Editorial: The War and You. (1914)

Editorial from the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we went to Press with our last issue, but too late for us to deal with the events in our pages, the great capitalist States of Europe were flinging declarations of war at each other and rushing in frenzied haste to the long-expected and carefully prepared for Armageddon.

When we say that this mad conflict has been long expected and well-prepared for we make a statement which is almost trite. However much the masters of Europe may have tried to hide the underlying causes and objects of their military preparations, they have never taken any pains to conceal the fact that they were arming against “the day”, and that “the day” was inevitable. Miles of paper and tons of printing ink have been used in the various countries in order to disseminate among the “common” people—i.e., the working class—explanations calculated to fix the blame on other shoulders. In each country voluminous “exposures” have been made of the villainous machinations of the “foreigner”, always in such deep contrast to the Christian innocence of the exposers. But so far have any of the chief parties ever been from disguising the inevitability of the event they have been arming for, that they have used these very “exposures” to obtain the assent of public opinion to the race for armaments and the preparations for wholesale slaughter.

On the Continent they speak of British hypocrisy. The truth is that there is among the rulers of every capitalist country, hypocrisy enough and to spare, and the attitude of British Statesmen toward neutrals and the working class at home reeks with characteristic hypocrisy. In spite of the fact that nowadays very few even of their working-class dupes really believe in the “altruistic” humbug regarding the maintenance of the “independence of small nations”, or attach any importance to Asquith, Grey & Co’s drivel about the “honour of Britain”, it is on those canting grounds that our masters seek to justify their plunge into the red vortex of war. 

However hard our masters may try to cover their actions with the tattered and slimy cloak of “national honour” like slobbering and sentimental frauds, and however a politically and economically ignorant working class may applaud and echo these sentiments as if in an effort to hide from themselves brutal facts of which they are conscious and ashamed, there remains the obstinate truth, obvious to anyone who will go out into the streets and listen to what is there said, that even the working class realise that the motive for the war is in the last resort an economic one. Behind the covering screen of cant about British honour and German perfidy is the consciousness, frequently voiced, that it is a question, not of German perfidy but of German trade; not of British honour, but of wider markets for the disposal of British surplus products.

Let us, then, clear away from our minds the befogging folds of cant and humbug in order that we may see the facts naked and understand them, and face the situation as it really is.

We must understand, first of all, that it is essentially the character of the modern system of wealth production to bring into existence a tremendous amount of surplus wealth. This surplus wealth is that portion which the workers produce but do not receive; the portion which goes to the employers and other sections of the ruling class in the shape of Rent, Interest and Profit.

There are two things peculiar about this surplus: (1) Production cannot continue unless it is produced, because the landlord only lets his premises in order to get his rent, the investor only lends his money in order to get interest, and the employer only employs to get profit. (2) Production can only continue whilst this product can be sold, because the proceeds of the sale to pay the landlord his rent, the investor his interest, and to realise for himself that profit which is his sole incentive to engage in industrial enterprise.

The result of these two features of modern production is very simple. They have brought the master class of every capitalist country face to face with the problem of finding a market for the disposal of their surplus products. And this problem becomes every day more pressing for the following reason.

The wealth produced by the workers is divided into two portions—the portion which they receive (wages) and the portion which is retained by the masters. The portion they receive is just sufficient to enable them to reproduce their strength and efficiency, and is therefore nearly stationary. But as the means and methods by which they produce are improved, the total of their product increases. Hence, since their share remains practically constant, what remains—the surplus or master’s share— increases in proportion as the machinery of production improves. Therefore, since this machinery improves at a prodigious rate, the surplus which the masters have to find a market for becomes larger every day.

As the rate of surplus wealth produced increases, it becomes more impossible for the inhabitants of the country in which it is produced—inhabitants of both classes—to use it up.The consumption of the working class is limited to that which their wages will buy, and therefore cannot encroach upon the surplus which is just that portion of their product their wages will not buy back. The consumption of the master class is limited on the one hand by their physical capacity, and on the other hand by their necessity for ever increasing their capital. Hence an outlet for it must be found in foreign markets.

Every reader will go with us so far, of course. Every British working man feels that behind all the cant and slobber about honour and the rest of it, is the solid, practical consideration that the successful issue of the war will cripple a great trade rival and provide increased opportunity of work for British workers—and so far our theory does not conflict with this. That the conception is false, however, we shall see when we return to it, as we shall later.

Military history of the past fifty years has been based upon this fact. Britain has gained control of the sea trade routes, and has seized most of the best markets of the world. At the same time it has been the policy of her statesmen to take up a repressive attitude towards the aspirations of all possible rivals. Hence the Crimea was fought in order to prevent Russia establishing herself on the trade routes to the East. Since then every endeavour has been made to prevent Russia getting an outlet to the sea through a port free from the ice grip in winter, and from the oppression of commanding forts of rival nations. This antagonism continued until the Japanese put a stopper on Russian hopes in the East, and other jealous eyes were watching her nearer home. 

Now took place a change of policy—or rather, a change in the direction of the old policy. A new rival had come to ripeness. And here we come to the drivel about national “honour”. First, a treaty with Japan releases the larger part of the British Naval forces in the Far East. Then an arrangement with France transfers the French Fleet to the Mediterranean, and clears the way for the concentration of the British Fleet in Home waters.

Now these facts are matters of history, and allow of no dispute. Therefore it is quite plain that so far was it from being any question of honour which impelled the British Government to range themselves on the side of France, that they had deliberately planned the present situation years ago.

Therefore when Sir Ed. Grey came before the British House of Commons and declared that it was simply a point of honour for the British Fleet to defend the Northern coast of France he spoke with his tongue in his cheek. It was not honour but just cut and dried policy. A man so completely versed in these matters as is Sir Edward Grey must have known that there could have been no such qualified neutrality as this. In the face of such an attitude as this not only was the Northern coast of France protected from German attack, but her Southern shore and her Fleet in the Mediterranean also; for the German Fleet dared not put to sea for fear of being cut off by the British ships and caught in a trap. Meanwhile German shipping was to be at the mercy of the French and the latter left to transport troops from their African colonies without a care in the world.

As far as effecting the course of the war goes England could do very little more. If Germany was to be strangled at sea by a “neutral” nation who could not strike very hard on land, then Germany had but little more to fear from flouting that nation’s “love” for Belgium. And this is so very obvious that it must have been plain to those who entered into the arrangement with France by which the defence of the French coasts was shouldered by the British Navy.

That arrangement was no secret to Germany, and its purpose and object must have been perfectly clear to them. It meant that, under the guise of neutrality, perhaps, the British naval force was to be thrown into the scale against Germany. How would this affect the situation of Belgium? The very foundation of the treaty to respect the independence of Belgium was the assumption that when either France or Germany should attempt to use Belgium as a jumping off ground against the other, it would be at the cost of arraigning Britain on the opposing side

But years before the war broke out the British Fleet was placed at the disposal of France, under a cunning arrangement that could not possibly deceive those against whom it was directed, and on whom the responsibility of meeting it fell. All they had to consider, then, in making their plans, was whether the British Naval force against them, and the rapidity of action more than ever necessary by reason of their strangulation at sea, the employment of the British Expeditionary force against them was too dear a price to pay for the advantages of a passage through Belgium. Whether the German military authorities blundered or not, they decided to take the risk.

There is no escaping, then, from the conclusion that British statesmen deliberately planned some years ago to place the country in such a position that the outbreak of the war must inevitably have involved both the participation of Britain and the invasion of Belgium. So much, then, for the canting reference to honour and the preservation of the independence of small nations—such as the Boers, for instance!

