News in Review: Cunarder on the Clyde (1965)

The News in Review column from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cunarder on the Clyde

Both the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth were built in the Clydeside shipyard of John Brown.

When it was confirmed, on the eve of Hogmanay, that the same shipyard had won the contract to make the replacement for the Queen Mary, both God and Commercial Television celebrated.

Church bells rang out in the Clydebank parish of Kilbowie. Scottish Television look huge press adverts, which crowed that the right yard had won the contract. Perhaps they are hoping that their blatant appeal to ignorance and patriotism will persuade some of the five thousand who will be employed on the new Cunarder to spend some of their wages on television sets.

No bells rang on the Tyne and in Belfast, homes of the other two firms competing for the contract, Swan, Hunter, Vickers-Armstrong and Harland and Wolff are probably hoping that John Brown’s preoccupation with the new Cunarder over the next three years or so will leave a more open market for them.

But this is by no means certain, British ship-building is still struggling, pushed hard by the Japanese and the Swedes and some Continental yards. The Cunard affair underlines the fact that in such competition there can be only one winner. There could be gloomy times ahead for the shipyard workers in Belfast and on Tyneside. Perhaps Scottish Television will make a small donation to their soup kitchens.

The profitability of the new Cunarder is doubtful. More and more people are crossing the Atlantic by air, and fewer and fewer by sea. The shipping lines have largely given up the struggle to compete in cheap travel, and now concentrate on selling the sea voyage as a more gracious and rejuvenating way of travelling than a clamourous jet flight.

The new liner is designed to accept these conditions. It will be a flexible ship, with accommodation which can be rearranged into two classes and a draught shallow enough to permit cruising, if this seems more profitable. Meanwhile the ageing Queens have to face competition from more modern, faster ships; next year Sweden and Italy enter the race.

This uncertain world, into which the new liner will be launched, does not resemble the leisured and gracious image which Cunard once built for themselves.

The reality of capitalism is grim, and never grimmer than when a proud example of craftsmanship and ingenuity is pushed out into the rough seas of commercial anarchy.

Agin' the Guinea

Next month, at Largs in Scotland, the Labour women will hold their annual national conference.

There they will discuss the customary sheaf of meaningless and hypocritical resolutions.

Consider, for example, the motion which condemns the practice of pricing goods in guineas and which calls on the government to abolish the guinea system.

On the face of it, this may seem a genuine expression of a desire to protect the consumer interests of the working class. But let us look at it a little deeper.

We are all familiar with the ruse of pricing in guineas. Perhaps some people are actually taken in by it, and think that a suit costing fifteen guineas is no more expensive than one costing fifteen pounds.

But such people are obviously beyond the help of pious resolutions. They would be just as easily deceived by another, equally transparent, trick if the Labour women got their way over the guinea.

So what will the conference be worrying about? Do the Labour women think that abolishing the guinea will do something to stop prices rising? Are they looking for an excuse for their government’s failure to keep that part of their election programme?

Let us get down to basic facts. The Labour Party supports capitalism, which is a system of production of goods for sale and therefore a system in which there are buyers and sellers and prices at which they buy and sell.

The interests of buyer and seller are directly opposed. One wants the price to be as low as possible, the other wants it as high as possible. These opposing interests are mostly asserted in ways which are within capitalism’s laws.

Sometimes they are asserted by illegal methods. And sometimes they are asserted by methods which, while not illegal, are not exactly honest. These methods include monopoly control and such diddles as pricing something worth half a crown at two shillings elevenpence halfpenny and the use of guineas instead of pounds.

Whatever method is used, it must be the forces of the market which finally control the fluctuations of a price, however it is expressed. All of this is very proper and necessary to capitalism, even if it sometimes means that prices rise sharply, or come crashing down in a slump.

Sly ruses, by buyer or seller, have no effect upon that. They are only a part of capitalism's competitive scramble. Individual members of the Labour Party may not like some of the effects of the scramble, but they ardently support the social system which produces it.

It is that basic issue, and nothing else, that they should be discussing at Largs.

Prices: up, up, up

“We was robbed!” has always been a favourite complaint of the Labour Party when contemplating the frustrations and the failures of their governments.

In 1931, they said they were beaten by a Bankers’ Ramp. After the war it was the unmanageable dollar gap. Last November the Gnomes of Zurich were said to be busily undermining the finances of Labour Britain. Now the grocers are on the rampage.

Rising prices are proving to be one of the government's big problems, especially in the grocery trade, where items like frozen foods, biscuits and sausages have recently gone up. This is not the end of it: during four weeks spanning the turn of the year, nearly one thousand retail prices were increased.

All of this makes Labour's promises in their election programme, New Britain, to introduce “ . . . new and more relevant policies to check the persistent rise in prices” look pretty sick. So the squeal —"We was robbed!” can be heard" again.

This time it is Mr. Frank Cousins, at one of his Nuneaton by-election meetings, who squealed:

  The 15 per cent surcharge does not apply to foodstuffs, so there is no excuse there (for price increases). . . to pretend that an extra 6d on fuel justifies an extra 1d or 2d on a particular tin, packet, or bcttle . . . is just plain nonsense.

Now what does this amount to? Mr. Cousins also complained; ”. . . some of the firms . . . are already making record profits.” What that means is that the Labour government are being given the run-around by the grocers; it means that they cannot control the mechanisms of capitalist society.

In the same way, if we accept the excuse that there was a Bankers’ Ramp in 1931, it follows that Labour could not control the international financiers. On the same argument the Attlee government could not control its financial crises and now Mr. Wilson’s lot cannot control its own retailers.

But the Labour party, like every other capitalist party, has always claimed that they can control capitalism. Hence their optimistic election talk of plans, control, priorities, all of which evaporates in face of reality.

The reality of prices is that they do not depend on the level of import duty and taxes. In the short run, the fluctuations of a price are governed by the forces of supply and demand, which means that the seller will charge as much as the market allows.

This is exactly what the grocery trade is doing, and what Mr. Cousins is complaining about. But nobody who supports capitalism can complain when the system takes its logical course.

Mr. Cousins cannot complain and the Labour government cannot complain. Neither can the millions of people who put them into power.

African turmoil

“Malawi,” said Dr. Hastings Banda recently, “is at war.” He is not the first of the leaders of the new States on the African continent to-make such a declaration.

Egypt, we have been told, is at war. So is Zambia. Nigeria and the Congo are immersed in internal conflicts of varying intensity. And so on.

There have been, of course, no formal declarations of war. But that is not what Dr. Banda and his counterparts mean when they use the word.

The new states are struggling to establish themselves against pressures both external and internal. One of their governments’ problems is to break down the old tribal allegiances and substitute a wider ranging patriotism.

Africans who once thought of themselves as belonging to this or that tribe, under this or that chief, must now be persuaded that it is better to belong to a developing capitalist nation, under this or that leader or dictator.

And how is this achieved? The techniques are wearyingly familiar. There are the patriotic declarations, the empty mysticism over the new flag, the dark warnings of impending danger from outside, the calls to arms. There is also the synthetic worship of the new nation’s leader—the personality cults of men like Nkrumah and Banda.

Part of this process is the “discovery” of alleged plots against the security of the state. Dr. Banda said that his former Foreign Minister, Mr. Chiume, is combining with the Zanzibar rebel Mr. Okello in a scheme to invade Malawi. Neighbouring Zambia is to spend £7 million on “defence and internal security,” double its border posts and step up its naval forces on the boundary rivers and lakes.

Dr. Banda appealed to the Malawi people to arrest any strangers and report them to the Congress Party; “ Investigate every strange face,” he said.

