House loan to Nigel Lawson (1966)

From the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conservative Party champions the cause of those who support the unequal society. They justify this by asserting that some individuals achieve success because they have an ability greater than others. They hold that this success entitles them to a larger share of the material things of life. I have often wondered if it were not possible to put a figure or ratio to this allegedly justifiable difference in consumption. It now appears from the housing committee of the Conservative Kensington and Chelsea Council that a reasonable ratio is of the order of 50: 1.

In this borough of the Greater London Council, embracing the highly fashionable Hyde Park Gate and the highly condemnable Notting Hill area, Mr. Nigel Lawson is buying a house. He is the new editor of “Spectator,” a former financial journalist and speech writer for Sir Alec Douglas Home. The house in Hyde Park Gate was valued by the Council at £34,000. The value placed on a property by a building society, local council or any other lending today is generally about 85 per cent, of the current market price, which leaves the lender a margin if the mortgagor should default on the repayments, when the property would have to be sold quickly. In order to complete his purchase, Mr. Lawson, or his agents, applied to the Kensington and Chelsea Council for a mortgage of £20,000. And got it.

The Labour Party opposition on the Council objected to the loan. Firstly they claimed the money could have been better advanced on say five £4,000 mortgages. or, alternatively, it could have been loaned to one of the borough’s housing associations, who could have utilised the money to house 50 people.

So there we have it: a loan to Mr. Lawson or a loan to 50 other people via a housing association. To take sides in this squabble is entirely to miss the point, which is that the housing shortage is one aspect of the general problem of poverty.

When questioned about the housing problem, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has often given the quick answer, to better illustrate the question, that the housing problem is only a problem for the working class, and has instanced the voluminous advertisements for houses for sale in the press. It is a shortage of money rather than houses that prevents most people from buying a house in a society that builds houses for sale rather than occupation. Despite all the talk of the affluent society, it remains a fact that a large section of the working class cannot afford the price of accommodation. As with any other necessity under capitalism. housing is available only within the limitations of a profit making system.

Mr. Lawson’s £20,000 mortgage carries interest at 6½ per cent, repayable over twenty years. A Councillor who wrote to the “Guardian” estimated that in order to qualify for the loan, Mr. Lawson must have an income of at least £8,000 per year and that the interest factor in the yearly repayments will be £1,256, upon which there will be relief from income tax and sur-tax of £840. So much for beer guzzling layabouts in council houses being the only recipients of subsidies.

In August 1965, HMSO published the table of personal incomes for 1963, which shows that of the 27 million individuals in receipt of personal income, 20 million were getting less than £1,000 and 25 million were getting less than £1,500 per year. If we average this out, it means that 80 per cent. were receiving an income equal to the amount paid by Mr. Lawson in mortgage interest, whereas his income, if the Councillor’s figures are correct, place him in the top 129,000, or the top 1 per cent. of the income table.

That “some are more equal than others” is true not only in Kensington and Chelsea but throughout the land. But perhaps the last word should go to Mr. Lawson, who wrote his first column as the new editor of “Spectator” on 7th January 1966; after all, he said, the Council will be making a profit from the mortgage they granted him. What more could a Tory ask, or give.

Ray Guy

Aspects of State Power (1966)

Editorial from the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The State is the people" is a popular misconception that lives on. It is still widely held that the State embodies the whole community. The illusion is fostered that it is “our” country, “our” government, “our” balance of payment crisis.

In fact the country is owned by a privileged minority. Exports are their problem. Inevitably the government administers their interests through control of the state machine.

The State is the armed forces, the police, the judiciary, the prisons. These exist to defend and maintain private property. The State also administers the Post Office, schools, hospitals, railways, etc.

Over the past hundred years government has grown enormously. Today it is accepted that the government will be directly concerned in every aspect of social and economic life. At the same time its power is more centralised.

This is not to say that the government can exercise its power in an arbitrary way. On the contrary government today must he tuned in with public opinion. Never before has the success of a politician been so dependent on his saying the right thing at the right time. Election programmes are largely the product of advertising men. This is partly why the manifestos of Labour and Tory parties hardly differ. In practice government policies bear little relation to electoral promises.

