Filing a Complaint (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Access to Personal Files Bill which is going through Parliament at the moment, is intended to give individuals the right of access to files which contain personal information about them. However, the extreme reluctance of the state to loosen its grip on information has meant that the Bill has been steadily diluted as it has gone through Parliament. It is not a government Bill and so cannot command the automatic support of a majority in the House of Commons as a result of MPs being told how to vote by the Party Whips. So although the Bill is supported by back-bench MPs from all parties, its sponsor. Liberal MP Archie Kirkwood, has had to do a deal with the government to ensure Tory support and the Bill's safe passage. As a result, the legislation will only provide right of access to housing, education and social work files and not medical, employment and immigration files or credit records, as was originally intended. It is proposed to establish, in addition to access to paper records, the right to amend files where information is shown to be incorrect and to provide payment in compensation for any hardship which might have been caused by the holding of the inaccurate information.

For anyone concerned about the use and abuse of information this must represent a (very small) step forward. However there are good reasons for believing that the impact of the new legislation will be even less than is commonly thought. Firstly, in order to gain access to information about yourself you must be aware that a particular agency has a file on you. This is by no means always the case. For example, some employers pay money to a right wing organisation called the Economic League which provides information about prospective employees. In particular they will inform the employer of a worker's trade union activities and political views. If an applicant for a job. whose name is passed to the Economic League for vetting, is thought to be "subversive" or an active trade unionist, then the League will recommend to the employer that that person should not be employed.

Where does the Economic League get its information from? Some of it is passed to them by police in the Special Branch; some is rumour and hearsay; much of it is inaccurate, defamatory and highly damaging. In most cases people will be completely unaware that an organisation like the Economic League has a file on them. They might simply be mystified at their continual failure to get jobs that they apply for. But even if they did know such a file was being held they would have no right of access to see that file, since the Economic League is not covered by the new legislation.

Some computerised files containing personal information are already covered by the Data Protection Act which comes into operation later this year. This Act. passed under duress in order to comply with European standards on data protection, provides minimal access to computer files on payment of a fee. (The Access to Personal Files Bill also requires individuals seeking access to files to pay a fee to the local authority holding the information). It was partly to plug the gaps left by the Data Protection Act that the new legislation was introduced. If not. the absurd situation would have existed where, if a housing authority had computerised its filing system then individuals would have a right to see their files (under the Data Protection Act) whereas, if records were kept on paper they would have no right of access. However, because of the limited categories of files covered by the Access to Personal Files Bill, such anomalies will continue to exist especially in relation to medical records.

Why should this be of any concern to workers? Why does it matter that the state and various private agencies collect information on us which they put into files? After all much of the information collected is intended to benefit us: by enabling the NHS to give us better health care; to enable a local authority to assess our housing needs; to allow a social security officer to assess our entitlement to benefit. It may be true that much of the information which we pass on about ourselves is collated by agencies whose main purpose is apparently benign — providing welfare, education. health care and so on. But this is not the only reason it’s collected. After all, just think for a moment how much information about yourself you are obliged to provide simply in order to claim housing benefit for example: how many rooms there are in your home; who lives with you and what the relationship is between you. details of your income and employment; what kind of heating you have and so on. Why is it all necessary?

It's necessary because housing benefit, like many other benefits, is means-tested. This means that you have no right to benefit but instead you've got to prove that you are a genuinely ' deserving'' case —that you fall within a certain category of claimant. It's not enough for you to say that you don't earn enough to pay the rent; you've got to prove it. So that's one reason why state agencies collect so much information — so that they can ration benefits in such a way that only certain groups get it. In other words giving all this information about yourself might help you to get benefit, but on the other hand, if you give the "wrong" answers then you will get nothing.

What is more worrying than the use of information to ration scarce resources is the fact that in many cases you may think you are supplying information for one purpose — getting a driving licence for example — when in fact that information is also being passed on to other agencies without your knowledge. So the information which you supply to the DVLC to get your driving licence may well find its way back on to the Police National Computer or Special Branch files and then on to the files of organisations like the Economic League. Similarly information given to the NHS or a housing authority might be passed to immigration officials looking for people who they believe have stayed in the country longer than for the period stipulated on their entry visa. So, while it is extremely difficult for us to gain access to information about ourselves held on official files, there may be few qualms on the part of state agencies about passing on personal information to others without our knowledge.


More information could lead to better provision of services designed to meet our needs. As anyone who has tried to claim housing benefit will know, this is very far from the case at the moment since the aim of the system is not meeting people's needs but rationing resources. The fact that countless officials collect information about us to which we have no right of access is worrying because we know that it can be used in such a way as to enable the state at least to control us and at worst to coerce, threaten or punish us. This is not surprising. In capitalism much of this information is collected by the state, and the main function of the state is to protect the interests of the capitalist class. One way of doing this is to exercise social control through apparently benign state agencies — schools, social services, social security. . .  A necessary precondition for the exercise of social control is information — knowing what the working class is up to, especially those labelled as "deviant " or “subversive". If effective control cannot be exercised through these "soft" control methods then there are still the more punitive methods of the police, prisons and security services. There is nothing new about these forms of state coercion. What is new is the effectiveness of information technology and surveillance methods which permit more people to be controlled in more areas of their lives. Neither the Access to Personal Files Bill, nor the Data Protection Act will do anything to alter the fundamental inequality of power that exists between individuals and the state in capitalism.

Janie Percy-Smith

The Armchair (1987)

A Short Story from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a very beautiful chair. People did not believe that he had made it himself. They asked how much it cost. Only their children understood. They always asked to sit in it and he always let them. Parents stood aside and smiled wryly, as if apologising. But the children knew what Karel's chair was for.