It is not for us to say that there is anything to be ashamed of in admitting that the war  has an economic basis. It is certainly more honest than throwing it back upon such humbug as the “honour of the British nation”. But it has this disadvantage in the eyes of the ruling class—it leaves this clear issue facing the working class (who are to do the fighting): what economic advantage are they going to gather as the reward of the blood they spill, the lives they sacrifice, and the miseries they endure through this most ghastly of all ghastly wars?

To this question their masters have but one reply, and that is based on an economic fallacy. They say that as a result of humbling Germany British trade will expand and there will be plenty of work for everybody. Only so long as the ruling class can maintain the belief in this fallacy among the working class can they hope to get working-class support for their wars. The old “bull dog breed” brand of “patriotism” is nearly dead—as the War Office recognised when, in their great recruiting campaign of a few months ago, they abandoned their time-worn policy of trying to convince the worker that he has a “glorious heritage” to fight for, and appealed to him on the ground that civil life had such poor prospects to offer him that he would be better off in the Army.

The contention that the crushing of Germany would lead to the extension of British trade and plenty of work for the British worker is plausible and perhaps partly true. British trade may certainly expand, but then the curious thing is that expansion is its normal condition, yet unemployment accompanies the unceasing growth of “Britain’s prosperity”.

Extracts from two Government publications will knock the bottom clean out of the argument that the expansion of British trade necessarily means less unemployment for British workers.

The 55th No. of the Statistical Abstract (Cd. 4258) published in 1908, gives the following information (p. 69):

                                                                     1897                             1907

Total exports of the United Kingdom     £234,219,708          £426,035,083

Proportion per head of population                £5 17s 2d.                      £9 13s 3d.

(The figures refer to the produce of the United Kingdom only.)

In ten years, it will be seen, the total exports of home produce almost doubled, and even as regards proportion to population, jumped up from £29 5s 10d. to £48 6s 3d. per family of five people. Now what was the result upon unemployment? Has this gigantic increase in the national exports provided “plenty of work”?

The Local Government Board’s Statistical Memoranda Cd 4671 tells us that the average unemployment among Trade Unions making returns was in 1897, 3.65; in 1907, 4.3.

So we arrive at the result, fatal to the argument that the seizure of Germany’s trade must mean “plenty of work for the British worker”, that this vast increase of exports which took place in a single decade, was actually accompanied by an increase of unemployment. The reason for this is very simple. It is due to that unceasing improvement in machinery which is constantly making human productive energy more fertile and enabling each worker to produce more wealth in a given time.

Now what would be the effect of Great Britain capturing a large portion of Germany’s export trade? The capitalist economists say that it would result in the absorption of the unemployed. Suppose we accept that, even then what is the position? One of the first effects of a decrease in unemployment is the rise of wages, as is indicated from the Local Government’s Board’s Cd. 4671 (p. 44):

Year Unemployment Wages

1897          3.65      162.3

1898          3.15      166.5

1899          2.40      170.4

1900          2.85      178.7

1901          3.80      177.0

1902          4.60      174.7

1903          5.30      173.7

1904          6.8        172.8

1905          5.6        173.3

1906          4.1        175.7

It will be noticed that there is a fall, a rise, and a second fall of unemployment recorded in the above table, and in agreement therewith, a rise, a fall, and a second rise in wages.

Wages are the price of labour power. Labour power, like other commodities, cannot  be sold in the face of cheaper and efficient competitors. It has one such competitor—machinery.

Think what the general nature of the pressure of machinery upon labour power is. It is not that this pressure is only asserted when and where some new invention has appeared. No, on the contrary there are many labour saving devices which are anything but new which still have not altogether displaced the means which were in use before them, though they are conquering fresh ground every day. The steam plough is an example in farming, the morticing machinery in joinery, and the Linotype Composing Machine in printing.

In almost every field of industry the workers know that what they are doing by hand can be done quicker with machinery, and what they are doing with machinery can be done still quicker with more efficient machinery. Take the cylinder machine in printing. First a worker is necessary to “lay on” the sheets of paper and another to “take off”. Then the invention of “flyers” knocked out the latter, and the perfection of a pneumatic appliance made the “layer-on” redundant. Yet today there are probably far more machines in operation without flyers than there are with the “laying on” apparatus.

So it is in every branch of industry. At every point operations are being performed by the means that are cheapest today, but at every point also other and more highly developed means are trying to oust the old. They can only advance by cheapening the productive process, that is, by economising the labour cost.

It is clear from this that a rise in wages, desirable as this is, is after all a handicap on labour power. At a given price it offers a given resistance to the advance of its competitor, machinery; but a rise in that price (a rise in wages) at once encourages the introduction of machinery which will enable the work to be done by fewer men.

For instance, suppose ten men with horse ploughs can plough a field at the same cost as three men with a steam plough outfit. If all their wages go up 5s. the steam plough at once becomes the cheaper means, because the advance of wages is only 15s. on three men, while in the other case the rise affects ten men, and amounts to 50s. 

So it is seen that the inevitable result of the capturing of German trade must be after a little that machinery would advance and, by displacing workers, provide a new unemployed army. This indeed always happens with the expansion of trade. The exports of British products increased by over £50,000,000 in the single year 1906-7, yet so easily did machinery absorb the “shock” that, instead of there being “plenty of work”, unemployment rose from 4.1 to 4.3!

So much, then, for the economic fallacy with which the masters, with their tales of their preparations for capturing German trade, try to make the workers think they are interested in the issue of the war. The workers are wage-slaves, and as such they are and always must be subject to economic laws which govern the wages system. An unemployed army suitable to the capitalist requirements of the time is one of the constant provisions of the operation of those laws—working through the development of machinery. No matter how trade may expand, or whether the German masters rule the country or the English masters continue to do so, this unemployed army will continue to be produced, and will determine the main conditions of working-class existence.

In addition, to take a job from a German in order to give it to a Briton still leaves unemployment in the working class, and the unemployed German simply follows the job to this country, and thus unemployment is again in our midst.

The question for the working class, then, is not that of British or German victory, since either event will leave them wage-slaves living upon wages. Under German rule those wages cannot be reduced lower than under British, for every British workingman knows that the masters who are shouting so loudly today for us to go and die in defence of our shackles and their shekels, have left no stone unturned to force wages to the lowest possible limits.

The question, then, before the workers, is the abolition of the whole social system of which war and unemployment are integral parts, and the establishment of society upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production—the establishment, that is, of SOCIALISM.

Why social reform is useless. (1914)

From the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has all along claimed that the only solution for the social diseases rampant in capitalist society is Socialism. The professional “Socialists” of the B.S.P. and I.L.P. type, whilst claiming the same in a somewhat misty and hazy manner, seek always to put some pet scheme of social reform before the working class. They are not alone, however, in their schemes of reform, for the capitalist class are well in the front as far as reform is concerned. The consequence of this being that some reformers who are able to hold their situations cling more tightly to the governing class, whilst others not so fortunate have jumped to the other end and have become anarchists, or what is the same, syndicalists.

Reform, to-day, chiefly through the activities of the politicians of the master class, has become very popular with the mass, many regarding it as eventually being capable of removing the anomalies of existing society.

Let us, therefore, see what reform has already accomplished for the workers; we shall then have an idea what to expect from the effects of reform in the future.

Before examining these reforms, however, let us, very briefly, look upon those people who are especially interested in social reform.