This is like a small-scale re-enactment of Europe in the Thirties. It is also reminiscent of the spy-scares which helped to keep war fever up to pitch during the two world wars.

But the African nationalists always claimed, when they were struggling for power, that they would be above the tricks and subterfuges of the old colonialist powers.

There need be no surprise that they have turned out to be different. Tricks and lies are always used in the fights between capitalist powers. As the new, African states enter these fights, it is inevitable that they should use the time honoured methods.

Perhaps Dr. Banda is right; perhaps Malawi is at war, for in war the first casualty has always been the truth.

Finance and Industry: Government and Industry (1965)

The Finance and Industry column from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Government and Industry

On December 15 last, representatives of employers and trade unions signed a Declaration of Intent on Incomes with Mr. George Brown, Minister of Economic Affairs. Mr. Brown proudly proclaimed the end of the class war and the co-operation of Labour and Capital for the Nation's good. A few days later, in a letter to The Times, he indignantly denied that the Labour government regarded “ the City, Investors, Property and Industry” as their enemies.

This should not have come as a surprise. Since the 1920’s, when the Labour Party first became the official Opposition, it has always declared that if elected it would govern and governing involves protecting the interests of the City, Investors, Property and Industry, in short, of the capitalist class. In office the Labour Party has done precisely this. Out of office it has acted as a responsible alternative government.

An expressive phrase of Karl Marx describes the government as the executive committee of the ruling class. The British government is, as it were, the board of directors of United Kingdom Ltd. For a “Nation” is a kind of business, a community of capitalists. On occasions the interests of the whole differ from those of the parts. It is the task of the government to see that the interests of the whole are maintained.

In Marx's time this involved little more than the keeping of law and order at home and abroad so that Industry could flourish, could make profits, in peace. Later the scope of government activity expanded: it had to concern itself with economic affairs as such and not merely as a source of revenue. Today various government departments have the task of drawing up detailed balance sheets for presentation to the capitalist class, the shareholders in UK Ltd.

A vast and detailed mass of figures on trade in general, on consumption, imports and exports, prices, profits and wages and the like are collected. In addition a large part of British industry is nationalised and the government has to answer to the capitalist class for its efficient running. The government is also expected to allow a high level of economic activity to persist and to avoid, or deal with, balance of payments difficulties.

The Class Struggle

The capitalist class is only one of the two classes of capitalist society. The other is the working class. These two classes have no interests in common so that any party which takes on the task of governing is inevitably brought into conflict with the working class. The history of the various Labour Party governments is ample proof of this.

George Brown proclaims the end of the class struggle. Unfortunately for him, however, the class struggle is a social phenomenon which cannot be abolished by mere pronouncement or by signing scraps of paper. It has its roots in the structure of society. Capitalism is based on the monopoly over the means of production by a minority, the capitalist class. As a result the working class are forced to work for this class.

And there is a struggle over the division of the product of labour. The share of the capitalist (profit, rent, interest) can only be increased at the expense of the share of the worker (wages) and vice versa. But this is not just a price struggle which can be settled by bargaining; it is a class struggle which can only be finally ended by the expropriation of the capitalist class.

This struggle takes place whether it is recognised for what it is or not. The trade unions in Britain, though to a certain limited extent an expression of this struggle, have never recognised this. They have regarded the struggle between employers and workers as a mere price struggle. They have sometimes acted on the assumption that there is a community of interests between employers and workers. Now trade unions have become an accepted part of the capitalist order in Britain.

Respectable trade unions

It is not generally appreciated the extent to which the trade unions are today a part of the institutional framework of British capitalism. The trade unions obtained legal recognition in the period 1871-5. This status was however fairly unstable;, many employers were still hostile to the very principle of trade unionism.

A series of court cases culminated in 1902 in the Taff Vale judgement, which seriously jeopardised the legality of strike action and picketing. An act of 1906 restored and improved on the previous position. The fact that trade unions were legal allowed the government to make use of responsible trade union leaders: not a few sat on Royal Commissions or became government inspectors of one sort or another.

During the first world war government-trade union co-operation grew. The attempt to continue this co-operation after the war through the joint industrial councils (Whitley councils) failed in the slump of 1920-2. Economic conditions also led to the General Strike of 1926.

The capitalist class was divided as to the legality of this strike; in any event it led to the Trades Disputes Act of 1927. The year 1928 is an important date in the evolution of respectable trade unionism in Britain. For in that year a group of employers led by Sir Alfred Mond (later Lord Melchett) approached the General Council of the TUC for discussions.

The chairman of the council at that time was Ben Turner, so that the discussions became known as the Mond-Turner Conference. It was agreed that the trade unions should be recognised as collective bargaining agents by the employers and should be encouraged by them as such. In addition employers and trade unions should insist on being consulted by the government before action on matters affecting industry.

Thus 1928 can be said to be the date that British capitalists recognised the usefulness of trade unions as collective bargaining instruments. Such bargaining is essential under capitalism and involves fairly detailed negotiations. Mond and his colleagues recognised the useful part trade unions could play in the process of wage-fixing. From this date on trade unions have been consulted on matters affecting industry and higher honours such as knighthoods have been distributed to prominent trade unionists.

Trade union-employer co-operation during the second world war followed as a matter of course. Since that war no government would dream of acting on matters concerning the TUC without prior consultation (an attempt to do so in 1948 by Sir Stafford Cripps caused an outcry). Indeed the economic council of the TUC exists for this very purpose.

The TUC decision to appoint members to the National Economic Development Council in 1962, and the recent signature of George Brown’s Declaration of Intent, are but a continuation of the process described above. Its only significance is that it represents a transition from trade union- employer co-operation to trade union-employer-government co-operation.

Government and wages

In the days when trade unions, in the employers’ eyes, were disreputable organisations, the government was used as a naked class instrument. Featherstone, Llanelly, Liverpool, Belfast are places where members of the working class were killed in clashes with the armed forces called in to maintain law and order during industrial disputes. No one has been killed in such a clash since before the first world war.

Nevertheless the government is still a class instrument even if not now so obviously. Its task is to run the general affairs of British capitalism. Since 1928 trade unions have been recognised institutions and the government has found them useful. In keeping with the changed status of trade unions, official strikes have a legitimacy which unofficial strikes have not. Of course the press are still hostile even to most official strikes and employers are still interested in getting as much as they can for as little as possible, but the role of the government has somewhat changed.

No longer are troops used to drive workers back to work in Britain. Instead, especially since the second world war, approaches have been made to trade union leaders to “moderate” their demands, to "discipline" their members and to get “capital and labour to co-operate in the nation’s interest.”

The second world war had a disastrous affect on the economic position of the British capitalist class. It meant that exports assumed a position more important than previously, as many overseas investments had been sold to pay for the war. All British governments since the war have had to devote much time to the balance of payments and exports.

One aspect of this has been their preoccupation with “too high” wages. Academic economists have disagreed as to whether these affect the balance of payments by increasing export prices or by encouraging imports. The various governments since the war tried many ways to solve this problem of “excessive” wages.

The post war Labour government tried ‘‘wage restraint” (1948) and a “wage freeze” (1949). The TUC agreed to co-operate in both. Despite this, the policy failed as economic forces (rising prices and labour shortage) proved stronger than government appeals and scraps of paper. The Conservative governments which followed had even less success: they couldn’t even get TUC co-operation.

At first they pursued a tough line, backing employers in their resistance to wage demands. As a result they provoked a series of official strikes, for example in engineering, transport and printing. These were the first big official strikes for over twenty years. Once again the economic forces won out and the government was forced to abandon its tough policy.

