News in Review: Sir William (1963)

The News in Review column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir William

Nobody who has troubled to keep an eye on the trade union movement will have fainted with surprise at the news that the New Year Honours List brought a knighthood to William Carron.

Carron, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (motto, carved impressively on the presidential chair, “Be United And Industrious”), is the latest in a lengthening line of trade union knights, preceded by such as Tom O’Brien of NATKE and Tom Williamson (now a life peer) of NUGMW.

One thing these men have in common. They are all what is known as “moderate” trade union leaders. And “moderate” is another of the euphemisms beloved of the Capitalist press.

It means a trade union leader who can be relied upon to angrily denounce unofficial strikes. It means the sort of leader who suffers the wage restrictions of a Labour government and who co-operates in drives for greater efficiency and productivity. A man who thinks that it is a good idea for the unions to be represented on the National Economic Development Council and other such bodies, which are designed to promote co-operation between the workers and the employers. It means a man who does his best to ignore the fact that there is a class struggle in Capitalist society.

But this is not what trade unions are there for. The unions should concern themselves with protecting and advancing the interests of their members. They should be struggling for higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, and so on. But where do honours come into all this?

Honours are reserved for the people who have served Capitalism in some way or other; they are the establishment’s mark of appreciation.

It is a bitter commentary on the standing of the trade unions today, and on the standard of consciousness of their members, that the men at the top are so often coming to wear a coronet or some other bauble to show that Capitalism has looked upon them and found them good.

Hailsham and Unemployment 

Lord Hailsham, the government’s odd-job man, has won himself a reputation of being a showy, energetic politician. How, then, to describe his appointment as the man to look into the unemployment problem in the North-East?

Was this Action? Or just another odd job?

Certainly there was nothing new about the idea. The 1929 Labour government had not one but three ministers looking after their unemployment problem. At least one of these was showy and at least one other was energetic. But the unemployment figures still kept on going up.

Why only the North-East? True, unemployment is relatively high there; but so it is in Scotland and Wales. Whatever claims the government might make about the North-East being different, the fact is that, as a problem of Capitalism, unemployment is the same in one area as it is in another.

Does Mr. Macmillan have a soft spot for the North-East? He told the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce ". . . human needs are as great in the North-East, in Scotland or Merseyside, and even in Birmingham. They are the boys who fought and died and suffered and as long as I have anything to do with the conduct of affairs I shall regard them as of the highest priority . . .  I felt that the appointment of a senior active member of the government . . .  was needed and I believe it will be received with pleasure in that locality 1 know and love so well.” (Macmillan was M.P. for Stockton-on-Tees until 1945, when Stockton showed that it did not love him well enough to send him back to Westminster.)

But apart from Macmillan’s sob stuff, no government cures unemployment because it loves the workers. Indeed, no government cures unemployment at all, because it is something which wrapped up with the basic nature of Capitalism, coming and going as economic conditions dictate.

No politician has ever been able to control these conditions. That is why Hailsham must prove no better than the men who have tackled the problem before him. He can find out how much unemployment there is in the North-East. He can discover that unemployment hurts. He may even realise the basic reason for it. But as far as he is concerned that will not be for publication.


Escape from the Dole

Short of war itself, the best recruiting sergeant has always been poverty. In the thirties, the prospect of endless waiting in the dole queues drove thousands of workers into the armed forces. Even the army canteen seemed like a slap-up West End restaurant after months of bread and marge and tea.

Those were the days when for every man accepted there were half-a-dozen turned away. Years of poverty and malnutrition had left large numbers of youths unable to pass the medical, so much so that even the Tory government became alarmed that there might not be enough efficient cannon fodder for the next holocaust.

Things have been different since 1945. Capitalist “prosperity” has left the services begging for recruits. Pay has had to be raised and conditions improved, but even so the response has been poor. Until now.

Now British capitalism is not doing so well. There is pressure on wages, a harder line against the unions and, most threatening of all, the return of unemployment and the dole queues.

What a sudden change this has caused! Only a little while ago we were hearing tales of the sumptuous married quarters being provided to encourage wives to persuade their husbands to join up. Now we are told that there have been so many applications that the authorities have decided to refuse almost all married volunteers.

Recruiting on Tees-side is apparently up 33 per cent, in Manchester 32 per cent, in Preston 40 per cent. Northern Ireland has also had “a good year” and Western Command recruitment has increased by a fifth.

Yet another grim development to remind us of those “bad old days" that were supposed to have gone for ever.

