The Review Column: Target Hanoi (1967)

The Review Column from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Target Hanoi

The start of this year was considerably dampened by the flood of crocodile tears provoked by the admitted bombing of civilians in Hanoi.

The tears flowed strongly as the eye witness accounts came in, especially those from Harrison Salisbury, assistant managing editor of the New York Times. Harrison’s reports also provoked a slight, but distinct, surprise that an American newspaper man should actually tell the truth about the results of his countrymen’s military exploits.

It is difficult to imagine anyone really believing the Pentagon’s assurances that only military targets were being bombed. This is a well worn fiction of modern war; even the RAF tried it in the last war. until the evidence to the contrary became overwhelming.

In any case, why the indignation about civilian deaths in wartime? The “advance” of capitalism's war-making machine has brought everyone into the front line.

War is now very much a social business, with many civilians playing a more important part in the war effort than many men in uniform. It is also important for a side to break the morale of the other’s civilians—usually by bombing or blockade.

The people of Hanoi, then—its children, its old people, its hospital patients—are all legitimate targets.

Does this sound callous? War is never an agreeable business and those who complain about its effects while they support the system which produces it, or those who demonstrate about the military activities of only one side, they are the callous ones.

As long as capitalism lasts there will be no end to war and we may expect it to become more and more fearsome.

The solution is not to wave banners about one incident or one aspect of war. It is to build a new society in which the cause of war no longer exists.

The Sinking Press

The once proud ships of the British newspaper industry are in dire trouble.

Many of them—the Daily Sketch (circulation 849,000), the Daily Mail (2,380,000)—are taking water fast and do not seem able to last much longer.

Almost certainly, the Sun (1,250,000) will be scuttled by the International Publishing Corporation when its obligation to keep it afloat runs out in 1968.

The Guardian (283,000) is fighting desperately but is badly holed—they are thinking about paying off a lot of the crew and one of their most distinguished officers— Gerard Fay—has actually jumped overboard to leave more room for everyone else.

Even the Times (273,000) is floundering, its only chance of salvation apparently being the sort of emergency repairs promised in the take over by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Thompson.

A lot of people—even the Prime Minister—profess to be unhappy about this situation.

But why are the papers sinking? Circulation is no longer of itself enough to pay a paper’s way. In the face of competition from other media like television, the newspapers have to fight harder for advertisers’ custom — and this, of course, goes in the main only to the papers with the really big readership.

What this means is that the advertisers say whether a paper makes a profit—sinks or floats—and that a paper must do everything it can to attract advertisements.

Now all the papers have always devoted a lot of their space to applauding the capitalist principle that profit is a glorious thing and that if something cannot be sold at a profit it has no business being made.

This principle is now being applied to the newspaper industry. And the press does not like it. But, as they have so often told other industries, there is nothing they can do about it.

Treatment at a Price

Last December a New York hospital was in trouble; $16,000 in arrears with the rent. Their bank foreclosed the mortgage and only the action of the doctors and nurses, who barricaded the entrances, prevented the patients being turned out onto the streets.

Last month in Houston, Texas, a father took his six month old baby to hospital for treatment. But he did not have enough cash on him to pay for it and the insurance policy he offered was not of a great enough value. The hospital turned him away and the baby died.

This is capitalism in the raw, where even medical attention is openly carried on on a ready cash basis.

In this country, as we all know, they organise things rather differently. A long time ago the British capitalist class appreciated the economy of spreading over the cost of a medical service, and of making the employers pay for some of it, so that all workers are kept pretty well in a constant state of fitness to work.

It seems inevitable that this will also come to America, although there is powerful opposition to it from the doctors, who think they can do better under the present hit and miss system.

If state medicine does come to America, no hospital will close over owing the rent and no parent will have to slap down ready cash before his children can be treated. The priorities of capitalism will still be working, but in a different way.

Everything will be nicely organised by the government —the drugs, the pills, the stimulants. Propped up by this, the American worker will stagger back to the factory. He may even think it is a good idea.

But in reality he will have exchanged one symptom of his poverty, ghastly though it is, for another.

Jailbreaks Galore

One thing which can be said in favour of the glut of escaping prisoners and that is that it gave the press a lot of entertaining stories at a time when news was distinctly short.

As the escape stories went on day after day. many people almost became convinced that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins was personally going around unlocking the prison gates. Time, and the fact that Jenkins is as determined as any other capitalist administrator that those who break capitalism’s laws shall suffer for it, may teach them differently.

