Cooking the Books: The rich remained rich (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Why’, the Times asked a few days after Trump announced the imposition of tariffs on imports into the US, ‘are global stock markets in a tailspin?’ Their answer was substantially correct and surprisingly honest:

‘The short answer is President Trump’s tariffs. The longer answer is that global investors are betting that the president’s tariff walls will result in a fall in corporate profits as companies face higher costs and lower demand for their goods. The prospect of falling profits encourages investors to sell their shares because it means companies will not be able to pay as much out in dividends and will be worth less in future’ (8 April).

Shares are, as the word suggests, a share in the ownership of a business and entitle their owner to some of the profits of that business. They can be traded in their own right independently of the activity of the business. The price at which they are bought and sold depends on the anticipated future profits of the business and is mainly arrived at through the expected stream of future profits being expressed as a notional capital sum which, if invested, would bring in the same amount. But this sum only exists as a share of anticipated future wealth which may or may not be realised.

This is where the Times was being honest in talking about ‘betting’ because that’s what trading in shares is partly about. Traders buy shares at a certain price because they calculate that the shares will bring in a bigger dividend or that they can be sold later at a higher price. But there is no guarantee that either will happen, any more than there is a guarantee that a horse you bet on will win. It may but, then again, it may not.

However, the stock exchange is not just a casino. It is also a place where a business can raise new or extra capital to invest by selling new shares. But once these have been issued and bought they can be traded and subject to betting and speculation just like any other shares. If their price goes up that does not of itself mean that the business that issued them has more capital to invest. Similarly, if their price falls, that doesn’t of itself reduce that capital.

The movement of the prices of shares does not affect, either way, the value of the real wealth in which capital has been invested. Obviously it does affect the amount of notional capital attributed to shareholders:

‘The world’s 500 richest people lost a collective $536bn (£417bn) in the first two days of stock market trading after Trump’s “liberation day” announcement last Wednesday. It was the biggest two-day loss of wealth ever recorded by Bloomberg’s billionaires index’ (Guardian, 7 April).

The losses here are calculated from the fall in the price of the huge holdings of shares that Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and the others hold in the companies they founded. But it was not a reduction in the capital value of the real wealth they own as the means of production held by their companies. That remained the same. It was a reduction in the size of a notional capital sum based on expected future profits, as traders adjusted their bets on the size of these. To some extent, a reflection of a change of betting odds.

The fall in share prices sparked by Trump’s tariffs did not mean that the value of any of the real underlying wealth the billionaires owned was wiped out, simply that the current market valuation of it was reduced.

Why we contest elections (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We stood 4 candidates in the local elections on 1 May. Why?

Capitalism, the system of society we live under, is based on the means for producing what society needs to survive being owned and controlled by a small section only of the population. We’re talking about the land on which food is grown and from which natural resources are extracted, the factories where these resources are fashioned into useful things, the power stations that provide the energy, the ships, planes, trains and lorries which transport the raw materials and the finished products, the warehouses and retail outlets where the products are stored, the media and communications. In short, all the natural and industrial resources needed to produce and distribute useful things and services.

This results in the division of society into two classes, those who own and receive an unearned property income and those who don’t and who, to live, have to work for a wage or salary. Useful things are not made and useful services are not provided to directly satisfy people’s needs but to be sold to make a profit which goes to those who own the places where the work takes place. The interests of the two classes are completely opposed as the profits of the one come from the work of the other.

Capitalism is a profit-making system that can only work for the few who own, not the many who work. It can only be run in the interest of capitalists, the tiny minority who invest money for profit and enjoy a privileged lifestyle on the proceeds.

That’s why the needs of the majority are never met properly and why for them there are always going to be problems over housing, health care, schools, and public services. The politicians blame each other but profits coming before needs is not something any government can change.

All the other parties that stand in elections support the profit system and are squabbling over which of them should run the administrative side of it. They think the profit system can be made to work in the interests of the majority. But it can’t be and, if they win office whether at national or local level, they end up having to do the system’s dirty work of saving money on public services so that taxes on profits can be kept down. At local level, Labour, Tories, LibDems, Greens, and Scots and Welsh nationalists have all done this. They will now be joined by Reform UK after its gains in last month’s county council and mayoral elections.

Profits first, people second (even third after military spending), that’s the only way the profit system can work. Despite the politicians’ promises, it can never be made to work for the majority working class whose income comes from working for a wage or salary.

But if nothing changes…

But, if changing governments changes nothing, why do we in the Socialist Party contest elections? Some people think that the government serves the rich because the rich own the means of wealth production. But, in fact, it is the other way round — they own the means of production because they control the government. And they control the government because, currently, when there is a general election, the vast majority of voters vote into control of political power — the power to make and enforce laws — parties that don’t challenge their legal right to own the means of wealth production.

