted for throwing open the gates of Kensington Palace to the homeless, or for offering pensioners a lift home from Netto with their weekly groceries in her Rolls Royce or for her blood donations.

And as for the obituary I sent to six regional newspapers, none published it; none dared publish it! The press were raking it in, so to speak, and couldn’t print enough pull-outs about their fairy tale princess, so there was no way they were going to print some anti-Di piece from a gobshite on South Tyneside. The TV networks were just as obsessive with their coverage, constantly showing us the spreading acres of flora laid at the gates of Kensington Palace by sobbing hoards of admirers, ever ready to tell the camera crews how their lives would never be the same again and what a miserable twat the Queen was for not flying the flag at half-mast above Buck House and what Tampax head needed was a good stiff kick in the jacobs.

It took the House of Windsor many years to recover from the popularity nose dive they had suffered after Diana died. And nothing they could do could raise their pre-Diana public profile. The Queen seemed to be having one “annus horribilis*” after another, and nothing her degenerate offspring did helped – they seemed hell-bent on living life as if it was one fun-filled holiday.

Husband Phil the Greek continued to make the racist royal gaffes* that have made him the toast of the BNP and the KKK and her sons looked destined to make prats of themselves at every opportunity, as if life was one long Monty Python sketch.

Even the Queen’s grandchildren kept on dragging the house of Windsor into the mud. On one occasion, back in July of 2001, Prince William, on one of his strenuous overseas visits, was pointed out a protected species of ibis flying over head. Just like gramps, his inbred reaction was to reach for a gun and shoot the poor creature dead, no questions asked, thereby showing that both stupidity and bloodthirsty sadism runs in the family, every bit as much as noses. For further details of Philip's bloody roll of dishonour go to the bottom of this post.

It was going to take something big to warm the multitudes to the occupants of Buck House. This happened on March 30th 2002, when the Queen Mum, who a year previous had received her 100th birthday telegram off her daughter, decided what the royal family needed right now was the sympathy vote, and promptly died – just six weeks after the funeral of the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret and which had attracted about as much attention as a USAF bomb-laden sortie over Iraq.

Anarchists jubilantly observed how you can wait for decades for one of the royals to die and then two pop their clogs at once and then went out and got pissed.

The public outpouring of affection in the days after the Queen Mum’s death was both amazing and nauseating. Again the press wasted no time in running off no end of obituaries and souvenir pull-outs, and the TV ran documentary after documentary about her wondrous like, from her humble beginnings in a stately home in Scotland to her wartime heroism (travelling to London to see the blitz victims each day, before making the 50 mile dash back to Windsor for he favourite war-time meal of swan and chips) and to her position as the nation’s favourite 101 year old gin-totting scrote. The queues of people waiting to file past her coffin as it lay in state for a week was estimated – if laid out in one line – to stretch to Neptune and back. Kleenex made another killing.

I again wrote a royal obituary and this time had it had it published! Several times - one paper, with a national circulation, even phoning up asking if they could also use it. The Queen mum may have been popular, but her age meant that she could not claim as her epitaph – as Diana had done – “only the good die young.” This coffin dodger had lived it up for over a century, so was fair game.

For over a year previous to the Queen Mum’s 100th birthday we had heard non stop the news of the preparations of this momentous occasion. Newspapers have given over thousands of column inches to this most important of national events, even stimulating debate as to whether the occasion be afforded the status of a bank holiday. On Wednesday, 19th July 2000, there was a national tribute to the Queen Mother, with military parades and presentations and the dropping of a million rose petals over the crowds who turned out in their tens of thousands and similar events were planned for the coming weeks.

As a socialists and hater of privilege, I was certain I was not alone in believing that not one penny should have beeen spent celebrating the 100 years of luxury that this ageing parasite had enjoyed; not that I believed it should have be put to better use. No doubt it could, but I’m not into the business of juggling the nation’s accounts.

For one thing, the Queen Mother was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, into the aristocracy and into a family which, at her birth owned three luxurious homes at a time when 99% of this country lived in various degrees of poverty. And 100 years later, she was still enjoying the good life, jumping hospital queues, waited on hand and foot by maids and servants and chauffeurs, whilst the average pensioner, after decades of struggling to survive, living in the shadow of debt, having been insulted by successive Labour and Tory governments, was given a weekly rise that year that could not, quite honestly, have bought a packet of chips.
Undoubtedly, the cost of keeping this wizen-faced has-been alive and in the manner to which her ilk have grown accustomed – in the finest accommodation, the best food, the most expensive clothes and jewellery – for 100 years, was perhaps equivalent to the annual income of many a third world country.