What was forgotten was that in 1964 there were more escapes under “strict” Home Secretary Henry Brooke than in 1966 under “liberal” Roy Jenkins.

Indignation ran riot. Nobody seemed to have time to think that escapes are an unavoidable result of imprisonment. and that the prisoner and his helpers have the advantage of a lot of time and chance for observation and planning.

It was not the time to remind anyone that, as the celebrated Frank Mitchell has proved, imprisonment and violent punishment are not the answers to crime.

That was the tragedy—and the scandal, if you like.

Workers who are in their own little prison of wage slavery, of subservience to their employer, of mortgaged living, were loudly demanding harsher methods of restriction for other members of their class who had chosen to lake a chance on another sort of prison.

At no time did anyone ask about the cause of it all. and why human beings are satisfied with a social system which so defiles them and which, in one way or another, makes prisoner or gaoler of them all.

British Capital in India (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class divisions are international. Nowhere is this better shown than in India. Surplus value extracted from the workers in this sub-continent finds its way to the capitalists of a dozen or more countries. The last official assessment of private foreign investment in India put the total at $1.29 billion; of this, British capital accounted for 80 per cent. But — since the calculation did not include banking capital, or capital engaged in construction and some other sectors of the economy — various economists have indicated that foreign-controlled assets are probably between 2-3 times greater than this figure implies. Michael Kidron in his Foreign Investments in India (1965) tentatively suggests that Rs. 1,400 crores [1] would be a more realistic estimate.

When the Reserve Bank of India published its breakdown of foreign investments in 1955 this showed that roughly one half was concentrated in manufacturing, plantation and mining companies and perhaps a further 30 per cent in trading and financial firms. British capital generally follows this pattern as well. The jute, tea and coal industries are are still dominated by British companies. Thus, in the early nineteen-sixties, about 70 per cent of the total acreage planted with tea was owned by English capitalists. Two U.K. organisations — Lipton (a Unilever concern) and Brooke Bond (Finlay) — handled 85 per cent of the retail distribution within India, while the export trade is largely a British monopoly. British capital also controls some of the largest cotton mills in the country — such as the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills of Madras, Kohinoor Mills of Bombay and Madura Mills of Madura. As might be expected, the motor-car industry is organised jointly with foreign manufacturers. Indian firms such as the Tatas and Birlas have agreements with British, American and European companies — Standard, Morris, Leyland, Studebaker and Fiat to name a few. A glance down the list of joint-stock companies operating in India shows that Indian workers are contributing to the profits of some of the really big names of world capitalism. For example Unilever, I.C.I. and Imperial Tobacco have all established plants or factories there.

Although the investments of the British capitalist class in India may soon be twice as large as they were at independence in 1947 this does not mean that the local bourgeoisie has not benefited from the exploitation of the country’s millions of workers. In just eight years, between 1948-1955, profits totalling Rs. 4,170 million were realized by foreign controlled enterprises; but this figure was dwarfed by the Rs. 12,460 million picked up by the Indian ruling class. There have, in fact, been some prominent transfers of control from British to Indian hands. For example, the Dalmia family took over from Bennett. Coleman and Co. of Bombay (owners of the Times of India newspaper) and from Govan Brothers of Delhi, while a whole group of British trading enterprises in Madras has been acquired by S. Anantharamakrishnan. In addition Indian capitalists now have a controlling interest in a number of nominally British enterprises. Thus, in Calcutta, the Goenkas, Bangurs and Kanorias have come to dominate agencies like Shaw Wallace, Octavius Steel, Kettlewell Bullen and Anderson Wright. Cases such as this have given much satisfaction to the ruling Congress party. This is understandable, since that party represents the interests of a majority of Indian capital. What is ludicrous is when it suggests that the workers, who continue to sweat in the factories, should be thankful for the change in ownership.

The American capitalist class also has a sizeable stake in the Indian economy; about $237 million from private investment sources at the last count. Commenting on these investments, the Economist said they left little scope for complaint in their profitability — the return in manufacturing industries being as high as 20.6 per cent in 1962. With profits running at this level, it is no wonder that India now lies second only to Britain in the amount of American capital it has absorbed. At the same time, capitalists in Holland, Japan, Italy, Belgium and so on find the Indian worker a no less attractive quarry.