The capitalists don’t own the land, the factories and the rest in the same way that people own their personal possessions. They don’t physically possess them. They own them because they have a legal right to own them, a right granted and enforced by the state. In fact, today very few means of production are even owned by individuals. They are owned by companies and corporations which are fictitious individuals created by law.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the way to end minority class ownership of the means of wealth production is not to directly take these over physically and kick out the bosses but to win control of the political power which granted and backs up their owners’ legal right to own.

To abolish capitalism, what is needed is to first win control of political power. In theory this could be done by seizing the central state in a violent insurrection but, unless this has majority support, the result would merely be a change of rulers — and, if it does have majority support, would be unnecessary as there is another, easier way to win political control — through the ballot box.

If a majority wants to abolish capitalism, it can use the electoral system to send to the central law-making body delegates mandated to end all private property rights, dissolving all companies and corporations and declaring all stocks and shares null and void. The means of production would then become the common property of society under democratic control. Capitalism will have been abolished. This will allow the socialist-minded working class majority, self-organised democratically outside parliament, to get on with managing the change-over to socialism at ground level through workplace committees, local councils and other associations, while the central administration, transformed from being an instrument of class rule, deals with wider issues.

So, the main reason why we say socialists should contest elections is an understanding that the capitalist few own the means of producing because the state grants them the right to do so and that the working class needs to win control of political power so as to be in a position to annul that right.

It is why we say workers should not vote for any party that supports capitalism as that is to leave political control in capitalist hands and so endorse their ownership of the means of production. That’s why when there is no socialist standing we don’t vote for them and either abstain from voting or cast a write-in vote for socialism.

Of course, today, as the results of elections show, only a tiny minority want socialism — the vast majority of workers still accept or at least acquiesce to capitalism — so when we contest elections now we are showing that we think that the working class, once they want socialism, should take political action to bring it about. We are also showing that we think that the electoral system, imperfect as it is, is still sufficiently democratic as to enable a socialist majority to win control of political power. And, of course, using the occasion to further publicise the case for socialism.

Adam Buick

Election results

Kent County Council Folkestone West: RefUK 1748, Lab 1152, Green 996, Con 852, LD 414, Soc 47.

Kent County Council Folkestone East: RefUK 1712, Lab 1076, Con 513, Green 509, LD 233, Homeland 50, Soc 38.

Gloucestershire Count Council Stroud Central: Greens 2166, Lab 799, RefUK 697, Con 309, LD 195, TUSC 49, Soc 25.

London Borough of Lambeth Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction: Greens 1,774, Lab 1,459, Con 183, RefUK 135, LD 121, TUSC 30, Soc 16.

SPGB June Events (2025)

Party News from the June 2025  issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Discredited reformism (2025)

Book Review from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism for Today. By David M. Kotz. Polity, 2025. xii +192pp.

This is an intriguing book. With the subtitle Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism and chapters on such topics as ‘Reform of Capitalism’, ‘Lessons from the Past for a Socialist Future’ and ‘From Capitalism to Socialism’, we are promised an enticing read. And perhaps all the more so that its author, though a seasoned academic, tells us it is aimed at a general audience and so tries to avoid technical analysis.

It is hard not to identify with his description of the capitalist society we live in, clear and straightforward as it is. His introduction sums up briefly but highly effectively some of the key ills associated with capitalism (eg, inequality, insecurity, poverty, homelessness, racial prejudice, war), while highlighting the paradox that, while capitalism has brought ‘economic and social advances’, it is at the same time ‘the underlying source of the severe problems encountered by the majority’. His three ‘defining features’ of capitalism – a market economy, wage and salary work and pursuit of profit – also neatly sum up the system we live under. He goes on then to aptly encapsulate the way it works as ‘an economic system in which the wealthy owners of enterprises hire free wage workers to produce products and compete to sell them in the market, with the aim of gaining the maximum possible profit’. And in this system, ‘the labor of the working class is the direct source of the flow of wealth that accrues to the capitalist class and that relationship of exploitation gives rise to a class struggle pitting labor against capital’.

However, while presenting a clear analysis of what capitalism is and how it works overall, David Kotz is not an absolutist, in the sense that he recognises that the particular forms it takes in certain countries and under certain political regimes may make life more or less comfortable or uncomfortable for workers. So, for example, he sees the kind of ‘social democratic’ capitalism practised in various Scandinavian countries as less oppressive than places where dog-eat-dog ‘neo-liberalism’ holds sway and certainly than countries where highly authoritarian regimes rule over the system, such as Russia and China. This does not however prevent him from advocating in all these places a complete change of system which he calls socialism.

What does he mean by socialism? He describes it as a society of ‘democratic participatory planning’ with ‘an economy designed to meet the needs and wants of the population’. He stresses the need for active participation by that population in decision-making while not attempting to lay down a blueprint of how that may work, since – and this seems eminently sensible – at any point of the development of any social system there will be a variety of views on how thing should operate according to the nature of that development and the availability of means available, and so it is likely there will be ‘a decision-making process based on negotiation and compromise’. The difference from what happens now, he makes clear, is that planning and decisions about how we organise our lives will not depend on profit-making or vested interests.