Skybolt

The Tories care. Many of them have clung to an independent British nuclear force as a sign that this country is not quite finished as a world power. Skybolt was meant to keep this force going until 1970, which will be some years after the Soviet defences are expected to render useless the missiles currently in service with the R.A.F.

The backbench Defence Committee of Conservative M.P.s. were especially glum at this latest blow to their ancient illusions. Macmillan and Thorneycroft had to do a lot of explaining to them.

The Labour Party cares. Gleefully, their spokesmen leapt upon what they love to call the “Tory mess" over what they like to call “defence." (Who, or what, was Skybolt supposed to defend?) Labour should have been as glum as the Tories. They were the party which started the British nuclear force, including the bombs which they grumble about, when the Tory government tests them.

In fact, all the Capitalist parties care about Skybolt. They all had some sort of policy on it, which they coughed up m the shape of advice for the government.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not care about the Skybolt row. We do not care whether Capitalism fights its wars with missiles which come from the air and hit the ground or from the sea and hit the air or from anywhere to hit anywhere else.

We think it is quite horrible that intelligent men and women should spend their time, all over the world, in thinking up nightmares like nuclear bombs and missiles. We think it is ridiculous that other grown up people should solemnly argue about which missile is the cheapest or the fastest or the most destructive. We think it is even more ridiculous that these people should be admired by the majority of workers as wise, good men.

We know that the best thing that could happen would be for the world working class to abolish Capitalists, with all its weapons and leaders.

Who cares about that? We do.


Medical Research

The medical profession are having a tough time in cracking the problem of replacing a diseased kidney with one which has been taken from another person. Up to the present, they have had very little success with this operation, and what they have had has been mainly confined to grafts between identical twins or other very close relatives.

If the doctors could solve this one, it would mean that a lot of people who are now condemned to die would be saved, because a diseased kidney can be a killer.

Research into the problem is going on all the time, in particular at the Hammersmith Hospital in London, where the work has been supported by a government grant. Then last month there came the news that this grant would run out in April and. that it was not likely to be renewed.

Dr. David Spencer, who was involved some months ago in a dramatic and unsuccessful kidney operation, made a public appeal for funds and soon got the money he had asked for.

And how much was this? A hundred million? Well, no. One million, then? Wrong again. A measly thirty thousand pounds. But apparently the government had decided that they just could not afford this amount.

Is the Exchequer broke, then? How much, say, do they spend each year on armaments? Thirty thousand? Well, no. Hundred million, then? Wrong again. A whacking great £1,709,000,000.

There are plenty of people, all of them supporters of Capitalism, who can get indignant about this. But it is most illogical of them to do so.

Because it is typical of Capitalism's priorities that, when the queue forms for the allocation of society’s resources, death and destruction should be somewhere up front and human health and safety somewhere near the back.

Socialism could, and would, get things in their right order. That is something which should be driven home to anybody who would rather beat disease than build a hydrogen bomb.

Trade Unions and the Cost of Living (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

If workers were slaves or horses and consequently were fed and housed by their owners they would have grievous hardship to put up with but would not have to trouble about the cost to their owners of providing fodder and stables: that would be the owners’ worry.

The slaves’ troubles would centre round the fact that they were being worked to the limit for the benefit of the owners. As workers are not owned but are “free,” they have the same basic grievance as did the slaves, but in addition they have to worry about their wages and the cost of living and about keeping a job. So for a century or more the trade unions, and other bodies claiming to speak for the workers have, alongside the job of struggling with the employers over wages, occupied themselves with the statistical problems of measuring movements of wages and movements of prices.

It is hard to think of any activity into which so much effort has gone with so little result. From a working class standpoint it has been almost totally misconceived and misdirected, though, of course, the masses of information, the wage indexes and price indexes, have been useful to governments and employers.

In the trade unions it started with the optimistic belief that if employers would not give wage increases under threat or actuality of a strike they might do so if presented with information about the high or rising cost of living. It was soon found that the employers were not moved by this argument whereupon the social reformers came forward with their notion that in such circumstances the government would intervene from a sense of social obligation, and compel the employers to give way.

This did seem to produce some limited result in that the better organised employers supported government legislation to enforce minimum wages for workers in some of the worst paid trades (the “sweated” trades and agriculture, for example). But the employers and the government were not thereby committing themselves to the principle that all workers were to be guaranteed a job at a reasonable standard of living and safeguarded against the effects of rising prices.

