Trade Unions and Socialism (1981)

Editorial from the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the continuing debate about the role, the power and the function of trade unions there are basic misconceptions on both sides.

Some of what are often called “moderate” trade union leaders, for example, think that unions should properly involve themselves in the shaping and execution of government policy. Len Murray is one of these; a constant complaint of his is that the Thatcher government are formulating policy without first calling the TUC to Ten Downing Street. One inevitable result of this attitude is that the unions are too often preoccupied with trying to resist the irresistible—opposing the inexorable effects of the slump on employment, for example.

Then there is the less “moderate” element, who are sure that the unions can extend themselves into the ownership of industry. This element is liable to organise sit-ins at firms which are about to close when they have become unprofitable and then to entertain fantasies about the basis of ownership and control in capitalist society. At more alarming times this approach can lead on to even wilder fantasies, that a sit-in can be the first step on the road to a socialist revolution. In reality what happens is that the profit-making demands of capitalism first undermine, then grind away, the fantasies and the enthusiasm which they gave birth to.

On the other side of the debate the great misconception is that trade unions are all-powerful, that they dictate policy to governments, run industry and can exert a strangle-hold on vital points in society such as medical services. The evidence offered to support this point of view is usually the disruption which can be caused by a strike and events like the collapse of the Heath government in 1973/4 and the recent retreat by the Thatcher government in face of the miners.

In fact, on both occasions the governments of the day judged the situation in terms of capitalist priorities—that is on the likely profitability of industry at large and the possibility of notching up a victory in the class struggle. These judgements did nothing to alter the basic situation; capitalism is still there, still run on the same motives and the same assumptions. At present, for example, there is reason to think that the government sees its retreat as no more than a temporary measure, to give some time to regroup its forces. This is what happened in the surrender (or so it seemed at the time) to the miners before the General Strike in 1926. (At that time there was another pressure group at work —the coal owners—but there was little complaint in the media at a powerful minority dictating policy to the government.)

All these misconceptions can be cleared simply by a clear idea about the role of trade unions, one which fits in with their history and their reality.

The first fact to take into account in this is that we live at present in a class divided society, the division being based on the minority class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. This division is the direct cause of a clash over the apportioning of wealth, which takes the form of a dispute about wages and working conditions. On the one hand the working class, who do not own the means of production, struggle for the best possible wages and conditions. The more they get the less there is for the owners, the capitalist class who employ the workers.

This clash is a continuing, unavoidable feature of capitalist society. It is obvious that in this—as in any other—struggle, unity is strength. The employers recognise this; they have their own organisations such as the Confederation of British Industry and overseeing them all, protecting the privileged position of the capitalist class as a whole, is the might of the state machine.

In face of this, the working class would be entirely helpless if they did not also build their own unity. Failure to do this would reduce workers’ bargaining over wages and conditions of work to a disorganised mass of separate, feeble entreaties. At present the trade unions, with all their faults (and socialists are more aware of these than anyone) represent that unity and offer the workers their only chance of offering to the employers a concerted front of resistance.

But there are many ways in which the unions, even accepting their present deficiencies, could be much more effective. To begin with, they should confine their activities to the industrial field, to the struggle to defend and improve working class wages and conditions of work. They should not be diverted in this by spurious appeals to consider concepts like the “national interest” —which means the  need of the British capitalist class to compete more successfully on the world markets.

They should not be impressed by an apparent readiness to involve them in capitalism’s legislative processes —to call them in to see the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Minister of Labour . . . These are no more than inducements to weaken their resolve in carrying out their proper function to promote working class interests on the industrial field. An effective union will not succumb to any such inducements but will single-mindedly carry out its task in those workers’ interests.

And in this there is a recognition of the limits of trade union activity. This can be only defensive; it is by definition an aspect of capitalist society, an inevitable product of that society and is restricted to operating under capitalism. Trade unions then can only ease the pressures upon workers; they cannot eliminate those pressures. They can only ameliorate working class problems, they cannot cure those problems. They can only moderate the effects of capitalism,  they cannot abolish the system.

That must be the work of a socialist working class, a working class conscious of the basic causes of capitalism’s problems and of the need to replace it with socialism. As that consciousness grows it will affect all social organs within capitalism; they will all become that more effective for an injection of aware, politically aggressive socialists. And that will apply with special force to trade unions. At present the unions are in truth a comparatively feeble lot, which should be vastly more effective given the size and the industrial power, of their membership. As the socialist movement grows, so will the strength and the effectiveness of the unions, powered by a membership no longer content to accept minor concessions from their masters but determined to have it all, for the benefit of all.