Apart from this, something needs to be said about “foreign aid” to India. A large percentage of this takes the form of loans repayable at normal, commercial interest rates. As B. Ward pointed out in his book India and The West, “they do not constitute aid in any direct sense. They are either profitable loans or export credits for the donor country. To call them ‘aid’ stretches the word until it is almost deprived of meaning.” This has been well illustrated by some fierce competition to finance various “aid” projects. One such case was that of the Bokaro steel plant. An Anglo-American consortium offered to back the scheme by means of long-term credits totalling $368 million. This group was led in America by Mr. Vance Brand, head of an international investment company, and in Britain by Mr. W. S. Hindson of Wellman Smith Owen. It had support from a variety of powerful companies, such as Koppers, Blaw Knox and General Electric in the U.S. and Davy United and Woodal-Duckam in Britain. At about the same time as this group was negotiating, a high-ranking official from the West German combine of Krupp visited New Delhi to put proposals to India’s steel minister, and a French federation — backed by the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas — had been in the running earlier. As it happened, however, it was the Russians who pulled off the deal. The Economist reported that Soviet capital to the tune of £110 million was to be involved in the first stage of the project, at the relatively “soft” terms of 2½ per cent spread over twelve years.

This is only one of many examples. When the American General Electric Company was discussing investment terms for an electrical plant in India, the Economist again pointed out that international rivalry was becoming sharper: “The first such plant was built with the help of Britain’s Associated Electrical Industries, but the next three were picked up for financing by the Russians and Czechs — which underlines the need for fresh western initiative in this field.” In fact, by the beginning of 1963, east European countries (excluding Yugoslavia) had authorized a total of Rs. 437 crores for “aid” to India. The majority of “foreign aid” finds its way to the nationalized industries, but there are numerous cases of financing privately owned firms. Nor have the “Communist” countries been backward in this sphere. Even if we leave Russia out of the picture, we find that there had been well over sixty agreements of this type by the end of 1964. (East Germany — 38; Czechoslovakia — 14; Poland — 14; Hungary — 9; Yugoslavia — 5). There have also been reports that Hungary is prepared to set up aluminium plants in the private sector of the economy — in Kerala and at Koyna, Maharashtra.

Naturally, a number of lame attempts have been made to defend the imperialism of Russia and her allies. Thus K. M. Kurian in his Impact of Foreign Capital on Indian Economy argues that:

  In general, it is possible to differentiate between aid from capitalist and aid from countries in the socialist system on the basis of the differences in their repayment and servicing terms and conditions. The terms and conditions attached to loans and credits from the socialist countries, on the other hand, have generally been extended on more favourable terms.

In the same spirit, V. I. Pavlov whines:

  It is impermissible to draw a common balance between the hard-earned savings set aside by the peoples of the socialist countries to help their friends, and the capital of imperialist monopolies which they expect, sooner or later, to bring them profit. (India: Economic Freedom versus Imperialism).

Obviously both of these writers are dishonest. However much they squirm away from the facts, it is clear that interest and profits from India are flowing back to Moscow, Prague and Warsaw — just as they do to London, Washington and Paris. The Russian ruling class has sunk its claws into part of the surplus value wrung out of the Indian working class. It is true that the scale of Russian involvement nowhere near matches that of Britain. But this is only because Russia was such a late starter. The first Russian “aid” did not come until 1955, after Bulganin and Krushchev had visited India in that year. Even so. in the current Fourth Five-Year Plan (1966-71), it is thought that the supply of Soviet capital will be in the region of one billion roubles.

India also represents an important market for the manufacturers of many advanced industrial countries. However, the share of the market monopolised by British capitalists has been dwindling — as rivals in the United States and the .Soviet Union forge ahead.

Once again, in the struggle for markets, the fiercest competition is coming from Russia and her allies. In January, 1966 it was reported that the Soviet Union now supplied 12 per cent of India’s imports, compared to 4 per cent in 1960/61. In fact, taken over the last decade, Indian imports from the state capitalist countries of east Europe have built up from Rs. 5.70 crores (in 1954) to Rs. 123.74 crores (in 1963/64). On top of that, an agreement has been signed to double trade with Russia by 1970. Bearing these sort of figures in mind, how daft does it make the “Communist” parties look when they claim that production in Russia is not geared to the world markets?