The bigger employers were protecting themselves against the competition of low-priced goods produced by the “sweaters,” and they and the government both had a long-term interest, industrial and military, in preventing the creation of masses of underfed and physically sub-standard workers. For the employers as a whole and for the government the paramount interest has always been the necessity of making profit and keeping the profit-system functioning as smoothly as maybe: which means that their paramount interest has always been, not in pushing wages up but in preventing them from rising to the point that profit is endangered.

No government has ever abandoned this and the Conservative Selwyn Lloyd’s efforts to impose a “wage-pause” in the face of rising prices only echoed the wage-restraint policy of the post-war Labour government. What then is the use of quoting the official retail price index to show that prices are rising, against a Selwyn Lloyd or a Stafford Cripps, who both declared in their day that it was government policy to prevent wages from rising notwithstanding the rise of the cost of living?

Against this background of the real world of Capitalism, the world of profit seeking, exploitation and class struggle, the question of the statistical accuracy of the government’s retail price index can be seen in its proper perspective, but even in this narrow field trade union effort has been often based on misconception. A sixpenny pamphlet, The New Cost of Living Index, published by the Labour Research Department, may help to dispel some of the misunderstandings.

In the last half century hundreds of trade union conference resolutions have been passed demanding a more accurate index and specifically urging the government to make the index more accurate by including items of expenditure in it that were earlier excluded. Many of the resolutions rested on the fallacious belief that making the index cover more items (e.g., by bringing into it motor cars, TV sets, refrigerators, Terylene garments, dog and cat foods, etc., etc.) has the effect of raising the index figure. But the index is not a measure of total cost of a lot of articles but a measure of the average percentage price change month by month; bringing in more articles has no effect whatever on the index figure at the point when they are brought in. If, after being brought in, the new items rise in price, that will help to raise the index, but if they fall in price, that will lower the index.

If all prices always moved in the same direction and by the same percentage an index based on only one article would be just as accurate as one based on hundreds of separate articles. But as prices do not move together and an average has to be taken of all the separate movements, it is necessary for statistical accuracy that the right importance (“weight”) should be given to each item. In the original index of half a century ago foods were given a “weight” of 60 out of a 100. This meant that if food prices as a whole rose by 10 per cent, and all other prices remained unchanged the index would rise by 6 per cent. In the present index food is given a weight of only about 30 in a 100, so that if food now went up by 10 per cent, and other prices remained unchanged the index would go up by only about 3 per cent.

The L.R.D. pamphlet explains these technicalities in some detail and argues that some items are inaccurately weighted (alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and housing). It also recognises that though in the past few years this has operated mainly to make the index lower than it otherwise would be, it could operate the other way. The overweighting of tobacco, which for long helped to depress the index because tobacco prices rose comparatively little, more recently had the opposite effect because tobacco prices rose sharply. Which brings us to a defect in the approach of the pamphlet. It has a subtitle which asks, is the index “fair,” and maintains that accuracy is an important question to the workers. So far as the index as such has any effect in determining the level of wages, which is at most very little, the workers, of course, do not want it to be “fair” and accurate; they want it to be inaccurate in one direction only. Between the wars when as its critics pointed out the index heavily overweighted food, those workers, including civil servants, who had wage agreements related to the index had reason to be pleased, for as long as food prices were rising faster than other prices, because this made the index figure “inaccurately” high. They ceased to like it when food prices slumped and their pay went down with them.

There are, however, trivialities by comparison with the real issues facing the working class: their need to use trade union organisation as far as it can be used, to push up wages regardless of cost of living index figures, and beyond this, the task of replacing Capitalism by Socialism which will involve the ending of wages and prices, and the cost of living index.

Edgar Hardcastle

What comes first? (1963)

Editorial from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

To put it mildly, life under capitalism is an unpleasant business. Apart from the dominating problems, there are the lesser irritations which also go into the balance against the private property system.

There are, for example, the constant admonitions to us, from government, church, press and so on, to conform to the morality of capitalism. For the workers, this means an uncomplaining acceptance of the system. It means to work hard and soberly and to keep capitalism's laws. A man who ignored these precepts to the extent of neglecting his sick and hungry children in favour of a career of destruction and violence would not only find the finger of the law upon him. He would also be an outcast because he had offended against capitalism’s morality. We can all imagine—in fact we have all seen—the treatment the popular press would give to such a man. We have all seen the emotional headlines and the carefully horrible photographs, all designed to make the man seem a human monster.

