How Labour Helps Capitalism (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bang the drum

As the date of the General Election approaches, the Labour Party girds its loins. The constituency parties are told to hurry on their preparations. A glossy party statement makes its appearance. Transport House tells of the special efforts being made in marginal constituencies, and reveals that the fighting fund is swelling to record proportions. The Labour Party prepares for battle.

The uniforms are smart, the drums exciting, the banners promise the earth. All is well until you read the accounts of the last campaign. What have the Labour M.P.s who were returned at the last General Election, after claiming working-class support, been doing to justify their claims to be Socialists ?

Brass tacks

Mr. George Strauss, for example, the Labour M.P. for Vauxhall and a former Minister of Supply. Late last year he surveyed the world scene—the exploitation of the working class by capitalism, the colonial bloodshed, the wars and the threats of wars—-and then he kicked up a great fuss in Parliament about . . .  the way the London Electricity Board disposes of its scrap cable (The Times, 5/12/58). He was afraid the Board might not be getting enough money for it. Mr. Strauss supported the reorganisation of electricity supply as a State capitalist industry, and is desperately anxious to show that State capitalism can make just as big a profit as private capitalism.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party, workers who see that the entire profit system must be ended are not likely to be excited by Mr. Strauss’s activities.

Unconsolable

Or take Mr. J. Callaghan, the Labour member for South-East Cardiff. Mr. Callaghan is worried because he thinks the Foreign Office is preventing British shipyards building warships for the Indonesians to kill each other with. In the Commons he alleged that shipbuilders here could have got orders for sixty million pounds' worth of warships but for the Government’s interference. “It has always been our policy to supply other nations with warships,” he said (Manchester Guardian, 13/12/58). Some of the orders, he said, had now gone to Italian firms.

Indonesia is now in a state of civil conflict and rebellion, and any warship which the Indonesian Government gets would first be used to crush opposition among the islands. The last moments of a dying Indonesian rebel would be made doubly bitter if he thought he had been shot by an Italian-built warship, when he could have been killed by a genuine British product.

Juggling

British shipbuilding firms will appreciate Mr. Callaghan's concern that they should have full order-books, and, consequently, fat profits. Mr. Callaghan said that “our people were being put out of work by the present Foreign Office policy,” so no doubt he would claim his prime concern is for the shipbuilding workers. But under the capitalist system, that is like demanding that more food shall be provided for the rich men, since the poor people will also benefit because of the few more crumbs which will then fall from the rich men's tables.

In any case, if Mr. Callaghan were successful, and these orders for warships went to British yards instead of to the Italians, what about the Italian workers? If Mr. Callaghan thinks it would be an advantage to the British workers that these orders should be placed here, he must also agree that it would be a corresponding blow to the Italian workers, and to their wives and families, if the orders were withdrawn from the Italian shipyards. No, Mr. Callaghan: if you want to benefit the working class, you won’t do it by juggling about with order-books, so that one group of workers, instead of another, are kindly allowed to be exploited full-time.

Arms and the Labour man

Mr. R. Mellish, the M.P. for Bermondsey, is another Labour member who keeps a wary eye on armaments. In Parliament he asked the Secretary for War what progress had been made with the development of the medium tank, and if he would give its approximate weight and speed and armament (Manchester Guardian, 18/12/58). He was much displeased with the answer that the tank would be ready for development trials towards the end of 1959. He put a subsidiary question:

  “Surely you will be aware that your predecessor in 1956 decided on a policy of manufacturing the medium tank ? Are you telling us now that these trials are not going to take place till 1959 ? Why this enormous delay?”

The British ruling class will be heartened to think there is such a good watchdog in Parliament as Mr. Mellish: sufficient arms to protect their interests in a third world war will not be lacking if Mr. Mellish has his way.

Presumably the electors of Bermondsey in the coming election will be invited to “Vote for Mellish and better tanks.”

Knight-Errants

Apart from these recent activities of the present Labour M.P.s the Sunday Express (14/12/58) has reminded us of an Act passed by the Labour Government in 1949 which must thrill the hearts of all the party’s supporters.

Lady Mountbatten revealed in 1949 that her net income, because of taxation, had fallen to only £4,500 per annum. So Lord and Lady Mountbatten had to scrimp and save on an income of only £90 a week, plus, of course, Lord Mountbatten’s pay as an Admiral and any other income he might have. A shock of horror ran through the country. I remember it well—protest meetings of dockers and miners, housewives weeping in the streets, old age pensioners offering to contribute. The Labour Government took swift action. It was at the time when they were endeavouring to enforce a wage freeze on the workers, but they realised immediately that the Mountbattens were in a different class. A Bill was introduced into Parliament—the Married Women (Restraint upon Anticipation) Bill— which enabled Lady Mountbatten and other heiresses in the same position, to borrow in advance on future income, and thereby save a considerable amount in surtax. The day was saved. But the incident had enabled the Labour Government to demonstrate its practical sympathy towards the sufferings of the people or at any rate of one of them.

Another vote for Labour

Why has the Sunday Express brought all this up now? Well, it appears that the 1949 Act was only an emergency measure, as it were. New moves, we are told, have started which will enable Countess Mountbatten to draw still more money from the trust fund she inherited from her grandfather. After all, her husband's income as an Admiral of the Fleet is only £100 a week. The exact nature of the new moves is uncertain. If they have not been successful by the time of the next General Election, and if Labour is returned to power as it hopes, no doubt a new Labour Government would come to the Countess's rescue as chivalrously as the last one did. But the workers had better not expect the same generous attitude, or they will be disappointed.

Alwyn Edgar

Enterprising I.C.I. (1959)

Film Review from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the Old Fallacies

On Sunday, 14th December, a most interesting film was shown at Head Office as part of our winter propaganda series. The film was called Enterprise and was made by the Imperial Chemical Industries about itself.

Although the film ran only for 22 minutes, it must have been quite costly to make, since it was entirely in cartoon form and in colour. As an attempt to justify the profit motive, from a Socialist point of view it was an elaborate waste of time. All the time-honoured catchphrases and phoney ideals, so dear to the hearts of the Capitalist Class, were put over with the most subtle propaganda technique.

Of course, one major weakness in films which set out to “sell” Capitalism as the best system possible is, that if it was really so good and in the best interest of everyone, it would not be necessary to “plug” it all the time. If the set-up existing between employers and employees, the owners and non-owners of the means of living, was so in accordance with man's nature that there was no antagonism or conflict of interest, there would be no need to keep turning out expensive sugar-coated propaganda.

What we are expected to swallow by the film is that giant concerns like I.C.I. exist for the purpose of doing things “for us.” We are told, via the commentator, that the Capitalists “risk" their money in a community-minded spirit to “produce for our use.” It is with heartfelt desire to serve “us” that the £220,000,000 capital of I.C.I. is set into motion. To produce, with the “maximum efficiency and speed the things we need” is the noble objective of the selfless Capitalist.

It is readily admitted by the film that the Capitalist makes profits, but, of course, this is his just “reward” for “risking” his money in our interest. Although the film several times makes reference to this “reward,” nothing is said about its origin. It is almost as though a good fairy recognises the kindly nature of the Capitalist and, with a wave of her wand, his “reward” materializes out of thin air. Considering that in 1957 I.C.I. made £27 million net profit, that must be some fairy. From the standpoint of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, these notions are the purest drivel. We would not waste time on such arguments except for the fact that they are expected to be, and too often are, taken seriously by members of the working class.

