The Political Background 1904-74 (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed there have been nineteen general elections in which the working class have testified to their faith that it is possible to reform capitalism in the interests of the majority and that the differences between politicians are real.

This conception can be lived with only by turning a blind eye and a deaf ear. The last seventy years is littered with broken promises and declarations. Lloyd George urging men into the trenches with his picture of them returning to Homes fit for Heroes; Jimmy Thomas burbling that he had “the complete cure” for unemployment (1930, just before the number out of work climbed to an all-time high); Wilson’s “new age” of technology. And the numerous pledges to provide us all with a rising standard of living.

The SPGB came into existence about the same time as the Labour Party. In the 1906 election of a Liberal government, there were 52 MPs from the new Labour Party, claiming to represent trade-union interests but promising to flower into a full-blown reformist party:

. . . It will require all our collective efforts to break down the forces of privilege and monopoly that have so long dominated the political life of this country.

That reads like Harold Wilson, promising to clean things up in 1974; in fact it is Arthur Henderson, celebrating Labour’s triumph in 1906.

But the tide receded and the Labour Party was losing seats in 1914. Labour leaders who had mouthed slogans about international working-class unity became patriots, joined the war government and persuaded workers to join up. In contrast, Socialists were standing against the war. That was no easy time to resist. Our propaganda was restricted, our members thrown into prison or forced to go on the run. The SPGB hung on, and there are many stories told of how we did it.

In 1918 the working class looked hopefully for all the speeches to become reality. They reasoned that the men who had organized mass murder should organize something in peacetime and the result was an overwhelming victory for Lloyd George’s coalition. Then came unemployment with its lines at the Labour Exchanges and ex-servicemen selling matches in gutters.

At this time a man who was to deceive the working class for a long time emerged. Stanley Baldwin’s vote-winning image was of the pipe-smoking, country-loving Englishman, which went down well with the workers, even those who had never seen a green field. In truth Baldwin was among the craftiest of political operators.

Baldwin battled to get rid of Lloyd George, and eventually accomplished it. (In the opinion of A. J. P. Taylor, Lloyd George was ". . . the first Prime Minister since Walpole to leave office flagrantly richer than he entered it.” The same could not be said for the people he had ruled over, buried among the battlefields of Europe or sunk in despair.) In 1923 Baldwin tried to persuade the workers that a tariff on imports would cure unemployment, and on that issue fought an election. He failed and for the first time Labour was in office.

Labour supporters rejoiced while their leader Ramsey MacDonald confessed himself “appalled at the poorness of the material” on the Labour benches. Anyone who feared wild revolutionaries was reassured when MacDonald, in full Court dress, showed that British traditions were to remain unharmed. But MacDonald’s government lasted only nine months.

The period which followed held the General Strike, which has been called a great betrayal of the working class. In truth, had the strikers been conscious of their class interests, betrayal would have been impossible. Their leaders were not traitors but expressions of the strikers’ lack of that consciousness. It was a bitter episode for the trade unions and the Labour Party.

By 1929 unemployment had reached serious proportions. In desperation, the workers tried another Labour government, again dependent on the Liberals. In 1931 unemployment reached nearly three million. MacDonald insisted that capitalism needed the unemployed to consume less, and took Snowden, Thomas and others to join Liberals and Tories in a National Government. The workers were allowed to join in the applause for this act of statesmanship; they elected 554 National MPs against only 52 to Labour.

Meanwhile in Germany, the Nazis harnessed working-class despair to rampant nationalism. They were the first steps towards the next war. One effect of that was to revive the Labour Party through support for Winston Churchill — Churchill, who never hid his contempt for the working class. Of course Labour leaders did get jobs in the Churchill government, sharing responsibility for the slaughter of millions.

Again, Socialists opposed that war and were made to suffer. Our stand was clearly justified when from the post-war election emerged the first majority Labour government. Many of its ministers had learned to run capitalism in co-operation with Churchill and the Tories during the war. The new government promised better relations with Russia; they brought in reforms in the social and medical services which would, they told us, end poverty; and they could apply their schemes of nationalization.

