Socialist Studies - Petard's Piffle Pulverised

Petards Piffle Pulverised

We have to hand a ten-page document written by one Paul Petard, which purports to be "a libertarian socialist critique of the politics of the SPGB". Petard sets himself the impossible task of debunking the case for Socialism. He inevitably fails miserably.

Most of his vacuous verbiage is devoted to attacking his own misconceptions about what constitutes a member of the working class. He describes himself as a "ranter", and directs his ranting against the Clapham-based Socialist Party which he accuses of having a membership only vaguely concerned with the Declaration of Principles, and of straying in various directions from the case for Socialism. These accusations against that Party are quite valid but Petard dishonestly uses this to avoid dealing with the position from which they have strayed.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain which holds to the founding position of 1904 including THE DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES, publishes The SPGB (www.socialiststudies.org.uk) as its official journal. Petard is blissfully only vaguely aware of this. Yet it is this case which he sets himself to answer.

It is worth responding to Petard's fallacies as they are commonly held by the apologists of capitalism. But, before dealing with what he does say, it is necessary to draw attention to some of the things he ignores.

He shows no recognition of the world-wide effects of capitalism. Militarism, war and poverty are nowhere mentioned. These phenomena directly follow from the dominant, owning position of the capitalist class. The extremes of wealth are to be seen in a few hundred billionaires or multi-millionaires featured in the SUNDAY TIMES RICH LIST, and the five million people dying each year for want of clean drinking water. The poverty of 20 million unemployed in Europe and nine million in America, and the suffering all this represents, has never filtered through to the muddled mind of Petard, whose main preoccupation is to pigeon-hole everybody into some "group" or other in order to deny that the working class as such exists.

Since he does not understand the class-ownership of the means of production and the workings of capitalism, he is naturally unable to grasp, that Socialism, a classless society, must replace this system. If he were forced to admit that workers have common interests and nothing for which to kill each other in capitalist wars, Petard might be driven to agreeing that the position stated in The Socialist Party of Great Britain's DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES is the correct one. That really would give him insomnia.

Petard struggles from the start to find anything to attack in the case for Socialism, so in common with many others he ridicules the time taken for Socialism to be embraced by the working class. "…has a full century and a bit of making socialist propaganda been of much use to the world?" And "They are 'impossibilists' who have been stuck in an historic time warp since 1904". You can hear such ignorant drivel in Hyde Park any Sunday from people who like Petard neither understand capitalism nor have any answer to the worldwide outrages it generates.

It has never been the case of the SPGB that Socialist propaganda, by and of itself will be what changes the world. A simple glance at our Declaration of Principles would reveal this, if Petard can understand plain English. CLAUSE 5 states: "That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself".

While workers are deluded into supporting capitalism and continue to vote its agents into power, the system will remain. Socialist propaganda is only valid because it accurately portrays the nature of the conflicts and contradictions of capitalism. Only when a democratic majority of the world's workers see society in these terms, will they organise consciously and use their votes for Socialism. While a minority, all that Socialists can do is advocate the answer.

Petard directs his shallow observations at the Clapham-based Socialist Party. If he knows the views of a "significant number" of the Party, as he claims, he should know that those Socialists who stand by the 1904 founding position, who were expelled in 1991, reconstituted The Socialist Party of Great Britain on the basis of the original Declaration of Principles and the single revolutionary Object. The Clapham based Socialist Party had changed the Party's name, and its members held a variety of non-socialist ideas.

Petard should know that Socialists do not "believe" anything. The case for Socialism rests on historical facts and evidence. It is not possible to "believe" or subscribe to "half of what the SPGB claims to stand for in their Object and Declaration of Principles…" (p2). THE DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES is a logical sequence of eight clauses which follow from the fact that the capitalist class own society's means of production.

Petard refers to a world of "…socialised production for need not profit without money or wage-labour" as "utopian". He has probably never heard of Frederick Engels's book SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC, where Engels explains Historical Materialism, making it clear that, while Socialist aspirations prior to the development of capitalism were utopian, modern industry, trade and navigation make the world, in effect, one economic unit, laying the foundation for abundance without classes, buying or selling, and markets.

