Bazaar (1938)

 Party News from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Bazaar will be held in December in aid of Party funds. We are to-day spending more money on propaganda and the distribution of literature than ever before and in order to meet the demands on Party funds we aim at increasing the sum raised last year.

Start sending in your gifts immediately. Having seen last year’s bazaar you know the kind of thing that is needed. If you cannot send in goods, money is an acceptable gift. Branches are asked to co-operate by appointing a member (or members) to organise the collection of suitable articles from members and sympathisers.

Time is short, but with the right effort we can surpass the sum raised last year.

Bazaar Committee.

SPGB Meetings (1938)

Party News from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answers to Correspondents: Trade Union Action and Political Action (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade Union Action and Political Action

A correspondent (R. J., Spalding) asks the following question: —

When the Trade Unions approach employers with demands for, say, increased pay, longer holidays, shorter hours, improved pension arrangements, you support their efforts. When, to supplement that approach, they take parliamentary action, either by trying to influence M.P.s of all parties, or through their representatives (invariably in the Labour Party) I gather that it is your policy to oppose them.

Please define the point at which your support for working-class efforts at improved conditions under capitalism ceases, and say how I, as a Trade Union secretary, can justify this attitude to my own members if I accept your point of view.

The Railway Clerks’ Association has done quite a lot for its members at one time or another by parliamentary means. For instance, only during February this year action was taken through Labour members . . . . .  who, by threatening to block the L.N E. Railway’s General Powers Bill, to draw attention to the lack of a proper Superannuation Fund on the L.N.E., were successful in forcing the Company to begin negotiations, that have every appearance of being satisfactory. Again, through action in Parliament, a schedule was included in the Railway Grouping Bill, which had the effect of preventing wholesale dismissals. This action was definitely of benefit to the workers, including myself, concerned.

Reply.

In order to clear the way for our reply it is necessary to correct one statement in our correspondent’s question. He says that when trade unions support the candidature of Members of Parliament they are “invariably in the Labour Party.” Though generally true of Great Britain, it is not invariably so. The National Union of Teachers, for example, has candidates in the other parties also. Going outside this country we see the American unions openly bargaining to support candidates, irrespective of their party.

The next point to notice is, that until Socialists become a majority of the electorates, a man can only become a Member of Parliament by standing for capitalism; while promising at the same time to press for certain reforms. If, therefore, a miners’ union or railwaymen’s union finances a successful Parliamentary candidature, it means helping to delude the workers into the belief that it is in their interest to reform capitalism instead of abolishing it. Similarly, what our correspondent calls “trying to influence M.P.s of all parties” means, in fact, striking a bargain with them. M.P.s want votes, and that is the only kind of “influence” they are interested in. The union, therefore, goes to the M.P. and offers—even if it is not put so bluntly as this, both parties know what is meant—to provide votes in the constituency in exchange for support in the House of Commons. In America the bargaining is quite openly admitted and defended by the unions.

What is the attitude of the Socialist to these practices? What attitude can it be except opposition? The Socialist holds, and preaches to the workers, that capitalism must be abolished, not reformed, and that the abolition can only be achieved by the conscious action of the workers organised together on a Socialist basis. How could a Socialist at one and the same time teach these elementary Socialist truths and make nonsense of them by helping to return to Parliament men whose mandate is to retain capitalism and reform it? ;

There are other aspects also to be considered, The achievement of Socialism requires that the workers should organise together on the basis of recognising that they have a common class interest against the capitalists. On no account can Socialists foster sectional rivalries among the workers. But when the Railwaymen try to get the support of M.P.s of all parties in the House of Commons, it frequently means, in fact, helping the Railway Companies to resist the encroachment of the road transport industry, and hoping, in return, to get some concessions from the M.P.s who represent Railway Company interests. Thus it divides the working class instead of uniting them. In the long run the class interest of the workers is more important, even to the sections which hope to gain small concessions by taking action on their own.

Also it should be remembered that when the capitalists feel that something vital to them as a class is at stake, all the Parliamentary lobbying and Labour candidatures count for nothing at all. A case in point was the 1927 Trade Union Act. The Baldwin Government wanted the Act and got it without paying the slightest attention to the opposition demands. In other words, if the united trade union movement cannot get something out of the employing class it is an illusion to think that political "influence” in the House of Commons will make any difference.

Lastly, it should not be forgotten that the final aim of the Labour Party is to get into office. When it does, that is when it takes on the administration of capitalism, the trade unions find themselves face to face with a Government of the people it had been supporting, only to discover, as did the miners in 1924, that the Labour Government tells them not to make “embarrassing” demands. Or it finds, as did the railwaymen, that the Labour Government is prepared to use Emergency Powers against strikers.

Workers should not forget, too, that after giving their support to the Labour Party in order to get petty concessions they found that Party in 1914 urging them into the trenches in capitalism’s war.

The outcome of it all is that many workers in their disappointment jump to the conclusion that a Labour Government is even worse than a Tory Government, and this enables Tories or Fascists, or some other supporters of capitalism, to gain adherents.

The time to avoid these evils is right at the start, and the way is to stick to Socialist political action, even if it appears to involve occasionally some loss of a minor advantage to some section of the workers.

Ed. Comm.

Answers to Correspondents: The Trade Union Political Levy (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Trade Union Political Levy

A correspondent (R. J., Spalding), who is a trade union branch secretary, says that he “strongly criticises the Labour Party from the Socialist point of view,” and is in doubt whether or not he ought to go on paying the political levy to his union. The money, he says, “ is at present utilised mainly to support such of our colleagues as have entered Parliament as Labour Members, in general parliamentary action and to provide loans to local parties in accordance with the decisions of local branch members; again almost exclusively the Labour Party benefits.”

He goes on to suggest two alternative courses of action, either not to pay the levy, or, alternatively, pay it but oppose its use to support the Labour Party.

The S.P.G.B.’s view is that the levy should not be paid, because only in that way can the Socialist’s opposition to reformist political parties be made clear and unambiguous. 

Ed. Comm.

Answers to Correspondents: The Busmen’s Problem : A Correction (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Busmen’s Problem : A Correction

Our attention has been drawn by Mr. F. Snelling, National Officer of the National Passenger Workers’ Union, to a misstatement in the article which appeared in the August The Socialist Standard under the title “The Busmen’s Problem.” The statement referred to was as follows : — 

“Following the strike, an enquiry was held by the union into the activities of certain of the more prominent members of the section, with the consequence that a number of the leading rank and file members were suspended from office and others expelled from the union. The suspensions and expulsions were subsequently endorsed by the 1937 Biennial Conference of the T. & G.W.U.”

Mr. Snelling informs us that the decision to suspend and expel members was not taken until after the 1937 Biennial Conference, and although the enquiry was held and completed before the end of the Conference, no statement was before the Conference on the result of the enquiry.

The Committee of Inquiry which was set up issued an interim report which made no reference to the suspensions and expulsions. This was the report that was accepted by the Conference.

W. E. W. & F. W. J.

The Prison Riots (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a world full of desperately eager advertising men, the prisons are notable for their desire to avoid publicity. In the limelight, they are positively uncomfortable; the recent demonstrations by the prisoners, attracting all the news media, have caused them a lot of embarrassment.

Responsibility for the demonstrations was claimed by an organisation going under the ambitious name of Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP). The first protests came in the form of sit-downs by men on remand. The Home Office advised the prisons to play this one cool; the demonstrations never got out of hand and it was deemed safe enough to allow some minor improvements in the remand men’s conditions. The next stage was the demonstrations by convicted prisoners. It seemed the same cool policy might have been applied, except that the prison officers reacted against the official “soft” line. They too got their publicity and Home Secretary Carr could hardly refuse to back them. Anyone who now breaks prison rules (in other words anyone who takes part in a demonstration inside) will be punished. PROP huffed and puffed and threatened to step up their campaign but the punishments went ahead with some men losing as much as a year’s remission, which amounts to being sentenced to another year in gaol. As PROP contemplates its next move and tries to deal with its own internal revolt, the prisons are very likely praying that for a while they will be out of the headlines.