The Labour government, with its Foreign Secretary Bevin, fought out the first days of the Cold War, which on occasion came near a hot World War. The health service was a more efficient method of servicing workers back to work. Nationalization was discredited. One of the ministers in that government, Alfred Robens, later said of the nationalization schemes he had championed:

I do not believe that in 1945 those of us who were nationalizing these industries would have done it with so much enthusiasm if someone had told us that they were going to turn into state capitalism. (The Times, 1 April 1968)

“We are the masters now” said Attorney General Hartley Shawcross, but Labour looked anything but masters. Their response to crises was to try to force down working-class standards; to keep conscription; to start a hydrogen bomb. Charges on the Health Service caused a storm of protest led by Aneurin Bevan. By the next election the Labour Party was broken; in October 1951 Churchill returned. There was little difference between the two parties. This may have contributed to a mood of cynicism and apathy which oppressed political activity in Britain for several years.

In 1955 Churchill, so far into his dotage that he was an embarrassment, handed over to Anthony Eden, one of the glamour boys of British politics. But Eden’s rule turned out anything but a romance. British capitalism was in retreat as the mighty sphere of control, mineral resources and markets once known as the British Empire had shrunk. Most politicians had accepted the reality but Eden seemed to live in another world. In the Middle East, British oil interests had been badly damaged by nationalist takeovers. When a new government in Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, Eden ordered an invasion of Egypt and in the resultant uproar he lost not only the Canal but his job as Prime Minister.

Eden was replaced by Macmillan, who looked and spoke like an Edwardian fop but knew how to outmanoeuvre opponents and deceive the voters. Macmillan’s party seemed in ruins and Labour hopes were high : the new leader Gaitskell appeared to be convinced that power lay within his grasp. His chance came in 1959, but when the votes were counted he was openly aghast at his party’s defeat.

Disappointed not to find himself Prime Minister, he tried to persuade Labour to say that what they had been advocating was wrong : such as the meaningless Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution, which was interpreted to mean outright nationalization. The result was an enormous battle at a Labour conference in 1959, when Gaitskell bluntly put his reason: “Nationalization,” he said, “is a vote loser.” The following year the Labour Party was in uproar again, as unilateralists fought for the abandonment of British nuclear arms. Gaitskell was not worried about having to take notice of conference decisions; what did concern him was that such decisions would be unpopular among the workers and damage the chances of returning to government.

Soon, however, Macmillan’s Tory government, caught up in another economic crisis, made an assault upon wages. Partly in an attempt to win back popularity Macmillan sacked part of his Cabinet, applied to join the Common Market and pushed the first racist laws on to the Statute Book, in the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. As these bids failed, Macmillan was doomed and the Profumo scandal in 1963 damaged him beyond repair. He resigned and Douglas-Home was appointed — by what one disappointed aspirant described as the “magic circle” of the Conservative Party.

But Home was simply not up to the job. Harold Wilson (who became Labour’s leader after Gaitskell died in 1963) rang rings round him, although when the election came in 1964, the Labour Party scraped home with the slimmest of majorities. Hoping that capitalism would not blow up a storm too soon, Wilson stated Labour’s aim to control wages :

For a Labour Government, no less than for the Conservatives, success or failure In the battle against inflation would depend on its ability to secure an understanding with the unions which would make wage restraint possible. (The Guardian, 25 October 1957)

A “Department of Economic Affairs” was set for the attack on working-class standards. It told everyone that the “norm” for wage rises was to be 3½ per cent, a year and we would all have to work harder.

Nevertheless, when Wilson timed another election for 1966 he got an increased majority. He was “Britain’s clever little man” (The Economist, 26 February 1966), Kosygin, the Russian ruler, is reputed to have said: “Sometimes I think you must have joined the Labour Party to save it from Socialism.”