Petard lists three claims made by the Party:

1. Socialism has long been an idea but nowhere in practice.
2. When it is established it must be globally.
3. World Socialism can only be achieved democratically

He then reveals his ignorance by asserting that no. 1 "… is a denial of Socialism, as an actual material historical tendency…" and "Socialism has long been a partially attempted practice giving rise to and making use of a collection of ideas".

This is classical utopianism. Socialism means a world where the means of production and distribution, the entire Earth's resources, will be commonly-owned by all mankind. And production will be solely to meet human needs. No "partial" practice is possible. Until Socialism is established, class society, money, wages and exploitation, i.e., capitalism will continue.

Petard's comments on item no. 2 continue to be asinine. He claims the establishment of Socialism "… implies a sort of managerial exercise… a formal suspension of history or all histories… by who? And how?".

He claims again that "… specific socialistic outlooks will begin at certain times in certain situations" (pp 2-3). He cannot conceive of "the whole world altogether consciously going for Socialism".

If he had ever read Marx, he would see exactly that:
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!

This was the great concluding appeal of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, published nearly 160 years ago.

The underlying deficiency running through Petard's arguments, apart from his having no understanding of Socialism, is that he cannot conceive of a majority of workers coming to understand the need for Socialism and acting consciously and politically together. How else could he ask: "…by who? And how?" There will be no "suspension" of history, merely a revolutionary change from obsolete capitalism to a higher form of society, Socialism.

Because he lacks the knowledge to be part of the process explaining Socialism. Petard sees "…various real struggles" (p.3) going on, without understanding that the day-to-day conflicts between the working class and the capitalist class arise from the exclusion of the workers from ownership of the means of production. This above all, is what will be resolved by Socialism.

He goes on to make the absurd assertion that:
… there isn't actually one big unified totalised so-called "capitalism". There isn't actually one big immediately unified strictly coherent social capital completely subsuming and dominating everything everywhere all the time….

This is gobbledegook for the fact is that capitalism is heterogeneous and competitive. What capital does is to exploit wage-labour everywhere and all the time. Nobody has claimed that capital is "unified". Capitalism, for all the variations in its development, is the world dominating system, and at any given time there is a total capital.

Capitalism, as Marx and Engels saw it in the middle of the 19th century, had "created a world in its own image" (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO). Its quest for ever greater markets chases it to every surface of the globe. Commodity production, monetary class relations and the profit motive are its universal modus operandi.

Petard's next "revelation" is that there is not:
… one big immediately unified and strictly coherent working class, or perfectly formed "proletariat", that can get to grips with this supposed "Capitalism" with one big hand and overthrow it in one big act (p3).

The working class is defined by the relations in which they stand to the means of production, that is, as non-owning employees -a class of wage workers. In the advanced dominant capitalist countries, they are the majority and share a common interest in ending their servitude. This is also the pattern that developing countries follow so, as Socialist ideas take hold, it will be on a world scale. We have already dealt with the "overthrown" issue.

Petard has persuaded us that he has looked through the index of Volume 1 of Marx's CAPITAL (there is no evidence that he went any further) and, finding the word "capitalism" does not appear, despite eleven headings on capitalist industry, capitalist accumulation and capitalist production, etc; in a book of 848 pages which minutely analyses every aspect of bourgeois society (another expression Marx uses), we are expected to infer that Volume 1 of CAPITAL does not deal with capitalism. The title of the volume shows the absurdity of his jibe, it is "CAPITAL 1. CAPITALISTIC PRODUCTION".

Petard then reveals his anarcho-syndicalist confusion with a lengthy attack on what he mistakenly thinks is democracy. He regards the political acceptance of majority decisions over a minority as despotic and tyrannical, but sees the spontaneous action of minorities as solidarity. He cannot think beyond democracy as "a system of rule" (p4) in which strikes, as a form of industrial action by part of a class of employees against part of a class of employers, would not exist.

His ignorance extends to not understanding that "rule", the government of one class over another, exists because of capitalism, where the vast majority of the working class accept their subject position in society and vote for parties which represent the owning (ruling) class.