Another phrase used in the film was. that I.C.I. is a “community in unity.” In fact the whole commentary is made to rhyme, but we felt more as though the commentator was spinning us a yarn than reciting poetry. There is no basis for unity between the working-class and the capitalist class. It is from the wealth produced by the workers that the profits of the Capitalist arise. The words "efficiency and speed” merely try to mask the employer’s determination to exploit his wage-slaves to the maximum possible extent.

The film started by depicting an ancient potter, who not only made the pots himself but, when times were hard, also went out and found new markets for them: if through HIS efforts HE got rich, good luck to him. Then we are brought forward in time to I.C.I., and they try to make the parallel that those who get profits out of I.C.I., too, are the ones who do the work. We are shown few workers and lots of board-rooms, executives, and costings departments. The ancient potter owned the implements he worked with, but under modern Capitalist production work and ownership of implements are separated. This fact lies at the bottom of all the major social problems facing mankind to-day.

How different from all this things would be under Socialism. When the means of production are held in common by all, the word “community” will have a real meaning. In a classless system, costings departments and board-rooms will have no place. It will not be necessary to calculate costs in order to maintain profits when society is no longer concerned with monetary systems. Under Capitalism, the first consideration is ‘‘Will it sell?” "Will it be profitable?” With Socialism, the first and only consideration will be human well-being, the democratic organisation of production for use on the basis of free access.

The Stock Exchange Year Book for 1958 gives an impressive list of about 20 countries in which I.C.I. have holdings. When the competition for markets, minerals and trade-routes, etc., leads the various ruling class groups to war it is possible for workers to fight for I.C.I.’s interests in almost every part of the world.

Much is made in the film of the vast number of shareholders in I.C.I. This is another stock argument of Capitalist defenders which only shows how shallow they really are. It is as good as admitting that it is anti-social for a few to own the means of society’s living, so if they can make it sound a lot it has a better effect. As if it matters to workers being exploited whether the wealth they produce above their wages is shared by many or few Capitalists. When the official figures show that 10 per cent. of the population own 90 per cent. of the accumulated wealth, one does not need to be a genius at maths, to find out what property interests or investments the working-class has.

A fact not mentioned in the film is that it is a regular practice of I.C.I. to make large donations to Scientific Education. In one of their own publications. I.C.I. Review for 1957, we are told that the amount for that year was £300,000 The review adds that the object is “to increase the amount and quality of Scientific and Technical work in the country generally, from which the Company itself will undoubtedly benefit.”

When workers begin to understand their true position in present-day society and start to see the need for Socialism, they will not be so easily deceived by Capitalist propaganda. They will read the Press, listen to the radio and watch films and television in the light of their growing class-consciousness. The days of production for the profit of a few will then be on the way out.

Harry Baldwin

50 Years Ago: The Socialist Party and Social Reform (1959)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party and Social Reform

In the S.P.G.B. we make but one stipulation, and that is that its members must be Socialists. The ranks of Social Reform include anybody with a pet fad who will adopt the formula: "I, too, am a Socialist, in some respects, ahem! but I think we want the Single Tax. or a paper currency, or State Ownership of the Ice Cream Carts, you know, first.” And so we find Joseph Fels, the single taxer, R. J. Campbell, the new theologian, Arthur Kitson, the currency crank, H. G. Wells, the sensational novelist, and hosts of others, representing all shades of faddism. up and down the whole gamut of puerile futility, all in the same camp and under the same many-coloured banner of “Social Reform."

— (From the Socialist Standard, February, 1909.)

• • •

The Purpose of Profit Sharing and Co-partnership

When trade is "booming" and the employer is making larger profits than usual, the “ungrateful” workman, despite the fact that he may be enjoying “plenty of work.” sometimes takes it into his head that he would like a slightly larger share of the wealth he has produced so abundantly, and taking a “mean advantage” of the employer, he threatens to strike unless his demands are granted. To have a strike to contend with means stoppage of production, and therefore, the losing of the opportunity of making those larger profits. The employer grates his teeth. Under his breath he curses the “wicked workers” who were not content . . .  to remain in the position in which capitalism has placed them. . . .

. . .  Here. then, are the two difficulties facing the capitalist—to get the “lazy" worker to speed up. and to prevent strikes taking place .at awkward moments—awkward, that is, for the capitalist’s profits. Labour Copartnership meets both these perils in a splendid way for the capitalist.

—(From the Socialist Standard, February, 1909.)

Party News Briefs (1959)

Party News from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Activity and enthusiasm appear to be the key words for the start of 1959. At Head Office on Tuesdays nowadays there are many members, all working in different aspects of improving and spreading Party Propaganda. It will be obvious when the list of Branch meetings are noted in the current issue of the Standard.

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Hackney Branch, which is concentrating especially on the forthcoming election campaign, report good progress. Here is an extract from a letter received from the Branch:—

   “The following is an announcement by the diarist 'Beta’ in the  'Hackney Gazette,’ December 2nd, 1958:
   'The Socialist Party of Great Britain inform me that they will be contesting the next General Election in Bethnal Green. The candidate is Jack Leslie Read, who was one of the candidates for the division in the last L.C.C. elections.
   " 'The candidate and his organisation stand in complete opposition to both the Labour and Tory parties, and also the Liberal and Communist parties if they choose to contest the seat.
    “ ‘Our purpose in putting forward a candidate is,’ says Mr. J. Harris, the party’s Press Officer, 'to give working people an opportunity of casting a vote against capitalism, the system which we claim gives rise to all the social problems and misery of our day, and casting it in favour of Socialism, by which we mean a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of all the means of living and where production takes place for use instead of for profit’.”
   " 'Beta’ then added, “Local Socialists, who put their faith in Hugh Gaitskell can make of this statement what they will.”
    "Hackney Branch hopes to give local 'Socialists' during the months ahead plenty of opportunities to make what they can of the Party’s Socialist message, and look forward to the maximum help from comrades in other Branches.”

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Ealing Branch starts the New Year optimistically. The merger of the literature and propaganda activities of the Branch into one "general purposes” Committee should help to streamline Branch organisation and lead to useful economies in members’ time. This Committee is already examining the possibilities of running film shows as an alternative to lectures and discussions. A Press Officer has been appointed to deal with correspondence in the national and local Press, and a monthly Branch Newsletter has been started. This will be distributed to all Branch members and to regular Socialist Standard readers made from our canvasses. The Annual Christmas Social was a great success: over 80 tickets were sold, and Branch funds benefited by about £10.

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Bristol Group has arranged a debate, and much work has gone into preparations to make it a success. It is hoped to enlarge propaganda there during the forthcoming months.

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Edinburgh, Mitcham and Swansea Groups are holding meetings after intensive work by members of the Groups.

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Paddington Branch, in planning well ahead, are confident that the meeting to be held at Denison House. Vauxhall Bridge Road, on Sunday, March 15th, will be the first of many such propaganda meetings held. London members are urged to make a special note of the date.

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Fulham, Islington and Lewisham branches are among the London branches who have planned well ahead for meetings. Notices of these appear in this issue.

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Glasgow (City and Kelvingrove). The branches in Glasgow have conducted propaganda this winter jointly and since November have held monthly meeting in the St. Andrews Halls. A feature of these meetings has been the number of new speakers who have volunteered to take the indoor platform. This is a very encouraging prospect for the outdoor season when it is hoped new stances may be tried.

A series of classes dealing with the socialist theory have been held on the Sunday evenings when there was no propaganda meeting and these have been exceptionally well attended by party members and sympathisers. The discussion has at the classes been most stimulating and is bound to encourage study of Marxism in all its aspects.

The general feeling among Glasgow members is that so far this winter we have managed to encourage young speakers to a greater degree than hitherto and we look forward to the coming outdoor season with a great deal more enthusiasm than last year.