First of all there is the sentimentalist, who, without any reason at all, is always wailing about the afflicted and poverty-stricken, so much so that he is absolutely blinded by his own tears from seeing the true state of affairs. Then there is the petty bourgeois reformer, the small capitalist, who at times may describe himself as a “Socialist,” but is always showing his fear of Socialism, for in his ignorance he believes that Socialists will confiscate what little property he may have—it may be his wedding ring or in some cases his house. Then again, we have the professional politician whose business it is to pander to the “mob.” In his cunning way he will invent all sorts of nostrums for the people, who, through their ignorance, are led to believe now one set of politicians, now another set, never realising that they are being hoodwinked by them all.

How these humbugs have been using the Home Rule for Ireland red herring to befool the mass is at once a comedy and a tragedy. And yet people will go on believing, in their simplicity, that the so-called leaders of the opposition and the Government are serious in their manoeuvres. They cannot see that it is merely a means to keep the workers divided and ignorant of their true social status.

The many reforms one might mention, instead of benefiting, injure the workers. One of the pet reforms of the sentimentalists is the “feeding of the school children.” Now, every sane man and woman wishes to see children fed ; but we cannot afford to allow sentiment to get the better of our reason. We know that those who possess children wish to feed their children by their own effort. State grants merely make, in most cases, subservient wage-slaves of those who receive them, thus making the work of the Socialist more difficult.

But what of the economic effect of such a measure ? Why, a woman who has children to look after, by paying a small sum of money to “farm” out her youngest child whilst her elder children are being fed at school, is enabled to .go to the factory or mill and be exploited at a low wage as married women are known to be.

The Old Age Pension scheme is another Act that has benefited the capitalists immensely. For whereas it costs to maintain a pauper something like fourteen shillings a week, they manage to get the aged State pauper to exist on five shillings. The Compensation Act seems on the face of it to be of much value to the worker. By being crippled or maimed they are sometimes able to get a certain sum of money as compensation. It may be true that in individual cases the Act has had some advantage for the worker. But it is hardly necessary to-day to repeat the facts of “too old at forty,” or a man with a slight injury not engaged, or if engaged, then at a lower rate of pay. The Compensation Act is a very good Act—for the capitalists.

We shall not talk of the Labour Exchanges, for even the over liberal-labour M.P.’s who at the inception of the bill claimed it to be Messiah itself, are now calling them “blackleg institutions.”

The Insurance Act again, compels the workers to submit to be mulcted of a certain sum of money so that they may keep going a lot of well-paid officials who are to ticket and number them and keep them in their respective grades.

The “Health” Insurance Act is a direct affront to the workers. It says it can prevent sickness ; it can do no such thing. Disease is bred by the conditions under which the workers must toil and live ; only Socialism can ensure healthy working and living conditions. Those who supported the “Health” Insurance Act avow by their action that they are the direct enemies of the working class.

Then there is the class of reformers who advocate the nationalising and municipalising of private enterprises, such as the railways, trams, etc. Here, again, we find that where national undertakings are in existence the lot of the workers engaged in those concerns is very little, if any, better than the wage-slaves in private firms. We know how the postal employees fare in the hands of a capitalistic government ; how the municipal workers of Leeds, Blackburn, and Dublin have been treated by unscrupulous and tyrannical corporations.

It is the very nature of capital, whether it be organised on national, local, or private basis, to oppress and exploit the workers. Only when it suits the capitalist class—who now have the mastery in these matters—will municipal or national enterprises be undertaken, and then only for their benefit.

“But,” say some ignorant persons, “it cannot be denied that these undertakings are able to cut down rates and taxes.” By such talk are they able persuade the workers that public enterprise is a benefit—because it saves rates and taxes. Before taxes are levied a person must receive, an income of no less than £160 a year; and in so far as the worker comes within the Health Insurance Act., i.e., receives less than £160 per year, he is not liable to pay taxes. “But he pays rates ?” shrieks our reformer. “For he certainly lives in a house—poor one though it be.” Here again our reformer is wrong : the workmen pays merely a rental for his house, the rent going up or down according to the demand for and supply of houses within a given area. The rents of the workers are not affected by the rising and lowering of the rates, which proves that it does not concern the working class, but only the property owners.

“But,” the reformer will say, ” if he does not pay taxes directly, he certainly pays indirectly, on his tea, tobacco, etc.” Again our social reformer errs ; for the worker is not robbed in the sphere of exchange. It is in the domain of production where the robbery of the workers is carried on. The latter, although producing all the wealth of society, are only allowed to buy a small portion of the wealth which they produce. Receiving a wage, the price of his labour power, he is not able to buy up all that he has produced. Therefore the concern of the working class is not that tobacco, or tea, or any commodity is dear, but that the major portion of what they produce is filched from them. It would make precious little difference to the working class as a whole, if all articles were cheapened in price if in like proportion their money wages dropped, or vice versa, their money wages rose while prices rose in the same proportion. The working class have never had the power, nor can they have such power under capitalism, of dictating their terms to the master class. Which proves that it is not the price of an article that matters, but the control by the workers of their own working conditions which Socialism alone can give, which matters.

Of late we have had the land taxers, with Lloyd George at their head, trying to revive an old nostrum. What villains these landed gentry are ! Certainly no one can say a wrong word against the people Lloyd George represents—for is he not the heaven anointed “Messiah,” himself ! Yes, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, the landlords are sucking the blood of the farm labourers and workers in general, but it is a mere flea-bite to the outrageous plunder and spoliation of your masters, the capitalists.

This nostrum, if put into practice, will certainly relieve capitalists of a burden. But will it help the workers ? These professional diddlers claim it will by opening up new land and industries. By such means, it is asserted, will the unemployed be absorbed and wages, as a consequence, raised.

Yes, but the land taxer has never looked into the nature of capital. The capitalist reformer looks to this scheme as being a means to increase profits. Seeking the support of the workers, he leads them to believe that wages will also rise. History shows that although profits have risen enormously, real wages have fallen. And this has come about through capital becoming greater by inventions of machinery and the speeding up of the workers.

This has been going on all along and taxation of land values will in no way disturb that process. Thus while land taxation will benefit the members of the commercial class, (who own little land), by easing their burden of taxation, it in no way guarantees to the workers better living conditions.

Having then examined the most popular and so-called beneficial reforms, we find their ill effects far outweigh what can be said in their favour. And naturally so. For the fact is that reforms which are enacted by a capitalist government are used generally for the benefit of the master class. They touch only the externals, and never the internal or foundation of society. So long as the basis of capitalist society remains, so long will the social diseases, that are a result of that basis, remain.

The whole foundation of capitalism must be removed for Socialism to take its place, for not till then will society be relieved of the social cancer that affects it to-day. Mere talk that reform may benefit under certain imaginary conditions that may arise in the future is futile. We as Socialists know that we cannot afford to deal with fantastical side issues ; for we are convinced that Socialism is the only means for the emancipation of the working class. Therefore, we must ever be advocating Socialism before the working class so that they may be prepared for the change in society.

“But,” say some reformers notably of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. type, “we cannot afford to wait so long, and besides, we are legislating Socialism step by step until we shall have secured the lot.” Our misguided reformer cannot see that it is not Socialism that is evolving, but capitalism. Day by day, as capitalism becomes more and more powerful, the workers’ position in, society becomes increasingly deplorable. The capitalists (who legislate—not the workers) will not legislate themselves out of power gradually despite the talk of some crazy people about “revolutionary reform,” rather will they seek to increase their power.

Only by the working class themselves taking conscious revolutionary political action will the fight be finished and their victory assured. By the workers taking such action, the capitalists, in their attempt to save their power, will dole out reforms in plenty, but the working class politically and intellectually organised will not be hood-winked as they are to-day. They will, through their political supremacy, abolish private ownership of the means of life, and institute social ownership for social use. Then and only then will society be freed from the glaring anomalies that exist to-day, viz., luxury and idleness on the one hand ; poverty and slavery on the other.