Trade Unions and the State (1981)

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade Unions today are respectable organisations. Their leaders move in lofty circles, both nationally and internationally, and sit on royal commissions and boards of major charities. Unions, too, are to some extent partners with employers in the management of production, and are consulted to varying degrees by governments who need their advice and cooperation. But this situation is fairly recent: less than fifty years ago, union involvement with government was minimal. It is only just over a century since unions achieved any adequate legal status, and fifty years before that they were actually illegal.

It has been argued that the first unions were a response to the Industrial Revolution, so that their history should be dated from the late eighteenth century. An alternative view sees the unions as the descendants, albeit much altered, of the mediaeval craft guilds, which were transformed by the conditions of capitalist wage labour. This latter view has recently been supported by R.A.Leeson in Travelling Brothers’:

I would argue that the “trade unions” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries derived a heritage from the earlier draft organisations by direct and indirect means, by links that were not only traditional and imitative, but also organisational. The unions in many trades have a pre-history as well as a history and a very long and proud one. Rather than being called “spontaneously” into existence by the Industrial Revolution, many of them were instead utterly transformed from what they had been before.

So we must examine “what they had been before”.

Guilds arose from about the thirteenth century as a form of organisation among all those who in feudal society were neither nobles nor ecclesiastics. One type of guild (also called a craft, among other names) embraced all inhabitants of a town who followed the same occupation or trade. Such guilds established minimum standards for goods, and maintained strict regulations for apprenticeship (generally a seven-year term), as a way of controlling skills and reducing competition. In 1351 the Statute of Labourers was passed, laying down maximum wages in every trade. Labourers were supposed to remain in their town or village and accept whatever wages were offered, rather than move elsewhere in search of higher pay. Such regulations were, in theory, directed at all craft members, whether masters or “yeomen”, for both belonged to the guild. Gradually, however, the powers of the masters, or “livery”, increased to the point where the law could be called upon to protect their interests. A law of 1548-9 prohibited craft “confederacies” that tried to lay down the price for work (for a second offence, the punishment was a fine of £40 and the loss of the accused’s ears!). For the master guild members were now full-scale employers, breaking the guild rules by taking on, as a source of cheap labour, more apprentices than they were entitled to.

It was against a background of increased influence on the part of the guilds that the nation’s rulers passed in 1563 the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, popularly known as Queen Betty’s Law. Seven years’ apprenticeship was reconfirmed, as was the earlier law against “confederacies and conspiracies” on the part of the workers. The aim was to harmonise relations among the different groups within each guild and to ensure that the guilds as a whole were subservient to the crown and the landowning class. But the nature of society was changing: as the merchants and craft-masters grew more powerful, they bit by bit ignored and went beyond the Statute, seeing it as an obstacle to industrial development. In 1753 Parliament stated that attempts to control entry into a trade, along the lines of the guilds, were “contrary to the liberty of the subject”. The regulations regarding apprenticeship blocked the availability of cheap labour to the rising capitalist class; the Statute of Apprentices had become a restraint on capitalist development.

The journeymen of the crafts attempted to use the provisions of the Statute to defend their position. This was more and more necessary because of the increased migration, especially of rural labourers uprooted by enclosing landlords. Begging was illegal, and such people were forced to seek work in the urban manufacturing areas:

Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system. (Karl Marx: Capital, vol. l, ch. 28)

The first half of the eighteenth century saw a number of laws aimed at controlling employees: for instance, in 1726, an Act against “unlawful clubs and societies” in the woollen trades. The journeymen’s clubs—which the guilds had now become — established inter-city links: a “tramp” system whereby a workman could travel from one town to another seeking work at the official rate (the public house connected with the trade often held a book listing vacancies) and, if successful, be lodged and given money for the next stage of his journey. And so local craft-based organisations began to be transformed into something closer to national trade unions.

This was the period of repression of popular movements: in 1795 Acts were passed making it treasonable to incite people to hatred of the government and illegal to hold meetings of more than fifty persons without notifying a magistrate. Demands by the employers for laws against workers’ organisations continued. In 1799 and 1800 they were rewarded with two Combination Acts, by which unions which had been at best tolerated by the powers-that-be and much circumscribed in their scope of activity, were made illegal. In 1814, the apprentice clause of Queen Betty’s Law was repealed, leaving the workers with neither legal nor organisational means of resisting the lowering of wages and the capitalists’ control over their working lives. But the Combination Acts did not in fact succeed in suppressing the trade unions which, during the period of their illegality, were comparatively flourishing. For one thing, it was the employers, not the government, who were expected to do the actual prosecuting, and this they proved reluctant to do. It was after the passing of the Combination Acts that the tramping system reached its height. It not only facilitated (and required) inter-town contact, but also kept the unions in existence, and frustrated the intentions of the law-makers, whose regulations could not affect the tramps. As one employer stated to a Parliamentary Select Committee:

The law cannot take hold of these men for they leave gradually, man by man and get employment in other places; thus the Combination Laws are by that means completely avoided.