Details of the propaganda meeting and the classes for this month are contained elsewhere in this issue and all members, sympathisers and of course opponents are invited along.

Phyllis Howard

Some Objections to Socialism (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The opponents of Socialism and those too lazy or too tired to think, retort that if there were no more fear of the morrow, if the material means of sustenance were guaranteed to every individual from the cradle to the grave as a matter of course, the incentive to work would also be killed. According to this, the rich who are not dependent on, and indeed would think it incompatible with their dignity to work for wages, people whose material existence is assured and who have never known want and insecurity, would long have become entirely degenerate and decrepit from sheer idleness. The propertied class, with their wealth invested in land and estate, in industrial enterprises, in transport and banks, etc., etc., yielding them rent, interest and profit, are still active: not all rich people are indulging in perpetual riotous living, as they could if they wanted to, or if they were stupid enough to do so and invite all kinds of physical troubles, and we see a large number of voluntary organisations devoting themselves to all kinds of activities without the incentive of the wages system; and who will assert that the work of the genuine amateur is less conscientious, less thorough and less fruitful than that of the paid employee?

Children also provide convincing proof that occupation is essential for happiness. They know nothing of the care for the morrow, but no one can say that youth does not want to do anything. On the contrary, they all dream in early years already of what they are going to be, whereby the question of earning money mostly does not yet arise at all. Children's longing for play is almost insatiable, and is play not physical and mental exertion, a pleasure and enjoyment, as all work will be under Socialism when all who work will know that it is directed to a social end of benefit to all.

And for what reward do the millions of mothers undertake the arduous task of bringing up and educating their children? What wages do these mothers get?

Are we work shy?

Opponents of Socialism who would have you believe that once the individual concern for the material existence is removed, man would sink into indolence, they refer to such things as the discontent and aversion to work shown by the general run of workers, their craving for escape, longing for holidays, etc. It is evident, however that just as the increase in crimes against property and general “offences and crime” is no proof of man’s inborn or increasing villainy and viciousness, but is due to a defective social organisation, in other words, just as such phenomena are only the product of Capitalist society, people’s aversion to work is due only to the CONDITIONS under which that work has to be done. It will be admitted that the conditions of work under Capitalism are anything but idyllic. Apart from the niggardly remuneration of labour, which barely suffices to keep the family from near starvation, not to speak of the denial of partaking in the loftier and nobler things of life, there are all the other brutal features of the class struggle. The end of Capitalism, and therewith of wage-slavery, will put in place of the sordid struggle for existence the healthy cooperation of all for something more than mere food, clothing and shelter, for the greatest possible perfection of physical and mental capacities and therewith for the greatest possible enjoyment of life. Men will have the possibility of engaging in such occupations as correspond to individual disposition, inclination and capacities, which will make work an enjoyment that nobody will be anxious to shirk. In the fullest sense of the word, men will work in order to live and enjoy, instead of merely living to work.

To listen to the opponent of Socialism, it is evident that he is often unaware of the fluidity of things in this world. Childish as it is, yet he seems to think that the present social arrangements with such features as wageworkers and shareholders, money, banks, dividends, and the rest, have existed from time immemorial, and will always so exist. Yet time was when there was no money, and the all-embracing rule of capital is a fairly recent development. Capitalism is the successor of feudalism, but Capitalism’s mad rush really dates from the time of the industrial revolution, from the use of steam and electrically-driven machinery, division of labour, in production and transport, and the opening of the whole world as a market.

Before Capitalism

Slave-labour, by which also the marvellous ancient temples and churches, the tombs, the pyramids, the Colosseum and other astounding edifices were erected; and chattel-slavery and serfdom, by which the medieval castles, abbeys, monasteries, etc., were built, was not wage-labour. The chattel-slave and bondsman who cultivated his master’s land, also had a piece of land for his own use, and even in the middle ages most people never saw money in their lives. The labourers were a responsibility of the then master-class who had to care for them, whereas the wage-slave of today is not a responsibility of his employer. He is only hired where and when his labour is required and he can be dismissed if no longer required, or for other reasons. The very terms in common use “giving him or her the sack.” or “to be fired” betray in all its brutality the position of the worker on the labour market and show that no sentimentality is shown towards the exploited of today.

Fact is that men have worked under all kinds of conditions and that much of the best work has in the past been done by people who did not work for wages, or, for that matter, for material reward. What incentive did the talented and genial poets and writers, the Greek and other philosophers of old, the composers of immortal music, the painters and inventors, the architects and men of science have? Did they give their labour to the world only for wages or material gain? For what reward was the great research-work in the many fields of science, for example, the life-long painstaking work of a Darwin. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and countless others, done?

If so much of the best work has in the past been and is still being done by people who had no. or little, material reward for their labours (great numbers of them died in penury and downright poverty), is it not ridiculous to say that the only incentive to work is money?

Work and Leisure

With the ownership and control of the machinery for wealth production and distribution taken out of the hands of the exploiting class and their State, with this machinery having become the COMMON PROPERTY of the people as a whole, all work and services will at last become identified with pleasure and. enjoyment of life. As there will be no more need for huge armies of soldiers, police, prisons, lawyers and judges, nor armaments, to protect the property and privileges of a parasite class, all the people engaged in these wasteful occupations will become free to do useful work. When, thanks to the process of production being carried on solely for USE (instead of for profit), no individual will be dependent on another individual for his means of life: in other words: when no worker will be dependent for his livelihood on an employer, no woman on a man. or man on a woman, when no children will be dependent on parents, or vice-versa, when the material existence of every human being is the responsibility of society as a matter of course, man will at last have become master over, and be able to enjoy the social wealth created by. his forbears and his own hands and brains, instead of being controlled by it. The whole complicated apparatus and mechanism of buying and selling, of advertising, propaganda, insurance, pensions, sick-clubs, tax and customs schemes. welfare and charity organisations, banks, pawnshops, lotteries and pools, etc., etc., will have become unnecessary and disappear.

The disappearance of these institutions and organisations with their insane waste and destruction will free millions of men and women for useful and more dignified occupation. When, in addition to all these people, the now unemployed (rich as well as poor) will share in the process of production and distribution, one can safely assume that the work and services necessary for the material and cultural equipment, maintenance and enjoyment of all members of society can be done with an individual daily average work far less than now.

No longer will men need to tremble when physical misfortune strikes. No more tramping the streets in search of work, no more fear of losing the job, getting in debt and seeing wife and children suffer as a consequence, since no family will be dependent on the fortune or misfortune of one or the other individual member for their material comforts. Nor need people despair when natural disasters occur, earthquakes, floods, fires, tempests, droughts with resultant bad harvests, etc., since under Socialism, with all the marvellous means of transportation at hand, even masses of people can be transferred from stricken areas to other places and homes, and suffering kept at a minimum. Whereas today, under Capitalism, people affected by such natural disasters usually become beggars, dependent on charity, and are soon left to their miserable fate.

Competition replaced by Co-operation

No burden of want, no hunger whip, no struggle to keep the wolf from the door, will be required to make men do the work and carry out the tasks necessary in the interest and for the well-being of society. Moreover, no material want will drive men to commit anti-social acts, theft or murder, or suicide. With the disappearance of Capitalist competition and the fight over markets, which unleash the lowest human passions, the soil on which the commercial “virtues” of greed, jealousy, mistrust. lying, fraud, hypocrisy, corruption, adulteration and swindle of all sorts thrive, will have been uprooted. And therewith—and most important of all—the cause of wars will have been removed from the face of the earth.