So far so good, but as this book progresses, some significant differences do emerge between certain key aspects of the author’s view of socialism and that of the Socialist Standard. The Socialist Party has, since its foundation in 1904, defined socialism as a marketless, moneyless, stateless, world-wide society of common ownership, economic equality and free access to all goods and services based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. But Kotz isn’t really with us on a good deal of this. For him socialism continues to have money and separate states and some people get more (if not much more) of that money than others depending on the work they do. And there would be ‘public banks’. So given that goods are still bought and sold with money, that is not a free access society. And given that states still exist, there are still governments and leaders, even if democratically elected or appointed. ‘Public ownership and economic planning, along with a democratic state’ is how he describes it.

He does not seem to have considered the possibility of a moneyless, free access society, which has remained alive as a strand of socialist thought since the nineteenth century and could be easily translated into practice given the potential abundance and production and distribution techniques offered by modern technology. He does present an argument for not advocating a single worldwide society, which is that it could not possibly all happen across the world at the same time and therefore each country will have to take its own path to it when it is ready – and indeed in the meantime there would likely be a situation where both socialist and capitalist countries exist side by side from one country to another (‘a mixture of capitalist and socialist systems’, as he puts it).

He does concede that ultimately there could be world socialism but even then he envisages it as ‘a world of socialist states’. One wonders how effective such an argument is in a world where already the means of communication are such that the spread of ideas across the world happens more or less instantly. So once the idea of socialism takes serious hold in some countries – which so far of course does not seem close to happening – is it imaginable that such a revolutionary and humanly beneficial idea will not spread like wildfire across the globe and very rapidly a complete free access society will be able to be established. And what need then will there be for the author’s ultimate vision of ‘a world of socialist states’?

Finally, on the question of how we get from capitalism to socialism which is the subject of the book’s last chapter, we are told – and this is its least satisfactory aspect – that, since it will take a long time, we should not hesitate to try and improve the conditions under capitalism by advocating and campaigning for reforms of various kinds which will at least make life more comfortable for workers in the meantime. To be precise: ‘The socialist movement should engage in reform struggles while promoting the need for moving beyond capitalism.’ Yes, what we have here is the familiar old and discredited ‘in the meantime’ argument – the one that imagines that, if you can spend time trying to bring about what amounts to minor changes in capitalism, this somehow brings us nearer to socialism, whereas in reality its main effect is to distract attention from the fundamental task of superseding capitalism completely.

So, unfortunately, a book that starts with a bang promising a clear vision of a new society it calls socialism to replace the problem-ridden system of capitalism we have now and a clear way through to that society ends with something of a whimper advocating the very reformism it has earlier seemed to reject.

Howard Moss

Action Replay: No standing room (2025)

George Reynolds and Darlington in happier times.

The Action Replay column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Filbert Street, Upton Park, Highbury, Burnden Park, White Hart Lane, Ninian Park: these are just some of the well-known and long-standing football stadiums that have been replaced in recent times by larger and swisher venues. The change to all-seater stadiums was one factor behind the desire by club owners to cash in on higher prices, improved facilities and additional uses. The new grounds can be very expensive, but maintaining elderly stadiums can be pricey too. Profit and Sustainability Rules are also an incentive to increase gate receipts.

It’s not just football, with suggestions that the Twickenham rugby stadium could be used to host music concerts, so boosting Rugby Football Union finances. But this would require a change of heart from the local council, which would have to issue a licence and is not keen on the idea, presumably because of the disruption it could cause.

The building of new stadiums is still ongoing. Everton’s new ground will host matches from next season, though this has led to UNESCO removing Liverpool’s status as a World Heritage Site, owing to the changes at the city’s waterfront. In addition, some clubs intend to make major changes to their current grounds, such as Bournemouth, who intend to double their current capacity of a mere eleven thousand, and Leeds United have plans to add fifteen thousand to the capacity of Elland Road.

But probably the biggest proposal is from Manchester United. Old Trafford holds 73,000 spectators, and is the largest club ground in the UK. But it is in some disrepair, with water cascading onto some seats. The intention is to build a new ground nearby, with a capacity of a hundred thousand, the cost of which is likely to be £2bn. This from a club which, under its wealthy capitalist part-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, recently sacked a large number of admin staff and withdrew its £40,000 annual donation to a charity that supports United players from before the days of massive wages, who are struggling financially.

And building new grounds doesn’t always work out. In 1999, Darlington FC were bought by George Reynolds, who financed the building of the George Reynolds Arena (of course) at a cost of £18m and seating 25,000. But attendances never approached that, Reynolds was imprisoned for tax evasion, and the club then experienced various changes of owners and went into administration, before being expelled from the Football Association, with a new ‘phoenix’ club being founded. They now play in the National League North (the sixth level of English football) and share a ground with the local rugby union club. The renamed Darlington Arena hosts rugby league games and music concerts.

So, like many capitalist ventures and attempts at expansion, new stadiums don’t always give a good return.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Sir Keith Joseph meets the SPGB (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Philippa Fawcett College 24th April 1975. The debate was held during the afternoon and was attended by about 250 people, mainly students.