It was both because of their ineffectiveness, and because of the beliefs of some that the unions only existed on account of their illegality, that the Combination Acts were repealed, in 1824 and 1825.

Trade unions were now illegal, but their exact status and power were still unclear; attempts at combination could still fall foul of the law. It was after the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1834 that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Australia. They were trapped in a complex legal web, involving the 1797 Mutiny Act, and were in fact guilty of “administering an oath not to reveal a combination which administers such oaths”! Despite such difficulties, unions expanded in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It is noticeable that the major legislation setting forth their legal standing all but coincided with the extension of the vote to urban male artisans in 1867.

Against this background, the government in 1866 convened a Royal Commission on trade unions. The following year, a court decision declared that unions were associations "in restraint of trade” and hence not able to claim the protection of the law for their funds, even if they were not exactly illegal. The minority report of the Royal Commission served as the basis for the 1871 Trade Union Act: unions were given adequate legal status and, importantly, their funds were protected. Picketing, however, was declared illegal. Unlike many other countries, no legal “right to strike” was established, the unions were simply given specific exemption from the penalties which they would otherwise automatically have incurred at Common Law, which looked with disfavour on those who interfered with the blind working of market forces. The 1871 Act formed the basis of labour legislation for exactly a century.

The Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 made peaceful picketing legal, so that conspiracy for the purposes of a trade union dispute was not now punishable. This was a period of major change in the trade union movement, with the founding of many new unions, not based on craft lines or descended in any way from the guilds, and recruiting the unskilled and semi-skilled, regardless of trade or industry. At the same time, the tramp system was dying out. Going to another town in search of employment had some point when there was a good prospect of work being available, but was useless during periods of mass unemployment. Since the 1830s, some unions had allowed their members to stay at home and collect out-of-work benefit, rather than go on the tramp, and this system now became general. There were then no government labour exchanges, old age pensions, or sickness or unemployment benefits. Unions provided these services — for their members only, of course — at the cost of great strain on their financial resources. For the rest there was only the Poor Law.

Union members were at that time far fewer in number than today: even in the early 1900s union membership represented only fifteen per cent of the workforce, compared with the current figure of over fifty per cent. But the union leaders were becoming conscious of their potential power and influence, and of the need for a voice in Parliament. Consequently, in 1900 was formed the Labour Representation Committee, which in 1906 became the Labour Party. This founding of a party by trade unions was unusual: elsewhere in Western Europe it was precisely the other way round, with “left-wing” parties being founded first and later creating their own union movements.

“Rapid" growth

The first Labour MPs were among those calling for the state to take over the benefit scheme run by the unions. It was obvious that the unions could not administer these schemes efficiently, and that the interests of capitalism necessitated a reliable — though not too generous — system of sickness and unemployment benefit and of labour exchanges. William Beveridge, who was instrumental in the establishment of the “welfare state”, appreciated the need for a mobile and well-maintained reserve army of labour:

To be able to follow the demand (for labour) men must possess greater powers of intelligent movement from place to place; they must possess also power to move from trade to trade or . . . must have better guidance in the first choice of occupations. To be able to wait for the demand, men must have a reserve for emergencies; they must not be living from hand to mouth, they must through insurance or its equivalent be able to average wages over good and bad times and to subsist without demoralisation until they can be re-absorbed again after industrial transformations.

Through Acts of 1909 and 1911, the government took on some of the benefits previously paid by the unions.

Elsewhere, however, the unions were coming into conflict with the state and its courts. The judgement in the 1900 Taff Vale case meant that unions could in effect be sued by employers for losses they had sustained as a result of strike action; in 1909 the courts declared that unions could not use their funds to support parliamentary candidates. Both judgements were reversed by Acts of Parliament. The unions were now rapidly growing in size, and their members increasing in militancy. Between 1910 and 1912 there were some major strikes, of South Wales miners and London dockers, and then a national miners’ strike. Even during the First World War, there were strikes in defiance of wartime legislation. In fact the war itself led to great advances in union membership, to eight million, about forty per cent of the workforce.

It was not to last. The twenties and thirties were decades of massive unemployment and a drop — almost a halving — of union numbers. In the aftermath of the General Strike, the 1927 Trades Disputes Act split unions in government service off from the TUC, restricted picketing and outlawed sympathetic strikes. (Incidentally, it also provided that trade unionists had to contract in to pay the political levy to the Labour Party; in 1946 the Labour government re-established the undemocratic contracting-out system.) After their 1926 climbdown, the TUC leaders were determined to avoid workers taking action on such a scale again and entered into talks with big employers. The TUC General Council stated that their policy was:

for the trade union movement to say boldly that not only is it concerned with the prosperity of industry, but it is going to have a voice in the way industry is carried on . . . The unions can use their power to promote and guide the scientific re-organisation of industry.

