Paradise what? (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

". . . having lunch with Bryan Cogwill at Thames Television . . .  he suggested that 1 might write a story covering the period in England since the war . . ." In these resplendency comfortable words John Mortimer describes the genesis of his novel Paradise Postponed. He is — who doesn't know — a barrister, author, playwright and wit. in fact a personality, which is why he can have lunch with important people in television. His fame as the TV adaptor of Brideshead Revisited and as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey foretold a wide interest in Paradise Postponed. The critics, it seemed certain, would have to take the book very seriously if all the money spent on it were not to be wasted. But need so many of them, perhaps searching for an elusive deeper meaning, have acclaimed it as a perceptive lament for the fine hopes nurtured by successive Labour governments since the war? Fiction, after all. must not lose all touch with reality.

Like any sensible novelist writing for television. Mortimer divides his characters starkly into goodies and baddies. Prominent among the goodies is Simeon Simcox. a stupid, cliche-dependent clergyman who punctiliously chases every possible left wing reformist issue, driving his bishop mad with letters about nuclear disarmament, lower rents for rural proletariats and the like. Prime among the baddies is Leslie Titmuss. who claws a determined way from village odd-job boy down to Thatcherite cabinet minister. These caricatures are surrounded by predictable cardboard characters — the village doctor who kids himself he is all forthright human feeling but who is really a prejudiced and irritating buffoon; the local squire who wearily longs for life to be like one long chivalrous game of pre-1914 cricket with everyone accepting their place in the batting order. There is a supporting cast of drudges who minister to the needs of the local bigwigs.

Of course this isn't Paradise and is not meant to be. Mortimer's village is moving, as the cynics take over from the simpletons and the property developers desecrate the High Street, in the opposite direction. But did Paradise ever exist? Was it ever likely to. or planned to? Was it really postponed to some time in the future? Will we ever get there, with the vicar and the squire and the village drudges?

To be sure, a vision not far short of a sort of Paradise was being offered as the future when the post-war Labour government came to power under Clement Attlee ("and a little mouse shall lead them" disloyally noted Attlee's first Chancellor Hugh Dalton, which was one of his many misjudgements. There were misjudgements on the other side too: "I feel that my entrails have been pulled right out of me" was the effect of the election on Tory Chief Whip James Stuart). What actually happened was far from paradisical. The British working class were told, again and again, that they were in an economic and financial crisis of unusual severity. In truth it was the British capitalist class who were in

that crisis — which had not been accounted for in the Labour government's assumptions about how they would run things:

We all thought that this post-war period was going to be easier than it has. in fact, turned out to be. in the economic sphere: and we have been trying to deal with it ever since by a series of temporary expedients which have led to a series of crises as each expedient became exhausted.

wailed Chancellor Stafford Cripps on the day he imposed another temporary expedient — the devaluation of the pound. "We work", the government informed the working class, "or want", meaning work much harder for less real wages. In any case people whose entire lives were shaped by their awareness that if they couldn't find an employer to buy their labour power they would suffer the harshest poverty hardly needed reminding of their reliance on working for their living. What the Labour government intended was to abate the crisis by imposing more intense exploitation of the workers but the little mouse and his ministers knew better than to put it that way. After all some of them, while this was going on, continued to describe themselves as socialists.

Paradise was also supposed to have a corner reserved for more amicable relations with the Stalinist rulers in Moscow, whose massive atrocities had been temporarily blanketed during the war by official propaganda. "Left can speak to left in comradeship and confidence" was how it was put by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, whose comradeship was not something to be lightly accepted by the nervous. Perhaps that government might have decided, as others have done, on an alliance with the robbers and murderers in Stalin's Kremlin. But there were solid reasons, all to do with protecting and promoting the interests of the British ruling class in world capitalism, for choosing an alliance with the bandits and killers in Washington instead. So they went, wholeheartedly, into the Korean war and into many campaigns against nationalist guerrillas in what were still then British colonies. Or rather we — the working class went in. Labour ministers played their part in those conflicts by signing alliances, lengthening the term of conscription and delivering speeches telling us that the austerity and repression would have to continue — that Paradise had indeed been postponed.

There were many other aspects to that government which Simeon Simcox did not seem to be aware of. He saw nothing inconsistent in marching with CND while supporting the Labour Party, whose consistent policy on nuclear weapons has been far from disarmament. From the beginning the Attlee government gave their blessing to the atomising of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, let it be remembered, are the only occasions so far when the bomb has been used on living human beings. Anxious that the British capitalist class should hold some sway on the ruthless international scene, they launched the programme to make a hydrogen bomb in this country and to set up a chain of nuclear power stations.

