50 Years Ago: Socialism Hard To Grasp (1961)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

No part of the Socialist proposition seems more difficult to the average worker than the proposal to abolish money, price and trade. So deep has the idea of commerce been driven into the working class that they have come to believe themselves formed for the sole purpose of working and increasing trade.

In capitalist production the toiler is, indeed, just a piece of mechanism, necessary to the progress of trade, and he has been taught to believe that such is all he is fitted to be.

To-day we live to work, and the proposal of the Socialist—undoubtedly a revolutionary one—to reverse the sequence, to produce wealth in order to live, seems to be beyond the comprehension of the wage-slave. His brain, stored with capitalist ideas, cannot get away from the notions connected with capitalist methods of production and exchange, hence the information that under u Socialist system no wages would be paid comes to him as a shock.

From the Socialist Standard, February, 1911.

50 Years Ago: Might is Right (1961)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man has a right to live only — if he can. The mightiest beast and the meanest parasite have as much right to live—and as little. . . .

Yet nature is not cruel: she knows nothing of emotions. She leaves her children to fight things out for themselves, giving them one universal law: Might is Right. . . .

The revolutionary requires no other justification than that of expediency. No revolutionary in history ever really did. True they have paid much lip service to Justice and other figments of the popular mind, but that has been only because they have required the assistance of those who were to gain nothing from revolution, and who had therefore to be inspired with empty phrases and confused with humbug. But the highest sanction revolutionaries ever have required has been—opportunity.

The Socialist asks no more. Let who will grovel at the feet of Justice, or slobber over the “Natural Rights of Man”—the Socialist has no use for such meaningless vapourings. . . .

Against the might of the strong few shall be put the might of the many weak ones. Before that might capitalism and private ownership will go down for ever. Then, when society founded upon common property in the means of life, has become one harmonious whole, the brutal dictum, might is right, will hold good only between the social organism and external nature, while between man and man a new ethic will arise—or rather the old ethic of gentile society under a new form—that only the social good is right.

From the Socialist Standard, February, 1911.

Back to Normal (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the last two General Elections we heard much about the wonderful affluent conditions in which we were living.

“You’ve never had it so good” was a Mac Wonder phrase much in the air. We have also distinct memories of “doubling our standard of living within twenty-five years”. The air was as, Hamlet said “promise-crammed" but as he himself tartly added “you cannot feed capons so”.

These promises have now come home to roost. All the other old and well-worn phrases and threats have now been dusted and polished and taken out of storage. The air is now full of them, as threatening. For example, Selwyn Lloyd:

   I will simply point out that no one in the world owes us a living and if we don’t earn it by hard work in this field, the standard of living in this country will go down. It’s goodbye to dreams of expansion and social progress. 

Translated this means—“Work harder. Don’t ask for higher wages or else ... ” 

And another pearl from Mr. Lloyd, "The whole emphasis should be on saving labour, or increasing efficiency and on being competitive”. Then as if to sugar the pill—“Far from that being a threat to full employment it is the only way to maintain it ”.

It would be interesting to hear the comments of the recently sacked motor workers (and those put on short time) on that last bit.

The facts of the matter are that in present-day competitive capitalist society goods can be sold only if, in terms of quality and price, they match up to, or improve upon similar or identical products from elsewhere: the ultimate purpose being to provide a profit for the owners. If this purpose of profit-making is threatened, production eases off, and workers are put on short-time or sacked. Of course, you may rest assured that no capitalist politician is ever going to make this plain to you.'

Max Judd

The Real Army Game (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

So an Army commanding officer banned his troops from viewing the television programme, “The Army Game”, on the grounds that it “appears to portray little that bears any relation to the present-day Army.”

But would Major Bill Cook really approve a true depiction of the Army—whether of today or of earlier days of the present order? Would he like to see revealed, for instance, the purpose of armies in current society? If so, he can well be accommodated by socialists.

Society as today constituted is composed of two classes, the capitalist class and the working class. Although the [capitalists are] the dominating faction. This is due to workers, in numbers, overwhelmingly preponderate, it is the capitalists who are the circumstance that the capitalist class owns (in the form of the land, factories, machines etc.), the means of producing the means of life.

