*LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SOCIALIST STANDARD*

*Speaker: Howard Moss*

https://zoom.us/j/7421974305

The below is from the Socialist Standard December 1965



‘Christmas, we shall be told again and again during the next few weeks, is for the children. There is, of course, another side to it, represented by the flood of gaudy rubbish which fills the shops, the big campaigns to sell it, and by the tinsel of nonsense with which the whole thing is embellished. This is not so romantic a vision as that of innocent, starry-eyed kiddies hanging their stockings by the chimney—and it suggests that, whatever enjoyment children may get out of it, Christmas is for a few other people as well.



As the City columns, the advertising agencies, and the trade statistics make clear, Christmas is that thing so beloved of a section of the capitalist class—a spending spree. Millions of people save up, perhaps for the entire year, for this one great splash-out. This is the time when savings vanish, bonuses are blued, hire purchase debts cheerfully taken on. These debts have partly replaced the old loan clubs, which used to have their big pay-out at Christmas. In fact, hire-purchase does no more than the clubs—it simply moves the payment date from one part of the year to another, but this is enough to make it one more piece of evidence for those who are trying to prove that we are all so much better off nowadays.



Christmas is responsible for an amazing expansion of the retail market, lasting for about a month at a time when trade would probably otherwise be slack. For example, the sales of one suburban branch of a famous retail chain bound up to around thirty thousand pounds on Saturdays during December; the manager can almost forecast what his sales figure will be for each weekend. These sales are in the established, non-seasonal goods such as clothes, which simply become more hectic during the Christmas rush. There are plenty of other examples, as people determinedly smoke more cigarettes, eat more food, and of course drink more alcohol during the space of a couple of days than they do in a normal week.



Apart from the established trades, there are the seasonal sales, with an appeal confined exclusively to the Christmas period. Christmas crackers, for instance, are being turned out all the year round; even the men who compose those dreadful jokes and mottoes are hard at it months in advance. The result of all this is that about one hundred million crackers are sold at Christmas, some of them abroad.



We must not forget Christmas cards. The first of these was sent in 1843; the idea did not catch on for about twenty years and since then the market has steadily expanded until now something over six hundred million cards, worth about 15 million, are sent each Christmas. This is good business for the firms which make the cards (one of whose executives said a little while ago “We are in the sentiment business”) and for the Post Office, who rake in something like £8 million in postage on the cards, not to mention the extra revenue on Christmas parcels, greetings telegrams, ‘phone calls and the rest.



It is anyone’s guess, how much of the spending at Christmas goes in a genuine effort to have, or to give someone else, a good time. A lot of the drinks, presents and smokes are sent as bribes (there is no other words for it) from the directors of one firm to those of another which, they hope, will buy their products. A host of calendars, diaries, packs of cards, are produced as advertising material. Some Christmas cards are sent out by firms as reminders that they are still in business—and magnificent pieces of work some of them are.



Apart from the business world, there is no doubt that a lot of money is spent at Christmas in an effort to impress other people. We have all seen—perhaps some of us have actually received—those Christmas cards which have so obviously been selected with the motive of convincing us that the senders are more wealthy and important than they actually are. We have all read the advertisements which say that no card is really gracious unless it has the senders’ name and address printed on the inside. It is an unpleasant fact that the acquisitive nature of capitalism gives strength to this sort of appeal; for those who fall for it, sending Christmas cards is a highly competitive business, in which a defeat has to smoulder for a whole year before the chance for revenge comes round again.



The fact is that Christmas is in some ways a time for people to show their less attractive side—and for the massed forces of commercialism to cash in on the situation, ruthlessly and to the full, with the only justification they need—in the end they have more profit than if they had not played up to peoples’ snobbery, their insecurity and their distorted conception of the world in which they struggle to live.



In other ways, too, commerce turns the screw at Christmas. A walk around any department store reveals an astounding variety of junk which is being sold at equally astounding prices. There are toys which are dangerous, or which will not last from Christmas to Boxing Day in the hands of any child. There are cakes of soap and bath cubes, stuck in a fancy box and covered in cellophane, selling for much more than their usual price. There is a bewildering mass of tinsel, plastic and coloured paper—and all the time there is the drive to sell, sell, sell for a Merry Christmas.



