Old King Coal in His Labour Robes (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

January 1st, 1947, saw the opening of one of the funniest political farces for a long time, the inauguration of State coal mines under the National Coal Board: time must pass before the miners discover its tragic aspects. M.P.s who had sung the Red Flag when the law was voted presided over the unfurling of flags bearing the mystic emblem “N.C.B.” – an emblem the irreverent have already happily refashioned. Notice boards were erected at the pitheads informing the coal wage-slaves that the mines are now operated by the State “on behalf of the people.” Leaflets were handed out telling the men of the stupendous transformation. Meetings were held and speeches delivered, at one of which Sir Ben Smith, now a regional coal official, told his miner audience they had reached “the end of a road.” Enough time and energy were spent on publicity to have raised a hundred thousand tons of coal, and all of it based, it, seems, on the curious notion that if you really had removed a prisoner’s handcuffs and leg-irons and thrown open the gates of his prison, you have to tell him so in case it should look to him that to-day is just like yesterday.

Cabinet ministers graced a ceremony at the Board’s London headquarters and the Minister of Fuel. Mr. Shinwell, handed over a specially bound copy of the Act to Lord Hyndley, the Chairman of N.C.B. Mr. Shinwell spoke about the campaign for nationalisation having at last triumphantly reached its goal. He said a few words about the pioneers – Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Robert Smillie – though it is at least open to question whether those two, if they were alive to-day, would feel gratified at what has come out of their well-meant but mistaken labours for nationalisation. The workers asked for nationalisation because they thought it would mean higher wages, and security against speeding-up and unemployment. The industrial capitalists wanted cheaper coal for their factories and thought that unification and modernisation of the mines was the way to get it. The Labour Government has adroitly wedded the two by giving the capitalists what they wanted but under the name that appeals to the workers. The catch will disclose itself in due course.

At Horden Colliery, Durham, the secretary of the local miners’ union “dropped a hatchet into a hole dug in the ground under the National Coal Board flagstaff. They were burying the hatchet, he said, as a symbol that in future there would be no dispute between owners and men. It was the end of the old regime” (Manchester Guardian, 6/1/47). The hatchet is already being dug up again long before it has had time to rust, and it is obvious that some at least of the miners have no illusions. The National Union of Mineworkers, on January 2nd, issued a statement that the miners do not intend to abandon the strike weapon. The statement was issued, the Union explained, in order to correct “a mistaken impression” that had got into the Press (News Chronicle, 3/1/47).

Mr. Ernest Thurtle, Labour M.P., informed the readers of his column in the Sunday Express that “capitalism has been deposed.” “A Socialist theory of long standing is being put to an acid test. It is that if private profit is taken out of an industry, and that industry is owned and controlled for the benefit of the nation as a whole, then the workers in it will exert themselves with increased zeal and enthusiasm” (Sunday Express, 5/1/47). Of course, the tongue-in-its-cheek Daily Worker (4/1/47) had to lend itself to the same game, with a report of a fall in absenteeism under the heading “State Pits Spur Miners to Record Turnout.”

Then to crown the farce one of the “people” who now own the pits was had up in court for stealing “coal worth 1s. 6d. belonging to the National Coal Board” (Daily Express, 7/1/47). The magistrate, binding him over, said “the coal was now the property of the King and stealing it was a serious offence.” Apparently the man had thought it at least equally serious that “he had no coal at home.”

A week later another criminal act took place. Someone unknown, either “as a prank or as an expression of hostility towards nationalisation,” had stolen the N.C.B, flag hoisted at Upton Colliery, Yorkshire. He had taken it “from the 50-foot flagpole which stands near the main offices.” The local miners’ secretary told a reporter “its disappearance had caused indignation among the 700 miners at the pit” (Manchester Guardian, 13/1/47).

