Would a Conservative Government be any better? (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The alternation of governing parties is usually represented as a free choice by the electorate: a political Judgement of Paris in which the voters composedly select the most beautiful, fair-spoken and wise. The actuality is something different. The party in charge has failed once more. Its inability to control the system has produced fresh grievances, its leaders are divided; and the opponent party, which itself was in this position not long ago, prepares to catch the Judges’ eye again. The voters don’t feel like masters of the situation. The widespread sentiment is that the existing régime is beyond hope, and to see if “the other lot” can do any better.

In these circumstances the Conservative Party is now looking at the prospect of winning the next general election. The Labour line, and that of the militant groups who attack the Labour Party but unfailingly support it at election times, is that the Conservatives stand for wealth and privilege and so must be kept out at all costs. It is much more fruitful to consider that many Conservatives, leaders and supporters alike, believe with Disraeli that they can and should “elevate the condition of the people”; and to see the reasons why they have failed and will fail.

State and Enterprise

The conspicuous difference between the two parties is that the Conservatives frankly accept the capitalist system, while Labour is committed to social-democratic ideas which mean running capitalism with a different vocabulary. The Conservative tradition is for “free enterprise” and against state intervention in production and distribution. In The Conservative Party (1949) Nigel Birch wrote: “They do not believe that the present type of central planning, which involves the attempt by the State to interfere in almost every aspect of human life and activity, can succeed or if it did succeed would lead to the good life.”

This passage goes on to quote J. M. Keynes— “The advantage to efficiency of the decentralisation of decisions and of individual responsibility is even greater perhaps than the nineteenth century supposed.” Most Conservatives would regard as ideal Keynes’s colourful statement in his General Theory:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig them up again . . . there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

The rôle of the state is thus confined to priming the pump, and the interplay of market forces provides not only the profits which are the rightful due of the capitalist class but benefits to the working class. This is seen as the practical alternative to state control and to a lot of welfare legislation. It embodies a taken-for-granted idea of justice: the most efficient industry and the most diligent workers get their reward.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. If it did, we should not have a trade depression with 1,500,000 unemployed in Britain today after thirty years of the application of Keynesian policies by Labour and Conservative governments alike. However, the Conservative Party has never been able in practice to reject “central planning” and, both before and since the war, has carried out more measures of state control of industry and social institutions than the Labour Party. It has to do so if it is to further the interests of capitalism. Prospect for Capitalism, a Conservative pamphlet published in 1958, urged action to restrain “the excesses of naked capitalism”, and in its introduction Lord Hailsham proposed the super-state as the unit for the future:

Moreover, the very size of modern units of production, and the prime cost even of the apparatus necessary for basic research, has limited the effectiveness of competition as a spur, and has provided an inevitable field even in Britain and America for the emergence of the State as a capitalist ... In some cases, the State itself has become too small a unit, and capital development has become the province of a consortium of States, as at CERN at Geneva.

Cutting Back

The outstanding matters for a Conservative government elected in the near future would be public expenditure and a wages policy. On the first of these, Conservatives have abandoned Keynes and latched on to the monetarist case put forward by Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and the editor of The Times: that inflation can and must be stopped by containing the money supply. It is not denied that this would mean unemployment and bankruptcies as liquidity dried up. The monetarists argue that we have those now, as the result of the policies they aim to stop. A report in The Times of 27th August said:

The Prime Minister must reject the demands of trade union leaders when he sees them next week about the serious level of unemployment, Mr. Prior, the Conservative spokesman on employment, said yesterday . . . He said it appeared that the union leaders were going to Downing Street to seek an intensification of the very policies that had proved so disastrous for their members and for the nation.

Prior did not add that these policies were pushed by the Conservatives every bit as much as by Labour. In the years 1972 and 1973 under Anthony Barber, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, the money supply increased by 24 and 26 per cent. respectively.

Given that the Conservatives have now changed their views, they are faced with the same problems as Labour. The reduction of the money supply means cutting government expenditure on roads, subsidies, schools and services—measures hardly likely to appeal to voters. On this, Conservative spokesmen are inevitably unspecific. In an article in The Observer on 22nd August Sir Keith Joseph said only that “Government spending is too high” and there must be “less Government spending”. But with the present-day importance of the car industry, for example, is it supposed that a Conservative government would have refused the “rescue operations” of putting massive sums of money into Leyland and Chrysler? It is unlikely.

In fact the belief that it is the money supply that is to blame is a mistaken one (see the article “The Financial Times and Inflation" on another page of this issue). But the greater fallacy is supposing that ending inflation would cure unemployment and solve the economic problems. Large-scale unemployment was chronic through the years up to 1939, when inflation was hardly known in most countries. In the early nineteen-twenties, at the same period as there was high unemployment with inflation in Germany, there was high unemployment without inflation in Britain. In his Observer article Sir Keith Joseph said: “The inequality of rewards by which a market economy functions is not unjust.” This implies not a cure, but a return to the disease as it was in the good old days.

Unions and Parties

The belief that a Conservative government could not live with the trade unions has no foundation. Obviously the unions have made their terms with Conservative governments for a large share of the post-war period. Both Wilson and Heath misjudged matters in this respect, and both their parties learned from that. An all-party Commons committee in 1974 unanimously rejected further attempts at a statutory incomes policy. After declaring that it would mean “an authoritarian state” (a fear not entertained when they were trying it):

Secondly, they argue that prices and incomes policies are liable to have all sorts of nasty side effects, including stagnation. This possibility, they say, should be closely investigated before anyone blindly advocates a statutory policy. Thirdly, “it is a fact of political life that a statutory policy cannot currently be imposed in Britain. The previous Government fell while doing so. “People who continue to advocate the solution,” they argue, are “living in a dream world, not the one that really exists.”