Yes, this is an enormous, briefly inflated, market; each year the note circulation leaps up to accommodate it. (Last year it increased from £2,583 million in the first week in November to £2,766 million in Christmas week.) The firms which hope to cash in on the boom lay their plans a long time ahead. From the summer months onwards, they are discussing and deciding on their advertising campaigns, their special wrappings and what they like to call their “presentation”. There is always the temptation for them to try to get in first, which they have to resist for fear of opening their campaign too early. But none of them can afford to leave it too late—they have such an awful lot to sell. So it is not uncommon for us to be able to buy Christmas decorations, wrappings, cards and so on in October; and before Guy Fawkes night there are not a few big stores with their Father Christmas, usually an unemployed stage extra, to induce people to buy by working on their children.



Many people complain that the Christmas sales campaign starts too early. But as the market is stimulated to grow, and as it grows, so will the effort to exploit it. This might mean an even longer sales drive in the future—wasn’t there a story about a business man who said that Christmas was good business as long as they kept religion out of it?



He must have been an ungrateful fellow; religion, after all, does him many a good turn. In any case, as we point out elsewhere in this issue, Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity; the Christians simply pinched it to suit their own purposes. What more natural, then, than that the capitalist social system, which is so faithfully supported by Christianity, should itself adopt Christianity’s most important festival for its own ends?



It was the Industrial Revolution which was responsible for reducing the old twelve days’ holiday at Christmas to a single day. The rise of capitalism meant that masses of people sold their working ability to the master class by time—and time spent on holidays was time not spent producing the masters profits in the factory or the mill or the mine. Capitalism, with the help of its religious lackeys, built up a massive condemnation of what it called idleness. And among other things it destroyed the ancient Twelve Days of Christmas.



More recently, capitalism has reduced the opposition to Christmas to a handful. Nobody now holds the opinion expressed in a Puritan pamphlet of 1656, that Christmas was “. . . the old Heathen’s Feasting Day . . . the Papists’ Massing Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol Day . . . Satan’s That Adversary’s Working Day” but until fairly recently there was a solid, articulate opposition to it. This is now all but silent, as the festival has been blown up into a vast, commercialised orgy of selling and consumption, one of the many working class Festivals of Delusion.



The great Delusion of Christmas is that dormant within us there is the Christmas Spirit—a gentle compound of benevolence, co-operation and goodwill which is roused at this time of year by the appeal of religion. When we are possessed of the Spirit we are wise and generous and loving; if only (says the Delusion) we could keep it up all the year round the problems of the world would be solved. If we would only cast out the Scrooges among us (and we all have our own idea of who Scrooge may be) and live by the Christmas Spirit there will be no more poverty, or war, or oppression.



This is no joke; the Delusion is powerful. It brought both sides out of their trenches to fraternise in No Man’s Land in 1914 (officially, that was the last time they did it). It inspires countless maudlin speeches at office parties and family gatherings. It runs through the entire Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day. It is powerful—and it is dangerous.



For the Delusion fosters the idea that the troubles of capitalism are caused by anything but the essential nature of the system. It promotes the nonsense that the world today is a fearsome, disturbed place because people are bad and that if only people were better the world would be a better place. It encourages people to think in terms of good and bad spirit, when they should be asking themselves why they behave as they do, and why the world is as it is. And as a final irony, the Christmas Delusion even encourages some people to think that there is something inconsistent in the determined way that capitalism exploits Christmas for all it is worth.



To start at the right end of this problem, we should first of all realise that there is nothing essentially wrong (or right, for that matter) with most people. It is the conditions of living and working under capitalism which largely make them what they are. Capitalism is constantly working out ways of exploiting us more efficiently, which means more intensely. It is always pushing us that bit harder, crowding us in that much more, making us into that much more of a cut-throat in the competitive scramble for the better job, the bigger house, the easier money.