The Labour Party sees the state machine as an instrument of social progress provided they control it. The illusion of nationalisation as an egalitarian system of ownership and distribution is now obvious by bitter experience. Under Labour as well as Tory governments state controlled industry is run in the interests of the capitalist class.

Nationally the State protects the interests of capitalism, and in doing so frequently has to over-ride sectional capitalist interests.

Two aspects of state administration which concern most people are education and health. The State cannot provide a proper education system because it is primarily concerned to train workers. Capitalist society creates more ill health than doctors and nurses can cope with. What the State provides is limited by the economics of a society that is concerned more for profits than for people.

Alcoholics numerous (1966)

From the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Attention has been focussed recently on the “problem drinkers”. Somebody has been counting their cost. In the December issue of Business, the Management Journal, it is claimed that the annual cost of alcoholism to British industry is £61 millions in absenteeism alone. It is claimed that of the total working population, two to three per cent are “problem drinkers”. The same percentage is given also for America.

It is a typical piece of commercial cynicism to measure and describe a problem in money terms. Officially, the most disturbing aspect of widespread alcoholism is not the tragedy of people who require opiates to fortify their existence, but the loss of £61 million. Indeed, it is this loss that qualifies alcoholism as a problem.

Of course, employers will never rest in their attempts to find the ideal labour force. Workers are besieged by exhortations to be conscientious, sober, hard working, honest and thrifty. In short, workers are asked to practice all the so- called virtues of moral and political conformity which assure their maximum exploitation as wage slaves. The curse of capitalism—for the capitalists—has always been that the units of labour power comprising the working class are also human beings. Regrettably they are not merely machines with brains; they are emotionally volatile, physically vulnerable; they give under pressure.

Addiction to alcohol is found at all levels of industry and commerce. The executive, the manager, the clerk, the shop floor operative. The kind of drink varies with the income bracket, from wines and spirits, beer, cheap wines, down to the cheapest of all, methylated spirits. The meths drinker has reached the stage of total degeneracy, a derelict hulk, rather than a vital human being.

The meths drinkers are the most pathetic of all, lost in a twilight world of doped unreality. With personalities destroyed and contact with fellow human beings broken down, they are interrogated in decrepit cellars by naive social workers. Why were they sleeping rough? Had they no accommodation at all? Had they any money? Had they jobs? In their cases, the National Assistance Board is interested, again counting the cost of subsidising the unemployable.

It is typical that blame for alcoholism should be put on the individual. The very phrase “problem drinker” emphasises not the plight of the sufferer but his nuisance value. For the heavy drinker, alcohol becomes the buffer between his sober self and an intolerable reality. Alcohol in fact becomes a substitute for living. For the man who needs alcohol to see the day through, his drinks are the terms on which he is prepared to adjust himself to an existence that he despises. Though he may not be aware of it, alcohol is the repudiation of a life to which he sees no alternative. Unfortunately the disease easily generates its own momentum, sometimes ending in a complete personal capitulation to the meths bottle.

Nevertheless to the conventional moralist, the individual is completely in the wrong. In those who are worried about the money cost of alcoholism, there is no criticism of society. It is the individual who must conform; if he does not or cannot, then at best he is lazy or weak, lacking in the necessary will to make the adjustment.

Alcohol is only one of the substitutes that men grasp in their flight from reality. There are others. Suicide and mental illness are equally results of the emotional stress that capitalist society imposes on humanity. The existence of all these problems is part of man’s unconscious protest against a society that not only denies his needs but actively destroys him.

The term “social workers” is an exquisite euphemism for individuals who are attempting to minimise the cost of capitalism’s worst effects. Even so, their work is useful in documenting the incidence of such problems as alcoholism. To put these facts in perspective it is necessary to clear away such concepts as "problem drinkers”, “social misfits”, etc. This phraseology by itself places the onus of responsibility on the individual. It fails to relate the incidence of alcoholism to the social pressures bearing on the individual. It implicitly encourages the view of the individual as a failure rather than a possible victim. In fact, by endorsing the status quo, this view of the problem guarantees its continuance. The use of phrases like “social failures” partly contributes to the problem. Surely it is this background of successes and failures, the empty competitive values of propertied society from which people seek a refuge in drink.