The union bureaucracy was well on the way to collaboration with both government and employers. In 1931 J. H. Thomas, once General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, joined the National Government under Ramsay Macdonald and acquiesced in its policy of reducing railwaymen’s wages from forty-four to thirty-eight shillings a week.

However, it was during the Second World War that union leaders’ involvement in government, and hence their role in defending the communal interests of the capitalist class against the workers, became deeper than ever before. Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, became wartime Minister of Labour, a post which gave him draconian powers over the allocation of labour to the war effort. There were legal restrictions on pay bargaining, including the outlawing of strikes, measures which a non-union minister might have had trouble in enforcing (though the laws against strikes were ineffective anyway). Some observers have eulogised this period and the role of the unions:

. . . the British trade union movement is miraculously capable of exercising a progressive and highly effective influence on this country. It was between the formation of the Churchill coalition in the terrible spring of 1940 and Labour’s great victory at the polls in July 1945 that a real and lasting social contract was forged between the unions and the. politicians. (Robert Taylor: The Fifth Estate).

Taylor cites as fruits of this contract the “welfare state” and the commitment to peacetime full employment — neither of which could truly be characterised as “lasting”.

Since the war union membership has grown steadily, especially among white-collar workers, as has union leaders’ willingness to co-operate in government policies aimed at reducing working-class living standards. When a Conservative government was returned in 1951, the TUC General Council offered its support and co-operation. In 1961, a sterling crisis led to a six-month freeze on pay rises, and the government established the National Economic Development Council. The unions decided by a majority to participate in NEDC,

. . . the minority arguing that the government was only involving the unions in planning in order eventually to implicate them in incomes policy, a view for which there is considerable support. (Colin Crouch: The Politics of Industrial Relations.) 

NEDC has now become an important forum: six senior union leaders meet with cabinet ministers and representatives of the Confederation of British Industry and nationalised industries every month.

“In Place of Strife”

In 1965 there was another sterling crisis, and the government (now Labour again) asked the TUC to agree to some statutory control over pay agreements and to keep its own member unions in order. Another six-month pay freeze was then imposed, and since then there has been a more or less continuous series of incomes policies, whether statutory or supposedly voluntary, all with the aim of keeping down wages. In 1969 the White Paper In Place of Strife was issued by the Labour government, aimed both at placing various restrictions on unions and also at increasing the authority of the union bureaucracy: unofficial strikes were to be made subject to strict statutory limits (and currently about ninety-five per cent of strikes are unofficial). This never became law, but the Tories’ Industrial Relations Act did: again, among other provisions, unions’ powers over their members were strengthened, with unions being obliged to take disciplinary measures against members striking in breach of the procedures laid down in the Act.

The Industrial Relations Act was repealed in 1974, since when there has been a fair amount of labour legislation, covering areas such as health and safety at work, unfair dismissal, and sexual and racial discrimination. As a result, workers may not be quite so much at the mercy of their employers as they once were, but their subordinate position at the workplace, and in society as a whole, has not been altered one jot. The political and judicial representatives of the capitalist class, however, like to represent the unions as overly powerful enemies of freedom. For instance, in the course of one judgement in 1977, Lord Denning stated:

Parliament has conferred more freedom from restraint on trade unions than ever has been known to the law before. All legal restraints have been lifted so that they can now do as they will.

This is a typical Denning remark: preposterous, class-biassed nonsense. The Grunwick case is quite sufficient to show that unions cannot just “do as they will”.

One of the aims of recent legislation has been to increase the authority of full-time union bureaucrats over their unruly and allegedly strike-obsessed members But there is a paradox here. in that governments also believe that union leaders often force their unwilling members to strike: hence the call far compulsory strike ballots. The closed shop is another area where governments have contradictory policies: on the one hand, non-union members can lessen the effectiveness of a strike, but on the other hand all-union membership can make the job of controlling workers that much easier. This, then, is the kind of trade union movement that the capitalist class would like to see: one that exercises reliable control over its members and is both able and willing to water down their demands for higher wages and better working conditions. One way of achieving this is to have union leaders sit on government economic bodies and attain the trappings of some power or influence. With its annual economic review, the TUC is an economic and political pressure-group like so many others.

The unions are a necessary weapon that they help to prevent employers from keeping wages down too much but, because of the nature of capitalism, they are strictly limited in what they can achieve for their members. Their proper sphere of activity is that of defending workers’ conditions and standards of living, not in helping the capitalist class to administer their system. However, there is little point in leftists bewailing “betrayal” by the union leaders, for the unions can only be as good (as active, as militant, as democratic) as their members. In the absence of a class-conscious working class, trade unionists have the unions they deserve.