His hands were old. He could not make things any more. People knew that he was poor, and that he could not afford to eat well or keep his house warm. They offered to buy the armchair at a low price. Karel smiled and shook his head. They did not ask again. They knew it was Karel's chair. But they let their children visit him.

He had a strange accent. The children asked if he was a Russian spy. He nodded gravely and they shrieked. He showed them his woodworking tools and told them the names. Some of them tried to make things. On his mantelpiece was a collection of animals with the children's names cut on them. Terry said: "It's s'posed to be a horse. It's for if I ever go away". He put it into Karel's hands. It was the first thing he had ever made.

One day Rosie cut her hand badly, and had to go to hospital. After that the children did not come any more. Karel sat in his armchair and smoked his pipe and waited. They did not come. Only the ticking of the carriage clock disturbed the silence.

He stroked the arm of his chair. It was old and darkened walnut. His fingers ran idly along the engravings, feeling the wood twist and writhe under his skin. It could be a blind man's chair. The leather upholstery was scented and soft as vintage port, the back smooth and caressing. But for the sighted there was the inlay. The swirling flows and florets of mother-of-pearl had a luminous rainbow sheen which danced and flickered in the firelight and gave life and power to the grain. Slowly the fire died. The room grew darker. In the gloom Karel dozed.

He had come to England in 1926, the year of the General Strike. He was young and excited, anxious to start work, eager to use his hands to carve and chisel and polish, ready to pass on his dead father's skills. First he found work on the docks, later on a building site. For three years he did only heavy labouring, and made enough to live. Then he was made apprentice to a cabinet-maker. It was what he had waited for. He soon earned respect for his craftsmanship and his pay was raised. He began to receive commissions to make furniture for the wealthy families of the area. Although there was a slump and very little work, these families had more money to spend than ever, and he often praised his good fortune in having a skill he could sell at such a time. With time he became well-known. His furniture appeared at auctions and fetched high prices among the rich. But he never became wealthy himself. The market was very small. Most people could not afford such luxury, and he made only small profits on what he could sell. The wealthy knew his situation and often wrangled with him over his price. Sometimes he even had to sell at a loss.

In 1953 he gave up and went back into paid employment as a joiner. He was obliged to use pine and cedar, and thin veneer, and to work to deadlines. The furniture he made was mediocre. He did not bother to initial it. The owners of the firm came round for inspections. They knew nothing about wood. They asked instead how long he was taking, how much material he wasted, how many he could produce in a week. Karel worked on. disheartened.

He calculated that he earned approximately fifteen per cent of the final price of each table, and twelve per cent of each chair that he made. He did not have the energy or the heart to make things at home, and so when it became necessary to have a table of his own, to replace one which was worm-rotted, he was obliged to save for five weeks in order to buy one of those which he made at work in four hours. The humour of this did not escape him. One day, after work, he passed in front of an antiques shop and saw one of his own chairs for sale. It was one he had made at the request of a writer in 1938. He remembered it. The writer had asked grandly for a work of art. Karel had taken six weeks over it, and then the writer had been furious at the expense, demanding a lower price or no sale. In the end Karel had sold it for cost. Yet it was a magnificent piece for all that. It was priced at seventy pounds. Karel stared at it for a long time. Then he went into the shop and gave the owner a deposit of thirty shillings. Every month he returned with another thirty shillings. It took him four years to pay. In those four years something went out of him. He never made anything of his own again.

When he came to retire the firm were very nice to him and the manager made a little speech. All the employees had an extended tea-break and he was presented with a carriage clock and a solid silver wine goblet. They shook his hand and wished him luck and hoped he would not forget them and would come back for visits. He said he would like that. Then he was on the street and alone. He clutched the goblet and the clock tightly all the way home, and then he locked the front door and drew the curtains and sat in his armchair and wept quietly.

The chair creaked a little under him. He woke up. The fire was nearly out. The children had not come. He stared into the darkness. He sighed and stood up wearily, his hand went up to stroke the wooden figures on the mantelpiece. Pain seized him momentarily, in the silence he could almost hear their shouts and laughter. The children understood. They knew what things were made for. He breathed hard. There was life in the crude cut of their figures, life and vitality and perhaps even joy. And there was a kind of beauty and truth in the creation of things for their own sake, to be used and loved and perhaps abused but still loved. Karel's chair had been sold for the last time. It should not have been made for sale, but for love. And it was. His heart jumped. He went to the light and switched it on. He was dazzled. He caught at his breath. The first thing he saw was the table he had made and bought from work.

He stared at it, a sense of distaste growing inside him. It did not belong here, in the same room with the armchair and the animals. His chest felt constricted. Pain stabbed at him. It did not belong here! He went over to it, grasped the edge in both hands, and began to lift it up. The table weighed very little. He dragged it to the doorway and manoeuvred it through. His breath came in short gasps. He wanted to sit down. The table stuck fast in the doorway. His strength seemed to ebb away. He realised that something was happening to him. He became frightened. His chest tightened as if in a vice. He could not move the table. He walked unsteadily through the other door into the workroom and found a small hatchet. His legs shook. There was a ringing sound in his ears. He stumbled over to the table, swung the hatchet down. The shock ran up his arm and made him gasp as the wood splintered and flew. He struck again, and then again. His eyes clouded over. He could not breathe. He dropped the hatchet and staggered over to the armchair. He fell sprawling into it. The blood pounded in his temple and behind his eyes. He did not have the breath to cry out. His hands went down to the arms of the chair, gripped them hard. His back arched in pain and then his body doubled over, fingers searching in the carvings and grooves of the chair-arms, groping in panic for help. Hideous laughter seemed to burst all around him. Toneless music deafened him. The room turned grey and dull. He tried to look round at his animals, at his chair. They had become empty and lifeless. All the colour had fled. He could scarcely see them. There was nothing left. His mind began to race. He knew what he had done, what they had all done. There was no escaping it. Only the children understood. But money would teach them not to understand. It would make them forget. It would stop them listening. It would stop them looking. It would stop them loving anything for its own sake because it had the power to beat them and trample them and starve them until they they learned to care more for cost than for life itself. And he had not understood that. He was like the children. Only the grown-ups understand the world they have made. He did not fit. His chair did not fit. That was the real truth.