L. Marks

Building trade’s decline. (1914)

From the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leading article with the above heading was published in the “Daily Chronicle” of Saturday, July 11th, 1914. This article is remarkable for the damaging information against the private ownership of the means of life, and for the “tender-heartedness” shown by this capitalist politician. Mr. Chiozza Money, M.P., the author of the article, has, as usual, condemned the economic and political state of the country, and switches the attention of working-class readers to Parliament—the saviour of the people—the place from which can issue the commands, the admonitions, the laws to make it so that all shall be well for the working class in the “better times” that are coming under capitalism.

Mr. Money says: “Between 1901 and 1911 an army of men passed out of the building trade in England and Wales, and that in spite of an increase in population of three and a half millions. Whereas in 1901, the population being 32,500,000, the Census showed 1,042,864 men employed in building and works of construction, in 1911, the population having advanced to 36,100,000, the number of persons employed in building and works of construction fell to 946,127. Three more years have elapsed, and in the interim, there is reason to fear, the number of persons employed in the industry has been stagnant or even subject to further decline. . The decline in employment is therefore a very serious thing for the nation, merely regarding the matter from the point of view of engaging our people in worthy occupations. When, however, we remember the nature of the industry concerned, we have to deplore in the figures referred to, not merely a decline in a noble employment, but a decline in the consumption of buildings, and especially of buildings in their aspect as the homes of our people.” Noble employment! Ye gods! So noble that the State has taken pity on those employed in the building trade to the extent of seven shillings unemployed benefit and ten shillings on sick ; so noble that they swarm like bees about a big job, and try to get the “glad eye” of the foreman ; so noble that when in work they have to speed up and compete one against the other—”Brothers” in the branch, and Brutes on the job.

We of the Socialist Party can tell where a great many of the builders’ “hands” have gone. Many have been forced to seek the shelter of the “Homes” provided for those broken on the wheel of industry—the workhouses ; many have “downed tools” for good, and walk the streets of “Old England” with “dull-eyed melancholly.” Hundreds have packed up and gone to distant lands with, the hope of getting “the staff of life” easier, and of securing a better prospect for their children. They have left this “tight little island,” blessed with hundreds of Acts of Parliament passed in the interest of the working class—so we have been told—left the land “blessed” with the history of “great men” who have looked after those who worked in “noble occupations.” “The Salvation Army” can account for some who have “got out and got under” ; in the workshops of the “Blood and Fire” brigade they have tasted the sweets of capitalism.

Mr. Chiozza Money has criticised the workings of capitalism, and we must try and “better the instruction.” Let us quote again. “It is fundamentally important that Britain should be rebuilt. It is by far the most important social question. The inside of a house matters much, and the outside of a house matters no less. Between their interior and their exterior aspects, buildings for an industrial nation become the framework of the lives of the majority of its people. They either let in or keep out the sun. They either form beautiful and healthy cities or environ town populations is ugliness and misery. They either make or mar our lives. Let no man imagine that by securing himself in a decent home he has rid his own person or his own family of the curse of bad housing. A house can never be an individual thing or a private thing. . . The private investor has failed and is failing to give the nation the houses which it needs. With the money which has been invested abroad in the last four years by British investors every slum in this country could have been wiped out, and when I say this I use the term ‘slum’ to include not merely the most squalid streets, but to cover about one-fifth of all the town dwellings of the country.”

What is the “remedy” of this capitalist M.P. ? It is to make it the duty of local authorities to “house their people well,” and to assist them with “supplies of cheap capital.” We can understand Mr. Money very well in his insidious way of keeping working-class attention still longer fixed on the lips and promises of the capitalist politicians. We understand from his wail that this social mess in the shape of “houses” is because of naughty capitalists ; much “good” will result when the “good” capitalists predominate. We, of the working class are according to this capitalist prize-fighter—the children of those who house us, of those who feed and clothe us, who pay us wages, and kill our brothers and sisters in Factory, Mill, and Mine, and fine themselves, through a manager, £24 for murdering over 400 miners in a pit in “gallant little Wales.”

Mr. Money wants our capitalist fathers to be more thoughtful for their children; but Mr. Money is in that section of capitalist politicians who raised the load line to suit the ship-owners; who ticketed and numbered the proletariat to suit the masters, and who have mucked about a “Home Rule Bill” for over 30 years while the workers have been stifled in slums—and polish their tools in case something turns up.

“Cheap Capital” to house the workers. Very well. The only way to attain this desired end of capitalist “goody goodies” is to exploit the working class more and more—and improved methods of hastening the wealth production under capitalism will swell the unemployed army, will crowd the workers in the slums, and make them fit instruments to produce wealth for “Cheap Capital.”

We, of the Socialist Party think that it matters everything to preach to the workers that they are wage-slaves; that their so-called decent homes hang together by but a slender thread ; the evolution of a rotten system of wealth production will scatter many home nests of those who think they are safe.

So, then, we are framed in by slums, by unemployed men, by starving children, by factory hells, by want of the necessaries of life in the midst of plenty. We want bread and it is difficult to get—but the steam plough is working. We want decent houses—but the workmen are not allowed to build. We want life, freedom, the obstacles hewn out of our path to get food, clothing, and shelter after the working of our brain and muscle—and some of greatest obstacles in the path of the toilers of the world are those who preach that we are “but little children weak” and they—the “great intellects” who will some day do us some good.

Look to Parliament and see there the agents of the capitalist class, who spin silky words about and around our social sores. When the delegates of the class-conscious workers sit in Parliaments of the World, the days of the “kind perishers” will be numbered.

S. W.

Lloyd George as Old Moore. (1914)

From the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. David Lloyd George is one of the mainstays and props of the Liberal Government. It is claimed for him by his paymasters, not only that he is a very Solomon of statesmanly wisdom, but also that he is the type, if not the spirit incarnate, of democracy. According to these, the masters whom he serves, the far-seeing acumen of this “little Welsh lawyer” is equalled only by his democratic candour, his persistent and irrepressible veracity in all his dealings with “the people.”

Of course, it is not for the opponent of the master class and their hirelings to quarrel with the statement that the intellectual capacity of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer and his veracity are on a par. It is more to the point to present the reader with material which might enable him to form an opinion for himself regarding the relative capacity of the Lloyd Georgian mental powers and his capacity for controlling one of them—his imagination.

The following extracts are taken from “Parliamentary Debates” (Vol. 65, No. 105), and occur in the process of the official report of the debates which took place in the House of Commons on July 23, 1914.

[Mr. Lloyd George.] “My hon. Friend has referred also to the question of armaments. The right hon. Gentleman the member for West Birmingham said, in future what are you going to tax when you want more money ? He also not merely assumed but stated that you could not depend upon any economy in armament? I think that is not so. I think he will find that next year there will be a substantial economy without interfering in the slightest degree with the efficiency of the Navy. The expenditure of the last few years has been very largely for the purpose of meeting what is recognised to be a temporary emergency. I think there are symptoms, not merely here but in other lands, not merely that the industrial classes, but that the financial interests of the world are getting alarmed. I have always thought you could not arrest them by mere political moves against them and by mere political criticism. I have always thought you could not arrest them by motives of humanity, and I regret that that is so. I am firmly of opinion that they will only be arrested when the great financial interests of the world begin to realise what a menace they are to capital, to property, to industry, to the prosperity of the world, and I think they are beginning to realise it. …

“It is very difficult for one nation to arrest this very terrible development. You cannot do it. You cannot when other nations are spending huge sums of money which are not merely weapons of defence, but are equally weapons of attack. I realise that, but the encouraging symptom which I observe is that the movement against it is a cosmopolitan one and an international one. Whether it will bear fruit this year or next year, that I am not sure of, but I am certain that it will come. I can see signs, distinct signs, of reaction throughout the world. Take a neighbour of ours. Our relations are very much better than they were a few years ago. There is none of that snarling which we used to see, more especially in the Press of those two great, I will not say rival nations, but two great Empires. The feeling is better between them. They begin to realise they can co-operate for common ends, and that the points of co-operation are greater and more numerous and more important than the points of possible controversy. All this is to the good.”

