Knock-out drops (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly two million people in Britain are addicted to drugs prescribed for them by their doctors. But. unlike the 80,000 heroin addicts who are mostly young and male, most tranquilliser addicts are women and predominantly elderly. Pain, misery, addiction or even death have frequently been associated with legitimately prescribed drugs. In the United States 130,000 deaths occur each year from drugs prescribed by medical practitioners; in Britain nearly one in thirty hospital admissions are due to prescribed drugs and about 2,500 people each year approach the charity Action for Victims of Medical Accidents for help.

With hindsight, some of the mistakes with addictive drugs seem incredible; when heroine was extracted from morphine in 1874 it was hailed as the new "miracle drug" for the safe treatment of morphine and opium addiction because it was considered safe and non-addictive. And it was to take over fifty years before the Rolleston Report identified heroin addiction in 1926. More recently, methadone was used extensively between 1971-1978 to treat morphine addiction and as an analgaesic substitute for morphine but, being itself highly addictive, led to a further spread of addiction.

Psychotropic drugs, prescribed for anxiety and depression, alter the patient's moods or mental processes. These drugs are much more likely to be prescribed for women; and extensive study in Oxfordshire found that psychotropic drugs accounted for one-fifth of all prescriptions and that women received more than twice as many tranquillisers and anti-depressant drugs as men. (Skegg et al British Medical Journal, 1977). The frequency of tranquilliser prescriptions increases with age; women over 75 years of age receive more of these than any other group.

In part, the larger quantities of mood altering drugs prescribed for elderly women can be attributed to the higher incidence of dementia in old age and the fact that most of the more common causes of dementia affect women more than men. But the excessive numbers of prescriptions for tranquillisers are not entirely justified on medical grounds alone. In recent years the closure of substantial numbers of hospital beds has led to increasing numbers of mentally and physically infirm elderly people being "cared for" in the community.

Providing safe care for mentally infirm old people in their own homes causes considerable problems for relatives. All too often tranquillisers have to be used to control the old person's behaviour and. even if the drugs are not addictive, the quality of life for the person is impaired. Caring for a demented person in a family home can prove to be a nightmare. Family life disintegrates due to disturbed nights, incontinence, noisy, aggressive behaviour and the need for somebody to be in attendance at all times. For such families there is no respite: holidays and nights out cannot be taken together and friends are deterred from visiting.

For middle aged women, in particular, caring for an elderly mother causes considerable anxiety because the traditional caring role is reversed and the awareness of the possibility of helplessness and insecurity for themselves in the future becomes all to evident. In such situations the temptation to resort to the use (and often the abuse) of tranquillisers is difficult to resist. Indeed, members of the family providing care may take tranquillisers themselves to cope with the difficult social circumstances forced on them by the lack of provision for care of the elderly. But for both the dependent elderly and their, mainly, female carers, tranquillisers are used as substitutes for social remedies which are not forthcoming under capitalism because workers are viewed as economic units.

The Royal Commission on Population put into perspective the disadvantageous position of the elderly under capitalism:

The burden of maintaining the old does not consist in the money paid out as Old Age Pensions. It consists in the excess of the consumption by the old over their production. It is the fact that (with some exceptions) the old consume without producing which differentiates them from the active population which makes them a factor reducing the average standard of living in the community, (pi 13)

This view of the elderly as redundant economic units has led to inferior standards of accommodation in the majority of hospitals for the long-stay elderly and the mentally ill.

The difficulty of attracting staff-in adequate numbers to work in poor conditions and inadequate facilities can lead to over-reliance on tranquillisers to control the patients as too few staff try to cope with relentlessly increasing numbers of admissions in the drive to make hospitals more "efficient" regardless of the social costs. And in private hospitals and nursing homes there is a greater temptation to resort to the use of tranquillisers to control disturbed elderly residents as trained nursing staff are reduced to a minimum in the drive to make profits.

Capitalist governments operate double standards when confronted with problems of drug abuse. In the past dangerous, addictive drugs have been sold abroad: human misery being an acceptable price to pay as long as profits are made. Drugs of doubtful therapeutic value but which have undesirable or even serious side-effects are produced and, where legislation prevents their use in this country, sold in countries which permit their use. Thus the addiction to tranquillisers and the misery that they cause, like addiction to tobacco and alcohol, only become the concern of the state when the efficiency of the workforce, and consequently profits, is threatened.