Spontaneous minority action over a far greater period than 100 years has made no difference to this.

Pouring scorn on the Parliamentary strategy of Socialists and claiming it "involves elitism" and being contemptuous of the "bourgeois electoral circuses", does not, as he imagines, set him free from the "national state's constitution" or from "…deference to and recognition of the national institutions, the national parliament and the national borders, etc"(p4).

Do anarchists like Petard have a passport? Does he use money? Thus respecting private property and national institutions. How does he stay out of prison if he does not recognise the laws that Parliament - the bourgeois electoral circus - passes? Does he drive on the wrong side of the road? (Quite likely).

Political power is very real; it resides in the seat of Government and centres on Parliament. It includes the coercive-state powers of the police, the prisons and the armed forces.

It will continue to represent the dominance of the capitalist class for as long as the workers are deluded to vote for their masters' ideas represented by reformist parties. What is certain is that the capitalist class cannot be stripped of their ownership of the means of wealth production without political power being taken out of their hands. This is why Socialists (the SPGB) urge an understanding of Socialism upon our fellow workers, so that a democratically elected majority of Socialist delegates will represent the demand to end capitalism by making the means of production communal.

The rule of one class over another will end when classes themselves disappear and people, as social equals, democratically administer production solely for use.

Petard falls back on the old "impossibilist" tag that was used to identify The Socialist Party of Great Britain's revolutionary position against that of the reformists. He uses it in an effort to be contemptuous. We welcome the appellation, man has always been impossibilist. Man harnesses the forces of nature to his needs. He cultivates food and generates power. He flies at hundreds of miles per hour and sends complex scientific instruments to make detailed investigations of the planets. If man has only attempted what was possible, he would still be in the cave-age.

Here, a few extracts from Marx and Engels (THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO) would be appropriate:

1. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
2. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
3. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class -the proletarians.
4. But every class struggle is a political struggle.
5. We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.
6. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Like Marx and Engels, The Socialist Party of Great Britain engages in spreading Socialist understanding. Petard regards education as "preaching" and "elitist", "detached" and "patronising". He believes there are already millions of workers and millions more "of other classes" who are "consciously aware in the back of their minds…" (pp 4&5). Rather like the man who left his "liversalts" in his back pocket?

He should have gone on to explain why these millions "around the world" continue to vote for capitalist parties, wave their masters' national flags, and slaughter each other in capitalist wars.

He exposes his own shoddy reading by claiming that our DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES is about "seizing state power". He then quotes the whole of Clause 6 which says something quite different, and also, ignorantly, attributes his own "seizing state power" to Marx.

In his next paragraph, he elaborates a fantasy world to show the state represents interests other than those of the capitalists. He says (p5) that, even if leaders who claim to represent the working class and are themselves from the working class background manage to gain power in government, they themselves become elitists, bureaucrats and state capitalists.

This has absolutely no bearing on the case of the SPGB which he pretends to be answering. Our case has always been one of the rejection of leaders on the grounds that a majority of workers must themselves understand and vote for Socialism to bring it about. There can be no elitist separation between conscious workers and their own instrument, the Party.

Petard concludes with yet another absurdity:
From a genuine socialist point of view it [the state] needs to be disbanded and abolished, not taken over or "converted" which is a reformist policy. So here another element of reformism in the politics of the SPGB is exposed (p5).

No hint of how the state can be "disbanded", without first being taken over.

"Converted", as used in our DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES, clearly means that, once captured by the votes of a democratic, class conscious majority, using a Socialist political party, the state will no longer be an instrument of class rule oppressing the workers. In their hands, it will be used to make the means of production the common property of all society.
"… The emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex" (CLAUSE 4)

Government over people will give way to the administration of production by and for the whole people.

Petard's last 3-and-a-half pages are a desperate attempt to identify the working class or, to be more precise, to avoid identifying the working class. He never manages to pin it down but it is the position people occupy in relation to the means of production that determines their class position.

For example, all those millions of Indian workers in Mumbai who commute in over-crowded trains each week to run India's financial centres are employees. They do not own the finance businesses, or the huge buildings in which these are conducted. They have this in common with millions of commuters in London and cities around the world. Whether they travel to work in offices, mines and factories, farms or transport systems, or teach in schools and whether they wear suits (or skirts and blouses) or overalls, makes no difference to their position as employees.