Crisis

The demonstrations were a stage in the long-standing state of crisis in British prisons. To begin with they are desperately overcrowded, in spite of all the official attempts to reduce their population. Overcrowding can mean three men locked up in a room designed for only one, for twenty-three hours a day. The tensions built up among prisoners in an overcrowded prison are also felt by the warders — and under tension they are unlikely to handle a demonstration with much delicacy or sympathy.

In 1969 the government announced a big programme of building new prisons and renovating the old ones. Holloway, for example, is now slowly being replaced by a new prison which is being built on its existing site. The plans for this new prison impressed, not to say excited, many penal reformers but disappointed many others who think that most of the tragic women who get sent to prison should really be in hospital. In many ways the building plans have been overtaken by the rise in prison population and by the increased emphasis on security—on stopping the prisoners escaping—which came after the Mountbatten Report of 1968.

Mountbatten, one of the blue-blooded war heroes and dirty-work performers of British capitalism, was put to investigating prison security after George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. This was only the latest in a series of escapes by men like train-robber Charles Wilson and gunman John McVicar, who had earned himself a number of dramatic titles like the Most Wanted Crook in England. As a result of Mountbatten great cliffs of wire were erected within the outer brick walls, backed up with more sophisticated devices like closed circuit TV and geophonic zones.

The report recommended that prisoners should be graded according to the necessity of preventing their escape and that those in the top Category A—men like Blake, Wilson, McVicar—should be concentrated in a single, fortress-like prison on the Isle of Wight. Such a prison would have been a place of tremendous tensions, which was the main reason for the government rejecting the idea in favour of dispersing some of the Category A men among those of a lower category.

Empires

Dispersal has produced tensions of its own, with the warders complaining that some of the “hard nuts” have terrorised other prisoners into supporting their empires of prison rackets. In fact this has nothing to do with the dispersal policy; the prisons have always had their underworld and the barons are well-established figures who operate although their identity is well known to the prison authorities. It is very often only by such compromises and “blind-eye” tactics that prisons are able to be run.

As the demonstrations spread and grew, with men sitting it out on the roof at Parkhurst and other places, and as the warders’ anger mounted, the government were heard to regret that the prisoners were fomenting an emergency which was delaying the “rehabilitation” which is the prisons’ proper work. Leaving aside for the moment what they mean by “rehabilitation”, it should be said that the official picture of a prison, where work to rehabilitate the prisoners is busily going on all the time, is one which would not be recognised by anyone who had spent any time inside the places. In prison people who are sick—physically, mentally, socially—are left to while away long stretches of their life until early one morning they are pushed out of the gate (it is officially known as “release”) into the unwelcoming world outside.

PROP burst onto the tense, overcrowded prison scene a few months ago, with a Charter of Prisoners’ Rights running to several sheets of foolscap. At first the organisation declared itself to be exclusively in the hands of ex-prisoners (anyone who has not been inside can be at best an associate member) but after recent events it would be no surprise to see PROP subjected to the familiar process of being infiltrated, then taken over, by elements whose interest in prisoners’ rights is at best passing.

Most of the “rights” demanded by PROP would need too large an adjustment in the assumptions of the prison institution to have much of a chance of being realised. This is illustrated by the example of one of the demands which has in fact in some cases been granted — the “right” to have a prisoners’ representative on the managing board of the prison. In quite a few places this has happened but with little effect apart from allowing the authorities to claim that the inmates have a say in running the prison.

Rules

The important fact which PROP is trying to ignore is that capitalism is a system which gives few rights even to its “free” people, so that prisoners have even fewer. Those they do have often exist more in theory than in reality; the Prison Rules exist to define and protect certain rights but the particular nature of the prison institution can ensure that they are not applied. One rule says that food should be varied, well cooked, nutritious and so on, as if the prison were a swell hotel. People who have been inside know the truth about that.

Prison is a complete, restrictive institution, with all that implies. When a person is gaoled he can be said to lose his self-awareness; he is stripped of most of the identity symbols which even life as a worker under capitalism allows him and he is degraded to the level of a surname and a number. His life is entirely organised to meet the demands of the institution and he is under great pressure not to disrupt the institution by resisting those demands. Ironically, some of the most hardened prisoners surrender most completely; they are “model prisoners” who serve their time without causing any trouble. One of the warders at Albany prison was reported as describing a Kray as one of these prisoners—”a proper toff” he called him and from such lips there can be no higher praise.

But prisons exist for punishment (indeed the official line is that the confinement is itself punishment enough and that once through the gates there should be no more) which means that there must be continual conflict between the punished and the punishers. The punished—the prisoners—react defensively to the demands of the institution. Notably, they fashion their own code of conduct, what is sometimes called their own culture, by which they can unite to ease the problems of their confinement. Many of them see themselves as being outcasts and the unity of their code helps them to cling to some self-esteem by rejecting their rejecters. Together they can regard the rest with an aggressive cynicism.

Rehabilitation

Since the overwhelming majority of what are called offences are committed against property, it follows that most of the people in prison are there because in some way or another they have broken the property laws of capitalism by stealing something. Prisons developed almost by accident, as places where convicts were held before being transported, but then the theory was that they could be places where behaviour and attitudes might be changed, where people could be “rehabilitated” to lives in keeping with the inequalities of capitalism.

Pentonville, which was opened in 1842, was one of the first to be run on this theory. The prisoners were confined to their cells for their entire sentence; association with other prisoners was kept to the irreducible minimum and talking absolutely forbidden. In the solicitude of their cells, it was presumed, the inmates would reflect upon their past life and emerge determined to change. It is hardly necessary to add that this experiment was religiously inspired, on the theory enforced meditation would bring the prisoner to religion. What it frequently did was to drive them mad.

Nevertheless, in spite of all its setbacks, mainly due to all current theories being overwhelmed by facts, the idea of reform and rehabilitation has hung on, sprouting anew in a variety of forms. Coldingley prison is one of the latest examples, the pride of the Home Office. This is a prison run like a modern factory, with the overriding object of teaching the prisoners the disciplines and repressions of getting up and going to work, which are accepted and absorbed by most of the workers on the other side of the walls. Prison Rule No. 1 says that “the purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life” and it is a fact that few of the prisoners would ask for more than that. They too want to conform to the ambitions of the prison system, to be drawn in at one end as a criminal and spat out at the other as a docile, conforming, wage-earning, mortgage-paying, member of the working class. That is what is really meant by “rehabilitation”.

Warders

The people who are supposed to be actively engaged in this process are the prison officers, whose protests have been in the news. Here again, theory does not match with reality. The warders are not able to immunise themselves against the effects of the institution and many of them bear as many of its marks as do the prisoners. It is not so long ago that a new prison officer, on asking for instructions in his job, was likely to be told with a snarl “Do as I did, mister—find out for yourself”. Many of them take the job after a long time in the Forces, which as institutions bear many similarities to prisons; it is not overstating the case to say that they are often lost without the comfort  of  an  institution,  with  its  rigidity, its rules, its security. If “rehabilitation” were a possibility inside prison, men as committed to the institution as the warders are most unlikely to be able to do it.

In reality prisons, like so many of capitalism’s prized organisations, fail because they are based upon an ignorance of facts. Many prisoners are in gaol as simply another episode in a lifetime of social and personal crisis. They are victims of slumdom, of grinding poverty, of a human inability to cope with inhuman social pressures. People are interdependent to a great extent—they need each other for support, for security, for self-esteem, for simple existence. But capitalism’s demands at best distort human contact, at worst deny it altogether. In a social system based upon property rights, we do not relate to one another as human beings but as other cogs in the machinery of profit production, as fellow rats in the mindless, destructive race.

Most workers cope with these demands by dint of absorbing a lot of punishment and adapting to some crippling personality damage. After a lifetime of repressed misery they go unfulfilled to their graves. A minority deal with the pressures by reacting; however unconsciously, they protest—take drugs, commit crimes, go mad. Somewhere along this line the discipline machinery of capitalism is liable to pick them up and give them “treatment”, which as like as not will be a spell in prison.

