Paddy Boylan, Socialist,
died aged 86 in Walsgrave
Hospital, Coventry, on Sunday
24 October.
Paddy had been a
member of the Socialist Party
of Ireland in Dublin before
emigrating to England in 1958
to work, like many others from
Ireland, in the then booming
car industry in Coventry. He
was secretary of the Coventry
Socialist Group in the early
1960s, made up largely of
other Socialists who had also
been forced to leave Ireland to
find work.
In Paddy Socialism has
lost a lifelong advocate here in
Coventry and in his native
Dublin. We, who had the
pleasure of knowing him, will
miss him..
PS
Letter
Dear Editors
I have just come across
on your website the (undated)
obituary of Wally Preston .
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[it was in the November 2000
issue - Eds]. I had not heard of
Wally's death, and was
saddened to learn of it. I met
him several times when he
was a member of the
International Socialists in the
1970s, and he once stayed the
night at my home. He was a
splendid speaker, a genuine
working-class intellectual and
a very likeable human being.
However, I must correct
your obituarist on one point.
He quotes my short history of
the IS/SWP and deduces that
the comrade who told an IS
Conference that a document
was so bad it must have been
written by a sociologist was
Wally. It was not. That speech
was made by the late Terry
Barrett, a London docker.
Barrett was a man of great
courage and principle (he
publicly opposed the dockers'
march in support of Enoch
Powell in 1968), but he was on
occasion given to a certain
demagogic anti-intellectualism
of a sort that I think Wally
would not have indulged in
.
IAN BIRCHALL,
LONDON N9
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The Socialist Party will
be standing a candidate in
Vauxhall, in the coming
general election. This is the
constituency covering our
Head Office in Clapham
High Street and the
campaign will be run by the
South London, Central
London and West London
branches.
A programme of
monthly activities (literature
stalls, leaflet distribution,
public meetings) is planned
between now and the
elections.
For details of how
you can join in these
activities, write to: London
Election Committee,
Socialist Party, 52 Clapham
High Street, London SW4
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Last month an adaptation of George Orwell’s
famous novel, “Nineteen-Eighty-Four”
appeared as a television play. The impact on
audiences was generally agreed to have been
startling—too startling, according to
newspaper complaints about unsuitability and
lack of “entertainment value.” The intention of
the author, however,was not to horrify
people, but to make them think and reflect,
and certainly the play must have succeeded
to a large extent in doing just that.
The story is set in
London of the future, which has
become Airstrip One in Oceania, one of three States
into which the world is divided. These states
are permanently at war with each other,
though the actual fighting takes place in
remote parts, in the jungle or the desert. The
social structure in Oceania is a hierarchy
consisting of the Proles, the Outer Party and
the Inner Party. At the bottom are the Proles,
people doing purely routine work, ignorant,
stupefied by abysmal and degrading
conditions. Not very different are the Outer
Party members, without privileges, living and
working like automata, named and numbered
on their clothing, rationed—and ceaselessly
spied on by the two-way tele-screen through
which the Thought Police watch and rule.—By
contrast, the Inner Party members are the
privileged, the givers of orders, the only
people with servants, with such luxuries as
wine, and with freedom to switch off their tele
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when
they wish. Above all stands the
figure of the leader, Big Brother. Whether he
is a real person is immaterial—he is the
“expression of the Party.” (…)
All the most detestable aspects of the
world today are enlarged and caricatured; the
slogans like “Ignorance Is Strength,” “War Is
Peace”; the Ministry of Plenty announcing
ration reductions as increases, the Ministry of
Peace proclaiming “another great victor over
our enemies,” the Ministry of Truth adjusting
the facts of past history and “amending all
records accordingly.”
The newspaper critics of this television
play generally assumed that it was to be taken as a warning against
totalitarianism as exemplified by Hitler’s
Germany and in Russia
today. When he wrote the
book in 1949, Orwell
doubtless drew
inspiration from the Nazi
regime and “Big Brother”
Stalin. Yet the warning is
not really against the
tendencies and
conditions in one “bad”
part of the world sullying the “good.” It is
against the actual and potential denial of
human qualities that is implicit in the world
set-up today. The theme is a powerful
condemnation of the whole system of
privileged and subject classes, of
governmental control to preserve the system
by crushing out any opposing idea. More than
anything, perhaps, it is a warning of the effect
of the mass-production of ideas on those who
lose the desire to think for themselves, and
who leave everything to “Big Brother.”
(From an article by “STAN”, Socialist
Standard, January 1955)
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Object and Declaration of
Principles
This declaration is the basis of our
organisation and, because it is also an
important historical document dating
from the formation of the party in
1904, its original language has been
retained.
Object
The establishment of a system of
society based upon the common
ownership and democratic control
of the means and instruments for
producing and distributing wealth
by and in the interest of the whole
community.
Declaration of Principles
The Socialist Party
of Great Britain
holds
That society as at present constituted
is based upon the ownership of the
means of living (i.e., land, factories,
railways, etc.) by the capitalist or
master class, and the consequent
enslavement of the working class, by
whose labour alone wealth is
produced.
That in society, therefore, there is an
antagonism of interests, manifesting
itself as a class struggle between
those who possess but do not
produce and those who produce but
do not possess.
That this antagonism can be
abolished only by the emancipation of
the working class from the domination
of the master class, by the conversion
into the common property of society of
the means of production and
distribution, and their democratic
control by the whole people.
That as in the order of social
evolution
the working class is the last class to
achieve its freedom, the emancipation
of the working class will involve the
emancipation of all mankind, without
distinction of race or sex.
That this emancipation must be the
work of the working class itself.
That as the machinery of government,
including the armed forces of the
nation, exists only to conserve the
monopoly by the capitalist class of the
wealth taken from the workers, the
working class must organize
consciously and politically for the
conquest of the powers of
government, national and local, in
order that this machinery, including
these forces, may be converted from
an instrument of oppression into the
agent of emancipation and the
overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and
plutocratic.
That as all political parties are
but the
expression of class interests, and as
the interest of the working class is
diametrically opposed to the interests
of all sections of all sections of the the
master class, the party seeking
working class emancipation must be
hostile to every other party.
The
Socialist Party of Great Britain,
therefore, enters the field of political
action determined to wage war
against all other political parties,
whether alleged labour or avowedly
capitalist, and calls upon the members
of the working class of this country to
muster under its banner to the end
that a speedy termination may be
wrought to the system which deprives
them of the fruits of their labour, and
that poverty may give place to
comfort, privilege to equality, and
slavery to freedom.
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