In 1961 the government tried again with Selwyn Lloyd’s “pay pause.” This again provoked unions. Nevertheless the TUC did agree to co-operate with the NEDC, set up in 1962. This was in keeping with the oft-repeated declaration of their general secretary that the TUC is prepared to work with any government.

George Brown's Declaration of Intent is the latest attempt to solve the problem of wages and exports for the capitalists. He has managed to get the TUC to agree to “moderate” their demands. Such an agreement runs quite contrary to the interests of the working class, but considering the position of the TUC in the economic structure of British capitalism, it is not really surprising.

As long as the membership of the trade unions are not class-conscious, it can hardly be expected that the unions themselves would act on the principle of the class struggle. Although the trade unions are not all they might be as working class organisations, this does not detract one bit from the importance of trade unionism, of working class organisation on the economic field.

But the working class, despite George Brown, should recognise that there is a class struggle, a real conflict of interest between the employing class and themselves.

Adam Buick

Food burners at work again (1965)

From the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since socialists first appeared and made the case for abolishing capitalism, they have had to contend with opponents voicing variations on the common theme of retaining that system. The different groups did not admit or always realise that they were at one in defending capitalism, and outwardly they did not even seem to be united. There were those who said that capitalism would be quite satisfactory if only governments would stop interfering and impeding—we have a relic still in Mr. Enoch Powell. Others thought that it would work well if people would mend their ways and not be greedy. This group is always with us. And those who thought that the crying need is for better or wiser men at the helm of state — Liberals or Labour when the government is Conservative and Liberal and Conservative when the government is Labour. And those who believe that the system is essentially sound but that its abuses must be tackled as they show themselves in the light of new ideas and through new acts of Parliament. Actually this last category takes in almost all those who in practice hinder the movement to Socialism, including that most ineffectual band who for a century have been saying that Socialism is absolutely necessary but not just now, not until this or that evil has been removed.

All of these reformers agree with each other in rejecting the Socialist argument that we can and should have a social system which will have no place for prices, wages, profits etc. They say that the human race cannot do without these things, and in any event has no need to waste time trying to do so because there is nothing wrong with them in principle, only with the way they are used. So at each General Election we start a new round of schemes supposed to rid us of worries about prices, wages, strikes, monopolies and so on.

And each succeeding election finds things just the same except that the government and opposition may have changed places.

Just at the moment it is prices which occupy pride of place in the list of public complaints.

The most common complaint is that prices are “too high” and everybody blames everybody else for it. (Not least the newspapers which have put up their own prices during the past 12 months). All the complainers agree that somebody ought to do something about it, without explaining exactly what should be done and what level of prices would be regarded as just the right one.

The very rash might rush in and say that the right level is the lowest level but in the midst of the hullabaloo about prices that are too high there are some agonised cries about prices that are too low.

There are several aspects of the problem of prices. First there are the economic laws which explain why different articles have different prices—why an ounce of gold has a higher price than the same weight of silver, and lead a higher price than coal. Basically this is explained by the amount of human labour necessary for the prediction of each kind of article.

Then there are the laws which explain the upward or downward movements of the price level as a whole—why for example the general price level here is three or more times what it was in 1938, or why the price level fell heavily and continually for 10 years or more in the Nineteen twenties and thirties.

Also there are the upward and downward movements of the price of any article which came under the head of fluctuations due to variations in supply and demand. It is these fluctuations that concern us here.

If the supply of an article falls in relation to "demand" prices will go up; and if demand falls in relation to supply they will go down. It works against the background that everyone wants high prices for what he sells and low prices for what he buys and will take advantage of any circumstances which help him to get what he wants. Greedy and anti-social? Maybe, but that is what capitalism is and how it works, and the working of capitalism needs price fluctuations, as a corrective for over and under supply in relation to the demand of the market.

Governments do from time to time imagine they can have a price system without its “abuses": they try to control and reduce prices irrespective of the market conditions, only to find that they have created a “black market."

The people who want a price system but do not want to let it operate are constantly being shocked by demonstrations of the system functioning normally.

So it was that between the wars we were told how iniquitous it was that with millions of people in want of food, wheat was being burned. It was burned because there was so much more than the market would absorb that its price had fallen to unprofitable levels. The same was true of coffee and some other commodities. From a human standpoint of course it was iniquitous but how else can capitalism, which produces for the market, operate except in terms of the market ?

An alternative to actual destruction is to let the depressed price have direct effect by ruining the producers and thus reducing production. Another it to hold the surplus off the market as has happened with coffee, wheat and other products when the interests concerned are sufficiently influential to get governments to intervene and bear the cost—as in U.S.A.

A “simple” solution that is suggested is for governments to give away the surplus, but this aggravates the problem since it both depresses prices and deprives other would-be sellers of a market.

The one thing that all the reformers agreed on was that destruction and restriction, and unemployed men and resources, must never again be allowed to happen. Expansion and abundance were on the banners and Keynes the prophet.

But capitalism has not changed. Though, as the authorities agree, the number of malnourished people in the world is increasing, burning and restriction are still with us. Last Autumn it was reported from Southern Rhodesia that, following a bumper tobacco crop and falling prices a scheme for restricting production had been adopted. The same wind struck Australia and some 200 tons of good tobacco were burned near Brisbane in December last.

Cocoa too has run into trouble. Too much has been produced for the demands of the market and in November last the six countries in the Cocoa Producers Alliance, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Togo decided to destroy cocoa stocks to help keep up the price. The following was reported by the Times on 12th December from Accra:

  Sir Tsibu Darku, the Chairman of Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Board, today put the torch to about 500 tons of cocoa which went up in flames hear here. He said the bonfire was the first of a series which would go on until they had completely destroyed two per cent of Ghana’s basic quota, to give effect to a decision of the alliance of cocoa producing countries.

But a Financial Times correspondent last December doubted if this would be effective—"most dealers feel that far more than the present suggestion of two per cent of the six member’s basic quota should be burnt." He thought they would have to choose between accepting lower prices and restricting production.

This, of course, will not prevent the Financial Times from urging greater production as the right policy for Britain and other countries.

Brazil is one of the cocoa group worried about the “overproduction,” committed to destruction of some of the surplus. In 1943 the Brazilian Government thought to solve its cocoa problem by nationalising the export of cocoa but gave up the idea in 1952.

It was Brazil that was mostly involved in the destruction of coffee before the war. As it is now reported that efforts of coffee producers to keep up prices in a falling market were failing, they may soon again be destroying coffee as well as cocoa.

Next on the list may be bananas. Fierce competition of West Indian banana producers has pronounced what is described in The Times (29th December) as "a collapse of the banana market.”

A spokesman of the Jamaica Banana Board said:

  This is the most calamitous situation the Jamaican banana industry has faced since the war and could be as bad as anything that has ever happened in all our banana history.

These are examples of over supply and calamity through depressed prices. But capitalism is nothing if not varied. The People (10th January 1965) has a lament of the opposite kind. There has recently been a shortage of bricks and some other building materials, with the consequence that building orders are subject to long delays in delivery. The result has been a big emergence of a “black market.” You can get a certain type of brick at £12 10s. a 1,000 if you can wait up to a year. But if you like to pay £20 or more you can get immediate delivery.

What we shall go on getting is the same old complaints, protests, speeches, committees of enquiry and so on. And capitalism's price system will continue to operate in the only way it can until the workers get to understand that there really is a solution, to get rid of the price system along with capitalism of which it is a part.