In these conditions, people live at an intense pressure. Events which in themselves are trivial—a telephone which rings, a child who behaves like a child—are an intolerable strain. It is only when we relax, when we put aside the worry of making ends meet, when we try to live like human beings, that we begin to get a better perspective on it all. Perhaps this is what a lot of people do at Christmas. Some of them, for a couple of days at any rate, actually succeed, and they put it all down to the Christmas Spirit.



The big laugh about this—if anyone can stand another joke at this time of year—is that if the working class really grasped the implications of this they would take a hard, sober look at capitalism and see it for the wretched way of living that it is. That old chap Scrooge had a word which aptly describes the delusions of capitalism, its cynicism and its hypocrisy. Humbug.’

Ivan

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/12/christmas-great-delusion-1965.html

The Unmasking of Tyranny

The tyrant feels secure in his redoubt

Amidst his cabinet of sycophants,

Where all his cold calculations and rants

Are applauded. He has the power to flout

Even pretences of democracy.

None oppose him who’re generously treated,

The few who do are swiftly deleted,

Or at least they’re detained indefinitely.

Yet aquifers of resentment and fear,

Build pressure, underground initially,

While the surface seems superficially

Stable, a violent rupture’s always near.

The brute once felled, might circumstance recruit

Not a liberator, but another brute?

D. A.

 Like many other people the writer has been notified that utility bills are to rise on 1st  January 2025.

This is a repost from SOYMB October 2013. We’re still waiting to  put an end to  the current iniquitous capitalist system.

‘Thirty days out to sea and the weather was fine

The wind that we’d prayed for and making good time

The honour of first home was soon to be mine

To homeland and to Queen’

Honour and Praise, a song by John Duncan Richards, covered by Fairport Convention, tells of a Victorian sailing ship, possibly a goods transporting clipper, whose captain is intent on being the first ship to arrive back at England with its cargo. But in racing across the ocean the ship is capsized in a storm and all the crew die except the narrator, the captain.

‘And I’ve lived with the thought for the rest of m’ days

That I’d given the lives of the crew just to pay

In search of the garlands of honour and praise

And I wish that I’d drowned in the storm’

‘Mayor of London  Sadiq Khan is reportedly being lined up for a knighthood in the New Year honours list after securing a historic third term as London mayor in May. He is expected to be awarded the gong for his political and public service, having previously served as the MP for Tooting before he left the Commons in 2016. Mr Khan is first Muslim mayor of the capital also served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Sources told the Financial Times he is expected to receive the honours alongside a number of Labour veterans, including Islington South MP Emily Thornberry.’

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/sadiq-khan-set-for-knighthood-in-new-year-honours-list/ar-AA1vnpHC?ocid=BingNewsSer

Greasy pole indeed.

The piece below from the Socialist Standard May 2006

‘We have been here before. We were here when New Labour were gleefully exploiting the Tories’ embarrassment over episodes of sleaze like Neil Hamilton and his cash for questions, while Tony Blair was encouraging the voters to believe that everything would be better, more open and honest, when he was at the head of the government. The party rosettes and the election manifestos had hardly been pushed down into the waste bins when that particular deception was exposed by the Bernie Ecclestone affair. Since then there has been a steady trickle of similarly discomforting events. And now there is the engulfing flood of revelations of “honours” being awarded in exchange for donations and loans to the party or to finance some of Blair’s desperate sticking plaster reforms of hospitals, schools… It is serious enough to involve the police, with one person arrested.

This raises the question of why there have been no prosecutions for something which has been illegal since 1925. It was Lloyd George who, as might be expected, was most infamously involved in what he described to a Tory MP as “… the cleanest way of raising money for a political party. The worst is that you cannot defend it in public”. In line with this he defended and promoted it in private, by appointing an agent, Maundy Gregory, to arrange the sale of honours – for, of course, a suitable commission. Gregory operated from a dauntingly expensive office in the heart of Whitehall, complete with uniformed flunkey. His price list varied from £80,000 to £120,000 for a viscountcy to £10,000 to £15,000 for a knighthood. Less affluent clients were also looked after; for them Lloyd George invented the OBE, which cost about £100. The Labour MP Victor Grayson, perhaps in an effort to revive a flagging political career, denounced the sale of honours through the work of “a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall”. Soon afterwards he was mysteriously beaten up and then disappeared in suspicious circumstances, leading to the assumption that he had been murdered. Apart from such regrettable lapses Lloyd George and Gregory ran a civilised and profitable business, quite unthreatened by the fact that Lloyd George had sneered at the Lords as “… five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed”.

