Answers to Correspondents. (1908)

Letters to the Editors from the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Walter Hearn (New Maiden) writes complaining that in our criticism of the replies given to a questioner by Joseph Burgess at Dundee, we did not say “what Comrade Joseph Burgess ought to have replied if he had been an Equal Dividuigist instead of a Socialist.”—Why complain to us. We don’t know what reply an “Equal Dividuigist” should make. What is an “Equal Dividuigist” ? We can only suggest the reply a Socialist should make. Joseph Burgess didn’t make the Socialist reply—which is understandable because he is not a Socialist and probably knew nothing about it.

John Tamlyn (Burnley).—Thanks. Will use at the earliest opportunity. As you say, Justice is very dull. For the rest we entirely agree.

Fred H. (Biggleswade).—We shall reach Hitchin some day. Meanwhile “go for” the local confusionists to the best of your power. You may make an effective John the Baptist for the Party.

F. W. Sanderson (Brighton).—We probably agree, but as your card is indecipherable we are not sure.

Special. (1908)

Party News from the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several comrades will spend a week in Nottingham, commencing Aug. 17th. Place and time of meetings will be announced in the local Press. Any member willing to assist should communicate with the Gen. Secretary at once.

#    #    #    #

Volunteers are also wanted for a week's propaganda in Bedford, second week in September.

Blogger's Note:

There's the briefest of mentions of the Nottingham activity at the bottom of this Party Pars column from the October 1908 Socialist Standard.

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For August. (1908)

Party News from the August 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why you should be a socialist (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some years ago, a Guardian writer wrote a succinct sentence: "Who stands for nothing falls for anything." This statement rings true for all socialists aware that their fellow workers, voting, for instance, for mainstream parties come election time, are in fact acquiescing in their own exploitation.

Labour, Tory and Liberal candidates are fond of telling workers, and indeed of convincing them, that a vote for them (the candidate) is a vote for themselves (the workers). By electing such-and-such candidate, we are told our taxes will come down, our hospitals will improve, our schools will churn out brighter pupils, that homelessness will disappear, that there will be less unemployment and more jobs and streets free of criminals. In short, we are offered a vision of utopia. The optimistic worker falls for all of this, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of capitalist reality.

In the absence of any coherent ideology, the worker will invariably fall for anything. This is not to insult members of the working class by casting aspersions on their intellect. It says more about the skill of politicians when it comes to regurgitating the same old cant. These administrators of capitalism, the politicians, have been plying their trade since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They have, therefore, become adept, highly skilled in the rhetoric of bullshitting workers. So successful are they, in fact, that a lot of what they have been saying have become the prevalent ideas in society; racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, hostility to the unemployed, the disabled, trades unions and criminals — all these prejudices have their roots more or less in the advent of capitalism.

Workers in this country are constantly reminded they are British, that they have a queen and a culture and a heritage, that they live on an island "the envy of less happy lands". Workers are raised to be nationalistic, patriotic and to stand when the national anthem is played at closing time in the British Legion. And then when wars break out, workers are encouraged to fight workers from other countries, under the delusion that freedom and democracy is at stake. But wars only break out when the interests of the dominant class of one nation clash with those of another, whether it be over trade routes, areas of domination or mineral resources. One US worker-cum-soldier, being interviewed en route to the Gulf, said he had never even heard of Kuwait until the order came through to mobilize. If he had not heard of Kuwait, you can bet he had no idea why he was being told to kill workers in Iraq.

Some workers actually believe their interests are served by killing workers they have never met before in far-away lands, workers who are similarly hoodwinked by their masters to protect their profits and potential markets. They fall for all the jingoism circulated by politicians.

When the Tories came to power in 1979, they had made great use of the slogan "Labour isn’t working", pointing out that unemployment stood at 1,000,000 and that this would fall under Conservatism. Workers fell for this, but within a few years unemployment figures had tripled, in spite of the Tories having made 17 adjustments to the way the original statistics were calculated. Statisticians put the real figure at 4.5 million.

When Mrs Thatcher resigned from office, workers were told she was the "greatest peace-time prime minister". Workers applauded her, some gave her a standing ovation, forgetting she had sent troops to the Falklands and the Gulf, sanctioned the US bombing raid on Libya, increased the troop presence in Northern Ireland and sent battalions of shield-thumping police to confront striking workers at Wapping and Orgreave.

The Labour candidate tells the worker how the coal industry would be safe under Labour, pointing to the number of pits closed since 1979. The worker tuts and pledges support, unaware that a Labour government closed 223 pits between 1965 and 1970.

Lies

The Tories conned workers into investing their hard-earned savings into the newly-privatized nationalized industries. The Labour governments who introduced nationalization (or rather state capitalism) had already told workers these industries belonged to the people. This did not, however, deter workers from buying shares in what theoretically already belonged to them. The Tories did not tell the workers that the returns on their investments would be minimal, nothing compared to the returns big business could expect, and that privatization was only meant to benefit the capitalist class in the first place.

The Tories had another idea — to encourage workers to set up their own businesses. Hundreds of thousands of workers were hoodwinked into believing they could compete with the big boys. Hundreds of thousands were to realize that in a climate where even some of the big boys could not survive, what chance had they. Politicians are always keen to assure workers that a country under their administration will be crime-free, but in the past 15 years there has been a sevenfold increase in reported crime and Britain's prison population is the largest in Europe. Inner-city riots have become so commonplace that they no longer make the headlines, and crimes such as joyriding and ram-raiding are so widespread they have become hackneyed in the plots of television serials.

Over the years, workers have been told there will be "peace in our time", that they’ve "never had it so good". Workers are urged to "watch" the lips of politicians while they repeat "no more taxes". The promises are as endless as they are futile, but still the worker falls for them.

In March this year, William Waldegrave reaffirmed what socialists already knew: "In exceptional circumstances, it is necessary to say something untrue in the House of Commons" (Guardian, 9 March). It doesn’t take much imagination to envisage which "circumstances" — those hidden truths about the nature of capitalist society that would cause a furore amongst workers were they revealed, but which remain a hidden truth because to reveal them would upset the capitalist minority whose system the politicians administer.

Leaders

Again, the administrators of capitalism have convinced workers that they need leaders. So prevalent is this idea that workers perpetuate the illusion themselves on behalf of the leaders, for instance, conditioning their children to take heed of everyone from the local vicar to the village bobby — all of whom see to it that the child never thinks for itself and will never challenge the status quo. The leaders, the politicians, however, are themselves only following the dictates of the profit system, which is itself governed by uncontrollable economic laws.

Workers have been led so long they have forgotten their potential collective strength. We seem unaware that everything in the world is produced by workers, from a pin to an oil rig, not thanks to politicians, but in spite of them.