In 1987 only £500.000 was allocated to help tranquilliser addicts compared with £24.5 million for the much smaller group of heroin addicts. But. unlike heroin addiction, the use of tranquillisers is legitimate, respectable and widespread, with 14 million prescriptions being dispensed in Britain last year. The enormous profits which the drug industry makes has led to general practitioners being the targets of aggressive advertising campaigns to promote tranquillisers as a panacea for their patients' problems. But for patients who are prescribed benzodiazepine tranquillisers (Lorazepam; Oxazepam; Diazepam. Chlordiazepoxide) for periods of longer than four months physical dependency occurs even at therapeutic dose levels.

Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, apprehension, tremor, insomnia, nausea and vomiting; in fact, many of the problems for which these drugs were prescribed in the first place.

Sexual dysfunction may be caused by both the phenothiazine group of drugs and the benzodiazepines. The phenothiazines, especially Phenergan, have been associated with cot deaths in infancy. The problems of toxicity and unpleasant side-effects of drugs arise because of the hasty and incomplete research carried out by pharmaceutical companies in their attempts to market their products ahead of their rivals. The continued demand for drugs to relieve anxiety is assured because competitiveness causes fear and insecurity. Capitalism's booms and slumps, wars, alienation at work and impoverishment in old age all generate anxiety for workers. And for women, the problems of isolation within the home for housewives or the stress of the "double shift" for working mothers leads to them consulting their doctors for the relief of tension more often than men.

Women's economic dependence on men (who themselves are economically insecure) has served capitalism's interests by providing future generations of workers within the conventional framework of the family.

Patrick Jenkin when he was Secretary of State for Social Services, stated.

I don't think that mothers have the same right to work as fathers. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn't have created men and women. (Man Alive, October 1979)

The barriers placed in the way of working mothers by such attitudes; relegation to mostly part-time, unskilled, alienating work; low pay — women earned less than three-quarters of the average wages paid to men in 1982 — have all combined to place a greater emotional strain on women. The operation of factories around the clock to maximise profits leads to shift workers being forced to adopt unnatural life-styles. Insomnia causes some workers to resort to taking sleeping tablets to cope with this. Doctors are helpless to remedy the political causes of all these problems and offer tranquillisers to help patients cope with intolerable social circumstances.

Further abuses of tranquillisers occur in prisons where drugs are used to control prisoners who fail to "adjust" to their environment.

Undeniably, tranquillisers can be of value. Used carefully they can help to relieve distress. But it is the application of drugs under capitalism, which fails to heed the lessons of the past while the present is profitable, which is at fault. Medical advances, in common with all forms of technological advances, will be abused until the workers decide to place human needs before profits.

Carl Pinel

Socialist Sonnet No. 209: Halloween (2025)

  From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Halloween

Halloween marks the way to the season

Of remembrance: let the dead be recalled

To mark how too frequently peace has stalled,

For which there’s one fundamental reason,

The persistence of capital in its

Voracious pursuit of profit, heedless

Of the inhuman cost, of the needless

Near countless lives lost. The market sits

In impersonal judgement as to where lies,

Not a moral, but the fiscal value,

Wherever barbarism’s breaking through,

No matter which blood drenched flag it flies.

Leaving the haunted, those who always lose,

To appear almost live on rolling news.

D. A.

Children in labour (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional view of child labour is summed up in a Low Pay Unit pamphlet:

"Child Labour" conjures up images of the pauper apprentices of Tudor times and the rag and dust sifters and mill children of the early industrial revolution. Its heyday was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrialisation drew upon the labour of children in new and more wholesome ways than had been customary in the family economy of earlier years.

(Working Children 1985)

Newspaper reports in recent years however. suggest that child labour is neither a thing of the past nor confined to delivering newspapers, baby sitting or similar chores normally associated with children's work. "Scandal of pin money Pupils'' was the headline in the Daily Express on 12 December 1977; "Slave Labour ", screamed the Daily Mirror, 20 October 1982. In April 1973 The Times reported that three schoolboys, all aged thirteen, were employed in a factory operating highly dangerous, defective power presses for 17 pence an hour.