Now, then. Mr. Lloyd George, the particularly brilliant star of the Liberal constellation, as late as July 23rd saw “signs, distinct signs” of a reaction against armaments that led him to prophesy “substantial economy” in armaments next year. This, mark, was three weeks after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife—the historic event which provided for Austria the opportunity to present her ultimatum to Servia—it was, in fact, the very day on which the ultimatum was launched.

Mr. Lloyd George, as a member of the British Cabinet, can be held to have very early and complete information concerning international political events. On the 23rd of July, and for some days before, the signs and portents were, to the man in the street, indicative of anything but that “reaction throughout the world” against armaments which the Liberal lawyer professed to be impressed with. Was the Chancellor’s intellect, then, despite the advantage of his inside knowledge of things from Marconies downward, not equal to the task of reading correctly the omens so obvious to other people, or was his florid imagination playing him tricks ? In other words, was he, when he declared that he could see “distinct signs” of a reaction throughout the world against armaments, and that he thought that in respect of these “next year there will be substantial economy “—was he when he expressed himself thus, merely a fool or simply a liar ?

Whichever the answer may be, the diary of the next few days following Mr. Lloyd George’s windy speech in the House of Commons, is hardly such as to bring to the prophet “honour in his own country.” For instance :

July 23. —”I think there are symptoms, not merely here but in other lands . . .”—Mr.Lloyd George in the Commons.

July 23.  — Austrian ultimatum to Servia.

„ 28.        —Austria declares war. 

Aug. 1.   — Germany declares war on Russia.

„ 4.          —Gt. Britain declares war on Germany.

„ 6.          —Austria declares war on Russia.

„ 12.        —Britain declares war on Austria.

„ 16.        —Japs present ultimatum to Germany.

One other point may be usefully noticed here. The hired spokesman of the ruling class—the class who establish and control the armaments of the world—says that in his opinion armaments cannot be arrested by “motives of “humanity,” but only by the fear that they are a “menace to capital, to property, to industry, to the prosperity of the world ” (meaning, of course, by “the world,” the capitalists, for whom alone he speaks).

That motives of humanity will never lead the master class to disarm is quite true. It is the blood of the workers which, in the main, pays the red levy of war. As long as working-class life and suffering are the coin in which war is paid for, our masters will be ready enough for butchery on the grand scale. It is significant how light-heartedly they launch a hundred thousand working men into the field of death, and call for further hundreds of thousands. Such material costs them nothing. How different, however, was their tone when they were called upon to “build against Germany” ! Then our masters went crawling and whining to their German rivals, like whipped curs, begging and praying for cessation of “the mad race for armaments.” It is the cost of war they do not like —the “blood” they do not mind (it is not theirs), but the treasure—ah! that is a very different matter.

Motives of humanity ! No, they have never counted for much in any ruling class—and never will. Plimsoll proved that true of a previous generation—Lloyd George with his new load line for ships proved it true of this generation. The safety and continuous growth of their property are all that our masters are concerned with, and that is the real meaning of Mr. Lloyd George’s words.

NED.

Blogger's Note:

Prior to 1914, Serbia was referred to as 'Servia', which was the medieval Latin spelling of Serbia, and only switched to 'Serbia' during the course of World War One. No, I don't know that either.

The Yellow Revolt. (1914)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

“China and the Social Revolution,” by Kiang Kang Hu.

This little pamphlet is an all too brief sketch of the revolutionary movement in China during the recent upheaval. It is exceedingly interesting reading, and would be a startling eye-opener to the brand of anti-Socialist whose only excuse for opposing Socialism is that England must wait for Socialism until the “uncivilised” and the heathen are converted to our cause.

Here we have the “heathen Chinee” applying Marxian remedies to working class evils, and showing a knowledge of capitalist conditions that would put to shame many a “civilised” Christian “labour leader.”

The great revolution in China in which the working class, as is customary in all such revolutions, was used to free the land from Manchu rule, leaves the Chinese worker groaning under still worse conditions, conditions common to the early development of capitalist production. And, as a result, to use the author’s words ;

“The faith of the people is gone in Republicanism. The belief that it was the Manchu’s only who were oppressive is shattered. There remains but one thing, THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. That and that only can bring relief to the toiling millions of China. Their only hope lies in this : the taking over of the entire mechanism of production and operation of it by the workers, for the workers—the Socialist or Industrial Republic.”

The growth of The Socialist Party of China was evidently too swift for the powers that were, for in 1913 martial law was declared in Peking, the headquarters raided, the Secretary, Chen Ye Long, was beheaded and the S. P. of China dissolved. It is however but for a time.

“China cannot remain long in the grip of the re-action. Yuan Shi Kai can overrun the country with his troops. He can zealously stamp out, every spark of revolt. And yet, even as he does that, the tremendous forces are gathering, forces to which his army is but a toy, which will hurl aside Yuan Shi Kai and the re-action as though they were nothing. The name of those forces is industrialism. Steadily in ever increasing speed, the great economic change to machine production continues in China. This means that China must be, will be modernised.

“And the Socialist Movement in China will reassemble its forces, fall in step with the great Red International and march with it to victory.”

The author puts things very straight, and a passage dealing with the missionary, the capitalist, and the invasion of China by the Allied Powers is thus neatly and forcibly summarised: “China can now come into contact with the holy trinity of capitalism, the Cross, the Dollar Mark, and the Bayonet.”

Much other useful information is given in this brochure, which is well worth perusal.

Twel.

The S.P.G.B. Lecture List September. (1914)

Party News from the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Running Commentary: Myths of equality (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Reagan's new bomb and how to fight it (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when governments are pleading with unemployed youths not to commit acts of violence on the streets, President Reagan has announced that the United States government intends to proceed with the manufacture of the neutron bomb.

The new weapon (officially known as an Enhanced Radiation Warhead) has the unique capacity to kill people while leaving property intact. By emitting an intense lethal pulse of neutron radiation, the weapon has the necessary radio-active potentiality to destroy urban populations, but leave the surrounding cities standing. According to US army field manual 100-5, published in July 1976, the new bomb is an effective killer:

A one kiliton neutron artillery shell can release about 8.000 rads. An active soldier suddenly exposed to 3,000 rads could become incapacitated within 3 to 5 minutes. He may recover to some degree within 45 minutes, but, due to vomiting, diarrhoea, and other radiation sickness symptoms, he would only be partially effective until he dies within about a week.

It is a tragic symbol of the perverse use of modern technology, which could otherwise be applied to feed the thirty million people who die of starvation each year. But what else should we expect under a social system where life has always had to come second to the needs of capital? Labour is cheap and replaceable; not so factories and machinery.