Very well. A man like that would certainly be an extremely objectionable person, one with whom it is impossible to feel much sympathy. What, then, are we to say of a social system which acts just like that man? How does capitalism itself live up to its own morality?

Violence and destruction? The British government is now spending £1,709 million a year on its armed forces and their weapons. The United States, with its greater power and its heavier international commitments, is spending at the rate of £17,648 million a year on the same things, over £5,357 million of it on nuclear weapons.

Now what about capitalism’s sick and hungry children? All around us there is evidence that plenty of such children literally do exist, hanging on to life by their fingernails. We have just come through the Christmas period, a regular feature of which is the mass of appeals from all sorts of charities whose declared object is to feed and to help distressed children. We have seen the pitiful pictures of the wasted little bodies, near-skeletons with swollen bellies and desperate eyes. The people who organise these charities are undoubtedly sincere and are involved in a problem which is quick to move any human being.

These are not the only things which capitalism neglects. We have recently heard that the research unit at Hammersmith Hospital, which has been doing such valuable work in the field of kidney grafting, has had its future threatened by lack of funds. Nor is Hammersmith Hospital the only research centre suffering in this way. Mr. James Callaghan, the Labour Party Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has said that he has heard of another “vitally important medical research unit which is living from hand to mouth.” Mr. Callaghan, of course, was gratefully wielding a stick upon the Tory government. Things were no better when Labour was in power.

There is one thing which all these charities and research teams need and which, within capitalism, might go a long way to assure their future. Money. Why don’t they have it? Because the capitalist class knows that its interests demand that it lavishes enormous sums upon making the means to kill and terrorise humans, even while the organisations which at any rate try to help humans are forced to penny pinch and to rely on charily.

Not that the answer is to support the charities. Those people who support capitalism and complain about its inevitable problems are as illogical as the man who drinks a bottle of whisky and then complains when inevitably he cannot walk straight.

The real solution to this is for the world working class to establish Socialism. This will be a world without armed forces and all that goes with them, without money and all that that entails, without the need for charities. It will be a world in which human interests are Number One Priority, in which the only motive for human activity will be human benefit.

Branch News (1963)

From the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the extreme wintry weather, Glasgow Branch have held five successful indoor lectures, this really reflects on the consistent work done by all the members. Fourteen members attended these meetings regularly, average audience 27, collections and literature over £8. After much correspondence with the Bellshill Constituency Labour Party, the Branch is optimistic that agreeable terms can be arranged for a debate sometime in February. The "advance guard" has already started the literature sales drive in North Kelvin in anticipation of the election (local) in May. It is hoped that the Cosmo cinema can be booked for the May Day Rally. There is no doubt that over the Border our Comrades are really consistently working hard for the Party in its work to spread Socialist propaganda.

We are happy to report that on the occasion of our comrade Lawrence's visit to his father in Vienna he met many friends and comrades of the Party and in order to mark the occasion they sent a contribution of £6 to the Party in London. We should like to thank our comrades in Vienna—R. Pechinger, Franz Klas, E. Schuster, Fran Draschinsky and R. Frank for the generous thought and we assure them that their contribution will be used in the best possible manner. We should also like to congratulate them on the work they are doing under quite difficult conditions.

It is with regret that we learn of the death of Fred Clarke of Burton-on-Trent, brother of Charley Clarke who died recently. We extend our sincere sympathy to his brother, J. Clarke who will, we know, continue his good work for the cause of Socialism.

Branches have planned well ahead for propaganda meetings, and 1963 should prove even more successful than last year, when provincial and London branches held regular series of indoor and outdoor propaganda meetings.

Ealing Branch continued its winter programme of films and lectures with two film shows during January. Attendance was good considering the weather. There was also a good response from branch members to Paddington branch's invitation to their lecture on the Common Market at which Comrade Hardy was the speaker. This was the first of the inter-Branch meetings, arranged jointly between Paddington, Bloomsbury and Ealing, and it was very successful.

Members are asked to make special note of the two lectures being held this month—on the 8th and 22nd—at 8 p.m. prompt.

Note. The Socialist Standard is regularly on sale at A. Rowe's newsagents shop at 30 High Street, Woolwich, S.E.18.

Will the following members please contact the Central Branch Secretary as soon as possible as correspondence sent to them has been returned by the post office—S. Killingbeck (Leamington), A. Thomas (Botley, Oxford), A. W. Kent (Aylesbury).