Edgar Hardcastle

The peace-mongers (1965)

From the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

War is a wearisome subject; most people seem to try to shut it out of their minds. They feel a sense of helplessness in the face of such a vast problem. With all the major powers of the world on a permanent war footing, most people fall back to the attitude—"What can we do about it?”

The vast military machines, the massive nuclear and "conventional” bases, the fleets with their unimaginable powers of destruction, all completely dwarf the individual; he feels at the mercy of powers beyond his control. Although every now and again a trigger-spot flares up in some part of the world and armed forces are more or less constantly in action, few people seem to ask why. Most of them simply accept the fictions dished out by the propaganda machine of whatever country claims their misguided loyalty.

The possibility of a major war is too frightening for them to face, so they think ‘‘let’s forget it till it happens,” while they hope that the smaller, local wars don’t get out of hand. The fact that capitalism has created this monstrous threat has not registered on any scale. The working-class think they are unable to move, because they are not aware of any alternative.

The so-called peace movements have all failed to understand the nature of the forces against which they pit themselves. They are stuck in the rut of nationalism, just as are those to whom they appeal. None of them can see any further than capitalism, even though some of them sometimes use phrases that might give a different impression. In this country, for example, the Ex-service Movement for Peace brags of its patriotism and its members attend meetings displaying their medal-ribbons.

It is this “British and proud of it” attitude that plays straight into the hands of the capitalist class, who like to hear nothing better than their property-less wage-slaves declaring loyalty to their masters’ country. While nationalist feelings prevail, it will be relatively easy for the propaganda machine to persuade workers that “if the country is good enough to live in, it is good enough to fight for.” Nationalism is a big help to the ruling class in getting support for armaments and ultimately for war.

In this all-important respect, the peace mongers are their own damnation. As long as workers think in terms of “the country,” it is logical for them to be prepared to defend it. Thus all the horror weapons become “necessary” in the name of “defence,” because if “they have got them we have to have them.” It is in this atmosphere that CND talk about Britain setting an example by abandoning her nuclear weapons. In the jungle world of capitalism the British—or any other—ruling class are not so naive as to fall for that one.

No ruling class is willingly going to “set any example” which would mean saying—“these are our oil-fields, markets and vested interests, but you, our rivals, can move in at will because we have no military might to support our claims.” It only has to be put like that to show how futile the peace movements are.

The present owners of the oil-fields, the land, investments etc., only came by them through robbery, plunder and force of arms. They realise that what they took by force can only be held by force; no national capitalist class is going to contract out of the rat-race in order to make way for their rivals. And if one ruling group did contract out, their loot would soon be snatched by whoever got in first and was militarily strong enough to hold it. Nothing basic would be changed. There would be one rival less and those remaining would be a little fatter.

To those people who innocently go around seeking to “ban the bomb” or to remove some other immediate outrage, it seems quite irrelevant to talk about private property in the means of production. They see the end product of it all, the Bomb, but the social relationships and the historically developed conditions from which the Bomb arose entirely escape their attention. Yet it is futile to attempt to deal with the end product while ignoring the process of its production.

The apathy and despair of millions of workers follows on the blind and emotional activities of organisations like CND, which have masses of terrifying data on the Bomb, but know of no way of dealing with it.

In any case, there are still plenty of people being killed by those old fashioned, “conventional,” weapons the rifle, the hand-grenade, or the bayonet. They are just as dead as if they were killed by any other means, and as far as they were concerned there was nothing at stake to justify their deaths.

The capitalist classes of the major power blocs maintain their military machines for the purpose of protecting or expanding their spheres of profitable influence, nationally and internationally. This minority of people own the factories, the land and all those assets which go to make up the country. At the same time that the majority of people—the working-class—own nothing to fight about. Workers in all parts of the world have a common interest to get rid of the social system which condemns them to exploitation. They cannot do this in ignorance; they must realise what capitalism means and how to change it.

Chasing after bombs or some other pressing effect of capitalism, only helps to retain the system that has produced these things. When a political challenge is made by INDEC, the overwhelming majority of their own supporters still vote for Capitalism under the Labourites or the Tories. Despite the mass following of CND, their political effort can only be described as feeble. These are the people who were going places, who could not wait for the day when there would be a majority of Socialists. It was the old familiar cry of “something now,” which results in nothing never. Disillusionment and disintegration is all that awaits such movements.

Harry Baldwin

Letter from Italy (1965)

From the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political situation and economic conditions in Italy were not entirely new to me when I arrived in 1963. My first move was to contact the local branches of the various parties in Trieste. I had “unofficial” discussions with the Communist Party of Italy and the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (more of these later), and can say right that they are Socialist in name only.

My contact with workers here is limited, political meetings are of the mass type and individual argument is difficult. The only activity of value was among my fellow students in the University and I was fortunate in meeting one young fellow who became particularly interested in the Socialist case. We used to discuss heatedly in between lectures and in our free time, and he certainly kept me busy answering his objections one after the other. After a winter of argument, he was becoming very sympathetic, but my hopes of his help in forming a Socialist group in Trieste were not fulfilled, as I left there that summer and he was due to graduate anyway,

Travelling about Italy for a while gave me a good chance to get to know something of the Italian working class and its political movements, but before going further, it would be best to name the main parties: so here they are.

Christian Democratic Party: The party in power at the time of writing. Conservative, hand in glove with the Church. Gets about 32 percent of the votes.

Communist Party of Italy: The major opposition party. About one third of supporters are religious (this was admitted to me by the Trieste Secretary). After the war joined by many ex-Fascists, some of whom have become M.P.’s. Despite its professed hatred of Fascism, the party has much in common with Fascist ideas and methods, e.g. violence and dictatorship. Most of its supporters know little or nothing about Communism, or Socialism, and many of them vote C.P. more as a protest against present government policies than for any positive reason. Gets about 24 per cent of the votes.

Italian Socialist Democratic Party: A reformist party. Exalts the Scandinavian brand of “Socialism.” Recently joined the Christian Democrats in a coalition, fearing a Communist majority. Gets about eight per cent of the votes.

Italian Socialist Party: Breakaway from the Communist Party in the fifties. Policy is like the weather—very changeable, sometimes supporting the communists and sometimes the Christian Democrats. Gets about six per cent of the votes.

Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity: Breakaway from the Socialist Democratic Party when the latter joined the government. Gets about 1.5 per cent of the votes.

Italian Liberal Party: Has similar policies to the Liberals in Britain, but also spends much of its time attacking the Communist Party and castigating the government for not dealing more severely with them. Gets about 10 per cent of the votes.

Italian Republican Party: Minor organisation, advocating a republic. Favours economic development, high protective tariffs, extensions of state power etc. Gets about 1.5 per cent of the votes.

Italian Social Movement: Composed of riff-raff and remnants of the old Fascist Party. Puts forward the sort of policy you hear from the Fascists in Britain and gets an alarmingly high proportion of the votes cast —about twelve per cent.

Italy is a political chaos. I am aware of about fifteen political parties, eight of which are represented in Parliament, and no less than seven claim to be Socialist. One of these, the Socialist Democratic Party (not to be confused with No. 3 above) is a splinter from the Italian Communist party and operates in the Trieste area, supporting the actions of the Yugoslav government. Needless to say, Socialism is the last thing any of them could be accused of supporting. They are a bunch of power-thirsty careerists, struggling to get control of Montecitorio (equivalent of Westminster) to run Italian capitalism.

