Current Jargon (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arguing with left-wing groups is not always a useful way for socialists to spend their time, but it’s difficult to resist when they are so willing to take up the role of fall-guys to the socialist case. One such group which often attends on the SPGB is the International Communist Current; our opponents in several recent debates.

Outwardly their talk and publications are forbidding, unless you have a political appetite that relishes jargon. “Bourgeoisie”, “decadent” and “reactionary” are the ICC’s favourite words. Trade union leaders are always “derailing the workers”, politicians are always uttering “verbiage” and the proletariat are always being exhorted to “generalise their struggles”. Not bad sentiments really, except that they lose their descriptive power when you read them ten times in a single journal. Nevertheless, some do adjust to this form of political communication because it always gives the impression of familiarity, like a collage of well-known newspaper headlines gummed onto a canvas. Those members of the ICC with whom I have argued are among the most committed political people I know. Perhaps the jargon and the commitment are linked. For if you exchange the power of creative expression for a set of ready-made phrases, that only make sense when bolted together in particular ways, then you cease to be able to describe the world if you change your political position. And if you do, you must suffer a period of communicative incoherence.

Strangely, the case of the ICC is quite unlike their mechanical language. They delight in and glorify spontaneous action by the working class. Whenever some workers down tools or typewriters and strike or occupy their workplaces, this fills the ICC with hope for the revolution. Their publications are full of details about strike committee meetings around the world and they devote much space to encouraging attempts to seize control of an industry by councils of workers.

It is here that the ICC display an amiable, if childlike, character. Their sensitivity to the economic and social difficulties of the workers makes them lionise those who express militant discontent. An ICC member in an occupied factory would count him or herself as one among the potential key actors at a possible turning-point in history.

So great is their respect for spontaneous expression in the economic class struggle, that they build their programme of action around an international expansion of strike committees or workers councils. Themselves they see as providing the missing link between anarcho-syndicalism and the vision of socialism carried by the SPGB, repeated in their principles:

   Socialism, the mode of social reproduction initiated by the workers’ councils, is not ‘workers’ self-management’ or ‘nationalisations’. Socialism requires the conscious abolition by the working class of capitalist social relations based on the law of value, such as wage labour, commodity production, national frontiers, and the construction of a world human community. (International Review, May 1976, back page)

Urge the workers’ councils on, they say, and these will spontaneously throw up political institutions able to dictate the will of the workers, overcoming the capitalist class and their governments. From this exercise of power by the workers will arise full socialist consciousness in an international workers’ councils movement, that can then be used as an untainted vehicle for a complete revolution; in much the way that the SPGB says the parliaments of the world could be.

The fragmentary and local nature of workers’ councils means that their solidarity is easily broken by very ordinary propaganda from the employers. While the massive effort required to create and co-ordinate a world-wide council movement is likely to trigger invasions, or wars, in the countries so disturbed.

Anyway, the existence of the SPGB is a standing refutation of the ICC claim that all who advocate “revolutionary parliamentarism” become corrupted and absorbed into capitalism.

B. K. McNeeney

Art and Civilization (1975)

From the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Art Historians apply their knowledge of the lives of great men from the past; kings, artists, sculptors, writers and so on, and assess the worth of past ages on the basis of work done during the period. Socialists have a better approach. They apply the materialist conception of history. Only the social and economic environment explains how man acquires certain aesthetic tastes and conceptions. Above the level of barbarism, that environment is determined as much by the mechanics of the class struggle as by nature, while the majority of the population—slaves, serfs and the like— have remained passive for long periods. So we may say that the ruling ideas of any age, are the ideas of the ruling class of the time. The history of art is one continuous proof of this statement.

EGYPT. What’s left after an empire lasting 3000 years? Little more than the tombs and monuments of the pharaohs. The size of the pyramids makes them the epitome of slave-state architecture. Long since looted of their wealth, but inside there are the frescoes: the paintings on the walls—all with one subject. The dead pharaoh. The compositions are all about his life; how many slaves, wives, subjects he had. The battles he won with his armies. There are even illustrations of his favourite sports, hawking and fishing. Strikingly, the pharaoh is always portrayed larger than his subjects. Women smaller than men. Slaves a different colour altogether. All of this gives one a picture of the social hierarchy in Ancient Egypt. It was a neo-romantic civilization. The dead were worshipped.

More, the pharaoh was expected to rise from the dead. The pictures are, therefore, subordinated to the one end of informing him, when he woke up, of his past history, his greatness and the shape his body should reassume out of his embalmed tissue. This is the key to an understanding of Egyptian life-painting. All the figures are portrayed in one general pose, displaying the most typical views of their separate limbs. Heads in profile, to show the cranial curve, facial features, chin and neck. Torso and hips in a front view, showing the triangulation between the shoulders and waist and the shape of the pelvic bone. Both arms extended left and right, one palm outermost, the other innermost. The legs were both in profile, each foot pointing the same way, showing the inside and outside of foot, leg and knee. No painting survives from Egypt which did not assume this form. Therefore the ideas and needs of the ruling class, determined the artist’s and the public’s conception of beauty.

CLASSICAL GREECE. Athens was one of the first places in Europe where the old system of tribal councils gave way to government by the city-state. The social structure for them was: - patrician, plebian, slave. History for them ran from the battle of the Gods and the Titans, to the interlocking of heavenly spheres. From the Heraclitean fire to the eternal flux and slow change. The ruling class needed to promote this idea of harmony; their civilization was top-heavy with slaves. Twenty slaves for every free man! And great restrictions on employment for poor freemen. The art and architecture of the time was the ruling class’s propaganda against social unrest.

Have a look at the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Notice how geometrically harmonic are the bodies of these heroic men and women. The sculptor built up the proportion of his figures from one basic dimension: the distance between the elbow and the wrist. The perfect man or woman was one whose body, when stood with feet that much apart, formed a series of equilateral triangles. Most humans are not good enough to model for a Greek statue. Neither were the Greeks! It was just a false theory, a ruling idea imposed upon nature. This is how you account for the ridiculously small heads on the statues by Praxiteles; the continuous line between their foreheads and noses: there was a secondary system of triangulation for the face as well!

ROME. Much that is true of Greece applies to Rome also. This can be illustrated from one Roman building: the Pantheon. The temple of all the gods. The Roman empire had continuous trouble on its borders. The marauding tribes of well-organized barbarians had to be placated. One way of doing this was to find a place in your temple for a statue of the enemy’s god, then invite the enemy chief to Rome to worship it. The Greek temple plan wasn’t much good for this. The barbarian shrines were a circle of tree-trunks with a conical thatch, an altar in the centre and a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. So the Romans built their enormous Pantheon on just these lines.

From within it is a ring of pillars supporting a celestory, with blind niches holding statues of the minor gods; below and between the pillars, are the shrines of the major gods. In the centre was an altar, while, the roof was a spherical web of arches. An arch needs a keystone to hold it up. But the Romans calculated that if they cross-vaulted arches to build up a dome, they could take out the large centre-stone and the whole structure would stand confined by its own stress. The building would then be lit directly from above. It worked. The barbarians were duly impressed and the Roman civilization lasted for another 350 years. This form of Architecture was admired as much for its political usefulness to the ruling class, as for anything else. Beauty, once again, born out of expediency.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE. The Cathedral Church. Here the decorative artist, architect and sculptor had but one patron—the church. The basis of Catholicism is mystery. No revealed religion can stand up to open enquiry. So the huge gothic churches they built had to be full of mystery. The large congregation was shut off from the sacrament by a tall choir-screen. Daylight had to be the tinted light of a religious vision. The wall hardly exists in a gothic church; just holes between piers and arches—all filled with lead - framed painted glass. The statuary carved on these piers and arches shows how closely art is connected with the ruling class’s ideas. Despite the tradition of free-standing statues from Greece and Rome; these are completely tied to the structure of the church and reflect the artist’s dependence. They are slim vertical figures and are mirrored in the dress of the time; with its tall hats and slender costumes, perhaps for people who went through narrow pointed doorways. Architecture and fashion for the ruling class were connected for the first time.