(Guardian, 14th Aug. 1974)

At the present time it is the relationship between the unions and the Labour government that is under strain, on account of rising unemployment. The speeches at last month’s Trade Union Congress repeatedly demanded government action for “an efficient manufacturing industry ... a more sustained and vigorous implementation of its economic strategy” (Hugh Scanlon). What the unions do depends more on the state of the economy than on ideological considerations; and that applies to governments equally. Given a change after the next election, government and unions will aim to make the best bargain they can in the circumstances. The TUC’s vote for a qualified return to free collective bargaining with employers in 1977 was a hope for conditions to improve, but also a message to whoever is in power a year from now.

Getting Anywhere ?

Another question which has made a battleground between Labour and Conservatives is education: comprehensive schools or a system of varied schools? The arguments about this range round the idea of “choice” and it is not the issue at all. The education system has failed throughout its history to find a formula satisfactory to the needs of capitalism, hence the repeated reorganisations. Over fifteen years the eleven-plus system was shown to be unsatisfactory, and the comprehensive system has turned out calamitous in an even shorter time.

Despite the elation over Thameside, it is unlikely that the Conservatives would go back to the old régime. An article by a Tory lecturer in social policy in The Spectator (31st Aug. 1973) attacked “artificial social impediments” provided by the public schools: “capitalist society requires greater social mobility if it is to survive in its present state”. This can be applied to separate-schools organization generally, and was the main Labour argument in 1958 for the introduction of comprehensive schools. What the Conservative Party is faced with is a fresh attempt to devise a formula for education, with the knowledge that the alternatives have all been tried.

The question put by Edward Heath as an unsuccessful election slogan, “Who governs Britain?” is the apposite one in looking at the Conservative Party. It stands for capitalism: the private ownership of the means of living, and production for profit. Conservatives approve those motives, and are made impotent by them. It is capitalism that inexorably produces unemployment, crises, and the social problems which defy solution. The capitalist system governs Britain, including the Conservative Party: on one hand forcing it to abandon ideas and policies, on the other making it as incapable as Labour of using political power in the interests of most of the population. Supporters of the Conservative Party would do well to ask themselves why they should go on accepting that state of affairs.

Robert Barltrop

The Struggle in South Africa (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a little over a month at least 250 African men, women and children have been butchered by South Africa's armed police. In the first day alone, 25 — mainly children — were slaughtered in Soweto. At the end of a week it was 176 killed, 1,139 injured and 1,298 arrested.

The rioting and demonstrations have continued in many other African townships and even the Coloured and White universities. The immediate cause of the big Soweto demonstration of school-children and parents was the Government’s insistence on Afrikaans being used as the language of instruction. In the reserves, however, schools are free to choose English instead. There is little doubt that Africans regard Afrikaans as “the symbol of our oppression.’’ It is the language of the police, of the pass laws, of the job reservation rules, of all that they detest. It is the boss’s language, not theirs.

The Nationalists would prefer to have no blacks at all. But they recognize that industry, mining etc. would collapse without black labour. So they built townships outside the big cities, outsize council estates with minimal amenities. In Soweto “fewer than 20% of their tiny, boxlike houses have electricity, no more than 5% have hot running water.” (Time, 28th June 1976.)

Government policy decrees that all Africans belong to the tribal reserves and should settle there. In a 1947 pamphlet on Apartheid, the Nationalists declared: “the Bantu in the urban areas should be regarded as migratory citizens not entitled to political or social rights equal to those of the Whites” (quoted in Apartheid, ed. Alex La Guma, 1972) In 1969 a Nationalist MP justified the townships on the grounds that the urban Africans ”are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour . . . it is labour we are importing and not labourers as individuals . . . numbers make no difference”.

In Guilty Land, P. van Rensburg sums up the policy: “at the moment the Blacks are still necessary for the urban labour force . . . but they must not be allowed to gain the impression that they a permanent part of the town and city population. When they are moved to residentially segregated areas, they can have no freehold rights ... for otherwise the Government fears they would regard themselves as something more than temporary sojourners.”

The urban Africans have no security of tenure. If they lose their jobs or get in any kind of trouble they can be "endorsed out” or jailed. A Pretoria survey showed that only 15 per cent of the township’s residents were “born and bred” there. The African worker is merely a migrant. The government denies him either the vote or the right to strike or belong to a registered trade union. He is thus nearly helpless in the hands of the capitalists. One such migrant was John Mvalo: “John was conceived during one of his father’s visits home from the mines . . .  Of his working life from the age of 16 to 47 (31 years) 36% of his time was spent at home and 64% in employment away. He had had 34 different jobs and the average length of a job had been 47 weeks.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)

Workers' Wages

The pay of Johannesburg Africans is only one-fifth of that earned by Whites in the same area, according to Time. A survey in 1957, after the bus boycott, indicated that for the bare essentials a family of five needed £27.10s. per month but the average income of such a family was only £18 per month. Ten years later a Johannesburg survey revealed that more than two-thirds of African families had incomes below R53 per month — the absolute minimum.

The next year the minimum figure rose to R59.70: “the effective minimum level of income is generally estimated at one and a half times the poverty datum line figure, which would mean that a family at Soweto should have at least R95.63 a month.” (Hilda Bernstein, in Apartheid.)