There will be NO wages under Socialism; there can be no payment of any kind since money and buying and selling will have no place. The reward for your activity will be the guaranty of LIFE, a life worth living for everybody. The guaranty will lie in your own activity in co-operation with your fellow men the world over. Your reward will be free access to all means and amenities of life, including all its cultural possibilities. And what greater reward can there be for work and service, even for the exercise of what is called “genius,” than the pleasure and enjoyment derived from it by the individual, and the acknowledgment and appreciation by your fellow men? Here, indeed, in this admiration and appreciation, is room and incentive for ambition! Though never will, nor can, a modest average or minimum contribution, physical or mental disability or incapacity, whether on account of illness, accident or otherwise, jeopardize or forfeit the guaranty of material existence for any member of Socialist society.

Stripped of their commodity character as things sold for a price, all material things capable of ministering to human wants and desires will have none but use-value. Thus in determining the individual's consumption, no considerations of “cost” or “price” can play any part, since these concepts will have been relegated to the limbo of the past. There can be no question under Socialism of apportioning such and such amount to individuals by some “authority” for work done, time spent, services rendered, or such like. Whatever kind or aspect of human needs and desires there may be. whether in the domain of food, clothing, housing, education or the care of children, the sick and old. cultural aspects, hospitals, sanatoria, travel and transport, everything will be a matter only of production technique and organisation, since financial or private interest considerations of any kind will be out of the way.

R.

“The belief in God . . . " (1959)

Quote from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand, a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man’s reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Deity.
  “The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he had been liberated by a long-continued culture.”

—The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin, (page 937.)

The American Civil War — II (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part I

No Compromise

Neither side rushed blindly into the American Civil War. North and South made many efforts to compromise on their disputes, but each settlement only flung up more problems, making the war seem more certain.

Louisiana Purchase

In 1803 it was proposed that the Louisiana lands, recently purchased from France, should be recognised as a State of the Union. This proposal roused the jealousy of the New Englanders, not because Louisiana was a slave State but because they feared the addition of a Southern State on the other side of the political balance. This dispute promoted the agreement that free and slave States should be admitted to the Union alternately. This compromise worked well until 1820, when Missouri, a slave State, applied to join the Union. (Indiana. Illinois, and Maine had joined as free States and Mississippi and Alabama as slave States.) Although it meant breaking their agreement, the North bitterly opposed the entry of Missouri, for they were coming to the opinion that no more slave States should be admitted to the Union. This dispute was shelved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which recognised Missouri as a slave State, but ruled that no slave State should exist north of a parallel 36' 30' N., and that any State south of this line should be allowed to decide its own status.

The Missouri Compromise was broken by the refusal to extend the line across the Continent when California joined the Union, and further trouble developed over the admission of Kansas and Nebraska. These two States were brought into the Union to carry the railways which were pushing into the West. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise both should have been free States, but in the event only Nebraska was recognised as such. Kansas, whose wild and lawless settlers were violently pro-slavery, was allowed to choose its own status and the whole procedure was legalised by the Kansas/Nebraska Bill of 1854, which finally wiped out the Missouri Compromise.

The first elections in Kansas were chaotic. First, heavily armed Border ruffians from Missouri came into the State and drowned the election in illegal votes. When the pro-slavery candidate was declared elected, John Brown led a counter invasion of Abolitionists. Civil war broke out between the two sides, with each setting up its own government and holding its own elections. In the end, the slavers won, and they passed the most stringent measures to protect their system. Another compromise had failed. 

The Republican Party

Tempers on both sides were now rising fast, aggravated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Act allowed Marshalls from the Southern States to arrest runaway slaves, who had previously been granted refuge in the North, and return them to their masters. The dispute over this Act was highlighted by the case of Dred Scott, a runaway slave, who legally contested his return. His case dragged on for years, until in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that he was a piece of property without the right to sue in Federal Courts and that anyway he had lost his case in the Missouri courts, which had sole authority to deal with it. This decision stung opinion in the North, and the extreme anti-slavery attitude of the Abolitionists became more acceptable. In Boston, Lloyd Garrison had earned from the State of Georgia a $5,000 price on his head for publishing the Abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Respectable Northerners, after the Dred Scott case, looked upon Garrison’s paper with a less hostile eye.

Still, the Abolitionists could not win a Presidential election; in 1856 John C. Fremont lost to the Democrat, Buchanan. In truth, the Abolitionists could never fulfil the needs of the North’s rising capitalists. As the railways grew out and the link-up of the Middle West destroyed local prejudices, as the struggle between industry and the Southern landowners became more acute, so opinion in the North became more solid. In 1856 the Republican Party was formed and the Northern capitalists had a political organisation strong enough to counter the aristocratic planters. The Republicans did not at first intend to abolish slavery, or to sharpen the conflict with the South. They wanted to expand American industry, develop the West and control the country’s political affairs. But each successive dispute, and the planters’ notion of their inborn superiority, made civil war seem unavoidable.

Abraham Lincoln

The Bourbon planters were blind to the fact that the South was falling behind economically. Two-thirds of the country’s banking and financial investments were in the North, with Massachusetts alone said to hold more money in her banks than the whole of the Confederacy in 1861. Other estimates put the North's manufactures as worth nearly ten times all the crops of the South, and reckoned the Northern hay crop more valuable than all the Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar. (The planters over-estimated the importance of the world’s demand for cotton right through the war, many Southerners expected Lancashire opinion to force England to declare war on the North). They were convinced of their strength, and America slithered towards civil war, with the feeble President, Buchanan, incapable of doing anything about it.

In 1860 another Presidential election fell due, with Abraham Lincoln representing the Republican Party. There were only 30,000 slave-owning families in the South, with about 10,000 of them large owners. But these were the influences in Southern public opinion and, although Lincoln was plainly moderate in his opinion on the slavery dispute, they had no desire to put political power into his hands. He did not receive one vote south of Virginia (where he polled 2,000). In the border State of Missouri he got just 17,000. In 1856 the cotton States had plainly said that, if the Abolitionist Fremont were elected, they would leave the Union. (There had been several such threats during the past 60 years’ political struggles, not all of them from the South.) The planters recognised that Lincoln’s victory broke their last link with the Union, which they regarded as a collection of sovereign States which they could leave at will. They would suffer no coercion from a central government.

Secession

In December, 1860, South Carolina led the way out of the Union, and by February of the following year Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Texas had joined her in a Confederacy formed at Montgomery, Alabama. Jefferson Davis was the President and Alexander Stephens the Vice-President. Civil War seemed a hardening certainty.

              Jack Law

(To be continued.)

Link to Part III

The Economics of Health (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

1. A Survey of the Problem

It has long been known that economic factors have an immense amount to do with health, although opinions vary on "why" and "how" health is so influenced. Frederick Engels, in his Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844 wrote: "Society in England daily and hourly commits social murder; it has placed the workers under conditions in which they neither retain health nor live long; it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to their grave before their time.” If conditions in this country have changed somewhat since 1844, in many parts of the world these things still apply. It has been stated by Lord Boyd Orr that two-thirds of the world’s population are still living below the standards of normal nutrition—in other words, they are suffering from malnutrition, and are destined to die of malnutrition if they don’t first succumb from some other condition.

In 1938 Dr. Scott Williamson and Dr. Innes Pearce, of the Peckham Health Centre, examined 1,530 men, women and children, and in only 9 per cent. did they find nothing wrong. Eight per cent. were diseased and were under treatment. Eighty-three per cent. had something wrong and were doing nothing about it—and this was only twenty years ago and in a large town where every help should be obtainable. It constitutes a great indictment that something appalling is wrong, and whatever it be that is wrong, it has a causative factor behind it.