Child labour does of course have a long history. In an agrarian economy, where there was no distinction between employment in the home and other labour, men, women and children each had a task to perform tending crops and providing for everyday necessities. Children also played a role in industrial labour. The daughters and sons of artisans frequently helped in the manufacturing process or were apprenticed in the trade of their parents. Children of weavers had a staged career of tasks given to them according to their age and abilities, ranging from fetching and carrying to treading cotton, winding bobbins and spinning. Life for these children was hard and often involved long hours of work.

In the late sixteenth century children orphaned due to the death or poverty of their parents became the responsibility of the parish in which they lived. A system arose of apprenticing orphans to local craftsmen or placing them in special workshops to learn a trade. This was administered by local justices whose main concern was to rid the parish of any unwanted burden. The treatment of orphans varied from employer to employer but cases of cruelty and sadism were not unknown.

With the coming of the industrial revolution the parish workshops evolved into factories and the exploitation of children as slave labour was common. The practice of apprenticing orphans continued as late as the 1840s, when boards of guardians in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were found to be

. . . still getting rid of pauper boys of six. seven and eight by apprenticing them to colliers with a guinea thrown in "for clothes".

(E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class)

Child labour in modern times is seen as one of the unacceptable features of capitalism. Apologists for the system moralise about it but at the same time seek to convince us that a society in which a majority are economically coerced and treated as mere factors in the profit-making machine is the best the human race can hope to achieve. Workers are employed because they produce an economic surplus over and above their wages, which are inevitably very low for a large section of the workforce. According to the Low Pay Unit, figures for April 1986 show that 17 per cent of full-time workers were being paid less than £2.40 an hour, while over a third were receiving less than £3.00. Of the women who work part-time, 50 per cent were earning less than £2.40 an hour and 75 per cent received less than £3.00 an hour. In total, around 2 million women part-time workers and 1.6 million full-time workers. both men and women, received less than £2.40 an hour, including overtime pay. (Low Pay Unit: Britain's False Economy. 1987.)

When confronted by the exploitation of child labour socialists reply that the only answer is to end the system where a majority of men. women and, in many cases, children are treated as economic units. This can only be done by establishing, by democratic political means, a world-wide system where the means of production are owned in common and production takes place solely to meet the people's needs. In such a society the exploitation endemic in employment will be replaced by voluntary co-operation to produce the things people have democratically decided they need. All will have the right to take part in decisions about what is to be produced and how production is organised. Let's take a look at what the alternative — doing "something now" — has achieved in the last 180 years in the area of child labour.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation was the 1802 Health and Morale of Apprentices Act. Its aim was to limit children's working hours and its main concern was with pauper apprentices. It sought to abolish night work and limited the working day of apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours. There were also provisions made for school on Sunday and proper clothing and sleeping arrangements. [To]  make sure that employers complied with the act, four independent factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law among the 3,000 textile manufacturing establishments of the time.

Apart from the low standards set by the act, its major flaw was that enforcement depended on magistrates who were in most cases mill owners themselves. Similar problems affected another act passed in 1819 and sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, which outlawed employment in cotton mills for children under the age of nine. As it had no independent inspectorate it was largely ignored by mill owners.

Next came the Factory Act of 1833, which was based on the evidence of the Sadler Committee of 1832 and the Factory Commission of 1833. It outlawed the employment in all textile factories of children under the age of nine; between nine and thirteen no child was allowed to work more than 48 hours a week; for those aged thirteen to eighteen the limit was sixty-nine hours and anyone under twenty one years was prohibited from night work. Such was the concern to [missing text]

In 1840 a further factory commission investigated employment in the mines, discovering even worse conditions than those existing in the mills. Small children were used to operate ventilation traps which involved sitting in the dark, sometimes thirteen to fourteen hours. Other children were used to hurry coal down shafts, pushing great loads for miles with their heads while bent double. Soon after the commission published its report in 1842, the Mines Act was passed which prohibited the employment underground of children under ten and women. It also restricted the number of hours and types of work performed by children.