When they were eventually removed from office, having convinced many workers that socialism was a crackpot theory which really meant even more austerity in their lives than usual, society in Britain was still split into two classes who were continually at war with each other. One — the capitalist, ruling, class had kept their position of riches and privilege and power, their sumptuous homes, their secure and parasitical life style. The other — the working, exploited, class — still lived in degradation, still struggled in the mire of disadvantage, in their slum homes, the stresses of their poverty.

It was easy for disgruntled Labourites like Simcox (and Mortimer?) to write all this off as a betrayal of the faith. If only Attlee had not been Prime Minister, or Dalton had been Foreign Secretary, if only Cripps had lived or Morrison had died. . . . None of this, they consoled themselves in cheerless, abandoned committee rooms after their defeat, need have happened. Never mind, it was only a postponement of Paradise; there was that young Harold Wilson who showed such promise and who was a true left-winger. Of course in his time Wilson provoked the same anguish, the same doubts, the same excuses, the same stubborn defence of the party, right or wrong. It was the same with Wilson's successor Callaghan, whose government went down in bitter memories of breaking the firemen's strike, of fighting the workers in hospitals and local authorities. Unemployment had doubled and Denis Healey at the Exchequer had done much of the groundwork for Thatcher's policy of reacting to the gathering slump with cuts in expenditure.

By 1979 the argument that there was something accidental and avoidable about Labour's record in government had been worn out by reality. Labour supporters were suffering a discomfort which they could have eliminated by simply recognising the obvious fact that the crises which all governments face have nothing to do with the personnel of those governments. They are rooted in the very nature of capitalism, in the fact that the system is founded on the class ownership of everything that is used to produce and distribute wealth. From this the rest follows — class conflict, poverty amid plenty, exploitation. war. . . .

It is incorrect to argue that it all went wrong for the Labour governments; in truth it all went right. They administered capitalism just as it demands to be — in the interests of the minority class of social parasites and against the interests of the majority class of workers and producers. If they get power once more it will happen again for them — the exposure, the disillusionment, the despair. This may give someone the idea of writing another blockbusting, silly book which will enrich them but is very bad for the rest of us. And it is all because workers persist in voting for Paradise rather than taking over the Earth.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

Steve Coleman's also wrote about John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed in the Between the Lines column in the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Workers as shareholders (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

In preparation for the next general election the Tory Party is popularising the idea of worker-shareholders as part of that party's long-held vote-catching conception of a "property-owning democracy". From the earliest days of capitalism the rich and governments have always urged the workers to work hard, be loyal to their employers, live prudently, save money and never get into debt. The advice also included warning them to put the money in a safe place such as the Trustee Savings Banks or. in 1861. in the newly established Post Office Savings Bank. The one thing they were advised not to do was to enter the risky field of company shares.

But times change and the advice also. Every inducement is now given to getting into debt by buying on credit. Working hard and being loyal to the employer remain, but nowadays this calls for more sophisticated methods. At all times the motives behind the advice have been the same. Workers who followed the advice would, it was thought, be better profit-producers for their employers, would be less likely to fall into destitution and become a burden on the rates.

In the middle of the nineteenth century few workers were able to save anything. British capitalism was booming but the wages of most workers were at bare subsistence level. Only skilled workers could put anything by. But it was only out of their own resources that any workers could make provision for sickness, unemployment and old age, or the cost of funerals. What provision some workers could make was through membership of the Friendly Societies and trade unions. (This and other information will be found in Paul Johnson's Savings and Spending: The Working Class Economy in Britain 1870-1939).

As Paul Johnson says, few workers even troubled about what they would live on in old age because they did not expect to live long enough Only the trade unions had provision for unemployment but as late as 1911 Lloyd George reckoned that not even ten per cent of the working class were covered for it. As the trade unions grew in membership and effectiveness, in the second half of the century. wages steadily increased and savings also. Between 1870 and 1914 the number of depositors in the Post Office Savings Bank and Trustee Savings Banks grew from 2,500,000 to 11,000,000. Yet in 1911 it was reckoned that the total assets of adult workers were only £11.10p a head — just enough to cover two months' unemployment or sickness.