Retirement

So blatant was the racket, from which Lloyd George made about £1.5million (about £150 million today) and Gregory about a fifth of that amount, that in 1925 it was deemed necessary to pass the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which should have landed a whole clutch of politicians, Tory as well as Labour, in trouble. In fact the only person to have been prosecuted was Gregory himself, who in 1933 was sent to prison for two months. After this “punishment” he retired comfortably to France on a generous pension as the price of his silence. The Tory MP who brokered that deal was awarded with a knighthood by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who whinged that the Tory Leader Baldwin had involved him “… in a scandal by forcing me to give an honour because a man has paid £30,000 to get Tory headquarters and some Tories out of a mess”. Was this, we may wonder, the same Ramsay MacDonald who had once described himself as a socialist?

And that was not the end of the affair, because since Gregory went about his odious business the sale of honours, under many guises, has continued to thrive. The Wilson government created Lords Sainsbury and Hamlyn, both of them contributors to party finances. Notoriously, the owner of the company which manufactured the Gannex raincoat so beloved by Wilson was ennobled as Lord Kagan; he was later jailed for corruption. Then there was Sir Eric Miller, who avoided further attentions from the Fraud Squad by committing suicide. That many of the peerages arranged by the Wilson government were rewards for donations to Labour Party funds was confirmed by Joe Haines, who was a kind of predecessor to Alastair Campbell in Wilson’s Downing Street. Although there is evidence that Wilson was not entirely happy about his awards, feeling that he was under pressure from party fund raisers, his retirement nominations (the infamous “lavender list”) was full of party donors and cronies. Haines refused to be included in it because he “…did not wish to appear in the kind of list which had Joe Kagan and Eric Miller and others whom I regarded as undeserving”.

Heath

Among all these double dealings Ted Heath was something of an aberration. Although he reversed Wilson’s decision to stop giving out political honours he was so sparing in his awards that he thought he had “… caused some grumbling among party members”. During his three and three quarters years in office he nominated 34 new life peers, in contrast to the following five years of Labour government under Wilson and Callaghan when 144 “suitable” candidates were put up. The payback for what Heath called “grumbling” came when he was confronted with Thatcher in the 1975 leadership contest. A number of backbenchers seemed likely to have taken revenge for their disappointment at being overlooked for a comfortable, unchallenged seat in the Lords which they saw as the just reward for their long abasement to the needs of the party.

With the advent of Thatcher things in the Tory party got back to what might be called normal. The Iron Lady established a reputation second only to Lloyd George’s for systematically using the honours system to raise money for the party or to reward or cajole restless backbenchers. Between 1979 and 1985 eleven industrialists were made peers after donating a total of £1.9 million to party finances; among them were Victor Matthews who gave £210,000, shipping magnate William Cayzer who gave £410,531 and Frank Taylor of the building firm Taylor Woodrow who donated £367,510. Then there were the knighthoods for the likes of Keith Showering (£424,000) and Nigel Broakes (£210,000). It was all summed up by the former MP, Chief Whip and Foreign Secretary Francis Pym who, undeterred by the fact that he himself had been ennobled as Lord Pym, told the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life that “… a person had to put money where their mouth is to be considered for an honour”.