Sir K. Joseph: The Market system is based on the proposition you only make a profit if you make and sell what people want. If you do not make what people want, you do not make a profit. This means widespread decision-making, decentralized control spread among thousands of small, medium and large firms. (…) How do we justify the vast profits of property? Somebody had to take the risk. The only justification for profit is risk. Civil servants’ decisions do not have to be right, they do not stand to lose. The Market system leaves decision-making to those who stand to gain if the decision is right and stand to lose if the decision is wrong. Look at Switzerland: we could be as prosperous and humane.

E. Hardy: Tories, Liberals and the Labour Party all believed in Keynes. Keynes said Marx was wrong. Capitalism can be controlled. You can have full employment, no more crises or wars. The Market economy is unregenerate capitalism given a new name. They have not got capitalism under control. They have not solved unemployment. We are now in a crisis. (…) We do not say civil servants can run capitalism better than the whiz-kids. Nothing can be done with capitalism; if you will not go in for Socialism, you will be stuck with capitalism. It will be the same in the future as it always has been in the past.

Summing up

Sir Keith Joseph: How simple it is to argue for a system that is purely emotional. Mr. Hardy is arguing for pie in the sky. You cannot get all people in the world to agree. Marx left no room for the owner, who is part of the productive mechanism, because of his willingness to take risks to ensure supply in the Market system. The investment occurs to give people what they need.

E. Hardy: Sir Keith Joseph has to defend the shocking system of capitalism. Capitalism was only a notion when it began. All the reformers have tried to be practical and improve capitalism. They have solved nothing. The utopians are the ones who think they can do something with capitalism. You can’t, you have to go in for Socialism.

This is an abridged report of the debate. You can hear the tape recording of the debate here.

[From the June 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard.]

Editorial: Starmer goes nativist (2025)

Editorial from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

ReformUK fought last year’s general election on a single issue. The same leaflet, distributed everywhere they were standing, declared that this was ‘the immigration election’ and that ‘only Reform UK will freeze immigration’. They won five seats, all from the Conservatives. Labour election strategists were pleased as the swing from Conservative to Reform helped them win in other seats Then, last month, Reform won a parliamentary by-election in a seat previously held by a large majority by Labour. Then, Labour realised that Farage’s party was as much a threat to them as to the Conservatives.

What to do? The decision was made to steal Reform’s clothes and on 12 May Starmer delivered his already notorious ‘island of strangers’ speech in which he claimed that if immigration wasn’t further curtailed native-born Britishers would become, as Enoch Powell had put it decades earlier, ‘strangers in their own country’. Neither Powell nor Starmer defined what they meant by ‘stranger’, leaving native-born people whose parents or grandparents came from the British colonial empire open to being victims of anti-immigration prejudice and attacks.

Starmer’s words was hard-core xenophobia, the language of nativist parties everywhere, as political theorists define parties that declare their aim to be ‘promoting or protecting the interests of native-born people over those of immigrants’. Many might see this as reasonable — why should people already there not get priority over newcomers? — but it is based on the premise that native-born workers and immigrant workers have different interests.

The nativist demagogues claim that the two groups compete not only for jobs but also for housing, hospital treatment and school places. This does appear to be the case but the limited supply of these is not caused by too many immigrants. It’s limited by the nature of the capitalist system under which workers are never going to be supplied, whether from their pay or from services provided by the state, with much more than enough to keep themselves in efficient working order. Keeping immigrants out won’t change this. It wouldn’t mean more or better for the ‘native-born’.

It is not clear why immigration should have become a big issue; probably a result of the media’s over-concentration on the desperate people crossing the channel in small boats. Immigration proper is a normal economic feature of capitalism and waxes and wanes as the economy expands or contracts. Capitalism needs workers because their work is the source of capitalist profits. When capitalism is expanding in some place due to the prospects of profit being good, more workers are needed there. Workers move to where the jobs are, sometimes recruited directly by employers. From a capitalist point of view, employing these migrating workers and providing housing and basic services for them to keep themselves fit to work is well worth it as the amount of profits they produce outweighs the cost.

Socialists say that workers, wherever they were born or whatever their language or state-imposed nationality or what religion they were brought up in, have a common interest in joining together, in the first instance, to face their employer. More widely, they have an interest in uniting to end the capitalist system and replace it with a world without borders based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Editorial: May Day myths (1965)

Editorial from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The myths of capitalism die hard.

There is, for example, the myth that the processions and demonstrations which take place on May Day have something to do with the unity of the working class.

It is true that the First of May is traditionally the workers’ day, the day on which working people of all countries should express their solidarity with each other. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, and our companion parties abroad, celebrate the day in those terms. But apart from us, the tradition has been debased by modern realities.

The tanks, the missiles, the guns, the soldiers which are paraded through Moscow’s Red Square are expressing, not the international unity, but the national strifes and prejudices, of the working class.