Petard sees a host of conditions and categories, which in his mind, have the effect of denying working class status. These include some peasants with small holdings on which significant amount of food might be grown. What happens to wages when workers have other means of access to food? Wages would tend to be correspondingly lower.

In general, as formerly feudal countries are drawn into the capitalist orbit, there are always hang-over situations. Marx, however, makes the point that undeveloped countries see in the developed ones, the conditions of their own future. It is not as though the workers in the advanced industrial countries are on the verge of establishing Socialism.

In little more than fifty years, China, for example, has become a major capitalist world power. As capitalism becomes ever more predominant "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat" (THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1848). Petard has much catching up to do!

He should bone-up on the Labour Theory of Value. The price for which workers (world-wide) sell their labour-power as employees represents on average the full cost of its reproduction. The trick is, as Marx demonstrated, that in the labour-process (the production of commodities), they as a class produce a mass of wealth far in excess of their wages. It is this surplus-value from which rent, interest and profit, the wealth of the capitalist class, accrues.

Petard sees the class-struggle as an unending series of wild-cat strikes; he fails to grasp the fact that the final class struggle in history is about taking the means of production away from a minority parasite class and making them common-property.

It is unnecessary to explore all of Petard's blind-alleys, they lead nowhere. The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never claimed that every person on Earth can be neatly pigeon-holed into a class category, or that anyone who is not a capitalist, is a member of the working class. This is an invention of one who knows no better.

He fails to understand the function of the so-called welfare-state in the economic cycle of capitalism is keeping workers who are sacked in a recession in working order ready to be exploited again as trade recovers. He even swallows the common delusion that a salary is different from a wage. Whether figured in hourly or monthly terms, they are the price of labour-power. He thinks a "salary" confers a "professional status" upon an employee and lifts him out of the working class.

Again Marx would reply:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Unfortunately for Petard, many of those workers he regards as "…protected professional elites such as the top medics / school-heads / middle and upper civil servants / lawyers and judges / top academics and scientists etc…" (p8) have in recent years been in disputes over pay. College and University lecturers actually went on strike for higher wages, and even went so far as to march and demonstrate. A million national and local government workers have either been on strike or threatened strike action. Doctors have fought to defend payment levels for treatments. Nurses leave the profession in droves against poor pay, and scientists fight the wages struggle by moving abroad for better-paid jobs.

Petard's attempts to divide the working-class along income and professional lines are ironically similar to those of the capitalist media: the last thing they would want is a united working class that recognises a common interest.

He deals at length with the police to show their special "protected status" failing to see that in the insecure world of violence, crime and terror which is modern capitalism, private property has to be protected,. Nine tenths of accumulated wealth belongs to the capitalist class. So for them to spend money on a few "privileges" to buy loyalty as well as labour-power is only to be expected. It is, however, a fact reported by the Halifax Building Society that the police, together with nurses, teachers, fire-fighters and ambulance workers, can no longer afford an average-priced house in 65% of towns in England. This compares with 24% of towns just five years ago (TELETEXT, 29 July 2006).

So the police's position as workers is a worsening one. The proof of their being members of the working class is demonstrated by the fact that those who leave the force must seek another job for wages, on the labour market.

Finally, just who Petard is remains unclear, since he refers to "us" and "we" here and there, and uses supportive remarks in favour of the so-called Revolutionary Communist Group and the alleged libertarian socialists. He pours scorn on debating while producing ten tight pages of highly debateable arguments.

In common with many of our opponents, he is unlikely to agree to debate with The Socialist Party of Great Britain.

With a name like Petard, he should not be turned loose on society with such a blunt instrument, he could hurt himself.

[NOTE: This is a reply to an article written by Petard entitled "The Socialist Substandard: 100 years of the socialist party of 1904. A libertarian socialist critique of the politics of the SPGB." The article is too long for publication in The SPGB but can be read at www.libcom.org/library/spgb-p(aul)-petard. The author has been sent our reply with a challenge to debate.]