Myths of equality
Do not believe the common myth that we are no longer living in a class-divided society. Class is not about being “classy”. It is not something you can take on or reject. While there is still the institution of property in human society we are all born into families who either do or do not possess it. The Low Pay Unit has just produced Low Pay Review 4, which shows that the lowest paid workers today are relatively worse off than the lowest paid in 1886, when figures were first collected. More wealth is produced today than a century ago, but those who are born to no property and are therefore forced to go out and work, producing that wealth, now receive proportionately less of it.
Mr. Chris Pond, director of the Low Pay Unit, comments: “The government’s assertion that workers could protect their jobs by cutting wages is a cruel deception. It is in those industries in which wages have fallen furthest, precisely because of the reduction in demand for the goods and services produced, that have faced the biggest job losses” (Guardian, 2/6/81). And do not forget the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, which reported in 1979 (after five years of Labour government) that the richest one per cent in Britain own more wealth than the poorer eighty per cent.
Against this background, which is based on a minority class owning stocks and shares and other property, and deriving a vast unearned income from employing the rest of us, the “European Socialists” tell us to pull in our belts still further. On 28 April this year, an Amsterdam conference of the “Socialist International” agreed unanimously that “the time had come to promote wage controls firmly linked to economic democracy” (Guardian, 29/4/81).
Are you trying to escape from this wage-slavery which is imposed upon us? The Pearl Assurance Company has recently been advertising what they call the Capital Accumulator Plan. Basically, this means workers struggling to save up their hard-earned cash for them to spend on a few trinkets just before they die. We can be sure than Pearl shareholders, among others, will be profiting from the process.
But don’t they know there is a far more reliable “Capital Accumulator Plan”? It works like this. You inherit a few million pounds (be sure to choose the right parents) or, perhaps rob a few banks (be sure not to be caught and incarcerated). Then you employ (exploit) a few thousand workers (who chose the wrong parents) and accumulate a few million more. At the moment, there are dozens of annual Company reports being published which illustrate the process. Just take one example. Mothcrcare. Profit after tax: £8,634,000. Earnings per share: 13.39p. Dividends per share: 5p. Mr. S. Zilkha and Mr. E. Zilkha, both on the Board, have between them 11,478,776 shares. Their dividend will be £573,938.80. Their earnings will be £1,537,008. They are not employees, they are owners. They do not produce, they possess. “Profit per employee” is declared to be £4,422 for the year. Each worker, then, was paid just enough to keep them fit to work, and produced about as much again on top for the benefit of their masters. That is what is known as “Civilisation”.
Take power
The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a report. Poor and Powerless, showing how the gas or electricity is being cut off in more than 770 households each day because the families concerned cannot afford to pay the bills. This is in spite of the fuel industry’s Code of Practice introduced in 1976 supposedly to reduce the hardship of those very people. The reductions in the real value of child benefit, unemployment benefit, sickness and industrial injury, and maternity benefits together with cuts in the real value of wages, have contributed to worsen the situation since the onset of depression, For example, [ . . . ] disconnected 37,648 people last year, more than three times as many as in 1978. The report quotes particular cases, such as one low-paid family of six children, one of whom had just been discharged from hospital after a bone marrow operation, who were cut off for a gas debt of £17.
The piecemeal suggestions of the CPAG, such as forcing the fuel industries to obtain court orders for such cases, or raising benefits to low-income families, will not remove the problem. As long as people are dependent on employers or the state for a meagre income, poverty will remain an integral aspect of society. Only in a classless society, where everything is owned in common, and resources are freely available to all, will we be able to feel properly secure. As long as the profit system is retained, workers’ living standards will be cut down to the minimum that the employers can get away with it.
American fuel companies have a mechanism called a service limiter adapter. In most parts of America, it is illegal to cut off consumers’ power supplies, so they have found this simple way round it. The adapter can reduce the supply in varying degrees, so that particular appliances cease to function one by one. One New York official has said: “The great attraction is that defaulters face an uncomfortable time without lives being put at risk in freezing weather conditions”.
Sick society
The Office of Health Economics have reported that work days lost through sickness for March 1981 are 21 per cent below the average for the same month over the past four years. The drop coincides with a one million rise in unemployment and the report suggests that high unemployment has made people so afraid of losing their jobs that they may be going to work even when ill.
If not, however, perhaps they can become ill once they get there. The CBI, the Chemical Industries Association and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries have mounted a vigorous campaign against proposed regulations to protect workers from dangerous chemicals. Section Six of the Health and Safety at Work Act, if it is passed, would prescribe the testing of certain chemicals used in industry, such as Dioxin, used in pesticides, which causes miscarriages and deformed births. “Tightening controls will involve the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in added cost, and this is the core of their objection” (Guardian, 10/8/81). In a confidential memo to members in June, the CBI stated: “CBI is likely to challenge the philosophy underlying the new controls . . . Industry has consistently opposed over-regulation and unnecessary bureaucratic controls by governments in the field of harmful substances”.
In a society of common ownership, production would be solely to satisfy human needs, and not for the profit of a minority. Under democratic control, work can become a pleasure in itself. But when it is owned and controlled by the likes of the CBI, the slogan is wealth before health.
Housing
Speaking of wealth, the Daily Mail did an interesting profile of Michael Heseltine on 17 July. It showed how the man who was sent to Liverpool to work out for his Prime Minister the puzzle of why people living in slums are frustrated, has four houses himself. One in Belgravia, worth £600,000, a country estate in Oxfordshire worth £750,000, a £100,000 “hideaway” in Exford, and a smaller place in Swansea, “not for personal occupation”.
He took some of his fellow capitalists on a bus-trip round Liverpool to see how the other sort live, and to work out how to buy off their discontent. The same issue of the Daily Mail reported on the court case involving Per Hegard, the “man who could buy everything”. His ownership of several companies allows him to live off the work of thousands, riding on their misery. He has six Rolls Royce cars, three yachts, two jet planes, half a dozen mansions and a £15,000 cigar bill.
Those who work to create Hegard wealth for him have least and suffer most, and it is in defence of the property of such people that millions die in wars fought over the control of markets; and his grasping need for profit causes pollution, industrial danger, poverty, destruction and waste.
The World Bank's World Development Report for 1981 refers to the millions living and dying in extreme poverty, and contains two predictions, one “optimistic” and the other less so. The optimistic forecast is that by the end of the century the number on the verge of starvation will fall from 750 million to 630 million. On the other hand, they say, it may rise to 850 million. But it is in our hands to make it fall to nought immediately, and to end all poverty and war, if we combine to end the profit system and create a community where wealth is produced freely for direct use according to needs.
Clifford Slapper
1 comment:
That's the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
Post a Comment