The Housing Question, Again (1967)

Book Review from the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Housing, like everything else under capitalism, is a commodity. To get the shelter they must have to live, human beings are forced to pay for it. Naturally, the standard of housing they get depends on what they can pay—and what most can pay is, thanks to the wages system, restricted by the price they get from selling their mental and physical energies to an employer. So that under capitalism the housing standards of most people are restricted to what they need to keep themselves in working order. Or, rather, this is the ideal. In fact, it is never achieved and many workers have to live in conditions which even capitalism admits no human being should have to suffer. Professor Donnison, who was a member of the Milner Housing Committee, argues, in a recent Pelican book The Government of Housing, that such kinks in the housing market can be ironed out.

After examining the needs of households and how they vary through a person’s life (unmarried, married with children, after the children grow up, old age), he says that it should be possible to work out a housing policy which gives everybody the type of housing they “need”.

Building houses is a business and those with money invested in it expect to get the normal rate of profit. So it is no use working put a policy unless you can ensure that the houses can be sold. The housing problem, as Donnison sees it, is how to redistribute demand (“effective” demand, of course) for housing to those who need it so that the housing market can be sustained:

  The difficulties of the richer countries arise not from an absolute shortage of personal income required to meet housing costs, but from an unequal distribution of incomes amongst households, and from a relationship between incomes and housing needs which is ill-matched, both in terms of income groups and in terms of the lifetime of individual households.

Donnison’s solution is to pay housing allowances “to enable poorer households to compete more effectively in the housing market”.

This is a classic case of a “redistribution of misery” a la Beveridge Report. The total (effective) demand of the working class for housing is not to be increased but is to be redistributed more efficiently so that people can buy what they need. Socialists have always denied that this was the problem. As far as the working class are concerned the problem is that they can’t afford the housing that human beings could—and therefore should—have. And we're not talking about minimum utility buildings for workers, but about houses for human beings. This problem will last as long as housing is a commodity and as long as people's “effective” demand is restricted by the wages system; that is; until capitalism is replaced by the common ownership and democratic control of the means of social life. Socialist society, where housing, like everything else, would be produced for use and where buying and selling would have gone, would only be faced with a technical and administrative problem here and not with a financial one. We wouldn't want to underestimate the work of planning involved but some of the research techniques (population forecasting, land use surveys, town planning) favoured by Prof. Donnison could easily be adapted for use in the non-commercial society that Socialism would be.

The book is written for the “experts”, those concerned with working and carrying out housing programmes, but that’s no reason why the rest of us should not have a look at it, especially as there are some shrewd comments on past reforms in this field. Donnison is one of the few to see that the 1965 Rent Act (hailed as the repeal of the Tory Rent Act of 1957) “is in the longer run a measure for the raising rather than the lowering of rents”. In popular usage the word “slum” is used loosely, but for slum clearance a precise legal definition must be reached. One result is that ‘uncertainty about the present criteria discourages local authorities from condemning houses whose unfitness may be humanly speaking obvious, but legally speaking questionable”. In Britain the danger to health, as from damp or lack of air or water, has been the criterion for classifying buildings as slums. A slum, in law, is an insanitary house. Local authorities have a certain amount of choice as to how many houses they declare unfit (“Many authorities are reluctant to look beyond the number of slums they are administratively and financially capable of dealing with during the next few years”). So, clearly, the number of slums so-designated is no guide to the real number of unfit houses. But more, some houses are bad from other than health reasons, as from overcrowding or mismanagement. A recent Act does allow councils to deal with such cases but still, as Donnison says:

  If the replacement programme is to be greatly enlarged, an increasing number of authorities will find that they have cleared all the houses that could properly be described as 'unfit' yet they will not have eliminated bad housing conditions.

An interesting confirmation of the Socialist argument that one reform leads to another problem is over rent control and the rates. Rent control was supposed to make the poor better off (in fact, at best, it just stops them becoming worse off). However, instead of paying high rents many had to pay high rates:

  In this country rent controls have permitted the rates levied on poorer households to increase to levels that would otherwise have been politically intolerable. Thus a large share of the revenue of which landlords were deprived as a result of rent control coupled with inflation was not retained by tenants but diverted to local authorities.

The recent rate relief reform was brought in to solve this problem, created in part by the rent control reform. Who knows what new problems this new reform may cause?

Donnison is good on immigration, often canvassed as a cause of bad housing. In practice there is no difference between internal and international migration but in Britain there has been a net outflow of migrants since the war:

  For a dozen years after the war there was a small net outflow of migrants from the United Kingdom; but between 1958 and 1960 this changed to a moderate inflow that rose steeply during the two years before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was brought into force—an increase that may have been largely brought about by the impending Act itself. But by 1964 the net movements of migrants was again an outward one. Further restrictions imposed since then and the recent increase in emigration from Britain will ensure that this loss continues.

Socialists have always said that migrants are further victims of capitalism’s bad housing not its cause. Donnison, writing of London’s housing, confirms this:

  Restriction of immigration from overseas will not have a major effect; the immigrants’ plight is the outcome not the cause of London’s housing difficulties, and if the inflow of immigrants is stopped their places will be taken by people from other parts of the country—or a number of essential jobs will remain unfilled.

There is no doubt that the Tory and Labour governments introduced immigration control not for economic but for political reasons as a sop to colour prejudice. So much for Labour’s professed stand for the brotherhood of man.

Adam Buick

More Trouble about the Means Test (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

A “Means Test” is defined by Chambers dictionary as test of private resources determining or limiting claim to a pension or allowance.

Such tests are centuries old. Ever since the time, four or five centuries ago, when governments and local authorities began to take over from religious bodies and private charity the obligation of supporting the destitute, there have always been tests of “Means” or “Needs*'.

It is a perennial problem of capitalism and no matter how many times the relief system has been reformed and given new names no solution has been found.

Even if we leave out of account the fact that workers generally do not consider their wages sufficient to meet their own ideas of reasonable needs, and consider only the question of a bare subsistence, capitalism cannot guarantee that workers will always have it provided. Capitalism cannot guarantee continuous employment and cannot even guarantee that wages will always be sufficient to provide bate subsistence.

So unless the authorities were prepared to let the destitute starve (and put up with consequent unemployed riots and encouragement to theft) they hail to pay out state and local government funds. But they could not let the applicants name their own figure for the money they wanted, nor could they fix their own figure and let everyone have it who applied.

If they had done this it would have acted as an inducement to workers in low paid jobs simply to give them up.

The authorities tried everything from the “whipping of beggars” in Tudor and Elizabethan times, to making them go into the hated workhouses, or work colonies, breaking up families, offering assistance in the form of food, making the unemployed prove they were genuinely seeking work, and applying means tests which subjected the applicants to official enquiry to demonstrate that they really were near destitution.

Then came schemes of compulsory contributions to provide for the payment of specified benefits in sickness, unemployment and old age but although this altered the form of the problem it did not abolish it, did not free the applicant from satisfying conditions laid down in the regulations and did not abolish destitution—there are still about two million people who in the course of a year get public assistance (recently re-named Social Security supplementary benefits).

In an article in the Guardian (2.6.67) Mr. Peter Jenkins states that “seventeen forms of benefit are subject to Means Tests of one form or another.”

No Means Test is popular but the most detested forms of test are those which go beyond the applicant and take into recount the means of other members of the household family.

It was a household means test which was one of the explosive political issues of the nineteen thirties. The National Government which came into office in August 1931 decided to apply to unemployment pay a determination of needs regulation. It was not a new test because it had long existed for applicants for public assistance: what was new was to apply it to the unemployed who had exhausted their right to benefit. The continued payment of benefit was made dependent on the household income and the applicants' savings, ownership of a house or other property.

When the National Government introduced the necessary legislation the section of the Labour Party in opposition condemned it, but as those members of the Labour Party who were in the National Government pointed out, this measure had been approved by a majority of the Cabinet of the Labour Government while it was still in office as part of their extensive economy plans. (Details were published in the Socialist Standard October 1931).

