History

Shrewsbury pickets: At last found innocent

March 26, 2021

Cormac Kelly, West Yorkshire Socialist Alternative
Marxism and Evolution: 150 years since publication of Darwin’s “The Descent of Man”

February 23, 2021

Andy Ford, Merseyside Socialist Alternative
Review: Should socialists claim ‘A Christmas Carol’ as our own?

December 24, 2020

James Kerr
New pamphlet review: Marxism in our Time

December 10, 2020

Connor Rosoman
The relevance of the Russian revolution today for women’s liberation and public health – part one

December 9, 2020

Jackie Grunsell
World War 2 and Covid-19 – The Politics of National crisis

December 1, 2020

Sam Gleaden

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Shrewsbury pickets: At last found innocent

The recent Court of Appeals judgement that all of the Shrewsbury pickets’ criminal convictions of 1974 was based on inadequate evidence and should be overturned must be welcome. After 47 years, it is a stunning exoneration of trade unionists who suffered imprisonment and criminal convictions as a result of a vindictive and systematic campaign by the state.

Nearly five decades of persistent campaigning has led to these sentences being put to one side. It is chilling to see the lengths to which bosses in the building industry, a Tory government and the deep state went to, in attacking these working men in the first place.

Edward Heath and his Conservative government had been elected in 1970 with a mandate to take on the unions. However, by 1972, the Tories were smashed by a victorious miners strike in a struggle for higher wages. Heath, humiliated and licking his wounds, decided again to take on the miners – the elite of the trade union movement. At the beginning of 1974, over half a million workers were laid off as unemployment rose. A victory for the government would put the working class in its place, reducing resistance. But the trade union movement stood by the miners, despite Heath openly publicising the training of the army and police in intimidation and riot control techniques. The miners triumphed over the Tories in a second strike in 1974; Heath and his government fell.

Building workers were perhaps an easier target. Sites in the UK had appalling conditions for workers. Often there would be a single toilet for many men and no shelter or drying facilities. In 1972, building workers were on their first national strike to increase wages and abolish the ‘Lump’, a casual employment system similar to that used in the gig economy now. Further construction sites were notorious for a high number of injuries and deaths. One person was killed or seriously injured every day in the 1970s. In the Shrewsbury area, militants Des Warren and Ricky Tomlinson were the leaders of 24 building workers determined to spread the strike.

They already had some success in their campaign through the use of flying pickets. Coaches were hired to go from site to site to persuade workers to take action. Although they were accompanied by police, none were arrested at the time and the picketing was peaceful, as Ricky and Des simply spoke to workers to persuade them to join the strike.

Out of the blue, five month later, they were charged with conspiring to intimidate workers, tried and found guilty. So what was behind this notorious court case? Heath had faced more problems. His Industrial Relations Act, which was designed to shackle the unions had been shredded when five dock workers’ leaders were jailed. With the threat of a general strike, the government backed off.

A secret government unit – the Information Research Department, which was run by the Foreign Office was established. Its job was to disseminate anti-socialist and anti-trade union propaganda. It provided intelligence about trade unionists to an ITV television production team who went on to make Red Under the Bed, a hostile attack on the union movement. This was broadcast during one of the trials and undoubtedly influenced some of the jurors. This kind of tactic is similar to the notorious BBC Panorama programme attacking Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite a few years ago.

After three trials, 22 trade unionists were convicted of unlawful assembly, conspiracy to intimidate and affray. Two were cleared. As Des Warren said while facing sentence, there was no conspiracy by the pickets but there was one “between the home secretary, the employers and the police.”

Ricky Tomlinson got a two year sentence and was held in solitary confinement after refusing to work or wear clothes; he was released after 18 months. Des Warren got three years and, because he would not cooperate with the prison authorities, was forced to drink a cocktail of tranquillisers. Despite being released after 30 months, his health was broken, leading to Parkinson disease and he never worked again, dying in 2004. All convicted pickets then faced blacklisting. No boss in the building industry would employ them.

In 1974, a new Labour government came to power and precisely nothing was done to get the imprisoned trade unionists released, in spite of huge protests. Their appeal was also turned down. Glasgow shipyard workers, construction workers and others marched to the building workers union offices in Glasgow, Liverpool, Edinburgh and elsewhere with no success.

