Socialism better than striking (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are few plaudits from the media for workers who come out on strike; at such times it is more usual for the inbuilt assumption to operate, that the employers and the government are exercising reason and patience while the strikers, to get their own way, are putting the nation’s economy, health and safety at risk. This argument relies on the type of snap judgement and prejudice which exist most easily when reality is obscured and inconvenient facts are smothered. For example, in the water workers’ dispute the new Environment Minister, Tom King, condemned the strikers for refusing to put the matter to arbitration when the fact is that he himself, by planning to abolish the Water Council, has undermined the industry’s established arbitration machinery.

Many of the snap judgements are made by workers in frustration at having to cope with the effects of a strike. Nobody can be expected to be happy, as they contemplate a pavement awash from a broken, unrepaired water main, or queue at a dismal stand pipe, about a hardship so obviously avoidable. In sane terms, there is an immediate, constant human need for water; there is the equipment and the people to produce it as it is needed. Why can’t the two — needs and ability — match up? The common response, fed by the media, is blame the strikers, forgetting that the employers could easily finish the dispute by conceding the workers’ demands. Their refusal to so concede is, of course, based on arguments about economic survival, just as are the workers’ wage claims. It is those same arguments which sometimes lead to the employers imposing a lock-out or closing down a works regardless of the hardship this causes to the people who work there or who might need the works’ products.

Workers suffer the effects of a strike because, as mass consumers of commodities, they are the ones most vulnerable to a breakdown in supplies. For example, the recent health workers’ dispute caused anxiety and physical suffering to people who were waiting for treatment in National Health Service hospitals. The media made much of this, with heart-rending stories of delayed operations and frustrated treatment plans. No publicity was given to the fact that rich people were unaffected by the dispute for the simple reason that their class does not depend on an economy-straitened, mass-produced medical service like the NHS; they have access to the doctors and the clinics where strikes and disputes are unknown but where treatment costs hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds a day.

This contrast effectively illuminates the hypocrisy of the officially expressed concern for the welfare of sick people, for children and pensioners — the traditionally vulnerable source of so many human interest stories in the gutter press — when they are affected by a strike. The same compassion is notably absent when a government or a local authority, in the name of economy, attacks the welfare of those same vulnerable people by cutting services like home helps and day centres and by closing down hospitals and residential homes. When these assaults are made on people's lives they are represented as the fruits of prudence and reason.

The fact of the matter is that strikes and lock-outs are not matters of morality except that they conform to the basic morality of capitalism which is that of a social system operating on class antagonisms. The opposing classes of capitalism arise from the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, which means that the class which does not own those means is reduced in order to live to selling their labour power to the owners. This is not immoral; it is an essential, historical feature of capitalism.

Private ownership is also responsible for the character of wealth under capitalism — that of commodities, of goods which are produced primarily for sale and profit. This is all-pervading; even cases like medical treatment, which may seem superficially unconnected with commodity production, are in fact very much a part of the productive and exploitative processes of capitalism. NHS hospitals are like vehicle repair shops and servicing bays, where the machines are human beings who are patched and tuned up to get them back on the road of employment again. Commodity production is motivated by the realisation of profit and the accumulation of capital; unless there is a prospect of these there is no production. So closures, redundancies and the like are not affronts to an eternal human morality; they are inexorable products of the class-antagonistic nature of capitalist society.

Occasionally, among their crocodile tears, the media may crudely philosophise about the possibility that there is a better way of doing things. Indeed there is, although it is one not to be dreamed of in even the wilder recesses of Fleet Street. To say that capitalism essentially has a class antagonism is to say that it must divide the human race into two factions endlessly disputing over the division of wealth at a time when enough can be produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. It is to say that this social system cannot operate in the harmonious manner which modern productive powers enable and demand.

If the class antagonisms are essential to capitalism they can be assessed and remedied only by reference to the basic nature of the system and that, as we have said, is the private ownership of the means of life. There is only one way in which that basis can be changed; after private ownership the next step must be common, worldwide, human ownership. The alternative to capitalism is socialism.

As socialism changes the basis of society, so it will bring in changed social relationships which will immediately be expressed and recognised in human harmony. Social ownership of the means of living entails a classless society, a world of united people whose entire interests are entirely as one. So socialism will replace antagonism with co-operation; it will substitute abundance for scarcity and human welfare for minority dominance. Its morality will replace that of privilege and repression with open access and freedom. It is the true alternative to strikes and to all the other conflicts of capitalism.