Think of the artificial brakes that are put on production, the inventions that could benefit humanity, but which are suppressed because their introduction would cause the influx of a product which would in turn diminish somebody’s profits from a similar more expensive product. Most workers are aware of this, but fail to challenge the contradictions of capitalist society because leaders have convinced them there is no alternative society. Workers are told that socialism has already been tried and has failed miserably. But socialism has never been put into practice in any country, and those nations that called themselves communist were in reality only state capitalist, which politicians knew all along.

Workers will continue to be led and to believe what leaders tell them so long as they do not believe in themselves, in their own capabilities. A worker who does not understand how society is really organized, whose conditioning has alienated them from their consciousness will fall for anything.

There is nothing special about a socialist. They do not assume the airs and graces and the arrogance of Leninist vanguard parties, who believe the workers can only achieve a trade union consciousness and who wish to lead the workers into oblivion. Socialists are simply workers who have made a conscious effort to understand society from their own objective position and who have realized that is their position in the relations of production and who can apply this relationship to every aspect of life in present-day society.

The capitalist system is only as strong as the socialist cause is weak. The contradictions of capitalist society will only continue as long as workers are oblivious of them. If you’re reading the Socialist Standard for the first time, then you’ve already made the conscious decision to think for yourself and to reject what you had hitherto been told about socialism. If you stand for socialism you’ll fall for nothing.

John Bissett

Where’s the money going to come from? (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who watches the political programmes at Sunday lunchtime will he familiar with the question "Where’s the money going to come from?" On 1 May, for instance, Brian Walden pressed Labour MP Ann Taylor on this question as a rejoinder to her suggestion of increased nursery provision. And Robin Cook, who insisted on the European Social Chapter (On The Record, 29 May), was similarly rebuked by the money question. Labour MPs of course have no real response they can hold against this shibboleth of received wisdom; they believe in the basic precepts which necessitate the asking of the question.

It seems obvious to socialists that an analysis of the nature of money is required here. It can't be simply assumed that money is a type of innocuous representation of actual wealth. On the contrary it must be asked if its overall arithmetical form imposes certain ideological categories and casts its own ethical (or unethical) shadow over our existence.

Nowadays the analysis of money has disappeared, in Orwellian fashion, from economic discourse. But critiques of money extend back over 2000 years. One of the best discussions of money, and one that greatly influenced Marx, is still that of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle

Aristotle attributed two natures to money, that of a means and that of an end. This distinction reflects an ethical critique of the effects of money and how it is used. Some uses of money were acceptable and even laudable, argued Aristotle, as when money is used simply as a convenient means of getting useful things. But other uses, he said, were unacceptable or perverted, as where the exchange of goods was simply a mask for the accumulation of money or spurious wealth. So trading directed towards the use of goods with money merely as a common medium of transaction was seen as good, and trading directed at the exchange of commodities for profit, with commodities used merely as a means of securing this profit, was seen as bad. The distinction corresponds closely, but problematically as we shall see, to the one between use value and exchange value.

Aristotle used the example of the Delphian knife to illustrate the perverting effect of money. The Delphian knife was a tool that was made to be exchanged for money rather than to be used to perform a task. It could be used as a knife, a file, and a hammer, but in none of these functions was it very adequate, its only advantage was that it was cheaper in money than the three separate tools together. Hence a compromise is made between the tool-like properties of the knife and its exchange properties, and insofar as it was made to serve the latter function, it is not really a tool, except, as it were, a tool for making money rather than things.

Even philosophy itself is compromised by its association with exchange value. According to Aristotle, the Sophists let themselves be tainted by the profit motive, for the Sophist "is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom". The medical profession too becomes confused when its ends are mixed between money-getting and health. Contemporary examples inevitably spring to mind: "health" businesses selling liposculpture, far from providing perfect information on the effects of the operation, as the market sophistry maintains, on the contrary deliberately deceive patients about the risks involved, in order to secure the sale. And it could be argued that in every consumer product, a compromise must be made when the purposes involved in its creation are divided between exchange and use value; between the requirements of the seller and those of the customer.

Aristotle’s distinctions of exchange and use, means and ends, ethics and purely economic factors apply to the modern orthodoxy. The relatively trivial question "Where’s the money going to come from?" becomes the penetrating question "What is money?" The latter question challenges the received categories of exchange relations and demands an investigation into the barbaric practices out of which exchange arose. It is a question that asks is money realistic — or atavistic?

It is clear that ideas as much as facts are central to the workings of money. For example, the principle that whatever projects are envisaged must come out of existing funds. Fiscal spending, so it is said, represents a real practical limit which it is impossible to surpass. Behind this is the idea of a finite cache of wealth, a fund or a larder, in which things have been stored, and out of which things can be withdrawn at a later date. Is this really a practical matter, as no doubt Brian Walden would believe, or is it the promulgation of an ideological programme?

Admittedly the roots of this "larderism" lie deep in the facts of prehistory, when the store of food for the winter exemplified the model of a limited physical source determined by the real quantity and the real fertility of the land. This model still provides a basic formula for the operation of banks and nations, the only difference being that food has been replaced by an abstract symbolism of money, taking the form of bank reserves or national currency reserves representing all forms of production, not just agricultural.

This larderism has a powerful hold on the level of folk economics. On this level, the constraints of fixed budgets emerge in populist style as slogans such as "you can't just print money", "there is no bottomless pit", "you can't have your cake and eat it", "you don’t get ought for nought", "money isn’t made in heaven it's earned here on Earth", "there's no such thing as a free lunch", etc. Ah, the stuff tabloids are made of. And on the academic level, the principle seems to be simply elevated by nobler terms of expression rather than critically evaluated. Lord Robbins urged us to accept economics as the eternal problem of matching infinite wants against finite resources; the fundamentals of Mercantilism insist that "no man profiteth but by another's loss". All these aphorisms, ranging from crudity to casuistry, suggest a store of goods gained by toil in the summer as protection from the oncoming winter.

Despite creditable origins, this economic picture is logically flawed by its attempt to project the properties of a primitive domestic situation upon the complexities of the modern macroeconomic world. Some systems do follow the model of a fixed fund of goods, but the patterns of complex interaction between humankind and the biological and physical world, are, or can be, either synergistic or mutually exclusive. In the case of synergy, the more you take out of them, the more you have left; in the case of exclusivity, activity in one area has no effect on activity in another. The universal form of money makes all activities mutually burdensome, and insists, for instance, that the growth in education must be paid for by cuts in health, or investment in transport must be paid for by defence. Thus a kind of universal parasitism is established. One must question the nature of a formula of mutual burden which happens to have the very useful effect, for the Establishment, of dividing factions of society as competitors for limited resources.

The concepts of synergy and mutually exclusivity seem to violate the plausible, but examples are easy to find. The human body is synergistic in that the more you expend its energy as in exercise, the more energy you have as in fitness. If the linear economic model was applied to the body, you would get fit by sitting still and eating, thereby accumulating capital as fat. Mutual independence is clearly a fact of the natural and human worlds; there is no logical or physical connection between distant objects and activities. A bee taking honey in Glasgow is not constrained by one doing the same in London, yet Strathclyde is constrained by public spending in the Home Counties. Why do we impede ourselves in this way? Well, the popular wisdom is that there is only one pot of honey (money), for which we vie for attention. We should learn something from the symbiotic ecology of insects.