In 1969 a survey gave these figures for all urban African households:

Monthly incomes between   R1 and R19   25%

   ” ” ” R20 and R49   40%

   ” ” ” R50 and R79   20%

                                over      R80                   15%

In other words, 85 per cent of urban African families were living below “the effective minimum level of income” and about half were trying to survive on incomes below even the poverty datum line! A survey of African schoolchildren, by the South African Institute of Race Relations, found that 60-70 per cent. were “recognizably malnourished”, 50 per cent. “needed nursing and medical attention” and almost 10 per cent. “required hospitalization for diseases directly or indirectly attributable to malnutrition”.

But if the urban African is badly off, note how much worse off he could be. If he worked on a farm he could earn an average of £50 per annum or, possibly, nothing at all: “the African works for a fixed number of days in a year, between 90 and 180 days, in return for the right to live on the farm, to graze cattle, and to cultivate the land.” (M.B. Yengwa, in Apartheid.) In 1972 there were about 2 million African workers on White farms.

Out of Town

The urban African worker’s insecurity is increased by the fear of being sent back to the Bantustans or tribal reserves. These comprise a mere 13 per cent. of South Africa’s land and only the Transkei has any coastline or is sizeable. Its only port, however, is zoned for Whites. “The land is impoverished and overcrowded with people and livestock; practically no economic development has taken place, and the primitive subsistence agriculture cannot at present support even the small proportion of resident Bantu; there are almost no mineral resources and no industry; and the population has acquired neither skills nor capital.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)

The Government refuses to allow White capital investment inside these areas. Instead the Government have insisted on the development of Border Industries just outside. The Border Industries, in spite of the cheap labour force, are unable to compete effectively against the heavy concentration of industry and capital in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area, which in 1969 housed 17 per cent. of the population and produced about 55 per cent. of S.A.’s industrial products. “The Reserves remain an economy without manpower. The men live in two worlds . . . More than 2 million people spend their lives circulating between industrial centres in White areas and in the subsistence life of the Reserves.” (Geographical Review.)

The same writer is anxious to point out how harmful this is: “only about half of the annual potential manpower resource of the Reserves is economically applied in White areas”. Moreover, according to a 1960 writer in the South African Journal of Economics, “a total annual potential of 1.140 000 man-years is available in the Bantu areas, of which 600,000 are not economically applied”. Now that’s what really hurts the bourgeois boffins: all that “cheap, docile” labour-power and it’s not being exploited. Just think of the loss of surplus-value involved!

In 1954 the Tomlinson Commission recommended that industry in the reserves should be financed by White capital investment. But the Government cut its own investment fund by two-thirds, refused to allow White capital investment and insisted on agriculture being based mainly on the tribal system.

Tomlinson proposed that 50 per cent. of the population of the reserves should be removed to enable the rest merely to get a living of 168 dollars per annum. Others suggested “a minimum subsistence figure three, for our even five times the Commission’s figure” (Geographical Review).

M. B. Yengwa describes life in the reserves in Apartheid: “Here grinding poverty and the resulting malnutrition, disease and squalor have become a way of life. This is the land of women, children and old and sick people. The healthy and active are the only exports “the Reserves have in the form of cheap ‘Bantu’ labour which they sell to the mining, agricultural and secondary industries in the White areas. In the Reserves — all Reserves — famine and starvation are the usual seasonal visitations.”

African Education

The government’s view of African education is clear. "The school must equip him (the Bantu pupil) to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him . . . There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” (Dr. Verwoerd, 1953.) Also: "Who will do the manual work if you give the Natives an academic education? . . . We should so conduct our schools that the Native who attends these schools knows that to a great extent he must be the labourer in the country” (Mr. le Roux, Nationalist MP).

To ensure that Africans don’t get too much education, the Government instituted a system of “academic ceilings.” The result is a phenomenal dropout rate. In 1968, of the 78 per cent. of African children in school, only 4 per cent. were getting secondary education. Other factors which prevent Africans from getting adequate schooling are lack of money, inadequate classrooms, gross overcrowding and double sessions in most schools (even triple sessions in some). Africans are forced to pay one-fifth or more of teachers’ salaries themselves, to raise half the cost of school building (from higher primary up) and to pay for school maintenance.

In 1969, the Johannesburg Star reported that the cost of education in Soweto schools had risen 50 per cent. The teacher-pupil ratio went from 1:42 in 1949 to 1:72 in 1969: “ill-fed families throughout South Africa cut down on the skim milk powder and mealie meal and contribute cents saved to pay thousands of extra teachers privately, thus improving the teacher-pupil ratio to the still appalling 1:58.5” (The Failure of Bantu Education, 1970).

In farming areas the policy is to have only primaries and these can only be established if the farmer wishes. The schools can be useful to the farmer. In 1969 the Minister of Bantu Education told the Senate: “we have made it compulsory that where the farmer wants these facilities, part of the school instruction . . . must be training in the normal activities on the farm . . . any farmer who has a farm school on his farm and who wishes to make use of the school children under the supervision of the teacher to assist with certain farm activities, this can be arranged . . .” The success of the Government’s policy has resulted in there being “no registered non-White veterinarians, architects, civil, electrical or mechanical engineers” (UNESCO). Dr. Birley visited the 4 secondary schools of the African township of Johannesburg: "I have recently surveyed their laboratories and equipment carefully. The schools have . . . between them 13 Bunsen burners, six balances and three microscopes.” Literacy among Africans dropped from 80 per cent. in ’59 to only 40-50 per cent. in ’63 (Government figures). In addition, the Government bans “unregistered” teaching, including night schools, and reduced its grant for night schools from R46.000 (’58-9) to zero (’65). The wonder is that any Africans learn to read at all!