Labour

But all of that was supposed to have ended when New Labour arrived in Downing Street with their pledge to replace sleaze with transparency (politician’s jargon for motivated obscurity) and reward on merit (to be assessed on the size of a donation). In some cases big money has been given to support the new city academies, which are supposed to be an improvement on schools which were “failing” because their pupils were performing as might be expected from the area they live in, the depth of their family poverty and the bleakness of their life horizons. The latter-day Maundy Gregory with the job of organising these donations was Des Smith, a head teacher who was also a schools adviser to the government. Smith was persuaded to tell an under cover reporter from the Sunday Times that someone could expect to get one of a range of honours depending on how much money they put into the academies, from an OBE for one academy to a knighthood for two and a peerage – a “certainty” – for five. As a result of his venture into that particular branch of New Labour transparency Mr. Smith has been the subject of close interest from the police.

But in a sense donations to the academies are actually to the Labour Party, since they are designed to boost the party’s chances at the next election by financing one of Blair’s pet projects. Rather more straightforward were the loans from individuals, which the party has defended on the grounds that the money was lent at “commercial” rates – which raises the question of why they did not simply approach their bank instead of people who had rather a lot to gain through lending the money. For example there is Rod Aldridge, chairman of the company Capita which paid him £501,000 in 2004. He also has shares in the company worth some £60 million. Capita has contracts to supply “support services” to the Criminal Records Bureau (which was not among their finest achievements); it runs call centres for the BBC and the NHS and it collects the London Congestion Charge. Aldridge has lent the party £1 million; he got an OBE in 1994. Another lender is Barry Townsley, chairman of a stockbroking firm who was barred from the Stock Exchange trading floor in the 1980s after a scandal involving some share deals. He has lent the party £1 million. Townsley was recommended for a peerage by Tony Blair but he refused the offer, saying it was not worth the negative publicity.

Ironic

It is clearly misleading to refer to the baubles and titles dished out to venal business people and party hangers-on as honours. There is nothing honourable about them, except that they conform to the morality of capitalism. This is a society based on, and ruled by, the principle that sale and profit is a celebration while redundancy and loss is a tragedy. Yet the mouthpieces of capitalism, when it suits them, tell us that there are rewards for a finer morality where human service counts above the crudities of the balance sheet. It is ironically appropriate that even capitalism’s “honours” are for sale. Yes we have been here before and will be here again.’

Ivan

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/05/greasy-pole-honour-rooted-in-dishonour.html

‘Astonishing news for Syrians that the 50-year tyranny of the Assad butchers seems to have collapsed amid a lightning offensive by coalition rebel forces. They have seized the opportunity to exploit Assad’s weakness in the absence of support from his military backers Hezbollah, crippled by Israeli strikes, and Russia, distracted in Ukraine.

The rebels have entered Damascus saying ‘After 50 years of oppression under Baath rule, and 13 years of crimes and tyranny… we announce today the end of this dark period and the start of a new era for Syria.’ At very best, Syrians can hope for the pseudo-democracy of capitalist wage-slavery. At worst, factional civil war as in Libya. They’re celebrating now, but the hangover is to come.’

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

The below is from the Socialist Standard April 2020

‘Last month’s Socialist Standard focused upon Turkey’s policy to grab a share of the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields. Turkey, once called the ‘sick man of Europe’, is endeavouring to confirm its role as a regional power. In the chaos of Syria, Turkey has been an active participant.

Recently there have been incidents where Turkish troops suffered numerous casualties caused by the Syrian government, which led to Turkey retaliating.

It was clear that working people in Syria started the uprising against the Assad regime because of the lack of freedom and social justice, the prevailing corruption and discrimination. Life for the majority was dismal with low incomes, a rising cost of living, homelessness, and unemployment, which all served to spark Syria’s ‘Arab Spring’. However, foreign powers and various Islamic jihadists became involved and changed the direction of the people’s uprising. The popular protests were diverted by neighbouring rulers into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey with the support of the US and Western nations on one side with Assad’s government, Iran and Russia on the other. The Syrian civil war proceeded to develop into a series of sieges.

Way back at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, Turkish authorities facilitated the involvement of the Islamists by permitting the infiltration of jihadists into Syria via its borders. It also allowed commandeered oil that financed ISIS/ISIL operations to be transported through Turkey to be sold on the world market.