In a Board of Education Survey (1927) of an unselected group of 1,638 London Elementary School children aged 5 (i.e., at the age when they first come under the eye of the School Medical Officer) 83 per cent. showed one or more signs of bony rickets; 66 per cent. showed two or more signs of bony rickets; 83 per cent. showed some abnormality of nose and throat; 67 per cent. had some degree of adenoids; 94 per cent. had decayed teeth ; 88 per cent. had a certain degree of bad development of the teeth. A great proportion of such defects are attributable to inadequate food.

This report did not suggest in what way the food was inadequate, for it might well have been inadequate in quality, i.e., deficient in nutritional value, or insufficient in quantity, or both.

It can be observed quite easily that there is a considerable difference in the distribution of illnesses between the rich and the poor. Dr. Spence (Medical Officer of Health for Newcastle-on-Tyne), in his annual Report for 1933, declared, “Since the high incidence of apparent malnutrition is not found in the children of the better class families, it is due to preventable causes. Ill-health, therefore, is not only very widespread, it is unevenly distributed, the poor being much more prone to illness than the rich.” The late Dr. Drysdale, Physician to the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, many years ago said that, “while 8 per cent. of the infants of the rich died, the death rate among the very poor was often 40 per cent.” According to this, full health is an idle dream so long as poverty persists. Quotations of this kind are unfortunately conspicuously lacking as the authorities have the knack of recording very few of them, and don’t seem to encourage research along these lines. They have the idea (or seem to) that it is not too healthy (politically) to paint the picture too black against their own administration. Yet, Sir George Newman more than once declared, “Health is a purchasable commodity.”

When Sir George Newman was Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health and the Board of Education, he stated in 1920 that not less than a million children of school age were so physically or mentally retarded, defective or diseased as to be unable to derive benefit from the State Education provided.

Public Opinion in Preventative Medicine

An article appeared in the Lancet (organ of the British Medical Profession), for 5th December, 1942, and in commenting on the Beveridge Report—the forerunner of the National Health Service—declared : “The greatest single cause of ill-health and sub-optimal health, mental and physical, is not a virus or a bacterium, but poverty. So it is the doctor’s duty to fight poverty with even greater vigour than He fights the diphtheria bacillus.”

If we look at the maternal mortality figures for different districts of London we notice that the maternal mortality for Bermondsey and Paddington (industrial districts), is four times as high as Westminster, and six times as high as Kensington, and twice as high as the average for Greater London. Letchworth, a relatively prosperous garden city with 10,000 insured workers in 1938 out of a total of 17,000. had no maternal deaths in the five years prior to that date. 

Another very striking quotation: “During the period 1935 to 1937 more than 10,000 expectant mothers in the poorer districts of South Wales were given special food supplements during pregnancy. As a result the death rate in this group was only about a quarter as great as that in 18,000 who received no food supplements.” There are a host of similar figures to prove this.

An interesting experiment has been tried which shows beyond any shadow of doubt the tremendous influence of economic factors on health. In the Papworth Village Settlement for sufferers from tuberculosis, the children living with their tuberculous parents do not develop the disease in spite of this close contact. Sir Pendril Varries Jones, the founder of the Settlement, gives the following reasons for this immunity, reasons which are, in themselves, a striking comment on our society; 1. Adequate food supply. 2. Adequate and prolonged parental income. 3. Freedom from anxiety. 4. No risk of unemployment after breakdown. 5. Proper housing. 6. Public opinion which makes it possible to observe the necessary hygienic conditions without being laughed at. He sums up with the remark, “Economic conditions determine the spread or otherwise of the disease.”

Horace Jarvis

Link to Part 2

Class Collaboration in Communist China (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

[The Trade Union Law of the People's Republic of China makes strikes illegal.]

“New China” is not a Socialist country. Despite the claims of the Chinese Communists that the working-class of China has achieved political power: is the leading class in the country; and that “New China” is “a people’s democratic dictatorship” (whatever that is supposed to mean), a Socialist society does not obtain there.

The Chinese Communists in their struggle for power have—following the “revolution” of Sun Yat Sen in 1911—completed the destruction of Feudalism, overthrown the War Lords and have driven the so-called Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland of China to the island of Formosa: and despite their claims to the contrary are building Capitalism—not Socialism—in the People’s Republic of China.

With this development of a bourgeois mode of production of a Capitalist industrial revolution; and with it a propertyless wage-earning class owning nothing but its labouring power; conflicts and disputes between Capital and Labour are bound to arise. And since the days of Sun Yet Sen, Chinese workers, often with the help of the Communists, have struggled to form Trade Unions in an attempt to improve their standards of living. Since coming to power in 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s Communist government has not abolished the Trade Unions; has not forbidden the workers to join them; but has, in fact, encouraged the “All-China Federation of Labour.” In fact, like all other “Communist” countries, the Trade Unions are now part of State apparatus—they are “company unions” writ large! This is borne out by The Trade Union Law of the People’s Republic of China; the Provisional Rules of Procedure for Settling Labour Disputes and Labour- Capital Consultative Councils in Private Enterprises (published by the Foreign Languages Press, Peking).

According to the Communists there are four classes in China today—the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie; but only wage workers may join Trade Unions. “All manual and non-manual wage workers in enterprises, institutions and schools in Chinese territory whose wages constitute their sole or main means of livelihood, and all wage workers in irregular employment shall have the right to organise trade unions.” (Article 1 of the Trade Union Law of the People’s Republic of China). At the present moment the majority of China’s 600 million or so people are not yet wage workers. But in the cities more than half the population constitute wage earners and their dependants. For example, in 1951, about 400,000 of Peking’s 2,000,000 people were wage workers, and with their dependents, exceeded 1,200,000. In Shanghai about 3,200,000 of the population of over 6,000,000 in 1951, were wage workers and their dependants.

All Chinese Trade Unions are bound by law to affiliate to the “All-China Federation of Labour” (Article 3) and any organization not belonging to the Federation of Labour “shall not be called a trade Union” (Article 4). Articles 5, 6, 7 and 8 state that:—

  “Trade Unions in enterprises operated by the State or by cooperatives shall have the right to represent the workers and staff in taking part in administering production and in concluding collective agreements with the management.'’ 

#    #    #    # 

  "Trade Unions in private enterprises shall have the right to represent and staff members in conducting negotiations with the employers, in taking part in the labour-capital consultative councils and in concluding collective agreements with the employers.” 

#    #    #    # 

 “It is the duty of Trade Unions to protect the interests of workers and staff members, to ensure that the managements or owners effectively carry out labour protection, labour insurance, wage standards, factory sanitation and safety measures as stipulated in the laws and decrees of the government, and other relevant regulations and directions, and to take measures for improving the material and cultural life of the workers and staff members."

#    #    #    # 

  "Trade Union organisations at all levels in enterprises operated by the State or by cooperatives shall have the right to ask the managements of the corresponding levels to submit reports on their work lo the trade union committees, to the general membership meetings or to representative conferences. They also have the right to represent the workers and staff members in taking part in administrative boards or administrative meetings at the corresponding levels.” 

#    #    #    #

But they do not have the right to go on strike if their claims are not satisfactorily met!