That particular means test as applied to unemployment pay was abolished when Ernest Bevin was Minister of Labour in the war-time National Government in April 1941, but a similar though not so searching test was and still is applied to applicants for Supplementary Pensions. The applicant has to provide information about his own and his wife’s income from all sources, “including such items as pensions from former employers, regular payments from friends and relatives, and the assumed income from capital”, though twenty shillings a week of this “other income” is disregarded in determining the right to and amount of benefit.

Other forms of means test relate to the present government’s schemes for rent rebates and rate rebates. Mr. Richard Crossman in July 1966, at that time Housing Minister, urged local Authorities to put up rent of council houses to a “more realistic” level and to meet the situation of low-income tenants by giving them rebates, subject of course, to evidence of need. He was opposed by objectors who maintained that the authorities “have no right to interfere with individual liberty by prying into tenant’s means to assess a fair rent.” (Daily Mail 9.7.66).

In a typical rent relief scheme, that used by the Greater London Council while the Labour Party still controlled it, the applicant had to give full information about the income of himself and wife from all sources and also the name and age and family relationship of all persons living in the house. But instead of asking for information about the income of those persons the Council added to the estimated total income determining the right to relief an amount of fourteen shillings a week for each person aged 21 or over and seven shillings a week for each person aged 18-20.

Peter Jenkins in the article already referred to, now tells us that long argument had been going on inside the Cabinet about applying a new means test in connection with a proposed increase of family allowances which would raise the allowance for the third and subsequent children by ten shillings a week—he claims that the Ministers were almost equally divided, with only a majority of one against it. “With the Cabinet so astonishingly narrowly divided it is certain that the issue will come up again.”

With unconscious irony he tells that the advocates of the new Means Test “were able to argue that each according to his needs is equally a principle of socialism” — as if that socialist principle can have any possible connection with a device of capitalism to screw down the pittance provided for its victims.

Edgar Hardcastle

Party News (1967)

Party News from the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Please Note

Mid Herts Branch will not meet during August First meeting in September will be on Monday September 4 at 8 p.m. at the Bedwell Community Centre.

Camden (Bloomsbury) Branch will not meet during August. Meetings re-commence at Conway Hall on Thursday September 7 at 6 p.m.

Southend Branch will deliver the Socialist Standard to your home. Write to H. G. Cottis, 19 Kingswood Chase, Leigh-on-Sea. Essex.

Camden (Hampstead Group) 

We have pleasure in announcing the formation of the Camden (Hampstead Group) of the SPGB. The Group will hold its first meeting on Monday 4th September, 8.30 p.m. at The Enterprise, Chalk Farm Road. N.W.l (opposite Chalk Farm Underground Stn.). It is intended to meet alternate Mondays after this date. A series of lectures, discussions etc. is being arranged and details will appear in the August S.S. In the meantime, if you are interested in the activities of the Group and wish to go on our mailing list, contact Secretary: Tel. 01-485 3182. The Group will also be pleased to consider speakers from other organisations to address them.

50 Years Ago: German Atrocities (1967)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last raid on London gave opportunity for an almost unprecedented flood of feeling, mostly cant. It is not the agony of the parents who lost little ones, the wives who have lost husbands, the husbands whose mates have been cruelly butchered, the mutilated remains moaning in the hospitals that finds expression in the horrified Press. No. They are horrified to order, and with a set purpose, and that purpose is not to deter the Germans from making such raids, but simply to inflame popular feeling against 'the enemy'.

Having embarked on war; having consented to this most serious business in life, having adventured thousands and perhaps millions of human lives in the trial by brute strength, it is folly to talk of putting any limit on the appeal to brute strength.

Much has been made of the fact that women and children have been numbered among the victims of the German air raids. But it is no worse to kill a man, notwithstanding all the sloppy nonsense that has been written on the subject. As a matter of fact the mental torture of a man dying in consciousness is probably far greater than that of a child similarly placed, while as for women, the fact that they find themselves brought within the range of actual hostilities may help them to realise their responsibility for the war—and it is not a little.

A harsh judgement this may seem to be, but then every phase of war must be judged by harsh standards, and the only ones who have any grounds for complaint are those who are opposed to the conflict, or at all events are not consenting parties to it.

From the Socialist Standard August 1917.

The Review Column: Peace (1967)

The News in Review column from the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peace

This, let us remind ourselves, is peacetime. At the time of writing no two countries are at war, in the sense of a formal declaration of hostilities.

Yet these are some of the events reported in just one day’s newspaper last month:

• Riots in Hong Kong; four people killed. Gurkha troops take up position on the frontier with China.
• Israel and Egypt exchange accusations over which side started the last bout of fighting in the Suez Canal area.
• Rebellion in the Congo. Three United States transport: aircraft sent to give long range support for the government: forces.
• Civil War in Nigeria. Government troops reported advancing rapidly southwards through secessionist Biafra.
• American Defence Secretary McNamara admits that United States Marines suffered heavy losses in recent fighting along the southern edge of the demilitarised zone in Vietnam.
• Mr. Kosygin, Russia’s Prime Minister, describes the world situation as “very grave.”

If some of these conflicts are complicated, this is only a symptom of the fact that capitalism is a mass of tortuous interests, treachery and coercion.

If they are persistent, this is an indication that capitalism continually produces unrest and insecurity, that it is a society which cannot be at peace.

And if there are statesmen whose only contribution is to tell us the obvious—that reveals the impotence of the men who say they can control capitalism, can tame its terrors.

There is, of course, a lesson in all this, about the future of the world and the welfare of the human race. But it will not be found in the morning newspapers.

Promises

Two of the most persistent of working class dreams are better and more plentiful housing and lower prices. It follows from this that these two issues are the subject of many promises, from politicians and others, and that much nonsense is talked about them.

Take housing. Tory Shadow Minister Sir Keith Joseph recently said that, provided everyone accepted a few brilliant ideas he had just happened to think up, the housing shortage in England and Wales could be over in five years.

This probably sounded quite plausible to anyone in need of a house, or to anyone who had forgotten that politicians are in the habit of promising to solve the housing problem, and that for a very long time they have been telling us that the solution to it was only a few years away.

Perhaps those same people have forgotten that Joseph was himself Minister of Housing when the Tories were in power; that he failed to abolish the housing shortage and failed even to produce any clear or original ideas about how it was to be tackled.

Now take prices. Take an article written in the Lloyds Bank Review last month, in which Sir Ronald Edwards, chairman of the Electricity Council, thought that “the average price per unit of electricity should be significantly lower at the end of 1977 than at the end of 1967 ”

This sounds as though the Electricity Council has found a secret denied to all other industries. But Edwards would be more convincing if he had not written his article at the very time when electricity prices are about to go up all over the country by about ten per cent. He would carry more conviction if his promise were not hedged about with all sorts of risky assumptions on future economic trends, which Edwards must know could easily upset his calculations.

He himself destroyed the whole thing with the obvious comment: “Only a fool or a prophet would stake his reputation on a firm forecast of electricity prices a decade from now.”

Capitalism is full of problems, and of smooth-talkers who say they can solve them. The tragedy is that so many people believe the promises, and fail to see the nonsense for what it is.

Zilliacus

Konni Zilliacus, who died last month, was the Left winger to end all Left wingers. The only man who was in step; the persistent thorn in his leaders’ sides; Labour’s unsleeping conscience. So they said.

Zilliacus had many disagreements with his party, especially on its foreign policy. He was one of those Labour M.P.s who found to their astonishment after the victory in 1945 that Bevin handled foreign affairs very much as they had expected a Tory Foreign Secretary to.

He was in almost all the rebel movements and eventually he paid for this, with expulsion. What Wilson has called “dog licences” were as necessary then as they are now; Zilliacus could not get back into Parliament until he had given the Labour leadership the necessary assurances about his future conduct, and they had accepted him into the fold once more.