In the short term, the incidence of alcoholism will probably increase. Capitalism cannot avoid a continuing ferment of discontent, albeit generally expressed in negative ways, through hate, violence, cynicism and even despair. Paradoxically, this may form a background for building up useful knowledge about where man’s true interests lie.

Pieter Lawrence

The Keynesian myth (1966)

From the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always held that the boom-slump cycle and periodical unemployment are inherent features of the system of production for the market with a view to profit i.e. capitalism. But, say the critics, there has been full employment in Britain for over 20 years; there has been no slump on the scale of the 1930's. Man, they say, has been proved wrong. Capitalism has changed, thanks to the theories and policies of John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes was a British economist who died just after the last war. He wrote a number of widely-read books on economic and political matters and held various government posts. His theories on how to get full employment and avoid slumps are to be found in his General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money which appeared in 1936.

The economic doctrines Keynes attacked in this book taught that capitalism automatically led to the full and most efficient use of productive resources. These doctrines said that unemployment was to be explained either by overpopulation or by restrictions on production and trade, such as trade unions. State interference and tariffs. Overproduction was impossible as "supply creates its own demand". This last dogma was known as Say's Law after a French economist of the early 19th century. Say argued that as every sale was a purchase and vice versa a shortage of purchasing power was impossible.

Keynes denied that laissez-faire capitalism automatically led to full employment and went on to show how overproduction and unemployment could occur: since all that was produced in a given period wasn’t all consumed in that period there was a gap between productive capacity and what Keynes called Consumption. This gap was filled by the making of means of production or Investment. However as Investment depends on what businessmen think are the chances of making profits there is no guarantee that this gap will be filled. And if it is not filled then there will be idle resources and unemployment.

Keynes suggested ways of overcoming this condition. The State should first try to encourage Consumption and Investment. As the poor tend to spend a larger proportion of their income than the rich, one way of encouraging spending, Keynes suggested, was to redistribute some of the income of the rich to the poor. Low interest rates might encourage businessmen to invest so a policy of reducing the price of money by increasing its supply was called for. Keynes believed that although these measures were useful they would not be enough. In the end the State itself would have to increase its own spending and even take steps to control Investment directly.

In overthrowing Say's Law, Keynes was doing nothing new. Marx had done this before when he pointed out that, although Say was right about every sale being a purchase because the buyer and seller were different people, the seller could interrupt circulation if for any reason he didn't re-spend the money immediately. Thus both Marx and Keynes showed how overproduction was possible under capitalism. Marx went further and showed how it was also inescapable.

The basic proposition of the Keynesians comes to this: steady growth at full employment level can be kept if the State controls spending and investment so that when a boom is developing it cuts down, and when a slump threatens it increases its spending.

Keynes had been a critic of laissez-faire for a long time before he wrote his General Theory. He was a member of the Liberal Party and sympathetic to the kind of State capitalist schemes the Fabians pushed. When he wrote this book he already had an international reputation as a leading economist. His book was given wide publicity because in it a well-known economist provided a theoretical justification for policies already being tried in the 1930's. Keynes's theories and policies—equalizing taxation, cheap money. State control—were eagerly spread by the Labour Party and "progressives’' generally. After all, this was what they—and Keynes himself, for that matter—had long been advocating. Helped by these partisans Keynesian economics has become the dominant theory. In Britain it completely conquered the universities and government departments. In America some conservative economists are still fighting a rearguard action on behalf of laissez-faire against Keynes' theories which they see as State Capitalism (to them "socialism").

It is true that Keynesian economics is a theory of State Capitalism. It is a theory that Capitalism can be managed by professional economists from Government departments. It is Fabianism in a new guise: capitalism run by "experts".

In Britain the first Keynesian budget was that of 1940 so the "experts" have been in charge for over 25 years How have they fared? Have they been able to control capitalism?

Under capitalism the market is the king; it decides what is produced and when. After the last war there was an expansion of the world market which, with a few minor upsets, has continued ever since. It is this expansion of the world market rather than State control which has been the major factor in the relatively full employment in some parts of the world.