Phyllis Howard

The Passing Show: The Aucas (1963)

The Passing Show column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some years ago five men, missionaries of a small Christian sect, went to try and convert to their own beliefs the Auca people, a small tribe living in a remote part of Ecuador. Since the white man has consistently destroyed the Indian way of life and taken the Indians' land from them throughout South America, it was perhaps not surprising that a rumour spread that these five strangers were cannibals, who had come to kill and eat the Aucas; the Aucas, as a result, killed them all.

Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of one of the men, was also a missionary among the Quichua Indian, and after her hus­band's death she became acquainted with two Auca women. Later. very bravely, she went with these women and with her own young daughter to live with the Auca tribe for a year. She has now written a book about her experiences. The Savage My Kinsman (Hodder and Stougbton, 37s. 6d.).

She was, she says, "immediately impressed with the Aucas' dignity and simplicity." They were ".. an exceptionally robust tribe. I found no diseases among them except one or two uncertain cases of malaria, and the common cold. There were none of the 'children's diseases' of civilization: mumps, measles, chicken-pox, whooping-cough, scarlet fever. I treated some infected sores, but the Indians had a remarkable resistance to these and seemed to recover equally well without treatment of any kind." The women grow crops of manioc and plantain, and the men spend most of the day hunting; with the animals and fish they catch they support "their wives, sisters, in-laws, and any widows who happen to be living with them or next door." The Aucas, moreover, "had no use for money or anything else which might have served as a trade item."

WITHOUT CHARGE 

The Auca has his own ideas of behaviour, says the author:

. . .  he shares his one small monkey with the widow next door. Be does not greet a friend or bid him good-bye, but he entertains without charge any guest who happens to drop in, even if he is a Quichua Indian whom he has never seen before. He does not wear clothing, but he has a strict code of modesty and is totally free from preoccupation with the human body, and all the absurd inhibitions this involves.
The Aucas, being so few in number, are a close-knit group, but there is no central authority of any kind. Every man is his own boss. The only social unit is the family, although there seems to be no marriage ceremony as such. 

The firm belief of civilized man, in fact, that all savages have a "chief" who is a kind of dictator (a misconception based on a misunderstanding of the role of the war-leader who emerges when tribes fight each other) was as usual found to be false.

The author tells us more about the Aucas' social customs (and she cannot have been prejudiced in their favour):

During my entire visit, I never saw the slightest friction between a husband and wife. Only rarely did I hear an Auca criticize another behind his back . . .  Malicious gossip was rare among the savages. In fact, many of our civilized sins were conspicuous by their absence. I noticed almost no vanity or personal pride, no covetousness or avarice. Intoxication was unknown. The men were not lazy, or selfish with the spoils of their hunting.
In short, I had to face the fact that socially I had nothing whatever to offer the Aucas.

NO PRAYER

It is, incidentally, interesting to record the author's conclusion that "the Auca has, so far as I know, no form of religion. He knows nothing of prayer, sacrifice, worship or placating evil spirits, although he believes in their existence." So much for another cherished belief of civilized man, that all savages are caught in an implacable web of religious beliefs and observances. Apparently if anyone is caught in the web, it is civilized man.

A FLEABITE 

The Aucas are still clearly living in a society of primitive Communism, or something very close to it, right into this modern era. We were all living in this kind of society up to perhaps five or, at the most, seven thousand years ago, and in some parts of the world even now private property has not yet been able to impose itself. Man has been on this earth 500 thousand years (the latest theories would extend this time to something like one and three-quarter million years) and throughout that time he has lived in a primitive Communist society—up to this very moment in remote areas: even in the most 'civilized' parts of the world the length of time man has suffered under private property systems is a mere fleabite compared to the vast ages that went before.

And still we are told that Socialism or Communism, a system of common ownership or of no ownership at all, is somehow 'against human nature'! If anything is against 'human nature,' (whatever that may be), it is clearly private property.

A NEW SOCIETY 

No one, of course, wants to return to primitive Communism, even if that were possible. The Aucas, for example, sometimes become involved in warfare, and lose men killed in fighting. (Although civilized men, who are now openly planning to destroy each other's cities, perhaps have not much ground to criticize them on that score.) But Socialists do want to go forward to a new society; in which all the good points of primitive Communism (the absence of 'civilized sins,' the comradeship and cooperation, the abolition of 'central authorities"—­in short, the much greater happiness and contentment) can be combined with the material comforts which Capitalism has produced. And nothing prevents us going forward to that society except that the mass of the working class have never realized that it is possible.

Alwyn Edgar