An important turning point in controlling child employment came with the Elementary Education Act of 1870. This provided elementary education on a national basis and set up an administration system of local school boards to keep track of attendance. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory for the first time and a child could only leave school at ten if he or she satisfied the attendance requirements. Children with poor attendance records were not allowed to leave until the age of thirteen. Prior to the 1880 act. the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878 had extended the 1833 Act to all factories and raised the minimum age of employment to ten. which also limited the hours children under fourteen could work to half the normal working day.

In 1920 the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations met in Washington to draw up a convention on the employment of children binding on all ratifying nations. In Britain it was embodied in the Employment of Women. Young Persons and Children Act of 1920, which tied together past legislation and provided a list of types of employment which were prohibited to children under a minimum working age.

Subsequent acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, the Factory Act of 1961 and the Infants Children and Young Persons Act. 1963 form the basis of modern child labour law. The most important aspects of these acts are the prohibition of child employment in industrial undertakings, a minimum age of thirteen for part-time employment, restrictions on hour and times of work done by children and the provision for local authority bye-laws which can set higher standards than the minimum requirements. There exists a wide variation between local authorities as to the extent of provisions under these bye-laws and the degree of care that is taken to see that they are enforced.

As with the nineteenth century act the major problem with more recent legislation concerns enforcement, responsibility for which falls mainly on three bodies — the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Local Authority Health Officers and the Education Welfare services. All of these bodies have other tasks apart from discovering the illegal employment of children and all are massively understaffed. It is estimated that the Health and Safety Inspectorate has only 750 general factory inspectors to cover 730,000 manufacturing establishments. Much of the education and welfare surveillance work on child labour is done by educational welfare officers through voluntary overtime, patrolling the streets outside normal hours of work.

Due to this understaffing routine inspections are more frequent in large firms or those where the risk of accident is considered high (for example, chemical plants). Less visible firms may never see a factory inspector. As a result "back street firms" — most likely to employ child labour illegally are least likely to be visited. In addition, educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry. As the Inner London Education Authority states:

The more serious kinds of illegal employment in factories, restaurants and building sites tend not to be detected because educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry.

(Working Children, pp. 12-13)

In 1973 an attempt was made to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the legal protection given to working children. The Employment of Children Act received the Royal Assent on 23 May of that year but as yet it still remains on the statute book and has never been fully implemented.

It is therefore not surprising that child labour is still widespread in modern Britain. A survey carried out by the Low Pay Unit and Open University in 1982-3 estimates its extent. Interviews of 1,700 children in the London, Luton and Bedfordshire areas found that, apart from newspaper delivering, children were employed in a wide range of jobs including retailing, catering and cleaning. Close to one in ten children in the survey had more than one job and half of these had more than two. While newspaper delivery accounted for one third of all children working, shop work accounted for one in five and farm work and cleaning both accounted for 13 per cent. A variety of other work performed by children included hotel and catering. painting and decorating, sewing machining. modelling, clerical work and work in street markets. More than one in five children were employed in manual jobs, cleaning, furniture removals, construction labour and garage work. The findings confirm that a majority of these children were in one way or another working illegally. An analysis of the data for London found that four out of five were illegally employed, either under age, working illegal hours or working in jobs they should not have been doing.

It does not require a degree in economics to appreciate that children are forced to work because of the financial position of their families. The survey indicated that there was a definite relationship between the socio-economic position of the families and child labour. The highest proportion of working children in the survey were from manual working class backgrounds (51 per cent) and the unemployed (52 per cent).

Neither is it any mystery why employers use child labour. It is of course a source of cheap and easily disposable labour power and savings can be made not only directly on wages but also indirectly. Children are invariably paid "cash in hand", do not appear on employers’ records and therefore are not subject to national insurance contributions. They are not members of a trade union even where the company is unionised. Neither have they any of the rights of adult workers, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, the right to an itemised pay slip and, as they pay no national insurance, they have no right to sick pay. Furthermore they are not classified as employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act. If injured at work children have no right to compensation unless their parents can prove in court that the employer has been negligent in some respect. Since most children are employed illegally, taking such cases to court could result in the parents being deemed parties to such negligence.