Pundits are still analyzing the fall of the Wilson government in 1970. They had outdone the Tories in racist legislation, imposed statutory restraint on wages, supported the American war in Vietnam, kept up the British nuclear armoury. Having abolished prescription charges, they brought them back again. They made another attempt to get into the Common Market, and sketched out their plans for anti-trade union laws. Whatever the workers thought, many businessmen approved :

. . . I have had to rather reluctantly recognise that the current Socialist administration seems to have a better appreciation of business matters than did its Conservative predecessors. (Frank Kearton, chairman of Courtaulds, The Guardian, 27 October 1966)

Edward Heath’s alternative was a refusal to apply statutory controls because, apparently, if wages and prices were left to their own levels we should be swamped in prosperity. In practice his government became famous for changes in policy, but failed to hold down prices, which ran higher than ever; eventually it too imposed controls, and the anti-union laws which had been among the ambitions of Labour and Tories. In a confused election, Heath was turned out. Wilson promised workers that he would get them back to work — and they cheered him, like galley-slaves cheering the whip.

This has been the background to the seventy years of the Socialist Party’s life. We have seen the working class oscillate between Liberals, Labour and Conservative, forgetting the past. Seventy years and still capitalism is entrenched. The working class have misused the vote, which can bring into being a society of human wellbeing. The work of the Socialist is to show its proper use.

Ivan

The Socialist-Myth Countries (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the: many factors which have contributed to the undoubtedly disappointing speed (if that is the word) at which the working class have progressed towards an understanding of Socialism in the years since the Socialist Party was formed, one which has undoubtedly had a serious effect is the emergence of the so-called socialist countries, commencing in 1917 with Russia and continuing with many others in more recent years. The effect has been pernicious in two ways. First, the picture of life as it affects the working class in those lands has been of sufficient grimness as to cause those workers who think at all about these things to say: if that is Socialism (and only the tiniest handful realise that it is isn’t), you can keep it.

Secondly, and perhaps of even greater importance, large numbers of workers who are dissatisfied with capitalism as they experience it in their daily lives, especially the younger and more idealistically-inclined elements, have been taken in by the propaganda put cut by these countries from Lenin’s time onwards, the mouthing of pseudo-Marxist phrases, the glib misuse of the terms Socialism and Communism for realities which were so different, often horrifically so. If all the youthful energy and enthusiasm which have been wasted on these false dawns had been channelled into genuinely Socialist effort, it is reasonable to suppose that the cause would have been materially advanced. The damage done to Socialist progress by Lenin and his ilk hardly bears thinking about.

It is of course no coincidence that the Socialist Party was never taken in by the spurious talk about the creation of Socialism in Russia. Our party was from the first anchored to the doctrine that there can be no Socialism until the material conditions for a society of abundance have been achieved (this, ironically or not, being the task of capitalism); and, equally important, till the majority of the working class understand and want the new system of common ownership. We stood behind Marx’s dictum that the establishment of the new society must be the work of the working class itself. And we therefore regarded with contempt Lenin’s completely opposite teaching (in What is to be done ? and other works) that the workers were not equipped to understand Socialism, which must be brought about by an élite Bolshevik leadership who were so equipped (presumably either by God or by nature). (It should be noted here that with Marx and Lenin having two mutually exclusive attitudes on this fundamental aspect, the very phrase “Marxism-Leninism”, always on the lips of the so-called Communists, is about as meaningful as square circles or black snowflakes.)

The rest of the world expressed puzzlement in 1917 (still does) that, contrary to Marx’s ideas, Socialism should come first not in the industrialised west but in backward Russia. We had no bother in dealing with this puzzle; we knew it was just a figment of the imagination. Lenin kept talking about Socialism. To many people that proved it existed. It didn’t. And doesn’t. The vast majority of Russians are propertyless workers who are forced to allow themselves to be exploited just as in the west. Marx’s “abolition of the wages system” is not even on the horizon in Russia. Any more than it is here. And the Russian workers are not even permitted the luxury of being allowed to talk about the idea or to publish papers like this one to propagate the idea of Socialism.