Like its counterparts elsewhere, Italian capitalism has been going through an economic crisis in the past year or so. The government has been forced to nationalise the privately owned section of the electricity supply and this has been followed by an increase in the price of electricity. But this has not been the only price rise. The cost of living increases substantially each year and strikes for higher wages are very frequent At the time of writing, it is somewhat quieter but at one stage there were three or four strikes a day. And strikes in Italy are no genteel affairs.

The Italian working class are forced to struggle, but there is no evidence of any growth of socialist ideas amongst them. Anyway, more or less militancy is not a measure of Socialist knowledge and while wishing workers all power to their elbow in these fights, we should not let ourselves be dazzled by it, as Trotskyists and other political idiots are. We should not forget that even the most daring strikes are only really a struggle against the downward pressures exerted by capitalism. I was forcefully reminded of this point when reading Carlo Sforza in his L’Italia dal 1914-1944. He says that there were 1881 strikes registered in 1920 and 1045 in 1921. So after more than forty years it is the same old story; the struggle goes on. If nothing else, this is a telling point in favour of Socialism.

Remy Starc

50 Years Ago: To The Princes of The Church. (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

You prate of love and murmur of goodwill,
Turn sanctimonious eyes toward your God,
Write on your walls the text "Thou shalt not kill,"
Point out the path your "Prince of Peace" once trod,
While all the time, with murder in your hearts,
You lie, cajole, and bully that the fools
Who heed your words may play their foolish parts
As slaves of Mammon, as the War-Lord's tools.
On many a field, in many a river bed,
Of Flanders and of Poland and of France,
Your bloody-minded words bear fruit indeed.
Preachers of Death! the thought of maimed and dead
Will nerve us when our hosts of Life advance
To crush for ever your accursed breed.

F. J. Webb

(From the Socialist Standard, February 1915.)

Flitting hither and thither (1965)

Editorial from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite many years’ experience to the contrary, working class men and women still cling assiduously to the belief that politicians flitting hither and thither to meetings in various parts of the world can solve the problems which capitalism produces.

This is an impression which capitalist politicians encourage and which some of them may even believe, at least at the start of their careers. It was the Labour Party who claimed in 1945, for instance, that they would stand a better chance of settling differences with Russia than the Tories, because of their better understanding of Soviet politics. But in the event, Mr. Molotov said “No" just as frequently to Ernest Bevin as he would have done to any Tory foreign secretary. Since those days we have had any number of international conferences, meetings of heads of state, not to mention sessions of that prime piece of organised post-war futility the United Nations. Yet capitalism has steered its usual bumpy course from crisis to crisis, at times drifting perilously close to the brink of another world war.

These are the things to bear in mind when considering the news that the British and Russian premiers have exchanged invitations to visit each other’s country this year. Mr. Wilson has expressed pleasure at the prospect; he told reporters he knew Mr. Kosygin well, and had had a long talk with him when last in Moscow. Which was no doubt intended to foster the idea that such cosy informality has the edge over the protocol of the conference table. Many people would agree with Mr. Wilson. They think that if direct and personal contact can be established—like friendly neighbours chatting across the back garden fence—international rivalry will ease and relations between the states improve in some mysterious way. But they are wrong.

When the Labour government took office last October, they were soon caught up in the whirl of international negotiations. Mr. Wilson went early to Washington and ministers were scattered about the globe at various conferences. Mr. Brown has recently been to Sweden. But they are not the only ones to go trotting around like this. At the time of writing, Chinese high-ups are busy getting neighbourly with Indonesia’s Sukarno, and it is only a few months ago that President De Gaulle returned from a visit to South America. It is the sort of move that statesmen are always making, but whether the discussions are informal or otherwise, they will be concerned with the interests of the particular capitalist classes involved, and not with those of the working class.

Wilson’s government, for example, have been trying to re-assess British defence policy and standing in Europe, and the Moscow visit is only a sequel to Washington last Autumn. It could be that there is a big re-alignment of powers coming as a result of China’s emergence as a nuclear power. Possibly Russia will draw closer to the West. The question of Britain’s entry into the Common Market may be re-opened (despite strong Labour opposition to it in the past), and some agreements may have to be re-negotiated. Still others may be scrapped altogether in the tussle to keep British capitalism in the running among the major powers.

All this will doubtless be represented as being cf vital concern to every one of us. There will be talk of “our” interests, “our” exports, “our” foreign policy, etc., when in fact workers have no stake in any of it. For most of us the wage packet is the limit of our horizon, and whether Britain is in or out of the Common Market will have no effect on that basic fact, any more than will the efforts of all the political leaders.

Leaders come and go, but capitalism outlives them all, bringing the usual trail of misery and destruction in its wake. Only a Socialist working class can do anything about that.

Letter: Friendly Criticism From Holland (1965)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are no objections on my part to the aims of the S.P.G.B. as laid down in your Declaration of Principles; my difficulty concerns the contradiction there is between some of those principles, whose values are being defended and advocated in your party's literature, and the fact that your party contests in the general election for exclusive political power, with the only possible result of one day being sent to the Houses of Parliament. There they would either share the responsibilities of that “time-honoured” institution or, in the case of your party's representatives not yielding to the temptations carried along with these responsibilities, they would not be allowed to enter, on the grounds that they want to change the status quo. And rightly so, since Parliament, as indeed all institutions, are only there for the purpose of maintaining the order of things as they are, allowing minor reforms only so as to adapt the system to newly arisen situations, and by doing so keep the control in the hands of the ruling class. All that might change is the composition of the privileged few.

However, these are mere side-reflections. The arguments against parliamentary action are based on a Marxist analysis of the present-day class struggle.

In the past the antagonisms of the capitalist way of organising the means of production called up such appalling conditions that universal suffrage and its consequence—parliamentary reform—became the means of the working class improving their general conditions. It is a different picture today. Now the workers sharply distinguish between bringing out their vote for a particular party and fighting the class struggle. The former they do according to their political notions, the latter as a result of their being exploited. The latter is more interesting because it concerns the whole class. Since the trade-unions, and their political extensions the social democratic parties, have integrated in modern capitalism, the workers have had to fight them as much as the traditional institutions. Their memory of the days when they fought side by side with union leaders and social democrats for improvements, leads them as yet to believe that corruption is the cause; other, more active and radical men must take the place of the capitalist stooges!

In true fact it is not, of course, the corruption of the leaders which has caused the at-one-time working class organisations to turn into a boomerang, but the vested interests these organisations have in the existing order.

Born from social conditions that no longer prevail, they have grown into mighty organisations with the task of maintaining and expanding their rule over the working class. Pre-eminently they are the exponents of State-Capitalism and as time goes on they will more and more prove to be far more ruthless than any established institution so far.

I have tried to show that reformism has not come about because various political parties lacked, or lack, firmness of principles but because their very form and nature belong to State-Capitalism. At a rapid speed they are swallowing the old private capitalist, for whom no one needs to feel sorry, leaving themselves as the sole rulers of the world. Contrary to the more backward countries, Western Europe and the United States were in no need of a revolution to bring to power the new class of bureaucrats,—the joint stock company of intellectuals, professionals and the most dangerous of all the managers—they had already attained sufficient power within private capitalism that a smooth take-over seems preferable with a view to the danger of rousing too much enthusiasm on the side of the working class!

If then political parties, trade unions and other bodies of professional rulers are a sign, a token of class-rule, we must try to find out what forces there are that oppose all of them equally vigorously.

This leads us to the working class themselves. They bear in themselves the means to organise socialism, they are numerous and all of them are engaged in producing the wealth of the world, and last but not least: they possess an enormous storehouse of hardly touched creative drive.