Roy Jenkins, the Labour Home Secretary refused to look at the case. Trade unionists made the point that it was they who got this government elected and in return the convictions should be overturned. Jenkins was later to jointly found the ‘scab’ Social Democratic Party, whose sole aim was to stop a Labour government coming to power in the 1980s. The imprisoned Shrewsbury picketers were left to rot as Labour and the Trades Union Congress abandoned them.

Six of the 14 who have now had their convictions overturned are dead; their relatives carried on for years with the battle for justice. Eventually, Eileen Turnbull, the researcher for the campaign found in the Public Records Office a document in the prosecution’s paperwork that proved the police had maliciously destroyed some of the original witness statements which would have helped the pickets case, had they been known about. The Appeal judge decided that this was unfair and overturned the sentences. Even at the time of the original trial the available evidence against the pickets was so unconvincing that two of the jurors stormed out of the courtroom in protest at Ricky Tomlinson’s guilty verdict.

Ricky went on to be an actor and appeared in some memorable Ken Loach films, along with Brookside and the Royle Family. He also made a TV documentary about the Shrewsbury 24 and was the public face of the campaign for justice.

In the years after, working people were shackled by draconian anti-trade union laws. Secondary picketing is illegal, with huge ballot thresholds required to be crossed before industrial action can be taken. More legislation to ban strikes in certain industries is coming down the line.

The police have been ordered to be far more aggressive in dealing with protestors in future. The latest proposed Tory Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill, if passed, would give the police the power to arrest demonstrators, based on the opinion of an officer of whether a person is causing a ‘serious annoyance’. A nurse in a demonstration for decent wages shouting ‘Give Boris the clap and give us the cash’ could get ten years!

The new ‘mood’ is summed up by the recent violent attack at Clapham Common on mainly female protestors remembering Sarah Everard. The police expect women to hide in their homes and if they have the audacity to go out and protest they are kettled, forced to the ground, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police van.

The war on protest goes on. Examples include Extinction Rebellion activists who organised a small socially distanced protest being arrested, a nurse fined £10,000 for organising a demonstration against poor pay, four legal observers arrested in a demonstration against the policing bill and recently the attacks on ‘Kill the Bill’ campaigners in Bristol. Police were still spitting heads open in Bristol a few days later.

The original ‘Kill the Bill’ campaign was against Heath government, when he introduced the Industrial Relations Bill. He came to power to break strikes and render impotent the trade union movement. A campaign by trade unionists and the TUC was launched against the bill, including agitation and vast demonstrations across the country. With industrial battles being fought everywhere, a heightened atmosphere of class consciousness and combativity permeated the advanced working class, who gained tremendous confidence in taking on the Tories and the rich. In the end the Bill was ‘killed’.

Nothing has changed since the early 70’s: brutality, arrests, intimidation, the use of the media to spread lies, dodgy courts, tampering with evidence are all tools designed by the ruling class to maintain their power. We must fight again to defeat another Conservative government, hell bent on stopping any kind of protest to improve our lives and create socialism.

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Marxism and Evolution: 150 years since publication of Darwin’s “The Descent of Man”

February 24th is the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking 1871 book, “The Descent of Man”, which situated humanity firmly within the natural world and not as some kind of special divine creation.

Marx and Engels greeted Darwin’s work enthusiastically as confirmation of their materialist outlook, even though Darwin’s version of evolution, one of countless incremental steps to produce a gradual evolution, was not fully dialectical or dynamic.

After the publication of “Origin of Species” Engels wrote to Marx “Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect.”

Marx was just as enthusiastic, calling it “The book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

In a letter to the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx wrote “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle”

Wilhelm Liebknecht, a friend and comrade who often visited the Marx family in London, later recalled: “When Darwin drew the conclusions from his research work and brought them to the knowledge of the public, we spoke of nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries.”

Stephen Jay Gould: Stability and revolutionary change

Despite the conservatism of most mainstream biologists who preferred to see gradual evolution in both the natural world, and in society as a whole, there were always scientists who pointed out that the fossil record was best explained by long periods of stability with occasional rapid changes and the emergence of new forms.

Stephen Jay Gould, who was at least influenced by the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, set down the idea of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ in his key 1972 paper “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to gradualism” and he did it so well that it has more or less become mainstream. He laid the groundwork for perhaps the best application of Marxist ideas to Darwinism, by the British biologist John Maynard Smith.

John Maynard Smith

The book “Major Transitions in Evolution” (1997) by Maynard Smith and Hungarian biochemist Eors Szathmary gives a startling confirmation of the theories of development outlined by Marx and Engels, and set down in outline by Engels in his “Dialectics of Nature”, published in 1883.