Since the Hitler war ended, the plague of fake socialist countries has spread widely. The countries of eastern Europe fell under the control of the military might of the state-capitalist giant in Moscow. The feelings of the workers who live under those pernicious régimes show through from time to time in the form of uprisings in Berlin, Budapest, Prague or Danzig (where Polish workers who merely protested against a massive increase in prices were mowed down by tanks sent by their “Communist” masters in Warsaw).

In China, a tiny gang of Maoists have imposed their iron grip over 800 million workers who are exploited without mercy and without the slightest vestige of trade union rights and other freedoms. And a British Labour Peeress, Lady Wootton, who has the nerve to call herself a Socialist, actually wrote in Encounter that it was quite right that these millions should not be allowed trade unions ! While in The Observer, an ignorant intellectual, Professor Galbraith, actually wrote: “It works for the Chinese” (this echoing a previous-generation American intellectual who returned from Moscow with the infamous remark : “I have seen the future and it works”). Of course it works well enough for these impudent carpet-baggers who enjoy VIP trips to see the exploitation of the Chinese workers and then return to their home comforts to get paid for writing lies about it. But it is a sad fact that many young workers and students, who apparently now see through the Russian fraud, have simply switched not to studying Marx but to bootlicking Mao.

The rash has now spread so that every tin-pot black dictatorship in Africa has the nerve to call itself Socialist. And of course, so-called radical papers like the Guardian play their ignoble part in fostering the myths and the confusion by conning their readers into thinking that Socialism exists in such unlikely places as Zambia, Tanzania or Cuba. It never seems to worry these western apostles of freedom that all these places have one thing in common — prisons crammed with poor wretches whose only crime is to have fallen foul of the tyrannies run by Kaunda, Nyerere or Castro. Perhaps they have a great deal to learn, but many of them must be already learning it.

L. E. Weidberg

A Different Kind of Life (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is not a political abstraction but a statement of here and now. Nearly all the questions and arguments thrust at Socialists resolve to a single one “What does it offer to me ?” The idea that offers have to be made is a mental habit acquired from capitalist politics — but one which implies the room for improvement to be, always, enormous.

To all of you: we are offering and promising nothing. Your first understanding must be that the different world so direly needed has to be made by you the multitude, not us the handful. If offers are thought of, of course it is the cut-price bird in the hand that will clutched every time. But don’t you wonder why the offer always turns out a swindle? For the last generation the bird in hand has been rising living standards, made a banquet by the Welfare State’s red wine. Look at them and the society in which they have gone sour, and you see what Socialism is all about.

#

The anticipations of the “never-had-it-so-good” era faded away abruptly. On one hand the Welfare State has failed, except in proliferating bureaucracy; on another there is the endless poverty, the cry all through society that ends can’t be met. People have ceased to point out that an unemployed man with a family can get twenty-five pounds a week in social security payments because it is seen — more and more often — that wages for innumerable workers are below even that figure. The drastic measures taken by the last Wilson government, deliberately creating unemployment and setting back wages, show the extent to which the Labour Party has fallen away from the humanism which. even if only in talk, once characterized it. Previous Labour governments had unemployment and economic crises, but they apologized and tried to excuse themselves; this one calculated the number it should have out of work and how long they should remain so.

The means by which depression and destitution were said to be being overcome in the ’fifties have rebounded. Credit and hire-purchase, the agencies through which working people were “improving their standards”, provide not only private millstones but instruments for the regulation of domestic consumption and the direction of labour. An increase in the statutory deposit for certain classes of good has the automatic effect of making them unpurchasable even on hire-purchase for the time, and so reducing production in — say — furniture factories to make part of their labour-force redundant and available for work elsewhere.