The basic point is that capitalism cannot deal with its problem of crime any more than it can with bad housing, mental sickness, war, destitution. These are all part of one great problem, which can be solved only by a conscious action to end the society which imprisons us all.

Ivan

Unemployment – profits first! (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first thing to note about unemployment is that it is a working class problem. A problem which only afflicts those who normally function as wage workers or employees.

The permanent non-producing existence of the capitalist class is not regarded as unemployment. They are a class which either privately, or through the State, function as an exploiting class. Their dominance over the means of production gives them a privileged position as wealth controllers, they have access to surplus value, and since as a class they are employers they never suffer from unemployment.

For unemployment to arise and be regarded as a dire social problem, a class must exist in society whose condition of life is mean and degrading. To be able to sell their working abilities for wages, to find an employer who will harness them like beasts of burden to his machinery of production, so that their lives may be spent producing wealth they do not own, is far preferable to being unused in a state of forced idleness.

Further, this alienated and dehumanised mode of existence must be their only means of gaining a livelihood. Such a class must depend on its income from wages or salaries, must have no property that would relieve them of the need to toil—no means of living save through prostituting their physical and mental energies on the labour market as employees.

Such a class exists all over the world. They are the working class.

Ideally they should be so conditioned to their slave position in life as to aspire only to demanding “the right to work”. To deny the slave his toil and his pittance is the last straw, the final insult. Capitalism for all its ills and woes can be tolerated with the occasional groan so long as there is work. Deny him his humanity. Deny him his personality. Deny him his freedom. This he can accept. But to deny him work is to affront him. He will produce all the wonders of modern science and technology. He will fashion and erect the most lavish hotels and luxury mansions, design and produce the most expensive jewellery and beautiful yachts, fine clothing and costly furs, wonderful ocean liners and a vast variety of delicate foods, and he will be content to live in squalid slums, wear inferior clothing, and eat adulterated food while “bargaining” only over the price at which he sells himself.

He will make do with the sham, the shoddy and the make-believe, so long as he is permitted to work. Work itself comes to equate with employment. And employment comes to equate with life.

This is the background against which unemployment must be understood. If unemployment means hardship, misery and deprivation, it is because poverty and insecurity are always with the worker.

Work is vital to the class of employees, not because they are docile, but because they depend upon wages to live. Their behaviour is determined by their position in the private property relationships of capitalism. They accept this position from want of an understanding of any alternative.

With this in mind, let us look at the current situation.

Shaking Out

Just a year ago the Sunday Times Business News published a report from Nicholas Faith. Unemployment was then 929,000 and it was thought “the gloom is not a temporary one”. It was pointed out that the present decline started in the mid-1960s, under the Labour government. The present government hoped for another upward turn, but it was feared that the investments boom of the 1960s was not sufficient to produce a big enough growth rate, i.e. more than 3 per cent, to take up the slack. The report blamed decades of neglect of capital stock for the low productivity rise, not (be it noted) the laziness of the workers. Capitalism is a system full of contradictions. Not least of its absurdities is the fact that those who run this system are forever screaming about insufficient growth rate, while at the same time nearly a million workers (in Britain alone) are thrown on the scrap heap and industrial resources grossly underused. All this while millions live in slums and many more millions in other countries starve.

In September 1971 Coventry had over 4 per cent unemployed; the figure still stood at 4.4 per cent in July 1972. For forty years Coventry was a boom town, with unemployment below the national average. The average for Great Britain in July was 3.6 per cent. The actual figure for the whole of Britain (early September 1972) was 930,123. Over a thousand more than a year ago, and the highest August figure for 33 years.

In Faith’s report the great “shake out” of 1966/67 is referred to. It is stated that the whole geography of post-war unemployment altered from that period and that “the whole of England outside the South East is now, by historic standards, a depressed area”. The Labour government was of course in power when the “shake out” began. It was in fact Wilson as Prime Minister who coined the phrase “shake out” in arguing that 400,000 was an “acceptable level” of unemployment.

The nationalised industries have been among the worst casualties. It will be recalled that the Labour Party sold nationalisation to the working class as a cure for various social problems, among them profiteering and unemployment.

Now, those mines and rail services which are unprofitable are ruthlessly closed. The process of “shaking out” many tens of thousands of miners and railway workers was at full tilt during Wilson’s Labour government. In Durham for example, miners have been redundant for ten years or more and “retired” whilst still unemployed, and therefore no longer figure in the unemployment statistics.

The changing pattern seems to indicate, according to the Sunday Times, a long-term change in the actual number employed, with unskilled workers over 40 years of age remaining virtually unemployable until they retire. There are 120,000 in this category.

Hopes Deferred

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research was said to be vaguely looking to 1973 and entry into the Common Market, for an investment boom. How vaguely might be seen from the fact that all the major European countries have unemployment problems of their own, with figures up on last year. They too could do with an “investment boom”. Unemployment is also up in the United States over last year, standing at 4,697,000 in April 1972, an increase of 203,000. Russia discreetly refrains from publishing any figures.

Those workers who trusted capitalism and thought they had secure jobs for life, among them the Upper Clyde shipworkers, those at Rolls Royce and in the mining and railway industries, not to mention the docks and many others, have been sadly disillusioned. Capitalism defies all attempts to control it. The Keyensian disciples of the Labour and Tory parties have had to stand powerlessly aside while the tidal wave of depression rises. All they are able to do is advocate more of the same futile policies and hope for the best.

Ramsey MacDonald in 1929/31 had his “economic blizzard”. Attlee did not plan the half-million unemployed of 1947. Wilson was “blown off course” with unemployment averaging over 600,000 during his last year of power.

The so called extreme “left” can demand nothing better than more work, better leadership, reforms and nationalisation. All the same old fallacies they were trotting out forty years ago. The Trotskyists and the “Communist” Party have helped spread the lie that the Labour Party is better for the workers than the Tories, and fostered the illusion that State capitalism can solve unemployment and other working-class problems.

Unemployment has always been a feature of capitalism. An industrial reserve army is the capitalists’ ultimate weapon against wage demands.

When wages reach a level where machinery becomes a better investment, the composition of capital will tend to favour the machine over the worker. Also, intensified world competition for markets produces the same result, namely relatively fewer workers to increasing technology. No major capitalist country can afford to lag too far behind the techniques employed by the fastest. This is the significance of what the Sunday Times calls “decades of neglect” of capital stock.

That’s What it’s All About

Capitalism inevitably creates situations where it chokes on its own surplus products, simply because of its market economy. Expanding industry means that ever wider markets must be found as profitable outlets for the sale of goods. As the whole world is drawn more and more into the orbit of capitalism, so the number of rivals grows and a stage is reached where it is no longer profitable to maintain production of goods which cannot be sold. The costly plant of modern industry demands the mass market. When markets begin to contract or fall to rivals, then unemployment starts to reappear.

The Daily Telegraph (1 October 1971) put it in a nutshell:

“Industry does not function, as some seem to think, to provide jobs. It functions to make profits. And if profits are unduly low as they have been now for at least five years the inevitable result is low investment. New finance becomes hard to get, adaptation and renewal slow down and the decline of jobs in the old industries remains unmatched by a growth of jobs in new industries. No priority, therefore, should rank higher than the restoration of British industry to a proper level of profitability.”

Capitalism can have no higher priority than profits.

The recurring cycle of boom and depression, at ever higher levels of technology, demonstrates more than anything the total inability of capitalism to harness its productive resources to the satisfaction of human needs. It further proves the complete obsolescence of the market economy.

What is really redundant, in terms of social welfare and human happiness, is the private and state ownership of the means of production.