CAPITALISM. The Industrial Revolution. Once the first stage of the movement towards enclosing the land was completed in the 18th century and great capital accumulation had enriched the aristocracy; they began to improve their lands, have their parks landscaped and country palaces built. In literature this period sees the beginning of the romantic revival. In art the sudden renewal of landscape painting, by Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and others. The popular conception of a good landscape painting still survives.

Among civilized people the technique of production more rarely shows direct influence upon art. This fact, to the superficial observer a contradiction to the materialist conception of history, in reality, when considered in the profound manner of a sociologist gives it brilliant support.

We can now develop upon this conclusion to Plechanov’s essay Materialism and Art. He wrote this at the end of the 19th century. Perhaps he was too close to the machine-made decorations of the time to see that they would be known as art. Some of the wrought-iron stair bannisters of the period were very beautiful. The Eiffel Tower and the early iron bridges were new ideas in three-dimensional form. The difficulty with even the best industrial products under capitalism, is that they are built for profit. Who has ever looked at one of the latest engineering “triumphs” and not felt that it could have been improved with a little more art and a little less profit? wasted sentiment, of course; capitalism will not work that way. But sometimes, by chance, it makes half-art.

The best example of techniques of production influencing art is that of the painter Seurat and “pointilism”. This style being a reflection of camera technology and research into the nature of light and colour, which produced the chemical pigments needed for the fast-dyeing of fibres. All the colours of the rainbow produce white light. Seurat found that by clustering a multitude of points of pure colour he could suggest lightness or darkness more after the manner of nature.

Since Plechanov’s time we have seen prefabricated “component art”, “chrome-plated art”, “collage”, and art formed from ready-made industrial products—all perfect examples of how the business of capitalism is beautified by art. Civilization remains the attempt on the part of the ruling class to impose order and permanence upon the wealth they possess.

What will be the conception of beauty under Socialism? Without a ruling class, will we have a unified art? It will be socialized, not civilized art. Human life shows infinite variety and for the first time, the people in an industrialized world will create an art which is a reflection of their own lives. We can’t use life under capitalism as a guide to Socialism. A few tribal peoples hold to conceptions of beauty which are attractive to people dissatisfied with capitalism, but that is not the answer.

Socialism will produce something other than the vicarious satisfactions of capitalism. Fewer people will want passively to look at works of art; many will want to create socially. One can imagine artists, artisans and craftsmen swarming over large-scale projects; but instead of being slaves toiling over pyramids, they will be free men and women creating their own kinds of beauty by their own conceiving.

B. K. McNeeney

The Social Revolution (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

An immediate and fundamental change in the basis of society. Perhaps, when younger and struck with some glaring contradiction of capitalism, you felt the need for a reorganization in human affairs. Eliminating such superfluous stuff as money, you went on to build a model of this new, perfect world inside your head. Its characteristics were peace, harmony, plenty and so on. As you filled in the details the picture grew clearer and more insistent. You began to question your friends upon their views. Finally, you put forward your ready-made utopia and asked them to follow you.

Suddenly it seemed as if everybody had been rehearsing a hundred objections to your scheme beforehand. It won’t work! You can’t change human nature! Who’ll do the dirty work? There’ll be no incentive to produce! What about the lazy people? Overwhelmed by this tremendous opposition, you had to concede the impracticalities in a few bits of your new scheme. Whereupon the completed system became a patchwork of ideas and one of your friends, who was taking O-level Economics, quoted a passage from the Old Testament, proving conclusively that capitalism had always existed as the natural state of mankind.

This onslaught beat your dream world to the back of your consciousness; parts of it to be resurrected only when sardonic comment upon the world was called for. But even a suggestion of your old utopia received so much stick from your friends that it made your position untenable. A year later, upon hearing something reminiscent of your old view from a stranger, you caught yourself saying — “Yes, I wanted to change the world too when I was younger. It’s part of the process of growing up. You’ll learn!’’ — You’d come full circle and disowned your brainchild! What went wrong?

The source of your error lies in history. You stopped short at Fourier, Owen and Proudhon. Though you may never have heard of these people, yet you were tracing, in your mind and conversation, the practical steps which these men and their followers took to remodel a bit of society upon different lines. Like your theoretical notion, they all came to grief.

If you followed the steps exactly you will have dived straight into trade unionism after abandoning Utopias. Owen did. The Grand National Trade Union which he helped to found, grew to a million members and then petered out. The General Strike of 1926 and the ease with which it was crushed makes plain what is the result of trade unions essaying confrontation with the State.

You may have begun your encounter with the union by advocating protracted strikes — “Bring the capitalists to their knees!” Which advice foundered upon the objections of the plodders, who said; “The masters will just starve us out, they can live off their fat in the Bahamas — we can’t. We never get back from a strike what we lose in pay.” Just like the New Model Unions of the 1850s!

Now if you are an archetype you will have remembered that your uncle was once the lord mayor of Louth. After a long talk with him you joined the local Labour Party. Talked to all and sundry about “Keeping our feet upon the floor of the House of Commons. Doing something practical NOW!” It had all the charm of your early utopian illusions — with none of the drawbacks. You could still foment about wicket capitalists, while at the opposite pole, you dealt in wage-price indices and the regulation of “mixed economies”.

Here is where we found you. On a wet Saturday in September, back where you started, an individual member of the working class. Your mind having reached the peak of its political evolution in society; you bought from the SPGB a copy of the Socialist Standard. The solution is now staring you in the face.

At first it seems like a refrain from the past. Common ownership? Abolition of the wages system? Classless, moneyless society? Production for use — not profit? Free access! Only, the details are missing. The SPGB does not paint a picture of the future society. In this journal there is no blueprint for Socialism. We only say to the mass of the population who, whether they know it or not, are in the working class: pursue your class interest.

Human life is essentially practical. Never mind what men say, think or write — in practice they must prove the truth. Can Socialism be established by the Labour Party? No matter how many workers say or think that it can, how do they act? When the Labour Party is running capitalism, do the workers abandon the economic struggle? Do they give up their trade union organizations? Of course not. Thus, their theory is at variance with their practice.

Similarly regarding life under capitalism. Do wage increases cause inflation? Is the “vicious spiral” all the fault of greedy workers? Never mind what economists and governments say, what do they do? Governments, when they have to, can end the inflation which they began by expanding an inconvertible currency. This action will prove all of their post pronouncements on inflation to have been nonsense. A glance at history, however, will show it makes no difference to capitalism and the working class: with or without inflation things are just the same.

Underlying all government propaganda on inflation is their basic need to sustain the interests of their capitalist class. Wage increases reduce profits. Capitalism’s apologists may deny that the class struggle exists. But on the annual balance sheets of trading and industrial concerns, evidence of the class war is written. In other words — at the highest level of practicality that capitalism assumes, in its budgetary affairs, the age-old conflict between classes is taken for granted.

Recognize the type of historical process by which changes in society are brought about. To introduce Socialism you must get yourself into an organization with that single purpose. Then help convince other workers that Socialism will be in their interest. But before you can introduce the fundamental change from private to common ownership, you must capture political power; to ensure that the state forces of coercion cannot be used against you. Your numerical superiority must be demonstrated, that means the ballot and the representative institutions must be yours also. This plan of action has been the programme of the SPGB for 71 years. We are the only political party which has succeeded in remaining a revolutionary party. Showing that the centuries-long evolution of political parties has not been in vain. And in practice, that is how you prove the truth in politics.