Zilliacus was a prime example of what are called honest politicians. Perhaps we can accept this—although he never took his disagreements with Labour to the extent of resigning, nor did he come back on his own terms—but the fact is that such men are dangerous.

The so-called Left wingers encourage the idea that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Labour Party, that its only fault is a temporary deviation from the straight and narrow path, that a change of leadership is all that is needed to put everything right again.

No one will ever know how many futile votes this idea has won for Labour. No one will ever know the extent of the confusion and the cynicism it has caused.

What we do know is that the problems of capitalism are as acute as ever and that the political ignorance and apathy which supports the system is still there, encouraged by the Labour Party, by its members honest and dishonest, its leaders and its rebels.

Toying with Soldiers (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the days when she was a member of the Opposition, Barbara Castle made something of a name for herself by launching a crusade for the abolition of the penny charge for ladies' lavatories. In the 1945/50 Parliament, Jimmy Hudson was famous for his passion for temperance reform. More lately, Leo Abse has become well known as an advocate of easier divorce. Thus do Labour Members, who call themselves Socialists, busy themselves with trivial, although newsworthy, adjustments to the capitalist system.

The latest in this undistinguished line is Mrs. Anne Kerr, the Member for Rochester and Chatham, who on July 4 last moved in the House that “. . . the sale, manufacture, import, export and advertisement of war toys in the press and magazines and on television should be banned.”

Now there was once a theory, well favoured among the Left Wing, that the cause of war was to be found in the conspiracies of the great armaments kings. Mrs. Kerr, of course, was only blaming the firms who make toy armaments. Perhaps it was safer that way; she was not, after all, pressing for the abolition of war itself, nor even of the weapons of war—only of plastic toys that go pop and sparkle and rat tat tat.

Predictably, the motion had the Parliamentary correspondents dipping their pens in laughing gas, and provided a golden chance for every amateur psychologist in the Commons. A thinly attended House heard some novel theories on the cause of war and of social violence. Then they threw out the motion and got down to more serious business.

The whole episode was fatuous enough and only deserves any attention because so many of the false ideas MPs proudly paraded are widely held also by the people who vote for them:

Destruction to many people is fun. At a church fete, for example, they will pay sixpence or a shilling to break crockery. (Mr. Tilney).
. . .  a dangerous motion because it opens a door to legislation to control the right of individuals and their children to think. (Mr. Onslow).

The best thing to do here is to begin at the beginning. It seems too obvious, but so many arguments about armaments ignore the fact that they exist only because war is an accepted way of settling society’s disputes. There has been a steady progression of the destructive power and efficiency of weapons; Mrs. Kerr complained about toy “guns, bombs, flame-throwers and booby traps” but these are among the gentler instruments at the disposal of the war makers.

Let us go on and ask why society tolerates the persistence of war. Here we can find a clue in the reply Mrs. Kerr received from Mr. Darling, Minister of State of the Board of Trade, who said that

. . . the United Kingdom toy industry was one of our most flourishing industries and last year exported £16 million worth of toys.
. . . Generally speaking, the Government wanted United Kingdom toys to be sold increasingly overseas . . .  (Daily Telegraph 4/7/67)

Now this does not apply only to toys, of course; there are all sorts of British industries which are exporting their products, and which the government would like to see increase their overseas trade. But the British government is not the only one with this idea, and British industry is not the only one engaged in an export trade. The capitalist world is, in fact, a mass of competing firms, states, combinations of states, all struggling for what in the end they hope will be some sort of economic supremacy. Sometimes this rivalry can be settled by a trade agreement or some other kind of pact. Sometimes it can be settled only by war.

Under capitalism, then, wars are unavoidable — which means that armed forces and weapons are necessary. But if it is all inevitable and necessary to capitalism, it is also extremely unpleasant — terrifying, dirty, obscene, brutalising. What is more natural, then, than that governments should try to hide the truth by embellishing the military man's life with false glamour?

Soldiers, sailors and airmen who do their grisly job efficiently are not simply successful men—capitalist society regards them as heroes. This line is pushed hard by the Services when they are advertising for recruits:

Don’t talk to Peter Cobb about hotted-up Minis. He drives this nuclear submarine. Wouldn’t you like to?

The glamour propaganda is aimed at young people and of course it has its effect on children. A child's life is full of dreams and expectations, most of them modelled on the adult world. If his parents regard a killer in uniform as a hero, the child will do the same-even more so. When a kid is playing soldiers, perhaps with the toys Mrs. Kerr thinks so odious, he is acting out what he hopes will be his heroic future.

But this is not the only aspect of life in which the kids imitate their elders and in which they prepare themselves for growing up under capitalism. The same shops which sell plastic machine guns probably also sell toy Post Offices and shops, Monopoly sets and so on. These games teach children some of the commercial facts of capitalism — that goods are made to be bought and sold, that survival is a matter of making money, that success goes to the man who can pull off the clever deal.

War toys teach children that organised killing and violence is an accepted part of society today. And since this has its roots in the economic basis of capitalism, there are as many objections to the sale of, say, toy money as there can be to the sale of toy flame throwers. Indeed, the fact that a child spends some happy hours picking off his mates with a plastic machine gun does not place him irretrievably on the path of being a military murderer, any more than winning at Monopoly will make him a future property tycoon.

As long as its people are content that it should be so, it is capitalism which maps out their future. The adults of capitalism fight its wars, and support the whole system which gives rise to them. They do this not because when they were children they played with toy soldiers, but because they are misled into believing that capitalism, with its property rights, its economic rivalries, its wars, is the best of all possible human societies.

No capitalist party—certainly not the Labour Party—ever does anything to end this massive and fundamental deception. Let us be kind to Mrs. Kerr and say that she is muddle-headed. But not every M.P. was so blind; the Member for St. Marylebone, for example, was almost caught out in approaching the heart of the problem:

You will not end wars by stopping children playing at soldiers, although you probably would stop children playing at soldiers if you prevented wars.

It is a rather unnerving experience, to be agreeing with Quintin Hogg. It probably won’t happen ever again — but strange things can go on, when fishes fly and forests walk, when there is blood on the moon or the House of Commons tries to put capitalism to rights.

Ivan

Gaspers: Patriotic Fervour (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

A boom in the sale of American flags was reported today by the Wall Street Journal. This is attributed to the fighting in Vietnam and the normal wartime increase in patriotic fervour . . .  (Daily Telegraph, 4/7/67.)

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I was almost stunned by the Foreign Secretary’s statement. Once or twice I thought I was listening to myself.” (Duncan Sandys in the debate on Aden. House of Commons, 19/6/67.)

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‘‘We thought just because we’d passed the Education Act and the National Health Service Act we’d ended poverty but we hadn’t done anything of the kind.” (Professor Richard Titmuss, Sunday Times, 9/7/67.)

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“. . . the Ministry regards it as important that every working man should have a living wage, but the difficulty is defining a living wage.” (Roy Hattersley, Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Labour, House of Commons, (10/7/67.)

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“All these arguments, remember, were based on the Bible. Thank God, in most of those issues wiser counsels have prevailed.” (The Rev. W. Grahame Bailey, at the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. The Times, 24/5/67.)

Past Migrations (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first thing to remember about emigration in the modern World, is that only workers emigrate. The wealthy “take up residence”, “pay a prolonged visit” or “retire abroad”. When King Edward VIII abdicated and left the country, nobody said that he had emigrated; he had gone into voluntary exile.

This is not a mere play on words. There is a world of difference between the two, the difference in fact between Capitalist and Worker. The wealthy do not need assisted passages, or National Assistance, and if they do not like a place when they get there, they can always move on. They are in no way economic rivals to the workers of the area they visit, so nobody worries about their accents or skin colour. No race-conscious worker would complain if the Aga Khan moved in next door; he would be too busy boasting about his distinguished neighbour for that. It’s the Aga Khan who would do the complaining, and not on account of race, but from an understandable reluctance to share the joys of working class life. The problems of emigration spring from the one thing that both immigrants and native workers share; their poverty.