As-yet the working class hesitate. Their actions are universally denounced as avaricious, subversive, unlawful and even anti-socialist. Their enemies are stronger than ever before, much better organised and have at their disposal an unequalled propaganda apparatus. Those who are conscious of what is taking place; who, stirred by the absymal wretchedness of the working class all over the world and of all people in general, have come to the conclusion that there is one remedy only: Socialism. And nothing less will do.

The SPGB stand for Socialism. Why should it uphold and advocate the idea that the working class can vote for socialism, while at the same time telling them that it's their task to build it? Moreover it supports the prevalent view as it is of the possibility to shun their responsibilities, with the effect that they keep on voting for the Labour party on the argument that it is bigger and more powerful!

Jos Van Oerns

Amsterdam

We have had to make some minor alterations to this letter, but only to cut out what Mr. van Oerns called “any errors of style and usage." The sense of the letter remains completely unchanged.

Editorial Committee.

Reply

First of all, we take it we are agreed on the aim: Socialism, a system of society in which all have free access to the means of production, a self-controlling world community in which the principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” prevails.

The question, then, is how to achieve this aim.

(1) Who is to implement it? A study of present-day society reveals that the class in whose interest it is to establish Socialism is the working class. This class, brought into being and trained by capitalism, now runs industry from top to bottom. It has no need of the superfluous owning class which lives off its unpaid labour. At present, however, the working class does not realise this. The present task of the SPGB is to help them to come to such an understanding.

(2) What grounds have we for assuming that such understanding is possible? According to the materialist conception of history the basic social relations are those of property, ultimately dependent on the development of technology. They give rise to classes and to class conflict. Social change comes about in the following way: a change in technology changes the mode of production and shifts the centre of industrial control, causing a new class to come to prominence. At first the struggle of this new class against the institutions and values of the old order will be purely an economic one. Later, as the new class becomes conscious of itself it will begin to organise itself politically. This organisation will be completed when the class achieves political power. The class conflicts generated by the economic structure of society always ultimately become political, i.e. conscious class, conflicts. The prize in all the class conflicts in history has always been, in the end, political power. This is the thesis of the materialist conception of history.

(3) Is this analysis applicable to present-day society? Certainly. The development of technology which was the Industrial Revolution and what has followed ever since has developed a new class. The economically important class today is the working class. The property relations of capitalist society give rise to a conflict between this class and the privileged owning class. Up till now this class struggle has been unconscious and purely economic. The working class have been forced to organise in trade unions to use in the struggle over the division of the product of their labour. Insofar as they art used for this purpose these trade unions have the support of the .SPGB. (Your comments seem to suggest that trade unions are wholly anti-working class organisations. In our view this is a dangerous oversimplification.)

(4) What of the future? Trade union action, the economic phase of the class struggle, precisely because of its unconscious nature, has its limitations. The history of class societies shows that the economic actions of any rising class have had a defensive character. To win they have had to organise consciously and politically. The same applies to the working class today. If they are to win, they must wage the class struggle consciously. This involves organising as a political party with a view to capturing political power. This is the case of the SPGB for political action.

(5) This view is based on a study of history and in particular of the role of the State, the seat of political power and the centre of social control. In the advanced capitalist countries, in order to ensure the smooth functioning of their system, in order to avoid interruptions of work by political conditions, the capitalist class have been forced (or, in some cases, found it convenient) to institute peaceful ways of sounding opinion and settling disputes. Disputes have been institutionalized in the voting and, for want of a better word, parliamentary system. It is our view that it is possible for the working class to use these institutions to settle their class struggle with the owning class. The vote is thus a potential class weapon. But the vote, like other weapons, can be used properly or improperly. Because at present the workers use it to elect demagogues and careerists of one kind or another is no argument against its potentialities.

(6) As far as we are concerned, what is important is not so much the vote as the understanding behind it. Thus, when we contest elections we do all we can to make sure that only convinced Socialists vote for us. A vote won on other grounds is worse than useless as the history of the Social Democrats of Europe has shown. The vote is just a possible means to political power—the goal of a class conscious working class.

(7) Clearly then our conception of political action differs from that of other parties and the reformists in particular. They perform any tricks and engage in all kinds of demagogy in order to get elected. Without a Socialist working class behind them, what can they do? Nothing save maintain the status quo. Hence the phenomena of "sell-out” and “betrayal.” It is completely irrelevant to judge the usefulness of political action on how the reformists have used it, not least because they operate on a different assumption, namely, that you can substantially improve the lot of the working class without Socialist understanding . When delegates of the SPGB are sent to the centre of political power they will be the delegates of the working class because the SPGB will be the working class organised consciously and politically.

(8) The point is that we are not a political party in the conventional sense of the term, we are not a group of politicians trying to get elected to do something for the working class, to pass a Socialism in Great Britain Act and legislate the new society into being. Far from it, in our view a Socialist party should not be a vanguard but an instrument. We conceive ourselves as an instrument which the working class can use to achieve political power, a necessary prerequisite for the establishment of Socialism.

Editorial Committee.

The Passing Show: Stolen Holiday (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stolen holiday

How dare you take an extra day off work at Christmas! How DARE you!

Is this the way to beat our foreign competitors and make Britain great again? Well, is it? You ought to be ASHAMED of yourselves. Here we are in the middle of an economic crisis. Exports are down and costs are up. The trade gap is wider and the pound narrower. But what do you care? Absolutely nothing—and to prove it you took Monday December 28th as an extra holiday.

The Daily Mail of the following day threw a purple-faced screaming headline at its readers. Did you know that you had had a stolen holiday? That is what the Mail called it, because Wilson’s government refused to declare it a public one but many firms granted it just the same. And those awful dockworkers actually took it without so much as a by-your-leave. This, at a time when industry in rival countries was allegedly working normally. “ Not exactly the Dunkirk Spirit ” moaned the Mail.

It’s a moot point whether British workers are more or less diligent than those elsewhere, and not one which is really worth much either way. West German workers, for example, get more holidays than British and West Germany is one of Britain’s major European competitors. After all, one day’s work more or less is not likely to make such a tremendous difference to the fortunes of the British Capitalist class, but the Mail is probably concerned least the habit should become more popular and frequent, and aims to knock it hard on the head before this gets a chance to happen.

It’s nothing new for workers to be called lazy. My own memory is long enough to recall the insults of the pre-war labour exchanges with their puffed-up little clerks, themselves dead scared of putting a foot wrong and landing in the queue on the other side of the counter. During and since the war things have changed, superficially anyway, but we still have to endure goading with stick or carrot from press and politicians alike. Of course, the Mail and the Labour Government would like to see a return to the “Dunkirk Spirit"—its self-denial and if need be, heroism, in the task of keeping British capitalism on the map. Do you remember the days of Dunkirk, incidentally? The futile bloodshed and misery, the long tedious hours of war work and short rations?

Dunkirk and 1940 have a nostalgic ring for capitalist politicians. In those days there was always the promise (the carrot) of a better world after the war, of course, and twenty years of post war experience have tarnished the image a bit. But never mind, if only they could recapture some of the spirit, how much easier would life be for them. Costs would be kept down as foolish workers cheerfully sacrificed their wage increases. Profit margins would widen and perhaps more markets be captured. All very desirable for the owners of industry but hardly an exciting prospect for the working class. Now perhaps you can see why we are not very impressed by the promises or threats that are made from time to time to try and get a bit more out of us.

About the same time as the Mail was working itself into such a rage over our laziness, The Duke of Edinburgh and his son were off for a week or two of winter sports. In February he will visit Australia for a week. Princess Margaret and husband went over to Ireland for a bit of a holiday. Perhaps if we scanned the society columns we could find plenty of other rich people doing the same sort of thing.