Free lunch

An even more serious error of money symbolism concerns the frontier of possible growth. The pseudo-physical arithmetic limit on economic development seems to be rooted in the Physiocratic principle that all wealth comes from the Earth, or the similarly-arbitrary Mercantilist precept that all wealth comes from the trade, or for that matter from the Marxist view that value is added by labour. But not only are the Earth’s resources, in contradistinction to the money model, symbiotic; they are also supplemented, as is the human body, from an external source. The human body is an organism in the world and receives its energy through food, and the Earth is a planet in the solar system, that likewise receives, free of charge, an inexhaustible input of fuel from the star in the middle of the solar system: the sun.

The sun is the free lunch that orthodox economics can’t come to terms with. The money system operates on a closed world assumption, on the much-stated monetarist principle that money is made here on Earth, it doesn’t come down from the sky. In fact all the wealth-making processes on the Earth are driven by extraneous energy that does come down, as it happens, from the sky. If money fails to reflect this reality and its function becomes not to reflect actual resources but to impose an ideological limit on their development and distribution. And if those limits demand that the homeless cannot be housed and that the hungry cannot eat (because where’s the money going to come from?) then that ideology isn't innocuous but a necessarily ethical, and unethical, force.

So Aristotle’s point is proved: the effect of money does poison the transactions and distributions it enforces its rule over. But not just directly because of the profit motive or exchange, but indirectly because of the general nature of the abstract form of exchange which embodies false assumptions about the nature of the world: the assumption that the fiscal frontier is the final frontier.

But to make Aristotle’s analysis fully consistent we ought to abandon the means/ends distinction which had a confused relation to the use/exchange distinction, and say not that there are two types of money (use money and exchange money) but that money necessarily is exchange value, that exchange value is necessarily perverse, and that true usefulness is necessarily contrary to the abstract value which money imposes on the physical world.

If Aristotle had accepted this analysis it would have solved a number of problems for him. Instead of having a tension between the two natures of money, one related to use, and one related to exchange, he could have rejected exchange completely and have said that the evaluation of goods should be dependent solely on their quality as defined in use. In a socialist system it is indeed use value that is the criterion of true wealth, and the spurious abstraction which exchange relations arbitrarily, and harmfully, apply to useful things would be simply removed.

If the premise of inherent scarcity is abandoned, as it can be when the qualitative, generous and realistic physical frontier is substituted for the miserly quantitative economic frontier, then it is no longer necessary to measure all goods by one universal standard as a means of rationing them. Is money the measure of all these things or are humans? Let us say the latter and thus advocate, along with an Aristotle-made-consistent, the abolition of exchange and the abolition of money. And if money is abolished, the question, where is the money to come from, is obviously redundant.

Norman Armstrong

Women, work and wages (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 28 April, a large number of schoolgirls spent the day in various workplaces up and down the land. Not because of a wish on the part of our capitalist exploiters to reintroduce child labour to the UK (although it could be argued that child labour never disappeared) but because a would-be charity called "Taking Our Daughters To Work" wished to "develop a forum whereby negative stereotypes about girls and their abilities are challenged and ultimately destroyed".

In a pamphlet entitled Taking our Daughters to Work: Exploring Tomorrow’s Choices, circulated to schools, employers and trades unions, the organisation argued that, due to social conventions instilled into them from birth, girls regard their career options as more circumscribed than boys do their own. Its aim is to encourage parents, teachers and employers to take schoolgirls aged 11 to 15 into a whole range of workplaces for the day, in order to widen the girls’ employment horizons.

In support of their case, the organisation cited statistics compiled by the Equal Opportunities Commission to the effect that, although women represent 45 percent of the current workforce, they account for less than one-third of managerial and administrative positions; and under 40 percent of professionally-qualified jobs. Over 40 percent of working women have no male colleagues, being employed in female employment ghettos, in what have come to be seen as women's jobs — such as typing and secretarial work, cleaning and catering.

Although this is the first time such a scheme has been attempted in Britain, Taking Our Daughters to Work ran a similar exercise in the USA in 1993, when nearly one million American girls took part. The project was greeted, according to their own literature, with enthusiasm by parents and employers, the media and politicians.

Economic imperative

It is the enthusiasm of employers that is of the greatest significance. No doubt many individual employers, as people, genuinely believe that women should be afforded the same opportunities as their male colleagues. But as managers of profit-making enterprises, they cannot treat the employment of women — or any aspect of Equal Opportunities — in a philanthropic manner. The concept of equal opportunities for women, and any initiative taken to further the concept, must be, and is, examined from the point of view of the gains, or likely costs, for the business in question. This is an economic imperative.

Anyone who doubts that this is so need only consider the question of childcare as an equal opportunities issue. During the mid-1980s — boom years for at least some British industry — considerable gains were made by women’s groups and trades unions campaigning for employer-sponsored childcare facilities. Nurseries sprang up in many areas, subsidised by employers, including those run by government departments and local councils. Employers banded together to run holiday playgroups; or issued childcare vouchers, supplied by a subsidiary company of Luncheon Vouchers Ltd. But in the recessionary 1990s, where the demand for an expanded labour force has gone away in most sectors, many schemes have foundered. Certainly, it is a lot more difficult now for a union to persuade an employer to start any new scheme or to increase its investment in an existing one. Labour is in plentiful supply; there is no longer a pressing business need to attract women, in general, into the workplace, so any benefits to a particular company has very often been outstripped by outlay.

The organisers of Taking Our Daughters to Work have recognised the economic imperative. Knowing that they had to get employer support if their scheme was to get off the ground they argued that "the organisations which recognise the skills potential of women will be the ones that benefit". In fact, they were so anxious to press the economic case for their idea, they fell quickly into the trap of making new stereotypes, to replace the ones that they are try ing to overcome, when they went so far as to say that "research has shown that women . . . are more flexible and adaptable and better at team-working, managing change and networking (than men)".

And it seems that quite a number of organisations have bought the line. Participants in the British scheme in 1994 included the BBC, Body Shop, ICI, the Industrial Society, London Underground and Sainsbury.

Of course, they could easily afford to take part. Although any potential benefits will take a long time to come through, the PR may well be valuable. And the cost of hosting a one-day seminar for a few schoolgirls is minimal. At the same time, a sop is thrown to women’s rights activists; and to those trades unions with a record of campaigning for equal opportunities, usually the white-collar unions and the general unions representing unskilled workers. And it enables businesses to do this without committing them to any further action, such as implementing the terms of the Equal Pay Act.