The workers, on the other hand, have no such means and implements of production, and to secure food, clothing and shelter and provision for their families. must offer for sale to the owning class their mental and physical energies. The price (or wages) paid for these energies are at a level that will roughly purchase the necessities of life. But those very energies (or labour power) are bought for working spells more than sufficient to produce the value of the wages paid for them. In a five-day working week this value may be produced by the end of the third day; the value produced on the fourth and fifth day. therefore, is a value in excess of the workers' labour-power value and thus the wages that represent that value in monetary terms of the food, clothing etc., required for the restoration of expended energies. This excess is thus a surplus value congealed, as it were, in the products (or commodities) the workers have produced for their masters. Surplus value, with the sale of the commodities incorporating it, is realised as profit; which, by continually flowing to the capitalist class enables them to further capitalise their businesses and live without the necessity of working.

Thus one sees the capitalist class as a relatively tiny section of the community, but a section which enjoys benefits denied to that much larger section, the working class. And added to the economic advantage of ownership of the productive means goes the political advantage of a State apparatus, the machinery of government, which since the birth of capitalism has carried out its appointed function of preserving the social set-up, and of conserving the masters' monopoly of the wealth produced by the working class. Included in this State apparatus are the coercive and armed forces which, possibly when all other official influences have failed, will be called upon to protect or restore “law and order” against any development likely to interrupt capitalism's normal productive and distributive processes or to subvert in any way the privileged position of the capitalists over the workers. And among the armed coercive forces, of course, is the Army.

As a force intended to be the last resort “persuaders” of large numbers of people—hungry and desperate strikers and unemployed demonstrators as in some cases—the Army is provided with weapons and taught how to use them. The result is that, in cases of threatened subversion etc., the Army is an efficient repressive force through its trained ability to maim or kill. Whether or not years elapse without such measures being applied, this remains one of the purposes behind the Army's existence.

There, then, lies the capitalist need for armies in the country of their being. But each national capitalist grouping also needs an armed force to defend or further its interests outside its homeland. Behind each of these national groupings, whatever the nation encompassing it, lies the pressure of competition. American capitalism contends with Russian, British with German, French with Japanese—indeed, each nation contends with all others in a quest for markets by which to sell its commodities, which have been produced by the workers of each competing country.

Hence between the national capitalist factions, there exists a struggle for markets, but for each competitive needs as cheaper fields of exploitation, economical trading routes, and all the other advantages that will enable their possessors to offer their commodities at competitive prices. Often the acquirement of these advantages can be effected only by filching them from rivals. From the diplomatic moves, the changing strategies, there come the international crises, the tensions, the cold wars—too often to end in a hot war.

If is then that the Army of each country concerned is ordered, with the other armed services, to carry out its function as the protector of the foreign interests of its native capitalist class. Not that the protection of capitalist interests will be the reason given for hurling masses of young men, mostly members of the working class, into bloody conflict against other masses of young men, similarly mainly workers. The various propaganda machines will manufacture high-sounding excuses. The war is a fight for “democracy over autocracy”, for “breathing-space”, to defend “the rights of small nations”. Augmented now by hosts of wartime conscripts the task for each army is to wreak what havoc, destruction and death it can upon the armies of the “enemy” countries. For no other reason than that they have been ordered to do so by their respective governments, man kills man so that his masters' trading interests are furthered or at least protected from damage.

One can scarcely expect a socially progressive and enlightened development among men trained to carry out the anti-social act of war. Certain it is that many of those whose military job is to make “good soldiers” are of necessity tyrannous and not far different to “The Army Game’s” Sergeant-Major Bullimore.

But perhaps this portrayal is too realistic for Major Cook. However, the Major need have no fear that “The Army Game” will in any way harm the Army. The Government, as the virtual executive committee of British capitalism, will see to that.

F. W. Hawkins

Sin on the Underground (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

What's your pet worry? The Congo? H-Bombs? The Cold War? Anybody who is preoccupied with these pleasantries may have missed the petty censorship which was recently imposed upon London's Tube stations and which passed, in fact, with only a little comment from one or two newspapers and the House of Lords. The subject of this censorship was a poster issued by the Family Planning Association which, after being displayed on many Tube stations, was withdrawn when the Transport Commission received some objections to it. The Commission justified their action by referring to a ruling of theirs which states that they “. . . will not accept posters which refer to religious or sacred subjects in a manner which might give offence or which contain matter or illustrations likely to be considered religiously controversial." 

What sort of a poster was it, to involve this ruling? We decided to find out. We spent a fortune on Tube fares, our eyes grew sore on advertisements for corsets, for films starring curvy B.B. or tough- slugging Westerners. We saw posters which exhorted the rush hour workers to partake of gracious living by drinking a certain Brown Ale—with out-of focus candelabra in the background.