That viewpoint survives which is best fitted to survive. It must be capable of comprehending the world of the past, present and future. The object and declaration of principles of the SPGB express the working-class viewpoint. Against all comers they have never been found wanting. This organization has adhered to them without compromise or expedient. We urge you to make them your own.

B.K. McNeeney

Why Socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury (1981)

Party News from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1922, after Mallory had turned back from the north face of Everest at 27,000 feet, he gave lectures on climbing beyond the height of human survival. Baffled listeners could not understand the point of such a man-versus-mountain contest. Why did he still want to go back and climb it? “Because it’s there” said Mallory.

Socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury in this month's GLC elections because it’s there. Were our resources and members greater we would contest everything that's going. For elections are capitalism's weak spot, they are the time when the social system is up for grabs.

What could a Tory or other politician do with Islington South and Finsbury if they won a seat? Little more than sit down in the council chair provided, give and receive congratulations, then get swept away by the blizzard of capitalism. What can the councillors of Greater London do about the bomb and the dole queue, urban decay, shrinking allocations of money from the central government and wages that don’t match prices for the workers? Hardly more than shake hands and commiserate with those who suffer. Who can plan activity in any large city, when practically everything that goes on involves the chaos of buying and selling commodities? Who can guarantee that goods and services will be there for all, in the face of the laws of this society; no cash, no sale; no profit, no production?

Yet socialists are contesting Islington South and Finsbury. In our campaign there will be no shaking hands all round, no kissing of babies and no election promises. The job of the candidate will not cease when his bottom hits the council chair. We are after this constituency as the first step in the working class conquest of the powers of government.

Put your own, your parents and your grandparents experience together for once. A society with a labour market where people are bought and sold like, goods cannot be governed in your interest. Because of this we do not stand as governors of the GLC. Socialists stand only as potential representatives of those workers who want to capture the powers of government. Once a majority of such seats ate gained locally and nationally, then the government and employers of the world will be paralysed, unable to oppose the reorganisation of society into a harmonious commonwealth.

Workers of Islington South and Finsbury: In the past most of you have not bothered to vote in the GLC elections. Implicitly, you may have felt that, whoever gets elected, they will do nothing for the workers. And you were right! Whichever party you put into government, still the same social system continues, grinding out problems for you and riches for your employers. What then have you got to lose by becoming supporters of the SPGB? Capitalist society will tick over in the same way under Labour, Tory or whatever. Withdraw your consent and support from this society and the way to peaceful revolution is open. You can help to get socialism.

The meaning of socialism is simple to grasp, and grasp it you must, if you wish to support it. Socialism describes the future world that socialists think you ought to desire as the creators of wealth. It will be one world of common ownership, democratic control and free access to the products of labour. A social system like that is yours for the taking. It will be a struggle to get. but there will be a new world waiting for all at the end.

B. K. McNeeney

Shape of things to come (1981)

Book Review from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? Langley Technical Services, 1980.

This is a tantalizing, awkward but informative little book. The question that Cooley does not answer is whether and in what way a socialist society could use the new technology—that is, automation, chips, computer aided design, computer-linked robotic production and so on. But he skirts around it and answers a hundred other related questions, so that all may find something useful here.

Cooley was a design engineer with Lucas Aerospace (he was sacked quite recently for taking time off work to propagandise the views in this book). His own attitude to modern technology shows an interesting evolution; he began by assuming that technology was neutral—that computers were inherently useful but that their use was perverted by what capitalist society demanded; he now thinks that the technology of any society is an integral part of its politics. The last point is worth labouring. Cooley holds that with a change in the politics of capitalism the uses of technology could change. Correspondingly, he holds that with a change in society the shape of technology must change. Consecutively, he holds that the drive to change society is linked with the drive to find socially harmonious uses for the new technology. For him these sum up the human/technology relationship. Such a position has led him to champion the Lucas Aerospace Corporate plan—a trade union-backed series of alternative production projects that are offered to industry, like vehicles for spina bifida cases in place of nuclear weapons.

Cooley thinks that something has been lacking in the socialist analysis of science and technology. We concentrate too much on the contradictions of distribution (poverty amid plenty) and neglect the contradictions of production (technological systems that produce an abundance of products by degrading skilled work). As a corrective he suggests that we should question the assumptions embodied in science and technology and find out whether the ideology of capitalism has helped to determine the experimental designs and theories upon which they are based. This balanced analysis would help us to determine the types of technology that would be compatible with a socialist society.

Computer aids to production have become very sophisticated over the last decade and a wide range of engineering components can be produced, inspected and delivered under continuous data processing control—including the design and planning of the product. It is important not to miss the last point. Gone are the days when a master craftsman suggested a new idea to a draughtsman and worked in conjunction with him to develop its design, materials, process treatments, properties and conditions of use. With data processing engineering there is only the draughtsman who draws the original design on a digitally coordinated board, translates this spatial information into numerical terms and types it into a central processor; the computer then specifies the entire sequence of movements required by all the machines under its control that are used in the making of the product. The other point not to miss is that this system works only for the range of product types and production operations that are given in the control programme, innovation outside this range is impossible; for that the system has to be re-programined, rebuilt or even replaced. The outcome is not merely that creative and co-operative work among craftsmen and designers is redundant, but that in factories with engineering data processing it becomes impossible.

The problem for a socialist society using this equipment would be to recognise when the process was destroying the potential for creative labour, or impeding technological innovation, or both. On this matter there can be no other guide than the tacit knowledge, skills and expertise of individuals; but on the face of it these may not be acceptable, because when this computer-controlled equipment produces a design for a component at the limit of its control programme, a craftsman may see it and only be able to say “it doesn’t look right to me”. Whereas the writer of the control programme and the system designers can produce masses of technical argument to prove that it will work, just by pressing the read-out buttons. Moreover the new components may function for several years before they fail and justify the craftsman’s intuition. The problem resolves into a social question—how much influence respectively do you allow the technical expert and the practical craftsman over production decisions when they are in dispute? In simple terms—who has the power to decide and how? If socialist society were to use present technology then its democracy could be tested by controversies about technics versus skill.

Computer aided design presents more problems still. There are now systems where a designer works with a light pen directly onto a video display unit, linked to a computer programmed with a design package. The designer has a basic idea for a building, he draws the rough outline on the screen and then gets the computer to manipulate this basic material with the set of subroutines in the programme. Effectively the computer can turn a few lines into a fully drawn Greek temple, or turn the basic specification for a tower block into a picture and project it on the screen in dramatic perspective. It can construct and display a picture of a non-existent structure in an architectural setting so that you can judge whether the proposed building will harmonise with the environment and will even give you a picture of what the outside world would look like from inside a building that was only an idea in your head a few minutes before.

“Terrific!” may be your first response to all this. Cooley suggests that “ugh!” may be your second. It hardly needs saying that the use of this equipment to capitalist society is to reduce reliance upon a range of architectural, draughting and civil engineering workers; resulting in redundancies, cutting of costs, increasing output and so on; bringing the design process under the “scientific management” of capital.

But what use would this equipment be to a socialist society? Once again there could be clashes between those who felt that architectural aesthetics were being obliterated in computer simulations and, however good it seemed on the screen, it wouldn’t be right to build a Centre Point on the Acropolis—or a Centre Point anywhere for that matter. Such disputes might be the stuff of life for a socialist society. Imagine two sets of protagonists flinging themselves into such architectural discussions with the zeal of William Morris in his crusade against industrial architecture, and the propagandist power of the Futurists for modern architecture. When they had exhausted themselves, a socialist society could count heads and do what the majority wanted.

But would the battle over ideas in such cases be an equal one if computer aided design takes over? It’s an interesting question and provides the core of Cooley’s book, although he doesn’t answer it.

The trouble with computer aided design is that on a large scale it will replace intuition, creativity and the sheer tactility that goes with the craftsman’s approach to the physical nature of production. As it does so the popular notion of good design becomes just a completed decision sequence in machine code. In one way computer aided designs can always be justified, because the programmes work with a simplified model of reality that raises no decision problems. While in the sophisticated reality of the craftsman all decisions arc reached in the face of bewildering complexity. The craftsman can rarely explain how he is able to identify and locate faults in a complicated machine just by listening to it running. But the programmer can explain in a million steps how his impoverished model of reality will yet deliver the goods. As victories for computer aided design go up, says Cooley, so does our hold on reality go down and with it the direct interaction between production systems and the real world. If this technology is utilised unchanged in a socialist society then the development of production will be out of control in fact, even with the purest form of democratic control being exercised over it.

Information and understanding are the obvious keys in solving this problem. Provided that the population of a socialist world are aware of the situation then that society can provide self-adjustment processes and if they don’t work then it must abandon the technology. We must take the craftsman’s approach—suck it and see!

Cooley takes the leftist approach and strives to construct a theory of socialist development based upon current popular reactions against unemployment, nuclear power, the degradation of the natural environment and so on. The Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan above mentioned is an example. Socialist society, says Cooley, becomes possible as the workers can conceive of an entire range of socially useful products to replace the destructive garbage that capitalism turns out. This would be an interesting point to discuss, but Cooley ruins it by describing the Russian revolution as a socialist transformation that went wrong, because Lenin introduced F. W. Taylor’s work measurement and control techniques after 1920; socialist production was thus supposed to have been converted back into capitalist toil. Howlers like this make you doubt whether he’s been talking about the same things as you all along. Particularly when he says that other countries are striving towards socialism.

How useful would computers be to a socialist world? The current crop of machines and programmes are laughably inadequate to represent even the noddy view of the capitalist system professed by bourgeois theorists. The original simulation of capitalism on a computer programme, written by Forrester in the late 1960s, was developed by Meadows, et al, in their doom-laden prophecy called Limits to Growth. Even in later sophisticated forms—Mesarovic and Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point—it still does little other than predict that what is happening now is going to continue.

Cooley may well be right in a way he doesn’t realise. Computers are electronic aids in the production of surplus value. The design and languages of electronic processors stem from and are geared to quantitative assessments of production in units of currency-business languages. Can the current range of machines be used with programmes designed to sense human needs? Can the current-programming skills of computer personnel encompass the idea of production for use and free access? Let’s all become socialists and find out.

B. K. McNeeney

Captain Anarchy (1982)

A Short Story from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Skip was squatting on a bedroll amid the wellingtons, tweed jackets, tractors and mud of a farm auction; bearded, longhaired and wearing a floppy hat, like a relic from the hippy revolution. He was on a sponsored walk from Land’s End to John O’ Groats and had come to the auction in passing. So I invited him home for tea.

You don’t often meet round the world sailors on top of a Somerset down, particularly not one with a badge on his hat that read “One World for One People”. 1 asked him how we could get such a world and shyly he put his case.

He was an anarchist down to his toenails, with a butterfly mind that flitted from hatred of the rich to contempt for the law he’d served seventeen months for vagrancy and theft. “I’ll be hitching at a roundabout”, he said, “and every police car will stop and tell me to move. They even tell me where I ought to stand on this earth! That’s really bad news! We’ve got to do away with those pigs and all their rules. We don’t need them. Everyone knows right from wrong. The law doesn’t help you in a force seven gale on the Atlantic.”

Incongruously he was a trained boat designer and builder who, as well as refitting yachts for capitalists (the bastards!), had planned and made his own dory and a junk-rigged yacht that was destroyed at anchorage in a storm. Now unemployed, his dream was to get enough money out of penny-a-mile sponsors to build a new yacht for a circumnavigation; proclaiming pacifism by example, against all the talk of politicians, with a crew of fourteen, in a boat called World Peace.

“We’ve got to destroy the concept of war” he said, warming up. I pounced: “No good, they’ll invent a new one. Even if you get rid of the rockets, tanks and guns, the armies, navies and air forces of all the nations of the world, it wouldn’t destroy war. It’s the competition between nations for markets, materials and spheres of influence that brings armies into being and drives each towards war". It was a bit too concentrated for him and he returned to the topic of his voyage.

The springs of anarchist thought are truly amazing. His boat was going to be designed and launched according to the principles of the Cabbala or Talmud! The most magical of all numbers is seven. So his boat had to be seventy-seven feet long, seven times longer than its beam, with a seven-sail schooner rig. His last boat had been launched at 7 minutes past 7, on 7 July 1977! Pressed for a reason, he twinkled and said, “it just happened that way”.

The idea of promoting an alternative way of living by high adventure is not new. In the 1930s the lone climber Maurice Wilson hoped to encourage his own brand of asceticism, fasting and peace, by conquering Everest. John Harlin, who died on the North Face of the Eiger in 1965, was a more modern example:

He was convinced that through the gospel of climbing, which he would preach in his International School, a panacea for the world’s sickness would emerge. Differences of race, colour and creed would disappear in the collective search for the truth and beauty of life as revealed by the climbing of mountains. (D. Whillans and A. Ormerod, Don Whillans, Penguin, 1976, p. 266.)

Internationally mixed expeditions are often commercially promoted using a weaker form of this sentiment, as with the Thor Heyerdal raft and boat journeys. Anyone who has read the literature of the attempts on the South Pole before the First World War must be impressed by the incredible idealism which drove men to trek across a thousand miles of ice. Yet all this heroism means nothing as far as creating a new world goes. Scott was a leader who inspires followers and patriotic death or glory boys. Harlin was a climber of incredible strength, reach and drive. Skip is a phenomenal sailor, who ran the teak-built Virtue class yacht Jan Guilder from Britain to the Azores and back in a race. Each in their own way prove only what exceptional people can do in extraordinary fields.

But the new world that Skip wants must be one which the majority can form and take full part in; what then is the use of example? The attempt to change from competitive capitalism to co-operative socialism, has nothing to do with the heroic striving after impossible goals by supermen and superwomen. It is a task for ordinary people, and must fall within the scope of ordinary lives and experience.

The romantic impulse, wherein a hero dares to do something against all the odds, while it may have spurred the early socialists to press their analysis of capitalism past the awful point where state power was challenged, has little relevance for a democratic social revolution. Socialism requires that men and women, safe in their terraces and semis, should dare, against all the heroes of capitalism who failed, to change the world, using only the ballot box.

Still, Skip and his crew might achieve something worthwhile. An anarchistic circumnavigation would knock a great big hole in the myth of the essential captain on the high seas, the capitalist of sailors ruling the waves.

Good luck Skip. I hope you get round the world. On a cold assessment your example will confuse and divert workers from the simple democratic and political solution of abolishing capitalism. Yet unreliable and quixotic as you are, I feel you will be with us on the day of revolution.

B. K. McNeeney

Calculating Capitalism (1981)

Book Review from the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Demystifying Social Statistics, edited by Irvine. Miles and Evans, Pluto Press, 1979.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the census forms that we completed this year contained questions like: are you a member of the capitalist or working class; give an account of all the property you posses and state the income derived from it; if an employer, state the rate of exploitation operating in your firm? So that we could refer directly to one set of official facts to support our contention that social problems arise because ownership of the means of living is private and profit-dominated, while production is public and necessarily co-operative. But official statistics are commodities tailored to meet the demands of capitalist society. One effect of this is that they mask the existence of the capitalist class and are silent on the source of all wealth; all of which is well-described in that piece of this book called The Poverty of Wealth Statistics.

If you pick and choose you should find something of interest in these twenty-two chapters. For instance, the piece on how official statistics are produced is fascinating and informative It leaves an impression of a bunch of moles boring from within the government statistical service in a way designed to make a Daily Telegraph leader writer see red and sensitive people weep over the stultifying boredom imposed upon statistical producers by rambling bureaucratic procedures.

It’s pleasant to record that though most of the authors are academics they do not shrink from drawing socialist conclusions:

We would replace accountancy in terms of money and profit by accountancy in terms of social needs. We would replace the definition of social goals by those at the top of the bureaucratic pyramids, by democratic self-control over all collective activities. We would then require new ways of measuring our needs and goals, which expressed their great variety rather than reduce them to money values or standards imposed from above. (ibid p.36.)

The question is - how do we get a society like that? By political action allied to knowledge and understanding say the authors. Statistics can play a part here, for they are not just commodities produced in government departments, but aids to knowledge (and to damned lies of course). Just what you can construct with statistics does not depend solely upon your politics, for a major theme of this book is that statistics bear the mark of the social conditions of their production. The Registrar-General’s definition of class is tied to dimensions of social stratification by income, but does not provide any explanation, nor much data, on how class inequality is maintained. While the official lumping together of shareholding wealth by capitalists with workers’ possessions, like cars, mortgages and household effects, ignores the obvious difference that workers in general cannot use their meagre possessions to generate more wealth, while capitalists use their wealth to employ workers who create profits.

These then are some of the marks that statistics bear. A good deal of this book is concerned with re-writing statistical information for radical re-use, so that it may bear interpretations other than those dear to the hearts of government departments. The problems involved in doing so are somewhat overblown by the authors and this takes us to the heart of the matter. Can there be a socialist statistical science? Only to a limited extent until society has been revolutionised, as there is a conflict over reforming the statistical practice of government departments and trying to bring about a socialist revolution. The most effective way of ensuring that socialism never comes about would be for socialists to strive to reform the civil service and fall into the bottomless pit of fabianism. So, as far as socialists are concerned, over facts and figures we “simply have to make do with what is available” (ibid, p. 371). Not a startlingly new conclusion for a book of four hundred pages.

Though much of the argument in this volume goes with the grain of the socialist ease, yet a flaw runs throughout, coming out most clearly in the contributions by John Krige, where he says, in effect, that socialism can never become a science:

In contrast to the natural world, social reality is constructed in and by people’s more or less conscious beliefs and practices. Criticism of a natural scientific theory in the light of facts or a rival theory, while directed at the beliefs of those who hold it. leaves the object of the theory (the natural world) as it is. On the other hand, the object of the social sciences is the same as that which is being criticised, namely, people's beliefs and practices. Thus in criticising those beliefs and practices one aims to change both them and the social order which they reflect and reproduce, (ibid. P-60.)

A feature of twentieth century capitalism has been the amount of criticism it can absorb and the amount of reforming zeal it can incorporate, while remaining unchanged in its essentials. Contrary to the last part of the above quotation it is only criticism of workers’ beliefs that aims to stimulate the practice of democratic revolution, which aims to change the social order. Movements like women’s liberation, societies for social responsibility in science and radical statistics groups could well get much of what they want, yet see the current social relations corrupt female and male equality in sordid legislation and contracts; bewilder responsible science with Windscale farces; and obfuscate the best wealth and poverty statistics imaginable.

The only movement that would be proof against this corruption is a world majority of workers determined to get socialism. Once such a body comes into being, then the world changes, capitalism will be viewed as socialists have viewed it all along. But if the socialist majority never is achieved, then what capitalism is remains an open question, to be fought over by Milton Friedman, the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the rest.

The search for finality, for the perfect case about the physical or social world, using only completely demystified statistical data is a vain quest. Consider - would any such truth ever stop scientists from devising questioning experiments? Consider too the possibility that, when socialism is established, historian of capitalism will still wrangle among themselves over things like - 'was the post-war inflation caused by an excess issue of incontrovertible paper currency and could the various governments have ended inflation whenever they liked, or were they prisoners of their own spending policies? The details of what capitalism was are not all to be decided by a socialist revolution. So what? For years now socialists have possessed the information, the arguments and the strategy for bringing capitalism down. All we lack are numbers. This book suggests reasons why we haven’t got the numbers but they aren’t the right ones.’

B. K. McNeeney

The new technology (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

In1968 the bread and butter version of tire ICL 1901 series central processor, with a 32K core store and peripherals consisting of a teletype, line printer and paper tape reader/punch, occupied the volume of three large wardrobes. It cost about £200,000. The current PET personal microprocessor, with a similar store, calculating facility and input/ output rates, occupies the volume of a small suitcase. It costs £700.

This reduction in the size of computer hardware has been achieved by the use of solid state and silicone chip components for the manufacture of microprocessors. The size reduction over eleven years has been 300 times, while the price reduction has been 285 times. Were the rate of development to remain the same for the next eleven years, the equivalent microprocessor would not be risible to the naked eye and there would not exist a currency unit small enough to enable you to buy one.

Semiconductor crystals

How is it done? A silicon chip bears comparison with a mainframe computer, in which rows of shelves are slotted to take a set of circuit boards with their snap-in connections. Similar microcircuitry allows many miniature boards to be stacked together like tiny playing cards and the whole to be bonded onto a connecting chassis which looks like a centipede.

The raw material for these tiny boards is the abundantly available raw silica, which is ground up and from which pure silica crystals are grown in conditions of controlled temperature and humidity. From these blocks of crystal the chip bases are sawn off about 10,000ths of an inch thick, lapped, polished and passed through a diffusion oven which dopes them with gaseous impurities, raising them from conductors to semiconductors of electricity. These bases are then chemically sensitised to light, the microphotographically reduced circuits are exposed upon them and a chemical bath then develops those circuits and simulated components in them. Many are stacked together, sealed onto a connecting chassis with ceramic or plastic and are ready for dropping into standard holes in processors, pocket calculators or TV ball games. The whole of this process is one continuous flow automatic system, with computer control of chip specification by programmed variation. It is very big business indeed.

Profit power

What effects might these microprocessors have on capitalist society? Well, the RAIR black box is the size of a trunk, has double the capacity of the ICL 1901. a 64K memory facility and 2 million word diskette storage. It can handle 3 programming languages and costs £2,300. So for less than the price of a car a medium sized capitalist can make his wages department redundant. Or, with the PET personal computer above a small capitalist, with a payroll package at a total of £800, can dispense with one clerk and employ a programmer/operator for half a day a week or do it himself.

The likely results of all this are an increase of profits in the small non-computer production industries, the encouraging of mergers between firms engaged in microprocessor production from chips bought in, and a concentration of capital in the chip production combines.

Silicon Euphoria

But beware of the many half-baked descriptions of predicted futures which are appearing in popular science journals and books; where workers’ homes are to have everything from vacuum cleaners and cookers to washing machines, controlled and executed by chip-based technology. Capitalism always sells its new technology this way. In the aftermath of the atom bomb strike on Japan blathering pundits assured everyone that in the nuclear age which had just dawned, electricity would be free for all and abundant leisure time our natural heritage. The North Sea gas strikes of the early sixties were thought by some to have begun an age of free energy, as the cost of the raw gas would fall below that which made it economic to meter. As an antidote to all this the director of one of the firms which covers the microprocessor domestic market pointed out recently that that market has levelled off at around 2 per cent of the total. This might well be its final position.

The rest of the microprocessor market is split up into educational hardware, in the form of teaching aids, videos and so on. This is likely to remain a cautious market as a result of the cuts in government spending. A peculiar group of users are those in large companies who cannot get time on the mainframe computer at their head office and so are having microprocessors installed on their desks. But the largest part of the market is made up of the small or medium sized business concern —anything from small factories and larger shops to freelance accountants and lawyers.

Silicon hysteria

Beware also of half-baked predicted futures which have the whole of capitalist production under automated microprocessor control. Interestingly, the current sale of chip-based equipment in the USA has a theoretical capacity to displace 40,000 workers a month—equivalent to half a million new unemployed each year. Twenty years ago, when the introduction of mechanical and hydraulic transfer automation was at its height, the potential displacement of workers in the engineering industry was also put at 40,000 a month. Experts theorised before a Congressional committee that capitalism would develop a 4-tier workforce focussed around the automation process:

• 10 per cent would be performing menial tasks which it was uneconomic to mechanise;
• 10 per cent would be technicians or mechanics servicing the auto equipment;
• 15 per cent would be highly trained personnel occupied with the design and policy formation for the automatic processes;
• 65 per cent would be unable to assimilate training or find menial jobs and would be unemployed permanently. (This last includes 7 per cent who are the capitalist class). The target date for the achievement of this stable mechanised state was 1975.

Technological fatalism

What are we to make of all this? The lock-out at The Times printing works has been about staffing, changed working conditions and subsequent redundancies following the introduction of chip-based processor controlled typesetting and correcting equipment. Historically we might welcome the new technology as another example of capitalism’s abundant productive potential. which could be used to make free access easier in a socialist world, while attributing to capitalism the social conflicts arising.

Extending a remark of Marx, we may say that the hand mill and hoe give you slavery: the water wheel and mill give you feudalism: the steam engine gives you capitalism: and the computer gives you socialism. But beware of technological determinism; the last phrase means that computers establish the abundant information potential of capitalism's technology, making free access more feasible. Neither computers nor automation determine the direction which capitalism must take; only profitability does that and technological complexity can act to reduce profitability. But microprocessors may make more workers want to realise the potential through a political solution.

Technological freedom

This attitude has come under a lot of fire of recent years. David Dickson’s book Alternative Technology (Fontana 1976) is one long argument against the technicists who see social developments arising spontaneously out of technical change. In opposition to this Dickson argues that technology is not neutral and will not carry over from one society to another.

To take an example: at the beginning of this century the design and dimensions of the capstan lathe were various. When the followers of F. W. Taylor — of scientific management fame—came to extend his work to the more complex engineering tasks, they still favoured the short, heavily built and docile workers who had been most ready in the past to obey detailed instructions without question. The application of the principles of time and motion study, with detailed breaking down of jobs into operations, brought increased output to capstan work. Yet further productive increases came when new capstans were designed with an eye to such studies. The turret spokes were extended to fall to the grasp of the ideal worker; the handwheels were clustered around his left grasp, with the resistance favourable for speedy setting. Likewise with the speed and gear levers. Such has remained the design of the capstan today. The result is that if you are tall, have sensitive hands and are not strong, the capstan is a trial to operate; to retain mastery of the wheels and levers you have to stand back from the machine, putting the workface and the tool just beyond observation. So you have to lean forward all of the time.

The general point aimed at by Dickson is that machines are progressively refined for the purpose of producing commodities and the generation of surplus value. This suggests that a total redesigning of the machinery of production, greater in its scope than the complete metrication of all dimensions, would be necessary before these machines could produce only use values. Especially is this so if the population in a socialist society must be happy in its work. Dickson, like any other leftie, wants to see this “socialisation" of the means of production before socialism—hence his call for alternative technologies now.

Technical squints

How do we relate this material to the new technology? Continuous through-flow production of chips in Taiwan requires that the dies which preform the dual in-line packages are periodically inspected. As there are thousands of these and they are used thousands of times a day, lines of girls using microscopes form the inspection department. The throughput of dies is nicely adjusted to the point where the average girl suffers from myopia after 3 years, which is the average working life of a Taiwan girl between school and marriage. The argument now goes that mixed up with the production and use of silicon chips are numerous such examples, all equally destructive of human ability.

These human abuses accrue to technical innovations because they serve the purpose of maximising surplus value. Without the capitalist system there would be no such driving necessity—something which may be illustrated by examples which are obviously candidates for the administration technology of a socialist society.

There is a hand-held computer terminal on the market which is the size of a pocket calculator and can be used for recording stock levels and inputting new orders. The data is collected when each terminal is plugged into the central processor. Variations upon this system are the use of light pens in the reading of bar codes printed on stock, with automatic reordering according to preprogrammed instructions. Both systems may soon be available with on-line radio transmission of data, from terminal to processor, by means of a set the size of a handbag. This would give a socialist world the facility of instant knowledge of the world stock of any item. However. as Dickson and his like would point out, this would involve many people in walking past rows of shelves making what were to them meaningless movements with light pens, and the programming requirements would force millions to learn Boolean algebra, symbolic logic and the programming languages, poring for days over elaborate print-out material de-bugging the new programmes. Much of this would be tedious work at best.

Academic nostrums

For Dickson and his kind the function of high technology is to promote the interest of the capitalist class. In more high-flown terminology — technology acts to support and propagate the legitimating ideology of capitalism. Or simply — technology and social relations reinforce each other. The ways and means are legion and this links up with another academic debate, that over the establishment of factory discipline during the industrial revolution. Marx observed that it is pointless to introduce labour-saving machinery unless the workforce can be controlled in a way which ensures that they will operate it at maximum efficiency. Such technical arrangements as bring this about will reflect the hierarchical organisation and control of capitalist society. The charge of Dickson now becomes that those who welcome the new technology are just reflecting the ideology of capitalism for which bigger, more and most are desirable irrespective of who controls the production flow.

Conflict into harmony

The answer of the socialist is still the only one. For no amount of soft technology would make the nuclear rockets less explosive. Nor could state and charity subsidised cottage industries for the unemployed be a substitute for those who will grapple for a solution to the social problems of the world. Such technological conflicts as there will be in a socialist world will serve to ensure that social policies are kept under constant review. For only in a total democracy, run by socialists whose successful attempt to change the world had established the social interest as the ruling idea of the time, could effect be given to the constant review of policies.

When the effects of capitalist designed technology seemed too brutalising as with the capstan; or when production seemed too much regulated by microprocessors and beyond the understanding of all, then would be the time to scrap the technology—old or new. How much of such brutalising work or bewilderment the population will tolerate before retooling is not a question which can be decided theoretically; it must await a trial. For that socialist society must be established.

B.K. McNeeney

Big Bangs and Whimpers (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where do Cruise missiles come on your personal list of production priorities? First, last, or not at all? Similarly, where do you place housing, food, clothing and entertainment? Do you know anybody who puts Cruise, Trident and Pershing II missiles first? Probably not. How is it then that over the northern hemisphere there are around 50 million people engaged in wielding weapons of destruction, servicing, administering to them, designing, manufacturing or testing new ones? Is it that the system of war production has got out of control? If so, what are you going to do about it?

Well, you could join in the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Europe; you could go and cheer E. P. Thompson at the next CND rally. If you’re good at spitting fire you could stomp church and civic halls up and down the country, fulminating against NATO and the eastern bloc, who’ve turned Europe into the world’s most dramatic nuclear theatre.

Whatever you do, whether you live in Britain, America or Russia, you’ll have to face a stubborn problem arising from the social system that the world currently operates. You’ll have to find a way of transforming rockets into ploughshares.

Nukes are nasty

At a simple level the weaponry of Europe can be dismantled and sold as scrap. When TSR2 was cancelled in the 1960s one enterprising firm cobbled together a range of costume jewellery out of components from aircraft guidance systems. Since 1945 army surplus stores have been the usual way of recycling non-strategic junk from the forces back into the economy. Quite what could be done with the 7,500 nuclear warheads deployed by NATO and the Warsaw Pact in and around Europe — their rockets, launch platforms, bunkers and control hardware — it’s not easy to say. Perhaps, without the warheads, they could all be let off in one gigantic Guy Fawkes display; or used to launch thousands of weather and communication satellites. The warheads are completely useless for anything except destroying life and wealth.