Paul Bennett

Redundant directors (1981)

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Walter Goldsmith, Director General of the Institute of Directors, did not like the fact that the Thatcher government averted, at least for the time being, the threat of a countrywide coal strike. He commented (Guardian, 20/2/81): “The events of the last few days have reduced the . . . government’s economic policies to a shambles . . .They have caved in on all fronts . . .They are . . . reinforcing trade union power”. Well, isn’t this jolly hard cheese! Here are the directors, rubbing their hands gleefully in expectation of the miners being put in their place, only to find the contest called off at the last minute! Unfortunately for the directors, and those who think like them, the capitalists cannot live as capitalists without the workers, from whom they extract the surplus value from which their profits come. Consequently, when these confrontations arise, concessions sometimes have to be made if the cost to the capitalists is less than that of a stoppage of production.

At times indeed employers and governments can be faced by quite awkward decisions. This was recognised by the Daily Telegraph, in an editorial (20/2/81): “A strike would have been grievously harmful to the coal industry and to the nation.” (By “nation” they of course mean the capitalist class.) However the Telegraph also looked forward to a possible confrontation later, when the government might be better placed. As was pointed out in a letter to the same newspaper the following day, coal can stand up to even severe outdoor exposure. Capitalist priorities are the deciding factor. Food, fuel, transport and raw materials are all vital commodities and workers employed in their production usually have some bargaining power, particularly if stocks are low. On the other hand hospital workers, for example, have very little going for them.

As for the directors, their role in the capitalist economy is not so vital. They ought not to be surprised when, despite financial backing which they receive from ruling class quarters, governments ignore their opinions when it comes to the crunch.

E. C. Edge

Political Notes: Farewell, Harold! (1981)

The Political Notes column from the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Farewell, Harold!
Ah, how Harold Wilson will be missed! Who can rival that calm defusing of the difficult TV question, lighting his pipe and losing the interviewer in a literal and metaphorical smokescreen so that he could get away without answering the question, or with answering one which hadn’t been asked!

Is there another such master of the facile, memorably headline-catching phrase, Like the “white hot technological revolution” which, in the early sixties, was going to bring in the age of boundless prosperity for us all. Like “a week in politics is a long time”, which meant that workers’ memories are peculiarly stunted about capitalism—a defect which its leaders exploit for all it is worth.

Will there be an equal in the art of the bland assurance that all things could be planned into docility by the magic Wilson touch? For nothing, if we are to believe Wilson, ever surprised him; his resignation as Prime Minister had, apparently, nothing to do with the mess of British capitalism under Labour but had been planned years before. Even the announcement of his impending retirement from Parliament has, he says, no bearing on the present split in the Labour Party.

Shall we ever see again such unshakeable audacity? Whenever the breath of scandal passed across him —which happened more often than a politician might hope—Wilson dealt with it by a simple denial. So it was that he wriggled out of a threatened exposure of Labour’s condoning Rhodesian sanctions busting. It was unlucky for him that the recipients of his infamous Resignation Honours exposed themselves so soon as crooks—or at least as the sort of crooks capitalism is liable to punish. But by then it had gone too far.

Yes he will be missed for he was a master politician—which means that he is the master of all the arts of manipulation, cynicism and plain deceit which capitalism’s politics require. And no doubt capitalism will reward him generously for his service.


Goose-stepping
In the 1945 election Tory newspapers often published the famous photograph of Clement Attlee giving the clenched fist salute at a Republican parade in the Spanish Civil War. This salute, the Tories warned us, meant that Attlee was really a Communist and if he ever became Prime Minister the way would be open for a full blooded revolution which would obliterate the monarchy, the House of Lords, cricket, tea on the lawn and everything else which is dear in the British Way of Life.

Well immediately on their taking power Attlee’s ministers were seen to be visiting the various royal homes and nervous defenders of the British Way of Life might have assumed that they were doing so in order to give the ruling class notice to quit.

Such paranoia would have been blind to the evidence, of which there was plenty, that the position of the British ruling class was being stoutly defended by that Labour government and that ruling class figureheads like the royal family were going about their business in complete assurance of their continued existence.

And now we have been given a glimpse of what actually went on during those visits. True, this glimpse (and it is secondhand at that) comes from the jealous, vindictive pen of Richard Crossman, whose contempt for his fellow politician was palpable (what must he have thought of the workers who voted for them?) but who did not tell lies all the time.

And Crossman has it that Labour ministers—including the austere, foreboding, one-time darling of the left wing Stafford Cripps—made fools of themselves in order to please the royals. Queen Elizabeth, for example, was always liable to be amused by the sight of ministers of the crown goose-stepping in line into a room.

So Attlee’s ministers goose-stepped. And the Queen laughed and perhaps commented on what nice, reassuring, unthreatening ministers she had in this supposedly revolutionary government. When the fun was over, the ministers returned to their labours of trying to control British capitalism while telling the working class that they were building socialism.