Likewise in the nineteen-fifties it was widely said that social barriers were disappearing. The fact that rich and poor read the same newspapers and watched the same television programmes was held to be the sign of an equalization of culture; working-class access to domestic comforts and leisure-time enjoyments, the beginning of the end of private privilege. What has emerged has been the drawing of new lines. If anything, the social-group divisions are now tighter and more numerous than before. They can be seen at work in the rapid destruction of country-village life, for instance. Today the cottages and houses are taken over by executive and professional townspeople who recognize only their own kind, and the villagers are herded into the rural council-house estates which are virtually their ghettoes.

The apparent social inroads have only set up more divisions. A package holiday abroad may be a pleasurable change, but its social status is on a level with a trip to Brighton. The proletarian stigmata are not permitted to be erased. The phrase “permissive society” for certain phenomena in the last few years is a giveaway as to the sort of society we are really living in. As apparent barriers have broken down, restrictive laws have been steadily extended : permission is given, but under supervision and on the condition of instant withdrawal when thought necessary.

#

That is all workaday and domestic living. What of the great issues and questions for humanity ? The keynote of the nineteen-fifties’ apathy was struck by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger — “There aren’t any good, brave causes any more”. There was, of course, the hydrogen bomb; it has now receded in people’s consciousness, the Vietnam war perhaps taken as a confirmation that the powers would simply never dare to use it. Vietnam itself was a fertile source of indignation and protest from mixed motives: human compassion, dismay at the cynicism of governments, anti-Americanism and desire for the Communists to win were all present in the rallies and the fights round Grosvenor Square.

The Socialist Standard was the only paper to remark, at the height of anti-nuclear feeling, what was the truly terrifying thing about the hydrogen bomb — that the world could be scourged and devastated by weapons of war without it. Less than twenty years later there is a still more terrifying thought, as evidence has accumulated of the effects of everyday pollution of the environment — the world can be equally scourged without war at all. There is, too, at this moment talk of a world-wide economic crisis on the scale of 1929 against whose onset the political and economic wisdom of capitalism is powerless.

What can be done about any or all of these things? They are not even problems in the sense of housing, or traffic, or the care of the old, where the hope that legislation can mitigate may be mistaken but is understandable; they are part of the condition of humanity now. Of course there are protests and demands. The protests, however, tend to be a matter of affirming self-respect and decent feelings more than anything else I have stood up and testified, runs the sentiment, so what is happening today is not my fault. Some time ago a Labour MP spoke to the writer of having given up the Vietnam crusade: “What can you do about Vietnam ? Nothing!”

It depends on what you want to do. Hopes for social reform are usually fragmentary or one-eyed; they concern themselves with a single outstanding evil, or are limited to a belief (for example) that people must be made better before the world will change much. If it is possible to find an umbrella covering all aspirations for a humane society, the nearest idea is that of choice. It is only in this context that the word “freedom” makes sense : freedom to choose. The objection to authority and coercion is precisely that they deny choice and impose someone else’s. Racialism and war are ultimates in the repudiation of choice — born on the wrong side, one forfeits the right to participation in society or even to live. Poverty denies choice; not only in the sense that if one is poor there is going to be bread-and-margarine, but in reference to work, housing, education, leisure activities and personal relationships.

The inference (as taken up by many “libertarians”) might be that what one has to do, then, is attack social evils and seek to extend areas of choice for everyone as far as possible. Paradoxically, it is impossible to do that in a class-divided — and therefore basically unfree — society. If an estate is built to rehouse people in a pleasant area, everyone who can afford it in the neighbourhood will promptly move away, making the estate automatically a colony of inferiors. Part of the bitterness over the Welfare State is that, though it was hailed as a national effort transcending individual status, it has never been seen as anything but sectional — a tax, more or less, on the comfortable and a bounty to the poor.

Nor is it feasible to try to legislate against a problem like pollution. There are, of course, partial approaches to it. A few rural districts with small populations have built sludge de-watering plants, where sewage effluent is transformed into a dry cake usable as a low-grade organic fertilizer; though the expense for urban areas would be gigantic. Likewise, a different and costlier composition for detergents would stop their contribution to the pollution of rivers. But if alternative techniques for all contaminatory industrial processes were found, the criterion is not going to be human wellbeing but “viability” — how much will it cost ?