Then, by contrast with the flag-wagging and jollifications, Lord Hyndley, Chairman of N.C.B., told some sober facts about the Board’s plans. Writing in the Observer (5/1/47), he mentioned the problem of “the closing of uneconomic pits and consequent transfer of labour,” the raising of £150 million new capital to modernise the mines, increase output and eliminate waste, and the likelihood that out of the proceeds of the industry some £10 million a year will eventually be needed to pay interest on the capital. (What Mr. Thurtle calls “taking private profit out of an industry” is thus shown merely to consist of calling profit by another name.) Of course, Lord Hyndley gave assurances that in all that is done to secure the production of coal “at the minimum cost,” due regard will be paid to the miners; but they will find that being speeded up, and being eliminated from their jobs by labour-displacing machinery, tastes just as bitter when served out by the capitalist State under the N.C.B. Flag as it does without those trimmings.

Looking to the future, it can be seen that the pressure to screw more and more production out of the miners will he accelerated as cheaper fuels come into competition with coal. The likely development of atomic energy is one and oil is another. The Manchester Guardian (2/1/47) points out that the proposed oil pipe line from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean “would make it profitable to sell oil here at, half the present price. With the cost of coal being what it is and transport on the verge of a great; development of the continuous combustion engine or gas turbine, cheap oil would deeply affect Britain’s industrial future.”

These developments will also deeply affect the miners, and help prove to them that, far from having reached the goal of Socialism which will emancipate them and other workers from capitalist wage-slavery, the struggle has yet to be waged. The ballyhoo surrounding the inauguration of State capitalism in the coal fields serves only to mislead them and to direct their minds away from the real issue that concerns the working class.

 Edgar Hardcastle

The Economics of False Teeth (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The prolonged dispute between the official representatives of the dental profession and the Government over the scale of fees for the supply of dentures to panel patients under the National Health Insurance scheme has brought the art of mechanical (as distinct from surgical) dentistry rather prominently before the public eye. A few days before Christmas Mr. W. J. Brown, M.P., shocked the members of the profession by publishing a statement of some of the main facts relating to the production of dentures and the pay of the producers (Evening Standard, 20/12/46). In the words of Mr Brown, “In the West End you pay anything from 30 to 40 guineas for a set of teeth. In the provinces from 10 to 15. Even under the National Insurance scheme the price is over seven guineas. But the actual cost of the material which goes into a set of dentures is only about 15s. The balance represents the wages of the mechanics . . . and above all, the profit of the dentist. For the mechanic, on an average rate of £5 to £6 a week, will make several sets of dentures in a week’s work.” Here we have a fairly neat summary of small capitalist exploitation in a handicraft.

Artificial dentures, unlike boots and shoes, and clothes generally, cannot be mass produced. There is no such thing as making for stock. Every set of dentures must be moulded to a pair of models taken from impressions of the individual patient’s mouth. Hence there is little scope for machinery in the production of dentures and the capital outlay on a dental workshop is small as compared with that on the normal run of productive establishments. A considerable number of mechanics, financially more fortunate than the majority of their fellows, have set up such workshops, but the provisions of the Dentists Act of 1921 prohibits anyone not on the Dental Register from taking impressions. Hence the mechanic working on his own account can only deal openly with a member of the profession and not with the public directly. He cannot therefore obtain the full market price for his commodity under normal conditions. Moreover, even in this narrow sphere, the middle-man has managed to insert himself, and a few fairly substantial concerns, employing, perhaps, a few dozen of the more poverty stricken mechanics, have claimed their percentage of the dentist’s profit.

As Mr. Brown points out, however, the 1921 Act has not prevented mechanics from repairing and even reconstructing existing dentures, and during the war a regular rash of repair shops has sprung up in most large centres of population. The dental profession have a shrewd and probably well-founded impression that behind the mask of the repair shop a good deal of illegal impression-taking goes on. Hence their desire to wipe out the repair-shops by means of a clause in the new Health Services Bill. Side by side with this effort they are demanding nine guineas as the price of a set of panel dentures (representing about eight hours’ work on the part of the mechanic), to which the dentist himself contributes about an hour of his time, although, of course, it is highly skilled labour. Whatever the outcome of the dispute, the position of the majority of mechanics will remain that of wage-slaves. Their direct or indirect employers are not agitating for higher fees in order to have the pleasure of paying more wages. During the war the small “ sectional organisations of mechanics, inside the larger bodies such as N.U.D.A.W. (and the Society of Goldsmiths, etc., in London), gained official recognition from the associations of professional men. Little serious effort has been made, however, on the part of these associations to compel their members to take mechanics seriously by respecting the terms of the national agreement. A temporary scarcity of mechanics has enabled them to force up wages in an endeavour to meet the rising cost of living. This appears to have reached its limit and even a Trade Union hospital such as Manor House has scrapped the grading scheme and adopted a wage scale which private employers are quite willing to pay. Bemused by the fancied advantages of “nationalisation” (in some form or another), the mechanics’ officials attach more importance to co-operating with their employers on public bodies than to improving their ability to defend their own interests. Under the new National Health scheme the wage-negotiating machinery will remain, as now, under the control of a Joint Council of masters and men with an alleged common interest in “the welfare of the craft” as a guiding idea.