Apparently, nothing in this pot-pourri of sex, violence and alcohol had raised a murmur of protest. At last we found the poster. We examined it closely, searched diligently for something in it which a reasonable person might object to. We could find none. It was not offensive, nor was it lewd. If anything, the people in it were a little overdressed.

It is difficult, then, to imagine the majority of Tube passengers objecting to this advertisement. We can only assume that it was removed because of a minority of religious purgers, who pressed their point in a barrage of protest. We have seen this happen before; the Lord’s Day Observance Society has used the technique for years, often against Roman Catholics. A more subtle method of suppression, this, than of yore, when Catholics would reduce to human charcoal any burglar or peasant who had difficulty in grasping a Papal chemical formula about bread and wine turning into flesh and blood. Or when Calvinists would burn a scholar who rejected a complex theory which held that there was a being called God, who was three people—and at the same time only one. More subtle, because the spread of materialist knowledge has made it harder to whip up hatred over theological disputes; but still reprehensible. For human progress depends upon the decisions of conscious people, not upon gags applied to society by a sanctimonious minority.

What about birth control? Much of the opposition to it is almost a mania for the intensely personal nature of sexual relationships makes it easy to rouse strong feelings in the matter. Some opponents—notably the Catholics —maintain that the use of contraceptives is a defiance of the "Almighty Will": others that it invites an increase in juvenile promiscuity. Can we expect, then, that Catholics are not promiscuous? The Chief Medical Officer of the London County Council has reported that during 1959 there were 183 unmarried female immigrants from Catholic, anti-birth control Eire who, because they were pregnant when they came to this country, had to be assisted by the L.C.C. Welfare department. The Catholic Church is as helpless as any other organisation in these matters. Without a doubt, much of the religious opposition to birth control is roused by the fact that it is an attempt to shape our own environment, instead of leaving it to the will of a mythical supernatural being.

In fact, birth control is at present only a method of spreading out workers' relative poverty, an attempt to prevent ourselves slipping too far into degradation and dire need. Whether we practice it or not, whether we have two children or sixteen we remain workers, depending on our wage to live. In underdeveloped countries, birth control is often given official backing, but the older established capitalist nations leave it as a matter of personal choice, only raising the issue of government support in. for example, times of slump.

We should remember that man’s future lies within his own society and that birth control could be a factor in fashioning the sort of world that man desires. But this in turn depends upon man’s social knowledge and his rejection of, for example, religious theories with their threats of hellfire and purgatory. When he has reached that stage, he will be facing the many aspects of living a civilised life in a developed society and there will be no bigots to decide what he may or may not do.

Jack Law

Notes on Economic History (4) (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the Physiocrats

Sir William Petty (1623-1687)

Marx, in Volume 1 of Capital, says: "Once for all, I may add that by classical political economy I understand that economy which since the time of W. Petty has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in contradiction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only".

This is a tribute to the genius and originality of Sir William Petty, the founder of modern political economy. It is in his Treatise of Taxes and Contribution, London 1662, that we find the first idea of surplus value.

Petty distinguishes the natural price of commodities from the market price, the "true price current". By natural price he means value. This is his main point, as the determination of surplus value depends on the determination of value itself. What, then, is value? Petty determines the value of commodities by the relative amounts of labour which they contain; he is concerned not with appearances, but with foundations.

In the following quotation from his Treatise of Taxes and Contributions we get the first definition of value:

If a man brings to London an ounce of Silver out of the earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and more mines a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did one, then corn will be as cheap at ten shillings the bushel as it was before at five shillings, caeteris paribus (all things being equal).

The next quotation from the same work interests us, as it is the early examination of the value of labour;

The law . . . should allow the labourer but just the wherewithall to live; for if you allow double then he works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the publick of the fruit of so much labour.

In modern words, in receiving for six hours' labour the value of six hours, the labourer would receive double what he receives if he worked for twelve hours and got only the value of six. he would therefore not work more than six hours. Thus the value of labour is determined by the minimum necessary for subsistence. To induce the labourer to produce surplus value and to perform surplus labour, it is necessary to compel him to expend all the labour power of which he is capable, as the condition upon which he may earn the necessities of life.