Harry Baldwin

How much do strikes achieve? (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The view is held by some trade unionists and by so-called militant organisations that militancy is the key that opens all doors for the working class. The argument is deceptively simple: as strikes can gain wage increases more and larger strikes will gain more increases, seemingly without limit. How far is this true? There is plenty of past and current evidence though, as will be seen, some of it is open to misinterpretation. When Marx wrote about this more than a century ago he did not share the “militant” view about the extent to which trade-union pressure could raise wages. In his Value, Price and Profit for example (Chapters IV and XIV) and in Wage-Labour and Capital (p. 35 in the Whitehead edition) he took a somewhat pessimistic line based on his understanding of how capitalism works. While urging resistance to the efforts of employers to depress wages he thought it was largely a defensive struggle, with only occasional opportunities for the workers to secure “temporary improvement”. His view was that the times when the workers can hope to gain an improvement were when the capitalists were doing well, expanding production and accumulating capital. In the reverse phase of the “trade cycle”, with sales and profits falling and unemployment rising, he thought the workers could do little.

“The relations between the supply and demand of labour-power undergo perpetual change, and with them the market price of labour-power. If the supply overshoots the demand wages sink, although it might in such circumstances be necessary to test the real state of demand and supply by a strike, for example, or any other method.”

(To bring this into harmony with the present period of fast-rising prices it has to be remembered that though money wages do not now sink, a pay increase which does not keep up with the cost of living represents a fall of “real” wages, i.e. purchasing power.)

Nothing Gained

It will be noticed that Marx talked of “testing” the situation when trade is bad. The militants reject this. They think that if enough workers strike they can make big gains in spite of adverse conditions. As regards past experience the evidence is all against the militants’ case. Apart from 1921 and 1926, the record number of days lost through strikes in any year was in 1893, when the total was over 30 million. This included Lancashire cotton workers who were out for five months, and 400,000 miners. Both strikes failed and wages generally did not rise.

Another outstanding example was the ten years 1921-1930. Unemployment was high, trade was bad and prices were falling—in all by 30 per cent. In those years, which included the General Strike of 1926, the number of days lost by strikes and lockouts averaged 31 million a year, but the strikes completely failed to prevent wages also falling by about 30 per cent.

Discontent & Resistance

The question arises to what extent recent experience differs from the past. Various changes have taken place. There are many more trade unionists, though still only a minority of the workers, and workers on strike instead of depending entirely on their own resources and trade-union and benefit-society funds can now get Social Security payments for their families. British capitalism in the past six years has been in depression with unemployment at one point topping the million mark. And strikes have been building up, from 2,400,000 days lost in 1966 to 13,600,000 days in 1971 and a likely total of 20 or 21 million in 1972. The fact that strikes have become more numerous and last longer is not simply a reflection of workers’ discontent but is also a reflection of stronger and better-organised resistance by employers. It is a truism that the most successful strike is the one that never happens because when trade is brisk employers may yield to the mere threat of a strike interrupting production.

In recent years, with sales falling off, employers have taken a tougher line because they stand to lose less when trade is slack than when they have full order-books and are hard pressed to meet delivery dates. Also, as in engineering and the building industry where the recent strikes were not general, employers with strikes on their hands received financial help from the other employers.

Keeping Pace

What then has been the outcome of the big increase in strikes? On the basis of the rise of the cost of living and the estimated increase of wage rates (not including overtime and bonuses etc.) and of average earnings (including overtime and bonuses) it would seem that real wages have been rising at about 2 per cent a year since 1966; but some complications have to be taken into account. The first is that what matters is not gross pay but “take-home pay” after deduction of tax, and owing to the way this operates take-home pay increases by a smaller percentage than gross pay. If for example a single man on pay of about £25 obtained an increase of £5 a week (20 per cent) his increase of take-home pay would be just under 19 per cent (£4.10).

And owing to the rules governing family income supplements and free school meals it can happen that some workers can be worse off through a pay increase. For a married man with two children a pay increase of £2 from £28 to £30 a week would leave him 95p. a week worse off. (The Times, 8 September 1972).

It is obvious that the past six years, in spite of more strikes, has left the mass of workers in Britain doing little more than keep pace with prices.

Some Do Not

An enquiry by the Economic Research Council (Financial Times, 18 August 1972) indicated that between 1962 and 1970 average take-home pay did not even keep up with the cost of living, though some improvement may have been made since 1970. Another factor that should be borne in mind is that the past few years have seen a widespread tightening-up of jobs through labour-displacing productivity schemes linked with pay increases. Take-home pay in terms of purchasing power has certainly not fully reflected increased output.

Some confirmation of Marx’s general argument is given by a comparison of Germany and some other continental countries with Britain. While British capitalism has been in depression, production has been expanding fast in Germany—the condition in which Marx expected the workers to be able to increase wages. Though strikes in Germany have been much fewer than in Britain, in recent years real wages have risen much more in Germany. Indeed, according to a document submitted to the TUC (The Times, 5 October 1972): “In recent years Britain’s wage increases have been the lowest in Europe.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Quote [Property boom] (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE FOLLOWING IS PART OF THE INTRODUCTION TO A CIRCULAR ADVERTISING THE LONDON PROPERTY LETTER, SENT TO PROPERTY COMPANIES AND LANDLORDS IN OCTOBER THIS YEAR. THE LPL IS PUBLISHED BY STONEHART [!] PUBLICATIONS LTD., 2 JARROW ROAD, ROMFORD, ESSEX, AT AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION OF £9. THE EDITOR IS ROBERT TROOP, PROPERTY CORRESPONDENT OF THE “SUNDAY TIMES”.

For the first time since the early sixties it’s possible to make real money out of property. Both for the expert developer and for the small man who wants to get in now and produce a useful private income for himself.

Since the Tories returned to power:

1. House prices have boomed as never before, giving dealers a rising market to profit from. What’s more, loans for once are readily forthcoming.

2. Office development restrictions have been shot away. Birmingham has become a capital place to operate in. (Rents have gone up from £1 to £1.25 per s.f. in a year). And Leeds and Bristol are following fast.

3. Landlords have started to cash in on the new bedsitter boom.

4. Converting properties of every type to flats for sale has become a big business. The Government is exceedingly generous with improvement grants, which makes this operation very profitable.

5. Many other factors are benefiting property, not least inflation, which is making bricks-and-mortar a safer hedge than ever for the investor. And the biggest bonanza of all may well be our entry into Europe. Already British developers are active in Brussels and Paris, and there will be equal scope in catering for Continental firms needing office and industrial accommodation in the U.K.

Someone is going to make a killing out of all this, and it might as well be you. Thousands of investors did so in the last property boom — most of them were armed with the shrewd inside information provided by the London Property Letter.

Too many eggs (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

A huge surplus of unsaleable eggs has recently been causing much concern to producers in Australia and Britain. A few years ago in Great Britain it was recommended that 2 million laying hens be slaughtered in an effort to curtail egg production and to push prices up so as to stabilise profitability of egg production. Research has also been conducted into ascertaining whether eggs could be used in producing cosmetics. Now it is reported from Uruguay (Time magazine, 27 March 1972), that a huge surplus of eggs is causing a headache to the American government. This has led to the Senate Agriculture Committee passing an Act which would require each producer to slaughter a percentage of his hens, subject to the eggs selling below their cost of production for three consecutive months and only upon approval by two-thirds of the egg producers in a referendum. This is a good example how governments are forced by economic circumstances to repudiate a policy of non-intervention, or less intervention, which is what President Nixon promised. As did Heath when his Minister, John Davies declared that industrial lame ducks would be allowed to go to slaughter. The American Act amounts to a concerted and deliberate attempt to force up the price of eggs to avoid too many bankruptcies which might disrupt their egg industry too severely.

It might be thought that in a world where so many are undernourished, being able to produce so much of this particular kind of food is a benefit rather than a problem, especially in view of the dire warnings of certain ecologists that the world is facing a problem of over-population. But it is a problem simply because food is produced for sale, not because people need it. No sale means no profit and no profit means no production, no matter how desperate people are for food. Once this simple fact of life of capitalism is understood, it should be obvious that food surpluses which cannot be sold at a profitable price are a problem and that this can only be cured by cutting back on production. Even today there are a lot of neo-Malthusians who attribute many of the ills of the world to overpopulation, but who conveniently overlook the persistent overproduction of a large variety of foodstuffs which are very often wantonly destroyed simply because the capitalist system is not geared to handling surpluses. Again it must be repeated that only Socialism can realise the potential that is there for solving world problems, especially the problem of providing sufficient food for every man, woman and child on the Earth.