The room seemed to tilt away from him. His hands froze on the edges of the chair. His head rushed as though in a strong wind. He knew that his heart had stopped. His face was a white mask, but somewhere in his whirling brain a smile flashed momentarily. He did not belong. His animals and his armchair and his love, they did not belong. It was all alright now.

Paddy Shannon

Playing the game (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been criticism for some time that today professional football is run as a business; winning is everything because it brings in the money. If that means boring or aggressive behaviour on the field, that’s hard luck on the punters who have paid to come and watch. No longer do butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, because of a real interest in the game, use some of their accumulated profits to support the local team with no expectation other than that they should do well. Apart from a few exceptions like Elton John who still funds Watford and looks for no financial return, those who now invest in football clubs do so for profit. If a club is successful, with regular gates in excess of 25,000, there is money to be made. Obviously there is only room for a few at the top and with talks of a Super League the atmosphere might get even more rarefied.

Then a new way of making profit was discovered. Crystal Palace sold part of one of their terraces as a site for a supermarket. Although, after hostile publicity, they "consulted" their fans and decided not to go ahead with a suggested merger with Wimbledon. they are also getting rent from Charlton FC whose fans were not consulted on the move from the Valley, and many of whom consequently voted with their feet. After all, shareholders expect to make a profit; players' and staff wages and running costs have to be paid. Television and changing lifestyles mean the days of mass attendances at all but a few clubs are gone. According to the March 1987 issue of the consumer magazine Which attendances have dropped from 33.6 million in 1957 to 16.5 million in 1987.

Recently there has been a well publicised, much more cynical effort to milk the game. Third Division Fulham were in a bad way in May 1986. Its chairman. Ernie Clay had sold the club's movable assets - its players. He also agreed with Kilroe, a property development company, that part of the ground should be used for building luxury flats with a guarantee that football would continue on the ground. Still £6 million in debt, he sold the club and ground as a going concern to another property developer Marler Estates, whose David Bulstrode became chairman of the club.

Shortly after taking over Bulstrode assured a meeting of supporters that Fulham would remain at Craven Cottage for two or three years although his company did intend to build a new stadium and eventually develop the ground. By assuring the local council of this, he persuaded them to refuse permission for the Kilroe partial development, the obligation for which Marler had taken over in the deal.

There can't be many people who don't know what happened next - a sudden announcement, only weeks after that undertaking, that Fulham were to be killed off in a merger with another local club. Queens Park Rangers, whom Marler had just bought. Presumably QPR's ground is not at present suitable for development although the BBC are due to build new offices nearby - perhaps then a hypermarket will seem more profitable on the site than a First Division football club! The Fulham ground at Craven Cottage would be completely built over in a luxury development.

But even property development whizzkids are not infallible. Bulstrode had overlooked two things. The first is the peculiar affection in which Fulham - that unfashionable and not particularly successful club - is held, even by many who have never been there. The second is that, if changes are to be made in Football League structure, they must be agreed by the League management - in effect chairmen of the major clubs, who have their own axes to grind.

Roy Hattersley, Jimmy Hill and Malcolm MacDonald.

The Players' Union saw the proposals as the thin edge of the wedge, throwing players out of work. So the League, the FA. and the Players' Union lined up with irate supporters of both clubs. Here was a story good for the media; not many could resist the banner headline FULHAM SOLD DOWN THE RIVER. Apart from demonstrations a protest meeting was called at Hammersmith Town Hall. The deputy leader of the Labour Party thought it a good platform on which to join the local MP Nick Rainsford and various football notables. Nevertheless, apart from the local council's promised refusal to grant planning permission for the development, Marler still thought they'd get away with the basics of their plan and prepared to ride out the storm.

But then, to defend himself against accusation of a sudden sell-out. Jim Gregory the present chairman of Queens Park Rangers stated he had been negotiating with Marler since September 1986. This threw an entirely new light on the matter. Not only was Bulstrode clearly shown to have lied both to the council and to supporters, but his co-director at Fulham, Robert Noonan, as well as the chairman of Walsall FC Terry Ramsden, had in the past few weeks considerably increased their share-holding in Marler. Marler's share price rose dramatically on the announcement. But insider dealing is the current dirty word, signifying the unacceptable face of capitalism. Previously unmoved Tory MPs suddenly expressed concern for their image and the silence of Sports Minister, Dick Tracey even worried his colleague David Mellor. Suddenly Bulstrode began negotiating, his only expressed condition is that the buying consortium must be genuinely interested in football and guarantee the continuation of the club. But quite clearly they're all playing a quite different game to football.

Eva Goodman

Designer politics (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are many ways to try to persuade people to buy a magazine: from putting a picture of a glamorous celebrity on the cover to promising a "shock, horror" story inside. Other magazines and journals try to attract readers by advertising special offers and free gifts. For organisations whose main concern is profit this comes as no surprise. The competition for readers is intense not least because a large circulation will attract profitable advertising. It is little wonder that the packaging and the gimmicks become as important as the content.

So, bearing that in mind try to guess which monthly journal in a recent issue contained within its stylish covers a special offer for unisex boxer shorts ("They're stylish! They're fashionable!"); another offer for "extra strength" condoms ("Teatless for the aesthetic among us"); and a feature on what to buy and where to go on Valentine's Day? A number of possible candidates come to mind. City Limits or Time Out perhaps whose main purpose is to inform young Londoners where to go or what to see? Or one of those glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan directed at the "liberated" woman-about-town? Or a spoof article in Private Eye maybe? 