If there is another world war—which is always a distinct possibility so long as society is organised on the basis of a mad race for profits—it is unlikely that modern nuclear weapons will remain unused. Of course, even a third world war involving the conventional military strategy employed in Dresden in 1945 (which killed more people than the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki) would be far worse than anything experienced throughout most of the last two world wars. But in all probability; the next world war would involve the use of weapons of hundreds of times more destructive power than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many military strategists, especially the Chinese, regard such a war as being inevitable. It is easy to be emotional about this prospect, but by any objective reckoning millions of human beings would perish if nuclear weapons were used in a future war. And despite dishonest and hopelessly inadequate government plans for civil defence, it is very likely indeed that those who survive such a holocaust will envy the dead.

It is assumed by some people that a third world war will never happen because governments will not want to see the level of destruction to their own property which such devastation would cause. It is argued that by pressing the button on hundreds of thousands of profit-producing wage slaves the capitalists will be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Such an argument fails to recognise the anarchy of the capitalist system. Capitalists do not want to fight expensive and damaging wars but, when economic rivalries within the capitalist class intensify, war is the only way open to them.

If there is a third world war, the main concern of the capitalist class will be to get their industries back on to a profitable basis as soon as hostilities are over. It is quite possible that a nuclear war could be fought without the majority of the world’s population being killed. A nuclear war might take place in Europe, with millions perishing either side of the Iron Curtain. Foreseeing such a situation the American and Russian imperialists, both equally concerned with expanding their areas of territorial domination, both want to ensure that the areas hit by their weapons will be industrially operable once the war is over. This is the great value of the neutron bomb: having killed enough people to assure surrender, the factories and machinery would remain intact.

Despite the fact that many people have fallen for the pernicious government lies that bombs are a means of preserving peace and that so-called civil defence will protect them in the event of a third world war, an increasing number of working class people are opposed to the ever-increasing weapons of destruction. It is a pity that so much energy is going in support of reform bodies like CND which are wholly bankrupt of any real policies which can avert the threat of war.

To eradicate war and all of its grotesque weaponry requires more than moral indignation. Modern wars are fought under particular economic conditions and it is only when we eradicate those conditions that we can live without fear of war. In the capitalist system which exists throughout the world today in the misnamed Communist countries as much as anywhere—the ownership and control of the means of producing and distributing wealth is in the hands of a small minority. This minority—the capitalist class—is divided into competing blocs, each fighting one another over markets, raw materials and strategic positions. On the other hand the working class constitutes the vast majority of the population of the earth. Between us, we run society from top to bottom, but we do not own much of the social wealth. We do not have property to protect. We do not have overseas investments to fight about. We do not have working class enemies in Russia or China or America who we want to fight with. Fighting wars is never in the interest of the working class. It is a sacrifice of our own class interest for that of the owning class.

But CND, and all other bodies which urge us to protest about the symptoms of the system while leaving the disease intact, divert many well-intentioned workers from their real enemy which is not simply the existence of bombs, but the existence of the profit system. In The Guardian (5/8/81) a group of well-meaning reformists published a draft letter which all readers were asked to post to President Reagan. Its effective message was: ‘Please, Mr. Reagan, we don’t want to be blown up by nuclear weapons. Will you do something to make capitalism a bit safer for us?’ Such a futile plea leaves several questions unanswered: Who elected Reagan, Thatcher and the other leaders? Who is it that produces the armaments? Who provides the political consent which allows governments to pursue their militarist policies? The fact of the matter is that the working class does these things; the workers support capitalism every time there is an election; and bodies like CND openly claim that members of any party may join them because CND does not take a political stance. War will only be eradicated when the majority of the working class does take a political stance in favour of production for use and against the system which puts profits before need.

On the day BBC radio announced that Reagan had given the go-ahead to the neutron bomb, there was also a news item that bubonic plague had been detected in a wood rat in the vicinity of Reagan’s country retreat. The President’s men, it was reported, were out shooting wood rats in the area around the retreat so as to kill off the disease at its source. The working class can learn a lesson from this. The bubonic plague is a natural disease, but it can be eliminated by eliminating its source. Neutron bombs, nuclear fall-out and napalm are not natural diseases, but they too can only be remedied by removing the system which gives rise to them. Unless, of course, you are a skyscraper or a tank, in which case neutron bombs are not reported to be damaging to your health.

Steve Coleman

The Failure of Reformism (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, during an election, you sit back and analyse what the various rival candidates are really saying you will find that virtually all of them share the view that the government has the power both to control the economy and to solve social problems. The promises they make are based on this assumption; so are the criticisms they direct at each other, all of which boil down to “you are a bad government” or “you were a bad government” or “you would be a bad government”.

This illusion that governments can solve economic and social problems—because it is other governments that cause them—is not just shared by politicians and their parties but by the vast majority of ordinary men and women, as any conversation about politics quickly reveals. Even those who appear to be the most critical of politicians and governments share the illusion. “They’re all corrupt” suggests that if all politicians were honest then things might be different. “What we need is a government of experts” suggests that things might be different if those who run governments were more competent. “We need a strong government” suggests that the problems are caused by weak governments.

That governments—all governments—have failed cannot be denied. Over the years all sorts of policies and political combinations have been tried, yet the same problems remain. Unfortunately too, most people still seek explanations in the realm of capitalist politics—bad policies, bad politicians, bad political structures—rather than considering that some other factor, such as the way society is organised, might be responsible.

Economic Laws of Capitalism

Governments are not in fact free agents that can do what they want. They operate within a definite economic and social system which severely limits their field of action. Present-day society is capitalist, in which wealth is produced not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit. Under capitalism the means for producing wealth are not the common possession of the whole of society but are monopolised, either as individuals or through the state, by a minority who thereby form a privileged class. The rest of society, the vast majority, can only get a living by selling their ability to work (their skills and knowledge) for a wage or salary.

Capitalism is a class-divided and profit-oriented society. It is an economic and social system which works according to certain definite economic laws-governing the level of economic activity, what is produced, prices and so on-laws which can be studied and understood but which cannot be changed. Basically, capitalism works in such a way that priority has always to be given to profit-making over human needs. Of course human needs are met to some extent but, as far as the wage and salary earning majority are concerned, in a quite inadequate way, as is shown by the persistent problems over such basic needs as housing, health and education.

Because capitalism is a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, its whole economic mechanism is necessarily governed by the search for profits. Priority has to be given to profits as they are capitalism's life-blood. This is the system’s economic logic, which imposes itself on individuals and governments whether they like it or not. As long as capitalism lasts there is nothing that can be done to change this; governments must not only respect this logic but also apply it. They can try to avoid this—as some have done for a short while—but in the end they have to accept the logic of capitalism that profits must come first.

The “housing problem” could be solved tomorrow if production were allowed to be carried on simply to satisfy human needs. The building materials to provide a decent home for everybody exist; so do the building workers. What prevents this happening is the economic law of capitalism which says that profits must be made out of producing things; and there is no profit in producing decent homes for people who can’t afford them. It is the same story in other fields such as health, education and the environment. Human needs are taken into account only to the extent that people have the money to pay for their satisfaction. If they do, then they constitute a market, supplying which is a potential field for profit-making.

For people’s needs to be met they must have money, but the amount of money most of us have is limited by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque—by, in other words, the proceeds of the sale of our ability to work to some employer. But, once again, this is something that is strictly governed by the economic mechanism of capitalism. Prices—and a wage or a salary is a price, the price of a person’s skills and knowledge-are not fixed arbitrarily, but depend on the average amount of labour expended to produce the commodity in question. In the case of a person’s ability to work this is the average amount of labour needed to produce the food, clothing, shelter and so on that the worker and their family need to live, together with the labour cost of the particular trade or skill. This is why the consumption of the wage and salary earning majority is restricted to more or less what they need to keep themselves fit to work. It is an inevitable economic consequence of their mental and physical energies being, like everything else under capitalism, a commodity bought and sold on a market.