Mr. Brown’s article leaves the reader with the impression that the legalisation of impression-taking by the mechanics would solve the problem; but the general poverty of the major portion of “the public.” (i.e., the working class) makes intense competition either for work or customers more or less inevitable. Any considerable increase of mechanics working on their own account would lead to a considerable number going broke and losing their savings, much as happens in other branches of production, etc., where the small man seems, on the surface, to have a fighting chance. The fight is short and the longest purse wins the day. Attempts to answer Mr. Brown in the columns of the Evening Standard followed on January 1st, 1947.

Lt.-Col. Drury, representing a group of dental surgeons, held up his hands in horror that an M.P. should boast of encouraging a defiance of the law and roundly declared that mechanics had insufficient knowledge of anatomy to take impressions. Unfortunately for the Colonel’s argument, the 1921 Act also placed on the register hundreds of men who, without calling themselves dentists, had for years been operating on mouths (as well as taking impressions) without any college training. These men, obviously, had no more access to knowledge of anatomy than the average mechanic. Further, it is obvious to any layman that taking an impression is not a surgical operation. It still seems to be true that the “professional” section of society are distinguished from the rest of the working class chiefly by their larger conceit.

Eric Boden

Priority Imports (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “A cargo of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo which arrived in the Elder Dempster ship, Fulani, is being handled at Toxteth Dock, Liverpool. It is contained in nearly 1,300 drums, weighing altogether more than 860 tons”

(Daily Telegraph, 20/11/46).

Laugh With Mr. Morrison (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Morrison is fast giving Politics a definite entertainment value. Time and favourable circumstances may yet link him with A. P. Herbert in the dual role of fellow M.P. and fellow humourist

To show we do Mr. Morrison no more than bare justice, consider a statement from his speech at Birmingham, Oct. 26th, “That the Labour Party does not propose to abolish the profit motive” (Observer, 28/10/46). Compound this with his repeated assertion that the Labour vote was a Socialist vote and there is concocted the rich, ripe, fruity humour that a Socialist is one who believes in the common ownership of the productive sources operating through production for use and based on the profit motive. One can almost visualise the pages of Marx’s “Capital” curling up at their edges with laughter.

Mr. Morrison’s whimsical humour is illustrated in his droll statement: “That the profit motive has been used as an excuse for exploiting Labour and treating workers as a commoditv and not as people.” But Capitalism is a system which produces commodities for sale with a view to profit. The worker’s labour power being the only thing he possesses for getting a living, it is this he must seek to sell on the so-called labour market. It is thus a commodity. The capitalist buys this commodity in the form of wages, these wages being on average its value or the sufficiency of things necessary to sustain and restore the worker’s productive energies. In the consumption of this commodity, labour-power by capital, however, a value greater than its own is produced. This unpaid labour or surplus value is the sole source of capitalist profit. This social economic process is included by Mr. Morrison under a single heading—“excuse.” Seeing, however, the employing class treat labour power as a commodity, because it is a commodity, and exploit workers because exploitation is the only method by which profit can be made, the excuse must be allowed. The question which seems to be most pertinent here is what excuse can be made for Mr. Morrison? We are inclined to the view that this is a more subtle form of Morrisonesque humour, and, if so, it leads inescapably to the conclusion that the technique of Marx (Harpo) has been closely studied by him. 