Where a dispute arises between management and labour, and where one side or the other considers that the other party has violated the collective agreement, they may take their complaint to the Government’s Labour Bureau. If the complaint is taken to a local government Labour Bureau it may set up an investigation and mediation committee. If agreement is then reached by both sides, through the activities of the investigation committee of the Bureau, it will be signed by the representatives of both parties for registration. If mediation should fail, then the Labour Bureau will set up its own arbitration committee. And, in the words of Article 8 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure for Settling Labour Disputes, “The award rendered by the arbitration committee shall be signed by the representative of the Labour Bureau who presides over the committee, and after the award is approved by the Director of the Labour Bureau it shall be notified to both parties to the dispute which it must carry out.” Both parties must abide by any agreement reached. If either party does not agree it must inform the Labour Bureau within five days, and must lodge an appeal with the “People’s Court” for a final verdict. This is as far as the Trade Unions can go. No worker in Communist China may withdraw his labour-power under any circumstances. Strikes are forbidden. Article 11 is quite clear on this point:—

  “After a dispute has broken out, both parties, during the period of consultation, mediation or arbitration, shall maintain the status quo in production. The management should not resort to a lock-out, suspend payment of wages, cease providing meals or take any other measures which lower workers' living conditions. Labour shall also maintain production and observe labour discipline. After arbitration by the Labour Bureau, even if one party disagrees and calls for settlement by the Court, the two parties shall nevertheless abide by the arbitration award pending the verdict of the Court.”

#    #    #    #

From The Trade Union Law of the People’s Republic of China it can be seen that the workers of “New China” are unable to organise in genuine Trade Unions; that they are not allowed to call strikes whatever their grievances may be, and that the so-called Trade Unions affiliated to the “All-China Federation of Labour” are Unions mainly in name only, similar to Hitler’s “Labour Front” in pre-war Germany. China’s “Trade Unions” are allowed to negotiate. But that is all. Their main functions, according to Article 9, of The Trade Union Law of the People’s Republic of China, are to organise the workers to support the laws of the government, carry out the policies of the government; to get the workers to adopt a new attitude towards labour—that is, to observe “labour discipline,” to organise “labour emulation campaigns and increase production to ensure the fulfilment of the production plans: to protect public property; to oppose corruption and bureaucracy and to fight “saboteurs” in enterprises operated by the State". In privately-owned enterprises the Trade Unions must help in developing production, “benefitting both labour and capital" — in other words, increasing the exploitation and subjection of the Chinese working-class. The outlook for the masses of China is indeed bleak.

Peter E. Newell.

Shorter Hours For What? (1959)

Editorial from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some of the longest and hardest struggles of the trade unions have been to secure agreements reducing hours of work. Hours were brought down from 10 a day to 9, and then to 8—each time against the complaint of the employers and their tame economists that this would ruin industry, price British exports out of all markets and produce millions of unemployed.

The last general movement towards shorter hours was after World War II, when the 44-hour week became fairly general for industrial workers. (The first World War had been followed by the movement that brought about the 48 to 47-hour week.)

Now a number of unions, including miners, and engineering and shipbuilding workers, are trying to get a further reduction. They are asking for shorter hours without reduction of weekly pay (that being the way hours were reduced on earlier occasions in the past 40 years). With persistent pressure, they should have some success.

It is, however, impossible to pass over without comment the seeming change of attitude that has taken place in recent years towards shorter hours. In the earlier movements the demand for shorter hours meant what it appeared to mean, but in recent years the nominally shorter hours have been used very often merely as a means of getting additional overtime pay while working the same hours as before. In manufacturing industry average hours of work in 1938 were 46½ a week and in 1946 46⅕. In 1947 the standard working week was generally reduced by agreement from 48 or 47 to 44, but the hours actually worked began to rise again, and in 1955 were only very slightly under 47. In August, 1955, out of about 6,000,000 workers covered by the Ministry of Labour inquiry, over one in four was working overtime, the average overtime of these 1½ millions averaging 8½ hours in the week. In November, 1956, there were 1,600,000 workers doing an average of 8 hours overtime a week, in the manufacturing group of industries employing about 6 million.

Of course, with the rise of unemployment and short-time working the numbers doing overtime have dropped, but at August, 1958, in the same manufacturing group of workers there were still nearly 1,200,000 doing overtime.

We shall therefore again see the trade unions in the somewhat odd position of going to the employers to state a case for a 40-hour week instead of 44, knowing that large numbers of workers are doing upwards of 50 hours.

Of course, it will be said that hundreds of thousands of workers simply cannot make ends meet on their bare pay; for them overtime is a necessity. In a sense this is true, but it is really a dangerous half-truth. If that attitude had been taken up in the 19th century the battles for shorter hours would never have been fought, but workers then did not take up that attitude. They took the more correct line of fighting both to press up the wage for the week and to reduce the weekly hours of work.

But they also set their face against the working of overtime as a normal practice, which is what it now often is. 

The hours of work problem raises other issues besides the number of hours spent in the factory or office. As the years go by it is increasingly bound up with the number of hours spent travelling from home to work and back again. Workers have long been forced to move further out from the centre of the big cities, which has meant giving up more time to travel the greater distance. With modern aggravation of the problem of how to keep the traffic moving, it is now also becoming a question of spending more and more time to travel the same distance.

The Rise of the Meritocracy (1959)

Book Review from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Society in 2034

When Swift, with satirical solemnity, suggested in his “Modest Proposals” that poverty in Ireland could be abolished by raising the children of the Irish poor for food, many at the time were shocked. The current suggestion that one day all children will be raised for fitting them to the rigid requirements of a stratified society evokes no great outcry, even though the consequences would be for humans as disastrous as if the “Modest Proposals” had been put into effect.

Dr. Young’s book, The Rise of the Meritocracy (publishers, Thomas and Hudson, 15s.) outlines such a future. By A.D. 2034 Britain is ruled by an intellectual elite, a mere 5 per cent, of the population, “who know what 5 per cent, means.” It is no longer wealth assets but Intelligence Quotient assessment which fixes people’s place in society. All social philosophy is compressed into the formula, l.Q. + Effort = Merit. I.Q. prediction has been pushed back into the womb and the job of the educator is to train these “womb products” at the appropriate level. A society, presumably, where there will be equality of opportunity for everyone to become unequal.

But this exclusion of the many brings frustration and resentment among the masses, who are too stupid to realise that they have been placed in that station of life to which it has pleased their I.Q. destiny to call them. Certain intellectuals, mostly women, to whom the Meritocracy is anathema, excite the mob to revolt. The climax is reached when the Ministry of Education is gutted, a call made for a general strike as well as a great May Day demonstration to be held at Peterloo. The dissident intellectuals also frame a charter demanding, among other things, retention of primary schools, raising of the school age to eighteen and common secondary schools for all.

The book takes the form of a history of the use of the Meritocracy by an unnamed sociologist who is killed at Peterloo before he has time to submit the proofs that in a competitive world where other nations have made the Meritocracy the essence of the Establishment, social survival is only, possible by perpetuating the l.Q. way of life.

Government by the Super-Intelligent

Dr. Young’s satire is apparently a warning against what he thinks might be the outcome of present trends and widely held beliefs. First, that the working class is in economic and cultural decline; that there is a fixed and limited potential of intelligence and that these limited intellectual resources must be efficiently utilised by rigid educational discrimination if we are to hold our own against other nations.

The logic of events would seem to indicate a world controlled by “experts” and “specialists.” The dissolving of the present class structure and the emergence of a new two class system of high I.Q.s and low I.Q.s based finally by continuous selection and breeding on an hereditary principle. The only thing against Dr. Young’s views is that there is no evidence of such trends which point in the direction he adumbrates.

Dr. Young’s account of how the present ruling class is cajoled, indoctrinated and finally liquidated is thoroughly unconvincing. It is a shadowy world where politicians, psychologists, pundits and pedagogues possess enormous power and the complex character of capitalism is reduced to the dimensions of a Meccano set, whose parts can be interchanged in a most arbitrary fashion. The Aladdin’s lamp of the old technocrats’ fantasy is introduced as a device to help the story and the genie is, of course, “automation.” The ruling class—the high I.Q.s,—get enormous incomes and the low I.Q.s live quite comfortably, although, due to labour displacement, many become domestic servants. This may be good fun, but it is bad satire.