But there is a further reason why the consumption of wage and salary earners must be restricted under capitalism. Profits are realised (converted into money) when a commodity is sold, but they are created when the commodity is produced. The source of profits is the unpaid labour of wage and salary earners; it is that part of the new wealth they produce over and above what they are paid in wages and salaries. So the latter can never rise too high since, in doing so, they eat into profits—the life-blood of capitalism. If this happens in a particular industry or country then production is cut back, workers are laid off and unemployment grows. The larger pool of unemployed acts as a downward pressure on the wages of those still employed, so tending to restore the original wage level. For wage and salary earners there is no escape from this vicious circle.

The International Dimension

Governments are also compelled to restrain wages and salaries by international competition. Capitalism exists all over the world, in countries like Russia and China (in the form of state capitalism) as well as in admittedly capitalist countries like Britain and America. But it is not a collection of separate capitalist societies each existing within the frontiers of the more or less artificial states into which the world is divided. Capitalism exists as a single world economic and social system, of which “Britain”, “America”, “Russia” and so on are merely parts. So, even if governments had the power to control economic activities within their frontiers (which they don’t), this would still only give them control over a very limited part of the world economy. They would still be at the mercy of external economic forces.

This is a very powerful restricting influence on the freedom of action of governments. Though rarely mentioned by politicians and their parties when making election promises, it is sometimes invoked by them when it comes to finding excuses for failure. “We have been blown off course”, they often explain correctly as it happens, since the pressures exerted by the world market on governments are so immense that they virtually dictate what policies they should pursue, at home as well as abroad.

Profits, we saw, arise out of the unpaid labour of wage and salary earners and are realised only when the goods in which this unpaid labour is incorporated are converted into money; when, in other words, they are sold. Capitalist enterprises, including those owned by states, compete against each other to sell their goods so as to realise the profits incorporated in them. So competition on the world market is not just competition for sales; it is above all competition for profits.

Any national government has to respect this and to help the efforts of the enterprises within its frontiers to amass as much profit as they can. Indeed, this can be said to be the role of governments within the world capitalist economy, which prevents them ever solving the problems facing wage and salary earners. For to protect and enhance the competitive position of enterprises within their borders, governments must help to restrict the consumption of wage and salary earners to no more than is necessary to ensure their productive efficiency. But it is precisely this restricted consumption that is the social problem facing wage and salary earners, of which shortages and inadequacies in housing, schooling, health, the environment and so on are but aspects.

If wages and salaries rise too high, then the competitive position of enterprises is undermined through cost increases. Government spending on social reform measures—building more houses, increasing pensions and allowances, providing better health services, improving educational standards, cleaning up the environment and so on—is restricted by the same economic mechanism. Government spending is financed either by taxation or by inflating the currency. High taxation causes capitalist enterprises to suffer because all taxes fall in the end on profits. Inflation raises the internal price level above the world level, making exports less competitive.

So the economic laws of capitalism not only act against wages rising too high; they also prevent governments spending too much on social reforms. In fact, in the long run, only those social reform measures which pay their own way, in the sense of increasing the productive efficiency of the workforce, are passed and maintained. Examples are: education to ensure better trained and more skillful workers; a health service to patch them up quickly so that they can return to work; social security schemes to try to ensure that their working ability does not degenerate in periods of non-employment. And if a government has miscalculated and proved to be too generous—as over the National Health Service introduced in Britain after the last war—then the situation is sooner or later corrected by the reform either being drastically cut back or slowly whittled away.

We can now see why the needs of the majority are not adequately met under capitalism and, what is more, why they never can be. The problems wage and salary earners face in meeting their needs—in housing, health, education, transport and the like—are inherent in capitalism. They arise from its very basis as a class-divided, profit-oriented society and cannot be solved within its framework.

This is why politicians and governments fail. It is not because they are corrupt or incompetent or weak. It is not because outdated political institutions and structures impede them. In fact it has nothing to do with politics at all. In trying to make capitalism serve human needs (which is basically what they are doing when they try to solve social problems) they are attempting the impossible. Capitalism simply cannot be reformed so as to serve the interests of the majority of its members—those who work for wages and salaries.

Opposition to Reformism

Once it is realised that capitalism’s basic nature can never be changed by reforms, then the futility of reformist politics becomes obvious. Governments which pass reform measures to try to solve social problems are like a doctor applying ointment when a surgical operation is called for. They are dealing with effects while leaving the basic cause unchanged—a certain recipe for failure since the same cause is bound to go on producing the same effects.

The social and economic problems facing wage and salary earners can only be solved by the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a new and basically different social system in which production will be carried on solely and directly to satisfy human needs. This is why socialists refuse to advocate or support reforms to be implemented within capitalism, which distinguishes us from all other parties and groups, even those claiming to be “revolutionary” and “anti-reformist”.

This does not mean an opposition to all reform measures being implemented. Some reforms can bring slight temporary relief to groups of wage and salary earners and, knowing the difficulties of living under capitalism, socialists don’t begrudge this. What we are opposed to is advocating and campaigning for reforms, since seeking reforms of capitalism is a misuse of time and energy which can at best result only in a temporary alleviation of the situation. Then there is the fact that most reform measures are passed to smooth out some problem of one or other section of the capitalist minority rather than to alleviate the lot of the wage and salary earning majority. If all the time and energy devoted over the years to trying to get reforms had been directed towards getting wage and salary earners to understand the need to replace capitalism by socialism, then socialism would have been established long ago; the housing problem, the education problem, the health problem, the environment problem and all the other problems we face today would be ancient history.

Adam Buick

Cops protect robbers (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a world society without a police force. In fact, it will be a society without a legal system. And because there will be no laws there will be no courts to argue about them in, no prisons in which to lock up offenders, and no people who will be called criminals because they have broken the law.

The idea of socialism as a lawless, crimeless society is likely to evoke the strangest of responses from those who stand for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law and order’. Judges will tell us that prisons and punishment must always be, for we are all sinners. The person in the street will say that without the law there would be anarchy and under anarchy nothing would be safe. Criminologists will tell us that anti-social behaviour is a necessary feature of modern urban industrial living (which is only a trendy way of saying what the judge has already said). Indeed, even most criminals will insist that a certain degree of law and order is necessary and that the best place for those who have committed worse crimes than them is in a prison cell.

As for the politicians, Leftie Frank Field (Labour, Birkenhead, no convictions) writes that ‘Like most people, I cannot conceive of a society without a police force’. (Guardian, 5/8/81). Tory Home Secretary Whitelaw warned on television recently that ‘without the police, that which we treasure as a nation would be jeopardised’. (Could he have been referring to the Stock Exchange?) Even the very silly Workers’ Revolutionary Party, in their recent GLC election manifesto, called for the replacement of the Metropolitan police force by an armed workers’ militia.

The public’s view of the police is currently undergoing a profound change. The image of the Dixon of Dock Green—type copper with a patronising concern to protect ‘villains’ from themselves and a claim to serve ‘the community’ is fast dying. The role of the police as the brutal defenders of property and privilege is increasingly being recognised. The use of the police as strikebreakers, as contributors to the harassment of racial minorities, as corrupt bullies who will often turn a blind eye to law-breaking if the price is high enough, and, in the cases of Liddle Towers, Blair Peach and unrecorded others, as the unprosecuted murderers of members of the working class.

This writer’s first experience of police methods came during the Grunwick strike in 1977 when he saw uniformed officers kicking pickets when they lay on the ground and beating people up in the back of open police vans. Many trade unionists will testify as to how the police have been used in strikes in order to make life hard for the strikers. Accounts of police persecution of legally innocent workers are increasingly common, especially in areas where there are many black immigrants. Many people convicted of crimes—and many not convicted, but charged-have told how police have illegally beaten them, forced confessions from them and even intimidated their friends and relatives.