Although Mr. Morrison is not desirous of changing the commodity status of labour-power, he at least wants it called by another name, for he said: “In future Management must recognise Labour as a service and not as a commodity.” To a possible objection that this is a distinction without a difference, it may be argued that it is at least a way of looking at things. To steal a man’s clothes while be is bathing may be an act of common theft, but to leave behind a message that a bathing costume covers him just the same as clothes does reveal a certain delicacy of feeling and shows that he is at any rate a somewhat uncommon thief. Whether, of course, the employing class will submit to this fundamental change or seek to impede the march of progress by every means within their power cannot as yet be said, but we feel sure that if they won’t change the name Mr. Morrison will fight to secure this historic act of class justice with every Socialist fibre in his revolutionary being.

It appears, however, from Mr. Morrsion’s following statement, that the something for nothing postulate is as inapplicable to the world of Labour politics as it is to the world of physics, for Mr. Morrison warns the workers “that the new status involves new duties as well as new rights.” “Take unemployment pay,” he said. “ How long is a worker who has been doing some particular job entitled to live on the contributions of his fellow workers rather than take a job of another kind under proper conditions or a job in another place? ”, which, put in another way, seems to pose the question, how soon will an unemployed “new status holder” be compelled to seek or take a job outside his own trade (involving, as it generally does, a lowering of his customary pay-rate) before being cut off Unemployment Insurance benefit? Or again, how soon will penalties operate subsequent to his refusal to take a job elsewhere? Elsewhere being, perhaps, as it has been in the past, a distance involving hundreds of miles. In view of the not remote possibility of large scale unemployment, the answer is of some importance to sellers of “services.” Mr. Morrison, as a member of the Government, may, of course, have some information on the subject, and so we would put the question to him by asking, how long do you think, Mr. Morrison, should be the period of non-compliance with such conditions before the “service seller" is deprived of unemployed pay, under the “not genuinely seeking work clause? ’’

Although Mr. Morrison seems blithely unacquainted with the way profits are made, he has, it would seem, a nonconformist conscience as to where they are made. For instance, he tells us “that at a time when people were living in slums, without enough to eat, the profit motive was fostering a boom in the building of luxury flats and dog-racing tracks." Both he regards as a form of misdirection of national resources into non-essential work. But starvation and slums have existed and persisted in the industries Mr. Morrison calls essential in their most booming periods. In fact they have been associated with Capitalism even in its remote pre-dog racing track period. Mr. Morrison must be aware of the fact that poverty, slumps, unemployment and economic insecurity have been permanent features throughout the whole course of present society and can no more be traced to the dog race tracks at Harringay or Wembley than they can on the pedigrees of the greyhounds who race there. The general poverty of the working class and the vast accumulation in the hands of the Capitalists is not due to misdirection of wealth resources, but to the class appropriation of the products of labour as a result of class ownership.

For that reason the profit motive is, in its profit motive propensities, coarsely promiscuous and makes no virtuous discrimination between non-essential and essential industry. Any encouragement of an anticipated profit yield from any enterprise, whatever its character, will lead to its becoming susceptible to the arduous advances of the profit-seeking passion. Mr. Morrison will, as his intimacy with the profit motive ripens, also discover it in due course.

When Mr. Morrison spoke in the same speech of Socialising the profit motive he was back to his old sparkling form. The profit motive being the personal incentive for investing capital in some enterprise for profit expectation, to speak of Socialising it is tantamount to decreeing that henceforth and hereinafter all vocal soloists must perform their respective efforts only through the medium of community choruses. This is political fun at a very high level, and such is Mr. Morrison’s control over his subject matter that he never relaxes from the gravity he is able to impart to such utterances, and which give, as a result, such zest to the humour of the occasion.

In a remoter period of Labour polities the presentation of the employing class much favoured by their cartoonists was a brutal-looking, treble-chinned plutocrat who was consistently using the prostrate body of the worker as a parking place for his posterior. That conception has apparently outlived its usefulness, for Mr. Morrison tells us that if the profit motive recognises its past abuses, such as investing money in dog-racing track building, price fixing by cartel formations and the non-oppression of Labour, then it will have an honourable part to play in Society. Evidently Mr. Morrison is about to authorise a new version of the Capitalist for Labour cartoonists, that of a conscience- stricken, white-haired old gentleman who, goaded by the reproachful ghost of Mr. Morrison, is only too anxious to assume the role of the capitalist reformed Scrooge to u working-class Bob Cratchit. One observes here an element of pathos in Mr. Morrison’s humour.