Effects on the Economy

Some of these facts go to explain just why the world capitalist class condemns Apartheid. Here are some typical criticisms:

“The very idea of separateness is a renunciation of market forces . . . it denies the non-Whites the right to advance industrially in existing fields where their skills can be fully used productively to the benefit of the community as a whole; it inhibits the development of consumer purchasing power and therefore it discourages new investment” (Fridjohn, quoted in The Geographical Review.)

In this context “productively” means of course “profitably”, the “benefit of the community as a whole” really means “the benefit of the employing class and the greater exploitation of the wage-slave class”.

The low wages which are preserved by job reservation, the pass system, denial of the right to strike or to organize in trade unions, lack of any political power, and concentration in the starvation areas of the reserves, these low wages which are so helpful to the farming and mining sections of the capitalist class in S.A. spell “wastage” to the manufacturers. (In S.A., industry has only got ofF the ground recently: in 1972 it still accounted for only 28 per cent. of the Gross National Product.) By the year 2000, it is estimated there will be more than 20 million Africans in S.A. Are they never to be allowed colour TV, washing machines, hi-fi, DIY gadgets, cars, holidays abroad and so on? After all, it’s a poor sort of a home market which specialises in mealie meal and skim-milk. Not much profit in them.

The “liberal” Patrick van Rensburg deplores apartheid because it means extra costs for “the taxpayer” (those poor capitalists!): all those dual bus services, separate park benches, loos, exits and entrances, the enormous bureaucracy needed to administer the Population Register, and the pass laws, not to mention boss’s army of police, spies and paid informers. Also he points out that “if the burden and worry of undernourishment were removed at once, Africans would immediately produce more”. Which shows us whose interests he really has at heart! Greater productivity means greater profit-making for bosses, greater exploitation for workers. Another point he makes is that job reservation, preventing the Africans from competing for skilled jobs, cushions inefficient Whites.

Quo Vadis

As Socialists we do not concern ourselves with the plight of the capitalists, and their dispute with South Africa’s White farmers. The pass laws exist to protect the farmers from the effect of higher wages in the urban areas. In South Africa political power is held by the representatives of the farming and business community, and working-class Whites support them. The Government’s policy has been successful in dividing the workers of S.A. on grounds not only of race but also of language — English or Afrikaans speaking.

It is a fallacy to suppose that the ending of Apartheid would mean the ending of slums, hunger, unemployment, and insecurity. Nowhere can you find a country which has eliminated these miserable features of the profit-producing system. The Africans of South Africa will remain second-class citizens as long as they are part of the international wage-slave class. Their poverty is a result of their class position in society, only made worse by the fact that they as a group have been selected for the low-paid jobs in the economy and that they are denied the right to organize for better living and working conditions, either politically or through trade-union action.

The Socialist attitude has nothing in common with the Pan Africanist Congress which operates on racially divisive lines, or the African National Congress, one of whose goals is “equal pay for equal work”. Both are reformist organizations. Neither is based on class-consciousness, and an awareness that the African worker is a part of the international working class, just as the South African boss class is a part of the international brotherhood of bosses. The workers of S.A. have a long way to go in discovering that their real enemy is our class-divided social system, and that unity on the basis of the common interests of all workers everywhere, “without distinction of race or sex”, is the real key to their liberation from misery and exploitation.

Charmian Skelton

So They Say: Revolutionary Prophet (1976)

The So They Say Column from the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolutionary Prophet

It had to come. The logical counter to revolutionary Socialism has been launched—“revolutionary capitalism.” Its arrival in Britain was announced by Dr. Khalil Osman Mahmoud who styles himself the most successful private industrialist in the Middle East. In spite of the “revolutionary” label, he affectionately retains certain features of what we suppose must now be called old-fashioned capitalism. For example he made the announcement "from the headquarters of his company, Gulf International, above Christian Dior’s plush London establishment in the heart of Mayfair.” As a partner in Gulf International, he, and his “revolutionary” associates, decided some years ago to enlarge the empire and contacted the equally "revolutionary” Lonrho Group. Readers will recall that so revolutionary was this company that a Conservative Prime Minister (Mr. Heath), described certain of its practices as representing “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” however, that is one of the prices of success. The link was made with the Lonrho chief, Tiny Rowland after certain basic facts had been established.

We smelled this was a man who could produce. We watched him for three years before we did a single deal with him. Now we never stop buying Lonrho shares—34m. at last count.

Sunday Times, 15th August 76

At the beginning of September, Lonrho industrial shares were quoted on the stock market at 64p each which would value the shareholding in the region of £22m. The uninitiated may be excused for thinking that Dr. Osman—who incidentally is now a Lonrho director—is just an old-fashioned capitalist after all. Where does the revolution come in?

That Certain Smile

Oh, but it does. Following Lonrho’s acquisition of the bankrupt Brentford Nylon Group, Dr. Osman underwent a unique experience and visited the newly completed Newcastle nylon factory. He expanded on the object of his trip:

To bridge the gap between workers and management from the start and to show “revolutionary capitalism” in practice. Dr. Osman’s first visit was to the union office. “I had the day of my life. I met the workers and managers. It was the first time I had met the working people of Britain. I said to them Let us all pray for the man who built this factory but could not complete it.”

It seems sincerity pays off in the end. After prayers for the dearly departed, some philosophy.