It is estimated the Queen Mum was ‘worth’ £60 million at her death, yet still managed to sponge of her relatives and receive £650,000 from the civil list, while being £4 million overdrawn. The crown that lay on top of her coffin was encrusted with 2,500 diamonds, any one of which could have given the average pensioner years of relative luxury.

The contribution made to society by the Queen Mother and her greedy and incestuous clan was, in my opinion, quite simply zilch. Each one is capable of happily consuming in one day more resources and commodities than any 100 members of the working class, perhaps 1000 times as much as the inhabitants of a small African village. Yet we are meant to kowtow to this bunch of indifferent, self-seeking brain-dead leeches, to prostrate ourselves like imbeciles in front of them?

As I wrote in my obituary on the Queen Mum: “It is time we, the working class, celebrated something of far more importance – ourselves and the latent strength we have and can utilise to help bring about a world in which we can all enjoy the nice things that civilisation ought to bring. It seems we have been led for so long by idiots, convinced we should look up to our ‘betters’ and to celebrate their shenanigans, brainwashed into thinking the same by the media, that we have forgotten our own collective strength. The Queen Mother’s 100th birthday deserves no more our sanction than the bombing of Iraq or the reintroduction of the slave trade. If the injustices that plague our world and perpetrated in the name of profit were to receive one-tenth as much coverage as this 100th birthday do, then our case would have been well publicised and our ranks undoubtedly swollen.”

But all said the Queen Mum had made the ultimate sacrifice – she died and saved her family. Or so many thought, for without the guiding hand of the Queen mother, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren just did what they bloody liked.

A few months ago, Diana’s cute little son Harry, now an upper class, hedonistic, beer swilling, nymphomaniac, prone to outbursts of rage - once slamming a camera into the face of a member of the paparazzi – thought it would a good giggle if he turned up for a fancy dress party dressed a World War 2 German soldier. Of course, Harry saw nothing wrong with the stunt. He was simply following a long royal Nazi tradition. The Nazi uniform is just one of the traditional costumes of royalty.

It is well known that the Queen Mum was the guardian of the secret vaults at Windsor castle, which house war time records of the dealings the House of Windsor had with the Third Reich. Sending a copy of Mein Kampf to a friend in the pre-war years, she commented: “Even a skip through gives a good idea of his obvious sincerity.” Harry’s Grandpa, Prince Phillip, had a brother in law in the SS, and his (Phil’s) uncle Prince Christopher of Hesse was in the Gestapo

In Germany, in 1997, Phil welcomed German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at a trade fair as “Reichskanzler” – the last German leader who used the title was Adolf Hitler. And, Edward VIII, Harry's great-great uncle, is accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. After giving up the throne to marry divorced American Wallace Simpson in 1937, the couple visited Germany and met Hitler, voicing admiration for his policies. He once remarked while on a visit to the USA: "It would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler were overthrown."

With the "Prince Harry the Nazi" story still making the news weeks after the event, what was noticeably absent from the debate about whether Harry was right, wrong or silly to wear a Nazi uniform, was that pertaining to the very existence of the Royal Family. It seemed to be taken for granted that we have one, we need one, they have always been there etc., and all that needs to be discussed is how the bastards should behave in public. No mention at all that the sole purpose of this parasitical and unscrupulous family is to serve as a repository for ‘history’ and ‘tradition’, which of course provides the glaring injustices of capitalism with some form of moral authority. What pissed people off was that Harry had dressed as a Nazi. If he had have come as a Coco the Clown the press would have applauded his sense of humour and written reams on what a fun-loving chappy he was and how Diana would have adored him..

Lately, and once again, we are subjected to endless reams of newspaper commentary and TV debate about the legality of Tampax head’s coming marriage to Park Your Balls. This morning’s Daily Mirror (9th March, 2005) ran a front page photo of a new first class postage stamp which will be produced to mark the occasion on April 8th and protested at the commemorative stamps (there are actually two). Why, the Mirror queried, if this is such a low key affair is the occasion being marked with commemorative stamps? Again, no mention that the Queen’s profile has graced every British stamp since 1952!!