In view of all this it is perhaps not wholly surprising that Mr. Macmillan demanded to know, of Mr. Morrison whether he was a Socialist? (Manchester Guardian, 19/10/46) and in the same speech asked Mr. Morrison to take hie courage in both hands and come over to what he described as the progressive Conservative and Liberal tradition as Chamberlain and Snowden had done in times past. Mr. Morrison, in the House of Commons (20/11/46), courteously returned the invitation by asking Mr. Macmillan, in view of the strong Socialist flavour of the speech he (Mr. Macmillan) had just made, and in view of the dissent it seemed to cause on the benches behind him, “how long the right hon. gentleman would be sitting there " (Ministerial laughter) (Times, 21/11/46). As Mr. Macmillan and Mr. Churchill have, as Mr. Morrison said, both advocated the Labour Party’s programme in the past, the question of who is converting whom is a little misty. As for the precise nature of the conversion, it is securely hidden in an impenetrable fog.

As for the present system, it assumes for Mr. Morrison the aspect of “an unsubstantial pageant faded,’’ for he referred to Capitalism and Imperialism as obsolete labels (Observer, 29/10/46). Such obsolete labels have their use, however, when they are stuck on the political wares of Mr. Morrison’s party and sold successfully at Election time. The “Socialist" Morrison here exhibits gifts, it would seem, of a born leg-puller as well.

To sum up, Mr. Morrison’s desire to perpetuate the profit motive is merely the tardy semblance of their compulsion to perpetuate Capitalism. Elected by working-class voters who merely desired to see the Labour way of running the present scheme of things, given a chance, it could not be otherwise. Only a Socialist working-class electorate will demand Socialism. Thus the long-promised indictment of Capitalism, couched in the vague pseudo-Socialist phrases of Labour ideologies, collapses. Before a mass jury consisting of a Labour majority the charge is reduced to Capitalism, being let off with a mild caution and a weak exhortation to try and behave better in future. Those of the Labour Party who have sought to pose as prosecuting counsel against the present order have now, when administering it, to go over to its defence. Thus the case for the prosecution breaks down, the spectacle of His Majesty’s Labour Ministers entering the political witness box in order to turn King’s Evidence has become almost a matter of routine procedure.

Ted Wilmott

For Use or Profit? (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Societies in the past have subsisted without their material wealth being an accumulation of things for sale. This was historically and radically changed by the rise of capitalist production, which, seizing upon the simple domestic industry of the time, transformed it into capitalist manufacture. The handicraft workers who had worked independently of each other now became employed as wage workers in a co-operative effort under one roof, where the tools, workshop and product were the property of a single employer. With the invention of power-driven machinery these manufactories gave place to large-scale production, so that to-day one cannot think of modern capitalism without its factory system, its heavy industry and the resultant flood of commodities seeking a market. Thus Marx’s opening words in “Capital” eminently sum up the wealth of capitalist society as being “an immense accumulation of commodities.” If one therefore wishes to seek the source of capitalist wealth one must first analyse the commodity as a unit of capitalist production.

To begin with, a commodity must have both exchange-value and use-value; it must, in other words, be saleable and satisfy some need or other. We will deal with the usefulness of commodities first. To discover the various use of things is the work of history, says Marx. For example, seaweed that the Highland clansmen watched idly floating offshore, and which appeared to them us quite useless, is to-day, centuries later, the raw material for medicinal and fertiliser compounds. Again, the aborigines of what is now called Canada gazed at the falling waters of Niagara without the dimmest notion that one day this force would be used to light whole communities by hydro-electric power. Social production hud yet to arise and urge the need to investigate these possibilities; it was to use a Marxism not then "socially necessary." It is worth noting in this respect that in competing on the commodity market the capitalists are ever seeking new use-values in the shape of inventions, their motive being one of profit, a fact usually hidden when they point out that capitalism has given the wage-workers things that not even the richest of men could command in the past, things like electric lighting and radio sets. But to proceed. The qualities that make up usefulness are multifarious — colour, durability, hardness, etc. — some, if not all, having their own terms of measurement in their own sphere of production and use. It is this variability which makes it impossible to measure use-value by any common factor. One cannot, for example, measure the strength or hardness of steel against the heat-giving properties of coal. Neither, for that matter, will exchange-value give any clue to a commodity’s usefulness. Price or exchange value would tell one nothing of the health giving qualities of, say, a pint of milk as compared with a pot of tea, though both may be the same price to the consumer. Again, the usefulness of the ordinary needle is incalculable, for without it austerity Britain might go in worse tatters than ever, yet its price is a few pence per packet