Migrations are as old as humanity. From the beginning of their existence men have migrated. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, they have moved in search of better and more fertile land, or to escape a stronger enemy, or because of over-population in their homelands. The last of the great migrations came in the centuries following the Discoveries. The whole of America and Australasia, together with large areas of Africa and northern Asia, were peopled by Europeans. Many went freely to seek their fortunes or to escape poverty and oppression at home, but millions were forcibly transported. Indentured servants, negro slaves and convicts all went to provide the cheap labour the new, expanding nations needed.

This was as cruel and bloody a chapter as any in the history of man. By the 19th century European type States had been established in these new lands, while the work of dispossessing the aboriginal inhabitants went steadily on. From then on an immigrant came into an established community as an outsider. There were still however vast unexplored areas into which pioneers could push. By the 20th century these had largely been occupied, except for something like a gold rush that could still send the adventurers on the move.

Emigrants flocked from Europe and Asia to all the new lands, but the one that gripped the imagination, then as now, was the United States. Most of the other new lands were either colonies of the very powers the emigrants were escaping from or, like South America, known dictatorships. America became the symbol of liberty and a myth amongst downtrodden peoples

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
Th wretched refuse of your teeming shores
Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

runs the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, with more sentiment than accuracy, and into America in about hundred years went vast numbers of immigrants. It is estimated that by 1921, when the Quota Act was passed, over 35,000,000 people had entered the United States. To us in Europe today, emigration to the United States has an importance that no other emigrations have, because America is the foremost Capitalist power and its ideas spill over into the rest of the world. These include attitudes to race and colour that are grafted on to existing attitudes, like the unpleasant idiots over here who burn crosses of paraffin soaked rags in weak imitation of the Ku Klux Klan.

From the very beginning, the more capital or influence that a settler possessed the better it was for him, and the greater his chance of success. This applied equally to the later immigrants who, if they had money, could push on from the ports of dis-embarkation into the new areas. Many Swedes, Germans and Dutch had some capital and struck out into the Middle West to start farms. Land in the frontier areas was usually available to all, but money to buy tools and equipment made life easier. Many settlers had special skills and abilities, for which there was a growing demand in an expanding economy, and in this they resemble the people who leave Britain today for Canada and Australia and for Africa and New Zealand. But a vast number were poor with only their passage money and some not even that, in Britain private and public assistance boards grew up to pay the passage of poor people. In Ireland the famines of the 1840’s drove a vast number overseas, while the city of Hamburg found it cheaper to ship paupers to the United States than to provide relief for them or to jail them. The abortive revolutions of 1848 also swelled the numbers. The conditions endured on the journey in these cases are too well known to repeat.

A pattern emerged that is a familiar one today. Poor immigrants tend to settle at their points of dis-embarkation, which are usually industrial centres as well. This is found in Britain today; areas near large airports and main-line railway termini often have large immigrant populations. It is no accident that the Southall area has a large coloured population. Nearness to a point of arrival, plus industry and cheap housing, continue to produce this effect. The areas around Euston Station, the main point of arrival from Ireland, have a large Irish population. Once such a pattern becomes established, friends and relations come to join the pioneers. This happened in America, where New York, the main point of arrival, became a great immigrant centre, with vast populations of foreign origin. When an immigrant prospered, as many did, they soon moved on to pleasanter areas, but the less-fortunate stayed to swell the slum population.

In the early part of the 19th century the main stream of immigrants into America came from Western Europe—from Great Britain and Ireland, Holland, Scandinavia and Germany. Of these the main prejudice was directed against the Irish. They were anti-British, Catholic and, coming from a poor agricultural economy, tended to undercut on wages when they first arrived. The notice “No Irish" was a common sight outside factories. By the 1880’s immigrants from Western Europe were falling off and Eastern Europeans, Mediterranean and Oriental people began to flock in. These were poor, illiterate and were referred to as New Immigrants. The older immigrants, who had begun to be absorbed, treated the new arrivals with hostility and contempt. In 1877 during a slump in San Francisco an unemployed meeting ended in a two-day riot against the Chinese. A party was formed called the Working Men’s Party of California commonly known as the Sand Lot Movement. Its main plank was to get rid of cheap Chinese labour. The irony of the situation was that the party was led by Irish immigrants.

Racial prejudice is essentially irrational, and the prejudices that grew up around American immigration bore little relation to common sense. The thirteen colonies that became the nucleus of the United States were British, consequently the laws, customs and language of the new State were British. At a later stage French and Spanish areas became incorporated and much of their culture was absorbed. Nevertheless, these were subordinate to the existing pattern. At the time of the American War of Independence Americans regarded themselves as the only true Britons, and thought that the ones left behind in Britain had deteriorated and become decadent In this they resemble the Rhodesians of today.

The most desirable thing to be in 19th century America was Anglo-Saxon. The use of this name to describe anything as racially mixed up as the average Briton, is itself typical of the arrogant nonsense talked by the racial theorists of the day. The following masterpiece of idiocy was written in 1885 by Josiah Strong, a Congregational minister and secretary of the American Home Missionary Society in Ohio. In his book Our Country he claimed that Anglo-Saxons above all other races were champions of “a pure spiritual Christianity" and were being schooled for the “final completion of the races"

  Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race unless devitalised by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others and mould the remainder, until in a very true and important sense it has Anglo-Saxonised mankind. (Age of Excess—Ray Ginger).

In its cool arrogance, it makes the puny efforts of our home grown racialists very tame indeed.

Scaling down from the “Anglo-Saxon" came other West Europeans, Mediterranean peoples, East Europeans, Mexicans down to Orientals, who had the additional disadvantage of being considered coloured. American official policy strove to make all immigrants into Americans, and discourage the formation of minorities. In this they had a great deal of success but real antagonisms still lay under the surface.

Until workers learn to recognise the real cause of their poverty, Capitalism, they will continue to find scapegoats, and who better for this purpose than a stranger from across the world?

Les Dale

The Wandering Worker (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Throughout history man has wandered over the face of the earth: in primitive times, in communities seeking new pastures or hunting grounds. Today people move as individuals looking for work. These movements are studied and discussed by sociologists and politicians who consider “mobility of labour" highly desirable but one aspect of it — the “brain drain” — as disastrous. The problems of modern migration give rise to many proposals of social reform and even to political parties whose case rests on stopping workers from abroad coming in to Britain and on getting out some of those already here. The immigration is blamed for bad housing, crime, spreading disease and undermining the security of local workers. The period since the war has seen millions of workers all over the world moving from the lands of their birth in search of a better life elsewhere. Their destinations have been the industrial centres where boom conditions demanded their services. Many set off from lands where large-scale industry is hardly known so that it is no surprise that problems arise from such dramatic changes of environment..

Britain provides a good example both of the inflow of workers from other lands and the outflow of local workers to distant lands. Western Europe too has attracted workers in large numbers over the past ten years, not only from southern Italy but also from North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. British workers, with their long experience of industrial capitalism, find their labour-power in great demand in places like Australia, Canada, South Africa and even in recent years Western Europe.

Posters with such messages as “Opportunity Wears A Thousand Faces In Manitoba”, articles and adverts in the press on the joys of life in Canada and Australia rub home the point. Such is the dissatisfaction of workers in Harold Wilson’s New Britain that in recent years more have left the country than have come in. The housing problem and the prospect of higher wages are among the factors that tempt workers to move elsewhere. There are other factors too. In 1957, after the Suez affair, 160,000 left Britain, nearly doubling the figure of earlier years and the years which followed until 1963, when the number started rising to an estimated total of 170,00 in 1965. The feeling that “the country is going down the drain”, a sort of negative nationalism, is expressed by disillusioned workers who hope that prospects may be better elsewhere. A Canadian official pointed out in a letter to The Times (27.1.65):

   From 1953 to 1964 the changes in the total number of pre-immigration medical examinations carried out in our European offices correspond to changes in unemployment in Canada (Our emphasis).