These people might well have felt contempt for the workers who with their votes acquiesced in such obscenities. When the workers express their contempt at it all—that is when we shall be making discernible progress.


Turning Thatcher
Come back Ted Heath, all is forgiven. Only by ignoring everyday facts can the Tories pretend that their policy is not in tatters. Thatcher’s defiant assurance to her party’s conference last autumn that “this lady’s not for turning” is becoming ever more embarrassing.

At the 1979 election the Tories claimed that solving the problems of British capitalism was really a simple matter; it had just escaped the attention of former governments, including Tory ones under Prime Ministers like Heath. One essential of the cure was that the governments should not interfere in wage disputes or to save unprofitable businesses. Left to themselves, to sink or swim in capitalism’s market economy, if they survived they would have proved their worth. If they went under well that would also be healthy because it would get rid of an industrial and commercial liability. So in the end we would all be more secure, richer.

Heath’s version of the same policy was that his government would not bale out “lame duck” firms and he too promised that his programme was a blindingly simple and effective remedy. Well it did not work out like that and Heath had to abandon his theories, with firms like Rolls Royce marking his retreat like tombstones.

In fact, the days are long gone when a capitalist class will allow basic industries to expire simply because their books don’t balance. Some industries have to be run at a loss in the overall interests of a national capitalism; thus most advanced industrial states subsidise their railways and their airlines — which means they pay to keep them going because they can’t afford to let them collapse.

Thatcher’s government is now openly recognising the force of this; they are pouring vast sums of money into British Leyland, British Steel and part of their climb down to the miners was a huge financial injection into the National Coal Board. Heath could not have been more generous.

With better luck in capitalism’s affairs, Thatcher’s rule might have coincided with a boom, which would have allowed her to claim that “monetarism” works. As it is, Saatchi and Saatchi have a big job on their hands for they must not only try to prove that “monetarism” is working but that it has even been tried.

A typical mess of deceit.

Obituary: Jack Gormley (1981)

Obituary from the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jack Gormley was 18 when he first met the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s at outdoor meetings in Rushcroft Road, Brixton; it was not until 1946 that he joined our then Camberwell Branch. In the years between—as jack wrote in the November 1975 Socialist Standard ("Why I joined the SPGB")—he had been attracted by reformists masquerading as revolutionaries, who boasting of their mass support imagined they were getting things done. Unemployment! Rents and Houses! Fighting Imperialism! The War against Fascism! Like many others who ignored the arguments of the SPGB, Jack was distracted by dozens of blind-alley issues. He went into the "lively" Norwood Labour Party, and was caught up in a Trotskyist cell. Every week there would be a fresh line to follow, supposedly spearheading the imminent workers' take-over.

Jack began to question all the wasted time and effort. The sense of the SPGB's argument about the paramount necessity to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, had begun to have its effect. He refused to be conscripted during the war, and joining the Socialist Party went enthusiastically to its education classes. For the rest of his life Jack vigorously propounded socialism to everyone he met. His exposition was clear, well illustrated by the fund of experience from his early politically wasted years, also enriched with a wide knowledge of literature. He particularly like the works of Jack London and William Morris, and the poetry of Shelley. South London Party speakers have long been indebted to Jack Gormley for his example and guidance.

Over the years the South London Press and other local papers published many of Jack's well written and pointed letters, frequently printed under the pen name: "Standard Socialist". Many of us will not forget Jack's passion for discussing politics and religion—he had dispensed with religion before meeting the Party. At every opportunity he went to opponents' meetings. The writer of this notice well remembers a Carshalton Labour Party meeting we both attended. Barbara Castle MP and Sydney Silverman MP had given long, dreary speeches, and were supposed to take questions. Came the first tame question, then Jack got up and put his, it was well put, barbed and resounded throughout the hall. The MPs, hastily excused themselves, retreated back to the House of Commons. The local paper reporting the incident noted the speedy departure in the face of questions, recording Jack's loud challenge: "You're not socialists!" in the wake of the MP's going.

Jack Gormley, troubled in recent years by poor health, died suddenly last month. With his passing, a powerful voice and pen is silenced. SW London Branch will greatly miss his political experience and valued contributions to discussion. His friends in the Party here and in Australia are sad at the loss of a staunch comrade. Our sympathy goes to his family; we share their loss.

MS

Soft soap opera (1981)

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a mark of the level at which political journalism is conducted when what seems to loom largest in the minds of some press commentators is the dress-sense, hairstyle, and love-life, of Shirley Williams. While all manner of things may be germane to our political and social condition, does the existence in William's one-time Oxford rooms, of seven photographs of Peter Parker, (Guardian, 10 February), have any possible bearing on that condition? What, one is entitled to ask, will these newspaper hacks cobble up for us next?