There is not the slightest evidence to show that the present ruling class is losing its grip and that effective power is passing into the hands of “experts” and “specialists” of attested I.Q. ability. History knows no ruling class that has voluntarily abdicated its power or has been persuaded out of it by those whose services it employs. The ability of a ruling class to rule is not basically a question of I.Q. assessments, but consists of tradition, cultural inheritance and social practice. A ruling class learns to rule by ruling. And the present ruling class has learned it well. It cannot, as Dr. Young imagines, be reduced to an instructed art or science. Again, people like Lloyd George, Churchill, Macmillan and many others have a knowledge of affairs born out of certain circumstances and experience not amenable to I.Q. prediction and perhaps inaccessible to I.Q. testers.

Fallacious Argument

An instructive part of the book, although perhaps not in the way the author intended, is when the dissident intellectuals of the Meritocracy argue that “people ought to be evaluated not merely in terms of their intelligence and education, but for their kindliness, courage, generosity, etc. And that people should have an opportunity to rise not in any mathematical sense but to each develop his special capacities for leading a rich life. Then we should have the classless society.” But why should sensibility, sensitivity, sympathy and ability to co-operate be excluded from intelligence rating?. The answer lies in the assumptions of present society about the nature of intelligence. In a society like the present one we have been taught to think of intelligence in a most unintelligent way, as something absolute and fixed. The most useful thing we can say about intelligence is that it is inseparably connected with the learning process. Given encouragement, sympathy and the appropriate conditions, people can go on learning all their lives. These prerequisites are gravely handicapped in present society. To-day the authorised pursuit of knowledge takes the form of the rat race of scholarships or later competitive exams, where concepts of status and privilege become the prime stimulus.

So far as the educational system becoming a power in itself, it only makes sense in the light of the requirements of capitalism, i.e., by fashioning the raw material of working class children into the manufactured article required by employers. Education, like charity, is still for the deserving poor. This may offend starry-eyed educationalists dedicated to some abstract principle of education, but they are the facts. Mental testers, administrators and teachers are only doing what capitalist society requires them to do. Many teachers, we believe, recognise this, but there is little they can do about it in practice.

Equality and Equality of Opportunity

Apparently the high I.Q. reformers of the Meritocracy have learned nothing from the reformers of the past—no, not even that they have learned nothing. They want a classless society based on the poetic sentiment of “something nearer to the heart’s desire" ignoring the fact that a privileged society conditions hearts, among other things. The latter day egalitarians, like the earlier ones, try to apply the concept of equality in a social context profoundly unequal. They even confuse themselves and others by equating equality with equality of opportunity, which is, of course, one of the major contemporary confusions. But in a privileged society opportunities are not born free and equal, and the demand for it is the demand of the underprivileged. The demand by Labour egalitarians for equality of opportunity merely turns out to be an opportunity of inequality. That is their dilemma.

We shall, of course, never grasp what human equality really means until we recognise where the source of inequalities lies, i.e., in the ownership of existing wealth resources by a privileged few.

Keeping up with the I.Q. of the Joneses

In a truly classless, society, where all members freely and equally participate in the life and work of the community, the term equality will cease to have meaning; it will have become dissolved into the every-day life and practice of social organisation. There will be no exclusion from above or inclusion from below. People will not be chosen, but do the choosing. As always when people are allowed to choose, they are for the most part sensible about it. In a classless society people will be able to freely avail themselves of a variation of choices and so richly utilise their various capacities. There will be no attempt to shape other people’s lives on some arbitrary intelligence model.

 

In spite of their high I.Q.S, the rulers of the Meritocracy are crass victims of their own ideology, where status and prestige are the ultimate values, and where the chosen themselves have no choice in the matter. A society where it seems families will emblazon their escutcheons not with a coat-of-arms but with I.Q. assessments, a kind of intellectual variation of keeping up with the Joneses. At least the present ruling class have a more intelligent view of the sources of their power and the reason for keeping those sources.

The book is a fusion of elements of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World and Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, and a rehash to a large extent of the Superman theory of the dead thinker, Shaw. Dead in more senses than one. Like many more, the author is so busy reading the future that he misses what is going on under his very nose. He looks for problems that are not really there, instead of solutions which are right here. i.e., the supersession of present-day profit motivated society for one based on free and equal access to the means of living.

The story of Meritocracy is the story of push-button capitalism and where every push-button country is furiously in competition with every other push-button country, although why, we are never told. The author has a naive belief in the miraculous powers of increased productivity via technocracy and science. For him all human problems are really technical problems which men may fail to master and so produce the Frankenstein of the Meritocracy.

It is a twice-told tale, first told more than half a century ago. There is no more human evidence or non-human evidence for believing it now than for believing it then.

As a book it belongs more properly to science fiction than to a serious social work.

Ted Wilmott

Obituary: Clifford Groves (1959)

Obituary from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a sad thought that, after several years of bad health, Clifford Groves is now dead at 52 years of age. Following the death of his wife, Ivy, also a member, he was taken into hospital with little hope of recovery. Comrade Groves’ family were Salvationists and during his boyhood he was taught the trumpet. As his mind matured he broke away from religion and, taking his trumpet with him, he used it to augment his wages by playing in a jazz band in good New Orleans style. Then he parted company with the trumpet for the mind-awakening blasts of Socialist propaganda. His experiences working in company offices and on the “road” as a firm’s representative (“high-class hawker,” to use his own description) made him more and more critical of the morality of the buying and selling of commodities until, in this frame of mind, he chanced to listen to Party speakers. Discussions with Party members ensued which not only did much for him but for the Party members also, for Groves possessed a very critical and ordered mind together with a somewhat caustic wit. Consequently Chiswick Branch members were soon polishing up and improving upon their own knowledge. He joined Chiswick in 1933 and shortly afterwards met Adolph Kohn, an outstandingly able propagandist and, in his own works, he “became Kohn’s pupil” and studied hard and long. He was soon speaking for the Party on the outdoor and indoor platforms and developed an excellent manner and clarity of expression that was a joy to hear. Some will recall his pre-war lectures on the “Popular Front” in France and, later, on the “Beveridge” Report and Family Allowances (the Party pamphlets on both these subjects were written by him).

As he developed, he became in demand as a Party representative in debate and was, at all times, calm and unruffled, even under the most trying conditions, giving of his best whether to a small audience in Cambridge or a “full house” at Kensington Town Hall. Later he became General Secretary and, in 1945, was nominated as our candidate at Paddington North in the General Election. Here, with many other Party members, he gave of his best in what, to many, was the best election campaign the Party has undertaken. (He also represented the Party in the by-election in 1946.) In 1949, signs of ill-health began to appear and, although he resigned as General Secretary, he continued on the Executive Committee for a few more years.

Few knew Groves well, but those of us who did, knew him to be a modest man and, in some ways, a shy one, who freely acknowledged the help that he had received from other Party members. To him the struggle for the establishment of Socialism was the only work worth while and represented his sole interest.

In concluding this salute to a very able propagandist for Socialism, it is appropriate to mention that, in large measure, his work was only made possible by the great help he received from Ivy, his wife, who, throughout the years took over practically all their domestic worries and responsibilities, leaving him free to carry out his Party work.

Phyllis Howard and Arthur George

A Drama of Hungary (1959)

Theatre Review from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shadow of Heroes by Robert Ardrey (Piccadilly Theatre)

It is not often that we see before us on the stage a re-enactment of events only recently cast into history, whose beam has lowered sufficiently to throw a “Shadow of Heroes” on to our vision; that of the people of Hungary, whose struggles formed the stuff of Robert Ardrey’s play at the Piccadilly Theatre in November.