Throughout the so-called Communist bloc the story is the same bellicose speeches spiced with one or two outworn and meaningless cliches, which in reality are a challenge to the Western capitalist powers on behalf of their counterparts fn the East, are applauded as revolutionary statements of working class interests.

In this country, the situation is no better. The Labour movement, which claims May Day for its own, is concerned not with the unity of the working class but with aggravating the issues which divide them.

A part of this movement demonstrates over Vietnam, disappointed that the Wilson government has treated the war there just as any other capitalist administration would.

It demonstrates over rents, losing itself in the impenetrable jungle of capitalist reform. It attacks the Conservatives, mistakenly believing that they are greater enemies of the working class than are the Labour Party.

It demonstrates on many things, none of them of any worth. Hands off this country. Hands on that country. Get this person out of goal. Put that person in.

These are all part of what the Left wing has always loved to call “spontaneous” demonstrations which show the “solidarity” of the workers. They are part of a favourite Left wing myth—that the working class are united.

This is a lie. The workers are split on a multitude of issues. They are split over the race and colour issue. They are split over which side they should take in the international disputes of the world's ruling classes. They are even split over which party they want to run British capitalism.

These splits are the fruits of about sixty years of Labour Party propaganda., The Left wing—the “progressive” politicians—have never done anything to heal them. Rather have they created some of the worst of them.

There is, therefore, an urgent need for someone to state, constantly and consistently, the reasons why the working class should be united.

The working class are those people in capitalist society who get their living by working for a wage. They sell their ability to work to their employers, which means that their interests as sellers of labour power are one, against those of the class who buy their labour power.

In the process of labour the working class are exploited. Here is the source of their problems—their poverty, their degradation, the ceaseless pressures of insecurity which distort their lives.

Here is the source of bad housing, of worry, of much misery and sickness.

Capitalism overshadows all our lives with fear and restrictions. All workers share an international unity of interest to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.

None of this is ever whispered at the multitude of Left wing demonstrations which deface May Day. The myths are dying hard, but facts have a force which cannot be denied.

The working class as a whole do not yet realise where their interests lie. If they demonstrate on May Day at all, it is for the wrong motives. Rather than waste their time in this way, they should unite to abolish the system which causes the problems they demonstrate about

News in Review: Unions to heel (1965)

The News in Review column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unions to heel

The time when the Attlee government were in office was the heyday of the unofficial strike. The reason was that very often an unofficial action was the only method of pushing a wage claim; whatever the official union leaders were compelled to do at the negotiating table, in public many of them championed the wage-restraint policy of the Labour government.

Since then, times have not been so good for the wildcat striker. The official strike has come back into respectability.

The Wilson government did not find the unions so docile. On the very night of Labour’s victory last October, TUC General Secretary George Woodcock made it plain that he still thought the unions’ first job was to stand out for their members’ interests, independent if need be from government policy.

But it was predictable that some union leaders should decide that, simply because Labour is in power, the economic fortunes of the employers should come first.

Last March Mr. John Boyd, who is on the executive of both the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Labour Party, appealed to the annual women’s conference of his union for “. . . sympathetic understanding, co-operation, discipline and restraint . . ."

The moderates have an even more impressive convert. Mr. Ted Hill of the Boilermakers, who was once the enfant terrible of the unions’ left wing, wrote in his union journal last January that unions should help the TUC to reduce strikes and restrictive practices: "If there is likely to be a demarcation dispute, submit the matter to arbitration . . . if there is likely to be a strike, take the matter through procedure before taking strike action.”

Are the unions, then, tamed? Will they give up the struggle for better wages and conditions? On the contrary, the pressures of capitalism will themselves show up the words of men like Boyd and Hill for the wishful thinking that they are. For example the AEU women, just like the Labour Party women before them, have demanded equal pay. All the time, the more usual type of wage claim is coming in, as inevitable as tomorrow's dawn.

This is not surprising. During Labour's first three months of office the Official Index Retail Prices which, whatever, its deficiencies is some sort of guide in these matters, rose by about one and a half per cent. This means that the buying power of the pound, taken as twenty shillings when Labour came into office, had fallen to 19s. 8d. by last January.

The working class cannot afford to ignore such factors as this. Rising prices mean a decline in living standards, unless they are balanced out by a rise in wages. Apart from that, there are other things which ensure that the working class will carry on the struggle to improve their wages and working conditions.

This is an inevitable by product of the basic employer/employee relationship of capitalism, which as long as it lasts will always produce strikes and other disputes.

This situation will not be abolished, nor even changed, by speeches and resolutions, nor by the breathtaking manoeuvres of union leaders who are left wing firebrands when the Tories are in office and who disappoint their deluded followers by becoming staid right wingers when Labour takes over.

Art, for whose sake?

An essential part of the popular British conception of an American millionaire is that he is a vulgar Philistine who yet likes to flaunt his wealth by buying up famous works of art which mean nothing to him.

It follows from this that, whenever a rich American buys a famous picture, or piece of sculpture, over here, and wants to take it back home, there are protests on all sides.

