HOME : User Page for Steelhamster

Hola, Me llamo Steelhamster. Como Estas?

My Motto is "Smoke Me A Kipper, I'll Be Back For Breakfast!"

My favourite movie line:-

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die.

Roy Batty - Bladerunner



What others say about me:-

Steelhamster you are a sick leftwing ostrich if i was to meet you face to face in Kansas wich is were i live ide
kick your ass and any pussys you leftwingers could digup oh that makes me violent ok the shit people like you spout gets people dead when its you and your ilk that should be dieing

by kerradolche on Jul 18, 2006 2:51am


Never second guess God. He doesnt play fair, he doesnt tell you all the rules, and he's a hell of a sore loser.


Rarely attribute to malice what can be as easily explained by stupidity

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Steelhamster Dictionary:


Conservative n. One who has raised selfishness to the level of an art form

Liberal n. One who has elevated whining to the level of self-avowed sainthood

Anarchist n A person who believes that all government is dishonest, corrupt, and intrinsically unfair. In other times, this has been called wisdom.

Peer n Someone with whom you have as little to do with as possible.

Safe sex n A solitary activity.

Sensible adj. Someone who daydreams in Black and White.

Success n Earning the hatred of those you despise.

Carcinogenic adj. Having the property of causing or augmenting the formation of cancer. Since there are only two things that dont (castor oil and library paste), its hardly a useful adjective.

Civilisation n. An edifice built upon the four cornerstones of treachery, deceit, hypocrisy, and greed.

Arguments for Socialism: Individualism

One way the defenders of capitalism try to discredit socialism is by claiming it would destroy individuality and reduce everything to a dull conformity. By contrast they give the impression that capitalism provides people with varied, exciting lives.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism proclaims individuality as the highest virtue. It talks of "freedom of choice", of people being able to buy whatever products they wish.

This is an illusion. The choice it offers us is to buy the similar products of the multinationals that dominate the world-McDonald's or Burger King, Levi's or Wrangler, Pepsi or Coke. The high street in almost every medium sized town or city in Britain is virtually identical to every other, offering the same goods.

The great mass of people wear similar kinds of clothes, eat similar foods, shop in the same places, drive virtually identical cars, and live in similar houses or flats. This is a process that is happening across the world as the global corporations come to control more and more.

It is also based on how much "freedom of choice" people can afford to buy. Individuality is reserved for the very few-the minority who own the massive firms which dominate the economy. The rest are expected to work for these firms, doing humdrum jobs on assembly lines or in offices, from which as much individuality as possible has been removed.

Indeed, capitalism could only develop in the first place by deliberately setting out to destroy the individuality of its workers. When the first factories developed in Britain, the capitalist class deliberately set out to make its workers as much like one another as possible. The workers were forced to regard work as their only aim in life, to sacrifice their small personal pleasures to endless toil.

Under modern capitalism this process has been carried through with ever higher intensity. In schools what matters most is not how a child learns to develop his or her own individual abilities.

Instead, children are measured against one another in more and more exams. These exams are always taken along a single scale, as if human beings were no different to potatoes, differing only in weight.

Interestingly, the most outspoken opponents of socialist "conformity" are usually the same people who insist that children dress the same in school uniforms and have the same "disciplined" behaviour. In factories and call centres people are specially employed to try to make sure that people do their job efficiently and uphold company policy.

Massive resources have been poured into developing fake sciences of work measurement and industrial relations in an effort to destroy workers' individuality ever more perfectly.

Things are not all that different for most of the middle classes. The typical Daily Mail reader may rage about the need to protect the individual, but their lifestyle is likely to be identical to that of hundreds of thousands of other people. They will live in similar suburban houses, express the same ideas, work in similar offices, and travel to work in almost the same kind of cars or trains. If this monotony and conformity is what characterises capitalism, how did people get hold of the idea that it is a feature of socialism?

A stultifying cramping of individual development marked the countries that used to claim to be socialist, like the USSR or China. The popular image of socialism as everybody wearing similar clothes comes from the practices of the undemocratic Stalinist regimes. All of this was not because these countries were, or are, socialist. They were not.

It is because the bureaucratic ruling groups that ran those societies were trying to do what capitalists did in the West. They wanted to develop their economies at maximum speed by holding down workers' living standards, so they could compete with the West and one another. Real individuality, the full and complete development of the distinct capacities of the individual, will only be possible in a completely different sort of society.

It would be a world in which the individual and society would no longer be opposed to one another. People would no longer compete with one another, and would not be under relentless pressure to work ever harder. Massive wealth is created in the modern world.

It is wasted in the blind competition between rival firms and rival states. In their attempts to beat one another these firms and states demand ever tighter control over and ever greater efforts from their workers. Real human individuality will only be possible when workers internationally have combined together.

They must use their collective power to overturn the capitalist classes and reorganise society so that it is based upon satisfying human need, and not the demands of competition.

Arguments for socialism: Selfisness

ONE OF the most popular arguments against socialism is that people are just too selfish for it to work. It is claimed that socialists are unrealistic dreamers for imagining that things will change overnight and people work together for the common good without being made to.