Spectator

East Europe “State Capitalist” says ex-bureaucrat (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Referring to Russia and Eastern Europe in a recent article in The Times, Dr. Ota Šik, a Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia under Dubcek now in exile in Switzerland, wrote: “The system has become state capitalist, or state monopolistic, not socialist” (October 4).

Šik joins the former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, in being an ex-State-capitalist bureaucrat who has come to recognise the class character of the regime of which he was once a privileged member.

Šik is no Socialist, however. Quite the contrary. He is the leading theorist of “market socialism” and so a leading distorter of Marxian economics. An opponent of bureaucratic state capitalism, he advocates instead competition between independent enterprises run by “elected supervisory councils”, a kind of “workers-controlled capitalism”. Marx would have regarded such a system as absurd since he was well aware that Socialism necessarily involved the complete abolition of the market and its replacement by democratic planning solely for use.

All the same, Šik (admittedly somewhat confused) recognition of the state-capitalist nature of Russia and Eastern Europe is a step in the right direction, and a sign that there will be others still in these countries who realise this too.

North West Propaganda Tour (1972)

 Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I'm presuming that Harry Young was the main speaker at all the meetings, both indoors and outdoors.  

"Sundays at 52, Clapham High Street (1972)

Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lectures, meetings and outdoor meetings (1972)

Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where to buy the Socialist Standard (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I don't usually make a point of posting the 'Where to buy the Socialist Standard' column on the blog, but I thought I would make an exception this time because of the fact there were seven listings alone for Aberdeen. And that was at a time when there wasn't even a SPGB group in the city listed in the Socialist Standard. Just a 'For Information' listing for Carole Duncan. Within the next 18 months there was a very active SPGB group in the city, mainly made up of students from Aberdeen University. According to Barltrop's book, The Monument, a number of them eventually broke from the Party in the mid-70s to form the Libertarian Communism Group.

Sold Again — As Usual (1951)

From the November 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever party you have voted for in the election you have voted for the continuation of the present system of production for profit, with all the evils that spring from it. Now you can sit back and take what is coming to you. For the third time in less than ten years you have been called upon to vote in a General Election. What have you gained by voting? Nothing but what you always get—hard work, insufficient wages, insecurity and war. As far as you are concerned the world is in an even worse mess than when the Labour Government took office in 1945. Then you were promised better times, peace and security, but all of these have proved to be an illusion. Even the boasted "full employment" is only due to the destruction of the last war and the preparation for a greater war in the future.

In 1945 you hailed the end of hostilities with sighs of relief and the vain hope that, after the dark days, your wounds would heal and you would soon resume your old ways with some measure of security. The hope was short-lived. The smoke of battle had hardly drifted away before the world was embarked upon another feverish armaments race and rising prices and shortages hit you hard. The German ogre had disappeared only to be replaced by the Russian one, and others are waiting round the corner to take its place. The war clouds have gathered fast again and the two main political parties were united in asking your support for the means and the privations associated with another gigantic holocaust. The bereaved, the wounded and the dead have made their sacrifices in vain.

Surely it is time you faced the stark realities of the world you live in? Surely it is time you faced the problem of reshaping the world so fundamentally that insecurity, the hard drab struggle for existence and the horrors of war will no longer darken your horizon and blast your lives and those of your families?

What is the real source of all your troubles—the source which all the candidates in the election ignored?

The means to produce and distribute the things you need to-day are owned by one class, a property-owning class, the capitalist class. This class lives out of incomes derived from the investment of money in shares and bonds. Whether the means of production are State-owned, company-owned or privately owned, they are operated for the purpose of providing incomes for the class that lives on your backs. You, the working class, operate the means of production and distribution, and you do so in return for wages and salaries because you are compelled to sell your power to work in order to obtain the means to live. You must find employment in order to live, but the owners of the means of production can live, and live luxuriously, without working. Their incomes come out of what you produce above what it costs to enable you to live and bring up a family. It is therefore to the interest of the capitalist to make you work as hard as possible for as low a wage as they can force you to accept. Hence the industrial strife, the class struggle, that breaks out between you and your employers; they try to depress your conditions, you try to raise them. Hence the united Tory and Labour exhortations to you, in their manifestoes, for increased production at a time when industrial profits are higher than they have ever been.

After nearly seven years of Labour Government they tell you in their manifesto, that "Half of Britain’s wealth is still owned by 1 per cent, of the population.” The Tories promise no more than to “do our best. . . . to make things better all round, but we do not blind ourselves to the difficulties that have to be overcome, or the time that will be required to bring us back to our rightful position in the world, and to revive the vigour of our national life and impulse.” In other words to revive the hungry twenties and thirties, when they were in power, and the conditions that led to the second world war. .

Production of goods for profit is the mainspring of the world to-day. Tory, Labour, Communist alike accept this as inevitable. And yet while the profit motive lasts there is no hope of amelioration for you. It defeats all good intentions and drives the world headlong to disaster after disaster.

The goods you produce must be sold by the capitalist, or the organisation working for him, before be can reap his surplus. Out of this comes the struggle for markets, for raw materials, for trade routes, and the periodical crises and wars. Since the cessation of hostilities on a grand scale these struggles for markets and raw materials have brought about new international alignments, the flourishing of secret diplomacy, many lesser wars and, lately, the war in Korea and the threat of war in Persia and Egypt. So long as production for profit lasts the trade rivalries and the wars associated with them cannot be avoided, no matter what government holds the reigns of power nor what promises they make.

Capitalism has unwittingly made a considerable contribution towards paving the way to Socialism. It has made the world one vast whole in which each section is dependent upon the others. The spread of modern conditions to all parts of the world is rapidly bringing the people of the world up to one general level of development; everywhere reproducing the conditions in which there is on one side a relatively small group of privileged property owners and on the other side, confronting them, the large mass of unprivileged and propertyless. Capitalist class ownership of the means of production has moved parallel with the spread of modern machines, modern methods and modem ideas. In face of this development the barriers between Eastern and Western culture have broken down; primitive customs and primitive ways are fast dissolving, bringing into line fresh groups of wage-workers with eyes opening to the evils of the present and the possibilities of the future.

Socialism is the antithesis of Capitalism. Its establishment will mean the abolition of all the antagonisms and miseries rooted in the class ownership of the means of living, and the dissolving of the disharmonies that hinder the enjoyment by all of the people of the world of the full fruitfulness of world unity and cooperative labour. Socialism is a system of society in which all that is in and on the earth will be the common heritage, and at the free disposal of all mankind. There will be no privileged classes and there will be no industrial antagonisms. Each will give according to his capacities and take according to his needs. The interest of each will be the interest of all because all will be working in harmony, and under the best conditions human ingenuity can devise, for the purpose of providing as full and comfortable a life as humanity can secure.

Surely you can see that this is directly in your interests and that, therefore, the case put forward by the socialist is worthy of serious examination. You are the people who can bring about this social change, but you cannot bring it about unless you understand it, realise what it involves and how it can be accomplished. Socialism cannot be brought into bring by a few people on behalf of the many. Any attempts, in that direction can only lead to confusion and disaster. Those who establish it must have cleared from their minds the prejudices that to-day set people at loggerheads; the prejudices of race, colour and class that set groups against each other. They must recognise the fundamental unity of all as members of one world-wide human family. Having arrived at this outlook they must then organise together to remove the privileged class from the seat of power—the control of the governmental machinery.

Parliament is the centre of government. It makes and enforces the law, and it does so on the basis of a society organised to serve the interests of a privileged group of capitalist property owners. In order to establish Socialism it is necessary to take away from the capitalist class their control of governmental power. This can only be accomplished by sending socialist delegates to parliament for this purpose alone. Parliamentary elections offer you this opportunity providing there are a sufficient number of you, who understand and want Socialism, to secure the return of your delegates. Up to the present this support has been sadly lacking.