No! It was the magazine that still refers to itself as the "Theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist Party" - Marxism Today. To be fair there was an attempt to try to give the boxer shorts some political significance. The reader was offered a choice of two styles - one with the word "Proletariat" in cyrillic lettering printed all over them; the other featuring the Aeroflot logo! (No, this really wasn't a Private Eye spoof). It was perhaps slightly surprising that Marxism Today was selling boxer shorts with an apparently pro-Soviet appeal since it is the journal of the Euro-communist lot in the CP. Or maybe it was a closet gesture of support for Gorbachev, who, if the western media are to be believed, is as trendy and style-conscious as Marxism Today. It was harder to try to discern any kind of political message behind the ad for the condoms, although they are, we are told, "brought to you exclusively by Red Stripe".

The Valentine's Day feature began with an overt attempt at making a political connection by suggesting that "the obvious gift for an activist" is a telephone answering machine. "Late for meetings?" it continued, "buy them Stephen Rotholz Icon watches". Or perhaps a £650 hand-made bicycle is more up your street as a present for your "Valentine"? Or a piece of Lalique glassware costing, we are helpfully informed, from £50 to £15,000. And for that special Valentine's night out? How about dinner for two at a Burmese restaurant which will cost you £30? Marxism Today even comes up with a suggestion to fill the pregnant pauses should the after-dinner conversation begin to flag. Shares and share fluctuations, of course! And for anyone with a conscience then Marxism Today helps us off the hook by announcing that "popular capitalism may be subverted with information from Stewardship Unit Trust, who will invest your money in ventures which don't have connections with alcohol, tobacco or defence industries". Well that's okay then. Ideologically sound shares!

Marxism Today claims to be a serious political journal. It's true that in between all the trivia quoted above there were some serious political articles aimed mostly at the trendy broad left rainbow coalition of good causes. Class politics are out. Life-style politics are most definitely in. Forget about trying to change society in any meaningful way and concentrate instead on changing your image and Marxism Today will tell you how. Design, presentation and packaging are being used to disguise the emptiness of their politics in much the same way as Conservative, Labour and Alliance parties which give as much attention to the colours, logos and wrappings of their policies as they do to the content in their attempt to sell them to the punters. The idea that you can win people over to your side by the packaging rather than the content of policies is nothing new. Elections, in particular, have always been long on fine-sounding rhetoric and short on incisive political analysis. Offering their readers designer Marxism Today condoms and boxer shorts is just the 1980s' version of politicians "buying" workers' support with free beer.

Marxism Today must be totally out of touch with the lives of the majority of workers in this country for whom whether to buy Lalique glassware or an answering machine as a Valentine's Day present is not a decision that they are likely to be losing much sleep over. Most people do not lead the lives of trendy lefties giving support to a handful of "good causes" because they've received the ideologically sound seal of approval from the political "style" gurus. Trying to win support and readers with gimmicks like boxer shorts and condoms shows contempt for workers and is no substitute for sound analysis of capitalism and convincing arguments for socialism. The Communist Party has always been short of both so perhaps, after all, it's not surprising that they've given up trying to sell politics and have turned to selling "lifestyles" instead.

Janie Percy-Smith

The great divide (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The "North-South divide" has become part of political rhetoric. The government recently issued figures which showed that of the jobs lost in recent years, 94 per cent were in the north of the country and only 6 per cent in the south, thereby seeming to provide still more evidence of a division between North and South. In fact the "north" now includes almost anywhere outside the south-east of England as the Midlands have also suffered massive job losses. Predictably, the opposition parties have blamed this on the government's mismanagement of the economy. Roy Hattersley, Labour's deputy leader and shadow chancellor, said the government had "scandalously neglected those areas of the economy with which it does not feel any emotional sympathy and deep political interest" (Independent, January 21). He accused them of favouring city and financial interests in the south-east at the expense of manufacturing industry, which is synonymous with the interests of the regions. Edward Heath, the former Tory Prime Minister and leading "wet", said that the North-South divide was moving further south and that the government should pursue a policy of investment for the regions. What was required, he claimed, was a "constructive, co-ordinated development policy for the country as a whole".

The Liberal-SDP Alliance is always keen to talk about divisions in society. At the recent launch of their joint election programme, which was designed to paper over the damaging splits between the two parties, they talked of the need to unite the country through co-operation and partnership. Partnership in government, they argued, is the only way to heal the divisions between North and South. They also urged co-operation between workers and employers. that class division should be forgotten in the interests of a united nation. This is rather like urging someone being mugged to co-operate with the mugger.

Chancellor Nigel Lawson and other Tory ministers denied the existence of any North-South divide. Lawson claimed that the worst of the recession is over, that the economy is growing fast and that over one million new jobs have been created since 1983. But these new jobs have not been spread evenly across the country. On the government's own figures, since 1983 there were 446,000 new jobs in the South-East, but only 135,000 new jobs in Scotland, the North-West, the North-East and Yorkshire and Humberside added together. There has been a five per cent increase in jobs in the financial services to 2.25 million, but manufacturing output is still four cent below its 1979 level. Thatcher has claimed that it is wrong to talk of a North-South divide as parts of the South are doing badly. She has got a point, although it does seem strange that she would want to remind people of the severe deprivation and decay that exists in parts of the South-East, especially areas of inner London.