Leaving for a moment the usual level of use-value and looking at the wider social view, what is more useful than the abilities of creators of all commodity use-value — the workers themselves — yet often a worker’s life is assessed in money terms at much less than a race-horse. Again, whole catches of fish were recently thrown back into the sea when the “market” for them showed little profit, their usefulness to hungry people being totally ignored. In the normal sense, the esteem or evaluation of a use-value is a subjective matter, giving service, comfort, etc., to the user, but it is not for this that the consumer pays, because before the consumer can come into possession of a use-value the whole process of capitalist production must be gone through, the motive behind which is not to attend to the wants of individuals, but to realise a profit for a class, the capitalist class. The capitalist process is to produce commodities (which have no personal use to the capitalists as such) and realise a profit by selling them at a greater price than the initial outlay. In this no special concern is shown about the inherent qualities that make up use-value, or even the kind of labour that went to the process. For the average profit a capitalist will supply the labour of skilled or “unskilled” workers, caring little whether the product of this labour be blacking or binoculars, while even harmful and useless things are marketed, necessitating such measures as the “Food and Drugs Act," etc. If, as is plain from all this, the goods of present-day society are not produced or exchanged on a basis of usefulness, what, then, is the common “something" which can qualitatively measure their value in exchange? Our following article, “ Exchange is no Robbery,” will endeavour to explain this “ something.”

Frank Dawe

Personalities or Principles? (1947)

From the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The conflict now raging between Social Democrats and Communists in almost every European country is receiving far more attention than it deserves. From the working-class view-point the questions in dispute are of little or no importance, and personalities, not principles, are the chief issues.

The corresponding parties in this country are the Labour Party, now in power, and the Communist Party. Both these parties claim to be out for a fundamental change, and to base their respective policies on this aim. Yet the activities of both parties are concerned solely with the advocacy of reforms within the capitalist system.

At the general election the Communists supported the Labour Party and sponsored their programme. They still do so, although criticising details here and there, together with the lack of speed and firmness in carrying out nationalisation schemes. At times these “blind leaders of the blind” endeavour to link their frothy rise to leadership and power with that glorious past when a real social science was in the making.

Such an attempt was made recently on the 50th anniversary of the death of William Morris. According to the Daily Worker (16/11/46), the Daily Herald claimed Morris as a forerunner of the Labour Party, and “the Attlee pastorale.”

W. Holmes, in the Worker, disputed this and claimed him for the Communists because

  “He left the S.D.F. in disgust at its reformist trend. But despite its vagaries, the S.D.F. was the forerunner of the Communist Party.”
   The Herald claimed him because ‘‘by Socialist he meant almost precisely what we mean, although the practical technique of British Socialism had not then been invented.”

We are not concerned with their respective claims on Morris. His chief merit lay in his thorough exposure of working-class conditions under capitalism. He was, perhaps, to some extent a reformist, but one who visualised correctly the real meaning of Socialism. Yet W. Holmes says of him:

   ‘‘But Morris wanted to tell the world that ‘It is not a small change in life that we advocate, but a very great one; that Socialism will transform our lives and habits.' ” “That full-blooded faith,” says Holmes, “led Moms to break with all the reformists of his day. For he was a Marxist, and called himself a 'Communist.’ ”

It is unfortunate for the Daily Worker, and the writer of the above notes on Labour Party gradualism, that in the adjoining columns Harry Pollitt should lay himself open to the same criticism in the following words:

  “Alongside this policy must also go the real fight against monopoly and its profits at home; improvement of the wages and working hours of the workers now; speed-up in the building of new houses, and reorganisation of the basic industries with the full participation of the workers. In this way we can lay, at home and abroad, the firm foundation which alone can guarantee the fulfilment of the policy the people voted for at the General Election in 1945.”