The words of police chiefs do not help to comfort those who live in fear of ‘the boys in blue’: Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, David McNee, recently stated that ‘if people stay off the streets at night they will have nothing to fear from the police’, while Merseyside’s Chief Constable. Kenneth Oxford, wrote in his report to the Liverpool police committee, six weeks before the Toxteth riot, that

My policy on relationships with the community has been endorsed and strengthened throughout the year, with all members of the force being mindful in this direction. I am confident that these relationships with all sections of the community are in a very healthy position and I do not foresee any serious difficulties developing in the future. (Quoted in the Guardian, 6/8/81. Our emphasis.)

Oxford, whose force has been seen as a major contributory factor in the outburst on Toxteth streets, is clearly not a man of prescience.

Much as some people would like to turn a blind eye to it, it is a fact that the police force often exceeds its legal powers, frequently serves to increase social tensions and ignore criminality when it is committed by the rich. But this is not the root of the problem; socialists are not simply opposed to the police-or to “bad” police—but to a system of social relationships which necessitates coercive forces.

The purpose of the police is to defend property. Yes, it is true that they help old ladies cross the road (whether they want to or not) and they run youth clubs for skinheads who want to be the next Henry Cooper. This, however, is not their main job and the idea of the police as uniformed social workers is a myth. Indeed, police officers can often be disciplined by their superiors for spending too much time helping people when there is real police work to be done elsewhere. One such case is quoted by E. Bittner:

An officer was walking a beat in a quiet residential area when he encountered a middle-aged matron who had been locked out of her home. She had a load of groceries and obviously could not climb into the window she designated as open . . . He set aside hat and truncheon, climbed in through the window, and came downstairs to let her in. As she was grateful and was going to write a letter informing his superior of his meritorious service, he had to carefully explain to her that what he did was against police regulations and quite possibly against the law (since he had no evidence that she actually lived in the house). Any mentions of his actions would probably become a black mark in his personnel file. (“A Theory of the Police” in Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob, Sage Publications.)

Before the establishment of an official police force in 1829, policing was the direct responsibility of property-owners. Private security gangs were employed to defend the wealth of the rich against the illegal requirements of the poor. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, the administration of the law was primarily in the hands of local land magnates. They would appoint their own magistrates, pay for their own guards and be looked upon as the final arbiters in local disputes. With the increasing role of the state as a means of social control in the mid-Nineteenth century, the unity between the right of ownership and the right of coercion became blurred, but not eradicated.

The role of the early police force, as now, was to ensure the maintenance of the order of property. In an age when slums and mansions, expensive restaurants and hungry children, night clubs and homeless vagrants exist in such close proximity to one another it is vital for the owning class to have a permanent force to protect them and their property from the intrusion of the impoverished. With capitalism, the concept of criminality became synonymous with the disruption of property relationships. In earlier centuries laws tended to be justified in moral terms, but modern jurisprudence has increasingly discarded anachronistic moral and religious formulae and has described its role in explicitly material terms. The police, as a body which is directly governed by laws passed in parliament, now have a clearly political role. What the state says, the police must do.

Dirty work

The state is not an institution which has always existed. In ancient societies, when the means of producing wealth were commonly held, there was no need for an institution to defend private property. The state was a direct consequence of the earliest appropriation of wealth in the form of tools, land and slaves—by private owners. The evolution of the state, as an institution to protect and expand private property, has developed as humankind has increased its domination over the natural environment. With the emergence of nation states with their own particular economic interests, in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, it became necessary for states to recruit standing armies to fight the battles of the various national ruling classes. At this stage of the evolution of the state machine emerged a division of its functions between military responsibilities to the ruling class—the protection and expansion of markets—and domestic responsibilities- the retention of internal order on the part of the nation’s rulers. That is the role of the police: they are the uniformed guards of the property-owning class. For every worker’s car which they retrieve and for every mugger they catch (and the police are notoriously bad at solving crimes which affect the working class), there are a hundred cases in which the police are quite directly defending property against poverty.

Of course, the capitalists do not do their own dirty work. They are the last people to be found treading the beat or risking their lives in fights against criminals. Why should they bother when they can pay suckers from the working class to act as human guard-dogs on their behalf? Just like other members of the working class, members of the police force have problems. They are dependent upon wages and, like most workers, these are never enough to satisfy their complete needs. They are frequently pushed around by authoritarian superiors who expect them to obey senseless orders. Many of them would like to be liked, but because of the real nature of their job (which is disguised during their training) they are forced to come into frequent conflict with their fellow workers. Of course, many workers join the police force because they are authoritarian, sadistic or politically motivated, but for the vast majority it is just a job, just a wage and just employment. Often the police respond to their problems by demanding more weapons or tougher laws, but in the end these will not eradicate their problems. So long as there is a system which needs repression, intolerance and thuggery in order to defend its norms, and as long as there are wage slaves who are willing to get their hands dirty defending their exploiters’ position, the police’s problem will continue.

Reformists are occasionally heard to demand the reform of the police. Indeed, the new Labour GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, has recently pledged himself in favour of a people’s police force, accountable to a ‘socialist GLC’! We have all experienced what is meant by a people’s police force. In state capitalist Poland, the armed bullies who smashed the skulls of striking workers in Bydgoszcz were called a ‘people’s’ militia. Did that stop them from viciously defending the right of capital against the needs of wage labour? To conceive of a legal system which will operate in terms of friendship and consensus within a system where ownership and control are firmly in the hands of a minority who own the productive and distributive machinery is naive in the extreme.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community without distinction of race or sex. In such a society, where no factory, farm, mine, newspaper, aeroplane or house will have an owner, be it an individual or the state, there will be no need for property laws. There will be no function for police or courts or prisons. The vast libraries containing thick statutes on who is entitled to possess what (and, by implication, who isn’t) will be placed in museums. The truncheons and uniforms and judge’s wigs will be regarded as items of perverse historical curiosity. For once the wealth of the world belongs to all humanity and there for our free access, what will there be to steal and what reason would there be to steal it?

Of course, the Human Nature Brigade will not be slow to answer our question. They will correct us for indulging in such utopian dreams. They will remind us that it is not the viciously competitive, warlike system of capitalism which leads people to commit acts of violence, but Human Nature. They will inform us that it is not the system which turns sex into a commodity and makes films glorifying the conquest of women which leads men to rape women, but Human Nature. They, who are the selected élite who have special knowledge of mankind’s inherent characteristics, will be able to tell us that it is not the overcrowded, boring, stressful conditions of most workers’ lives which leads some to act anti-socially, but Human Nature. And our Nature being what it is, we shall always need police to push us around and prison warders to lock us up and judges to judge us. Socialists argue that the social environment makes men and women what they are and that a competitive, jungle society will create anti-social beasts. Change the way in which the society is organised and human behaviour will change also.

But just as capitalism creates wage slaves who want to be pushed around and want to be slaves and fear freedom, at the same time, paradoxically, it creates its own gravediggers. By subjecting the working class more and more to the reality of its exploited and oppressed condition, capitalism creates dissent. If such dissent currently takes the form of engaging in futile street battles with the police and looting the third-rate commodities from the windows of the cheapest shops, experience will eventually transform such dissent into conscious political action. After all, however many policeman’s hats are knocked from their head, the police and the class which they exist to protect will still be there. However many reforms are passed to soften policemen’s truncheons, the arm of the law will always be stronger than the power of a politically atomised working class.

Steve Coleman