Manufacturing industry has suffered badly in the current world depression. Many coalmines, steelmills, shipyards and factories have been closed and many others have had severe job losses. Some towns and cities have rates of unemployment in excess of 20 per cent, with some pockets in these areas having much higher levels. This is not a deliberate government policy however - governments can do little to affect the way the economy operates. All wealth under capitalism is produced for sale on the market in the expectation that it will make a profit for the owners. If a product cannot be sold at a profit then production is cut back and workers thrown on the dole. Many industries in the north of the country have been faced with this situation and have acted accordingly. Most of the political criticism seems to want a "fairer" spread of employment prospects across the whole country. Even if this were possible, the implication of this kind of argument is to spread poverty across a wider geographical area. Which ever way capitalism inflicts its suffering on the working class is unacceptable. To argue about its location but ignore its real cause serves only to perpetuate it.

Talk about a North-South divide, or indeed whether workers are employed or unemployed, only covers over the real division in society -  the class division. If you have to work in order to live, if you are a member of the working class, then you are likely to experience a life of shortage, insecurity and relative poverty. Whether you live in London or Liverpool or whether you earn 300 a week or are on the dole will not change this. Clearly existing on a giro means more intense poverty than existing on a wage packet but compared to the life of ease and luxury lived by the capitalist class, these differences are meaningless. As long as workers allow capitalism to continue there will be arguments about who is doing best (or least badly). We will be told that northerners are being hard done by compared to southerners, despite the fact that both endure various levels of poverty. In fact workers themselves will contribute to these artificial divisions - not so long ago there were reports of trouble at a football match when supporters of a London club waved bunches of 10 notes at Liverpool fans and sang songs about them being on the dole.

There always seem to be a plentiful supply of Scottish nationalists who claim that the "English" parliament doesn't care about the Scots, who should get their own parliament and run their own affairs. The Brixton and Tottenham riots happened almost within spitting distance of the House of Commons; clearly, having the "mother of parliaments" on your doorstep is no sure way to peace and prosperity. Not so long ago we were told how lucky we are to live in a developed country like Britain, because if we lived in parts of Africa we'd be starving to death. They were still talking about the North-South divide, but now in global terms. It is cold comfort to people on the dole to be told that they are lucky that they don't live in Ethiopia. The absolute poverty is not the same, but its cause and solution certainly are.

The possibility of finding differences in working class existence are endless. The urgent need is to put an end to the system that creates these artificial divisions. Capitalism is by its nature divisive and competitive, whether it divides people on the grounds of race, sex, nationality or geographical location. Workers have got to transcend these artificial differences and recognise our common interest - that of a degraded, exploited class. Once we recognise our basic class interests then no force on earth can prevent us from acting accordingly, and putting an end to all social division once and for all.

Ian Ratcliffe

Why do we need socialism? (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The reaction of many workers to this question will be to dismiss it as being no concern of theirs. They are concerned, they say, with the company that employs them, with their chance of keeping their jobs and with getting more pay. They are mistaken. What happens to a particular company depends on its ability to sell its products at a profit, which in turn depends on what happens in the economy as a whole - that is in capitalism. Workers give partial recognition to this by organising with other workers in trade unions. Socialists urge them, in their own class interest, to take the further step of replacing capitalism with socialism.

Capitalism, the social system under which we live now, is briefly described in our Declaration of Principles:

Society, as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living, (i.e. land, factories, railways etc) by the capitalist or Master class, and the consecutive enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

And our Object deals with socialism:

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. 

Unfortunately, and through no fault of our ours, the terms capitalism and socialism have both come to be widely used to mean something quite different from what they mean to socialists.

The Labour Party and the Tory Party have, for many years, restricted the term capitalism to cover only part of the whole capitalist system, excluding from the definition the nationalised, or state capitalist industries. In keeping with this unjustified limitation both parties have chosen to call the state capitalist industries "socialism".

This was not always so, for some of the leaders of the Labour Party once took a different view. Sidney Webb, later to become a minister in Labour governments, signed  the Manifesto of English Socialists which contained this declaration:

On this point all socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage-system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish National and International Communism on a sound basis.

In 1907 Keir Hardie the "father of the Labour Party" - and its first champion, justified nationalisation, not as an end in itself, but on the ground that "it will prepare the way for free communism . . . in which the rule of life will be  . . . 'from each according to his ability. To each according to his needs'". In saying this he was, as he said, claiming the Labour Party to be Marxist.

The Tory Party has been equally inconsistent. Now they say that nationalisation is socialism. They did not say that in 1844, when they passed the first act giving the government power to nationalise the railways, or when Tory governments nationalised the postal, telegraph and telephone services of when they set up the Central Electricity Board and the BBC. Their version then was that these were measures undertaken in the interests of capitalism.

They have a special problem with their idolised leader, Winston Churchill, for during the greater part of his political life he was a supporter of nationalisation and, in their misuse of language, must therefore have been a "socialist". Churchill was minister in several governments which nationalised various services and in 1943, when he was Prime Minister, he declared: "There is a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise, especially in relation to monopolies">

Karl Marx spent a large part of his life studying the historical developments which produced capitalism. He identified what distinguishes it from earlier social systems, describing how capitalism came into being with the forcible removal of the peasants from the land, turning them into a propertyless class - wage earners producing profits for the owners of land and capital. In his analysis Marx set out the conditions necessary for the rise of the capitalist system of society -  a peasantry forced off the land and compelled therefore to seek employment; an owning class possessing land and money; the prevailing arrangement being the production of "commodities" (the products of industry should be, not for the direct use of the owning class but for sale in the market) and the dispossessed class being wage workers as opposed to slaves.

He showed that the essential, distinctive characteristic of capitalism is not the exploitation of one class by another, or riches and poverty (both existed when there was slavery and where there was serfdom) but commodity production as the prevailing system, wealth being produced by a class of wage-earners. So the opening paragraph of Marx's Capital (Vol. 1) begins with the words:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities". 

 In line with this, Marx's aim of replacing capitalism with socialism involved, not only the dispossession of the owning class, but the ending of production for sale. It was put by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto as "the abolition of buying and selling". Engels said: "With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with". Marx also showed that historically, in all forms of society, the way in which the products of industry are divided among the different class is determined by the existing mode of production itself.