In 1992, the Equal Opportunities Commission found that women in full-time employment earned 75-79 percent of the average hourly earnings of their male counterparts. Groups like Taking Our Daughters to Work and many others, tend to regard that difference as a matter of discrimination. But it is also helpful, and accurate, to view it as a symptom of the exploitation of working people as a whole.

In any event, attempts to improve the lot of women — as with any attempt to reform capitalism — will meet with no success unless there are sound economic reasons for employers to agree to the particular measure being proposed. To use the childcare example again, a Treasury circular to government departments thinking of making such provision instructs Permanent Secretaries and Chief Executives to "ensure that a childcare arrangement returns value for money to (their) organisation". Ways of doing this include "balancing the savings in recruitment and training that result from retention of staff against the cost of providing the childcare arrangement" (Making a Case for Childcare).

Rate of failure

There are those who argue that the pursuit of Equal Opportunities within capitalism is not reformism per se, but will in fact lead to a real and radical shift in attitudes. This view ignores the rate of failure in the pursuit of Equal Opportunities.

The 1970 Equal Pay Act, as amended, makes different treatment of women over remuneration illegal. Yet the Equal Opportunities Commission figures quoted above make it quite clear that this very direct form of discrimination is still prevalent. And of course the campaign for equal pay did not begin in 1970. The Women’s Trade Union League was campaigning for fair treatment on pay, as on other matters, in the early 1900s.

Similarly, in spite of various employment acts, the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act, and the EC Equal Treatment and Equal Pay Directives, a 1994 report of the Office of Science and Technology states that girls accounted for just 22 percent of Physics A-level passes in England and Wales in 1991, 36 percent in Maths and 41 percent in Chemistry. Where women do opt for scientific subjects in Higher Education, the bulk read medicine or a biological science. Those going for other sciences or engineering are still heavily outnumbered by men. And in the engineering industry in 1990, 75 percent of clerical positions were occupied by women, against only 20 percent of administrative and professional posts, and a mere five percent of scientists and technologists jobs (The Rising Tide: A Report on Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, Office of Science and Technology, 1994).

The prime aims of the women’s liberation movement can be identified as a redivision of domestic labour and childcare, an end to the idea of "women’s work", an end to women’s dependence on men, and changes to the ideas relating to gender, sexuality and the family. No socialist can possibly argue with the need to achieve these aims. But — given all that has been said above — it has to be concluded that attempts to reform capitalism so as to achieve them are doomed to failure.

In our Declaration of Principles we state that "the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex". If the Declaration had been written in 1994, instead of 1904, we would have substituted "humanity" for "mankind" but the point remains the same. Men and women are not enemies. The exploiting men and women are the enemies of the exploited men and women. Only in a non-parasitical society, where the profit motive has been abolished, can women and men truly be free — and equal.

Paul Burroughs

Warning: capitalism can harm your health (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part of the socialist case against capitalism is that in a society based on ruthless competition the control of economic costs will always take priority over the needs of human beings. Therefore plans to cut government and business costs by weakening health and safety regulations are of little surprise to socialists.

The government gave notice of its intentions last November when in the Queen’s Speech it announced a Deregulation Bill which many feared was directly aimed at diluting some of the Health and Safety laws. This Deregulation Bill would give government departments and ministers the power to abolish laws by parliamentary order (Labour Research, January 1994).

At the beginning of this year it was announced that the Health and Safety Executive, the body responsible for enforcing health and safety standards, was to make 230 cuts in jobs over the next two years because the government has reduced its grant. Its budget has been cut by £5 million for the period 1994-95. In 1995-96 it will get only £192 million which is £10 million less than it asked for. In the coal-mining industry the pit deputies union NACODS failed in an attempt in the High Court to prevent the introduction of new mine safety regulations which will weaken safety standards in the pits. The Management and Administration of Safety and Health in Mines Regulations Act of 1993 takes away the role of pit supervisors to monitor safety at pits. This role will now be given to safety inspectors who will have no legal powers and can be overruled by management (Labour Research, February 1994).

Lower standards

Despite improvement in conditions for most workers since the early stages of capitalist industrial production, many workers still suffer illness, injury and even loss of life due to avoidable accidents at work or through diseases directly related to their working environment. Statistics for 1993 show that 430 workers were killed through their employment and there were 88,536 injuries reported to the enforcing authorities (Labour Research, January 1994).

An example of the type of dangers still facing workers in their employment concerns people working with or coming into contact with asbestos.

The effects of inhaling asbestos dust have been known for decades. Asbestos causes asbestosis, a disabling and ultimately fatal scarring of the lungs, lung cancer which is almost always fatal, and mesothelioma, a painful and fatal cancer of the lining of the lung or stomach. Amongst the workers most affected are miners, dockers, those involved in the manufacturing of asbestos products, building workers using products containing asbestos and those who work in or maintain buildings which contain decorating asbestos products. It has been estimated by the Department of Employment that some six million tonnes of the three main types of the product crocidolite blue asbestos, amosite brown asbestos and chrysotile white asbestos had been imported into the UK by 1986.

The widespread use of asbestos left a legacy of almost 3,000 people dying of asbestos-related cancer last year. Asbestos is responsible for more cancers than any other industrial substance. According to recent research by Professor Peto of the Institute of Cancer Research and the Health and Safety Executive, death rates due to mesothelioma alone will increase from around 1,000 in 1991 to between 2,500 and 3,000 a year. As usual under a system designed to meet profit rather than human need, the victims of these avoidable diseases are very often not properly compensated particularly where they have been exposed to asbestos contained in the buildings they work in.

Obstacles to compensation

Various obstacles are put in the way of claiming so-called benefits. To be able to claim compensation workers have to have worked in certain prescribed industries. This generally means they would have to have had some direct contact with the substance via actual asbestos materials or the machinery or appliances used in the manufacture of asbestos products. Under these limitations for claiming compensation it is estimated that 43 percent of mesothelioma victims actually die before they receive their benefit (Labour Research, March 1994).

Despite all the evidence about the health hazards from working with asbestos there are few signs of a complete ban on all types of the substance. In fact William Bernard, president of the American asbestos workers’ union, at a recent conference on construction safety in the USA, gave the following warning:

"Asbestos manufacturers are once again on the assault. They are arguing that a particular type of asbestos chrysotile is not hazardous to health. They are asking the European Community and World Health Organisation to allow it to be used again, especially for use in third world countries" (Labour Research, March 1994).

The fact that workers still suffer illness, injury and death through their employment is yet another indictment of a system of production for profit. It is also an indictment of the failure of reformism. Not only have years of reformist political parties and trade unions campaigning on such issues failed to resolve the problems, at present we are seeing moves designed to weaken already inadequate health and safety legislation.

Profits first

As with other issues reformism cannot succeed as it fails to get to the root cause of the problem — a social system where human well-being must take secondary place to controlling economic cost for the sake of profit. The failure of reformism can also be seen by the fact that in arguing for, in this case, better health and safety provisions reformists accept a capitalist agenda. The TUC, for example argue for better health and safety on the basis that in the long run it will prove "cost effective". The TUC points out that an analysis of the costs and benefits of legislation such as those prepared by the Health and Safety Executive have shown the legislation involved to be "cost positive".