The other side of this coin is that when there is unemployment in the receiving country, the immigrants tend to be the first out of a job. Estimates say that about half-a-million workers returned to Britain during the slump years of the 1930’s for just this reason. In spite of the rosy pictures drawn by governments touting for immigrants, and [they made] their way home again. An article in The Times of 13 January this year, discussing why immigrants leave Canada, pointed out that of 195,383 British immigrants to Canada in the ten years between 1956 and 1966 more than 56,300 returned to Britain. Some went back to Canada again after rediscovering the joys of working class life in Britain.

One difficulty is that of being in a strange country without friends. Canadian health and welfare services were considered inadequate. The article concluded by remarking that “it is really a question of whether one is sufficiently hard working and adaptable to meet modern changing conditions in a dynamic country”. But, as workers should know, this is a requirement of capitalism the world over. They are also only too familiar with the smear that things have gone wrong because they haven’t worked hard enough.

Australia, with its sunshine and fine beaches, attracts far more British workers than Canada. But the assisted passages for immigrants are not given in order to fill the beaches, but to fill the vacancies in the mines and steelworks, factories, shops and offices. Their energies are also needed to open up new mineral deposits well off the beaten tracks and on the building sites where skilled bricklayers are in short supply. There are snags, of course, as the Daily Telegraph (8.10.66) pointed out:

  Hundreds of British immigrants at Elizabeth, a satellite town 20 miles from Adelaide, are unemployed or in financial difficulties, mostly because of retrenchment in the local motor and building industries . . .
   Mr. Bill Simpson, a local estate agent, says ’hundreds’ of immigrants are selling or trying to sell their houses to return to Britain or to move to other States in Australia. The Rev. Ralph Hood, a Methodist Minister, said recently: ’People are on the bread line and sometimes below it. I know of some children who had not been able to go to school because they haven’t any shoes’.

No doubt some are cursing the day they ever read an advert like “Get Up and Go People Are Cut Out for Australia” and the passage that read “Australia offers you a future as big as you wish to make it. Help Australia grow and you'll share in her prosperity”.

At present the movement of workers from Britain to Australia, Canada and the United States is growing. Many are young and highly skilled. This is the so-called brain drain. Some politicians try to make a moral issue of this, claiming that the country that paid for their training has a right to their services. It’s another story, of course, when doctors trained in India or Pakistan come to Britain to work. This well shows that workers’ energies and skills under capitalism take the form of commodities. It is up to the seller to get the best possible price. That they leave the land of their birth to do this shows that they have no stake in it. The workers have no country.

While some workers have been leaving Britain, many others have moved in. It is estimated that two million immigrants are now resident in Britain, 700,000 from Eire; 350,000 from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa; 400,000 from the rest of Europe; and the remainder from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Africa and other ex-colonial territories. It is the last group which, by the colour of their skin, have been the most conspicuous. Generally, only the most menial jobs have been open to them and they have suffered most from discrimination in housing. The 1964 election saw the immigration issue used by certain Tory candidates as a weapon against the Labour Party. Quite unnecessarily as it turned out; the new Labour government soon outdid their predecessors in limiting the number of immigrants allowed into Britain.

Immigrants did not import the housing problem. It was here already. Like workers coming from Eire, they found themselves barred from many lodging houses and as a result the landlords who were prepared to take them were able to charge above average rents. Workers coming to Britain have settled in areas with low unemployment, mainly in the London area, the Midlands and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Few have gone to Scotland or Ireland where unemployment is high and where the local workers are themselves moving out.

A further aspect of migration is the movement of workers within a country. The recent tendency in Britain has been called “the drift to the South East”. This highlights the changing industrial structure of Britain with the decline of industries like coal mining, shipbuilding and heavy engineering which were located in the north of England and Scotland; and the advance of light engineering, electronics, motor and aircraft production mainly located in the Midlands and South East England.

This sort of situation was summed up by Townsend Warner, writing at the end of the nineteenth century in Landmarks in English Industrial History:

   Man is of all kinds of baggage the most difficult to be moved. . . .Man is classified as ]labour' and is represented as 'followings' where there is a demand for labour.

However, this applies only to the working man who has to get his living by working for an employer. It applies to capitalist society where the economic considerations of having enough workers at the right place at the right time overrides all other factors. Homesickness, insecurity, housing problems are all by-products of it. Workers seeking a better life elsewhere represent only a small proportion of the movement of population in recent years. Most have moved as the result of wars and the setting up of new states:

  It has been estimated that the migrations of the last 25 years, bound up with the Second World War and the nationalist movements which followed it constitute the greatest population movement of all time, perhaps a hundred million people have been involved (J. Beaujeu Gamier, Geography of Population, Longmans, 1966).

After the independence of India and Pakistan 17 million people moved: “in 1957 there were 8.4 million refugees in Pakistan and 8.85 million in India”. Nor is there any let up to the problem, as the new flood of refugees following the recent Middle East war shows.

Migration of workers brings problems in its wake but is itself caused by capitalism. Wars and nationalisms are part and parcel of the system, as are the erratic movements of the trade cycle which require a mobile labour force. Wherever workers may move their problems will go with them. The employer-employee relationship remains, along with the insecurity that arises from production for sale with a view to profit.

Migration in recent years, with assisted passages and government schemes for helping the immigrant settle in, has changed in detail from the days of convict settlements and the mass movements following the Highland clearances and the Irish famine; but the essential features remain. For the capitalist class opportunity to make a profit wears a thousand faces in Manitoba and elsewhere. This means millions of workers have to move to the places where their energies can be most profitably used. Welfare states or not, discontented workers still wander the world in search of that elusive “good job.” The answer is not in a new job or better employer but in abolishing the status of labour-power as a commodity. The world would then belong to all to enjoy, instead of as today the world and its workers being at the disposal of a privileged few.

Joe Carter

Australian Outlook (1967)

From the Seven Days for Socialism! International Supplement (August 1967)

To describe the position in Australia, one could truthfully say, as could be said of most capitalist countries. Socialism is just as near or as far off as the industrial development and the political understanding of the working class will allow it to be.

Not withstanding the promises of the “emancipators” of the last 150 years, there has been no “hot-house” growth of socialist ideas—any more than there have been further developments in Labour or Liberal ideas.

The one great difference is that while the Liberal, Labour, Communist and other parties have chopped and changed—and even stolen each other’s programmes from time to time—without basically improving working class conditions, the Socialist Party has propagated principles based on an understanding of the Socialist teachings of Marx, Engels and others who not only interpreted the world differently but showed the working class how to change it.

To many, these words may sound stale and outmoded (we are often twitted by our opponents on the score of “not being with it politically”) but the basic conditions of capitalism remain the same in Australia as elsewhere. However much the pedlars of vote-catching political slogans and election gimmicks try, they do not improve working class understanding of Socialism by their confusing jargon.

In the so-called affluent society of today, emphasis has been stressed on the comparatively long periods of almost full employment. But in Australia this so-called affluence is marked by many workers having to do two—or even more—jobs, while many wives are working with the children helping occasionally.

And even with these multiple incomes many of their purchases are ‘hire purchase’ with millions owing, much of which will never be paid. Where mum, dad and the kids have to work to obtain sufficient to try and cover the costs involved in the ‘ersatz’ affluence, there is not much of what our masters used to call ‘family life’.

With minds filled with capitalist ideas and bodies geared to the grind of capitalist economy, work is now all that matters to most people; and the fact that they ‘live to work’ rather than work in order to live is soothed by pills, powders and pop singers.

The greater the acceptance of the status quo, the more stagnant the growth of Socialism appears to be. Still, there is always a questioning of the value of the existing political parties and the industrial organisations.

From a country once renowned for its ‘militant’ trade unionism, Australia has now reached a point where the ‘fighting’ ability of the trade union movement is gauged by the amount of money they spend on futile appeals to arbitration courts in an endeavour to retain a basic wage that doesn’t even cover the minimum requirements of the family unit for which it was originally designed.