In socialist society therefore, with production directly and solely for use and the consequent disappearance of the money system, the wages system and incomes from the ownership of property, all will have free access to what has been produced. This brings us to another misuse of the word socialism, based on the fallacy that state capitalism (nationalisation) is socialism. We are told the world is divided into "capitalist countries" and "socialist countries", the latter comprising Russia with her allies and associates, China, and such modern countries as happen to have governments which call themselves "socialist" (France and Spain at present and Britain when the Labour Party is in power).

This theory is totally without foundation. In all the 160 countries in the world there is a wage-earning class divorced from the means of production, getting a living by being the employees of the companies and governments which own and control society's means of production and distribution. In all there are inequalities of wealth and income; the more money you have the more you can enjoy of the products of industry. In all, the prevalent form is commodity production' production for sale at a profit. (In Russia for example a large part of the revenue of the central government is described as "a share in the profits of state industry'). The very existence of the 160 separate countries with their conflicting interests and armed forces is an indication of world-wide capitalism for, as Marx said, the formation of the separate nation states was a necessary part of the establishment of capitalist class supremacy.

In seeking to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism the appeal of socialists is to the working class of the world, in whose common interest it is to bring about that revolutionary change.

Edgar Hardcastle 

Between the Lines: Pioneers of Socialism (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

GOBBLEDEGOOK TIME

It is hard to understand quite why Question Time (BBC1, Thursdays, 10pm) is so called. It should, if accuracy ever became in fashion at the BBC, be called Non-Answer Time or Evasion Time or Any Cliches or, perhaps, just plain Idiots' Hour. The format of Question Time well reflects all that is undemocratic in capitalist politics. At the front sit an invited team of "experts", all accomplished in various ways in screwing up workers' lives. The night I watched (5 March) there was Baker for the Tories, Clwyd for Labour, Carlisle for the Liberals and a journalist whose name I was not only unaware of before the programme but cannot recall a week after it.

The role of the team is to answer "questions" posed by the invited audience. The questions are selected in advance by the producer, so what is really happening is that instead of a presenter asking BBC questions to a panel of speakers the BBC is choosing the questions which the presenter would have asked anyway and allowing them to be posed by an unpaid audience whose function is to ask, not answer. The presenter  of the programme is the self-important Robin Day, a man whose pomposity is only exceeded by his stupidity.

A few years ago The Socialist Party received some tickets for Question Time and a group went along. The programme is recorded an hour in advance, so any serious dissident comment can be edited out. One of us got in a question about war which was then consumed and twisted and evaded and played with by the experts. Later in the programme the panel had reached the dizzy excitement of discussing Britain's membership of the Common Market -  arguably one of the dullest issues in twentieth century history.

Now, members of the audience are allowed to make short one - or two-line comments after the founts of wisdom at the front have had their say and on this occasion the microphone landed in front of one of our members. "I'm not in favour of the Common Market. I'm in favour of abolishing all markets" said the socialist while Day scratched his head. Abolishing all markets? This was too much of a question for Question Time to contemplate and away went the microphone as Day pointed to a well-dressed fellow at the back who looked like he could be relied upon to get us back on to the straight and narrow. Tough luck, BBC, for it was another member of The Socialist Party who got in some first-class socialist points before the microphone danced away, taking with it the chance to address millions of viewers. Back to the panel went the sound and vision: normal service had been resumed.

So what is this freedom of speech which capitalism takes such pride in? The freedom of capitalism's defenders to monopolise the means of mass communication while the advocate of the socialist alternative is given the sacred constitutional liberty to stand on a platform in Hyde Park and address those who have not been persuaded by the media that the case for socialism is not worth stopping to hear.

PIONEERS OF REFORMISM

The Saturday-night series on Channel Four, Pioneers of Socialism, was a study in failure. It told the story of four Scottish reformers - Ramsay MacDonald (Labour leader who later joined forces with the Tories), Keir Hardie (who, despite the myth in the programme that he opposed the First World War, actually offered support to recruiting workers for the army), Jimmy Maxton ( who built a career out of promising workers reforms of the wages system which were never and could never be realised) and John Maclean (whose perceptions about capitalism were swamped in 1917 by the illusions of Leninism).

Apart from the enduring historical legend about Hardie opposing the 1914-18 world war, the programmes were well-researched and made clear just how much more the pioneers of the Labour Party understood about the capitalist system than do the pathetic Kinnocks, Hattersleys and Healeys of our time. At least the men who set out to form the Labour Party thought that something vaguely radical needed to be done, even if their vagueness overcame their radicalism. But they were reformists and the great failure of this century has been the reformist claim that capitalism could somehow be humanised from the point of view of the working-class majority.

If these "pioneers" returned today what might they conclude? After well over half a century of reforms supported by their party and seven Labour governments the working class has not had even a taste of socialism. But back in the days when these "pioneers" were active there were some other pioneers, the men and women of the working class who formed The Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904 - two years before the Labour Party was formed.

Like those other pioneers before them, Marx and Engels, the early members of The Socialist Party  were young people in a hurry, certain that the awakening of their class to the need for emancipation from wage slavery was not far off. Socialists today are still in a hurry, still pioneering new and better ways to win our class to a recognition of what needs doing. It is a pity that our efforts are obstructed, not helped, by those who stand in the tradition of those bogus Pioneers of Socialism remembered on our TV screens.