The economic cost benefit argument may or may not be correct but this is not the point. From the point of the majority of us who have to sell our ability to work to an employer in order to live, and so the potential victims of the profit system, our health and lives must come first and to hell with profit. In the short-term the best way to protect our health and ultimately our lives is to organise collectively and effectively at the point of production in order to assert our own interests as against those of our employer. This factor is more important than arguing for improved health and safety legislation.

Ultimately this issue proves once again that the real choice facing us is a society' based on profit which dominates our lives at present as against that of one based on human need for which we need to organise to bring about. As with so many other issues capitalism has proved that it cannot safeguard our health and life in the production process. If capitalism cannot afford the economic cost of health and safety our answer must be that we cannot afford capitalism.

Ray Carr

Business methods undermine health service (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years there have been a number of sinister changes in the National Health Service. The use of deliberately deceptive rhetoric employed in the 1989 White Paper Working for Patients has tried to disguise the fact that the NHS is becoming increasingly subjected to market forces to the detriment of patient care and is becoming increasingly undemocratic. Expressions of dissent are stifled by getting rid of medical and nursing staff who protest at the deterioration in health care.

With a record 1.07 million people on the waiting list for treatment and an estimated two million people waiting for their first appointment before they can even join an official waiting list (Guardian, 7 May), it is clear that there is something seriously wrong with the health service.

Of more serious concern is the fact that so many people are ill. Poverty is the main contributory factor of ill-health and the increase in morbidity rates in recent years reflects the attacks on the living standards of the workers and the continued high rates of unemployment caused by capitalism’s slump.

Almost half the health trusts are failing to reach their financial targets and in 1992-93, £265 million had to be borrowed from the government or from banks and underwritten from taxes (Observer, 22 May).

To try to save money the Mancunian Community Trust is sending letters to its staff asking them if they want to take breaks to start families, take up courses or work overseas. All of these options are cheaper than redundancies, but the Trust’s chief executive Elizabeth Law has warned that if the workforce cannot be reduced by voluntary means then people may have to be forced out (Manchester Metro News, 27 May).

More bureaucrats

Administrative costs in the internal market have risen from four percent in the mid-1980s to eleven percent of NHS spending by 1993, and there are now half as many administrators and clerical staff as there are nurses in British hospitals.

In fact, when one considers that nurses work a three-shift system to cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are actually more clerical and administrative staff working in hospitals on weekdays than there are nurses.

The Health Secretary has the power to appoint the general managers of large hospitals and the chairpersons of trusts are political appointees: Ann Parkinson, Sheila Taylor, Sarah Biffen and Mary Archer, all wives of well-known Conservatives, are on the boards of trust hospitals. The government has succeeded in pushing through unpopular measures by political appointments and patronage. Thus, lacking control of local councils in many areas, Conservative ideology can be imposed on the electorate which would have been opposed by councillors on the old boards.

The NHS has never been particularly democratic. Nurses have been subjected to a para-military, hierarchical management which has placed them in a subordinate position to medical staff. A questioning attitude has been discouraged; speaking out considered "unprofessional". Consequently, very few nurses have spoken out about shortcomings in the service or their terms of employment. In the past, large numbers of immigrant nurses were dependent on hospital employment for a place to live and continued stay in this country. And this made criticism extremely difficult because of the risks of speaking out.

Doctors have always been in a privileged position in terms of pay, status and power in the NHS and have been able to speak up for their patients. But in the last fifteen years this has begun to change. Doctors who speak out about shortcomings in their hospitals now risk disciplinary action being taken against them.

Disciplinary action

Early in 1990 Dr Helen Zeitlin, a consultant haematologist at Alexandra Hospital, Redditch spoke at a public meeting against the hospital becoming a self-governing trust. She also criticised the shortage of nursing staff at the hospital (Guardian, 10 May 1991). In November 1990 Dr Zeitlin was told that disciplinary action would be taken against her for misuse of a nursing report on staffing levels. Redundancy was then proposed, only to be changed for a different set of disciplinary charges. These charges were then dropped and Dr Zeitlin was made redundant with 24 hours notice instead of the usual three months.

Hospital bosses sometimes go to extreme lengths to silence critics. Dr Bridget O'Connell worked as a consultant paediatrician at the King George Hospital, Ilford from 1977 until the end of 1982 when she was suspended because of her alleged "inability to relate effectively with clinical colleagues". Significantly, this occurred after she had complained to management of her concern about the standard of care within the paediatric service. For the next eleven-and-a-half years Dr O’Connell remained suspended on full pay of about £50,000 a year before the North Thames Regional Board withdrew all allegations, apologised and paid damages believed to be a six-figure sum (Guardian, 7 May).

A doctor was dismissed in 1993 in Cornwall for misconduct. Nurses had pressure put on them to keep secret diaries of her activities to provide evidence which could be used against her (Nursing Tunes, 13 April).

The row caused by the disclosure that a consultant in Luton, known to be opposed to trusts, had his telephone bugged by the chief executive forced junior minister, Tom Sackville to intervene. He stated that anyone "bugging" a telephone will be sacked but that individual employers have to decide whether to include confidentiality clauses in their contract of employment (Manchester Evening News, 24 May).

Most nurses have not seen the NHS executive Duncan Nichol’s guidelines on reporting incidents which give rise to concern over treatment or staffing levels, and some NHS trusts have introduced catch-all gagging clauses into nurses’ contracts to prevent them from speaking out, although barrister Michael Douglas has stated that some of them are so broad as to be meaningless (Nursing Times, vol.90, 1994).

Spying, illegal telephone tapping and the use of disciplinary action to silence critics all add to the climate of fear and mistrust pervading the health service. For health workers the message is clear: to speak out against the undemocratic, anti-working-class measures is to risk the sack.

Business methods can never operate in the interests of the workers; the whole history of capitalism has shown that misery always follows in its wake. The NHS, in its slow but inexorable move towards private health care, is showing all the ugly features of capitalism. Only by workers uniting to get rid of capitalism can we stop the misery that the system imposes on our lives.

Carl Pinel

50 Years Ago: Control: Remote or Direct? (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Five years of war have dragged by. Countries have been devastated. Food, machinery and lives lost. Millions of people have been moved about like cattle, cajoled or threatened into working long hours, and the products of their labours have gone up in smoke. In this country, we read, tuberculosis and neurosis are increasing. Little wonder, when the present state of affairs is taken into account. To add to all this, science, harnessed to the war machine, has ushered in a new and diabolical piece of machinery— the flying bomb.

From the stone hammers of the Stone Age we have now developed to the stage when it is possible to inflict destruction by remote control. The flying bomb is only a crude foretaste of what is in store for future civilian populations in wars to come. (. . .)