“A businessman lives to get pleasure from the smile of his working people. I got it that day in Newcastle. I went back to London and next day I met with my colleagues. I told them, we can do lots more with this factory and with people like this. If a businessman is not interested in that smile, if he goes off and spends his time on the Riviera, he’s finished.”

This is something new: Up to now the owners have lived to get surplus value from their workers. Clearly the £22m. which Osman has so far accumulated off the backs of his workers has been more by accident than design. These workers may have been smiling, the owners are positively rubbing their hands together.

Busy Doing Nothing

An American professor of neurological surgery and psychology recently concluded after a year’s research that the size of a woman’s bust influences her chances of getting lifts while hitchhiking. Fascinating stuff, and more could be on the way. Messrs. Heidrick and Struggles, an American “headhunting” company is about to conduct a survey among selected British public companies to learn how part-time (sleeping) directors got on to their particular boards, and what work they do in the boardroom to earn their fees. One City editor expressed approval of the scheme, but felt that there may be some reluctance on the part of those surveyed.

Whether the part-timers are ready to answer such questions is another matter. A good many of the questionnaires sent out by Heidrick and Struggles will, I suspect, end up in the boardroom waste paper baskets.

London Evening Standard, 31st August 76

That makes sense at least. We could have told them that these chaps are far too busy doing other things, to bother with silly questionnaires—and about work of all things!

Party Tricks

It was hard to tell if the writer of the following letter, published in the Daily Telegraph on 28th August, did not have her tongue in her cheek. She directed some stinging facts against the “lefties.”

After reading your editorial comment about Mr. Auberon Waugh and the perpetuation of the “Tory twits” myth (Aug. 25), I feel it is a pity that it is not better known that by far the greater number of members of Mensa (the high IQ society) lean politically to the Conservatives. This also holds true of members of other countries, and in fact it seems the higher a person’s intelligence the more likely is he to hold so-called "Right-wing” views.

What has escaped her attention is that IQ tests examine the individual’s ability to do IQ tests—she refers to intelligence which is something else. However it matters not a jot whether “Tory twits” are better at such tests than “Labour loonies”. Both groups are ignorant, or profess to be, of the need for the working class internationally to take control of the means of wealth production and distribution. While Mensa’s members may “lean” in every direction but the right one, this should not dissuade members of the working class from doing some thinking on their own account.

Allies in Wonderland

The London Evening Standard of 31st August reported the comments of Joseph Kraft “one of Washington’s most widely read syndicated columnists” who described Ford’s opponent, Carter, as “inexperienced, even naive” in matters of foreign policy. Carter is “an amateur who treats foreign affairs as a kind of wonderland.” Telling points no doubt, until it is recalled that even Presidents have suffered from similar deficiencies. When the pound was ‘floated’ in 1972, the matter was brought to President Nixon’s attention.

Mr. Haldeman offered the President a report from one of his economic advisers outlining the effect of the British float on the world monetary system. Mr. Nixon brushed it aside saying: ‘It’s too complicated for me to get into.' Haldeman said that Dr. Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, expected the British move to result in a five per cent devaluation of sterling against the dollar.

The President: ‘Yeah. OK. Fine.’

Haldeman: Burns is concerned about speculation about the lira.

The President: ‘Well I don’t give a (expletive deleted) about the lira (unintelligible).’

The discussion turned briefly to legislative matters before the President asked Haldeman: ‘OK. What else have you got that’s amusing today?’ 

Transcript of White House tape recording of June 23rd, 1972. Reported in the Daily Telegraph.

Nixon of course could argue that he was far too involved in fooling the American people over his part in a burglary to pay much attention. Carter’s line of defence is clear therefore—he must tell his critics that he is far too involved in fooling Americans that he can make capitalism work.

Goldwater on Democracy

Following Gerald Ford’s success in obtaining the Republican Party’s nomination for presidential candidate, the Daily Mail of 20th August carried a centre page spread on the forthcoming us election. The headline read “Now every punch a dirty one” and the article predicts that the respective camps will be taking part in “a raucous and possibly unedifying campaign.” If the words of Senator Barry Goldwater are anything to go by, the Mail has understated it. Ford’s running mate, Robert Dole, caught his attention :

Senator Barry Goldwater, no pansy himself, says admiringly of Dole: “Thank God we finally have someone who will grab the other side by the hair and drag them down the hill.”

And having done so, will then declare himself for freedom, fair play and law and order.

Getting the Priorities Right

The government published a white paper toward the end of August in response to the 1974 all-Party Expenditure Committee’s suggestion that loans, rather than grants be made to postgraduate students. These currently number 33,000.

The Government do not consider it possible to achieve worthwhile public expenditure savings in the near future by a loans scheme which spread the repayments over a reasonable period.

Daily Telegraph, 25th August 76

Although they argue that the loan scheme could be “potentially damaging in terms of social equity,” they go on to say that they will “continue to bear in mind the possibility of achieving savings in the long run through such a change.” The “social equity” will be more resilient then, no doubt. For the time being, they are in agreement with the Expenditure Committee’s main recommendation that resources should be provided “Primarily in order to meet the country’s need for trained manpower.”

One of the other guidelines for expenditure on postgraduate education “the satisfaction of the demands from students (individual demands)” was considered to be “too haphazard.”

Alan D'Arcy

The Philosophy of Anarchism (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The problems thrown up by present-day society are plain for all to see. What is not so obvious is the way to deal with them. This requires thinking about, and once workers start to seriously think about why society provides drudgery, poverty and insecurity, the Socialist alternative will become apparent. It is being content to let others do the thinking that results in failure to achieve anything.  