The reason for printing such irrelevant hogwash is a determination in Fleet Street and broadcasting to build up the Labour Party's latest defectors as the beautiful people of British politics (even if that means the inclusion of Roy Jenkins). We are to be persuaded that these dilettantes are more concerned with the "moderate" decencies of political life than with its intrigue and infighting. In fact, what primarily motivates the media is the perpetuation of privilege and patronage among an "in" group who are assured of a comfortable ride on one or other of the band-waggons operated in the interests of our masters (who can recognise a loyal servant when they see one.)

The "sacrifices" such as Shirley Williams and her friends are flaunting in our less-than-terstained faces are those of the true class -collaborator, who would be (Roy Jenkins and Lazards, for example) received into almost any boardroom in the country. Neither would such people have much difficulty in being accepted by their Fleet Street friends, or by the BBC or IBA. To these latter they are very much a commodity, produced for sale with a view (that of the media) to profit. So naturally they can afford to play ducks and drakes with the organisation which provided them with so very lucrative a platform from which to mislead, and betray, the class they purported to represent.

The point about the whole sorry mess is that the defection from the Labour Party of a handful of disaffected class collaborators must essentially be a matter of indifference to us of the working class. It is a true measure of the sort of organisation the Labour Party is (and always was) that it can contain so motley a crew of the misguided, the careerist, the opportunistic and the sycophantic. The real surprise is that Williams and Co. have decided that their political fortunes lie elsewhere. After all, as will become increasingly plain as the months pass by, the Labour Party will revert to type: a reformist hotch-potch; a "broad church", complete with its pocket-lining priesthood, offering the working class nothing more nourishing than the same old mixture of pious platitudes and shop-soiled placebos. Right up Shirley Williams' street, one would have thought: but no—she's off; even if she has to be seen standing an awful long time upon the order of her going. (But then she would no doubt wish to maximise both the damage to her erstwhile colleagues and the publicity to herself.)

It is certain, should the beautiful quartet represented by Williams, Owen, Rogers and Jenkins, manage to play in tune, we shall shortly discover that their music has a remarkably familiar ring. Before so very long the cynical rhetoric will begin to fly. No amount of thumbing through Roget's Thesaurus will disguise the old shibboleths: the inevitable "incomes policy", even should it be further euphemised as, say, "rational rewards", or "restructured reimbursements", will remain an attempt strictly to control wages. A Centre Party, or as they may prefer to call it, a "Social Democratic Alliance", will, willingly or unwillingly—wittingly or unwittingly—run capitalism in the interests of those who primarily benefit from it: the capitalists. And if this means—as it will—a continued toleration of all the inequalities, frustrations and miseries so familiar to those who collectively produce all wealth, then our "social democrats" may confidently be expected to remain dry-eyed as they toast each other in their Limehouse redoubt.

Rodgers, Jenkins, Williams and Owen.

For make no mistake about it, Williams and Co. are quite unable to do anything more effective than jerk on the ends of the strings the ruling class have strung them with. The nearest mention of Karl Marx's name would be enough to send our Shirl scurrying for her crucifix (or whatever equivalent she might prefer). These people have deliberately chosen not to arm themselves with the sharpest weapons available to us. Again this is natural enough, for there is no career to be carved out of the ripping away of the mask from the face of capitalistic exploitation. So they turn to the likes of John Maynard Keynes and, using his tool-kit, they tinker with what has manifestly become a clapped-out old banger. Oh, yes: it can be made to cough and stutter on almost indefinitely; but how many of us are to be asphyxiated along the way?

So, should a "Social Democratic" Party start to roll it must merely mean that the politics of capitalism will have been further fragmented. The divisions and sub-divisions; the shades of meaning already virtually numberless, and to be found both within the parties and outside them, will have been further increased. Understanding of our class position will have been even further confused. Workers, offered once again a multiplicity of predictably mendacious "solutions" to the inevitable crises of capitalism, may well be tempted to turn to a shiny new grouping; (well, dusted off and refurbished, anyway). They might as well resort to a chiropodist to cure a hopelessly gangrenous leg. For it is the capitalist system itself which is solely responsible for the contradictions and absurdities, the cruelty and waste we see all around us. Capitalism works on a cold and irrational cruelty which leads to a total disregard of the cost as measured in human lives; it is under a compulsion to behave in this way. And capitalists, while exploiting the working class, must also gobble up each other: it is their only way "forward".

Labour's Gang of Four (or however many they are by now) may be the beautiful people of British politics but they are trying to do the same ugly job as all the others.

Richard Cooper

Tony Benn: a political con-man (1981)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even if capitalism was administered by politicians who were all selfless and honest men and women, it would make little or no difference. The evils of poverty, unemployment, war—the list is endless—are an integral part of capitalism and will not be removed until the system itself is removed. Which itself can only happen when the working class decides to do its own thinking instead of hiring out its minds to leaders. Good leaders or bad leaders—it doesn't matter.