No doubt an antidote will be found to the flying bomb, but the fact remains that it is a form of warfare come to stay. What then is to be done? Are we to go on perpetuating capitalism, with its wars, booms, slumps crises and general poverty for the workers, or are we to substitute a sane form of society?

It is for the working class to decide. Take no notice of the priests and politicians with their social reforms, housing schemes, and foolish ideas for a "new world."

We urge workers to study the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, that they may understand the economic causes of the phenomena already mentioned, and work for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.

[From an article by Chester in the Socialist Standard, August 1944.]

SPGB Summer School (1994)

Party News from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

An audio recording of Ralph Critchfield's talk on Living without the Law is available on the SPGB website.

SPGB Meetings (1994)

Party News from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Women's Movements (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women's Movements

It is seldom that the Socialist Standard gives cause for complaint on factual grounds, and also it seems rather churlish to quibble at anything in the lavish, and extremely interesting, 70th anniversary issue.

But in The First and Only Liberationists I read that “the idea that (women) might need a wider horizon than could be provided by a home and family had scarcely dawned”. And the writer also asks, “Who else (other than the founders of the Socialist Party) in 1904 was interested in the freedom of women?”

The answer is, women. The modern assumption that the women’s movement only started up recently is false. The evidence is that there have been women demanding “emancipation” or “equal rights”, as a sex, since the Eighteenth century. In America the First Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848 and resolved “that the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities”.

Other national conventions were held annually in America right through the nineteenth century and the Washington Convention in 1900 was dominated by the question of working class women and women’s position as wage-earners—“without political expression woman’s economic value is at the bottom of the scale . . . She must do better work than men for equal pay or equal work for less pay”. (Voices from Women’s Liberation) That such a situation still prevails today is proof of our Party’s contention that it is nothing to have a vote if you don’t use it properly.

If I can add something personal on this question, it is that as a women I am proud to be a member of this Party which has never treated me as a (mere) women, has never pigeon-holed me into some specifically “woman’s” work, but has always treated all members, white or black, male or female, as comrades in a common struggle.

C. Sultan 

Woking

Reply:

Thanks for the compliments, which are among very many received, on the Anniversary Issue.

In the context of that article it was not possible to enlarge on the point but “scarcely dawned” was not meant to imply that no one had questioned the  rôle of women in society. Rather that this questioning was not widespread. It is of course true that some women, and a few men, had been actively involved in campaigns for women’s rights over many years. For example the first leaflet on female suffrage had been issued in 1847. The vote was originally seen as a way of obtaining “social justice”. To the sometime scorn of the modern women’s movement its attainment became an end in itself.

The question “who else” was, at that time, interested in women was about political parties. Here the position taken by the SPGB at its formation, in 1904, was unique.

Editors.

Letter: Truth & Politics (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Truth & Politics

Just to conclude the matter of the labour-time vouchers, I don’t see that Horatio’s remark in the May issue gets us any further. We are still stuck at the point that you can’t time a Shakespeare as you can a miner and you can’t get a Schubert to clock on when he jots down an inspired tune in the middle of the night. We must just leave it that now the Socialist position holds good — to each according to his need. Without measuring.

May I express a little surprise that in his otherwise most percipient article on Logic, Truth and Politics, R. Barltrop lapses into naivety when he says there are such things as honest politicians and he immediately proves the opposite by reference to some “thoroughly decent” C.P. leader — who nevertheless “told . . . whopping . . . lies”. But the example of another “honest liar”, Stafford Cripps, is even more odd. The suggestion that he really believed in ’49 that the pound would not be devalued when he swore this right until the day it happened is untenable. To say that the “government” did the devaluing is meaningless. As Chancellor, in this matter, for practical purposes he was the government and he lied because he had to (otherwise speculators would have reduced the pound to waste paper).

I am afraid your writer has rather misunderstood Churchill’s reference to Cripps (“There but for the grace of God goes God”). He did not mean that he thought Cripps was honest — merely a puritanical humbug. The proof is almost contained in the article which refers to the lies about the regime in Russia when Stalin became our glorious ally. Churchill needed as an ambassador someone who would be able to go there and see the atrocities which Stalin was committing against the Russian workers — and send enormous lies home which would be swallowed by the British workers. So the old cynic sent the most plausible leftist liar he could find. Cripps. I agree with Barltrop that the psalmist’s “All men are liars” is wrong. The correct position was stated by the late Crossman (who knew!) when he once wrote in The Guardian “all politicians tell lies” (my emphasis). Lying is one of the evils of capitalism which Socialism will render unnecessary along with greed, envy, etc.

S. Gamzu

Other letters and replies held over to next month through pressure on space.

Letter: Being sure (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Being sure

I think you say that Socialism is scientific, and I appreciate an argument which is presented factually and as a result of convincing research. Your arguments on, say, population and food and raw material resources are compelling but clash with other arguments presented by reputable scientists. On what solid fact or research do you come to your conclusions, and where are your references for checking? It is true that a lot can be deduced from common sense and first principles, but on questions such as “how much fossil fuel is left?” only scientific facts will do. I know that an organization of your size and limited financial resources and research facilities can’t hope to tackle this problem, but references to second-hand figures from other journals leave at least one of your readers wondering: how do they really know?

I think your arguments are at their best when they are couched in cool and temperate language. While agreeing with many of your criticisms, are all monarchs and their hangers-on, politicians and capitalists etc. wicked, malicious, deceitful villains? Or is it not possible that the Queen, say, is an honest, straightforward, well-meaning anachronism and in that sense as, much a victim of the system as you or I? Do you really think that every single member (or leader) of, say, the Labour Party is a cynical careerist or is it possible that most are genuinely misguided sincere men who believe by reformism that they are doing good work? Again, the capitalists themselves: what are they to do in the present system—should one sell all his goods and leave his family as destitute as the rest of the working class just for the sake of it? Such a person may, through his environment, education and upbringing, be a victim of the system. Are there not wicked workers? I’m saying you are right, but can the working class be won over only if there are “baddies and goodies”? Or should we be looking at the system and its effects, treating human nature as an “effect” of the system?

Please reflect on this and see whether there isn’t a bit of truth in it. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea for one or two of you to be bloody wrong for once, because as well as being a bit peevish I think you are a bit smug as well. Try to take a joke.

J.

Greater Manchester (name and address supplied)

Reply

We say that the two condtions for establishing Socialism are (a) when social production can produce a sufficiency of goods and (b) when the majority of the working class understand Socialism and are convinced of the necessity for it. We claim that the first of these conditions exists. Our support for this comes from all sorts of sources. A major one is United Nations statistics (e.g. the Study of the Problem of Raw Materials and Development, UN Gen. Assembly A 9544); and it is unlikely that they are biased in our favour. Others include scientific journals such as the Scientific American and The Ecologist, to which reputable scientists contribute.