Despite the large number of health and safety regulations applying to the employment of children, a large minority of those surveyed reported having accidents while in their current jobs. One third of all boys and 29 per cent of girls reported some accident or injury. The main causes were heavy weights, broken glass, slipping or falling and injuries from materials and machinery. Of all the children at work only 19 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls were given uniforms or any kind of protective clothing by their employers.

Apart from accidents, the health of working children suffers in other ways. In 1970 a group of teachers in Tynemouth conducted a survey of pupils to discover why so many were falling asleep in class. They discovered that of the 390 interviewed over one third were working illegally and many of them were being grossly overworked and underpaid. As the Low Pay Unit pamphlet suggests, these findings illustrate the fallacy of the view that employment is good for children's health and education. An official of the National Association of School Masters stated:

Children are late to school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep during lessons and are unable to take part in any out of school activities such as sports because they have to report to work.

(Working Children, p.32)

The exploitative use of child labour is not a thing of the distant past. Reform via legislation has failed. The enactment of new laws may give the illusion that something is being done but this is merely a surface appearance; the problem remains because its root cause has not been treated. Doing something now may sound appealing but the reality is that nothing changes because a system unfit for men. women and children remains firmly in operation.

Ray Carr

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, the original text was garbled in places. It looks like there was a typesetting/proof-reading mishap. I couldn't see any notices of corrections in later Standards.

Funds appeal (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a long time since we made an appeal for funds in these columns and we do so only when the work of the Party shows signs of outstripping its finances.

To sell the Socialist Standard at 40p and to try to keep the price-range of our literature as low as possible involves a subsidy from the General Fund which slowly erodes it. Add to this the routine things like electricity, telephone and rates, and it is not long before we have to look round to see what we can cut back on, when we should be expanding our activities for socialism and going forward.

We are well aware that our fellow workers to whom we address this appeal have their own financial worries. If, however, you think it is worth getting rid of the system which produces them, please send as much or as little as you can. Cheques should be crossed, made payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and sent to theTreasurer at 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Beyond trade unionism (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The poor workers whose job is to paint the Forth Bridge: no sooner have they finished putting fresh paint on to one end than the paint is peeling at the other. It is a never-ending exercise in human frustration. Watching Norman Willis plodding and nodding and huffing and bluffing his way through the Trade Union Congress's annual conference evokes vivid images of those painters.

It is not because trade unions are wickedly corrupt that they achieve so very little. Compared with most institutions under capitalism the unions are remarkably democratic. They do their best. They win a wage increase here; they stop some new. intolerable conditions being introduced into the workplace there, they provide lawyers for the persecuted wage slave; they pick up as many crumbs as they can from the cake which the working class has baked. Without such defensive action the workers would be exploited entirely at the bosses' will. Of course, workers need trade unions.

What unions can do is dictated by capitalism. Indeed, trade unions, far from being something to do with socialism, as the ill-informed believe, are features of the capitalist system. Only where there are two classes — the buyers and sellers of labour power — are unions needed to defend the sale of the workers' sole possession: our ability to work. Wages and salaries are the price which workers are paid for being turned into human commodities, there to form the basis of the affluence which the capitalists derive from profit. Where does profit come from? It comes from the legalised robbery of the working class. It comes from the payment of workers less than the value of what we produce. Trade unions are there to negotiate the rate of exploitation; they exist to preside over the act of robbery and ensure that it is not too vicious, to see that the exploiting minority leave the unexploited wealth producers with enough crumbs to nibble on.

Trade unions cannot bring about ''fairness". Capitalism is fair, insofar as it determines what justice is to mean. What would happen to a trade union official who went to the boss and said. "Look, my members are being paid £130 each a week; by 5pm every Wednesday they have each produced goods worth well over £130 for you; they have even covered your costs of machinery and electricity; why should they work Thursdays and Fridays. Be fair and let them work for what they are paid and no more." The boss would look at the trade unionist as if he had just arrived from the kindergarten and would explain that in this world (under this system) workers are not employed to make them happy but to make profits. Profits come from the workers' unpaid labour. The trade unionist is not entitled to question the employer's right to rob the workers, only to haggle over the rate of robbery.