There is, unfortunately, no sign yet that the working class is ready to stop putting its faith in leaders and it remains an endless source of wonder that they can go on, generation after generation trusting shepherds who lead them from one morass to another. How is it possible that workers could even expect people like Wilson or Callaghan to solve their problems for them? And having realised after the "winter of discontent" that the Labour government was doing them no good at all, how could they possibly think that Margaret Thatcher would be able to do other than what she has done? There now seems to be a possibility that the next miracle worker the electorate will appoint to run British capitalism will be A. Wedgwood Benn. He cut the Wedgwood part from his name to lend a spurious working-class aroma to his stock-in-trade, while carefully retaining the capitalist wealth that the name implies. It might be instructive, therefore, to look at the slogans used by this men to lever himself to the top of the Labour Party—slogans which will presumably form the so-called left-wing programme on which the workers will in due course be asked to vote.

In a report in the Guardian (2/2/81), we are told that Benn advocates five priorities for the next Labour government. It is important first to remark that one "priority" is bound to be missing: socialism. And yet, as he calls himself a socialist, one would suppose this should be the sole priority. What else should a socialist want to introduce other than socialism? What is the point of being a socialist otherwise? If you think that socialism is the answer to the problems of society, then surely the establishment of such a system in the place of capitalism must be the object of obtaining power. If you don't think that, then you are clearly a fraud of the most impudent kind. Nobody will be surprised to learn that Benn's five points make no reference whatever to socialism. And the sad thing is that this slight omission will not even be noticed by the working class in general or even by the leftists Militant faction in the Labour Party who are lending such vociferous support to Benn and denying the right to call themselves socialists to such as Shirley Williams and David Owen (well they're right about that last bit, at least).

First of the five priorities is "the restoration of full employment". Merely to state this shows the utter contempt this would-be leader has for the working class. He takes it for granted that they are too stupid to see that the very inclusion of the word "restore" is itself a piece of chicanery. How can you restore something that never existed in the first place? Benn knows full well that the Labour government, of which he was a prominent member under both Wilson and Callaghan, not only presided over a large unemployment problem (which Thatcher inherited). He knows that under that government, unemployment actually doubled from the three-quarters of a million when the Heath Tories were removed from office to one and a half million when Callaghan was kicked out. The nerve of people like Benn and Foot to lead huge demonstrations denouncing unemployment can only mean that they assume the workers have no memory.

Next we have something called "expansion of public services". Whatever that might mean, it is clearly shown up as fraudulent by the cuts in social services which were a chief cause of discontent in that famous last winter of the Labour government. Thirdly, Benn regards it as important for the working class to support the idea of "withdrawal from the EEC". In fact the question of British capitalism being in, or out of, the EEC is of no consequence whatever to the working class.

So now we get to Priority Number Four. Benn wants unilateral nuclear disarmament. If one thing above all betrays the duplicity of the man (and of Foot and the rest of them) it is this, The Labour government of Attlee the Great was, after all, the one that made the decision to build their very own H Bomb. Then, when they were removed from office, all these lefties, Benn included, became supporters of CND and were to be heard screaming "Ban the Bomb!" They should have screamed "Ban the Bomb Which We Made" but perhaps that's too long for a slogan. However, in due course the pendulum swung and Labour, including Benn, was back in power. So they could ban the bomb, scrap Polaris, kick out the American bases and anything else that was needful to carry out their high-principled policy.

As everyone knows, they did nothing of the sort. The Labour government carried on where the Tories left off, voting vast sums on improving their H Bomb at a time when they said it was necessary to make cuts in hospital beds, school meals and the like—all the very things in fact which they now blame the Tories for. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that Benn resigned from the Labour Party to show his contempt for this disgraceful dereliction of principle? And pigs might fly. Once again, he kept mum for the whole time his party was enjoying the sweets of office. But almost the very moment they were kicked out, he and his fellow tricksters were at it again. Ban the Bomb!

Last, and one hopes least, Benn wants to "strengthen democracy at all levels in society". It is not worth wasting much of the valuable space of this journal on worrying about what this vague claptrap can possibly mean. In a society based on two classes, the minority owning almost everything and the majority owning almost nothing, there is a clear limit to the amount of democracy that is possible. But if Benn now seeks power "for more democracy" (whether t means anything or nothing), surely he should face the obvious question: As you were in power for many years until quite recently, why did you not introduce this improved democracy? Why did you not resign if your governmental colleagues stopped you? Why did we never hear so much as a whisper about it during the whole period and yet the moment you are out of office you suddenly discover what has been missing?

Enough is enough. If the working class would behave like thinking human beings, instead of like sheep, then bogus shepherds like Benn would no longer be able to fleece them.

L. E. Weidberg