It would be easier for us to reply properly if you had been a little more specific: which scientists disagree with us over what? One report which superficially contradicts one of our claims is the MIT Limits to Growth study, 1972, which argues that of the 19 mineral and energy resources vital to industrial society, 10 had such low known reserves that at current consumption rates they would run out in forty years. But this makes assumptions such as (1) that population is increasing exponentially, (2) that current consumption rates will continue, and (3) that it is not possible to develop alternative energy sources. In fact it is no longer true that population is increasing at the 1972 rate.

Maybe there are “wicked, malicious, deceitful villains” around; we don’t allege that the Queen is among them, and we certainly don’t blame individuals for the positions they occupy in society. Capitalism and its effects would still be here if every capitalist and every politician were scrupulously honest. No capitalist is responsible for the present order of things; capitalism was brought about not by individual decision but by the pressures of class interests leading to a change in the mode of production.

We don’t tell capitalists to act the part of philanthropists, but we advise any individual to start propagating Socialism. And we don’t think it is human nature to cheat, be competitive etc.; this is only socially-conditioned human behaviour. If you do know any capitalist who wants to give some away, the SPGB is short of money at the moment. (Most of us do have a sense of humour.)

Editors.

Letter: Catching votes (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Catching votes 

In answering my criticism that the SPGB fails to get across the socialist alternative two reasons were given: lack of funds and the BBC’s refusal to allow the SPGB onto the Open Door programme.

It is deplorable that, through the BBC and its commercial pals, the Government continues to monopolize the broadcasting media in this country and I would say that the BBC’s grounds for turning down the SPGB is highly questionable and ought to be looked into.

But, these problems aside, there is clearly something wrong with the SPGB’s approach to the public. In the May GLC elections the three SPGB candidates managed to net 0.59 per cent of the total number of votes cast in the constituencies of Marylebone, Lambeth and Camden.

This doesn’t leave much evidence of non-party support. So either the Party is failing to make its platform attractive enough to the electorate or the latter cannot, or will not, understand it. Now if the political coherency of the average tabloid daily, popular among the British working classes, is anything to go by the political awareness of our electorate is . . . undeveloped.

So, as straightforward as your present image is (a rare thing in politics) it’s not catching votes. Perhaps the socialist programme is too overwhelming for the average person who has inherited centuries of conscious grovelling to capitalist leadership and wage-slavery. As much as this is inexcusable the SPGB is not going to change it as long as it remain aloof in the higher reaches of Marxist weltanschauung. Start by looking at the wording in your Declaration of Principles: precise it may be but the language resounds with nineteenth century tub-thumping.

Of course you will remind me of the inherent antagonism in the class struggle and the need to attack all the aspects of the capitalist habit. But if the SPGB wants to achieve political legitimacy it’s going to have to adopt fresh ways of approaching us simpletons who haven’t managed to get through every volume of Capital. I hope for everyone’s sake it does.

Jon Lieberman 

Oxford

Reply:

We invited you to expand on how the SPGB could, vide your previous letter, “exploit the media and all the other available channels”, and we find your response extremely lame. You say the BBC’s turning us down “ought to be looked into”. By whom? There have been various committees of enquiry into broadcasting; the SPGB has submitted evidence to all of them, and they have often stated that minorities such as ourselves should have opportunities to speak. The BBC has gone on rejecting us. What do you suggest?

You now abandon the other projects you proposed, and draw attention to our poll in the GLC elections as proof that “there is clearly something wrong with the SPGB’s approach”. However, in your first letter you said it was “a fact” that Trotskyists and other left-wing groups “had greater sway” and “leave the SPGB behind”. An article elsewhere in this issue gives election figures for all these groups. In the 1974 General Election they averaged an estimated .065 of the votes cast, and in the GLC elections they did not do conspicuously better than we. Would you now modify your previous opinion?

We hardly need telling that the political awareness of the majority of the electorate is “undeveloped”. Whether or not our language is “aloof” is a matter of opinion; the Socialist Standard frequently receives letters from readers who find it direct and comprehensible compared with other political journals. But whatever language is used, we still have to get it into the hands of working people. If you know “fresh ways” of doing this, or otherwise promoting the Socialist case, we should be more than interested to hear about them. Hope isn’t enough; as we asked previously, what are you doing to help get Socialism?

Editors.

Letter: Ever-interesting topics (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever-interesting topics

I read with interest your publication this month, and I find that you seem to contradict yourself or the aspect of religion. One of the main themes of your publication is that one should not equate Socialism with the Labour Movement. I ask, then, why is it not possible not to equate Christianity with the Church of today?

Secondly, in reply to N. Fox’s letter in this month’s edition, you state that many people are deserting their religious beliefs “which palpably stand against their material well-being”, and yet in the preceding paragraph you condemn religious institutions “for their role in upholding property and exploitation”. Isn’t there a contradiction in terms here?

Finally, I wish to point out that ever since Adam, man has been interested in three things: politics, religion and sex. Whatever your efforts, you are not going to change that. Far from religion being “an obstacle to understanding” for man, it is the explanation of his being.

G. J. Rajakarier

Sheffield

Reply

To re-state your first point as we understand it, you are saying that Christianity need not be identified with the established churches, and you attempt an analogy with Socialism for Christianity and the Labour Party as the Church. It does not answer our case that Socialism is both valid and desirable, and Christianity (in or out of churches) is neither. We see religious beliefs as an obstacle to understanding that man makes his own history out of material conditions.

An example of people abandoning religious beliefs which conflict with their interests is the Catholic Church’s teaching on birth control. It is founded on the doctrine that the soul is infused by God at the moment of conception : therefore, birth control thwarts the divine intention. Despite that awesome thought, fewer and fewer Catholics adhere to this teaching and the numbers of the Catholic Church are falling. Why? Because, for the working class today, outsize families mean an unacceptable degree of poverty and discomfort.

You apparently have in mind that the capitalist class, who obtain their well-being from property and exploitation, would approve of religion’s upholding rôle. As individuals a good many of them do, of course. But for the capitalist system as a whole, materialism is the necessary basis for scientific and technical development to keep large-scale production profitable in the modern world.

Your final paragraph is mistaken, even overlooking “ever since Adam ’. Politics means participation in the powers of government, and until recently in history it concerned small sections of society. Only since the appearance of capitalism have increasing numbers of the population been widely interested in politics, being required to approve rulers of their nation-states—“dragged into the political arena”, as Marx and Engels put it. The forms taken by man’s interest in sex are closely bound up with changes in society; it has become a subject by itself to the extent that it has become separated from reproduction. As for religion being "the explanation for man’s being”, what religion we are talking about? Voodooism, sun-worship, the Aztec blood-sacrifice?

Editors.

Letter: What Makes us Different ? (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Makes us Different ?