We put forward a socialist candidate in the 1945 General Election and two in the last General Election. On the present occasion we have not been able to put forward any candidates. While this does not in any way affect our outlook or our determination to contest elections, it does mean, unfortunately, that the socialist position was not expressed by any candidate in the election, regardless of what name-tag he or his opponents fixed upon him. The result of the election simply decided which party will run Capitalism, with its accompanying miseries, for the next term. It may even be that they will decide to pool their resources and form a coalition government. In any event it is of no consequence to you which of them was victorious because their programmes are fundamentally identical; they are all committed to the continuance of the present social order, with its privileged class, its production for profit and its promise of greater and more devastating wars in future.

You have voted the Liberal Party into power and it brought you insecurity, misery and war; you have voted the Tory Party into power and you got the same thing; you have voted the Labour Party into power and fared no better; the Communist Party cannot offer you any fundamental change—their alternative is direction of the same system from the Kremlin instead of Westminster. If you voted for any candidate in the election you only voted for the continuance of the system that enslaves you, deprives you of the full fruits of your labour and prepares the means to send you to the shambles.

You will be called upon to vote again in the future, perhaps before long. Make up your mind now to give the position we have outlined your serious consideration. Are you content to remain beasts of burden, doomed to labour obediently for the enrichment of those who live like leeches on your backs, or will you rise from your knees and order your own lives in harmony with your fellows for your mutual benefit? Upon your understanding and action depends the possibility of a world free from the evils that afflict the world of to-day. The responsibility is yours, you cannot pass it on; you shirk it at your peril!

Gilmac.

Passing Comments: Take your Pick (1951)

The Passing Comments Column from the November 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Take your Pick

One way of spending an entertaining half hour is to go into a public library and compare the accounts given in each paper of one particular event. For example, on September 5th all the papers except the Daily Herald and the Daily Mirror carried reports of the wedding in Germany of Prince Ernst August of Brunswick-Luneburg and Princess Ortrud of Schleswig-Holstein. The details of the story, as told in the various dailies, enable one to see just how far the Press is animated by a passion for truth. The News Chronicle said a horse-drawn bridal coach took the princess to church. The Daily Worker said that the Government of Lower Saxony had vetoed all horse-drawn vehicles, and had stipulated that cars of not less than 8 m.p.h. must be used. The Daily Express, ahead of its rivals, said that the cars had to go at 10 miles an hour. Inside the church, the Daily Mail said that the bridal train was made of 27 yards of champagne-coloured silk, and 19 yards of taffeta. The Daily Worker, more generous, gave her 28 yards of silk and 21 of taffeta. After the ceremony, the Daily Mail said that there were 150 royal and titled guests, the Daily Express that there were 800 royal and noble guests, and the Daily Telegraph that there were 4,000 guests, without specifying their ranks in society.

Fascist Aggressor

But certain indisputable facts emerged. The bridegroom is the eldest son of the man who would be king of Hanover if Germany still had kings; and his mother is the daughter of the last Kaiser, Wilhelm II. During the war he fought for the Nazis, becoming aide-de-camp to a panzer commander. Did the British upper class ignore his wedding on that account? They did not. The Land Commissioner for Lower Saxony, Mr. Gibson, and the former Land Commissioner for Hanover, Brigadier Langham, were there. So were two sisters of the Duke of Edinburgh. One of them, Sophie, married the bridegroom’s brother, Prince George, and the other, Theodora, married his cousin, the margrave of Baden. (The former’s eldest son, by the way, who was born in 1937, was christened Karl Adolf, after Hitler. What a pity our newspapers, who delight in printing slushy articles about the royal family, don’t tell their readers the really interesting facts—such as that Prince Charles has a cousin called after the man whom Winston Churchill described as “this wicked man, this repository and embodiment of many forms of soul- destroying hatred.”) As for King George, he sent his congratulations and lent the bride her diadem.

The Grip of the Gestapo

Now, it is not a dozen years since Churchill was whipping up the working class to the pitch of fury necessary for them to go on fighting the war by launching his polemics against the Nazis. In 1940 be was saying “the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.” “Upon this battle,” he said, “depends the survival of Christian civilisation." “If we fail, then the whole world . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.” Many of the workers believed him, and sacrificed themselves on the battlefields. But apparently the ruling class didn’t, if we judge by the friendliness they now display towards a man who spent several years helping Hitler to impose “the grip of the Gestapo and all the hideous apparatus of Nazi rule ” on more and more conquered territories.

Moral Re-armament

An article appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on September 24th about the conferences which the moral re-armament movement has been holding at Caux in Switzerland since the beginning of August. The author waxed lyrical about a “force which solves industrial deadlock,” and said that at Caux an ideology was taught which was one of “inspired democracy above party, class, colour, creed, national prejudice and point of view.” One sought in vain for a more detailed description of this force or ideology; and a Times article which appeared four days later was similarly vague, saying merely that what moral re-armament wants is a “worldwide renaissance of moral and spiritual forces.” Exactly what system of morality Buchman and his friends want, exactly what kind of spirituality, all this is left dark. But about the practical achievements which they claim their movement has made they are less reticent. One of their aims is apparently harmony in industry. And proudly they produce at Caux labour leaders who in the past have led strikes against the employers, and who now publicly regret that they have been capable of such wickedness. But so far no morally re-armed employers have been heard to regret refusing wage-increases to their workers. Nor have any converted shareholders been produced who have resolved to refuse in future to live on the labour of others.

Does the Conservative Party Lose Members?

Further, the Buchmanites claim that they have been instrumental in reducing the membership of the Communist Party in certain areas. No doubt: but if the movement is really above class and party, why does not M.R.A. produce figures to show how the membership of the Conservative and Labour Parties drops when it gets to work. After all, neither the former party, which supports the private-enterprise bosses, nor the latter, which supports the bosses of State-industries, can claim with truth to be above class.

Matters become clearer when one reads in The Times that employers of labour have taken a close interest in the proceedings at Caux, and that industrialists were present from British centres, Germany, North Italy, the French textile area, Austria and the Low Countries; and further when it emerges that among those also present were Dutch officer-cadets sent by their military authorities. It would take more than the persuasions of a Buchmanite to convince one that the Dutch army chiefs were spending good money on holidays for officer-cadets with no ulterior motive whatever in view.

Close Harmony

If all these facts did not indicate the real character of M.R.A, then surely the talk about harmony in industry would. For the idea of harmony between a ruling and a subject class is not new: members of the ruling class in every age have propagated it. Under a slave-owning system, it is in the interest of the slave-owners to preserve harmony between themselves and the slaves, while it is in the interest of the slaves to put an end to that system. And under a feudal land-holding system, it is in the interest of the barons to preserve harmony between themselves and the peasants, while the interest of the peasants lies in ending that system. Similarly, under capitalist industry, State-owned or private, it is in the interest of the bosses to promote harmonious relations between themselves and the workers; but what will benefit the workers is not harmony in capitalist industry, but its abolition, and the introduction in its place of Socialism,

Moral Re-Armament is, in fact, one of the forms taken by the struggle of the capitalists of the Western world against their own working class on the one hand, and against the Russian ruling class on the other.

When the Workers Ran the Factories

Recently the Trade Unions International of Metal and Engineering Workers (which is part of the World Federation of Trade Unions) issued a pamphlet describing how the Italian steel workers refused to allow the owners to close steel factories during 1949 and 1950, and instead continued at their work without wages and without professional management, electing temporary managers from their own ranks. While the workers ran the factories themselves, they built ships, aeroplanes, furnaces; they improved efficiency; and by introducing new processes, they economised considerably on production costs—for example, at the Ilva-Bolzaneto works at Genoa, they reduced the price of a kilogram of metal from 44 to 28 lire, and, in order to economise on oil, they invented a process which saved 500 kilograms of oil in every eight hours of work.