Quite clearly the Royal Family and the rest do not take the Mail's strictures very seriously and in any case they were not aimed in their direction. For they belong to the ten per cent who do hot have to sell themselves for a wage packet to make a living, and who live a life of perpetual ease and comfort. The rest of us do all the work and have a pretty drab time of it. Just think about that before you get too conscience-stricken over your Christmas break.

The ultimate stunt

Let’s face it. There are some of us who have never been daring or mildly athletic. A jump from the top board of the local swimming baths would be a real trial of courage for many, including me. Even our childhood pranks can only be called slightly audacious, quite harmless in themselves and never very exciting.

To get to the point. This is perhaps the age of the stunt man, highly trained and physically fit, whose job it is to keep giving his audience bigger and better thrills. He is in great demand for the stand-in feats of riding, fighting and falling that enthrall you on the silver screen, and keep the big (and expensive) stars in one piece. He must have nerves of steel and a lion's courage, and early on he has to face the possibility of serious injury or sudden and violent death.

Like the rest of us, the stunt man lives in a highly commercial world, and although he may be comparatively well paid, he has to make his living under particularly difficult and trying conditions. And being a commercial world, it subjects him to its rules and regulations and the same sorts of pressures as other workers. In practical terms, this means that he must never really relax. His eyes must always be open for new feats (“gimmicks” would be a less generous term) to maintain his audiences’ interest and keep his labour power in demand. And just as in other fields demanding intense concentration and devotion, the job can become a pretty unhealthy obsession.

Did you read about the Hollywood stunt man Rod Pack in the Daily Mail of January 8th? His escapade made Blondin and his barrel look like child’s play. He had been doing a lot of skydiving—parachute jumping to you—which you might think dangerous enough. But not Mr. Pack. He heard a writer’s joking suggestion about trying a jump without a ’chute. “It became a obsession,’’ he confessed and with the not entirely disinterested assistance of some enterprising T.V. producer who offered him a contract, he managed to pull it off. He is still alive to tell the tale.

Granting Mr. Pack’s courage, what has been the result of his feat? A lot of worry for his wife and friends, a rake-off for the T.V. producer and some exclusive pictures for the Daily Mail. “Just for the hell of it, just to be first” was his reason, and as far as he was concerned, that was the end of it. But we can be sure there will be others to follow him, risking life and limb in perhaps even more foolhardy and dangerous stunts to satisfy the demands of the entertainments market. It will prove precious little and solve no outstanding social problems. A tragic waste, really, of human skill and strength, but then that is a fitting description of capitalism as a whole.

Eddie Critchfield

What is Politics (1965)

Book Review from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Introduction To Politics by Dorothy M. Pickles. Methuen, University Paperbacks, 9s 6d.

“I am not interested in politics,” is a statement that is made with monotonous regularity, usually by people who sincerely imagine that politics are something existing outside of society. They regard politics as a kind of superstructure built up around the realities of government, which can be ignored while they deal with the important things of life, such as the day-to-day problems of existence.

Problems are of course one of the few things that workers are never short of. At the time of the last General Election, a member of a much publicised quartet stated that the “Election was nonsense," a gem of wisdom that was given full publicity in the press. Somebody had probably told him that he was a philosopher.

But the important point is, that such a remark must have been acceptable to many of his admirers, otherwise the publicity boys would have quietly stifled it. Needless to say the General Election wasn’t nonsense to the capitalist class, who were once again confirmed by it in their position in society.

Developing from this idea come further statements such as, “Politics are a dirty game,” and “Politicians are in it for what they can get.” Politics and Politicians often are dirty, but in modern society no politician stays long in power unless he has the backing of the electorate, in other words politician’s reflect the society that places them in power.

One of the dangerous results of these attitudes is the belief that politics can be dispensed with by electing a non-politician, such as a famous soldier, to power. The fact that the soldier, upon election, behaves like all the others, is usually lost on the people who elected him. Totalitarian parties will always claim that a one-party stale is above politics, and the promise that they will clean up the state machinery, is always one of their main arguments.

The truth is that any action to control any society, whether primitive or complex, is political and if people refuse to take political action which is in their own interest, others are only too willing to fill the gap, and run society in their own way.

Introduction to Politics by Dorothy M. Pickles, the latest of the very useful series of University Paperbacks, begins:

The practice of politics is necessarily as old as society itself. Wherever men live in a community, they must accept certain rules of conduct, if only to safeguard the existence of the community itself.

and later;

The study of politics, which is sometimes called political science, is born when men begin to speculate about the rules by which they are governed, or by which their ancestors were governed, when they begin to ask whether these rules ought to be accepted, or ought to have been accepted in the past, why some societies chose different rules from others, or whether it is possible to discover general rules of conduct which could or should be applicable to all societies.

Mrs. Pickles traces the development of political organisation from its primitive beginnings in “ . . . a few traditions handed down orally from one generation to another to the whole complex set of constitutional and governmental regulations of the modern state.”

This is a book which contains much useful information, and many controversial statements, and which is well worth the effort of reading.

Les Dale

Away with hanging (1965)

From the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

“They pull the lever and away he goes,” Mr. Albert Pierrepoint, public hangman, in evidence to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment.

One of the conclusions of the last Royal Commission on Capital Punishment was that, in the words of one of its witnesses, hanging is “ . . . certain, painless, simple and expeditious.”

Whatever the truth of this (and there are some horrible rumours which contradict it) the fact is that hanging was not originally designed as a quick and humane method of dispatching a criminal. The poor man was often dead before they hung him up. The idea was to display him in as humiliating way as possible, strung up in public for the mob to spit and jeer at—and to take warning from.

Thus hanging was regarded as a particularly abject and dishonourable form of execution. Beheading used to be considered more dignified and soldiers, immersed in the fatuities of military chivalry, still prefer the firing squad.

The capital crimes to which public hangings were supposed to be a massive deterrent could once be as trivial as stealing five shillings from a shop. In 1830 there were no less than 220 offences which carried the death penalty. But far from deterring the criminal, public hangings were something like carnival events for him. When they were abolished in 1868, The Times sighed with relief:

We shall not in future have to read how, the night before an execution, thousands of the worst characters in England . . . met beneath the gallows to pass the night in drinking and buffoonery; . . . how, at the very foot of the gallows, they committed with impunity deeds of lawless violence, scarcely less reprehensible than the crime of which they had come to witness the expiation.

The end of public hanging still left a lot of gruesome ritual, which has been slowly dismantled. No longer is a black flag hoisted and a bell tolled, or a notice posted, at a prison after an execution. No longer does the executed person suffer the last indignity of being left hanging for an hour after his death.

These reforms left the execution a cleaner, more clinical affair, but still a ritual. The condemned prisoner had to be weighed and measured, and secretly observed by the hangman, before the length of his drop could be calculated. (There is an official table on which this calculation was done.) The execution had to be rehearsed with a bag of sand as a stand-in. Finally, amid unbearable tension within the prison, the execution itself. 

Now, it seems, the whole thing is finished. After about 150 years of battle, the abolitionists’ appear to have won. Unless something unexpected—and, let us be clear, unplanned for— happens in the House of Lords, Mr. Sidney Silverman’s private member’s Bill will soon become law. The hangman’s noose has rattled and jerked in this country for the last time.

The origins of capital punishment are obscure; in Saxon England a killing could be expiated by payment of blood money. The method of execution has varied; beheading, stoning and impaling have all been used. The offences which carried the death penalty have also varied. The 18th Century was a bumper period for the executioners; 156 offences were made capital between 1714 and 1830.