Ardrey has given us an epic, or a document if you will; a play that points no finger, no moral, but simply shows us people playing the only parts they know, in a world not of their own making.

Lately familiar-sounding names: Kádár, Gerő and Rákosi, echo about the actors who present them to us— impersonally. Rajk, the idealist, and Kádár, the dedicated plodder; who fought in the Hungarian Communist underground; Gerő and Rákosi, the suave politicians, who, after due preparation in Moscow, were returned to Hungary in the wake of the Red Army to rule for the Kremlin. 

That which followed is what we have come to know as the Hungarian tragedy and the events that lead up to it; new events in an old pattern. We are soon aware that there is no common cause between those Hungarians from Moscow and those from the cellars of Budapest.

Rajk is hanged as a sacrifice to the needs of rotten political expediency, on a trumped-up charge of Titoist conspiracy, and resurrected as a public hero at the behest of another. As an attempt to line up with the new coformity, the Khrushchev ascendency after the death of Stalin, which went astray and, instead, exploded the keg of suppressed working-class hatred for the oppression of their “ liberators ” in October, 1956.

Through all this Kádár appears as little more than a pawn, a servant of the Communist Party, to be pulled up and pitched down as and when the interests of the ruling circle require it.

Finally, the intrigues of the Communist overlords for the perks and privileges of despotism, skulking from the wrath of Moscow, eventually invoke that wrath upon themselves and the unfortunate working class.

Ardrey knows little of politics and the motive forces of history (at least this is not apparent). Neither should we credit him with personal or political accuracy without verification.

But he pronounces no judgment that his narrative does not do for itself. He gives no causes; no profound analysis. Just people. This is both the strength and weakness of the play. We are free to draw our own conclusions (except for Mr. Emlyn Williams’ slight vocal insinuations). Some may draw the wrong ones, or none at all: but at least we are not told what they should be, which is refreshing and salutary.

There is an air of openness about the play: a “chorus,” or story teller, weaves in and out the action, the actors set their own scenery of broken outlines, around which the drama unfolds.

We are not involved: we sit and watch, listen and, maybe, think.

Ian Jones

Little Brother is Watching You (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has always been fashionable for the champions of so-called Western Democracy to describe in horrifying detail the horrors perpetrated by Big Brother Stalin, Big Brother Khruschev and the other dictators, in order that we might be comforted by the thought that circumstances here might be a lot worse. When one looks around, though, the differences aren't as great as they are made out to be. Everywhere one looks there are myriads of little brothers—the petty bureaucrats and officials that are apparently indispensable to modem society. So vast and impersonal has the State machine become, that the sum total of all the little brothers appears to make a very big brother indeed. 

One of the most disturbing features about this is the way in which little-brotherdom has been taken for granted, few now questioning the supervisory rights exercised by the multitudes of little brothers. 

Practically every moment of our waking life is spent under the observation and control of these watchdogs, who themselves are oblivious to the nature of their task, that is to be the ruling class's minions who ensure that every dot and comma of the laws of property society are observed. 

Let us take a look at our lives and see how far we are dominated by little-brotherdom. We open our eyes in the morning, lift our heads from the pillow (Purchase Tax (Domestic Pillowslips) Order 1947, S.R. & O., 1876); and gaze around our cosy Council flat ("Tenants shall not keep cats, dogs, chickens, livestock or any animal whatsoever"). We lower our feet gently to the floor, careful not to wake the baby downstairs ("No musical instruments, radio, record-player or noisy instrument whatsoever shall be played or used between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7.30 a.m."). We pull on our cotton socks (Customs and Excise (Import Licences for Foreign Cotton Goods) Order 1954. S.T. No. 6764). 

The carpet we tread on is subject to Purchase Tax, Hire Purchase restrictions, Customs and Excise duty if it is imported, Police investigation if it is stolen, and some thousands of officials in various Ministries and Departments are concerned with all these qualities of the carpet. The only quality that they are not interested in is the one that concerns the owner, that is, its usefulness. Similarly the tea that we pop into the teapot is haggled over by harassed merchants, discussed by diplomats, preserved by security police, checked by Customs officials, weighed by weights and measures men, and litigated over by lawyers, all without reference or relevance to the need that it satisfies. 

And so the morning goes on; everything we do, everything we use, and even our conversations are affected in some way or other by regulations, statutes, restrictions, official decrees, taxes, tithes, fines, penalties, and the rest. 

Perhaps the postman has brought us some mail? Ah, yes, a kind letter from our obedient servant, the Inspector of Taxes, requesting us to complete and return Form A.63 forthwith or have our code number reduced to zero (almost a fate worse than death). What else—perhaps a billet-doux from the Postmaster-General reminding us that our television licence expires on the 31st proximo? Or a figure-studded form from the Town Clerk telling us that each pound of rates was divided up into such fascinating items as 3¾d. for roads: 4¼d. for schools; 9d. for himself as watcher-in-chief and for his myrmidons; and so on. In fact, one could hazard the guess that three-quarters of the average man's mail comes from the little brothers. 

And so it goes on—one is always subject to the restrictions, petty tyranny and feeling of soul-destroying impotence produced by constant surveillance—"Good morning, madam; may I see your wireless and television licences?"; and the rest of it. 

Even the forms of little-brotherdom that we take completely for granted -"Fares, please"; "May I see your ticket?"; "One and nines at the far paybox" — all these are the product of an irrational society which substitutes profit for human needs, money for human feelings, and cash registers for human lives. 

A whole army of people exists, whose only purpose is to restrict us, regulate our lives, keep us submissive, and preserve the sanctity of private property. This is not a criticism of the watchdogs themselves—the clerk in the tax office or the bus conductor is only carrying out a job, although the job itself is one that stultifies and inhibits. Millions of able-bodied men and women carry out these socially useless tasks for the purpose of keeping capitalism running efficiently and keeping the others in order. 

Capitalism requires an army, navy, air force, police force and judiciary to defend the rights of employers to exploit their propertyless employees. In order to do this efficiently in the modern world, an immense and complicated State machine grows up, which irons out the differences between individual capitalists and combines all their interests in what is complacently described as the "national interest." To maintain this top-heavy institution, hundreds of thousands of workers are required to staff the end less Ministries and Departments. The Inland Revenue Department rakes in the State's share of the profits exacted from workers, and the various Ministries spend it in the ways deemed best by the ruling class's administrators.

And yet, a large proportion of the tasks performed by this vast army of people are, from a rational point of view, socially worthless. The Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance keeps infirm and aged workers alive at the minimum expense; the Customs and Excise Department preserves the State monopolies of tobacco and alcohol and keeps the rapacious foreign capitalist from the door; the Defence Ministry and Foreign Office ensure that the British capitalist can hang on to what he has captured; and so on. No doubt this is all very desirable from the ruling class's point of view, but has little to do with the interests of the majority of people.

People's acceptance of these social fungi implies an acceptance of capitalism, with all the evils that go with it. Conversely, once one has rejected capitalism, it can be seen that this implies the rejection of all of its stupid paraphernalia - of which little brothers are a part. Little brothers are only a facet of a harmful social system which has long outlived its purpose; a facet which itself emphasises and demonstrates the irrational and undesirable nature of capitalist society. 

A society which turns in on itself in this way, which dominates and regiments humans instead of serving their interests—this is a world which is unworthy of human beings. The fact that people find life unthinkable without the little brothers proves just how unthinkable it has become with them. 

Albert Ivimey