HOBBES He stripped bare the mechanism of religion and state

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which allowed his message to get through, but the confidence with which the ruling , class regard the Chapples of the trade union movement.

McShane does not truly regard the problem of press witch-hunts as being rooted in class ownership.

He sees it as a problem of winning over journalists to the side of "progressive' Yet MeShane makes clear that what they are to be won to is not defence of the independent interests of the working class but the bureaucratic interests of the labour officials.

"Every month the TUC's General Council meets. The news value of the meetings varies. Sometimes the General Council will take a decision on a matter of great public interest; sometimes the meeting ends without any but routine, humdrum matters having been discussed.

"Yet the TUC holds a press conference for industrial reporters after each meeting-no matter what the news value-and the TUC General Secretary comes along and chats with reporters.

«For both the journalists and the TUC it does not really matter if the General Council meeting provides news or not. The news conference maintains contact at a personal level between Len Murray and the TUC press officer and It also gives the journalists a chance to question Murray in person about some point which is not opposed to the new Tory Bill. Lord Gibson, chairman of the parent company of the Financial Times, declared that it was better to retain "an unworkable blunderbus which is seldom invoked "than to implement the new Bill.

Yet the National Union of Journalists and the Civil Service unions, which have most at risk from the legislation, have as yet mounted по concerted campaign against the Bill, which could be law next Spring.

This is plainly urgent if there is to be any struggle for the defence of democratic rights against this latest Tory attack.

NEXT WEEK eview of the b Beneath the Ci formally connected with the General Council's business.

«The whole exercise, whether or not there is a page lead for the next day, helps to ou the connection that the TUC has built with the corps of national industrial reporters."

It is to this task of oiling that 'connection' that the book should be dedicated.

Dromey The question of day to day dealing with the press for workers in struggle is a tactical one.

But unless such tactics are based on strategic understanding of the class nature of the capitalist press all struggles will inevitably become diverted from taking action to win, into playing the game of trying to influence 'public opinion' and to win favourable articles in the press.

The question is not whether from time to time an article that is not actually hostile will appear, because an individual journalist is favourably disposed. (That indeed can and does happen).

It is what happens when the interests of capital are under attack.

The witch-hunt then is not a product of 'bad journalism' as MoShane appears to believe, but of the essential role that the press plays in attacking workers in It is more important for workers to understand that a "bad press" is probably a sign that they are doing something right, than to indulge in bureaucratic manoeuvres to try to square the circle.

Workers whose leaders are praised for their statesmanlike qualities in a dispute can be sure that they are being led to disaster.

Chasing after public opinion is a euphemism for subjugating the class interests of workers to the reactionary interests of the petty bourgeoisie.

The task of those who truly speak in the interests of the working class is not to provide an occasional antidote to the daily dose of poison but to mobilise and forge a party capable of leading to the seizing of control of the press as part of the struggle for socialism.

PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report Chapple 1979 marks 300 years since the death of Thomas is an anniversary that is passing with the minimum of acknowledgement.

Hobbes would have understood that. The uncomfortable truths he laid bare concerning the nature of power in bourgeois society were generally ignored or reviled in his lifetime, and have seldom since then been valued at their true worth.

Value The concept of value lay at the heart of Hobbes's philosophy.

Marx showed his appreciation of that when in Volume 1 of Capital he approvingly quoted from Hobbes's Levia«The value of worth of a man is, of all other things, his price - that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power"

This grasp of the concept of labour power illustrates how firmly rooted in the emergent bourgeois social relations was the thought of Hobbes.

He rejected the outmoded feudal concepts of man's value as being determined by his place in a divinely ordained social hierarchy.

A man's value is decided by his economic status in a freely competitive society.

The central problem for Hobbes, however, was how in such a society were the competing economic interests to be reconciled so as to establish a stable social order?

Anarchy

If they failed to achieve reconciliation then the prospect was anarchy, chaos and death.

It is this fear of death that Hobbes sees as driving men to establish a common political authority which will hold in check the tendencies to disruption and anarachy.