The first mumblings of opposition were heard in the early nineteenth century. In 1810 Sir Samuel Romilly tried to introduce a Bill to abolish the capital penalty for stealing five shillings from a shop. It soon became obvious that, to avoid the severity of the death sentence, juries were aquitting guilty men. Plainly, the interests of capitalist law and order demanded that something be done and thus began the long, slow, retreat of the hangman. »

In 1832 cattle stealing was removed from the list of capital crimes; in 1833 housebreaking. By 1837 there were only fifteen capital offences left and by 1861 the number was down to four, where it stayed until 1957, when the Homicide Act changed the definition of murder.

The restriction or the abolition of capital punishment has always provided a battleground of controversy. The Chief Justice of England, Lord Ellenborough, opposing Romilly's 1810 Bill, said:

. . .  the expediency of justice and the public security require that there should not be a remission of capital punishment in this part of the criminal law.

This sort of argument has always been used by those in favour of hanging, who have conjured up lurid prospects of crime running rife once the shadow of the hangman was removed.

In 1930 a Select Committee recommended the experimental abolition of capital punishment for five years, but no action was taken. In 1938 a motion in similar terms was carried by the House of Commons, but was also ignored. In 1949 the House of Lords, its benches thick with blue blooded backwoodsmen, threw out an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which would have suspended hanging for five years. The Labour government, perhaps with a sigh of relief at the avoidance of an electorally tricky issue, pushed the Bill through without the amendment.

Then came the Royal Commission, to enquire into the modification—not abolition—of the death penalty and the Homicide Act of 1957, full of anomalies and causing more dissatisfaction than ever. All the way along the line the reformers have been bitterly resisted. At one time the bishops and the judges were solidly against any alteration in the law; now many of the bishops and some of the judges are on the other side.

Lord Ellenborough is dead, but his ideas go marching on. These are some of the arguments offered in the Commons against the Silverman Bill: “ . . . we are going to get more children murdered, and it will be entirely Mr. Silverman’s fault.” “I do believe you can deter the professional criminal who goes and acquires a pistol, and goes out to rob . . . ”

This sort of argument is almost wholly inspired by emotion, and although it is easy to become emotional when contemplating the murder of a child, or a revolting sex murder, or a cold-blooded shooting, we should remember that pathological brutality is not confined to murderers. When Derek Bentley was hanged, the Manchester Guardian reported that among the crowd of several hundred outside the prison were people who regularly attended executions. One of them remarked: “Pretty small turn out, all considered. Haven’t missed one of these in fifteen years.” And one of the disquieting facts unearthed by the Royal Commission was that there were an average of five unsolicited applications a week for the job of hangman.

In any case, facts and experience should outweigh emotion, and the facts leave little room for doubt in the matter.

The arguments in favour of capital punishment usually fall under three headings: That society should take its revenge for a murder; that murderers should be restrained, and the most effective way of doing this is to kill them; that the death penalty is the surest deterrent to murder.

These arguments are typically negative. Revenge is quite useless to the murderers victim and so is restraint by execution. In any case, the number of murderers who need restraining— who are so deranged that they are liable to commit a second murder— is very small indeed. Both these arguments ignore the positive fact that the death penalty deprives society of a good chance of preventing future murders, because it destroys the best source of discovering why the murderer committed his crime.

Finally, the supposed great deterrent does not deter. All experience abroad, in places where the death penalty has been abolished, indicates that it has no effect on the incidence of murder. In Italy, indeed, the ending of capital punishment in 1945 (it was first abolished in 1890, but reintroduced under Mussolini) coincided with a decline in the incidence of murder.

It is true that since Mr. Silverman’s Bill was introduced there has been a sudden upsurge of murders and shootings. With or without capital punishment, crime waves have been known before. There was one in the late forties, attributed to a backlash of wartime conditions and training. In early 1961, there were seventeen murders in one period of only twenty-three days.

The annual figure of the number of murders known to the police was rising before the 1957 Homicide Act. A little time after the Act became law the murder figure fell, then rose, then fell again.

What does this prove? The Royal Commission called up a world wide survey on capital punishment by the American criminologist, Professor Thorsten Sellin. He summed up his conclusions:

. . . whether the death penalty is used or not . . . both death penalty States and abolition States show rates (of murder) which suggest that these rates are conditioned by other factors than the death penalty.

The abolitionists' case, then, is made. Even by capitalism's standards, the death penalty is an outworn slice of more barbaric days. But the issue should not be allowed to get out of proportion.

A certain amount of fuss was made about the fact that a free vote was allowed on Mr. Silverman's Bill, leaving M.P.s to vote as what they call their conscience guided them. That may be all very well when the House is discussing something like capital punishment, which after all is only concerned with human lives and then with only about a couple of hundred of them a year.

But the vast majority of crime is not against people; it is against the property laws and privileges which are an essential part of capitalist society. When Parliament is debating these, there is never a free vote and no member exhibits a conscience. The Whips are on, and voting is strictly on party lines.

The opponents of capital punishment—men like Mr. Silverman, Victor Gollancz, Lord Gardiner—have argued that hanging is a futile barbarity. But at the same time they have supported the social system which is just as barbarous, just as futile—and universal in the degradation which it imposes.

Soon after the debate on the Silverman Bill, for example, the Soviet Union essayed yet another sequence in the endless minuet of disarmament talks, by proposing the renunciation of atomic weapons. The United States, who know the routine well, responded in the expected way; they rejected the proposal as “insincere " and instead called on China to sign the Test Ban Treaty.

This is playing with almost universal death and destruction. Yet no M.P.’s conscience was offended and there will be no Private Members Bill to abolish the cause of nuclear weapons.

In the same debate, Brigadier Terence Clarke, Tory M.P. for Portsmouth West, said that the abolition of hanging should be referred to the British public. This does not, of course, mean that members of Parliament intend to consult us on all matters of life and death. We shall not be asked whether we want any more Bomb tests, nor shall our opinions be sought on a possible future declaration of war. The use of nuclear weapons has never been the subject of a plebiscite, and never will be.

Brigadier Clarke is typical of the people who regard murder, and other crime, as an isolated personal failing, unconnected with social influences. To them, criminals are evil, and should be punished in accordance with their crime.

To say the least this is an inadequate conception and not "only because its distinction between “criminal" and “legal" (tilling is convenient to capitalist society. The act of killing an “enemy” in wartime is specifically excluded from the legal definition of murder. Brutal murderers in uniform are heroes; the same sort of person in civvies is a vicious thug.

Crime, like so many other social problems, needs a completely new approach, free of the restrictions arising from the private property basis of capitalism. We have already pointed out that the mass of crime consists of offences against property. To abolish capitalism would wipe all of them out.

Let us go further. The end of capitalism will mean the end of the poverty and the social conceits which are a persistent incentive to violent crime. It will mean the end of the slums where violence festers and where people are in some ways more like beasts than human beings. It will mean the end of the frustrated, the desperate, the sensation-seekers brutalized by the fabulous world of the trash fiction heroes.

It will mean that people will have the chance to behave socially, humanely and to live undistorted lives. In that society of freedom, crime will be an incredible irrelevance. There may be an infinitesimal number of murders, committed by the congenitally sick who wreck their derangements in violence. For the first time in history, such people will be dealt with, in freedom, with sympathy—and effectively.

We have a long way to go, and what sort of a milestone is Mr. Silverman’s Bill? It is no more than a creaky, reluctant step away from a primitive ritual—by a social system which , prefers its barbarians to be more sophisticated.

Ivan.