This is what happened when Mr. Norton Simon bought Rembrandt's picture of his son, Titus, at Christie's. The protests were all the stronger because Mr. Simon appeared to have put in his successful bid after the auctioneer's hammer had come down for the last time.

The press reports of what they called this “dramatic” incident inspired many workers whose usual experience of artistic enjoyment is confined to studying the Maidenform Bra adverts on the Underground to assume a sudden knowledge of the intricacies of top rank auctions.

Everyone seemed to be agreed that it would be a calamity if Titus left this country. In some ways it was reminiscent of the hooha over da Vinci's Madonna and Child; there were attempts to stop the Board of Trade granting an export licence for Titus, appeals to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to provide for repurchasing the picture in his Budget, schemes to raise the £798,000 needed to buy it back. A simple soul would have assumed from this that Titus was a British picture, and that there had been long queues of art-hungry people to view it. In fact Rembrandt was, of course, a Dutchman, which, on the protestors’ own arguments, means that the Dutch are the only people who have a right to be annoyed about the affair.

Then again, the picture had not been open to public viewing but had been part of a rich Englishman’s collection in the Channel Islands. (Were the Dutch annoyed when Titus was originally bought out of Holland?)

Nationalism is never logical, but it is blatantly stupid when it works up its ire over the artistic products of another country.

Most of the people who were indignant over the Rembrandt picture can never have come remotely near to seeing it when it was in the Cooks’ private collection. At any rate, Mr. Simon intended it for wider enjoyment than that; he planned to show it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Indignation would be better directed against a social system in which works of art can be bought and sold, and bargained for, and be the subject of nationalistic emotions. Rembrandt, who died in neglected squalor, might have been bitterly amused by it all.

Gas in Vietnam

The world has never recovered from the shock of the first gas attacks on the Western Front in 1915, and the sense of shock has been in no way lessened by the knowledge that there were many other horrors borne of that war.

Why the shock should have been so intense and so long-lasting has never been adequately explained. It persists today, although there is no gas which inflicts a worse death than napalm, or the fringes of a nuclear flash, or indeed many other of the ghastly machines which capitalism has invented and developed to a high degree of efficiency to prosecute its wars.

Poison gas is outlawed by what are called the international rules of war something which, although it allows all manner of horrors to flourish uncondemned, seems to convince many people that war is really a comfortable, humane occupation for gentlemen.

It was this combination of fear and hypocrisy which caused the storm over the American gas attacks in Vietnam. The United States government protested that they would not dream of using such barbaric methods of warfare (at the time they were busily dropping napalm bombs) and that the gas was really harmless stuff which any government might use against strikers or demonstrators.

The only comment to make on this is that it may be true. And then again it may not. No government—especially one which has such widespread interests and involvements as Washington—thinks twice about lying when it suits its purpose, and purposes are particularly open to being suited in wartime.

Gas warfare has one great thing to commend it to the designers of capitalism’s war machine. It destroys human beings but it does not damage property. The only snag, from their point of view, is that ways of delivering the stuff have to be found, and that these will he attacked by the other side with all the old methods of destruction—high explosives, incendiaries, nuclear missiles—which means that property is going to suffer after all.

There is no way out of it. War is not going to become a humane business. Even a comparatively small affair like the struggle in Vietnam can call into use some ghastly methods of dealing out death and destruction.

It is futile to expect capitalism to take a step backwards and humanise its wars—futile to expect a great power to throw away powerful, and possibly dominating, weapons. The people who have protested over the use of gas in Vietnam—many of them are the usual weary crowd of “Progressives’’—are once more turning their backs on the facts of capitalist life.

This js a dangerous habit. Capitalism has a way of making us face facts—and plenty of equipment with which to do it.

The Budget

Budget Day is usually the occasion for a certain amount of clowning about on the part of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some of this is undoubtedly stimulated by the newspapers’ anxiety to unearth what they call a human story behind the impersonally vast amounts of money with which the Chancellor juggles.

Thus there was Mr. Heathcoat Amory feeding the birds on his window sill. There was Mr. Maudling’s comely young daughter suddenly bursting to fame as a film starlet after the press had discovered her. And this year there was Mr. Callaghan’s new dispatch box—symbolising, he promised us, a new era in the Treasury.

After this it came as no surprise when the Chancellor chose the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol to bear increased taxes. These are two of the fields where government control has established near-monopoly conditions, which enables prices to be high enough for the State to skim off a nice, creamy dollop of tax.

Many of the Budget's extra imposts were widely forecast by the financial journalists. These “experts” get their living by discussing the effects which the government's financial policies are supposed to have on the British economy. But while they predict in one breath that a certain tax will operate in a certain way, they have to admit in the next that the whole thing is unpredictable.

For example, Alan Day in The Observer:

. . . very large tax increases . . . are needed if the Government wants both to slow down inflation and to keep up a more reasonable pace of expansion of output

And in the same article:

The authors of last week’s Economic Report were clearly bewildered by the task even of explaining what happened last year . . . Any judgement about this year's developments must involve a high degree of uncertainty.