Since 1945 conditions have altered in various ways. The purchasing power of workers' take home pay (after deductions of PAYE and NI contributions) has continued to increase and is now well above the level of 1938. Workers' savings have grown but the ownership of accumulated wealth of all kinds remains highly unequal. The Royal Commission on the Distribution of Wealth and Income, in its report in 1975, found that the top twenty per cent of adult population owned seventy-eight per cent of the wealth and the bottom eighty per cent of the population only twenty-two per cent of the wealth. One new factor has been the payment of £10,000 million redundancy pay to workers who have lost their jobs, producing the somewhat novel feature of unemployed workers having, for a time, cash at their disposal. It is against this background that the Tory Government launched its programme for a property-owning democracy. This included a change in the law enabling council house tenants to buy their houses at prices below the market rate. The Tory Election Manifesto 1983 said. "There are a million more owner-occupiers today than four years ago".

Other items in the Tory programme have been encouragement to companies to introduce "profit sharing" to their workers and schemes to increase the buying of shares by workers. In the "privatisation" of British Telecom and other nationalised industries shares have been issued at prices below market rates, with preference to employees to buy shares. The result has been that those who acquired shares saw an immediate big rise in their stock-exchange price. According to the British Market Research Bureau the proportion of individual shareholders among the adult population has more than doubled in the past two years, to about 16 per cent. The British Telecom share issue is reported to have attracted about a million investors who had never owned shares before, including a large proportion of the firm's employees.

The latest government scheme (still in its discussion stage) aims to encourage companies to make agreements with their workers to have part of their wages related to the ups and downs of profits. Instead of an agreed wage of. say, £10,000 a year (£192 a week) there might be a basic rate of £8,000 (£154) plus a share in profit. In an average year the profit share would be £38 which, with the basic £154. would give £192 as before. If profits rose, the total would be above £192 but in a bad year the worker would receive only the basic £154. The inducement to the worker would be that some part (half has been suggested) of the profit element of pay would be exempt from PAYE deduction, worth about £5 a week to a worker on average pay.

The advantage to the employer would be that the workers would have an interest in co-operating to produce maximum profits and avoid strikes, and would make it easier for the employer to adjust costs in times of bad trade. Instead of having to try to reduce wages, the fall in total payments to the workers would be automatic, in the terms of the agreement. However the supposed effect of the scheme to which the government attaches most importance is that it would, in the governments view, encourage employers to take on more workers and thus reduce unemployment, instead of having to pay £192 a week to additional workers the employers' commitment would be only the basic rate. £154. Only if profits again increased would the employer have to pay more than that.

The scheme has received a very mixed reception. The Confederation of British Industry is lukewarm about it and the largest employers' organisation, the Engineering Employers' Federation, is hostile. The Federation doubts whether it would change the workers' attitude towards their employers and whether it would have any effect in reducing unemployment. Among the objections raised to the scheme by employers is that the unions would counter any fall in the profit-related part of wages simply by claiming an increase of the basic rate and that the workers would resist the employment of additional workers because it would mean sharing the profits among a larger number, reducing the amount going to each worker. In spite of the objections, present indications are that the government will go on with the scheme.

The TUC is sceptical and the attitude of the Labour Party is not yet known. But about worker shareholders the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Roy Hattersley, has come out in favour. "The extension of employee shareholding . . .  is wholly consistent with the aims of socialism. It is also in the interests of the economic success and social cohesion of the country" (Observer 16 March 1986). Whether or not the government really believes that their various schemes for a property owning democracy will make any difference to the way capitalism operates, it is certain that they will feature prominently at the next general election, in confrontation with the Labour Party's attempts to revive the lagging popularity of nationalisation by giving it the new name "Social Ownership"

The Labour Party will claim that, in selling the nationalised industries to raise revenue and to make possible a reduction of income tax, the Tories have been guilty of a profligate misuse of "public property". The Tories will retort that a Labour government, with its plans for a vast increase of government expenditure, will have to raise income tax drastically and that employee share ownership “is the truest public ownership of all" (Tory Election Programme 1983).

The Tories will make the most of the Labour Party's declared intention of government action about the shareholders in British Telecom. At present the holders of shares in British Telecom and other privatised industries are seeing a big increase in the stock exchange price of their shares. A Labour government will offer to these shareholders the option of selling the shares to the corporation only at the lower price paid for them, or of having Consumer Bonds which will not carry voting rights.

Of course, by the time the election comes round the stock exchange price of British Telecom and British Gas shares (under the impact of increased competition) may have fallen below the present price. But if the stock exchange prices keep up to the present high level, the Tories will represent the Labour Party's taking over of the shares as an act of "robbery of the workers' savings".