Steve Coleman

See Also:

March 1961 Socialist Standard - 'The Keir Hardie Myth'

State Capitalism (1987)

Book Review from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alfred P. Sloane, who once ran General Motors, is reported to have said: It is the business of the automobile industry to make money not cars and what he was saying applies generally to production in the modern world. It takes place first and foremost with a view to making monetary profit and only incidentally with a view to producing goods or services. Theres no difficulty in seeing this in whats called the private sector. Its clear that an employer will only carry on a business as long as it is making a profit or theres a prospect of profit. If profit stops being made, the business will either try to cut costs (usually by reducing its workforce) or, if this is impossible, will close down.

We can see this process together with its human toll in insecurity and unemployment going on all the time. And we can see it not just in the private sector but in state-owned industry too, as in the closure in recent years of so many British coal mines. Yet its still widely thought that in state owned industry profit is not paramount and that in countries such as Russia, where virtually the whole of the production process is state controlled, planning and not the profit motive prevails. In the West, because many of the state-owned industries have been concerned with providing essential goods and services (such as energy and transport) its been widely believed that they somehow belong to us all, that their purpose is to serve the community and they do not have to run at a profit.

This belief was particularly widespread in Britain in the years immediately following the second world war when the Labour government introduced large-scale nationalisation measures. The old lady who went down to the pithead with her coal bucket to collect some of what she thought was her coal had just this kind of optimism. She had been told that now the mines were nationalised they belonged to the people. In fact she was greeted with delirious laughter and told to go and buy her coal from the coal merchant as before. Many other people have been similarly disillusioned when confronted with the failure of nationalisation to bring about the shared prosperity of a new social order. And so unpopular has it now become that the present-day Conservative Party is able to gain electoral advantage by bringing in sweeping privatisation measures.

Its often said that this failure of state-run industry to give people a better life shows that socialism has been tried and failed. This is true only if you regard socialism as synonymous with state ownership (and by extension capitalism with private ownership). But another way of looking at it is that state ownership is simply an alternative to private ownership of capital and of running a capitalist economy. No matter who handles capital the state or private investors the majority of people, all those who have to work for a living, continue to have only the limited access to the wealth of society which their wage or salary gives them.

State industries

This is an approach adopted in a new book by Adam Buick and John Crump called State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management (Macmillan, 1986, 157pp.) Buick and Crump argue that state-run production is just as much concerned with profit as private enterprise and present convincing evidence that, when it comes to making profit, nationalised industries in Britain and other Western countries have on the whole been extraordinarily successful. They do not deny that state-run industries such as coal and transport necessary for the overall profitability of production have sometimes been run at a loss with the aid of government subsidies. But this has been the exception rather than the rule and in general nationalised industries, which have a statutory legal obligation to try to run at a profit, have not been allowed to continue to run at a loss. The cut- backs in the coal and iron and steel industries over the last 20 years by both Labour and Tory governments are evidence of this and on the whole anyway, despite popular myth, subsidies have not been needed for nationalised industries. They have generally produced not only enough profit to accumulate new capital but also enough to provide a property income for the private individuals who originally owned the nationalised industries. For the old private owners nationalisation meant a change in the form of ownership from private shares to interest-bearing government bonds, while some chose to receive payment in cash from the state to the full value of what was being purchased from them.

What this shows is that nationalisation does not dispossess private capitalists but simply changes their property titles. And what Buick and Crump go on to illustrate with many practical examples is that historically state intervention in industry (or state purchase as it used to be called) has taken place not for ideological reasons but to protect the interests of the private-owning class as a whole so that individual or groups of capitalists could not, by their monopoly of an essential good or service, hold the rest of the capitalist class to ransom.

The depth and sophistication of the authors analysis makes their conclusions irresistible nationalisation is essentially a buying and selling transaction involving haggling over a purchase price and represents no more than an institutional arrangement, a change of formal ownership which leaves intact the basic social relation of wage labour to capital. It is of no concern therefore to the majority of us in society, who receive in return for selling our energies to a state or private employer a wage or salary of smaller value than what we have produced. And like private capitalists or the managers of a private enterprise, the professional managers appointed by the state to run the nationalised industries are, as the authors put it. the mere agents of market forces, interpreting, more or less successfully, the dictates of the market and exploiting, more or less successfully, the labour power purchased.

But what about countries like Russia and China where there is blanket state ownership and no distinct privately-owning capitalist class? Here Buick and Crump show that the party bosses and bureaucrats who govern Russia also effectively own the wealth of that country, by virtue of their control over production and the productive machinery. The privileges they draw from ownership are expressed in the massively higher living standards they enjoy compared with the majority of Russians. Like the private capitalists in the West they derive their wealth from the surplus value produced by the wage and salary earners. But instead of, as in the West, receiving this wealth directly in the form of profit due to them legally as a return on investment, they receive it in the form of enormously bloated salaries, bonuses and payments in kind of various types holiday villas, travel abroad, access to special shops and so on.

Socialist analysis

Not that Buick and Crump claim to have discovered anything new in this. In the detailed and wide-ranging account they give of the idea and history of state capitalism, they point out that since the 1920s the Socialist Standard has argued that Russia has a capitalist class and that the system there is not socialism or communism but a form of capitalism -state capitalism. They point out too that in recent years other observers and political currents have been driven to a similar view, usually without even knowing about the pioneering work of the Socialist Party. Unlike the Socialist Party, however, most of them have argued that if Russia is now a class society in which the party leaders and bureaucrats have become a new ruling class on the basis of the wages system, it was not always so. The Russian revolution of 1917, the arguments run, was a socialist revolution which overthrew capitalism for a while until it was restored at a later date by Stalin, Kruschev or whoever. But, as Buick and Crump remark, wherever the date of capitalisms restoration in Russia is fixed, all the elements which are cited as evidence of capitalisms existence subsequent to that date were also in existence previously.