John Maynard Smith in interviews even referred to his ideas as a theory of “revolutionary development” in evolution as opposed to a gradual evolution purely by the accumulation of small changes. The authors see the evolution of life proceeding by periods of gradual change, adaptation and variation, punctuated by huge transformations giving rise to new and more complex forms.

Smith and Szathmary identify nine major transitions, or, in the language of dialectics, qualitative changes that have taken place in the evolution of life. None of these changes can be explained by gradual evolution from one state to another – a new level of biological organisation had to come through a dramatic re-organisation of living material and of the information required to transmit and reproduce life.

Nine key transitions in evolution of life on earth

In order, these transitions are:

(1) the origin of life itself as self-replicating chemicals, (2) the grouping of single replicating molecules or genes into chromosomes which contain many self-replicators, (3) the transition from life coded by RNA as an enzyme to DNA as purely an information-storing molecule; then (4) the origin of bacteria as cells containing chromosomes, (5) the transition from bacteria to single-celled organisms and then (6) the transition from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular animals, plans and fungi. Once these groups had evolved, many species, though not all, moved from reproduction by asexual budding or cloning to (7) reproduction by sex. He also sees two further transitions within the animal kingdom – (8) the rise of social insects; and (9) the development of human societies. None of these qualitative changes can be explained by a simple evolution from what went before.

1) The origin of life

The first transition, from chemicals to self replicators, is one of the knottiest problems in biology. The simple organic compounds which are the building blocks of life – amino acids, aldehydes and fatty acids and even sugars – were shown in the 1950s to be a likely outcome of the interaction of lightning and methane, ammonia and nitrogen in the atmosphere of the early earth.

Some of these compounds have also been found in comets, asteroids and other planets. However, it is still unclear how or where the resulting organic chemicals first became able to reproduce themselves – most scientists favour deep sea vents, but alternatives include volcanic mud pools or metallic surfaces. This mystery remains unsolved.
Nevertheless, we are here, so it must have been solved.

2) Chromosomes as templates

The next step was for the self-replicating chemicals to be able to organise themselves into templates ready for use in protein replication, what we see today as chromosomes. This step is constrained by what is termed ‘Eigen’s Paradox’ – that for effective replication enzymes are required and yet the genetic code required to make enzymes is too long to be made without enzymes. Another mystery for science to solve.

3) RNA to DNA

The third transition is from an ‘RNA world’ where RNA carries out both the functions of enzyme activity and that of storing genetic information, to a ‘DNA world’ where DNA stores the genetic code and RNA is confined to translating the genetic code to sequences of amino acids which then form to form proteins. RNA can work as both code and enzyme, although it does each inadequately, whereas DNA is a much better information store, being more resistant to mutation and damage.

We can see the traces of this early division of labour when we examine a modern cell – DNA in genes binds to RNA molecules in the cell nucleus and the RNA then moves off into the cytoplasm where it binds to amino acids in the order originally coded by the DNA.

The resulting sequences of amino acids form proteins which fold into particular shapes to form enzymes and structural proteins. It is these enzymes which create and destroy chemicals for cell metabolism, which pump harmful ions out of the cell and useful ones in, and which build cell structures and even repair the DNA itself. They are very basis of life.

4) The origin of the cell

Once this step had been accomplished the stage was set for the first forms of life observable today – the bacteria. A bacterium has a DNA chromosome which synthesises the proteins with help of RNA, and a cell membrane and wall to keep the living material separate from the environment. The cell wall and membrane have to be created and maintained by proteins coded for by DNA.

By some criteria, bacteria are the most successful life forms on the planet, inhabiting almost all known environments from the edge of space, to the Antarctic, volcanic pools, the deep sea, and as confirmed recently, the deep earth, kilometres below the surface. Fossils of bacterial colonies first appear in the record just less than 4 billion years ago. They were the dominant life form for the next 2 billion years.

5) Emergence of animals, plants and fungi

The next stage, around 2 billion years ago, was the emergence of more complex, but still single celled, organisms such as amoebae, algae and yeasts. It is now accepted that this happened through the co-operation and interpenetration of different forms of bacteria. The idea was first put forward by American biologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, based on earlier Russian work.

Margulis’ Theory was that a large bacterial cell had formed a partnership with a small energy-producing bacterium, akin to modern Purple Non-Sulphur Bacteria, so that eventually neither could live without the other. Eventually the small cell took up residence in the larger cell, and we see the descendants of these small energy producing cells inside each cell of modern animals, plants and fungi in the form of mitochondria.

In the case of plants these two partners were joined by a third type of bacteria closely related to modern Blue-Green Algae which was capable of photosynthesis. Proof of this partnership or symbiosis is the fact that both mitochondria and the photosynthetic components, chloroplasts, of plant cells retain their own separate DNA. Also at the present time the lichens are composed of at least two organisms – a fungus and an alga – living together, interpenetrated, and each unable to survive without the other.

6) Multicelled animals and plants

For a further billion years life on earth was restricted to bacteria and single celled plants, animals and fungi. However at a certain stage the single celled organisms began to associate with each other into colonies and strands as we see in modern jellyfish, sponges and sea-weeds, and around 500 million years ago true multi-cellular animals and plants can be seen in the fossil record.

The exact mechanism is still obscure, but in what is termed the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ most of the modern families of plants and animals burst onto the scene. Darwin himself admitted that the Cambrian Explosion posed the greatest difficulty for his theory of gradual evolution – the theory simply does not fit with the facts. Smith and Szathmary speculate that the drastic change in earth’s atmosphere due to the production of oxygen by algae may have allowed larger animals to survive, or else the ‘division of labour’ by the different tissues of multi-cellular animals drove their explosive evolution.

Other scientists believe that a process of hybridisation between the different animal groups lay behind the sudden appearance of insects, worms, molluscs, crustaceans and vertebrates. One thing is certain – it was no gradual process.

7) Sexual reproduction

Once multi-celled organisms had evolved there was a further transition from reproduction by simple budding or cloning to reproduction by sexual means. This may have evolved once but more likely several times as not all animals, plants and fungi are sexual, and many can use either method. For instance, amongst aphids some species are asexual, some are sexual and some reproduce by cloning in summer when food is plentiful and turn to sexual reproduction as autumn approaches.

Turkeys can occasionally reproduce asexually and recently a lonely Komodo Dragon in Chester Zoo produced young with no male present. Asexual reproduction is seemingly the less complex and difficult process but the population will lack genetic diversity and be vulnerable to disease and less adaptable to changes in the habitat.

8) The social insects

Once multi-cellular life had evolved Smith and Szathmary trace two further major transitions. The first is that of the social insects which evolved separately on at least three occasions – termites, bees and wasps, and ants. In many ways the insect colony behaves like one super-organism with sterile workers dividing the work of gathering food, defence and care of the young for the benefit of a single queen.

9) Human society

The final transition they trace is the transition to human society. It is here I part company with their analysis. They see speech and language as the crucial development but I would see the development of a ‘mode of production’ as the unique characteristic of human society. The use of fire and cooking may have been the gateway to living through a mode of production rather than just existing in nature. In ‘The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ Engels describes animals as having a “mode of being” contrasting with the human “mode of production”. Of course speech will have been closely linked with the adoption of a mode of production but I think here Engels was closer to the reality than even Smith and Szathmary.

Rough timeline of life on earth

Dialectics confirmed in nature

It seems strange to think that for three quarters of earth’s history, billions of years, there was no life- form on the planet more advanced than slime. But even slime has cells with an amazing and interlinked cycle of metabolism and self-sustaining biochemical activity which is still only superficially understood by modern science.

“Major Transitions in Evolution” explains this very well and strikingly verifies the theoretical framework outlined by Frederick Engels in “Dialectics of Nature” over 140 years ago but on a much higher plane of facts and evidence. Each of the transitions is a dialectical transformation of “quality into quantity”; we see an “interdependence of opposites” in the derivation of single celled animals, plants and fungi from simpler bacteria; also the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” in the case of multi-cellular animals and plants, and in the social insects and human societies.

“Major Transitions” is well worth reading by any socialist with an interest in dialectics or biology. They also wrote a shorter book “The Origin of Life” which covers much of the same ground but in a more accessible format.
Review: Should socialists claim ‘A Christmas Carol’ as our own?

A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption and transformation as wealthy businessman Ebeneezer Scrooge, through the intervention of four ghosts, realises the error of his ways and is turned philanthropist. So, should socialists claim it as their own?