One writer blames the Labour Government for their reformism and the other asks no more from them than the implementation of the programme of reforms on which they were elected!

Gradualism means slowing-up progress towards Socialism and is the avowed policy of the Fabians. They professed to bring Socialism about by evolution, not social revolution. Taken in this sense, the Labour Party’s programme is gradualism pure and simple, its nationalisation schemes are put forward on the assumption that nationalisation must precede Socialism; and form a necessary part of the process. But this assumption has never been justified by the Fabians, or anyone else. The reverse, of course, being true, because of the confusion arising over the two terms, public ownership and common ownership; for which both Fabians and Communists are responsible, and which neither have made the slightest attempt to remove. It is this reformist and nationalisation programme that Pollitt and the Communist Party insist on being carried through; while W. Holmes, in the same paper and on the same day, describes it as gradualism.

To advocate reforms is to slow-up the progress towards Socialism, because it concentrates the attention of the workers on a fruitless struggle for something now. W. Holmes agrees with this, for he quotes Morris to that' effect, as follows:

   “There is, generally speaking, among democrats, a leaning towards a kind of limited State Socialism, and it is through that that they hope to bring about a peaceful Revolution which, if it does not introduce a condition of equality, will at least make the workers better off and contented with their lot . . . nor would some of them be discontented if we could glide into complete State Socialism.”

Which is where Fabians and Communists are heading if we call it by its correct name, State Capitalism.

But in addition to this reform policy which diverts the workers from Socialist knowledge and activity, Pollitt has a further diversion:

   “The Labour Government must be compelled to change its policy at home and abroad so that we stand four-square with those nations which think politically like millions do in Britain. This is the best insurance against the predatory designs of American imperialism. If Britain, the Soviet Union, France and the other democratic nations in Europe now stand together, then for these nations there will be no new economic crises or new wars.” 

In this he helps the capitalists to split the workers of Europe and America into hostile camps, battling for supremacy in world trade, a conflict leading inevitably to future wars. Nothing is more certain to slow up the spread of Socialist thought than to sow dissension between the workers by emphasising nationalist differences that are purely capitalist in character. Far from being a Marxist, Pollitt, in the above paragraph, repudiates Marx and his famous slogan: Workers of the World Unite.

But where does nationalisation lead? According to the Labour Party, Socialism will be complete with the nationalisation of every possible industry. The Communists do not deny this, although they criticise the Government for paying too much in compensation to dispossessed shareholders. Sometimes they say no compensation at all should be paid. If these eventually have their way, the likeness to Russia will be complete. The dream of the Fabians realised: Government by experts, and the working-class still wage-workers: Industry still run for profits, and the results, over and above wages, shared between the experts, political and industrial. As in Russia, they can bring into existence a perfect hierarchy of officials, industrial experts, scientists, economists and technicians, to create an atmosphereof inevitability and permanence to their rule.

Small wonder that G. B. Shaw greeted the Soviet leaders as Fabians, and, incidentally, showed that the aims of Communists and Fabians were identical: Government by the middle-class, as he termed the intellectuals and professionals. In short, a totalitarian form of government in "Socialist" Britain as in “Communist" Russia.

The British Communist Party, adopting the methods of the Kremlin, can only land themselves in the same vicious circle of competitive struggle for markets with its ever-present threat of war. It stamps it as being of the same nature as the Labour Party; thirsting for power, that they may impose their ideas and methods on a working-class not yet alive to their real interests. 

No government can establish Socialism. Only the working class, the overwhelming mass of the people, can do that. Because, as Morris said, Socialism involves revolutionary changes in every aspect of the working-class way of life. The wages system must be supplanted by a democratic administration of production and distribution, based on individual needs and equality. This means the building of a working-class organisation now, where every worker understands and accepts the democratic principles of administration; and is ready to take his place in the scheme of things, both on the productive and administrative side.