As the Syrian situation escalated it resulted in the mass movement of refugees, with Turkey hosting millions of displaced Syrians fleeing for safety. Turkey is also the route for refugees to reach Europe and it entered into an agreement with the EU to stem the flow of refugees. These desperate and vulnerable people have now become political pawns used by Turkey with Greece now ignoring international law and slamming the doors shut in the faces of refugees.

At first the Kurdish independence movement tried a third way in that it would side neither with the regime nor with the opposition. It would defend itself, but it would not wage war. Starting in mid-2012, various places in the Kurdish areas were one by one freed from Assad control. When Kurdish separatists created an autonomous region, Rojava, this was seen as a direct threat to the rule of Turkey and it led to a direct invasion of Syria to neutralise the PYG/PKK (Kurdish People’s Protection Units/Kurdistan Workers’ Party). It meant a military stand-off with the US who inserted its forces within the Kurds’ defences to assist the Kurds in combating the Islamist terrorists. This ended when Trump re-deployed US forces to secure Syria’s oil fields and it left Turkey along with Syrian mercenaries with a free rein to launch an assault against the Kurds who quickly then looked to the Syrian government and its Russian mercenaries for protection.

Added to this complex situation is the current Syrian regime’s advance to retake the last rebel-held territory in the country, the province of Idlib which is under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate. Turkey is backing these anti-Assad rebels. This has brought Syria and Turkey into direct conflict and created a possible confrontation with Russia. If the Syrian government is victorious, there will be a new flight of refugees fleeing towards the safety of Turkey increasing the refugee burden Turkey already carries.

But Turkish military expansionism has not stopped the UK from selling Turkey weaponry. The UK has licensed sales of military equipment to Turkey worth more than £1bn since 2013, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, principally aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades, small arms and ammunition. Leading armament manufacturers BAE Systems and TAI were awarded with an Open General Export Licence that makes the flow of weapons to Turkey easier. It wasn’t until October 2019 that the UK government halted new sales of weapons to Turkey while still honouring existing arms contracts.

In fact the world’s arms traders – the ‘merchants of death’ – are literally making a killing out of this war, with those in Turkey and Russia being able to test their weapons under battlefield conditions.’

ALJO

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/04/material-world-proxy-warring-in-syria.html

John Lennon: 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1990

From the Socialist Standard January 1981

‘’Newspapers have described the tragic death of John Lennon as the end of an era. We wish they were right. We wish it was theend of a period of human society in which rock singers could accumulate millions of pounds from the sale of records while millions starve for want of a bowl of rice; we wish we could write an obituary to the violent social system of capitalism in which men like Lennon’s alleged murderer can easily obtain and use a gun; we wish we could report the end of the wars and malnutrition and the inequality which Lennon sang about so well. But the era of capitalism is still with us and there will be others to grow rich singing about the miseries it causes.

Lennon was a talented musician and lyricist who understood the world he lived in more than most of his musical colleagues. Some of his songs showed definite political perception and what is generally considered to be his greatest post-Beatles record, ‘Imagine‘, showed an understanding of the meaning of socialism which is almost unmatched in the history of rock music. The song urges people to imagine a world without possessions, countries, wars, hunger or religion. When a meeting of our companion party, the Socialist Party of Canada, was shown on Canadian TV, ‘Imagine‘ was selected by the producer as the most appropriate theme song to sum up our views.

Rock critics regarded Lennon’s message with predictable hypocrisy. While claiming that Lennon was a great musician and that they were in tune with what he was trying to say, they have disparaged such songs as ‘Imagine‘ as an “idealistic vision”. (Robin Denselow, the Guardian, 12.12.80.) They prefer to stress Lennon’s more easily categorised leftist lyrics, such as those on ‘Some Time In New York City’ in which he expressed his support for thedivisive nationalism of the IRA. Like many people, John Lennon vaguely perceived important socialist ideas, but these became confused with the pragmatic radicalism for which he will be remembered by the trendy sloganisers of the Left. For genuine world socialists the vision of a society of which Lennon sings in ‘Imagine‘ is worth more than any of the sterile aggression of modern punk rock. The man may be dead, but the vision of a world of peace, equality and freedom lives on within the socialist movement which neither Lennon nor his supporters have had the wisdom to join. At the risk of being labelled a Marxist-Lennonist, this writer echoes the words of ‘Imagine’

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope one day you’ll join me

And the world will live as one.’