The point here is that the difference between capitalism and socialism is seen as a difference between the politics of those controlling the state and not as a different form of social organisation. And what the authors show, in their chapter entitled The Revolutionary Road to State Capitalism, is that a different form of social organisation on a socialist basis of production for use, voluntary cooperation and the abolition of the wages system never existed at any time in Russia. The Russian revolution from the very beginning was aimed not at abolishing capitalism and making the means of living into the common property of the whole community but at a takeover of the state by a minority group whose purpose was to centralise capital in the state with a view to speeding up industrial development and all this behind a smokescreen of socialist declarations.

How has this centralisation of capital in the hands of the state worked out in practice? The answer to this question is the area in which Buick and Crump are at their most original. What they do is to analyse in detail the mechanics of production in Russia and other such countries (but in particular Russia) to show precisely how and why production, even under almost total state control, takes place and indeed must take place with a view to making profit and not to satisfying peoples needs. Not to concentrate on profit, they point out, would be to ignore the pressure arising from the international rivalry of competing capitals, the pressure to compete both militarily and commercially, and therefore to accumulate capital. And the penalty for such ignorance would be economic and political collapse. So Russian planning is not aimed at satisfying the needs of consumers but at extracting surplus value from Russian workers as effectively as possible making them produce greater value by their labour than they receive in wages or salaries, just like workers in the West. Not that, under the profit imperative, planning and its production targets are a particularly precise, reliable or long-term instrument for economic organisation. They must of necessity be short-term, piecemeal and subject to constant revision as indeed they have always been in Russia as the nature and amount of the goods that can be sold on the market at a profit constantly changes.

Russian capitalism

Shades here of Western market forces. And indeed perhaps the most penetrating insight of this book is that an effective market and the forces of competition that go with it do exist in Russia. The plan does not abolish exchange relationships between enterprises but merely attempts to quantify the exchanges in advance.

In other words the state has to devise mechanisms of a market kind and the pressures which act on the state and its economic planners in the state capitalist countries are identical to the pressures which act on their private capitalist counterparts via the market. And these pressures, the need to make financial calculations in order to realise profit and accumulate capital indicate, over and above any differences of detail, the essential similarity of the economic systems of East and West. Nor does planning remove the element of competition from Russian production. Competition remains an essential and ever-present feature. There is competition between enterprises producing different goods where financially accountable enterprise managers are anxious to achieve their targets ahead of other enterprises. There is competition between enterprises which produce the same goods, with planning specifications, which are necessarily vague and approximate to allow individual managers latitude to adapt to rises and falls in spare capacity and consumer demand, have brought about a situation where a number of different enterprises may be producing, say, refrigerators at the same time in competition with one another. There is, above all, because of the pressure on managers to reach production targets, competition among enterprises for the skilled labour power available.

Such is the intensity of competition for scarce grades of labour power that even the Russian authorities admit that almost one-third of labour recruitment by-passes official channels, while many Western scholars believe that, with certain exceptions, the immense majority of workers and employees is recruited at the factory or office gates.

All this knocks sideways the arguments of those who say that what exists in Russia is not state capitalism but some form of socialism, or at least a fundamentally different economic system than in the West. The view of Trotsky, Trotskyist theoreticians like Ernest Mandel and Trotskys followers in many of todays left-wing organisations, that Russia does not operate on capitalist principles but is a deformed or degenerate workers state where production takes place at least partly for the benefit of workers is shown to be based on excessive attention to legal forms and official ideological pronouncements rather than on how the economy functions in practice. Likewise, those who, identifying socialism with fullscale nationalisation, refuse to see Russia as capitalist because it has no privately-owning class are shown wrong through overestimating the importance and effectiveness of planning and seriously underestimating the role of prices, profit and money. Often of course such Western observers have an ideological point to prove but in this they are no different from the official ideologists of the Russian state who must also insist on qualitative differences of organisation and lifestyle between socialist Russia and the capitalist West.

But if Russias state propaganda calls the society there socialist, what it claims to be moving towards as the ultimate realisation is communism . And what it is widely thought to mean by this is a classless, stateless society based on the principle from each according to ability, to each according to need. But in their final chapter, The Alternative to Capitalism, Buick and Crump examine closely the wording of official Russian pronouncements on future society and find that what is actually being advocated is not a classless society of free access at all but a society of free distribution, one in which a minority will still rule and a majority will still work for the rulers receiving in return for their work payment in kind of the things the rulers consider they need. Such a society would still be a form of wages system and in any case not a society based on the self-determined satisfaction of needs.

Alternative society

The alternative the authors offer to replace all the different forms of wages system examined in the book is just that society of free access which Russian state ideology denies. It is a society without money and wages and without buying and selling. It cannot, they insist, be brought in gradually by some kind of transition process but only as a rupture, a clean break with the present system if for no other reason than the total difference in the form that wealth takes in the two societies. In the one (socialism or production for use) it appears in its natural form for the purpose of satisfying human needs; in the other (capitalism or production for profit) it appears in the form of exchange value for the purpose of being sold on the market at a profit. And the two are mutually exclusive. In socialism, as the writers put it:

"Goods would simply become useful things produced for human beings to take and use . . . people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution centre and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers."

And they go on to suggest how it could be organised in practical terms. Such arrangements are possible today, they conclude, because our resources, technology, skills and knowledge are sufficient to allow us to produce a massive abundance of all the goods and services we need in order to live comfortably on a worldwide scale. But if this is to be achieved then we must organise ourselves democratically on the basis of voluntary cooperative work instead of forced wage labour and through production for use instead of profit and all this in a society without states and frontiers, without rulers and ruled, without leaders and led.

Some might find these recommendations require too great a leap of the imagination, but they should not be deterred from reading this excellent book. It is a landmark in the study of modern society to which no short account can do justice and it is thoroughly readable. It will find its way on to the bookshelf of socialists but it will also be read by, and change the thinking of, many non-socialists. 

Howard Moss