Until the workers do this. Society cannot move forward to its higher and freer conception of life. Workers everywhere should concentrate on Socialism and leave reforms and public ownership to those interested in preserving Capitalism.

F. Foan

Labour Government, Strikes and Arbitration (1947)

Editorial from the February 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The road haulage strike, which lasted for some ten days in the early part of January, brought out clearly the false position of the Labour Government and the impracticability of its policy.

Having undertaken the running of the capitalist system, the Labour Government is finding that it has got to do it in the only way it can be done. Capitalism will only work if the Capitalists can see the prospect of making a profit, so, in disregard of years of vaguely anti-capitalist propaganda, the Labour Government has had to come out in support of the "profit motive.” Having claimed it would raise wages, it urges the unions not to make wage claims, lest profits should all be swallowed up. It declared for shorter hours, but now says the time is inopportune. It condemned the use of troops in strikes, and has twice used them since it came to power. It declared that under Labour Government strikes were unnecessary because "impartial arbitration” would give all the workers wanted, but has repeatedly seen the workers defying unsatisfactory arbitration awards.

On the use of troops in strikes it is only necessary to recall the motion put forward by the Labour Party in Parliament on May 12th, 1939.

Moved by Mr. Shinwell, a Minister in the present Government, the motion would have freed conscripts from the obligation to “take duty in aid of the civil power in connection with a trade dispute, or to perform, in consequence of a trade dispute, any civil or industrial duty customarily performed by a civilian in the course of his employment.”

Faced with the road haulage strike, the Government used large bodies of troops to do the work of the strikers. Mr. Strachey, erstwhile left-winger and critic of the Labour Party, had the duty, as Minister of Food, of issuing the statement about the use of the troops. He assured the strikers that in using troops he was "not interfering in this industrial dispute” (Daily Express, 11/1/47) and hoped that the workers would not mind. That they did mind very much was soon shown by the fact that men not directly involved in the dispute stopped work as a protest, and by January 15th 35,000 road haulage strikers had been joined by 21,000 sympathetic strikers (Daily Express, 16/1/47).

Government spokesmen and the Capitalist Press made the usual reproach that the strike inflicted hardship on other workers. It certainly did, but then so does every strike in greater or less degree. If the argument is accepted as an over-riding objection it rules out all strikes; but what, then, is meant by the Labour Party’s own claim that it defends the right to strike?

One curious criticism of the strikers was made by the Manchester Guardian, which argued that the men’s grievances "are not substantial,” and “ there is no question of poverty or oppressive conditions of work ” (14/1/ 47). But if the matter in dispute was small, why did not the employers and the Wages Board and the Government promptly concede it? What about their responsibility for indicting suffering over a trivial matter? We can also imagine what the criticism would have been if the men had struck for something really substantial. Then the critics would have got hot under the collar about "unreasonable demands.” 

The Daily Herald did not agree with the Guardian. Their line (10/1/47) was that the strike was “a boiling over of bad blood which has existed for a long time; bad blood created by bad conditions of employment”; hut, argued the Herald, the men should have obeyed the Minister of Labour’s appeal "to go back to work at once and abide by the decision of the Board, with the assurance that it will be reached on the basis of a fair and impartial hearing of their claims.” This argument will not stand a moment’s examination. As the Board had already rejected the main claim and given what the Herald described as "only minor but nevertheless valuable concessions,” what reason could there have been for supposing that a re-hearing of the claim would have any other result, but for the pressure brought to bear by the strike? If the second hearing would have been different from the first, how “fair and impartial” was the first? Events proceeded to blow the Herald's case sky-high, for the men did not go back until a new, quicker-working Joint Industrial Council had been set up to short-circuit the Wages Board.

Lack of space precludes further comments. We will deal more fully with arbitration later. For the moment it is sufficient to say that the whole idea of arbitration as a substitute for strikes is based on an illusion, as the Herald itself once clearly realised. In an editorial (12/4/1924) the Herald pointed out that, "so long as the wage system exists,” and whether the workers are employed by a private employer of by the State, their capacity to "sell their labour-power . . . at a fair price depends on their capacity, through their trade unions, to refuse to work.”

The road haulage strike is just a further pointer to the impossibility of Labourism.