This particular combination of circumstances has allowed the Keynesians to claim as the benefits of their “economic management" what in fact are the results of world market conditions favourable to the capitalists of the countries concerned. The world market has not expanded at a steady rate; it has done so in fits and jerks. This, of course, is the boom-slump cycle. In Britain the figures of unemployment, industrial production and trade have gone up and down with the world market—and the "experts" have been unable to do anything about it. Indeed far from these “experts" controlling capitalism it is the other way round: the Keynesians seated in their government offices have had to take orders from the world market. Given a contraction of the world market on a large-sale the emptiness of the claims of the Keynesians to control capitalism. and especially its boom-slump cycle, would become apparent immediately.

Nor have the "experts" been able to end unemployment. In many parts of the world unemployment is widespread, in the Caribbean and Mediterranean areas to mention just two. Keynesians have been unable to do anything about this. Some of their thinkers have admitted this and call the unemployment in these areas "Marxian" as opposed to the “Keynesian" unemployment they an cure. Very clever! as if this unemployment wasn’t connected with the relatively full employment elsewhere. For these unemployed are the reserve army of labour Marx talked about. They are drawn on by industries in the dominant capitalist countries as and when required to produce for the world market.

Keynesian economics—a combination of a policy of “inflation" and the rule of economic "experts"—is not at all what it is made out to be. It has not, and cannot, control capitalism in the ways that it claims.

Adam Buick

Obituaries: Joe Clarke & Billy Iles (1966)

Obituaries from the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Joe Clarke
Nottingham Branch members, have suffered a great loss, by the death of our friend and comrade, Joe Clarke.

Joe was the last of three brothers, all dedicated Socialists, and Party members over 38 years, who lived at Burton on Trent. Their role in the Party did not bring them into great prominence, for they were neither speakers nor writers; the work they did was that performed by the persistent plodders, whom the Party could not do without. Selling literature, discussing and exchanging ideas wherever possible, collecting funds to finance Party propaganda, and last but not least, attending political meetings to question and challenge the veracity of statements made by capitalist politicians.

Joe was able to talk quite freely on politics, economics, philosophy, science and space, astronomy, and a subject uncommon, but nevertheless one which he felt to be important: "health culture". In pursuit of good health Joe took a daily dip in the River Trent winter and summer, during the whole of his adult life, and was a vegetarian. Indeed, he did survive many illnesses in his later years and these were contracted no doubt through cycling long journeys, in all weather, while doing Party work.

Although he was 79 years of age when he died, many of his comrades and friends thought he would go on for ever for he was virile and strong, and carried on his usual activities until his last days.

Men of Joe's calibre are difficult to replace, but there is no doubt that the work that Joe did for the Party with such great enthusiasm will give inspiration to those left behind to carry on the struggle.

J. Cuthbertson.

Billy Iles

In December a group of members attended a crematorium in Guildford, Surrey, to say a last and sad farewell to an old comrade, O. C. Iles, who had been ill for some time with cancer.

Billy Iles, as he was always known to us, joined the Party in 1911 and was active for years in London as a writer, speaker and doing the routine work at Head Office, until his work finally took him to Liverpool.

He was called up during the First World War but refused to join the army. He managed to keep out of trouble during the war, although he never left London, by taking various jobs on night work at Covent Garden, as a milkman, and the like. He lodged for a time with a woman member, Mrs. Chilton, along with other members "on the run"; later with another member in a flat over Head Office until the war was over. In those days we used to collect the Socialist Standard in loose sheets from the printer and folded them ourselves. Billy Iles made many trips to the printer for this purpose and spent many nights folding so that the "S.S." could be out on time.

After the war times were somewhat turbulent and meetings were inclined to be noisy. On one Bank Holiday Billy cycled all night up to Hanley in the Potteries, to hold a meeting during the coal strike in 1921.

During the twenties he was secretary to the Editorial Committee and wrote articles over the initials O.C.I.

Owing to the fact that he lived out of London we did not see much of him during late years, but his optimism and steadfast support continued all through the years and he sent many useful organisational suggestions to Head Office.

The present writer will always remember Billy as a lively and humorous companion on many cycling trips in years gone by.

His illness was a heavy burden to his wife as he only went into hospital during his last few days. To his wife, daughter and brother we send our sincere sympathy.

And so has passed away another of the diminishing group of members, who now only number a handful, who actively pressed forward the Party's principles before and during the years of the First World War.

Gilmac.