The Anarchist, in competition with other reformers, claims to have a solution to social problems. He claims these originate from the authoritarian state. The state is the negation of liberty in the eyes of the anarchist. It has to be destroyed before liberty can be established (Bakunin). Socialists are accused of wanting to extend the power of the state which shows how little anarchists understand Socialism.

On the surface, the anarchists’ concept of a libertarian society has led a number of people to believe that Socialism and anarchism have the same objective in mind, and differ only in method. This is erroneous. The Socialist is a materialist who has grasped the historical significance of changing economic conditions leading to changes in men’s ideas, whilst the anarchist is an idealist — that is, someone who constructs the world in his mind without reference to material and historical circumstances. The Socialist holds that the agent of social change is the class struggle. The capitalist class destroyed the feudal conditions of property, and the working class will, in turn, put an end to the capitalist conditions of property. This is the issue in the class struggle, and it has to be fought on the political field by political parties.

Social change is not possible without political power being gained by those who desire the change. This is the historical sequence civilized society has gone through and must go through in future. The emergence of the capitalist class and the working class went hand in hand with social progress in the production of wealth. They are not eternal categories, and represent the development of the institution of private property. The impulse to Socialism comes from the necessity for the working class as a whole to realize its interests.

Anarchists do not accept this view. They maintain that political action for control of the state by workers is a waste of time, because Parliament cannot possibly serve as an instrument of social transformation. Instead, they advocate industrial and everyday struggles, though experience has shown that social reform is a waste of time and leads nowhere. In pursuing this line the anarchist movement is identical with the reformers of “the Left” with their “day-to- day struggles”, and form only another fragment of the multifarious reform movements.

One group, the Anarchist Workers’ Association, has in fact moved away from the traditional anarchist position and wants to “create political consciousness amongst the working class, and seeks to develop and support working-class organization” (“Aims and Principles,” Anarchist Worker, Aug. 1976). The journal of the Anarchist Collective, called Anarchy 19, discusses at length the need for organization, and states a conflict between liberal individualists who are apolitical and what is described as the broad anarchist movement linked with the class struggle. “The wider anarchist movement finds itself floundering in a sea of confusion, largely unable to present any coherent alternative to the authoritarian Left, simply because it fails to see the need to politically organize” (Anarchy 19).

This is a complete departure from the classic anarchist position which was hostile to working-class organizations, let alone political organizations. Proudhon opposed trade unionism on the grounds that it interfered with the liberty of the subject. Bakunin, during the sessions of the First International, told workers that political action was a waste of time. He constantly attacked Marx who urged the workers to build up an effective well-knit organization for the prosecution of the class struggle on the political field.

The anarchist view is that a change of ideas in themselves, whatever the historical epoch, is sufficient for the establishment of a libertarian society, the perfect society. Rejecting, as they do the theory of social development, their philosophy is purely abstract. It has no roots in the material world, having separated man from his environment. Men are a product of their social environment, and their thoughts and aspirations are determined by it. The prevailing ideas under capitalism are the ideas of the ruling class, in favour of the wages system and private property. The workers are not revolutionary at present, and it would be impossible for them to be revolutionary without seeking the essential step of dispossessing the capitalists by the political machinery. There is no other way. Yet the anarchists persist that it can be done by direct action against the capitalists who control the armed forces. So far, the only direct action anarchists have taken has been for reforms.

The present activities of anarchists have their origin in the unsound theories advocated by their founders. Max Stirner was one such pioneer. To him the individual was the only reality. Some years earlier, Ludwig Feurbach, the German philosopher, had said the love of humanity must not extend beyond humanity. Man is the highest being for man. Stirner went a stage further. He claimed that the love of humanity was an abstract thing and only existed in the mind of man, and the only reality was the individual with his wants, tendencies, and will: “For me there is nothing above myself”. Religion, conscience, morality, the law and family, were so many fetters forced upon him in the name of the abstraction — humanity. “Right is might and might is right. If you have not got the former you have not got the latter. Every state is a despotism, even the most democratic, whether it is the despotism of one or many. I recognize nothing above myself. I feel oppressed by every institution that imposes any duty upon me”. (The Individual and his Property, 1845).

This is idealism of the highest order. The whole philosophy is based on an abstraction — the individual. Society is not just a collection of individuals, it is the aggregate of relationships. Production and distribution must be organized; labour must be based on co-operation. To talk about individuals as above and separate from the social organization of wealth production is pure fantasy.

Stirner formed what he called the League of Egoists (one ego could not exist on its own). In common with anarchists of the present day, he was opposed to Socialism. “If the socialist says that society gives me what I need, the egoist says I take what I want” (The Individual and his Property). The anarchists’ claim that common ownership and democratic control of the means of production will lead to the regimentation and oppression of the producers shows their ignorance of human behaviour. Man is by nature a co-operative animal with a common interest in making society function to the greatest advantage of all.

Three years after Stirner, Proudhon repeated the same viewpoint. For him there was no such thing as social evolution. The state was a fiction. Everything in history was born of men’s ideas. The perfect society was always possible at any stage in history if only men had discovered the ideas of anarchism. “The social constitution is innate in humanity, yet it could only be discovered as the result of long experience, and for the want of it humanity had to invent the political constitution”. (Confessions of a Revolutionary, Proudhon, quoted by Plechanoff.) This is an entirely utopian concept of human nature. Man does not have any innate principles — his viewpoints are results of his social experience.