For example, Richard Fry in The Guardian:

. . . the Chancellor must devise his tax claims so that the total effect will have just the right impact on demand, production, and employment over the coming year. That is always a delicate and chancy operation and it will be harder than usual this year.

This confusion persists, even after the Budget is out Mr. Callaghan himself, in a television interview, admitted that he was not sure what the result of his Budget would be and that he could only hope his sums and forecasts would turn out right Nobody pointed out the obvious, that capitalism is a chaotic social system which cannot be planned or budgeted or controlled.

Workers, also, are confused by Budgets. They are convinced that what the Chancellor decides will have a significant effect on their livelihoods. In fact, with or without tax, everyone who has to work for a living gets a wage which is generally enough to reproduce their working energies and abilities.

Taxation is really a concern of the capitalist class. They are the class who need the vast State machine, the armed forces and their costly weapons. It is in their interests that State medical and social services are run. They are the only class who can afford to bear the immense tax burden.

These facts are not generally accepted. Budgets are excellent subjects for the customary political shadow-boxing between the Labour and Conservative parties, and this year’s was no exception. But no Budget has ever had more than a negligible effect upon the lives of the mass of the people. Their poverty and problems have deeper roots.

It is unfortunate, to say the least, that most workers ignore this, preferring to spend their time grumbling about a few pennies on or off beer, fags and the other consolations of their drab existence.

Ku-Klux-Klan

One of the results of the much-publicised Civil Rights activities in Selma, Alabama, and the murder of a white woman civil rights worker, has been to focus attention on that grotesque body the Ku-Klux-Klan.

The excesses of this gang of bigots and racketeers are too well known to need repeating, but they are probably nearing the end of the road. A mere shadow of their former selves, although still a murderous shadow, President Johnson’s violent attack on them, and the Congressional Committee of Investigation, that looks as if it means business, will probably finish them off.

After all, a powerful modern state like the U.S.A. cannot tolerate an Invisible Empire within its boundaries, that defies its laws and holds it up to contempt.

Perhaps just as important, this is a world in which a large number of independent states with predominately coloured populations exist, and are growing in importance. These have economic, political and military value to the United States, particularly as other powerful States are looking for opportunities to muscle in. American Capitalists do not want visiting diplomats or businessmen to be insulted or threatened because of their skin colour.

The Ku-Klux-Klan, with its lunatic mumbo-jumbo, with its Imperial Wizards, Exalted Cyclops, Klokards, Klokams and Nighthawks, to quote just a few, its passwords, bloodoaths and burning crosses, sound like an exaggerated form of such harmless but futile organisations as the Freemasons and the Buffalo’s.

Except that its purpose is terrorism. It is amazing that anyone should take it seriously, but the grim fact is that in its hey-day its membership ran into millions. Its childish costumes and antics make it sound like a schoolboy game or a joke, but it was no joke to the victims of its obscene brutality.

Based on an organisation that arose in the bitter aftermath of the American Civil War, and which flourished for only about three years during the Reconstruction period before being disbanded, the KKK was resurrected in the early years of this century.

Anti; foreigners, Jews. Catholics and Negroes, it appealed to the worst prejudices and the ignorance of the American working class. From time to time it has ridden on waves of hysteria to national importance, but most of the time its power has been more local. In the I930's it added Communists and “labour agitators” to its list of victims.

The progress of the Klan has been marked by a trail of misery. Murder, mutilation, flogging and branding have been amongst its methods, and although its end is probably in sight, as the time-bombs of Alabama show, it looks like making a bloody exit.

The Passing Show: Free blood (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free blood

You walk in and sit down. You are called to a table, where a man in a white coat pricks your finger for a test. Then you lie on a bench and hand the bottle you've been given to a nurse. About twenty minutes later they have a pint of your blood in the bottle and you are drinking a cup of tea. Not long after that you're back at work (that's the worst part of it—the rest is not at all a bother).

This is the typical routine at a blood donor session, and such is the demand for blood, that your pint may be used within a matter of hours. This is one of the sobering facts surrounding the National Blood Transfusion Service in England, and probably one which prompts many workers to give their life fluid every few months.

In this country there is no money in it for you. merely a small certificate or badge in recognition of your services. Equally there are no strings attached or compulsion, yet thousands of people donate at regular intervals and give it no more thought than going to bed or any other day-to-day function. No doubt the prospect of an hour off from the monotony of their work and the chance to see other faces are factors, but I think there is something more to it than that.

Here is perhaps just a faint glimpse of human beings doing something for each other without the prospect of "gain" in the sense that it is meant today, but equally without fear of injury to themselves in the process. Under such conditions is it too much to feel that perhaps many of them get a real sense of satisfaction such as they rarely encounter in their workaday lives? The eagerness with which they give their blood suggests maybe a sense of relief at being able to act for a brief spell without the normal restrictions which capitalism imposes, although they are not conscious of its reason.