Certainly if you look at society today the argument seems justified. Many people do see life as a rat race in which the key thing is to get what you can for yourself, regardless of others. Bankers are quite happy to extract interest payments from Third World countries, condemning children to starvation. Industrialists don't care if they ruin the environment, providing they make profits.

And workers are not immune to the same kind of poison. Some, for example, can resent benefit being paid out to refugees or those without work. But such selfishness is not a result of an unchanging human nature. With the best will in the world, people are often pushed to act in such ways by the structure of capitalist society.

Bosses can only survive if they are more competitive than other bosses. That means they have to try to get as much as possible out of their workers all the time. And it's an added bonus for them if they can find some legal way of doing down other bosses or fiddling consumers. To boost their profits, industrialists have to do their utmost to prevent their workers fighting back.

All the resources they can muster are employed to turn one worker against another, to inflict the mass of the population with the same blind, vicious competitive spirit that prevails among the rival capitalists at the top. In schools, children are brought up to compete with one another from the age of five onwards. They are continually being put through races called exams.

Each child is supposed to worry about how he or she compares with other children rather than developing their own capacities as best they can. Where possible the same system is imposed in industry.

You get the repeated grading and regrading of workers, as if they were objects rather than human beings. If that were all there was to say, the outlook would be grim. It would be difficult to see how things could change enough for socialism to be possible. But even within capitalist society there is another, quite different, side to human behaviour.

For capitalism not only involves people competing with each other. It also involves them working alongside one another on a scale never dreamt of before in human history. In the modern factory or office hundreds or even thousands of people work together.

Without some element of genuine cooperation the factory system could not work. Whenever people work to rule it show how capitalism depends on the cooperative action of workers. Workers give such cooperation even when it is against their interests individually and as a class to do so. The most blatant example of this is wartime.

In the First World War millions of workers marched off to sacrifice themselves for what they regarded as a "higher ideal", though in fact it was only to help "their" capitalists outdo rival foreign capitalists. Such misguided heroism shows that ordinary people are far from always being selfish.

In the case of the First World War, it would have been better for humanity if workers had been more selfish, and less willing to risk their lives killing other workers. At times workers show the same spirit of cooperation acting in their own interests. The results of this can be impressive. Look, for example, at the many examples of selfless bravery shown when it comes to rescuing people from fires or train crashes.

The most important way in which the present system makes people cooperate with each other is when it drives them to fight back against it. Some 70 years ago industrial sociologists did some experiments in electrical factories in the US.

They made a discovery that absolutely horrified the big business interests backing them. Even in completely non-unionised factories, workers instinctively cooperated to resist efforts of management to make one worker compete with another. The cooperation can be more powerful when organised. Look at strikes such as the great year-long miners' strike of 1984-5 or the 28-month Liverpool docks strike of the mid-1990s.

Workers fighting against the employing class displayed the same cooperative enthusiasm and selflessness they put at the disposal of the bosses in wartime. It is out of such spirit that a new world can be built.

Arguments for socialism: Unionism

"HOW CAN you support the strikes for more pay by London tube workers when they are already on £30,000 a year?" That question was posed by someone at a Marxist forum in London last week. It reflects a wider debate, fanned by bitterly hostile coverage of the tube strikes in much of the media.

Papers like the Daily Mail and London's Evening Standard have led the way, claiming that well paid tube workers are being greedy, and that if they get more money it will mean less for low paid workers like many nurses. Tony Blair echoed the media attacks last week too, when he weighed in against the tube workers.

Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee tried to give another twist to the same argument, attacking firefighters for demanding £30,000 a year. She slammed them as "macho" and said their battle would undermine the claims of low paid women health workers. Leave aside the fact that well heeled pundits like Toynbee wouldn't get out of bed, still less do any real work, for £30,000 a year.

Leave aside also the insult to the women firefighters or tube workers who are playing a central role in their respective struggles, or the many low paid male health workers who need more. The argument that supporting relatively better off and better organised workers undermines the struggle of lower paid and less well organised groups is fundamentally wrong.

The figures bandied around by the media about what tube workers or firefighters get paid vastly exaggerate the reality. Most tube workers are not train drivers and get as little as £17,500 a year, living and working in London and doing long, anti-social hours. Firefighters can start on just £19,500 a year and even a fully qualified firefighter gets £21,500.

The argument goes much deeper than figures though. The history of working class struggle contains two clear lessons. If better organised and stronger groups of workers are beaten in struggle, all workers suffer as a result. And if stronger groups win then all workers gain. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher's Tory government took on and beat some of the strongest and best paid groups of workers in Britain.

First she defeated the miners, then the print workers, then the dockers. At the time, her government and the press often used the same arguments we hear today about better paid groups of workers. Lower paid workers did not gain from these defeats - they suffered. Thatcher's victories allowed her and the bosses to go on the offensive against the whole working class.

The effects went far wider than pay and jobs. The defeats helped create a climate in which right wing ideas, and ideas that divide workers like racism, could gain a wider hearing.