I would like you to consider the difference between the SPGB and other organizations that call themselves Socialist. What is it that makes up the difference? I suggest that it is theoretical knowledge. This has been developed by facing up to hypothetical problems that may have to be faced on the way to, and also within, the new society. It seems to me that this task is not even half-done, hence I called Socialism a half-baked idea. The vast majority of SPGBers seem to think that this task is over, but in fact there is no Socialist politics nor any Socialist economics. In fact the SPGB is not so very far ahead of the mindless SWP in being able to explain what Socialism is. I think we would agree on their theoretical merits.

Anyway, the problems of Socialism will certainly not be solved by wishing them away as Engels did. It is not a fact that all conflict is due to private property. People are likely to clash over other things like temperament, sex and even philosophy and taste. But even if Engels was right, we would still need Socialist law and order until the “new man” emerged. As it is I would drop Engels’ brand of Owenism and attempt to work a theoretical system of politics that will enable you to explain what Socialism is today, and will, perhaps, develop into a body of theory that will give the revolutionaries some idea of how to go about things in the new society.

Of course the majority of revolutionaries will cooperate, but then the vast majority of people always do; in any society. Law and order is a minority problem but this minority is unlikely to be uniform or static. It is likely to be continually changing as people go through phases of development.

A general framework of Socialist economics needs to be added to the politics mentioned above. No matter how much technology improves our standard of living, it will never do so at a uniform rate. Economic choices will have to be made as to what to produce, and of how much as well as the allocation of scarce consumer goods and the effective use of producer goods. As those problems of investment and consumption will remain in the new society, a Socialist solution to them is required. The price system gives us the sort of information we need in capitalism. What is going to replace it in Socialism?

David McDonagh, 

Birmingham

Reply:

Unfortunately we can’t deal with all the points you raise in a short reply. Some of the questions you mention will have to be left to an article.

However, the main point you raise relates to “socialist economics”. In our view “economics” would be a very much simpler question in socialism than it is under capitalism. You require some “socialist economics” to explain socialism in the same way that modern economics explains capitalism. First, modern economics does not explain capitalism, far from it. Second, socialism will not have the need to “justify” itself in the same way that capitalism uses “economics” to justify itself. The theoretical exposition of socialism is the description of the way socialist society will be organised; i.e. common ownership and free access to wealth based on the technological possibilities that capitalism has created. This needs explaining; it does not (cannot) involve the equivalent presentation that those who (attempt) to explain modern capitalism indulge in.

How will socialist society know what to produce when money no longer acts as a guide? The answer may be this: in socialist society people will take freely from what is produced. But when goods are taken there is no reason for them not to be numbered and checked. So for example, the local store supplying product x to the locality could keep a record of the number of “takes” (there would of course be no sales) of product x. It would know how much of product x had to be kept in stock to cover the time between the requisitioning of x and its arrival at the store. Computers could be used to monitor the “take up” of all products as part of the world system, and this information would be relayed to the producers. This system would of course be far more efficient than the present system.

The above outline does of course depend on society being able to produce sufficient of the things people require for no one to go without. But it is possible that society as a whole will decide that one particular product (an example given in the September ss was a Rolls Royce) will not be produced. How society would decide which products to do without would of course in part depend on the product in question. At this stage, all we can indicate is that no human being would be without any “need” and anything over and above that which might be required but not be socially possible will be decided on by society, democratically.

So far as your question on Law and order is concerned, there is no space to go into that here. We would refer you in particular to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels, which shows that law is a product (and therefore a problem) of property society, and will be of no relevance to propertyless society.

Editors.

Letter: Taxes and Labour (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Taxes and Labour

Thank you very much for your stimulating reply to my letter which was published in your January, 1978 issue. In order to clarify my ideas, I should like the opportunity to answer the criticisms made of my theories.

Firstly, you asserted that, where my hypothesis assumes a retrenchment in the rate of direct taxation (and, ergo, a fall in government revenue from paye), unless the total cost of administration also decreases, then the government has to make an equal increase in the amount of tax collected directly from the capitalists (I presume that here you allude to Corporation Tax). However, if we assume that the cost of administration has remained the same, are there not other sources of government revenue which would obviate the need for more tax to be collected directly from the capitalists. For example, indirect taxation and loans which are not collected from the capitalists.

Secondly, you maintain that it cannot be assumed that a reduction of PAYE can enable the workers to improve their bargaining power increasing their net pay. But if you accept the above explanation of alternative sources of government revenue, which enable the total outlay of the capitalist to remain the same, then perhaps you will also agree that the capitalist will not be concerned about the in creased net pay of his workers since his aggregate outlay on tax and wages has not increased. In fact, he may be pleased if the fall in the rate of tax, by increasing the net pay of his workers, forestalls pressure for higher gross wages, which, if successful, would increase his total disbursements on wages and tax.

P. S. Maloney, 

Palmers Green

 

Reply:

In your earlier letter (SS January 1978) you accepted the proposition "that taxes are paid by the employing class", but argued that a reduction of PAYE would benefit the workers without costing the employers anything. You forgot that if government total expenditure remained the same (which was assumed in your letter) they would have to raise additional tax revenue to meet it. Our reply took the simplest case, that of additional taxes on profits.

You now accept that you had overlooked that if government expenditure remained the same they would need to raise additional revenue following the reduction of PAYE, but you say the government could increase indirect taxation or raise revenue by loans.

Without wishing to go into the complex question of the effect that indirect taxes have on the price level, we can take both cases, i.e. that prices remain the same, or that they rise.

If the capitalists' selling prices remain the same but indirect taxes go up his profits are reduced. If prices go up then the workers have an additional inducement to press for higher wages—and again his profits are affected.

About loans you also overlook the fact that government borrowing via the banks goes along with the persistent increase of the note issue with its effect in raising the price level.

The more important issue is whether the struggle that workers have to engage in to maintain or increase real wages can somehow be avoided by a reduction of PAYE; the implication being that if workers' wages did not come into the scope of Income Tax at all they would be better off. In the 19th century hardly any workers came into the Income Tax range. Are we to suppose that this made it easier for them to maintain or increase real wages?

The fact is that any concession received by the workers lessens the urgency with which they will press for more, as is shown in every strike settlement. Mr. Healey's strategy clearly lecognises this. He has told the Unions that if he succeeds in limiting the increase of money wages to 10 per cent he will make tax concessions, but will not give both a higher increase of money wages and a reduction of PAYE.

The one weapon the workers have on the industrial field is the strike. It is a dangerous illusion that the class struggle can somehow be side-stepped by campaigning for tax reductions.

Editors.

This Month's Quotation: George Bernard Shaw (1937)

The Front Page quote from the August 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Let as therefore dismiss the fear that persons of exceptional ability need special inducements to exercise that ability to the utmost."

G. B. Shaw

This Month's Quotation

The quotation in the panel on the front page is from Shaw's "Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism," Pelican Books Edition, P. 322.

Blogger's Note:

The Shaw book quoted from was reviewed in the August 1937 Socialist Standard by Edgar Hardcastle.