The Tories will not have forgotten what happened at the general election in 1931. The Labour government had collapsed, with the Labour Prime Minister. J. R. MacDonald and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. Philip Snowden, joining a National government with the Tories and Liberals. The Labour Party lost heavily in votes and seats and political commentators said that a major factor in their defeat was a broadcast by Snowden asserting that if a Labour government were elected it intended to "rob the Post Office Savings Bank" in which the workers had their savings.

Edgar Hardcastle

Beware the bogey-men (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a time when hard-pressed parents sought to control their high-spirited children by threatening that, if they were not "good" (willing to conform to parental convenience). the bogey-man would get them. The owners of newspapers use the same device to frighten their readers into conformity with ruling class ideas and. on occasion, to create a willingness to die in their defence.

The earliest bogey-man the writer can remember was the "Hun" — the subject of fear and hatred during the first World War. This was the name given to the Germans of that time in spite of the fact that the Huns last swept across Europe from Central Asia in the 4th and 5th centuries. However. "Hun" was a convenient alternative to "German" since the British Royal Family were related to Germans.

Then, with the Russian revolution of 1917, a new bogey-man appeared on the horizon. He was known as a "Bolshy" and, although this was an abbreviation of "Bolshevik", meaning "one of those forming a majority", this in no way detracted from the horror with which people were persuaded to regard him. This bogey-man was unique in having an alternative name: "Red", which was on occasion applied to members of the Labour Party as well as supporters of the Communist Party.

But then, when Hitler disappointed the British ruling class by deciding to invade the West instead of the East, the "Nazi" became the biggest bogey-man of all. "Nazi" was an abbreviation of Nationalsozialist — meaning National Socialist — and workers should bear this in mind when others lay claim to being socialist when they represent just another form of capitalism.

However the bogey-man of the 1980s is certainly a "Marxist" — often a "hard-line Marxist", whatever that means. Now. presumably a Marxist is one who agrees with the main economic and political ideas of Karl Marx. So it might be as well for those members of the working class who might be frightened by this latest bogey-man to find out exactly what his ideas were.

Marx maintained that in an advanced capitalist country the population was divided into two main social classes whose interests were diametrically opposed: the capitalist class and the working class. He pointed to the fact that, because the capitalist class owned the means of production of wealth (the land, factories, railways and so on) the working class was dependent on selling to the capitalists their only asset, their ability to work, in order to live. In this process he explained the exploitation of labour, the inevitable poverty of a majority of the working class — and the origin of profit:

The fact that half a day 's labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working the whole day. Therefore, the value of labour power and the value which that labour power creates in the labour process, are two entirely different magnitudes and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view when he was purchasing labour power.

(Capital Part III Chapter VII)

Marx also held that the only solution to the poverty of the working class was for them to make the means of production of wealth the common property of all mankind:

When therefore capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transferred into social property.

(Communist Manifesto)

In the above statement he was also answering those critics who asked what would become of personal belongings. The result however of the change from private ownership of capital to common ownership would, Marx pointed out. mean the cessation of buying and selling since this can only occur if wealth is privately owned:

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying (free trade) disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying and all the other brave words of our bourgeoisie [. . .] have no meaning when opposed to the communistic abolition of buying and selling

(Communist Manifesto)

It would also mean the end of the wages system by which workers were exploited:

Instead of the conservative motto: "a fair day s wages for a fair day's work" they [the working class] ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: abolition of the wages system.

(Value, Price and Profit) 

Finally, he maintained that the establishment of this form of society must be achieved democratically by the working class itself:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

(Communist Manifesto)

and

Thus socialism was. in 1847. a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. [. . .] And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take.

(Preface to the Communist Manifesto)

So what can we conclude from the above quotations? Firstly that members of the working class — and in this group we include those who think of their wages as "salaries" — should have nothing to fear from this latest in a long line of "bogey-men": the Marxist. The true Marxist brings the key to the emancipation of all people from poverty and conflict.

Secondly the above quotations should enable us to distinguish the true Marxist from the many who assume, or are given, this title Reading back over the quotations, we can ask whether the self-styled "Marxist" explains the economics of capitalist exploitation, believes that the means of wealth production should be the common property of all. explains that this means the abolition of buying and selling and the end of the wages system — and whether the revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism (or communism) must be the democratic act of a majority of the working class.

Or does the "Marxist" represent an élite who claim they can lead the working class — offering reforms on the way — to a form of society in which they see themselves as the new ruling class? If so. here is your true bogeyman.

John Moore