The political superstructure of any given society, or the way in which public affairs are administered, arises from the economic basis of that society and exists to serve that basis. A change in the basis produces a change in the superstructure. The administration of public affairs at present is carried on by the state, which is the instrument of the ruling class, and it is essential as long as private property exists. In a society based on common property, the state could not exist as its function would have disappeared. The state is not the cause of private property but the effect of it. Even if the “smashing” of the state as advocated by anarchists were possible, it would not remove the condition of private property. Not that Stirner, Proudhon and Kropotkin were opposed to property — on the contrary.

Michael Bakunin died over a hundred years ago. His collected works were published by Sam Dolgoff (Allen & Unwin 1972), and he is described as the active founder of world anarchism. The same unrealistic theme runs through his entire works. He advances the theory' of collectivism, a vast network of free associations with social autonomy which may or may not federate with each other at every level, with of course the right to secede from any federation. The basis of this association was collective property: “I am in favour of collective property because I am convinced that so long as property, individually dually hereditary, exists . . .  the realisation of equality, economical and social will be impossible” (Anarchism and Socialism, G. Plechanoff, p.82, Kerr edn). Bakunin apparently was not opposed to individual property if it was not hereditary!

We are left in the dark as to how collective property can be socially administered; there is obviously no system proposed, and he was not dealing with social property. How can there be administration when any group can secede at any time? Collective property based on independent autonomous units may have had some place in a small peasant community or petty industry in an earlier stage of civilization with low standards of production but to apply the concept to a modern socially integrated economy is utopian. In any case anarchists are not in favour of democratic control, and Bakunin’s views on communism bear this out. “I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty, and I cannot conceive anything human without liberty” (p.81, Anarchism and Socialism). This theme of absolute liberty and the “freedom” of the individual which runs through anarchist literature is pure abstraction. The anarchists lose sight of the fact that we have to produce the necessities of society and require a social organization for this purpose, and the only way this organization can run effectively is by the democratic control of the majority, not by small autonomous independent units.

Prince Kropotkin followed Bakunin, and is probably the most widely read of all anarchists. He contributed the article on anarchism for the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1905. The definition of anarchism which he supplied is given as “a principle on the theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government”. The ageless nature of this description is later shown by the reference to anarchism in history. According to Kropotkin, everybody from Socrates to Rabelais and others who objected to state interference was an anarchist. He tells us that the exponent of anarchy in ancient Greece was Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy who lived around 300 BC. He regrets that the writings of Zeno have not reached us. "However, the fact that his wording is similar to the wording now in use shows how deeply he has laid the tendency of human nature of which he was the mouthpiece”. (Encyclopedia Britannica.)

This defies balanced comment, but it does demonstrate an unsound, almost spiritual approach. We can leave it for modern anarchists to explain the relevance of Zeno to the social problems of today. Kropotkin supported Proudhon’s mutualist rubbish published in The Philosophy of Poverty, which Marx dealt with in The Poverty of Philosophy: for example, rendering capital incapable of earning interest by means of a National Bank. All anarchists have to do is stop the industrial capitalist from earning a profit on his capital and the landlord and the banker to stop charging rent and interest, and this without expropriation. They do not propose to take political action to dispossess the capitalists. Industrial capitalists will not function without profit, and the workers support the wages system. The proposition is idealism gone mad. Little wonder that the capitalists have never taken the theories of anarchism seriously. How could this ethereal rubbish threaten their existence?

The shallowness of Kropotkin was exposed in the Great War of 1914-18 when he supported the Allied cause. He also supported the Russian Revolution in 1917. When the testing time came, the woolly-headed Kropotkin, in company with other figures of the international Left, was completely impotent. Not understanding the economics of capitalism they were unable to offer any clear advice to the working class who in their millions were going forward to the slaughter. The liberty of the individual met its nemesis in mass conscription.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the political weapon is the only one which a conscious working class can use to establish Socialism. It is not possible for society to develop in any other way. If Socialism cannot be established capitalism will continue; there is not a third choice called collective anarchism, communist anarchism, syndicalism, workers’ control or workers’ states. The means of production and distribution are held by the capitalists of the world. It is of the utmost urgency that society as a whole must make them common property of society. The control of the state machine ensures ownership by the capitalist class, so that the first and only task before a revolutionary working class is to gain control of that machine for Socialism. The worker can do this by voting, but it is not just the cross on the ballot paper which makes the revolution. It is the man behind the vote. The theories of anarchism rest on the idea that a small intellectual élite can sway society: they have a contempt for the ability of the worker to understand the economics and politics of capitalism and consequently gain Socialist knowledge. They preach the gospel of despair, disguised though it may be in the romantic jargon of two centuries ago.

The old Utopians like St. Simon gave some stimulus and incentive to the development of the theories of scientific Socialism, then in its infancy. The present-day anarchist is reactionary because he advocates the abandonment of the only effective weapon which social evolution has made possible — the political weapon — and politics mean Parliament.

Jim D'Arcy

The Fraud is dead! Long live the Fraud! (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Labour MP called John Stonehouse has had the bad luck to be arraigned at the Old Bailey on a charge of fraud and. being found guilty, sentenced to seven years in clink. In case this was not unlucky enough, the poor politician had to listen to an idiot in a wig telling him in the course of sentencing that three besetting sins led to his downfall: lying, hypocrisy, ambition. Now is it not remarkable that a man be so wise, a veritable Daniel come to Judgment, and yet pronounce such an obvious load of codswallop?