Peace time war training

It is about as near to a "harmony of interests" that capitalism will ever let you go, because apart from odd moments like these, you are in constant competition with your fellow man. And even in this sphere, capitalism has a degrading effect, for as fast as blood is collected in one place, it is shed even faster on the roads at home and in places farther afield like the trouble spots of Malaysia. Cyprus and Aden.

This is the background against which to view the efforts of the devoted doctors and nurses of the blood bank. It seems you just can't win while capitalism is with us.

Capitalism causes wars, big and small. That is a simple statement of fact, but it has many implications. You should not, for instance, run away with the idea that war is something which bursts like a thunderclap over a largely unprepared and unsuspecting world, for such are the conditions of modern capitalism that there is plenty of suspicion between the powers, even while they are professing undying friendship, and they are never entirely unprepared.

They are constantly training their forces and developing their weapons of death and destruction, and where they get the chance, they will give them a tryout under operating conditions. Thus they gain valuable data for future modifications in time for the bigger showdowns to come. .Such was the case during the Spanish Civil War for example, when some of the major powers sent arms and "volunteers" to one side or the other and noted their effects. Then there was the Korean episode, when the British Centurion tank was in action and later underwent alterations as a result.

Now this is not to say that Spain and Korea were just glorified weapon testing grounds. Obviously there were very real capitalist interests at stake which caused the flareups and put the men and weapons there in the first place. But they are also regarded as useful training grounds, although this is not something that statesmen and politicians will normally care to admit. However, sometimes we may get a glimpse of cynical candour as one or another of them shoots his mouth off, like Lord Mountbatten, thus:

This is war, but is a very small form of war . . . We are being shot at but really it is the most marvellous training that our forces ever had . . . (speaking on the Malaysian situation in New Zealand March 4th.)

Out of the horse’s mouth indeed. Obviously Lord Mountbatten does not think that the “marvellous training" will be wasted. No doubt it will come in handy to protect British capitalism’s interests elsewhere when this little crisis blows over, and for that very reason then as now, workers will get killed or horribly maimed. It’s a man’s life in the Army.

Infernal combustion engines

A friend of mine runs a small shop on the outskirts of Watford. Apart front his shop and a few others, the road is lined with houses on both sides almost for its entire length. Most of the houses and shops have been there for many years, so there has keen little change in the size or appearance of the road in all that time. But there has been one big change in another respect which terrifies the wits out of me every time I walk along that road.

Time was when the shop door could be left open on a warm day in Summer. But that was some years ago, before the road became a feeder to the M.1. Now, the stink and deafening noise of huge lorries and countless cars have made a nightmare of the place, especially in the rush hour. So, Winter and Summer alike, the shop door stays closed and if you walk along the narrow pavement (laid long before the car became the monster it is today), you need eyes in the back of your head to get you home in one piece. Probably all that has saved the road from complete destruction is the construction of M.1 extension into London a few miles away, due for opening in the near future.

The problem of the roads was growing before the second world war, but it is in the post war years that it has threatened to get out of hand and has been such a headache for the capitalist class of Britain and other countries. One gets the impression that some of them would like to see some sort of restrictions imposed, but the car industry has now assumed such importance in modern capitalist economy, that they will not attempt anything to hamper its growth to any great extent. What this holds in store for us in terms of ripping up the countryside and the deterioration of already ugly places remains to be seen.

It is of course very convenient in many ways to have a car nowadays, but more than that—for many workers it is a positive necessity by the very nature of their employment. It is indicative of the demand to move ever faster in the world of capitalist competition, where time is money and every second counts.

So the politician who takes over the administration of modern capitalism will have to make big allowances for the automobile in his electoral calculations, whatever his personal feelings. Greater London Council Member Mrs. Peggy Jay (wife of Douglas) may shout about proposed “box” of motorways for London, and tell of the destruction of living space, and about ten thousand trees, which it may well entail, but she will not get much support from the electorate at large. For the system which she supports has produced the motorised worker of the sixties, dominated by his machine and hating anyone who denies him the right to drive it where he likes, even in some places onto the sea shore to the very edge of the waves.

Crackpot? indeed yes, but just another of those problems that only a private property system can produce.

Gaspers

”. . . The Conservative Party should not be afraid of inequality.” (Mr. Du Cann, Tory Party Chairman, 27.3.65.)

“ This is not an attack on profits.” (Mr. Brown, defending Labour Government's budget 7.4.65.)

“ My first job is to maintain political stability and if 1 have to detain ten or twenty thousand, I will do it.” (Dr. Banda at a Blantyre rally on 4.4.65.)

“The days of nuclear war are gone." (Mao Tse Tung to Arab Leaders in Peking, reported 6.4.65.)

"Businessmen have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour Government than they had before.” (Mr. Brown in an interview with the editor of Director, Institute of Directors Journal, April 1965.)

"We do not care what colour a person's skin is. It is just that we do not want any more coloured people in Marshall Street.” (Mrs. Groves of Smethwick after a deputation meeting with the Housing Minister 8.4.65.)

Eddie Critchfield