‘Militant’ seamen, wharf labourers, miners and others who once vigorously eschewed any idea of “carting their grievances to capitalist courts” now seek economic salvation in professional, academic advocates of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

The ACTU, dubbed by the militants from its inception as “the Graveyard of Industrial Disputes”, like its counterpart in Britain the TUC willingly accepts the working man’s burdens while shepherding its deluded followers into supporting its political reflection — the Australian Labour Party, and the leaders monotonously desert to the political ranks to spread deception still further.

Our self-styled ‘leftists’ still perpetuate the illusion that the salvation of the working class lies in Labour governments. Labourites, communists, humanists, radicals, and other professed emancipators oppose the socialist view that the emancipation of the working class lies in the abolition of the capitalist system.

This, of course, is not confined to Australia. Socialists in all countries are faced with similar ‘intellectual’ opposition, our opponents adorning themselves with attractive political labels in order to suborn unsuspecting workers from socialist parties. The dissemination of socialist knowledge will help workers detect the political fakirs.

Capitalism has provided another subject for a ‘hands off’ slogan — the ‘aggressors’ are on the rampage in the Middle East and by the time it is discovered who the ‘aggressors’ are, thousands of workers’ lives will have been buried in the sands on both sides of the Suez.

And while workers lay down their lives for lands they do not own we have to listen to the leaders of the various political parties telling us that “We must defend ‘our Country’.” The fact that such things can happen is an indication of the need for a better understanding of social and political events. This understanding can come only by the spread of socialist knowledge and it is here where the socialist enters the scene.

When the workers understand the need for socialism they can work for its achievement; while they submit to capitalism they will have to fight to defend it.

Hence the pressing need for the dissemination of socialist ideas. It is a long and difficult task but the reward--“The World for the Workers”—is well worth it!

W. Jacee

The American Scene (1967)

From the Seven Days for Socialism! International Supplement (August 1967)

To properly understand the American scene today, a perspective is necessary that goes deeper than the celebrities and events noted by the newspaper headlines. Superficially, the news seems to be the talk and posturing of the ‘big shots'. When people ask what is going on in the USA they tend to think of these things. Will Bobby Kennedy be able to make enough political capital out of Johnson's slip in popularity to be nominated by the Democrats in 1968? Who will be the Republican nominee; Romney, Scranton, Reagan, or Nixon? These are thought to be the political questions concerning the American political scene. As for the economic scene, that concerns whether there will be a recession or an inflation. The social scene—why that involves whether women’s hemlines are going up or down. Most people in the USA do not care very deeply—and rightly so— for life will go on pretty much the same.

For those who care about the political questions, it is widely agreed that the answers hinge on the Vietnam war. If, as seems likely, the war continues unabated then Johnson, although he will win the nomination, will lose the election to the Republicans, with Romney a likely standard bearer for the winners. If a truce is reached in Vietnam, then Johnson will win. But insight into the dynamics of American social and political life will not be gained from these ‘newsworthy' events. The vast majority of the American people, the working class, realise this and give only scant attention to the antics of the professional politicians and their games because they are of only minor entertainment value. Changes in the political bosses of workers are of no more concern to them than are changes in the bosses of the corporations for which they work.

Workers feel powerless to deal with the important questions affecting their lives. So they ‘participate’ in politics only to the extent of investing some emotional energy by identifying with some personality whose victory will give them some vicarious satisfaction. The workers’ sense of powerlessness with respect to events also makes them unconcerned with policy issues concerned with proposals for reform. Middle-level bureaucrats, editorial writers, intellectuals, and all species of ‘middle class’ reformers frequently advance proposals that are intended to solve, within the confine of capitalism, such problems as racial conflicts, riots, decaying cities, unemployment, air pollution, and foreign policy dilemmas. Such people often bemoan the lack of interest among workers for these proposals. Workers, through their experience, have developed a cynicism about such promises and they feel “let those who get paid for it worry about it”.

Outside the small strata of the decision-makers for capitalism, little serious attention is given to the stuff that is served up by the news media as the subject matter of politics. Thus, in one sense, the American scene remains unchanged. The frivolities and gossip that pass for political and social issues are discussed by a small number of those concerned, the masses apathetic; businesses keep on making profits that are quietly pocketed by the ruling capitalist class, and everyone continually faces the problems which the capitalist mode of production makes inevitable. From this perspective American capitalism, like capitalism everywhere, has not changed fundamentally in the past hundred years—only the problems have gotten larger. War, for instance, now threatens to annihilate the human race. Political class consciousness, the conscious desire for Socialism, is still all but non-existent. The American scene, for all its noise, is quiet about Socialism.

Yet this discouraging sameness of the American scene is deceptive. Beneath the surface, the forces that shape American society are at work, ceaselessly changing the foundations. It is not merely that machinery improves, workers become more skilled and new commodities are marketed while capital accumulates. Men’s ideas also change as their conditions of life change.

Ideas about social conventions change — customary formal dress and bathing attire are trivial examples. Ideas about right and wrong change—the propriety of chattel slavery, birth control, and tobacco smoking by women are illustrations. However, so far these changes in ideas have stopped short of rejecting the assumptions of capitalist ideology. Before there can be a change in ideas basic to a society, there first must be a crisis of confidence in which the ability of accepted ideas to explain events is disbelieved. There is some evidence that the USA is just starting to enter such a crisis of confidence.

America is the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world—in fact it is the strongest and wealthiest in the history of the world. Its resources and technology are the wonder of the world. By all its own standards US capitalism should be a veritable Utopia. Its propagandists often do talk as if it is a utopia. Yet everywhere there are signs of a growing uneasiness—an increasing realisation that something is deeply wrong. Americans who, in the past, have overwhelming believed that the 'American way of life' was the highest goal possible for humanity are now having second thoughts.

Those who speak for capitalism see a shiny future of more consumer gadgets, more and bigger autos crowding more and wider highways at ever-increasing speeds, hurrying more and more people to more box-like houses in the suburbs. This philosophy of more and more of the same is all capitalist ideologists have to offer. More and more people are beginning to wonder if, even were this continuous spiralling of abundance possible, it will provide the answers.

The truth of the matter is that, however successful and secure American capitalism looks at first glance, it is plagued with deep contradictions. These contradictions revolve around the inability of American capitalism, despite its wealth, technology and power, to satisfy human needs. On one hand there is fabulous wealth, on the other hand the most basic of human needs go unsatisfied. Scientists will eventually put a man on the moon but American society cannot perform the simple ask of getting a hungry man with his face pressed against a shop window into contact with the food he needs. Children die of rat bites within sight of the world's marvels of engineering. The illiteracy rate and the rate of infant mortality of the US are above that of far less advanced nations. Farmers are paid not to produce food while millions in the world are starving.

America is a sick society and this is becoming more apparent with each passing day. An assassin kills a stranger merely because the stranger wanted to help people to vote; the assassin is found guilty, then is given a public welcome as a hero, and then runs for governor of the state! In the world’s most advanced civilisation the city streets are not safe at night. A model ex-marine and boy scout commits mass murder. In spite of massive government effort, rumours concerning the last president's assassination are given widespread credence. Violence and threats of violence are a continuing part of American life. Police savagely assault and even kill poorer citizens with impunity. Desperate men fight back by striking out at anything within their reach. Large scale armies are regularly deployed in the major cities in the summertime to preserve property and 'law and order'—the same law and order which created the conditions in the first place. This capitalist ‘utopia’ is becoming a hell of hatred, despair, and violence. This can no longer be ignored and so people, or at least some people, are beginning to lose confidence in the reasonableness of the system.