Can anyone be so obtuse as not to realize that it is impossible for a man to succeed in the dirty game of capitalist politics unless he exhibits these very sins? Sins? Does not the learned ass know that these are essential qualifications for the job and that without them you might as well look for some relatively honest job (a landlord, or a moneylender, for example)? Imagine a Labour politician coming to the electorate and saying: “My friends, I will not be a liar or a hypocrite. I will not tell you that I am a socialist or that you will be one whit better off if you return a Labour government into power because I know full well—and it’s high time you did too; you members of the working class have been conned so often—that if you elect me and my friends we will administer capitalism in the way it has always ben run. Indeed there is no other way. I will tell you that I want you to vote for me because being an MP is a nicer job than being a miner or a railwayman or whatever I would be otherwise. The only difference in voting for me instead of the Tory or the Liberal is that you will have Bloggs as your MP instead of Smogs or Flogs. Or, as Tolstoy wrote to Chekhov in another context, the difference is that between cats and dogs. No lies. No hypocrisy. And of course, no votes.

As for ambition, it is news that this is a sin under capitalism. I always thought it was regarded as a virtue to become a great leader of men or a great capitalist. The judge must have been reading Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral where he defended his dead friend against the charge: “But Brutus says he was ambitious.’’ Well, whatever ambition signified in ancient Rome, it is nothing to be ashamed of in capitalist society. Harold Wilson’s daddy got a picture of little Harold in front of No. 10 Downing St. to fire him with the right ideas—and the ambitious little lad got there, didn’t he?

Needless to say, we are not seriously offering sympathy to Stonehouse. It seems he was in rather too much of a hurry to make his fortune and purloined a few hundred thousand quid that belonged to other people. This sort of fraud is not looked kindly upon under capitalism, even though it is a system which is actually based on the purloining of the wealth produced by the working class by a small minority of society for their own benefit. We socialists have no truck with the Stonehouse kind of frauds. We have no regard for crooks or murderers or rogues in general, but we can leave them to the tender mercies of the capitalist establishment.

Our worry—and it should be the worry of the working class as a whole—concerns the system itself and the politicians who run it. Because look at the absurdity of this Stonehouse business. He is found guilty of fraud and no longer represents the electors of Walsall North. His party’s aim is to secure his votes from the dupes of Walsall by putting forward promises while knowing that it has no prospect of fulfilling them. In other words, the element which the lawyers call the mens rea, the guilty mind, is clearly present and renders the Labour Party guilty of intent to defraud. His successor was formerly an MP and is as sure as we are that his being elected will have no more to do with Socialism now than it had when he was in the House before. We have little regard for Labour politicians but we know they are not such idiots as to imagine that their government will do anything other than administer capitalism. How can you be at the same time a Socialist, dedicated to overthrowing the system which now rules the earth, and at the same time say that you will make the system run better for the voters—who are of course almost entirely workers? (Capitalists can choose where they live so there aren’t many in Walsall which is a place only fit for workers.)

Winnick, Stonehouse’s successor, is a leftist and knows perfectly well that by electing him his voters will not cure their unemployment, their rotten housing, their insecurity—and the mental stresses that go with insecurity and cause one in six of the voters of Walsall (as of everywhere else, of course) to need psychiatric treatment at some time of their lives and cause the NHS to devote half its beds to mental sickness—i.e. as much as all the rest of the illnesses put together. It must surely be the greatest of all indictments of capitalism that it drives millions of people this way, people who organically have nothing wrong whatever. A lunatic system fit only for lunatics. And frauds. And yet here are the workers of Walsall, having had their fraudulent MP taken from them, about to be the victim again of the swindle that eclipses his.

At the same time as we read of Stonehouse being jailed for fraud his former leader announces that he is going to do a series on TV telling what goes on in the councils of the great. The former working-class boy, now Duke of Uddersfield is already reputed to have made half a million selling his memoirs but of course he is going to help himself to as much as he can. But of course, the “sensible” politicians like Wilson and Winnick (and Foot and Callaghan and Heath and Thatcher) deceive the working class with monotonous regularity and far from being charged with the “sin” of ambition are loaded with wealth and honours. And if the workers of Walsall swallow all the decades of bitter experience of so-called socialist governments, they really cannot altogether complain “I wuz robbed”. The virgin who out of sheer cussedness determines to frequent a dark alley after she has been warned it is the abode of thugs has no right to scream “outrage!” The workers of the world have had plenty of evidence that capitalism is their enemy. As long as they keep voting for it they will deserve what leaders they get.

As a sort of postscript to the above, it is worth having a wry smile at the letters column of that Sunday paper for the intelligent (Jesus!), The Observer.

They published a letter (16th Aug.) suggesting that the crimes of people like Stonehouse, like those of Hitler, are caused by the onset of the male menopause. At one time sunspots were held to be the cause of crises. Now we don’t need to look for the kind of reasons given in this article for the emergence of Stonehouse. It’s the male menopause! A brand-new disease which none of us knew we had till it appeared in the brains of Observer intellectuals. One looked in following issues for letters pointing out the sheer idiocy of this stuff; instead a letter (30th Aug.) by two nitwits: “Quite right. We are just writing a book about it”. Must read it. Perhaps we will find out why Hitler tried his first fascist putsch when he was 30. And why Sir ’Arold was an ambitious little brat when he was 8.

L. E. Weidberg

Blogger's Note:

The Labour Party candidate, David Winnick, actually lost the bye-election but he did he regain the seat at the 1979 General Election.