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/12/john-lennon-1981.html

From  the Socialist Standard February 2018

‘Why oppose dreaming? Who opposes dreaming? Those who are supporters of the status quo.

The enemy of the dreamer of better times is the ideologist of the present, out to defend the existing miseries with the claim that the prevailing relationships of oppression are immutable.

‘You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn’t control the winds.’  – Thomas More (1478 -1535), Utopia, published in 1516 in Latin.

‘One man with an idea in his head is in danger to be considered a mad man; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act; a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer the question.’ – William Morris (1834-1896), ‘Art Under Plutocracy’ 1883, LINK. ).

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) once remarked, ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.’ Also that: ‘The map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth glaring at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ (Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, p. 270).

‘Be realistic – Demand the Impossible’ was the slogan of the active dreamers who gave the ‘realists’ a good shock in the Paris of May 1968. A couple of years later John Lennon (1940 -1980) composed one of the finest modern contributions to utopian literature: the words of Imagine urged the millions who sent the song to Number One in the record charts to share the vision of a world without possessions, commerce, countries or religion. ‘You may say I’m a dreamer’, sang Lennon, ‘but I’m not the only one: I hope some day you’ll join us , and the world will live as one.’

William Morris (who had little time for music) would have had a lot of time for those words. In another lecture he said:

   ‘It is not we who can build up the new social order; the past ages have done the most of that work for us; but we can clear our eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then see that the attainment of a good condition of life is being made possible for us, and that it is now our business to stretch our hands to take it’ (How We Live and How We Might Live).

In Marx’s words, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).’

Binay Sarkar

World Socialist Party of India

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/12/whats-wrong-with-dreaming-2018.html

Extracted from SOYMB post 12 December, 2012.

‘Ask most Americans why the United States got into World War II, and they will talk about Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941. Ask why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and many Americans will struggle for an answer, perhaps suggesting that the Japanese people were aggressive militarists who wanted to take over the world. Ask if the United States provoked the Japanese, and they will probably say that the Americans did nothing: we were just minding our own business when those crazy Japanese, completely without justification, mounted a sneak attack, catching us totally by surprise at Pearl Harbour. Don’t bother to ask the typical American what U.S. economic warfare had to do with provoking the Japanese to mount their attack, because they simply won’t know.



 In the 1930s, the US as one of the world’s leading industrial powers was constantly looking out for sources of inexpensive raw materials such as rubber and oil, as well as for markets for its finished products. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, America had consistently pursued its interests in this respect by extending its economic and sometimes even direct political influence across oceans and continents. This aggressive, “imperialist” policy – pursued ruthlessly by presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, a cousin of FDR – had led to American control over former Spanish colonies such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and also over the hitherto independent island nation of Hawaii. America had thus also developed into a major power in the Pacific Ocean and in the Far East.



However, the US faced the competition there of an aggressive rival industrial power, one that was even more needy for oil and similar raw materials, and also for markets for its finished products. That competitor was Japan which sought to realize its own imperialist ambitions in China and in resource-rich Southeast Asia and, like the US, did not hesitate to use violence in the process, for example waging ruthless war on China. Japan as an expanding industrial nation required access to raw materials and energy. In the Great Depression, as trade dried up and unemployment grew, an ultra-nationalist clique within the Japanese military sought to secure the markets and raw materials Japan so desperately wanted. For a time there were two competing strategies to capture oil, the Strike North route to acquire the USSR’s and the Strike South route to capture the Dutch East Indies, one being mainly land-based and army dominated, the other mostlly naval. 1938 saw the defeat of an attempted Japanese invasion of the USSR , (which brought General Zhukov to prominence). Therefore Japanese diplomacy became centred upon the views of the naval commanders.