In an earlier period the opposite lesson was proved. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the miners were at the forefront of major strikes and won big victories over pay. The result was to make miners probably the best paid group of workers in Britain. Far from undermining other workers, the miners' battles helped wider pay fights.

They inspired major battles that won better pay by health workers, low paid civil servants and the like. And workers' victories also created a climate of confidence that extended to wider social and political issues too.

The class struggle is like a battle along on an extended front. If your strongest units break the opposing line it throws the enemy into disarray and allows advances all along the front. But if your strongest units are thrown back, it leads to disarray and retreat all along the line. This is what is at stake in today's strikes.

The government, and the media, want to undermine support for groups like the tube workers to isolate and hopefully defeat their fight for more pay.

Their pretence that this is somehow motivated by concern for lower paid workers is deeply hypocritical. Their real aim is to make it easier to beat off demands for higher pay by all other groups of workers.

They want to create a climate in which workers say, "If a well organised and strong group like the tube workers can't win, what chance have we got?" This is precisely the atmosphere Margaret Thatcher created after she defeated the miners in 1984-5. If the tube workers today are beaten it won't just make it harder for other low paid workers to win.

It will also make it easier for Blair to press ahead with his backing for George Bush's war on Iraq. But if the tube workers and others win their battles it will boost the movement to stop that war.

That is why everyone should support all the strikes now taking place or that could soon begin. The old trade union slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all" is not just empty rhetoric. It sums up a vital truth about workers' struggles and politics that is sharply relevant today.

Arguments for socialism: Socialism failed in Russia

In the past people speaking of Socialism would sometimes be told, "Get back to Russia." Today it would be more appropriate to turn this taunt on supporters of capitalism as Russia's suffering shows the horrors of market capitalism. But it is still important for revolutionaries to understand what happened in Russia. How could the revolutionary hope of 1917 to be turned into dictatorship by 1930?

Russia under Stalin was the result not of the revolution but of the defeat of that revolution. The essence of the revolution was the idea of workers' power, of ordinary people making all the crucial decisions in society democratically. The workers' councils or soviets were the mechanism for that debate to take place and then to implement the decisions taken.

The revolution and the soviets depended on having a working class with a high degree of political consciousness and activity. In 1917 the Russian working class had these in abundance. But workers' strength was shattered in the years after revolution.

This was not inevitable, the result of some "natural law" that revolutions fail. It was because of the economic, social and political conditions of the time. As soon as workers smashed the old ruling class the other great powers unleashed war.

Britain, France and the other "democratic" imperialist powers were horrified that people had done away with tyranny and rule by bosses and landlords. They were scared that hundreds of millions of other workers and peasants-including many among their own populations-would be inspired to copy the Russian experience. They sent troops to invade Russia and also backed the brutal anti-Semitic "White Russian" forces which were fighting against the revolution. The civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, claimed the lives of a huge proportion of the most politically advanced workers.

The war also utterly devastated the Russian economy. Most railways, locomotives and rolling stock were destroyed during the fighting. Sources of raw materials such as oil and cotton were cut off for long periods when the supply regions were seized or blockaded by the White Russians and their imperialist allies.

By 1920 industrial production had fallen to about 18 percent of what it had been in the year before the revolution. The number of workers employed fell from about three million to 1.25 million.

They had to resort to direct barter with peasants, exchanging their products or even parts of their machines for food. In the spring of 1919 three quarters of the workers of Petrograd, the city that had been the flower of the revolution, bought their bread on the black market. It was common for workers to stay away from the factories in order to forage in the countryside.

In the absence of an active working class the Bolsheviks, who had led the working class to victory, were forced to rely more and more on officials from the old regime to administer the country. This increased the pressure towards a bureaucracy ruling in what it decided were people's interests rather than the people ruling themselves. The individual who personified this development was Joseph Stalin. The only thing that could have prevented the rise of the bureaucracy was international revolution.

If the revolution had spread from Russia to other European countries (as it nearly did in 1918-19) the civil war would have been won before the working class was torn apart. It would have brought material and political aid to poverty-stricken Russia and so strengthened the workers.

Instead after 1923 the bureaucracy turned its back on international revolution. It was concerned with shoring up and developing its own power, not spreading workers' power.

This led to Stalin's policy of "socialism in one country", an idea which none of the revolutionary leaders of 1917 had considered possible. The revolutionary leader Lenin devoted the last months of his life, when he was incapacitated by illness, to a struggle against the bureaucracy and Stalin. Almost all the leading Bolsheviks made some attempt to block the path of counter-revolution. Trotsky remained its uncompromising opponent.

But the social conditions of the 1920s, the hardship and sense of isolation, favoured the bureaucracy. By the end of the 1920s all effective opposition had been eliminated and all workers' rights were removed.

Stalin triumphed by eliminating all the "old Bolsheviks" and murdering the entire revolutionary leadership that had headed the 1917 revolution. Once firmly in power Stalin set about strengthening the Russian state in competition with the West.

Stalinism does not prove that socialism cannot work. It is one of the strongest arguments for socialism from below.
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