Letter: Working together

Sir : I think two or three points in your reply to my letter (SOCIALIST STANDARD, February 1967) are unworthy of you.
The minor point about East Germany is only of consequence as it is the feeling of one member of the Socialist Medical Association. Our Editorial Committee gives space to articles on Socialism and Health. It does not censor within that context. Your reply suggests that every SPGB member has exactly the same thoughts and ideas as the next. Do you never vote on anything? Does every member agree with every phrase in the SOCIALIST STANDARD?
The fact is that the SPGB and the SMA would achieve more if they worked together. If you discuss health matters today the SMA has discussed them since 1936. So why not acept the fact that a specialist health organisation is likely to know its own subject better than yourselves.
If you wish to have ideas on Health Centres, Occupational Health, Bronchitis. Health Education and other ideas linking Socialist thought and Health you could not better the wealth of experience the SMA has.
Your statement about the state giving out “charity” to the workers to keep them fit enough is much too cynical. We know this is a “truth” of the State. But the Socialist state that did not have some sort of law and order and therefore some sort of control of its population is pure Anarchist and although I accept it as the final solution can you really see this as a possibility with the level of political, emotional, educational and individualistic greed that pervades our planet today.
It is the “exclusiveness” of the SPGB as much as its “aloofness” that worries me. There is no fault to find in the Declaration of Principles. But you who have had more experience than I of the slowness of change and the compromise that have to be made in politics must know that the choice is either slow Parliamentary type method or bloody revolution.
Revolution is useless unless there is a high chance of winning. Only the religious fanatic would wish to commit suicide — it may take him to his “maker” more quickly.
We Socialists and humanists know better.
M.S. (London)

Reply
M.S. is worried about “the level of political, emotional, educational and individualistic greed that pervades our planet today”. But greed is not a characterestic of working men and women. In fact, the working class is the most charitable body of men ever known to history. Inadequately housed, shabbily dressed, underpaid and overworked, the workers make do with only a tiny portion of the wealth they produce so that the capitalist class can live in idle luxury.

When the working class throughout the world has grasped that there is a socialist alternative to the capitalist system it will use its immense numbers to capture political power. It will make use of the parliamentary machinery to achieve the revolutionary transformation of society. There is, however, unlikely to be very much blood about at the time. The workers, who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, will be able to smother any attempt at resistance by a dissident minority.

The alternatives facing the working class are socialism or capitalism. There is no middle path nor, as M.S. suggests, is any compromise with capital possible.

Finally, a few more words on the ‘Socialist’ Medical Association. M.S. is now recommending that the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain should work with the SMA because it is “a specialist health organisation”, full of “ideas on Health Centres, Occupational Health, Bronchitis, Health Education” etc. We do not deny that many members of the SMA have a thorough medical knowledge and no doubt some of them are brilliant in their own fields. But, politically, the SMA is crippled from the start, because it sets out to operate within the framework of capitalism.

We gave the example of the supporter of East Germany because he typifies the confusion within the ranks of the SMA. We could have chosen numerous others, including M.S. himself. Of course, there is plenty of discussion in the Socialist Party but none of our members would think of referring it to the State as though it were some sort of benevolent society looking after working class interests. Socialists realise that the State is the executive committee of the ruling class and that it only has a basis in a class-divided social system. As M.S. would put it, we socialists know better.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE