The real Michael Foot (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could it be that in Michael Foot the Labour Party have elected someone who will never rise any higher than Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? As Foot fumbles on, questions are beginning to be asked about him, and hopeful contenders for his job are making careful speeches. One version of Foot is the sick, half blind, scabrous, dishevelled bookworm, accident-prone in more senses than one — the sort of person who would wear a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Another is the former left wing firebrand who has come to betray his principles and his friends and now hunts the Militants out of his party like mediaeval witches. Another, more despairing, is that he is a tousled intellectual, so unsuited to the political rough and tumble that he is quite unable to put the Tories, three million unemployed, Norman Tebbit and all, out of their misery.

Foot comes from a a well-heeled family with famously liberal traditions. Until he was upstaged by his tempestuous nephew Paul he was the wayward son, the brainy darling of the Labour Party rank and file who was greeted at the conference rostrum with rapturous applause before he had so much as uttered a single word. Of course he went to Oxford and of course he occupied there that position, so coveted by all aspiring politicians among the dreaming spires, of President of the Union.

Of course he was involved with Tribune and with the old TUC/Labour Party newspaper the Daily Herald. His brilliance so impressed the crusty imperialist Lord Beaverbrook that, in spite of his reputation, Foot was given the job of editing Beaverbrook’s paper the Evening Standard. Just after Dunkirk Foot, with Peter Howard (who later joined Moral Rearmament) and Frank Owen (who later joined the Liberal Party) wrote the book Guilty Men. This cleverly caught the mood of the time; it argued that many of the problems in pre-war Britain, and the war itself, were the responsibility of a bunch of complacent, arrogant Conservative politicians. Guilty Men, with other similar books published by Victor Gollancz, quickly became fashionable reading among people who were looking for an explanation — or more accurately a scapegoat — for the dreadful things that had happened since 1918.

In the 1945 election, Foot was a notable boulder in the landslide to Labour, capturing Plymouth Devonport which had been the seat of Lady Astor. This was indeed a symbolic victory — the dazzling young intellectual sitting where once sat a Tory who personified much about pre-war Britain that had become despised — and had been denounced in Guilty Men. Foot had no intention of allowing the glamour of his victory grow dim. He quickly busied himself in the appropriate causes, in particular the Keep Left Group, whose manifesto attacked the basis of the Attlee government’s foreign policy, which was the alliance with America and the cold war antagonism towards Russia.

To a government which was fighting the cause of British capitalism on several fronts at once. Foot was something of a nuisance and there was small prospect then of him ever joining the Front Bench. He came to represent much of the frustrations of Labour supporters who wondered why their government was failing so signally to introduce the Promised Land into Britain; he was the evidence that cleverer, more sincere, more radical ministers would do a more effective job of transforming society. The working class in Devonport did not see it quite like that however; in the 1955 election Foot lost his seat and remained out of Parliament until 1960, when Aneurin Bevan's death left a vacancy at the mining seat of Ebbw Vale. Foot was Bevan’s worshipping biographer; he seemed the obvious choice as Labour candidate which, in a place like Ebbw Vale where Tories were as rare as fumbling fly-halves, was tantamount to being the MP.

No eyebrows were raised when he was passed over by Wilson during the 1964/70 governments but when Labour came back to power in February 1974 Foot was given charge of the Department of Employment. His first brief was to settle the miners’ strike. In her diaries. Barbara Castle describes this as a brilliant appointment; Foot would use his standing among the miners to get them back to work and Wilson would defuse a potential critic. Foot's start was not all that promising because when he went to get his seal of office and to kiss the queen he was dressed as if he had been camping. But the queen need not have worried; her new Minister of Employment soon showed that it is not necessary to wear formal clothes in order to protect the interests of the class she represents.

Labour’s programme in the first 1974 election was very embarrassing because it talked about “socialist aims” and declared an intention to “. . . eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . .” Just in case they did not manage to get rid of all poverty, the Labour programme had as a fail-safe a rather less ambitious aim, which was to “. . . achieve far greater economic equality in income, wealth and living standards . . . bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . .” Denis Healey, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, showed that he meant business, and that he was not to be easily embarrassed by little considerations like election promises, by threatening to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked. What with all that, and with the tearaway lefty Foot at the Department of Employment, workers who thought that any shift in the balance of wealth might begin with a rise in their wages could well have concluded that their day had come.

Illustration by George Meddemmen

But the first message of that government was that there must be some delay. World capitalism was fast sliding into recession and the Labour government’s response, to which they were by then well conditioned, was an assault on working class living standards. The conflict was sharpened by the fact that after Labour had abolished the statutory wage restraint of the Heath government there was a flood of wage claims. It was then that Foot showed the true mettle of a left winger in power; with some gusto he bent to the task of holding back the flood. The coal strike settled, he quickly decided that further miners' wage claims were “excessive", although by what standards he did not make clear. In January 1975 he told the TUC that there should be no argument about the official “guidelines” on pay (the Labour government's new name for wage restraint) but that they should ". . . merely apply them as they stand". Barbara Castle thought that “He is taking his role as guardian of the Pay Code so seriously that he is becoming more rigid than Jim Callaghan was in his Chancellor days” (she was commenting about an argument over a rise for the nurses) and she later explained “Mike is obsessed with the need to win the next election”.

The record of that government, whose return was Foot's obsession, is set down now in a disreputable history. They quickly abandoned the professed aims of their manifesto and concentrated on organising a more efficient and intense exploitation of the working class — or of those of them that remained in employment as the dole queues grew longer. Public expenditure, which many Labour supporters saw as the key to any change in the balance of wealth, was cut in absolute and relative terms and Chancellor Healey, trying to hold wage rises below those in prices, turned his attention to squeezing the poor. There were some bitterly contested strikes, in which Prime Minister Callaghan encouraged workers to break through picket lines and urged the police to immediately arrest any picket they thought was making threats against blacklegs. Meanwhile, the pips of the rich remained conspicuously unsqueezed; the signs were that their share of national wealth, which had actually fallen under the Heath government, increased under Labour.

Disgruntled Labour supporters now describe those years as a time of mistakes and missed opportunities. They assert nostalgically that the aims of the 1974 manifesto are still relevant, which is another way of saying that the problems Labour claimed to be able to deal with then are still here today — that, in other words, the manifesto was worthless.

Any sense of betrayal in their ranks, as Labour recovered from the shock of their defeat in 1979, can only have helped Foot beat Healey for the leadership in 1980. In spite of the responsibility he bore, Foot seemed to be considered somehow blameless while Healey acquired the reputation of a beetle-browed political thug. Since then Foot has continued to play the double game. The conference rhetoric is as readily available as ever, to excite the delegates who have come all that way to the seaside to be cheered up: “I am a peacemonger!” Foot raved to thunderous applause at Brighton last year. “An inveterate, incurable peacemonger." The value of those rousing words could be assessed a few months later, as the Task Force was being prepared for the assault on the Falklands: “I believe the government is right. . . I support the despatch of the Task Force” were the words with which Foot urged the government on to quicker and more brutal bellicosity.

The man who once marched in support of CND’s demand for immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament now craftily fudges the issue: “I agree with the programme . . . for trying to get a non-nuclear defence programme for this country as speedily as we possibly can. . . (Weekend World, 3 October 1982). “The greatest task which this Labour Party will have to take is . . . securing nuclear disarmament in this country and throughout the world" (Labour Conference, 28 September 1982). In more direct words. Foot was saying that he favours nuclear disarmament eventually. when all the other nuclear powers have also disarmed — the sort of noncommittal policy to attract Tories, Liberals. SDP members and all floating voters everywhere.

These developments are not accidental; they are exactly consistent with Foot's record in government and out of it. Neither is he himself exceptional; he is only the latest example of the processes of capitalist leadership, which passes through stages of extravaganza, reality and disintegration. This unavoidable process reflects the fact that capitalism's problems — like poverty which Labour promises to abolish, like weapons of war which Foot once wished to abolish — do not respond to the dramatic speeches of political leaders. Foot is typical in that his followers invest him with a power which he does not have, nor can have; their political ignorance and his impotence are components in the basic fallacy of the entire principle of leadership and the theory that leaders are indispensable.

So will the real Michael Foot stand up? To show us that, after all the learning, the speeches and the writing he has at last come into his own? And then would some of his followers also stand up. to show that they understand that it is all a noxious mockery of their human interests.

Ivan

Who cares for the nurses? (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is important that nurses, in contemplating strike action, are rejecting their image as self-sacrificing and dedicated professionals. By acting in a militant and self-interested way they are questioning an oppressive ideology long associated with this form of employment.

There are all sorts of moral values attached to nursing. You just have to look at the words which the public, the unions, the media and nurses and patients themselves, use about the job. Nurses are expected to have a sense of “vocation", to function in a dedicated, committed and devoted way. These characteristics are to some extent hang-overs from the historical association with certain religious orders which have traditionally cared for the sick and needy; the terminology in nursing with "sisters" and “matrons” (mothers) — confirms this. But if you think about what these words really mean, then you have the problem in a nutshell. A nurse's sense of vocation is supposed to suggest a “calling”, in a literal sense by a god or some other external power. To be “committed” and “dedicated" to that sense of vocation means to “give oneself over” to it, to lose a sense of self in pursuit of an activity or purpose outside of oneself. In other words, to be self-sacrificing rather than —self interested.

Why is it that nurses are questioning the notion that they should be selflessly committed, and are beginning to act in a self-interested, class-interested way? The most clear cut reason arises directly out of their actual day to day experiences at work: contradictions between what they expect and what happens.

What are nurses' expectations? Most people who enter training do so out of a genuine desire to help people. The sick need to be looked after. Most reasons given by nurses for their choice of job are associated with helping people and the social usefulness of the work (Maguire: The Role of the Nurse, RCN Research Project, 1966). Yet in practice nurses are frustrated at every turn by their inability to do precisely that. There is a stark contradiction between the real desire to care for and give to other people and the economic realities of working in any capitalist health organisation. The NHS is a low class service oriented basically towards servicing the sick and making them socially and economically useful once again (in much the same way that the parts of a vehicle need to be serviced every so often); it exists to patch up workers and send them home — and back to work — as quickly as possible.

The allocation of finance and skills within the NHS is on the basis of cost-effectiveness. Well-equipped geriatric care units are of a much lower priority than surgical units. The economic return on removing an infected appendix from an otherwise fit young male is higher in this society than is the allocation of resources to the terminally ill. The young male will be fit for the labour market after his treatment. whereas the old person is no longer economically useful to capitalism: literally, he or she can be considered fit for nothing.

This “needs allocation” decision-making process is actually mirrored in the nurse's daily routine. Given an environment constantly lacking adequate resources (of people and equipment), simply because these are not allocated on the basis of human need, the nurse must decide which needs can be satisfied. And there is very little choice in what is a priority. The needs of those who are likely to go on living take precedence over the needs of those who are almost certain to die. A nurse will cause trouble on a short-staffed ward by insisting on sitting with and comforting an old person who is dying, rather than giving out drugs, helping to feed or wash patients, or anything else which in a simplistic way will — like a certain orange, fizzy glucose drink — “aid recovery”. The nurse, like the administrators, makes decisions according to social and economic norms associated with the rationale on which the NHS is based — on what is most "profitable". It is profitable to service fit young people; it is not profitable to spend time or money on the dying.

Perhaps the most explicit contradiction which the nurse experiences is that between the theory of nursing practice and the practice itself. This must create unpleasant tensions. The main contradiction is between more or less intelligent and scientific approaches to caring for sick people, which are learned during training, and the fact that these cannot be put into practice. For example, the nurse is taught to have a view of the patient as a “whole person”; to “empathise”, and respond to perceived physical and psychological needs. If in practice the nurse can only act as an automaton, a dose of Lucozade, and respond only to selected physical needs, a tension is felt. It is a commonly held view among nurses that what they are taught is irrelevant to how they must perform as practitioners. It is naively idealistic to believe that nurses can care for the “whole person”, or meet such varied needs, in a working environment where those needs must be systematically ignored. Rather than begin to believe that the training is impracticable or faulty, nurses have to resolve the tension by realising that it is the economic structure of society, and the consequent nature of the health service itself, which creates the problems. Neither a genuine desire to help people nor to care for them in the most effective way possible, can be satisfied in a health care system organised to “cure” the largest number for the lowest cost. In such a system the weakest go to the wall. When a nurse has to decide who to neglect, day in and day out, the idea of being able to “empathise” becomes a sick joke. The tensions are endless.

Another singular aspect of nursing as employment is the rigidity of its hierarchy. To experience the authority structure in a hospital is to learn to tread carefully — an unpleasant mixture of walking a tightrope and a cat on hot bricks. Not only is there the medical contingent “above” the nurse, but there is also the army of ancillary workers to whom the nurse is “superior”. On one level the experience of the different status of co-workers seems bewildering and intimidating; on a more complex level it engenders another contradiction.

Nursing is an unusually “co-operative” activity. Anyone who has been in hospital may have witnessed the enthusiasm created by a group of nurses trying to do their work, often under pressure, in the most effective way possible: they have a common and human aim to do as much as they can for their patients, and often it is up to them to organise this as best they can. One quality of a “good” nurse is “team spirit”, an ability to co-operate and co-ordinate effectively with others. This is only one side of it however. This cooperative situation only exists when nurses actually perceive that they have an aim in common — a goal to work towards together. As soon as nurses enter into a game of one-upmanship this is no longer the case: and unfortunately, one-upmanship is often the game to be played.

Trainee nurses are in competition with one another, as well as having the cooperative aim of getting the work done. Each one will be graded by the nurse in charge of the ward, and each one will attempt to be evaluated more highly than fellow workers. Similarly for qualified staff: they constantly seek promotion to higher grades, and must therefore win the approval of the hierarchy. This competitive behaviour conflicts with the cooperative endeavour. On a practical level this means that the nurse you were working with in a fulfilling, friendly, useful way five minutes ago, has suddenly gone sneaking off into the office to report something to the sister which you just noticed — so scoring your point.

Why is it that the types of working relationships created in nursing have to turn peoples’ illnesses and lives into a matter of scoring points? This is a question which most nurses must sense. Mow they answer it is of vital concern. They have to see the tension between the competitive and cooperative nature of their work as a product of the entire power structure within their profession. They are induced to compete because a hierarchical structure requires competition for positions of status. And more than this, it is vital also to recognise it as a mirror of the way in which workers compete with one another, to score a few points in the status stakes, rather than cooperating in their interests as a class.

There is another important factor which encourages nurses to question traditional expectations and, alongside, the values and ethics of a society which creates their oppressive and perverted role. In hospitals there is a clear-cut sexual division of labour according to status. Ninety per cent of nurses are female; 80 per cent of doctors are male. As one ascends the nursing hierarchy, the proportion of males increases, while in the medical profession women are decreasingly represented in the higher ranks. The difference in the representation of men and women in medical and paramedical jobs occurs largely in terms of gender expectations.

Doyal and Pennell, in their book The Political Economy of Health, give an historical analysis of the development of this situation. They quote Eckstein:

. . . the Nightingale nurse was simply the ideal Lady, transplanted from home to the hospital . . . to the doctor, she brought the wifely virtue of absolute obedience. To the patient she brought the selfless devotion of a mother. To the lower level hospital employees, she brought the firm but kindly discipline of a household manager accustomed to dealing with servants. . .

In their own analysis, they go on to say:

A basic division was therefore created between what were regarded as the hard-headed, diagnostic attitudes of medicine, the "curing" that male doctors did, and the “caring" which was to be done by women. . . 

In other words, to be a nurse is to be the stereotypical woman: selfless, devoted, committed and unassertive. In fact this is becoming less and less the case. Changing social attitudes to masculinity and femininity have enabled nurses to he more critical of tradition — and this has encouraged their greater militancy in the traditionally male arena of trade union action. To be involved in action for better pay and conditions means leaving selflessness and unassertiveness behind: means abandoning, to some extent, passive femininity and recognising a class interest. This is a vital step in the development of women's consciousness. Unless women reject traditional femininity, they will not develop a critical attitude toward society. Nursing creates many contradictions, which can be resolved in a class conscious way.

But we start with indignation. Nurses are rightly indignant about their position. They are sick of working for a pittance. Anyone can see that for a nurse, trying to get everything done is like trying to bail out a leaking boat with a sieve. It is time for nurses to express this real indignation — and not just about being paid “too little". It is time to get up and say “Look, I'm sick of being put upon, of being paid a pittance to watch people suffer needlessly. There comes a time when I just have to express my own needs — there’s just too many demands being made on me. I am being exploited in every sense of the word — as a worker selling myself for a salary as well as a person wanting to help other people".

Within capitalism, genuine caring cannot flourish. For nurses and other workers, self and mutual interest only begin with fighting for better pay; beyond this is a necessary political struggle to create a society in which the desire to be co-operative and caring people can be realised.

Chira Lovat

Running Commentary: Russia yawns (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In face of the conspicuous indifference of the Russian working class, the weeping news-reader announced that their leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was dead. Within a week the non-weeping masses were told to mop up their tears, for a new Tsar (official title: General Secretary of the Communist Party) had been appointed by the Politburo. Like the dictator who preceded him. Yuri Andropov. ex-KGB chief and Russian ambassador in Budapest in 1956, will preside over the Russian state capitalist empire. All leaders, be they elected like Thatcher and Reagan, or installed by totalitarian regimes, like Andropov and Jaruzelski. can only rule within the limitations of the anti-social profit system. Brezhnev’s tyrannical policies, which sent dissidents to the freezing wastelands of Siberia or the mind- manipulating confines of psychiatric asylums, were not the expression of his own hatred of the working class, but of capitalism’s inherent inability to satisfy working class needs and still produce maximum profits.

The new leader of Russian capitalism lives in a luxury apartment at Kurtuzov Prospekt — a home which is said to compare favourably with any owned by the richest capitalist parasites. How does he get his privilege and luxury? Simply by being one of the class of Party bureaucrats who control the state, which formally owns the means of wealth production and distribution. In short, Andropov and his fellow Communist Party dictators over the proletariat, live off the fruits of the labour of the Russian working class. To speak of such a system as socialist — as do certain gullible folk on the Left — is to totally distort the meaning of the word.

Capitalism is characterised by wage labour and capital, social phenomena which clearly exist in Russia. The only difference between Andropov's capitalism and Reagan’s is that in the latter capital tends to be privately owned and controlled and workers have some opportunity to choose their leaders, whereas under the former the state owns and controls most capital and workers have very limited democratic opportunities.

Within the field of capitalist politics, the so-called Left wing favours state capitalism and the Right wing prefers private capitalism. Both are prepared to accept either form of capitalism when the needs of profit-making dictate: for example, for all his rhetorical commitment to “the Soviet system” (state capitalism) Brezhnev was always happy to trade with the West. Whatever new policies Andropov may introduce, the capitalists of the West may rest assured that he will not cease to involve the Russian state in international commercial competition in which the wage slaves always lose.

Socialists oppose capitalism in ail its forms; we oppose it for the simple reason that it has outlived its usefulness as a way of organising society. Opposing the idea that there must always be leaders and led. socialists regard the passing of Brezhnev and the inauguration of his successor as of no consequence to the working class. The class which produces all social wealth need not mourn the death of one of those who legally steals that wealth from us. 

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Costly votes (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

History was not made by the high level of debate, nor by any prescience of the voters' decisions, in the recent American elections but records were broken by the amount of money laid out in the candidates' campaigns.

Something like £150 million was spent in this massive effort to persuade the American workers, against what should have been their better judgment, that capitalism would be good for them under Republicans or Democrats. Some staggering sums were afforded by the candidates themselves.

A Democrat in Minnesota spent a total of $8 million, half of which he paid himself. In Texas a Republican spent $12 million — and was not elected. But most spectacular of all. in the battle for Governor of New' York State, Republican Lewis Lehrman’s election expenses came to $15 million, half of it from his own pocket.

Lehrman was another loser, at least in the election. In other ways he is a winner; "I will." he announced, "go out to work and make the money back." He was only fooling because his millions came not from his own work but from that of his employees, whose exploitation yielded the profits which enabled Lehrman to make his flamboyant bid for power in New York.

Expensive election campaigns, which imply that only the rich can mount an effective contest, make a lot of people fear for democracy. Such anxieties miss the point, which is essentially in the fact that millions of New Yorkers voted for the big spending Lehrman and millions more for Cuomo, the Democrat victor, who also spent millions of dollars in the election.

Workers who are enlightened about capitalism, who are aware of the impotence of its politicians to run the system in the interests of the people, are unimpressed by gaudy, costly electoral stunts. Such workers are. in the end, the only certain guardians of democracy.

The fact that at present working class voters are so misled as to support candidates like Lehrman and Cuomo is not a measure of how much money was spent in their campaigns but of the low level of workers' consciousness.

Running Commentary: On the gridiron (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the baseball players of America went-on strike in the summer of 1981, we pointed out the similarities between their action and that of industrial workers trying to defend their standard of living. Most American workers, with a fair bit of prompting from the media, took a cynical attitude to the dispute, which was seen as a squabble between two sets of rich people. Now the players of the National Football League, who perform in steel helmets and liberal amounts of padding and look more like spacemen than footballers, have also taken “industrial action”.

Normally games are televised live on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings but since the middle of September the networks have been showing instead Canadian Football, old “classic” games, or baseball, now in the last days of its season. None of this satisfies National Football League addicts.

Television income is one of the points at issue. The players have asked for fifty per cent to be allocated to them, to be divided on a seniority scale, and changes in the system of medical checks. They are unhappy about the way drug testing is conducted, want each player to have the right to a second medical opinion and a surgeon of his choice, and to be told all pertinent information about his injuries. The very fact that these medical demands have to be made shows how dissatisfied the players are with the present situation. At the time of writing, labour and management remain deadlocked on all these points.

The point about the players’ high wages deserves some further comment. In a number of cases high salaries can be the front behind which surplus value reaches the pockets of wealthy capitalists. However, the American brand of football is hard, bruising work and the great majority of players come from the working class, often from the desperately poor. Under capitalism wages represent the value of labour power — that is. the average cost of producing and reproducing the worker. American football is such a dangerous game that even in a deep recession — with welfare checks (dole) a probable alternative — it is only the high pay and other lucrative trappings that induce men to make a living of it.

American football is well able to pay such wages: with only a few top clubs widely scattered over a large country, even the unsuccessful play in front of near capacity crowds. On top of this is the large income from television. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Britain where a large number of clubs are in competition and many are near to bankruptcy. Recently the Rugby League players in England threatened to strike, but this dispute has been smoothed over. The threat of being driven out of business is often used by capitalist spokesmen, sometimes in defiance of the truth, in order to dissuade workers from pursuing pay claims. In the case of the Rugby League, however, a prolonged stoppage may well have closed many clubs. The Rugby League game is only part professional anyway, the players’ main income deriving from other jobs when they are lucky enough to have one. There is no suggestion however of the NFL clubs going to the wall, even though a long strike is considered possible.

To dispel any lingering doubts about whether the issues in the footballers’ strike are indeed the same as in an “ordinary” industrial dispute, we give two quotations from the International Herald Tribune of 2 and 3 October 1982. Gene Upshaw , Union President, said:

It is a tragic situation to be dealing with these people. They don’t care about you. We’re replaceable parts. We asked them what gives them the right to give 1500 players a physical examination. Then we said "what if 1500 players refuse to take them?” They said they would get 1500 other players.

Jack Donlan, director of the League’s Management Council, presented the management view:

Their proposals, we perceive, are designed to control the game. They’re always talking about their wage scales, their medical program. They’re trying to take away everything that has made this game and this League great.

There you have it; we have been wrong all the time. The crowds don't turn up to see the players play. They don’t even go to see the managers manage, which can be a spectaclc in itself in the United States. They go to see the owners own. 

E C Edge 

The dispute was settled shortly after this piece was written. None of the players’ demands was met and they returned to work.

Correction (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the item Sunshine in the October Socialist Standard we may have inadvertently given the impression that if only politicians and "experts" could predict the course of capitalism's economy, slumps and booms could be eliminated. In fact both are impossible; capitalism is anarchic and can be neither predicted nor controlled.

Editors.

50 Years Ago: Shorter Hours No Cure for Unemployment (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Various Labour leaders, having therefore rejected the idea of shorter hours with reduced wages, have stood firmly by the notion that the problem can be solved if hours are reduced and wages left unchanged. The Transport and General Workers’ Union have made much of an agreement fixed up with Mander Brothers, paint manufacturers, of Wolverhampton, under which hours are reduced from 47 to 40 without reduction of the minimum rates of pay. The agreement may or may not be a satisfactory one in other respects, but it certainly does not show a way of remedying unemployment, for the change is accompanied by a reorganisation of the works and the introduction of a new system of piece-rates winch will increase the output per head of the workers and will result in eventual dismissal of redundant staff. The only guarantee is that no dismissals shall take place for six months and that the dismissed men will then receive some “compensation.” In the meantime, the increased output at smaller costs will enable Manders to undersell their competitors and throw their workers into the ranks of the unemployed.

[From an editorial in the Socialist Standard December 1932]

SPGB Meetings (1982)

Party News from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Audio recordings of the following meetings from the December 1982 Standard are available on the SPGB website.

WILLIAM MORRIS’ VISION OF SOCIALISM (Part 1, Part 2)

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 12th December 1982

Speaker - Steve Coleman

MARTOV AND THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK APPROACH TO REVOLUTION

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 26th December 1982

Speaker - Steve Coleman

Promised Land (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “promised land” of Biblical myth is so-called because, for all the impoverished Jewish and Arab workers who are trained to kill over it. “promised” is all it will ever be. Investors, capitalist employers of one side or another will continue to dominate, or come to dominate, the lucrative industry and markets there as long as world capitalism remains.

Class division among Jews was typified towards the end of the last century by the reaction of the “Cousinhood” of established Anglo-Jewry to the wave of poorer Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. For example, Benjamin Cohen, the Conservative MP for Islington at the time, supported the 1905 Aliens Act to limit further immigration. The historical tendency towards international integration and class polarisation makes Jewish nationalism, like its Palestinian counterpart, a pointless and reactionary response to the exploitation and oppression of the past and present. There is no Jewish “race": Israeli and British workers share the same interest in i breaking down national boundaries and forming a democratic, socialist society.

In the nineteenth century, Zionism developed as a nationalist movement similar to many others involving the setting up of capitalist states. Because of the banning of Jews from many fields of work in the Middle Ages, and the Christian ruling against taking part in money-lending, many Jews ended up as moneylenders. This was used as part of the vicious campaign of persecution directed against Jews over centuries, as they were used as a scapegoat for the problems of poverty and conflict which were endemic to the rise of capitalism. In the twentieth century, the idea of giving the Jews a country where they might be safe from the painful discrimination and attacks they had suffered was harnessed to the need for Western capitalism to have an outpost in an area of great strategic importance, the Middle East.

As early as 1840 Lord Shaftesbury, anxious to ensure an overland route to India, proposed a scheme of Jewish colonisation to use “the wealth and industry of the Jewish people for the economic development of a backward area”. In the nineteenth century Rothschild invested £2 million in Palestine, and the French government showed an interest in colonisation. The first Zionist conference was held in 1897 at Basle, at a time of violent anti-semitism in Germany and France. Herzl originally advocated a Jewish settlement in Uganda, but the congress decided on the area of Palestine, because of its religious significance. For thousands of years, it had been a crucially situated trade centre. The pogroms in Russia since the 1880s had sent thousands of Jews fleeing across Europe, and the prospect of a Jewish state seemed welcome to them.

During the First World War, as pact of its contradictory war-bribes, Britain promised the Jews a “national home” and the Arabs independence throughout the Middle East. In 1940 Joseph Weitz, then heading the Jewish Agency Colonisation Programme, wrote in his diary:

Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country . . . the only solution is Palestine without Arabs (Quoted in Socialist Charter, February 1979).

Indeed, the attempt to solve the problem of anti-semitism within a nationalist framework demanded that Jews should remain in a majority in the newly created state, with all of the immigration restrictions that implies, if the exercise was not to lose its point.

The state of Israel was founded in 1948, and by 1968 the annual influx of capital invested in the area was equivalent to about one tenth of the total world “aid” bill. Most of this capital was owned by British, French and American investors who did not live in the Middle East and for whom the religious ideals of Zionism meant nothing, other than a pool of labour inspired by those ideals to work hard to produce a substantial return for such investors.

Did the formation of Israel solve the problem of anti-semitism? Clearly not, and for three reasons in particular. First, the only real binding factor between people calling themselves Jewish is the acceptance of Judaism. Like other religions, Judaism is a reactionary dogma with its own implicit racism, in its reference to the “chosen people”. Second, capitalism generates racism and divisiveness because of its class divisions, and the competition between nations over world markets and between workers over jobs. The problems of poverty, unemployment, state violence and war are as evident in Israel as anywhere else. Israel is allied to the segregated state of South Africa. At least three Israeli trade unions bar Palestinian Arabs. The elements of Jewish culture which have attracted some to Zionism are all but wiped out by the demands of the capitalist state. Shops are opened on Saturdays, despite the religious ruling against it, to compete more aggressively for the market. Yiddish has been all but suppressed.

Thirdly, there is the creation of a new, Palestinian "diaspora” around Israel, and a Palestinian minority within Israel. The search for a scapegoat for the problems of the area, in the form of “Arab terrorists”, or the official anti-Jewish policies of some of the surrounding Arab states, are yet another way in which Zionism has generated racism, rather than ending it.

The persecution of Jews over many centuries, culminating in the Nazi genocide of the ’thirties, led many Jews sincerely to hope for a better future in the creation of a “humane” Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Such hopes are dangerously idealistic, and have themselves proved divisive and reactionary. The Zionists and Palestinian nationalists who argue over the borders in the area hardly own between them a single acre of that territory. As workers, owning no substantial property, they are arguing about where and by whom they will be exploited. The solution to the oppression which Jews have suffered is not to build “Jewish” prisons, tanks and bombs. The truncheons in the hands of Israeli police feel no different to those wielded in Germany, Russia or Ireland. In this respect, Israeli nationalism is basically no different from dozens of other nationalist movements with their roots in the nineteenth century expansion of capitalism. Each has its own myths, its own religious sanction, irrational loyalties, violence and senseless support for capitalism.

One final way in which racism is still being generated is in the reaction towards Israel’s recent military policies. Liberal newspapers like the Guardian, for example, have tried to interpret events by unsubstantiated racist myths:

Most opponents of the government are Ashkenazi, and most supporters of the government are oriental. "And those people don't understand peace or compromise.” said the journalist, "they understand dominance. And that's what Begin promises them.” For much of this constituency, the arguments about Palestinian purposes don't matter. (Martin Woollacott, 2 September 1982)

Like every other state, Israel is a political unit for the accumulation of capital. From 1948 to 1968, productivity increased nine-fold. Lacking natural resources, Israel imports more than 67 per cent of its raw material requirements, uses its pool of labour to work these up into finished products, and then exports nearly half of the resulting industrial production to earn foreign currency. In 1981, about 5 billion dollars was received from industrial exports, and 7.5 billion dollars spent by Israel on the world market. Since the early ’seventies there has been a high technology boom, which has largely replaced textiles and other industries of the ‘fifties. The general way in which the profit system functions across the world has been very clearly summed up in the ease of Israel as follows:

That magic ingredient (“added value”) is the difference between the cost of raw materials, plus transport and related costs, and the same price after the raw materials have been turned into highly sophisticated equipment . . . the higher the added value, the more foreign currency Israel earns. With diamonds, for example, the added value is between 20 and 25 per cent; in many electronic and other highly sophisticated products, it can reach between 45 and 70 per cent.

British Israel Trade, journal of British-Israel Chamber of Commerce, May/June 1982.

The wages and salaries on which the majority of Israelis depend in order to live are simply one of the "related costs" which this process seeks to minimise.

Seventy per cent of capital in Israel is owned by private investors, ten per cent is controlled by the state and about twenty per cent is owned by Hevrat Ovdim, the industrial holding company of the Histadrut, the main trade union, which is otherwise known as the General Confederation of Labour. In any of these cases, the same extraction of "added value” from the subordinate class of wage- and salary-workers is carried on in the interests of capital; 35 per cent of the budget goes on arms. When the Sinai Peninsula was evacuated it still had over 17 billion dollars' worth of military bases and armaments invested in it. It was Israeli and American shareholders who lost out as a result, not wage-earners or peasants.

Earlier this year, the President of the Israeli Bonds Drive attended a London lunch given by Bank Leumi for “business people and financiers”. He reported that Israel’s stock exchange, currently valued at over 11 billion dollars, is growing "by leaps and bounds" and is second in profitability only to Singapore, with an average rate of profit of 18 per cent. Israel Bonds are now the third most widely held security in the USA, after US government bonds and shares in AT and T. The President of the Bonds Drive stressed that Israel Bonds were “making an important contribution to peace". They are in fact doing so no more than Israeli bombs.

Some of the more idealistic of the early Zionists thought that it would be possible to establish a separate country which would be insulated from the conflicts and crises of world capitalism. This hope has also been shown as ill-founded by the course of history. Ernest Japhet, Chairman of Bank Leumi, said at the Industrial Club in Israel in January 1982, that “the Israeli economy, more than many other national economies, is dependent on developments in the world economy” and he went on to list problems such as fluctuations in markets and prices, and the uncertainties of market demand for Israeli exports.

The only practical way in which the majority of Israelis. Palestinians and others in the Middle East are going to come together in harmony and solidarity is through the recognition of their common class interest against their border-drawing rulers. How many Arab workers and peasants sat at the Arab summit conference of oil-sheiks and princes, which proclaimed the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”? How many Israeli workers, their wages and salaries trailing desperately behind the spiralling cost of living in Israel, are among the millionaire shareholders in high- technology industries, or American and French arms and firms?

Hundreds of thousands of Israeli workers have recently been involved in the Peace Now movement against the war in the Lebanon. If they are to make their dream of peace into a practical reality, they must be prepared to throw off their ideological chains of religion, nationalism and support for the profit system in any of its many forms. They could do worse than to follow the advice given nearly a hundred years ago. in the Yiddish socialist paper Arbeiter Freund (“Workers' Friend"). January 15, 1886:

We say again that no colonisation, no land of one's own and no independent government will help the Jewish nation. Jewish happiness will come with the happiness of all unhappy workers, and Jewish emancipation must come with the general emancipation of humanity.

Clifford Slapper

Blogger's Note:

A correction to an item in this article appeared in the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Assault on Wages (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most members of the working class find it difficult to imagine a society without wage-earners. Born into a world where the majority of people depend on wages to survive, they imagine that there is something inevitable about this arrangement and perhaps forget that it was not always so. In primitive societies there were no wage-earners; in slave-owning and feudal societies, very few. The preponderance of wage-workers in modern societies is the result of the development of capitalism as a mode of wealth production.

Wages are the price paid by the capitalist employer for the physical and mental energies of the worker for an agreed period of time – typically in this country for a forty-hour week – although the period of time may be much greater, especially among what are known as “salaried employees” or the “executive class” who are nonetheless wage workers like the rest. However, during whatever period of time is customary for the type of work, the employee must accept that any wealth produced, whether in the form of commodities or services, belongs to the employer to dispose of at whatever price the market will bear.

Profit is not something added on by the employer when the product is marketed. A moment’s thought will show that this cannot be so. If it were, then we would need to ask ourselves why profit margins vary so much, why occasionally some employers make a loss, and why they are so concerned about wage levels when all they would need do is add to the costs of production, including wages, a percentage profit

At a time when there is a shrinking and therefore highly competitive market, employers are under greater pressure to reduce wages in order to survive. This downward pressure on wages takes many forms, some of which may not be immediately evident.

 
In a period of high unemployment employers may present workers with the alternative of a direct cut in wages or redundancy as has happened recently on Sealink Ferries.

 
Employers may search the labour market for workers who will accept the lowest pay, compatible with efficient work, for example by employing women instead of men, younger workers with smaller financial commitments or immigrant workers accustomed to a lower standard of living. They may even transfer their activities abroad to take advantage of a cheaper labour market. 

 
The introduction of machinery, or the updating of existing machinery, may reduce a company’s wage bill by making it possible to employ unskilled instead of skilled workers or simply by reducing the numbers of workers required for a given volume of production.

By changing the organisation of the productive process, for example by division of labour, the actual numbers employed may be reduced or production may be increased without adding to the labour force. The stress put on “increased productivity” should sound a clear note of warning for the working class in spite of the fact that many so-called representatives of the workers go along with the idea. Just as the capitalist class consider their interests as a class, so should the working class view their collective interests.

In the road transport industry the increase in the size of lorries is designed to reduce the number of drivers and therefore the total wage bill. Thus we see on the roads today lorries of a capacity many times those used a decade ago – yet still under the control of one driver. A similar development is seen in the size of aircraft, which results in a more intensive use of airfields.

In the retail trade self-service has been introduced wherever practical. For some products, for example groceries, people may welcome the saving in time. Some may deplore the lack of personal service. These considerations do not however enter into the calculations of the capitalist, who will weigh in the balance the cost of installing the self-service system against the saving in wages which may result. This is often a two-fold saving: in numbers of staff relative to the volume of sales and the level of wages required to operate the system.

To maximise profits wages should ideally be just adequate to maintain the worker’s efficiency and to rear children as replacements. When during World War II reformers were advocating a system of family allowances – in this case payment to those with large families – Sir William Beveridge put the matter quite clearly from the employers’ point of view. In a letter to The Times (12 January 1940) he wrote:

We cannot in this war afford luxuries of any kind, and it is a luxury to provide people with incomes for non-existent children.

A system of family allowances is not the only way in which wages can be made to fit more closely the minimum needs of the working class. Any form of government subsidy must be viewed with suspicion from this point of view. We may take for example the recent debate on the need to subsidise public transport. Its advocates present such measures as a benefit for those workers who travel to work each day by train or bus. In fact it is only a benefit to employers who would otherwise have to include in the wages of all their employees enough to pay the “economic fare” – whether or not they all make use of public transport. To paraphrase Sir William Beveridge’s comment: “We cannot afford the luxury of providing people with incomes for non-existent journeys”.

We leave to last the most general assault on wages, an assault which has occurred in all those countries which have departed from a currency linked to gold – in other words, those countries using inconvertible paper money. Where paper money is issued, unrelated to the wealth production of a country, then the purchasing power of that money falls. The massive increase in prices which we have seen in this country over the last ten years has been almost entirely due to the excessive printing of paper money; that is, currency inflation which successive governments have employed to meet part of their public spending requirement. In a speech in the House of Commons Sir Keith Joseph reminded MPs that

The Government had to obtain the money it spends from taxing, borrowing or printing. There is no other source (The Times 27 January 1981).

and during a debate on exports Michael Neubert (Conservative) stated that

She (Margaret Thatcher) should emphasise that, if we are not to have higher taxes or higher borrowing leading to higher interest rates, then calls for higher public expenditure can only mean printing money (The Times 28 October 1981).

The Prime Minister heartily agreed. Nevertheless, the over-issue of currency has continued, though much abated, so that the resulting price inflation still runs at around 8 per cent.

If any worker imagines that the present assault on wages is temporary, he should be warned by a statement made recently by Sir Terence Beckett, Director General of the Confederation of British Industries. The Times (29 July 1982) reported him as saying:

In practice, employers should try in the forthcoming pay round to keep increases in labour costs down to a ‘remarkable 3 per cent last year’, as far below those of their overseas competitors as possible. But pay restraint should not be exercised for the next 12 months or the next decade. It is for ever.

Any government, whether it be Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Social Democrat or “Communist”, is forced to assist in the downward pressure on wages in face of the fierce competition for the sale of commodities and services at a profit.

John Moore

Russia: the left-wing fantasy (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty-five years ago a myth was born. A Dictatorship of the Russian Proletariat had been set up amid the chaos of World War 1. The simple slogan Peace, Land and Bread echoed from the cities to the remotest villages.

As the dust settled, facts emerged. The peasants had seized whatever land they could while the landlords, rightly fearing a repetition of the French Revolution, packed up and fled. Peace broke out as far as Russia's involvement in the World War was concerned but only temporarily: civil war was to follow. Bread was to be very scarce for a long time. The workers' councils, the Soviets, had no real power. The Bolshevik Party were in power and they meant to stay there. Within weeks the Cheka took the place of the Tsarist Okhrana — with unlimited powers. This was not a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was a dictatorship over the proletariat, and shortly over the peasants too.

The myth of a classless society — as socialism will indeed be — was widely publicised. Yet the reality was a society split by irreconcilable antagonisms. The Bolsheviks were desperate for food for the starving cities and sent raiding parties to rob the peasants, who fought back.

This conflict came to a head sixty years ago. The winter of 1920-21 was terrible; food in the cities was very scarce, rationing was arbitrary and chaotic, many workers fled the cities to join relatives in the countryside while those who remained starved on wages which were less than 10 per cent of the 1913 level.

The Kronstadt revolt highlighted real grievances, demanding better food supplies and new elections. “The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses . . . Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow which show clearly that the Party has lost the confidence of the working masses. [1] . . . Our cause is just. We stand for the power of the Soviets, not for that of the Party. We stand for freely elected representatives of the toiling masses. Deformed Soviets, dominated by the Party, have remained deaf to our pleas. Our appeals have been answered with bullets.”[2]

At the same time, peasant risings showed opposition to grain procurements. Lenin did a U-turn. In 1921, within weeks of Trotsky’s massacre of the Kronstadt garrison, he instituted the New Economic Policy. The collapse of Russian agriculture was halted and grain harvests increased through the twenties until the first Five Year Plan brought compulsory collectivisation and attacks on so-called kulaks. Food production nose-dived in the years 1928-32 and peasants slaughtered their livestock. Millions were liquidated or disappeared to concentration camps, others fled the hungry, terrorised countryside for the overcrowded cities. The gap between theory and practice widened:

  “From their bloodstained platforms they shout that the soil belongs to the peasants and the factories belong to the workers . . . [But] a new Communist serfdom arose. The peasant in the Soviet farms became a slave, and the worker in the factories a day-labourer.” [3]

From the time of the first Five Year Plan, which ended 50 years ago, we may date the completion of Russia's capitalist revolution. This was the third Russian Revolution. The first, in February 1917, toppled the Tsar and brought about a liberal bourgeois government under Kerensky; the second was the November coup by the Bolsheviks with promises of “Peace, Land and Bread". Between 1927 and 1932, the number of wage-workers in Russia increased by 30 per cent and the expropriation of the peasants proceeded by leaps and bounds.

Marx wrote of the “primitive accumulation" of capital — the process by which a landless proletariat is brought into being, with no means of livelihood except the sale of their labour power, renting themselves out for hire by the hour, the day or the week for wages. He pointed out that everywhere the methods employed "all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition "[4]. This ruthless, enforced process, was as cruel in the steppes of Russia as in the Highlands of Scotland. For Highland Clearances, read “de-kulakisation and collectivisation.”

But Russia, it was claimed, was different. There was no exploitation — it was illegal for individuals to own factories or mines, or to enrich themselves by employing a workforce. If there were no individual capitalists, there could be no capitalist class. Therefore this was not capitalism.

But. as Marx, Engels and Bukharin explained earlier, the wages system does not require individual capitalists. The capitalist class as a whole collectively exploits the working class as a whole. This can be done by means of institutional or corporate ownership of the land, factories, mines and so on as had already happened in the 19th century. (When Bismarck nationalised the railways, this had nothing whatever to do with socialism, as Engels pointed out.) Lenin's view was that in Russia what was needed was state capitalism, on the Prussian model. Yet to this day, it is generally believed that Russia's nationalisation is characteristic of socialism in practice. Later, Khrushchev tried to explain away the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat". This, he said, had been superseded by a “government of the whole people": there was still to be coercion "but not in a class sense, since it was no longer necessary to suppress entire social layers and classes, but only criminals and individuals who violated Soviet laws.”[5]

Now. however, this policy is disavowed in Moscow. On a recent visit to Russia we were invited to take part in a discussion with two official spokesmen at the Marx-Engels Institute. In response to this point — that Russia had developed beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat and had become a classless society, a "government of the whole people” — the official spokesmen were anxious to reassure all present that nothing so terrible had happened. Khrushchev, he scoffed, talked a lot of twaddle. Yet this position had been endorsed as part of the CFSU's programme at the 22nd Congress (1961): “(the party had) transformed the state of the proletarian dictatorship into a state of the whole people"[6]. Evidently, the CPSU also talks twaddle.

Another Leftwing fantasy is that in Russia there is no unemployment. But with deportation to Siberia, pass laws which fix where any individual is allowed to live, black-listing of the system's critics, a paternalist state, gross waste of human resources in the overmanned and hopelessly inefficient farms, large scale unemployment would be unlikely. Yet there are unemployed workers in Russia.

Workers may be sacked for absenteeism or other infringements of the Labour Code. They may be sacked and blacklisted for complaining or protesting against abuses by management [7]. The only difference is that in Russia, unemployed workers cannot get any unemployment benefit and there are no published statistics. In any case, with or without unemployment, the wages system exploits workers.

If Russia is Utopia, it is Utopia only for the Male Chauvinist Pig. On my first visit, twenty-five years ago, I saw Moscow in sweltering summer. All the people queueing with buckets for water at standpipes were women — never men: This year I visited three cities (Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad) in the winter. In each city, snow was being shovelled off the pavements by women and only by women. I asked why such hard work is done only by women and why women do not reach the higher decision-making strata. The official response: "We don't like our women to be put under stress"!

Russia is said to represent a “transition stage’’, not capitalist (no individual capitalists) but not yet communist. But how long can a transition be expected to last? This one qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records: sixty-five years is an awful long time to be in transit.

The claim that in Russia there is no class struggle is fraudulent. In 1956-57 there was a wave of strikes (especially “Italian strikes", a form of go-slow); in 1962, the Army machine-gunned demonstrators, including children, protesting at food prices and work norms; and about ten years ago, 30,000 workers struck at the Kiev car factory. What has developed is a form of capitalism where most capital is state property.

As Engels wrote: “State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict . . . The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers — proletarians.” [9]

The history of Russia in the last fifty years has demonstrated the truth of this proposition.

Workers have learned to associate Marxism and socialism with a totalitarian dictatorship, ruthless and corrupt. The damage done by this to the socialist cause is immeasurable. Yet there is some cause for hope. Moscow’s magicians find it harder to support the illusion of a Workers' Paradise. In the last twenty-five years, the publication of samizdat material has become well established. The early critics wrote poems and novels. Later came scientists, historians, economists and engineers, and in the last decade a number of shop-floor workers. These usually follow Sakharov, who described the system as state capitalism. as in the 1972 leaflet:

   It is not towards communism that we are heading: all that is idle talk. Our system is state capitalism — the very worst, the most wretched political system possible . . . The Kremlin bosses and their hangers-on live better and richer than many Tsarist noblemen did before the Revolution — and yet they call themselves ‘the vanguard of the Soviet people', its servants! [10] 

Just as forthright are the comments of Pohyba arguing for independent trade unions: “ultimately it is the state which is the exploiter along with the State-party bourgeoisie which is in its service and which is the one wielding real power in the country . . . Our country is actually a State capitalist society with a totalitarian form of government’’. [11]

How can Left-wingers explain the existence of profits in what they claim is a socialist society? The Kremlin’s tame economists worry about new methods of measuring “the true rate of profit for each enterprise” (Nemchinov), and Liberman's Kharkov plan stipulated that a factory's rewards should be linked to the profits it could earn on its capital investment. [12] If there are profits, they can only come about by the exploitation of the working class. Profits arc part of our unpaid labour. Yet the myth of this “socialist state” confronts us still and debunking it is still a necessary chore for every socialist speaker or writer.

Charmian Skelton

References
1. 1st issue of Kronstadt Izvestya (3 March 1921) — see Ida Mett The Kronstadt Uprising.
2. Final Kronstadt appeal (same source).
3. Kronstadt Izvestya, quoted by Kautsky Bolshevism at a Deadlock (1930).
4. Capital I ch. xxxi (Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist).
5. Pravda, December 1964.
6. Quoted by Gollan in C.P. Pamphlet Socialist Democracy — some problems (1976) from The Road to Communism — The Proceedings of the 22nd Congress (Moscow, 1961).
7. See Workers Against the Gulag (Pluto Press 1979).
8. Censorship rules ban publication of information on accidents, epidemics and unemployment.
9. Socialism Utopian and Scientific.
10. An Underground Leaflet, June 1972. published in full in Socialist Standard. January 1973.
11. Cf. Nove, An economic History of the Soviet Union.

Poland: recession and repression (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

We see that, after all, society has not entered upon a new phase. Instead, the State has gone back to its earliest form, in which the sword rules without shame and club-law prevails

Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Just such a tyranny rules in Poland today. It is no more socialist than Argentina is. It is a land where this autumn workers were murdered behind their impoverished barricades. A land in which a bus driver, walking home with his wife after work, was shot from behind in an empty street. A land where the unemployed, deprived of state benefits, rapidly fall into destitution. A land in which prisoners are often brutally beaten, sometimes tortured. A land where only the “security forces" and those they serve live free from hunger.

1982 was a year in which conscript miners in Poland sweated to produced 200 million tons more coal than in 1981. A number died in the effort. Following reports of dangerous levels of methane gas, military commissars threatened miners with court-martial for desertion if they did not continue work. Explosions killed at least 17 miners. The official report on two such "accidents" proved management's guilt. [1] Conditions of work in the militarised mines are near to slavery: only two free Sundays a month, armed guards, and minimal safety precautions.

The recession, combined with crippling foreign debts and lack of foreign exchange, has brought industry almost to a halt. It is thought that real wages have fallen by 40 per cent, while the unemployment rate has reached 20 per cent. [2]

Polish economic problems are part and parcel of the recession which has hit East European “socialist” countries as hard as those in the openly capitalist West. This can be seen from the decline in the annual rate of growth. Czechoslovakia and Hungary arc now on a "zero growth” rate, while Romania’s claimed growth rate fell from 11 per cent in 1971 to 2½ per cent in 1981. Not one East European state managed as high a growth rate in the second half of the seventies as had been achieved from 1971-75. [3]

In the summer of 1981. desperate measures were being introduced. "Protected" industries were to have priority in obtaining raw material and labour, the "sacrifice" ones were to be run down. [4] “Profit maximisation" is a tacit admission that Poland is as capitalist as any Western country. Where profit exists, there is surplus value which comes into being from workers’ unpaid labour. It results from workers’ exploitation, and is an inevitable consequence of the wages system. There is no difference between the demand of the Polish government for "profit maximisation" and that of Thatcher’s government for “greater efficiency". Both spell a demand for greater exploitation of the workers.

Unlike other rulers in a capitalist crisis, Jaruzclski and his junta hope to shackle the workers with tough new laws which would hinder effective strike organisation. In Poland, the 1981 draft law laid down that strikes would only be legal after approval by the majority of workers and after compulsory arbitration had failed. Afterwards, strikers would only get half-pay until lost production had been made up. Also, the Sejm could declare a 60-day moratorium on strikes if it decided that an economic emergency existed. The 1982 version is worse: many workers will not be allowed to strike under any conditions. [5]

For those "lucky” enough to be in work, it is close to forced labour. Many work 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, including Sundays and Bank Holidays. Parasites (the unemployed) can be directed into any kind of work, however unsuited. There is also forced labour, without pay. Workers can be drafted to other areas. Hundreds arc held in internment camps, including those who arc held merely because it is thought possible that they might, one day. break some regulation or other. There are many reports of serious brutality, even torture, and no inspection of conditions in the camps is allowed, even by the Red Cross. Families of internees suffer great hardship, alleviated to some extent by collections and other aid organised by Solidarity or the church.

Yet only two years ago. massive strikes in the shipyards and the coal mines of the south led to the formation of a nationwide union, independent of the ruling Party, backed by 80 per cent of workers. The workers expected that if they had an independent union, everything else would follow and they could coerce the government into implementing reforms. This belief lingers on. Solidarity leaders called for a general strike in June, and a recent statement declared that "it is still too soon to order a general strike" while not ruling this out at a later date. [6]

Lech Walesa and others who urged that the new movement should restrict its role to that of a trade union were unable to prevent it developing into a political opposition. This was mainly a consequence of the growing demoralisation of the ruling party, as heads rolled in corruption scandals, with many criminal charges and embarrassment over the economic mess. As in other countries, economic collapse led to political instability. Poland had four Prime Ministers in 1981, and recently Jaruzelski sacked five Economic Ministers. The economic crisis did not vanish when Solidarity was suspended.

Weak as the government was, there is much evidence that the rulers could not concede to Solidarity. At stake were the Leninist dogma of a vanguard Party with a leading role, the vested interests of corrupt. ambitious members of the Polish Communist Party (PUWP) with a finger in every nomenclatural pie. and the strategic imperative of ensuring that Poland remained a docile, loyal member of the Warsaw Pact; all these combined to make the Gdansk Agreement another "scrap of paper", like the Helsinki Agreement on human rights. By January 1981, Solidarity stated bluntly that there had been a "blatant refusal (by the government) to honour its commitments. . . . The government is not fulfilling its promises given in August-September I980". [7] There was little that Solidarity could do about this: its strongest weapon, industrial action, was weakened by the recession, and already it was having its work cut out trying to resist closures and redundancies.

Yet in the West, left wingers were claiming Solidarity's existence as a great victory. A tendency to see in Solidarity whatever they wanted to see was shown by the Bennite wing of the Labour Party: “Solidarity — a model of workers’ democracy". [8] Solidarity’s success would “demonstrate the enormous superiority of a nationalised economy combined with working class political power over the capitalist system in the West". [9]

While Jaruzelski's officers were preparing their coup. Chris Harman of the Socialist Workers’ Party raved:

Rarely has a workers’ movement historically been in a stronger position for making a bid to solve society’s problems by taking power into its own hands . . . Even within the army and the police, only a few hardliners would put up determined resistance to any serious attempt by the mass workers' movement to bring the present chaos to an end by taking power. [10]

Neither in 1980 nor at any later date was Solidarity able to gain political power. At its strongest, when it surprised the government into signing the Gdansk Agreement making many concessions — on paper — Solidarity gained no political power and had no means of enforcing that agreement, other than by industrial action. But industrial action is at its weakest in a recession when workers fear the sack, while management need not worry about delayed orders since their order books are mostly empty. Without political power, Solidarity’s very existence was always at risk and its independence curtailed by fear of head-on conflict with the government.

Solidarity was also weakened by the fact that, rather than being simply a trade union, its membership included almost all sections of the population including "intellectuals”, shopkeepers, farmers and students. Its demands were mostly for Labour Party-type reforms. While some of these were of a welfare state nature, others were for economic reform in the "national interest".

In 1981 this demand for economic reform became a specific demand for "marketisation”, for the abandonment of the central plan characteristic of the command economy, in favour of enterprise autonomy with a flexible response to market forces. Underlying this was the naive belief that, if left to itself, capitalism works. That is as unrealistic as the left wing expectation that central state planning can iron out the inherent anarchy of the system. Also, as some delegates at Solidarity’s Congress noted, marketisation would involve closures and throw their members out of work. Such a policy might be in the "national interest” but workers threatened with redundancy could hardly regard it as in their interests.

Another reform which Solidarity pursued in 1981 was the demand for “workers’ self-management". In Britain, this was mistakenly seen by left-wingers as “workers' control”. In fact, this demand was put forward as a result of the corruption, mismanagement and incompetence of top management who were appointed by committees of the PUWP. This nomenclature system was held by many Poles — especially those in middle management and in the universities — to be a major contributing factor in the economic collapse. Get rid of the nomenclature system and you get rid of managerial muddle, was their argument. Trying to abolish the PUWP’s treasured powers of patronage brought Solidarity into head-on conflict with the vested interests of the corrupt PUWP.

Neither “marketisation” nor the ability to elect the managing director and decide the policies of the enterprise which employ us could alter the fact that this system can only operate by making profits. Whoever manages capital in a capitalist world has to do the best they can to produce profits. This applies as much to workers elected to run an enterprise as it does to politicians’ nephews. Trade unions should not concern themselves with measures which aim to make industry more profitable: their concern should be to defend workers’ interests.

Solidarity was increasingly side-tracked from its original role as a trade union which, we must remember, could not change the system, even supposing that its members wanted such a change. In fact, the overwhelming majority did not demand fundamental change, only reforms “in the national interest”. Now they are pleading for talks with the government aimed at some sort of “entente nationale” or social contract.

The problem was summed up by Gdansk workers who struck in protest at the banning of Solidarity: “How can you do anything when they put a pistol to your head?” At all times the PUWP retained political power and with it control over the police and armed forces which, as we said before Jaruzelski’s coup, can be used, have been used and may be used again against the workers.

It is probable that other workers’ movements will be crushed, as Solidarity has been, until the demand for independent trade unions is backed by a class-conscious workers’ movement. Tragically, even if Solidarity had achieved all it demanded, Poland’s workers would have remained exploited wage-slaves, alienated from the means of producing and distributing wealth, suffering — as all workers do, East or West — from poverty.

Charmian Skelton

References

[1.] Solidarność: Bulletin d'Information (Paris), nos. 34 and 35, Sept.’82.

[2.] The same, no.35.

[3.] Problems of Communism, July-Aug. ’82; D.M. Nuti, The Polish Crisis — Economic Factors and Constraints (The Socialist Register 1981).

[4.] Nuti (as above); Government Programme for overcoming the crisis, July ’81.

[5.] Time 16 March ’81; The Economist 9 Oct. ’82.

[6.] Solidarność Bulletin 27 Oct. ’82; Time 1 Nov. ’82.

[7.] Solidarność: N.C.C. statement 11 Jan. ’81.

[8.] Socialist Challenge 7 Jan. ’82.

[9.] Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, editorial, winter-spring ’81.

[10.] Socialist Review, Nov.-Dec. ’81.

[11.] Financial Times 14 Oct. ’82.