As 25 December approaches, the references to Dickens’ classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ become more frequent and it is used as a jumping off point for polemics right across the political spectrum. In 2012 Prince Charles hailed Dickens for using his creative genius to campaign for social justice. In the aftermath of the 2019 General Election The Telegraph counterposed Boris Johnson as the ‘opulent Ghost of Christmas Present’ to Corbyn as ‘Scrooge’. Not wanting to be left out, Corbyn himself chose to ‘gift’ Johnson a copy of the novella when asked during a televised debate what present he would give to the Tory leader. Zarah Sultana MP has continued the tradition this year by sending a copy to Jacob Rees Mogg in response to his claim that UNICEF were ‘playing politics’ by funding breakfasts for children in South London. While Mogg is possibly best placed to be the modern day Scrooge, we need to delve into the story and its historical context a little bit more to understand it as a ‘political’ work.

‘Scrooge’ (derived from ‘screw’ & ‘gouge’) has become a byword for mean-spirited money grubbing bosses and certainly it is a story of dramatic transformation. Dickens was part of a generation of Victorian authors who saw their role as more than entertainers. Karl Marx described those authors as having “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, moralists and publicists put together.”

So, what motivated Dickens to write the Carol and should socialists claim it?

Charles Dickens was inspired to write the classic having been “perfectly stricken down” by an 1843 parliamentary report into child labour and the treatment of women in Victorian factories. Horrified at the conditions people were working under, he resolved to “strike the heaviest blow in my power” against the injustices he saw in the report. The struggles of Victorian working class children are foregrounded in the story when, at the end of ‘Stave 3’, two malnourished children appear from behind the robe of the ‘Ghost of Christmas Present’. They are named ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Want’, to symbolise the two greatest ills dogging Victorian society.

Bob Crachit, Scrooge’s underpaid clerk, sees his children sent off to work to make ends meet and his youngest ‘Tiny Tim’ faces an early death from a curable health condition. At the start of the novel Scrooge is completely unsympathetic to the plight of the poor and takes no responsibility for their situation despite hoarding wealth and preying on hardship as an unscrupulous money lender. He echoes Christian minister Thomas Malthus by suggesting the poor had better die and “decrease the surplus population”. The story is social criticism from start to finish and appeals for change.

Dickens highlights the personal effect this avaricious nature has on Scrooge as he is shunned by society, “solitary as an oyster”. By looking back into his past, Scrooge is forced to confront the trauma of losing his fiance, sister and business partner and faces a bleak future. By the last chapter, he is “merry as a schoolboy” and like a “second father to Tiny Tim”, supposedly showing the positive effects of developing a charitable nature.

However, while it is certainly a story of personal transformation, it stops short of being a tale of societal change. In the final chapter, we still see the ‘Portly Gentlemen’ out collecting money for the poor and there is a reliance on the benevolence of the wealthy, rather than the independent action of the working class to affect change. In fact the working class are presented as meek, mild and generally helpless. Bob Cratchit stops his wife chastising Scrooge when he toasts his boss on Christmas day and brushes aside years of ill treatment in a moment of seemingly Christian forgiveness. The burning anger at the gaping chasm between rich and poor is largely absent from the book, this is despite the fact that at the time the book was written, Chartism was emerging as the one of the first independent movements of the working class. Marx’s political collaborator, Friedrich Engels was more forthright in his ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England” (written the year after The Carol was published) when he described how “these Londoners have had to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city.”

In fact the book seems to be an appeal for the ruling class to modify their ways in order to prevent the kind of uprisings that took place across Europe five years later in 1848. The previous century had seen the French, American and Haitian revolutions and liberal reformers like Dickens would be worried the same could happen in Britain. Victorian philanthropists like Thomas Barnardo were held up as examples for others to follow. These figures are reflected in one of the most sympathetically written characters in the story, Scrooge’s old boss Fezziwig. Fezziwig is kind and welcoming to all and generous with his time and money but he’s still a boss, still wealthy and sees his apprentices sleep under the cash register rather than in a home of their own.

Dickens’ conservatism was even more pronounced when applied to the British Empire. In 1865 Dickens rallied to the defence of General Eyre, Governor of Jamaica after Eyre put down the Morant Bay Rebellion by killing hundreds and burning over a thousand houses. The author sat on Eyre’s defence committee, helping him escape a jail sentence and never seeing justice for a brutal episode in Britain’s colonial conquest of the island.

So overall, while A Christmas Carol highlights the struggles faced by the Victorian poor and has many important and worthy qualities as a piece of literature, it is what Dickens leaves out that is possibly most significant. Karl Marx offered the working class in Victorian England and beyond a maxim to live by “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” and it is at that point him and Dickens diverge.

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