What bothered the United States was not how the Japanese treated the Chinese or Koreans but that the Japanese intention was to turned that part of the world into what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, i.e., an exclusive economic zone with no room for the American to trade (albeit Japan was prepared to make major concessions, such as “sharing” China with the US.)  America was to be squeezed out of the lucrative Far Eastern market. By the summer of 1941, Japan had further increased its zone of influence in the Far East, e.g. by occupying the rubber-rich French colony of Indochina and, desperate above all for oil, and was obviously vying to occupy the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The American capitalist class was virtually unanimously in favour of a war against Japan but public opinion was strongly against American involvement in any foreign war. Roosevelt’s solution was to provoke Japan into an overt act of war against the United States to rally behind the Stars and Stripes. FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s noted “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials. Under this authority,  exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants were restricted. The  Roosevelt administration froze all Japanese assets in the United States. In collaboration with the British and the Dutch, the US imposed severe economic sanctions on Japan, including an embargo on vital oil products and steel. Washington demanded Japan’s withdrawal from China. Roosevelt obligingly arranged for such a war, not because of Tokyo’s unprovoked aggression and horrible war crimes in China, but because American corporations wanted a share of the luscious big “pie” of Far Eastern resources and markets.



Japan was certainly not averse to attacking others and had been busy creating an Asian empire. And the United States and Japan were certainly not living in harmonious friendship. But what could bring the Japanese to launch an attack on America? Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda in a communication to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”



PM Konoe set about arranging a meeting with Rooseveldt in a last ditch attempt to restore trade relations and avoid war in the Pacific. While FDR initially welcomed Konoe’s planned visit, his inner circle, as they had for decades, viewed Japan as untrustworthy and vulnerable, and steadfastly opposed the idea of a Pacific summit. Hull, Hornbeck, Stimson and others shared the view of senior military officials that a successful summit could have disastrous consequences for America’s strategic position in Asia. A negotiated end to the war in China and the prompt withdrawal of Japanese forces would be the core of any agreement and this, that military officials argued, America must avoid. In October 1941, Hayes Kroner, chief of the British Empire Section for the War Department General Staff, informed Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, as follows “At this stage in the execution of our national strategic plan, cessation of hostilities in China…would be highly detrimental to our interests.” By early November, Tojo and Togo overcame substantial cabinet opposition to continued negotiations and won approval for talks based on two proposal. In Proposal A. Tokyo pledged to immediately withdraw forces from Indochina, remove troops from all of China except Hainan Islans and the far north and respect the Open Door. Japan also agreed to not automatically support Berlin in the event of a German-American war. Proposal B sought only a limited agreement in which Japan pledged to refrain from further offensive operations in return for normalized trade relations and a US promise not to take such actions as may hinder efforts for peace by both Japan and China.



When President Franklin Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor on July 28, 1934, seven years before the Japanese attack, the Japanese military expressed apprehension. General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser, objecting to the build-up of the American fleet in Hawaii and the creation of additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. “It makes us think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific.” In March 1935, Roosevelt gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a threat. The U.S. Navy spent the next few years working up plans for war with Japan, the March 8, 1939, version of which described “an offensive war of long duration” that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.



As early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its war with Japan. In November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S. crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities. On December 21, 1940, two weeks shy of a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, China’s Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been urging them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in Henry Morgenthau’s dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed. On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the Chinese air force, and the provision of “numerous fighting and bombing planes” to China by the United States. “Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected” read the sub-headline. By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American planes to be flown by American volunteers trained. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, “wired Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese spies.” Whether or not that was the entire point, this was the letter: “I am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with twenty-four to be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese pilot training program here. Details through normal channels. Warm regards.”



In the eyes of the Japanese press they were being corralled “First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya and Burma…”



On November 15th, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as “the Marshall Plan.” In fact we don’t remember it at all. “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” Marshall said.



The idea that it was a defensive war because an innocent imperial outpost in the middle of the Pacific was attacked out of the clear blue sky is a myth that deserves to be buried.’

https://soymb.com/2012/12/americas-good-war-part-two-japan.html

POLITICAL COMEDY: JOKING AND PROVOKING