One of the phrases that is being heard more frequently is the 'credibility gap'. It originally referred to the disbelief of the government's statements about the Vietnam war and was then extended to refer to the gap between the pretentions of what the capitalist American way of life stands for and the deeds and actions of that same society. The truth about the war, about the Kennedy assassination, about the relation of cancer to cigarette smoking, about CIA involvement in labour and student activities—or about anything, will not be found in what officials say to the public.

The inability of U S capitalism to solve its contradictions is slowly undermining people's confidence in its ideology; this is the first step. In the middle ages, feudalism began to crumble before developing capitalism when men became sceptical about the accuracy of its world-view. Don Quixote, the famous book ridiculing feudal values, marked the stage when feudal ideas were being rejected to prepare the way for capitalism. In a similar way, capitalist values are being first weakened, then disbelieved, and finally ridiculed.

In the middle ages it was segments of the intellectuals, lower clergy, and tradesmen who first became disenchanted; today it is mainly segments of the youth. One small stratum, those known as 'hippies', have openly rejected, in their disgust, most of the traditional values of bourgeois society. A somewhat larger segment, the 'new left’, has undertaken political action avowedly against the system; although, unfortunately, it does not understand the system well enough to take effective action against it. But beyond those observedly alienated from capitalist ideology, there are widespread misgivings among almost all youth. There is a growing crisis of confidence about capitalist ideology.

This is not to say that all these doubts have led any significant numbers of people to explicitly reject capitalism and to become socialists. This is where we American socialists come in. The great challenge of the times is in hastening the development of a socialist consciousness that is the prerequisite of Socialism. The SEVEN DAYS FOR SOCIALISM will find us carrying on as usual with our propaganda activities in Boston, New York, and a few other scattered areas. We have accomplished no momentuous things, nor do we expect to do so in the near future. We take heart with the thought that, although our numbers are insignificant, our ideas will triumph. The intellectual bankruptcy of capitalism— and its phoney ‘radical’ critics—assure our success.

William Jerome

The Canadian Scene (1967)

From the Seven Days for Socialism! International Supplement (August 1967)

Like all nations that dazzle the world with their riches, Canada is well to the fore in such displays—and less forward in showing its poverty.

But riches and poverty go together, as also do the defenders of the one and the champions of the other, who are in fact less far apart than they suspect.

No less so in Canada than elsewhere, Mr. Diefenbaker, the ex-prime minister, waxed eloquently on Canada’s greatness—and raised the old age pension. Mr. Pearson, the present prime minister, is not less rapturous in flag-flapping and boosted the pension a bit more. Mr. Douglas, the aspiring Prime Minister, would keep profits in Canada away from Americans and give the old age pension another hoist.

Only Mr. Thompson, erstwhile top banana of social credit, fond of his country though he is, had nary a mite for the pensioners —and was dumped by the wayside. Canada then is just another capitalist country. It is a giant in size, in industry and agriculture. It ranks among the first half-dozen producing nations, despite a sparse population of twenty million. But it exploits its wage slaves as much as the traffic will bear, searches the world for outlets for its commodities, and takes sides in international squabbles, having been involved in nearly all the talking and fighting adventures of this century.

It has its demands for higher wages and better working conditions which are sometimes made to stick; a wearisome burden to government and industry, whose appeals for moderation in the national interest have not always convinced workers that low wages are a mark of distinction.

It has its mods, its diggers, its hippies, its peace meetings, freedom marches, petitions to Parliament and all the churning, raging, futile produce of a world turned away from the vital need to really know its own nature.

It is just another capitalist country.

French Canada

Canada was originally taken from the Indians by the French and English, the latter then dispossessing the former, the descendants of both presently snarling at one another over their respective tongues’, ‘cultures’ and other ‘differences’ as vital as the output of the representative ‘love-in’. French Canada, located almost entirely in Quebec, has been prodded by the church and Quebec capital for many years for reasons less than altruistic, and has been belted and catered to by English Canada with motives of no greater merit.

Traditionally, the Quebec political scene has been dominated by the Liberal Party which has had to tread warily to offset the work of ‘nationalistic’ elements in the province. Liberal influence has waned in recent years, provincial politics becoming dominated by the Union Nationale Party, an organisation existing entirely in Quebec and aiming at almost every kind of ‘independence’ for the province, short of complete separation from the rest of Canada. On the federal field the Quebec Liberals have been weakened by the rise of a group originally part of the National Social Credit Party which broke away from the parent body and established itself as an independent social credit party. The reason for the breakaway is believed to be the need to reflect Quebec nationalism, a must these days for all parties searching for votes in Quebec.

None of Canada’s five social credit groups having federal or provincial representation is interested in social credit, or even talks about it.

Liberals and Conservatives

The Liberal Party, patterned after the Liberals of Great Britain, controls the Ottawa Government but without an overall majority and can retain hold on power only with the support of one of the other parties. Sometimes this support comes from one or both of the social credit parties and sometimes from the New Democratic Party. Its hold on power has not been seriously threatened, opinion being that no other party feels confident of strengthening its position in another election.

The Conservative Party (or Progressive-Conservative Party, as it has preferred to be called for some years now) is the Canadian equivalent of the Conservative Party in Britain. It is the leading contender for power if this should be lost by the Liberals. These two parties, in fact, have alternated in power since confederation, surviving a number of political windstorms without damage.

There is little to distinguish between the Liberal and Conservative parties. With minor differences on how best to run the affairs of the capitalist class, they have never been divided when these affairs have conflicted with the interests of workers—who have suffered this unity and have so far learned little from it.

The New Democratic Party
The ‘party of labor’ is the New Democratic Party. It is the result of a deal between the former Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the trade union movement, the latter deciding a few years ago that the time was ripe for labor to come to power. Successive elections, despite considerable trade union support, did not bring ‘labor’ to power and trade union enthusiasm, even, interest, has declined. The initial gain through trade union support was matched by the loss in farmer support that had formerly gone to the CCF, leaving the NDP parliamentary representation practically unchanged from that of the CCF.

Socialists were critical of the CCF through all the years of its existence. Coming on the scene professing Socialism as its aim, it spread a number of wrong ideas in the name of socialism. In its later years it came to the view that its advocacy of ‘socialism’ did not help its election chances and it dropped the use of the term and all suggestions that it held any aims that could not be approved by Liberal and Conservative supporters. It was then ripe for a complete break with its rebellious past and the New Democratic Party was born. This body, if anything, is an even more watery collection than the British Labour Party, reaching its odious depth in the 1963 anti-American crusading of its leader Mr. Douglas.

There are other parties that run candidates for Parliament, two social credit groups being among the successful one, although their combined representation is less than that of the NDP. All in all, the ruling class has little to grumble about, being represented one way or another by every member in Parliament.

The Socialist Party of Canada

The Socialist Party is of course also on deck, working always to keep the message of Socialism to the fore. Its membership now reaches from Montreal to Victoria and although still not numerous we would record the reply of the lion when told brashly by the rabbit of its numerous offspring, “But each of my progeny is a lion”.

Jim Milne

The Irish: Scene—yesterday and today (1967)

From the Seven Days for Socialism! International Supplement (August 1967)

At the turn of the century the ruling class in Ireland were united in the classical sense in which capitalists are united throughout the world: North and South of the country Catholic and Protestant capitalists found unanimity in their desire to promote and maintain that system of economic organisation based on the exploitation of the country’s wealth producers, the working class.

Unionist and Nationalist, Sinn Fein and Labour, ALL stood UNITED on this issue: capitalism would be the way of life irrespective of the Party that administered it, or the colour of the rag that flew at its political masthead.

As far as the working class were concerned they were not offered a choice nor had they then (or now) the degree of political understanding to make a choice. But, as elsewhere in the domain of capitalism, they were given the fiction that the personnel and location of their government had some bearing on their way of life—that life under Paddy Murphy’s lash was preferable to life under John Bull’s whip, or vice versa.