Petty recognises two forms of surplus value, ground rent and money rent (interest). He divides the second from the first which, for him, as later for the Physiocrats, is the true form of surplus value. He depicts rent not as simple surplus of labour expended over and above necessary labour, but as a surplus, of the surplus labour of the producer himself over and above his wages and the replacement of his capital; as for example the following"

Suppose a man could with his own hands plant a certain scope of land with corn, that is, could dig, or plough, harrow, weed, reap, carry home, thresh and winnow so much as the husbandry of this land requires; and had withal seed wherewith to sow the same. I say that when this man has subtracted his food out of the proceed and given to others in exchange for clothes and other natural necessaries, that the remainder of the corn is the natural and true rent of the land for that year, and the medium of seven years, or rather of so-many years as make up the cycle, within which dearth and plenties make their revolution, doth give the ordinary rent of the land in corn.

To Petty, the value of the corn is determined by the labour time which it contains, while rent, equivalent to the total product after the deduction of wages and seed, equals the surplus labour represented by surplus product. Rent, therefore, includes profit which is inseparable from it.

Petty also shows that the individual character of the labour is of no consequence. Labour time is what matters.

As a final tribute, and summing up of Petty's contribution to political economy, we quote the following extract from Volume III, of Capital.

Petty . . .  and in general the writers who are closer to feudal times, assume that ground rent is the normal form of surplus value, whereas profit to them is still vaguely combined with wages, or at best looks to them like a portion of surplus value filched by the capitalist from the landlord. These writers take their departure from a condition, in which the agricultural population still constitutes the overwhelming majority of the nation, and in which the landlord still appears as the individual, who appropriates at first hand the surplus labor of the direct producers through his land monopoly, in which land therefore still appears as the chief requisite of production. These writers could not yet face the question, which, contrary to them, seeks to investigate from the point of view of capitalist production, how it happens that private ownership in land manages to wrest from capital a portion of the surplus-value produced by it at first hand (that is, filched by it from the direct producers) and first appropriated by it.

John Locke (1633-1704)
John Locke is probably better known for his philosophy than he is for his contribution to political economy. He follows William Petty in that he regarded human labour as the principal source of wealth, though Petty regarded both labour and land as the important factors. For Locke, nature was out of the prime importance. He believed that the laws of nature established personal labour as the natural limit of private property—the limit arising from the physical limitation on the amount of labour an individual can perform, and from the fact that no one should accumulate more than his needs.

Locke was opposed to the private ownership of land. In his opinion ground rent was no different from usury and, due to the unequal distribution of the means of production, was a transfer from one person to another of the profit that should have been the reward of one man's labour. The following quotation from his Consideration of the Lowering of Interest is an illustration of this:

Money, therefore, in buying and selling, being perfectly in the same condition with other commodities, and subject to all the same laws of value, let us next see how it comes to be of the same nature with land, by yielding a certain yearly income, which we call use or interest. For land produces naturally something new and profitable, and of value to mankind; but money is a barren thing, and produces nothing, but by compact transfers that profit that was the reward of one man's labour into another man's pocket.

Locke's importance is that he is the voice of the juridical theories of capitalist society as opposed to feudalism. His work in philosophy was the basis upon which the thinking of subsequent English economist rested.

Sir Dudley North (1641-1690)
Sir Dudley North is best known his Discourses upon Trade. This is mainly concerned with commercial capital, and as such is outside the scope of these notes. The importance of North is that he reflects in his writing the period in which he lived.

From 1663 to 1798, except for the years 1708 and 1709, wheat prices were falling. Landlords complained continuously about falling rents. Industrial capitalists and landowners were concerned about, and did in fact bring about, a reduction in the rate of interest. Up to 1760 it was considered to be in the national interest to maintain and increase the value of land. From 1760 onwards an economic investigation began into the rise in rents, about the increase in the price of land and corn, and of other consumer goods.

The years 1650 to 1750 were full of struggles between "monied interests" and "landed interests". The landowners gradually lost out to the money lenders and financiers of the period. The financiers, with the establishment of the credit system, and the system of State debt, became predominant in society.

Petty, in his works, refers to the complaints of the landlords regarding the fall of rents. He defended the monied interests against the landlords, and placed the rent of money and rent of land in the same category. North, in his writing, follows Petty. It was in this form that capital gave landed property its first set-back, since money-lending at interest was one of the main means for the accumulation of capital.

North seems to have been the first to understand interest correctly. He included both capital and money in "Stock". On price and money his observation that gold and silver serve not as gold and silver in themselves, but only as forms of exchange value, is, for his day, remarkable.

To sum up, the position of the economists before the physiocrats was that they had to try and understand the conditions in which the landlord was being forced out, to the advantage of finance capital which was growing.

Bob Ambridge