The Left entertain huge illusions about the power of trade unionism. A picket line to a Trotskyist is like a bone to a dog. It's where things are happening. Picketing is a necessary activity by workers who, when on strike, have a class interest in ensuring that other workers do not take over their jobs. The scab provides safety for the boss and undermines what combined strength the workers can muster. For the Left picket lines are where the class struggle takes place. It is where the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil are to be found. It is where the student-vanguards. equipped with the collected works of Trotsky and a few scraps of Gramsci and the odd Sun article by Derek Hatton, can find proletarian recruits for their Bolshevik fantasies. That is why the Left enthuse about strikes. Sadly, many strikes end in dismal failure. The workers go back defeated, or winning victories which are cancelled by the losses incurred while striking. Even when real victories are won — and trade unions do win real victories more often than is usually realised — all that it amounts to is a return to wage slavery on new terms. There is nothing glorious about strikes or pickets. These are the actions of workers driven to fight for survival. Socialism, which the Left falsely claims to stand for, is about rather more than mere survival.

The "workerism" of the Left, which sees workers only where it sees blue collars and struggle only where it sees strikes, misses the crucial point that the working class comprises not only those men and women who work in factories or offices. The working class are all those who are forced to work to live, including millions who are non-unionised and vast numbers who are self-employed. The Leftist caricature of the cloth-capped, machine-operating worker excludes from its vision workers who look after homes, rear children, are children, are retired, are disabled. are unemployed. . . In other words the working class is far more than what Ron Todd contemptuously calls "our people".

Karl Marx, whom the Daily Express no doubt thinks was an adviser to the NUM, expressed the view that workers must not overstate to themselves the importance of trade unions. At best, trade unionism is a struggle to prevent their living standards being pushed down: "They ought, therefore, not be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. "Instead of confining themselves to the futile demand for fair wages, which Marx called a conservative demand, they should advocate the abolition of the wages system. (Marx, Value, Price and Profit) That advice is over a century old but it is as valid now as it was when it was written. What point is there in workers endlessly running breathlessly in order to stand still when, with no greater energy, we could demand not a better price for selling ourselves but the right to be free from selling ourselves?

When workers establish socialism all the means of wealth production and distribution will belong to everyone. Instead of working for a boss we will work for ourselves, for the community. Instead of the coercion of the wages system, we shall have a society in which each will work according to his or her ability and take according to his or her needs. Wages will not exist. And without wages to negotiate or bosses to fight, why would there be any need for trade unions to protect us from ourselves? As the owners and controllers of society the people of a socialist community will require no bodies to defend them against the rival interests of a ruling class. There will be no rulers or ruled. Trade unionism will have no role to play.

The Left are of the view that to speak to workers — "ordinary" workers — about such big ideas as abolishing the wages system and creating a society in which trade unionism will have no function is all too much for our little minds. Instead, run campaigns to replace Union Leader A with Union Leader B; spend endless hours manipulating committees and getting Red Ron put in the chair instead of Pink Pete. Instead of organising to remove the system which causes the workers' misery, the Leftists applaud the windy rhetoric of posers who make vague, rhetorical noises against profiteering and "bad" employers. In other words, the Left perpetuate the illusions of trade unionism. Just as at election time they throw aside their revolutionary outfits in favour of a Labour government to run British capitalism, so on the economic field they cannot see further than a bit of pushing and shoving within the wages system.

When workers' consciousness of the need for socialism grows, the form which trade unions take will change. As millions of workers begin to think beyond the limits of the profit system they will ensure that the unions are there to back up the majority will for socialism when it is expressed. Unions whose members are committed to the revolutionary objective of abolishing the system which created them will be able to make plans for how their particular industry or service will be run (or disbanded in the case of useless areas of work, such as banking or ticket collecting) once production for use is introduced; trade unions can be units of planning for socialist society.

It is up to the socialists in their trade unions to constantly urge their fellow workers to look beyond the narrow horizons of wage or salary slavery. To see that beyond the crumbs there is the whole cake and beyond that there is the bakery itself which we should take into our common possession. In the meantime painters will gloomily set about the ceaseless task of painting the Forth Bridge. Norman Willis will complete his apprenticeship for the House of Lords and many, many workers will wonder why they are struggling so much for so very, very little.

Steve Coleman