Real Issues

Needless to say, the Action was suitably embellished with promises on one hand and threats on the other. The ‘British way of life’ vied with a ‘prosperous Ireland controlling its own destiny'; ‘Popish plots’ opposed ‘Orange tyranny’. The seeds of hatred were cast around with abandon of necessity and hatred and violence were necessary weapons in the real issues, AND THE ONLY ISSUES WHICH WERE REAL WERE THOSE THAT DIVIDED THE CAPITALIST CLASS.

Here was the real motive behind the bigotry, viciousness and carnage, the hate propaganda, the ‘national’ struggle and the baloney over flags: Irish capitalism, UNITED in its purpose was DIVIDED in its means.

As the nineteenth century, with its memories of struggle and famine, retreated into the sad past of Ireland’s history it left its peculiarly malformed economic off-spring in the form of a native capitalism, healthy and virile (for the capitalists, of course!) in the north-eastern portion of the country, faltering and weak throughout the rest of Ireland. In north-east Ulster some prosperous descendants of earlier English and Scottish ‘planters’, using the wealth derived from their conquest of the native resources and their direct affinity with their class cousins in Great Britain, had accomplished a high degree of industrialisation.

The Belfast shipyards and the Ulster textile industry (which included the manufacture of textile machinery) was on a par with anything found elsewhere and, of course, other ‘service' industries had developed accordingly. The owners of these resources were culturally, economically and politically at one with British capitalism, enjoying the benefits of a parliament skilled in the artifice of class deception and the markets accruing from Britain’s position as a world power.

In the rest of the country the position was different. Those who had been the victims of earlier English tyranny, allegedly because of their religion, had, after years of struggle, thrown off the yoke that militated against their accumulation of wealth. By the turn of the century the Catholic ‘businessman’ had ‘arrived’ in sufficient numbers to engage in political struggle against ‘English domination’ that enabled their ‘favourably placed’ English competitors (including the powerful and entrenched Northern Irish industrialists) to keep them, the fledging entrepreneurs of the south, in a disadvantageous position.

One of their chief spokesmen, Arthur Griffith, founder member and leader of Sinn Fein, states the motive behind their ‘principles' quite simply:

   “It is a comparatively simple matter for English capitalists to crush out their Irish competitors and we must know that this is too often the fate of Irishmen striving to promote the manufactures of this country.
  “Under Sinn Fein policy such a deplorable error could not occur . . . and no possibility would be left as far as Sinn Fein were concerned for a syndicate of English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and home trader.” Arthur Griffith, Sinn Fein Policy; 1917.

Double Dealing Diplomacy

Thus, briefly, the conflict between the rival sections of the capitalist class: in the North industry was sufficiently strong to resist the encroachments of English competition, while enjoying the wider market and system of economic preference resulting from their association with Great Britain. In the South a fledgling capitalism needed the exercise of protectionist policies in the exploitation of the limited home market—against the time when it could meet competition on a wider field.

Interwoven into the fabric of lies and deceit used by the political manipulators on both sides to gain the power of the working class to their cause, was the double-dealing diplomacy of the political flunkeys of the British ruling class. Concerned with their direct economic interests, their allegiance to their fellow-robbers in ‘Ulster’ and the (then) strategic importance of Ireland as an Atlantic base in the event of war, they used all the dirty weapons in the arsenal of capitalism in pursuit of their ends.

The only issues which were real were those differences that divided the opposing sections of the master class. Aside, however, from their differences there was a unanimity of purpose that revealed itself in the miserable exploitation of the working class THROUGHOUT IRELAND and in the manner in which Unionist and Nationalist elements of capitalism closed ranks to prosecute and persecute the working class and its organisations.

The outcome of the struggle is well known to us today. The investment in blood of the Irish workers—for, as always, it was the workers who gave and the masters who got—is seen in the reality of the two statelets in Ireland.

Since their inception both statelets have shown a marked similarity: the governments of both areas have scarce failed to conceal their detestation of organised labour and both have introduced legislation frankly loaded against the working class. Both, each from its respective point of view, have used the ‘partition’ of the country as a propaganda gimmick to arrest the attention of their electorates from such issues as poverty, slums and unemployment. Spokesmen for each area rebut criticism by drawing attention to the same conditions in the other area!

Things Are Changing!

But things are changing! Changing with a rapidity! that would have seemed almost indecent a decade ago. Now we are in the era of ‘bridge building’, of forgetting yesterday. Now we are advised about the importance of a ‘public image’. Why?

The short answer is that the factors that divided our masters, the factors that demanded the sacrifice of workers’ blood, have now changed.

Industry in the Republic of Ireland, nurtured behind tariff walls and import quotas and infused with ‘foreign’ capital, now feels the need for an expanding market at a time when the convenient European market is trying to introduce a super-protectionist policy.

Similarly in the North, with the decline of the traditional industries and the growth of the light export- orientated industries—often financed by the same companies or corporations which have invested heavily in the South (in both instances, as a springboard, so to speak, to Europe)—there is the need for the expanding continental market.

Yet, more important still—despite ‘principles’ and the resulting struggles of yester-year—is the fact that the economy of the country, NORTH AND SOUTH, is still tied to the British market and with that country begging an entry to the Common Market, the ‘principles’ of both sections of Irish capitalism must be scrapped—under, of course, a smoke screen of new ‘principles’!

Irrelevant

Unfortunately for the governmental servants of capitalism in both areas, the change, necessarily rapid, has brought about its problems. After sowing the seeds of bitterness and bigotry—instruments of policy in the North, inevitable consequences of policies in the South— for half a century it is too much to expect, even from a docile populace, an immediate unanimous response to the new policies of the ‘bridges builders’.

The Protestant bigot, Reverend ‘Dr’ Paisley, and those of his kind, have no difficulty sanctifying their actions with suitable quotations from the government spokesmen of yesterday—even if such spokesmen now sing a different tune—and the Irish Republican Army, likewise, can quote political scripture from the gospel written yesterday in blood by the now ‘great men’ of the Southern Irish’Government.

For the working class the whole game is as irrelevant today as it was in the past. Yesterday they had the example of workers in other countries with their ‘own’ government sharing the same poverty problems as the Irish workers. Today we have the example of European workers STILL WITH THE SAME WORKING CLASS PROBLEMS living in the Common Market. As Socialists, knowing full well the nature of capitalism, knowing that that system cannot operate IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES in the interests of the working class, we feel safe in prophesying that our problems, the problems of the working class, will remain with us whatever the demarcations of capitalism’s market.

Political Parties
Space does not permit an examination of the records and attitudes of the political parties in Ireland. At any rate we are not too concerned in the niceties of their political separation. Suffice to say that they have all lent support to one or other side in the political chess of capitalism.

Whatever their title, Unionist, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein, Labour or ‘Communist’, they have all put forward the ignorant assumption that they possess the policies and personnel to make a buying-and-selling system, a capitalist system, operate in the interests of ‘the people’.

The fact that it has not worked in the interest of the working class ANYWHERE, under ANY government or ANY political party, whether in the guise of ‘western democracy’ or ‘peoples' democracy’, bears eloquent testimony to their ignorance of the nature of capitalism.

Unlike our opponents we in the World Socialist Party have no plans for running—or being run by—Irish capitalism, petitioned, united, inside or outside the Common Market. We have no urge for taking over the role of government, nor can we claim that, given the opportunity of ‘taking over the government’ (or governments) of Ireland, we could administer capitalism fairly and in the interests of all.

Banish Government 
On the contrary, we affirm that no political party, irrespective of its title or aspirations, can run a system BASED ON THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING CLASS THROUGH THE WAGES-MONEY SYSTEM IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL.

That is why our role in the political cocktail of Irish politics is the political education of our fellow members of the working class to the end of achieving mass understanding of why capitalism must always operate against us and why we must choose the Socialist alternative—a wageless, classless society of production for use.

With such understanding achieved, our purpose will not be to ‘take over the government’ but, rather, to gain, democratically, the use of its executive authority and, in concert with our fellow workers throughout the world, to banish such government—along with the system of class privilege that gave rise to it.

Richard Montague