What is there to say of such a problem except that it is inseparable from production for profit ? Though popular awareness of it is recent, it is simply the development of what has been going on throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If one adds to it the other chronic problems of the modern world — the crisis-producing imbalances of production which are part of the nature of capitalism, the international rivalries and tensions and the dreadful consequences when tension breaks — these alone press a majestic case for a fundamental alteration in society. When is added the failure of capitalism to house, feed, educate or make happy vast numbers of people, or to give any degree of choice — the case becomes overwhelming.

The argument for Socialism is that the problems will cease to exist and freedom of choice be given, only on the terms of common ownership of all the means of living. Production for use means production unconfined by the market as to either distribution or cost. On one hand there would be free access to the wealth of society; on the other, cost and competition would not oppose themselves to human wellbeing. The material fears of loss of work, housing or status that largely underlie racialism would disappear with every other kind of superiority-distinction. So would the pressures which continually crush the quality of personal life. Indeed, if common ownership is seen as the means and not the end, Socialism appears not simply as the solution but as many thousands of solutions : the facility from which progress, in the true sense, may begin.

Robert Barltrop

From the first issue of the Socialist Standard (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

The greatest problem awaiting solution in the world to-day is the existence in every commercial country of extreme poverty side by side with extreme wealth. In every land where, in the natural development of society, the capitalist method of producing and distributing wealth has been introduced, this problem presses itself upon us. Not only so but the greater the grip which capitalism has on industry the more intense is the poverty of the many and the more marked are the riches of the few.

In observing the conditions of this problem, the fact is quickly forced under our notice that it is the producer of wealth who is poor, the non-producer who is rich. How comes it that the men and women who till the soil, who dig the mine, who manipulate the machine, who build the factory and the home, and, in a word, who create the whole of the wealth, receive only sufficient to maintain themselves and their families on the border line of bare physical efficiency, while those who do not aid in production – the employing class – obtain more than is enough to supply their every necessity, comfort, and luxury?

[Extract from Socialist Standard 3 September 1904]

Taxes not a working-class issue (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

Rates and taxes are imposed to cover the cost of local and national government. The employing class — the possessors of property — in order to maintain their existence as a ruling class, must pay the various charges incurred by employing an army, navy, and police force. The ever-growing body of officials they appoint the numerous departments they have to run to make smooth the working of capitalist commerce ; the interest on their “National” Debt heaped up by the cost of past wars : all these have to be paid, and the problem ever facing our masters is—which section of the propertied class is to provide the money ?

[From “Rates and Taxes — Do they fall upon the working class?” Socialist Standard, March 1912]

A Worker’s first problem (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

Mr. Andrew Carnegie in his rectorial address to the Aberdeen University students said:

“Youths should have a decisive voice, if possible, in the selection of their future occupation.”

There is another thing he might have advised them to do, viz, choose their own parents. If they did what large families the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Goulds, and Morgans would have ! Why, no poor man could have any children at all, unless some foolish young man chose a labourer on 16s. a week to be his father.

[From “Jottings”, Socialist Standard, July 1912]

Speak with forked tongue (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

Bernard Shaw has at last told why he “left off lecturing on Socialism.” He says : “Nine-tenths of the art of popular oratory lies in sympathising with the grievances of your hearers.” When his audiences were no longer of the working class he changed his tune.

The lesson is clear. Shawism is for the shirkers, while Socialism is for the workers.

[From “From the Front”, Socialist Standard, December 1912]

Prices not a new problem (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

But starting as a simple commodity, gold only retains its potency because it is still in essence a commodity. As the labour involved in producing it lessens or grows according to the difficulties of mining or the advance of technology, so the amount of other things which a piece of gold will buy alters correspondingly. Equal labour products ever form the basis of the normal exchange. Gold, then, is the barometer of value only because it has value which varies as the labour socially required to produce it varies.

[From “the Secret of Money – And the rise in prices”, Socialist Standard, June 1913]