It Can be Done

This episode in Italy has a number of useful lessons for all socialists. First, that workers can run the factories by themselves; and that they can not only maintain but improve efficiency. Second, that this kind of movement, which consists of industrial action alone, cannot permanently put the workers in control of the factories. As the pamphlet itself says, "there was no point in cherishing the illusion of stable and lasting working-class management in a capitalist regime." Like all such experiments, this one would have ended immediately had the Government decided to employ resolutely the coercive forces at its disposal. Italy thus reinforces the lesson of Russia after 1917, where the system of worker-elected managements, which operated for a short time after the Revolution, was soon abolished by the Bolsheviks in favour of State-appointed managements when the former system was seen to be incompatible with State-capitalism.

State-Ownership

And the third lesson is that State-ownership of factories does not alter in the slightest the position of the workers vis-a-vis their employers. The most powerful attack of the employers, says the pamphlet, came in September and October, 1950, when in a dozen or more factories they attempted to dismiss 15,000 metal workers. And of these undertakings, “the majority belong to the I.R.I., that is to say they are State corporations." So in Italy, as in Britain, those workers who spent their energies forwarding the nationalisation of factories can now seen how they have wasted their time.

Set Free the Producers

Mr. Roy Harrod gave a talk on the home service on September 19th in which he brought forward a theory which has been heard often of late from Conservative economists and politicians; it is that the cure for our national ills lies in greater productivity, and that this can only be obtained by reducing controls and restrictions and setting the "producers” free. No one could object to this, were it not for the fact that when a Conservative talks of the "producers” he means not the actual producers, the workers, but the people who order the producers about, the business-men and managers. Now setting the business-men free to produce exactly what they wanted might lead to greater productivity, and it might not; for what every business-man pursues, what the system forces him to pursue, is not higher output as such, but higher profits. If the business-men in a particular industry come to the conclusion—as they sometimes do—that the way to raise profits is not to increase output, but to restrict it, then they will restrict output

Agreed, Mr. Harrod

But although Mr. Harrod did not know it when he talked of our output being kept below what it could be by a system which restricts the producers, he had stumbled on to a great fact—one of the facts on which the theory of Socialism is based. For in our society the workers, the producers, are indeed greatly restricted. Millions of them are forced, by economic necessity or by orders of the heads of State, to work in occupations which produce nothing whatever, which adds nothing whatever to the sum total of the goods and services consumed by mankind. Hundreds of thousands of them, in this country alone, are forced to join those monstrous organisations whose sole aim is to murder other human beings, to destroy the houses, schools and factories which other men have built; those organisations which are constituted, maintained and directed not with the aim of increasing human happiness, but with the aim of increasing, by cold and scientific calculation, the already vast sum of human misery and destitution; those organisations, in short, which are politely known as ‘‘His Majesty’s armed forces.” Other workers are forced to spend their time and their skill in the armaments industries, producing instruments and machines which will be used when the next war comes to kill workers in other countries and to wreck their houses. Other workers still are employed in clerking and office jobs, in stamping tickets, in doing all the jobs connected with money, advertising and banking—all of which have one thing in common: they are totally non-productive. Socialism would give to all these workers the pleasure of doing a constructive, creative job, which is at present denied them.

So if you really mean what you say, Mr. Harrod, about setting the producers free to raise production you know which party to support.

Words and Deeds

Many people are misled by the revolutionary phraseology of some parties of the “left.” They hear these parties attacking Capitalism and imperialism, and they assume that the parties concerned must be parties of socialists, parties of the working class. But, unfortunately for clarity of political thought, any demagogue trying to gain power during the last thirty-five years has automatically had to denounce Capitalism and imperialism in order to obtain support. Such demagogues have often been the instruments of developing State-capitalism, either in countries which have previously had private-capitalist systems, or in countries where previously the landowners have ruled.

Why take their word for it?

But just as no one would now accept the claim of the English Puritans of the 17th century that they were fighting merely to secure freedom for their own form of religion, so in the 20th century no one should accept any politician’s speeches at their face value. It was therefore surprising to bear so eminent an historian as Professor E. H. Carr (during his talk on the B.B.C., 5.9.51) repeat the old fable that because Marx said that the first socialist revolutions were to be expected in the leading industrial countries of the world, and because the first socialist revolution actually took place in Russia in 1917. therefore Marx was wrong. If the first socialist revolution had in fact taken place in Russia in 1917, then Marx would have been wrong on this point; but since neither the 1917 nor any subsequent revolution was socialist (as should be obvious to anyone who not only quotes but also reads Marx) then the truth or otherwise of Marx’s statement still remains to be proved. It is true that the leaders of the 1917 revolution indulged in lengthy tirades against Capitalism, and it is true that they were the first successful revolutionaries to do so; but are we to believe their words or their actions? And if we believe their words, why are we not to believe all the other demagogues who followed them, all claiming to be the leaders of the proletariat against the national or international capitalists?

Uncle Tom Peron and All

Hot on the heels of the Bolsheviks in Russia came Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, who claimed the fight against “international capital” and the “rule of the bourgeoisie,” and who said he was on the side of "the proletarian masses of the world.” Then came Mussolini in Italy, Salazar in Portugual, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, and a number of dictators in South America; now Tito has emerged in Yugoslavia, Mao Tse-Tung in China, and Ho-Chi-Minh in Indo-China. Of the same demagogic type, though the regimes they have introduced are less dictatorial because of the particular circumstances of their various countries, are, or were. Roosevelt in the United States, the Labour leaders in Britain, and Nehru in India. All claim to be socialist, or at any rate to be against Capitalism and “big business.” And the recent revolt in Argentina was blamed by dictator Peron on “obscure forces of Capitalism and imperialism.” Peron, it is worth noting, commands the enthusiastic allegiance of Argentina’s trade union congress, the “General Confederation of Workers”: which should be a clear warning against supporting any particular politician or party just because the trade unions do.

Case Dismissed

Are all these claimants to be admitted as socialists? Or are their respective policies and actions to be examined first, before a decision is made? If they are, no member of the Socialist Party will doubt the verdict that will be reached. And if we reject the laziness which takes every politician at his own valuation, let us hope that the argument that Russia’s was the first socialist revolution, and that therefore Marx was wrong, will be consigned to the limbo of the lost.

By Courtesy of Sir John

It seems that Sir John Ellerman may be ranked among those who can differentiate between the Labour Party’s protestations and its practice. Sir John (Daily Express, 28.9.51) is the richest man in Britain, and he holds shares in the majority of the papers which support the Labour Party—he has 307,450 shares in the Daily Mirror, 41,285 in the Sunday Pictorial, and 10.000 in Odhams, publishers of the Daily Herald. So all these papers support the Labourites with the help of Sir John’s money; evidently be has no strong objection to their politics.

While we are on the subject of Sir John, those who believe that Capitalism will in some mysterious way be ended by attacks on the fortunes of individual capitalists by devices like death duties will be interested to know that Sir John’s father, who died in 1933, left £36 million, which was reduced to less than £20 million by death duties; and that only eighteen years afterwards, the Ellerman fortune has surpassed the 1933 figure, being now estimated at £40 millions.

Sympathy

Concerning the sympathy which recently poured in from the rich and powerful in many parts of the world when a very wealthy man in this country was ill; we should all, of course, be sympathetic to all those who are sick, but especially toward those who cannot afford five doctors and eight nurses to look after them.

Alwyn Edgar

Letter: More about industrial action: The Legend of the "Jolly George” (1951)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have had correspondence with a reader (P.C.O., London) who in the letter below raises the question of minority action and the effectiveness of strikes to stop war.

Editorial Committee,

The Socialist Standard.

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter of the 20th July. I have taken in carefully all you have had to say. There is one point, however, you seem to have overlooked.

The general tone of your letter suggests that you think the individual can do nothing to alter affairs, and I would like to remind you of the Russian Revolution, started by a mere “handful,” also of the “Capitalist Trade Union ” (to use your own term) action which started with the refusal by the dockers to load the “Jolly George" and ended with the Capitalist Government being compelled to withdraw their armed forces from Russia, to which they had been sent to destroy the new “Workers’ State,” although the said “Workers’ State” may not be a very pleasant one to live under nowadays.