Debate has been ongoing for weeks as to whether they should marry, where they should marry, whether the Queen should attend the wedding or only the piss up afterwards and whether, in marrying such a commoner, Charles would forfeit his right to the crown. And amidst all this intense debate there has been lost one far more important question: who gives a shite? Just why should it concern any member of the working class if these sad old spongers marry or not? What the hell are the mass media thinking of, imagining that the majority of people will really take an interest in this farce?

Who the hell gives a toss for Charles? Anyone out there elect him Prince? He doesn’t give a bugger for any of us yet he thinks he can lecture us on every aspect of life: how to identify architectural ‘carbuncles’ – he should know, he’s marrying one – and how to get the best out of plants by talking to them. Incidentally, I’d like to see him talk to the plants in my garden – they’ll grow for no bugger, royalty or not – far too many cats have pissed on that plot of soil.
But for the future king of England to lecture us on family life, whilst phoning his lover on the phone and telling her he wants to be reincarnated as her tampax, is just taking the piss and perhaps suggests it is high time he met the fate of a previous king Charles. And…hold on a second…just what made him think that a woman that age still used a tampax? Christ, a colostomy bag, yeah - a tampax? Fuck off.

So there you are – my slant on royalty. You can love them or you can hate them, but how much, either way, determines your continuing acquiescence in your own exploitation. You may well think that the country would fair better without royalty, but at the end of the day in a republic we would be exposed to the same inequalities of the present system and our class position would change not one iota. So, are we going to allow ourselves to be brow beaten with royal sentimentality by the media again? Isn’t it time we snapped out of our hypnotic vulnerability to such garbage and threw the whole sorry spectacle back in our masters’ faces? More! Let’s just topple their god-damned system and refashion the world in our own interests!!

Notes

* annus horribilus: does not actually refer to the Queen having a horrible arse, but was actually her description, during one Christmas message to the people, of theyear that was coming to an end: “a horrible year”, which sounds more impressive in Latin, as if her “horrible year” was more horrid than ours.

*Phil the Murderer: By 1993 deranged Phil’, who has an arsenal of over 56 shooting rifles, had personally killed for the pleasure of murdering 15,000 pheasants, 15,000 assorted other birds, 2 crocodiles, 60 wild boar (killing 50 in one day), hundreds of stags, and a tiger.
Not bad for the president of the World Wildlife Fund.
(source, Mail on Sunday,7.2.93)
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* Phil the Racist:In China in 1986, he described Beijing as "ghastly" and told British students: "If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed."

And meeting a Briton on a 1993 visit to Hungary he joked "you can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly" - in what was seen as an unflattering allusion to the national cuisine.

He was savaged by the media when he quipped during a visit to an Edinburgh electronics company that an unsophisticated fusebox looked as if it had been "put in by an Indian".

In Egypt he quipped "You Egyptians breed too much."

TWELVE MAD MONARCHS

First 10 taken from Time Out, November 1998

King George III once walked over to an oak tree, shook hands with one of its branches and chatted to it for several minutes. The King thought he was talking to the King of Prussia.

Princess Alexandria of Bavaria believed she swallowed a grand piano as a child and kept up this belief until she dies.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria decreed that day was night and night was day and had a moon painted on his bedroom ceiling.

Prince Otto - Ludwig II's youngest brother decided that the only way to keep his sanity while Ludwig reigned was to shoot a peasant a day. He shot peasants working in his garden.

Catherine The Great of Russia imprisoned her hairdresser for three years to stop him spreading the news that she had dandruff.

Queen Juana of Spain went mad when her husband Philip died. She refused to let him be buried and had his coffin accompany her wherever she travelled.

King Fedinand II of Sicily would only allow his face to be used on stamps if franking marks were never placed on his image.

Prince Philip of Calabria was mad about gloves - and wore up to 16 pairs at once.

King Charles VI of France was convinced he was made of glass and refused to travel by coach in case the vibrations caused him to shatter into a thousand pieces.

King Henry Christophe of Northern Haiti forced his guards to prove their loyalty by marching off a 200ft cliff. Those who refused were executed.

Prince Charles of Wales talked to plants and professed a desire to be reincarnated as a sanitary product. Despite being as thick as pig-shit he felt he could tell other people how to educate their children, what types of houses they should live and work in and what foods they should eat. He seemed confused that his proclamations were met with the near-universal derision.

Prince Philip of Edinburgh felt that the best way to advertise his commitment to world wide environmental issues was to be seen as often as possible shooting at domestic wildlife. After Scottish school-children were massacred by a crazed gun-men, Philip proffered the view that a cricket bat was as dangerous as a gun.