Hobbes was writing in the midst of the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century.

He was acutely aware of the necessity of creating a political power capable of achieving, in the short term, a stable social order as against the demands of the radicals, and, in the long term, a social equilibrium that would hold in balance the dynamic forces released by the bourgeois revolution.

To achieve a stable society men choose to agree to erect a common political authority whose rule they accept out of self-interest "the erection of some common Power, by the fear whereof, they may be compelled ... to keep the Peace amongst themselves"

Man's obligation to obey the state is based upon rational self-interest, not upon a recognition of a divinely ordained natural law.

The varied interests in society find common cause in the recognition of a supreme power which reconciles the private and public interests.

This rigorous definition of the roots of political obligation has appalled generations of bourgeois political philosophers who have found the philosophy of John Locke more congenial. Locke, writing in the later seventeenth centruy, also conjectures that political power is Hobbes based on a social contract, but it is an agreement from which either of the parties can withdraw, not a surrender of the wills of the subjects to supreme authority such as described by Hobbes.

Yet if Hobbes's vision is bleak, his logic is rigorous ano his imagination more fertile than that of Locke.

Hobbes makes the present-day bourgeois political philosopher uncomfortable because he pierces to some of the central elements in the nature of the capitalist state; above all, that there must be in capitalist society a sovereign power whose authority is ultimately indisputable.

For Marxists, whatever the form of bourgeois rule, whether monarchy or republic, democracy or •fascism, the capitalist state in its many guises remains the : supreme arbiter.

The relatively freely competitive society of which Hobbes wrote has long given way to the era of imperialism, of a world capitalist economy dominated by multinational corporations and competing nation states battling for survival.

More than ever, is the existence of a sovereign indivisible authority essential for the maintenance of the capitalist system.

No amounts of effort at reducing government intervention in the economy and allowing the "forces of the market" to proceed unfettered can detract from the central fact that the capitalist state, far from surrendering its powers, is today summoning its strength for a major trial of strength with the organised working class.

The advance of the modern proletariat could not have been conceived by Hobbes.

Yet he was well aware of the need to condition the lower orders to a state of obedience.

For this, he reasoned, the instrument of religion was vital. Hobbes was, along with Bacon, the founder of modern mechanical materialism.

He set about establishing a scientific understanding of the workings of society.

For him society was composed of human atoms each proceeding on its own individual course yet all held in check and reconciled bya supreme sovereign authority.

It was, as Marx explained, Locke in The Holy Family, an attempt to reduce human passions to the mechanical laws of nature.

This thorough going materialism of Hobbes forms part of that continuum of mechanical materialism which stretches through Holbach and Helvetius in eighteenth century France to Feuerbach in the nineteenth century, to be consciously negated and subsumed in the dialectical materialism of Marx.

Engels

As Engels wrote, 'if Englishmen do not exactly relish the compliment he [Marx. paid their ancestors, the more's the pity". (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

This addition the development of human understanding had for Hobbes a very practical political conclusion.

For Hobbes, religion is part of "policy"; it is an essential instrument to inculcate obedience among all classes in society; it is the cement of social cohesion.

Certainly Hobbes did not conceive of the extent of class differentiation that the development of capitalism would create, but he. was acutely conscious of the dangers of subversion and of the role religion could play in either fomenting or stifling unrest.

Repays study

However scholastic he may appear at first reading, Hobbes repays study by Marxists.

He grasped, however inadequately, the new forces released by the bourgeois revolution; he spelled out the essential nature of the bourgeois state as an organ of repression.

Of course he could not go beyona that to reveal, as dio varx, the state as the "central committee of the bourgeoisie": but he sharply delineated the elements of political power in a manner that is much to the discomfiture of the apologists for the ruling class.

Nor do they find any more appealing his materialism and his explanation of the political purposes of religion.

His theory of the sovereignty of the state, his materialism and his rationality all distinguish him as a profoundly revolutionary thinker whose contribution to our understanding of the nature of society still demands our attention.

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Hobbes, the most perceptive philosopher of the English bourgeois revolution. Yet it