The original US “Operation Plowshare’’, which planned to use nuclear bombs to blast a wider Panama Canal, was abandoned because of the radioactive filth it would have belched into the atmosphere and because it might have started violent volcanic activity along the Panamanian Isthmus.

Projects to develop interplanetary travel for the masses are non-starters; even capitalism’s best salesmen can’t find any suckers to go on a jerky joy-ride in a vehicle powered by nuclear squibs going bang at the tail.

The US “Operation Gas Buggy", in which a chain of buried nuclear devices were detonated to produce a vast underground cavern of gas for domestic consumption, did not produce enough gas to fuel the fleet of concrete lorries that were needed to cap the surface fractures out of which the subsequent radioactivity leaked.

Nukes are nasty and aside from their intended purpose, neither NATO nor the Eastern Bloc can find anything to do with them.

Poverty and plenty

So the slogan “rockets into ploughshares’’ is misleading. But would a society that makes only “ploughshares" in the first place be enough? For even if the nuclear factories were converted to produce agricultural machinery, most third world governments do not have the foreign exchange to buy such equipment. It needs only a little imagination to work out what happens when there is overproduction of such machinery for a non-existent — market the bottom falls out of world trade. A “surplus” of agricultural produce brings about a world food shortage in this way: as investment falls, production is cut back, land is unused until the surplus is gone; but with rising demand in the developed countries agricultural produce is sucked out of the underdeveloped countries and as neglected land cannot be made productive immediately millions starve as the price of grain soars.

Behind capitalism with its nuclear big bangs you can hear the crying of hungry people. Behind capitalism without the big bangs you will still hear the whimpers of starving people.

A much more useful slogan than “rockets into ploughshares" is “transform capitalism into socialism”. Nuclear disarmers and others should consider this as an immediate priority

B.K. McNeeney

Socialism and the free market (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look forward to a society where buying and selling have no place, to a truly social world where each contributes such work as they are able and all may take freely from the store of wealth created. But capitalism still has many apologists who assert that a socialist system would not work; often they are pie-eyed over the virtues of the market place, where freedom, equality of opportunity and property are supposed to reign supreme. In reality there is nothing equal about the major transaction that most of us have to endure throughout our lives. On the labour market the capitalist confronts the worker and after an average working lifetime of this “equal” transaction, the boss still owns the factory, the office, the shop and the profit made on the goods; while it is a lucky worker who manages to retain a house, a few sticks of furniture and a car through retirement and up to death.

The drive for profits and the capture of markets, which sets people against people, factory against factory and nation against nation, is the force that excludes a majority of the world’s population from the potential abundance of wealth that the modern industrial system is capable of producing. Endless wars and endless famines, with millions of guns and no bread, have been normal someplace in the world throughout this century. Socialists look with horror on this direct effect of the capitalist market and do what they can to make the revolution in consciousness that is needed before a system of free access can be introduced.

Yet there are some who see clearly what capitalism is and what it does, but who say “yes, give us a lot more of that! Let the free market be supreme. Give full and unfettered capitalism a chance!”

Communication among people of different political persuasion is never easy and this is the extreme case. It’s like the rhyme about the convicts:

Two men look through prison bars,
One sees mud, the other sees stars.

Chicken or egg?

Just what is so special about the capitalist market that it makes some people become starry-eyed at the wonders performed when buyers and sellers squabble over the price of a commodity? Because the market is an open place its apologists can see the crafty entrepreneurs shake hands on a price and imagine that something final and necessary is determined in this price formation. By contrast, what takes place in production, in the factory, is hidden and often secret; yet it is to production that you must look to discover the secret of profit making. For the prices realised in the market are determined by what took place earlier, in the closed confines of the shopfloor. Put at its simplest, the value of the bundle of goods produced by a workforce must greatly exceed the value of the bundle of goods they can buy with their wages. The surplus of these two values is the source of capitalist profit to be realised through a price.

At this the free marketeers present us with a chicken-and-egg argument. “To be sure”, they say, ‘‘prices reflect productive efficiency (what you would call levels of exploitation of the workforce) but prices also function as the final measure of productive efficiency. A socialist society without prices would lack any means of evaluating alternative methods for producing the same article. It would be a society where sensible choices about the most economic methods for production could not be made. Therefore a socialist society would be an irrational society”.

This argument often comes dressed up in a mathematical form as the von Mises supreme objection to socialism. Yet on examination it is easy to show that it is not an argument at all — just a series of assertions, comprising:

1. prices allow sensible choices to be made;
2. choices made without prices would be non-sensible;
3. socialist production would be non- sensible or irrational;
4. capitalist production is the only rational system.

The slide from no prices, to the non- sensible, to the irrational is an amusing ideological subterfuge. For, of course, any production system not using capitalism’s criterion must be non-sensible by that same criterion; it would not be a different society otherwise. So the von Mises argument has to assume what it needs to prove.

Overproduction everywhere

The thing which strikes socialists as being funny is how anyone can assume that the price system is rational in any super-social sense. When American grain growers face a world glut of wheat and a famine in Africa or Asia, it is rational for them to burn their surplus and maintain prices and profits. It would also be rational for them to allow the price of grain to fall to what production conditions dictate — providing they can persuade their government to subsidise production to the extent of the lost profit. What would not be rational for capitalist grain-growers is to allow the free distribution of grain wherever it is needed. Such free distribution of unlimited production is precisely what would be rational about a socialist society.

On another level it is absurd to imagine that only prices allow sensible choices to be made over alternative production processes. The most famous illustration of this absurdity is the public inquiry into the Cow Green reservoir in Cumbria over a decade ago.

Further water supplies for north east coast industries could have been taken from rivers or reservoir sites (pumped storage or catchment). Official choice fell on a catchment reservoir at the Cow Green site—the economically sensible choice. At the inquiry water authority officials and environmentalists clashed in mutual incomprehension, for the site of Cow Green was an ecological relic from the Ice Ages. It was a basin with powdery slopes of sugar-limestone covered with inter-glacial flora in unique combinations. Despite vociferous protest the sugar-limestone site was flooded. A society where economic efficiency and price-effectiveness reign supreme must discount scientific interest, beauty and uniqueness of habitat, because none of these last factors will bear an economic quantification,

Making use of it

The myopia of capitalist decision-making impoverishes the full natural and human complexities involved over alternative production processes. By contrast a socialist society would make its production choices on the bases of usefulness, desirability and the needs of the population. Productive efficiency in units of direct output can be weighed and ranged alongside usefulness, desirability, needs, beauty and scientific interest. The factors that will govern production in a socialist society are commensurable factors; and it is the similarities between material, aesthetic and scientific needs which will allow socialist society to compare them directly and make sensible choices about alternative production processes, based on overall needs. In a capitalist society the “sensible”choice is made by cost-evaluation, economic efficiency predictions and profitability; such choices seem obviously rational because this society grants those factors the highest place anyway.

If anyone doubts the wisdom of allowing non-economic factors full play in production decisions they need only consider the subsequent history of Cow Green reservoir. Capitalism went into a slump and industry had little need of the extra water. Any other decision than the economic one actually taken would have been more sensible. As an amenity the reservoir is useless; the fishing is neglected and those who use the new road to Cow Green go only to see the waterfall of Cauldron Snout, now despoiled by the huge concrete dam above it.