The “Jolly George” incident also compelled a Capitalist Government to cease conscripting working- class boys and young men into a Capitalist Army.

Why has there been nothing to rival it to-day? After the 1st G. War there were demobilisation riots, demonstrating in Whitehall, etc., etc. After the 2nd G. War there were no such disorders—the workers meekly waited for. their “Demob.”, their age group, etc., etc. Meanwhile they went to places like Greece and slaughtered foreign workers for the glory of the British and American Capitalist States. The only thing that nearly resembled anything like riots was the outbreak of mutiny at the Aldershot “Glasshouse” in 1946. If there were anything approaching the solidarity I would like to see, there would have been a General Strike in sympathy with the men imprisoned in the “Glasshouse” and protection from Capitalist Militarism given to all members of the working class by organised Labour. In Spain, an attempt might have been made to free the conscripts in a military prison, judging by the workers’ conduct in the Civil War. Personally I would like to see a General Strike take place whenever a deserter from the Capitalist Armed Forces is arrested.

Yours, etc.,

P.C.O.

Reply:

(1) Recipe for Revolution

The S.P.G.B. case is that the achievement of Socialism requires in the first place a majority of socialists, and the resulting democratic political action to gain control of the machinery of government. Our impatient correspondent replies by pointing to Russia and offers us his own recipe for starting a revolution: “Just take a mere handful of people.”

But why does he tarry to tell us this? Why hasn’t he already collected his simple ingredients and cooked his revolution? Why he has not done so is indicated elsewhere in his letter; where be tells us, for example, that the insurgent attitude of some workers after World War I has to be contrasted with the meekly accepting attitude of workers after World War II. He has left something out of his recipe; the handful of would-be leaders of riots and mutinies can put themselves at the head of bodies of rioters and mutineers only if there are such bodies to put themselves at the head of.

In Russia in 1917, because that semi-feudal economy could not stand up to war with industrialised Germany, army discipline, civil administration, and the transport system had all broken down, and there were millions of land-hungry peasants, mutinous soldiers and starving workers ready to support a movement to overthrow the Czarist regime. Having no electoral system through which to vote the Government out, the discontented Russians rioted and mutinied. If our correspondent in 1945 had called on the British workers to stage a “revolution” in order to get rid of the Churchill government they might reasonably reply by asking why go to all that trouble to get something they could and did get by using their votes at the election.

More important from the socialist standpoint is not whether a minority can do “something” but whether it can achieve Socialism. Doubtless the Russian Monarchist Liberals who started the movement to overthrow the Czar were a small handful, as also were the Communists who later started the movement which ended with the present State capitalist dictatorship. They did not and could not introduce Socialism and it is that which concerns us. What the Russian Communists did achieve, to quote our correspondent, is a condition of affairs “not very pleasant to live under nowadays.” But surely we don’t have to do anything to achieve that state of affairs; we have it already.

(2) The Legend of the “Jolly George”

But our correspondent has a subsidiary weapon in his armoury of argument. Without waiting for Socialism, a handful of dockers, he tells us. could start a movement which would force a government to withdraw its armed forces from war against Russia and compel them to abandon conscription. He is sure of this because it happened.

Never were so many errors compressed into so small a space.

It is of course easy to make the claim that the Government was forced to do certain things because of a strike by some London dockers, but there is not the slightest evidence to back up the claim.

It is a simple matter to show that the decision after the first World War to abandon conscription had nothing to do with the refusal to load the “Jolly George,” and we can only suppose that our correspondent’s memory is at fault. Immediately the war ended with the armistice on 11th November, 1918, new Conscription call-up notices were cancelled. (Hansard, 15th November, 1918, Col. 3110.) Existing conscripts were retained in the Forces after that date, but the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, announced on 30th October, 1919, that conscription was being lapsed. "We have arranged that by the end of this financial year there will not be a conscript in this country.” (Hansard, 30th October, 1919, Col. 981.) The plan was adhered to and the period of compulsory service was officially terminated on 30th April, 1920.

Note particularly these dates, all of them before 1st May, 1920, for it was not until ten days later, on 10th May, 1920, that some London dockers refused to load arms for Poland on the “Jolly George,” so that incident cannot possibly have been the cause of events that took place long before it happened.

Nor was it the determining factor on Government policy about Russian intervention. One intervention, that of the British troops at Archangel was ended by their withdrawal on 27th September, 1919, a decision obviously governed by military and other considerations.

But then came the Polish war against Russia in April, 1920, and it is this our correspondent has in mind. The facts show how completely wrong are his conclusions:

As already stated the dockers refused to load arms for Poland (a free gift, incidentally, from the British Government) on 10th May, 1920.

Did this stop the war? No. For the Russo-Polish armistice was not signed until five months later, on 12th October.

Did it stop the British Government using naval forces to help Russia’s enemies? No. For British warships were still in the Black Sea when the war ended.

Did it cause the British Government to desist from its policy of hostility to the Russian Government? No. For early in August when the Polish armies were temporarily in retreat, the Government warned Russia off:

"The British Government now took up a threatening position, demanding the cessation of the Russian advance, failing which they would give all aid to Poland.” (Labour Research Department Monthly Circular," 1st September, 1920.)

And coming down to the specific issue of the flow of British armaments to Poland, did the dockers stop it? Here we can quote a witness who for this purpose can hardly be doubted:—

“Frankly, the National Council of Action has failed. . . . It was formed to prevent the supplies and munitions being sent in support of the attack on Soviet Russia, which it is quite obviously not doing. Somehow, and from somewhere in this country, these supplies are being sent. A Moscow report alleges that England has sent seven steamers of munitions, three tanks, and twelve small steamers with provisions in aid of Poland, and that these have been unloaded at Danzig."

That candid admission was published by the Communist Party of Great Britain in their organ, “The Communist” on 7th October, 1920, five months after the “Jolly George” affair. And if the Council of Action movement failed in Britain parallel actions on the Continent were equally futile. We read in Labour Research Department Circular of 1st September. 1920:

“The French Government now turned every effort to pouring munitions and officers into Poland. Supplies also came from Great Britain."

"So great was the flood that the same journal reported that ‘the Poles were firing ten shots to the Russian one.’"

The attempt by industrial action to save Russia from defeat by the Polish forces was a complete fiasco: —

". . . the unlimited foreign supplies . . . and the expert military advice were producing their effect, and the Russian advance was turned. By August 20 the Poles were in Brest Litvosk.” (L.R.D. Circular, September 1920).

So much for the legend of the “ Jolly George.”

(3) Why not a General Strike against the Labour Government?

Then our correspondent, filled with false recollections of what happened after World War I, tells us how he would like to see "organised labour” staging a general strike to help army deserters, etc., and he wonders why the workers now do not act as he says they acted after the first world war.

We have already pointed out that our correspondent on his own showing does not have to wait for “organised labour.” All he has to do is to collect his "mere handful ” and start something.

And could anything be more unrealistic than the talk of action by “organised labour”? The Council of Action of 1920 was a joint body formed by the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress and was directed (unsuccessfully as we have shown) against the Lloyd George-Churchill government.

So let us now repeat our correspondent’s advice in its proper form. “Why do not the Labour Party and the Labour M.P.s and the Trade Unions now organise a general strike to stop themselves from supporting the policies of their Labour Government which they uphold and agree with and vote for?”

We cannot conclude without drawing attention to a curious time-lag in our correspondent’s programme of action. If, as be believes, a "mere handful” could start a movement to stop war, why waste this potent weapon by bringing it into action only after the war is over and then only to help deserters and military prisoners. Why not do it before World War II began and stop the war itself?

Can it be that our correspondent knows as well as we do that “organised labour” in all countries in 1939 was not opposed to the war-making of the respective governments but was supporting it?

One last point. We do not know what our correspondent means in his letter when he says that the “Jolly George" action was described by us as "capitalist Trade Union action.”

Ed. Comm.