Reductio ad absurdum

So just what do capitalist costs and prices represent? The explanations put forward by economists are versions of an abstinence theory, where the cost of any goods produced from invested capital is equal to the cost of what could best have been produced otherwise. Now this is useless, both as an explanation of costs and as a means of making a choice over alternative production processes. Most environmentalists object very strongly to paying 30 per cent of their electricity bills (by conventional accounting) for the funding of nuclear-powered electricity generating, when nuclear installations provide only 8 per cent of the electricity. They say that 30 per cent of their bills would be better used to fund the 30 per cent of electricity which could be generated from wind, wave, solar and geothermal power. But apologists for the nuclear power investment programme, while agreeing that their baby is over-capitalised compared to its net electricity contribution, still argue that when fossil fuels run out the contribution of nuclear power will exceed its capitalisation by as much as it now falls short of it. Thus, both environmentalists and fissionists use the same theory of costs to arrive at “sensible” yet contradictory conclusions.

In brief, costs cannot be calculated without regard for the social system they are related to. No major nation may give up nuclear generating without cost to its independence in providing armed forces with weapons-grade plutonium. Such considerations apply, in a different way, to the whole of capitalist production. For all goods must realise sufficient surplus value to enable a government to tax profits and provide the armed forces which ultimately will be used to secure the markets where the profits may be realised. In addition the capitalist system has built into it an incredible set of socially necessary costs, including the entire range of fiscal activities that ensure the circulation of commodities over the globe; to a socialist, treasuries, mints, banks, underwriters and vast armies of cashiers, ticket issuers/collectors and accountants, constitute just one great big unproductive drain down which capitalism pours the suprabundant energies of the working class.

The free society

Free market advocates may object to some of the examples used above because they are culled from the real capitalist world and not from some imaginary state where the government does not levy taxes, where cartels are not formed, where state investment does not exist and where laissez faire is triumphant. Yet the market is not and never can be “free”, for the simple reason that the capitalist class is divided itself; each part of the class tries to enforce the trading conditions it prefers and the whole class only unites against the working class, or when threatened by another national capitalism. The peculiarity of the position held by the free marketeers is that they accuse socialists of “copping-out” and having no world to defend; yet they themselves do not defend capitalism as it is, but only as it might be, in their auctioneering dreams.

Socialist society is not a dream, but something for which the development of capitalism has prepared production. Remove the vast unproductive apparatus referred to above and you can see what a flood of labour power and resources would be available for useful production in a socialist society. Socialist freedom means the ability to accommodate all the many and varied styles of living, production systems, special and overall concerns that grab people in their interactions with the social and physical environment. Without the drag of private property and the market an abundant future is secure anyway.

B. K. McNeeney

The Palace-Builders (1975)

From the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

We cut sandstone pyramids out of desert strata,
They said it would preserve them for our God;
And piled on pile for the Tower of Babylon,
For they promised us good in a score of tongues;
We gave them tribute at the gates of the Labyrinth,
To pacify the Bull which was shaking the earth;
Upon the Rock of Athens, we built to perfection,
Were not all now equal under rule of the many?
We vaulted a dome for the Pantheon, needing no centre,
Had not Caesar promised to restore the Republic?
At Santa Sophia we gave the heavens a new roof,
Blessed by one Pope, cursed by another, and used in the name of Allah.
We watered their moats, raised up castle keeps,
Ploughed the land which owned us, safe in its fief;
Pointed their arches, filled them with painted glass,
Reaching for heaven with our tallest spire.
We gave them our tools, beggared our serfdom,
They put a price on our hands and some were unsold;
Then cut off our ears and in our foreheads branded
The mark of a slave and none paid us wages;
The fields were trenched and with fences enclosed,
Our cottage homes sank under palace improvements,
Our infants were gathered — the care of the Poor was Law —
Cotton, wool and linen their small hands wove them all.
We build no more now that art needs no muscle,
The hammer wears out its shaft, the stone eats the chisel;
Because we held the levers we thought we were in control,
Pharaoh, King Caesar, Pope, Baron, Merchant — Capital!
Their machines have sucked upon our labour,
Our skills and their products quarter the globe;
But coming is the time when the world will favour
We! — And masons will carve their own abode.

B. K. McNeeney

One person, one vote (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down the centuries upholders of privilege have recognised and feared the power of the masses to overthrow the rulers of society; but it took a poet to flip the coin of fear and turn it into a joke:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest . . .
do it just to spit in their eye.
(D. H. Lawrence, A Sane Revolution.)

Fear, irony and humour characterise the responses of many who contemplate for long the oddity that rulers are few and the ruled are many. Plato thought about it a lot:

The third group is the mass of the people, who earn their own living, take little interest in politics, and aren't very well off. They are the largest class in a democracy, and once assembled are supreme.
(Plato, The Republic, p.385, Penguin, 1975)

His ironic response was to spin out an analogy between society and a bee-hive. He wanted all drones cleared out of the hive and replaced by three brainwashed classes of people, presided over by a philosopher-king, who alone stung everyone into submission with a venomous dialectic.

The fearful response to popular power sometimes contains a magical incantation, as when Edmund Burke tried to ward off the evil influence of the French Revolution from his English readers:

We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.
(Revolutions 1775-1830. (ed) M. Williams, Penguin, 1971, pp. 108-9.)

It is indeed a heathenish thing for the masses to rise up and bite the hand that whips them!

Goodbye To All That

Fear is creeping into Margaret Thatcher's voice now; with unemployment rising to three million and bankruptcies soaring, and yet insists she's doing us good. Presumably she'll get booted out at the next election and replaced by an earnest Labourite, or a smarmy Liberal-Social Democrat, who'll play at ruling capitalism for a further five years.

What potential for revolution remains among the workers now that parliamentary democracy has made the barricade and the guillotine decadent, even absurd, as a way of removing and chastising Thatcher?

One person, one vote: the implication of this democratic slogan is that there is a revolutionary use for the cube of black-japanned metal — the ballot box. It would not have amused Lawrence, would have puzzled Plato and infuriated Burke; but is something Thatcher and the working class could come to terms with. The ballot can dictate the shape of society. Provided Thatcher displays only the usual amount of incompetence over the next two years, then not the fulminations of Foot, not the hysteria of left-wingers and not the self-starvation of all terrorists will remove her from office. Yet sometime in 1984 she will meekly accept the probable dictate of the ballot box and cease to rule with her usual bad grace. Capitalism could be deposed throughout the world in just the same way; after all, how could an "ism" fight back?

Individuals are the bearers or agents of ideologies. When you vote, you put a cross against the name of someone and the sum total of ideologies borne by the successful names yields the style of society around you — give or take a nuclear hiccup or two. Putting a cross on a ballot for revolution would be much the same — give or take a capitalist or two. What about a world-wide referendum, where the ballot paper reads "capitalism or socialism: place a cross against your choice"?

Hello New World

But the simplest revolutionary use of the ballot box would be to nominate and vote for individuals as bearers of the ideology of the masses — the working class. Theirs is a beautifully simple ideology, well-fitted for revolution. It goes something like this:

Politicians never do the workers any good.
If you want something done, do it yourself.
Labour is the source of wealth and only a fool says otherwise.
You'll never change the world until you get the vast majority to agree.

The political programme to fit this goes as follows:

One person, one vote;
therefore the last thing we need are politicians and leaders;
therefore if anything is to be done to the world all must do their bit;
therefore away with all that nonsense about banks,
advertising and invisible earnings creating wealth — it's brain and brawn that will do it all;
therefore you can stick your United Nations, your summit meetings, your social security plans and all the rest;
we've got to talk it out like we do down the pub — then pick our team.

Strange that a colossal social system like capitalism can be toppled by something as ordinary as the process used by a darts club to choose team members; by the method an angling club uses to select venues for a season; by the way the local women's institute decides who'll make the sausage rolls, make the cakes and cut the sandwiches for the next whist drive. Yet all socialism requires is that workers put their heads together and decide about society, stick their men and women in the parliaments of the world and stick their fingers up at all those who said it couldn't be done.

B. K. McNeeney