Time and again the Indian leaders have asserted that their aim is to establish a “socialist pattern of society” in the country. They have now had twenty years of independence to put this into effect. Yet today, more than at any time in the past, the working class in India finds itself the prey of international capital. This should cause no surprise to any thinking worker. He has only to recall some of the definitions of “Indian socialism” which have been put forward. (For example: “The ‘socialism’ contemplated in India . . . is a system under which private enterprise has and will continue to have a vital role to play; it is a system which respects private property . . .” — H.V.R. Ienger, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India). Divided by religious and nationalist prejudices, the Indian worker is easy meat for his masters in London, Moscow and New Delhi.

S. C.

Note:

[1] *Rs. 1 crore = £750,000 = £2,100,000.

Finance and Industry: Was Lenin an O. & M. Man? (1967)

The Finance and Industry column from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Was Lenin an O. & M. Man?

The Russian governors have got themselves into the position of having to justify everything they do by what Lenin said. Thus a recent pamphlet put out by the Novosti Press Agency called Material and Moral Incentives under Socialism by Mikhail Laptin attacks “wage-levelling” with quotes from Lenin. The problem the Russian propaganda machine faces here is the vague link in many people’s minds between Socialism and equality while in Russia inequality flourishes.

The titles of some of the chapters of this pamphlet are revealing enough: Wage Levelling or Material Incentive? Improving the Wage System; Differentiation of Wages; Rate Fixing; Bonuses for the Best. But let Laptin speak for himself.

  Wage levelling is incompatible with scientific progress and the wellbeing of all members of society. Should an honest worker and an idler receive the same wages, this would frustrate personal interest in raising labour productivity. in expanding and improving social production. Wage levelling would hamper the workers’ initiative, encourage passive attitudes and adversely affect production.
  The wage-rate policy of the first years of Soviet power resulted in unwarranted restrictions on the earnings of certain workers, thus creating artificial barriers to raising labour productivity. Wage rates were brought so close that most workers had no desire to improve their skill or to do complicated or physically difficult work. On the contrary, workers sought to get a quiet job, such as factory watchman, or leave the factory altogether.
  Lenin wrote that it was necessary to study scientific achievements in analyzing mechanical motions during work, so as to eliminate superfluous and awkward movements, find the most efficient ways of doing the work and introduce the best system of control and recording of results.

If these passages show nothing else they show that the Russian employers look on their workers in the same way as our employers look on us: as lazy and greedy people who will only work when forced or enticed to. Time and motion, speed-up, Taylorism and the like have always been looked on with suspicion — and rightly — by workers. Laptin says this suspicion is not justified in Russia as the means of production there belong to the people. But if this were so, why don't Russian workers recognise it? Why do they have to be convinced of it? Why do they need “material incentives” to work for themselves? Of course the answer is that this is not so. The worker in Russia does not own the means of production; he is a wage-worker selling his labour power to live. Where labour power is a commodity its price is governed by definite economic laws. Over a hundred years ago. in an address to the International Working Men's Association (later published as Value, Price and Profit), Marx explained this on the very point we are discussing:

  . . . as the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality differ, so must differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an insane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable redistribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?

Given the wages system equality of wages (or wage levelling) is impossible. The early utopian experiments of the Bolsheviks failed as the economic laws of capitalism asserted themselves. Lenin admitted that this was a retreat. His successors have made a virtue of necessity. For Laptin is not one of those Marx was getting at. He thinks that it is equality of wages that is not “just and equitable”! He likes the wages system as it is, inequalities and all!

Marx was not for equal or for unequal wages. He was against the whole wages system and ended his address with this appeal to the working class:

  Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day's wage for a fair days work!“ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword. “Abolition of the wages system!"

What is Money?

The recent White Paper on decimal currency means that by 1971 the money tokens, inherited in a simplified form from feudal times, will be replaced by tokens based on a decimal system (They’re still arguing over which). The government will merely be changing the face-values and names of the paper notes and metallic coins that circulate as money. This it can do as these values and, names are matters of convention.

It is impossible to understand the role of money tokens today without realising the origin of money as a commodity. Out of the simple exchange of commodities one commodity became money, that is, the prices of the other commodities came to be expressed in terms of this money-commodity which could be exchanged for any of them. Various things, including cattle and even human beings, have functioned as money. But the most convenient in the end have always been the precious metals silver and gold. These can express a high value with a little weight and are easily divisible. The price of other commodities was at first expressed directly as a weight of the precious metal, as with shekels in the bible. This too is the origin of the name “pound”. Later the metals were coined by being stamped with the mark of the state that issued them. From this point on exists the possibility of a divergence between the face-value and the real value of the metal. This happened both as the coin lost weight through wear and tear and through deliberate debasement by the state. So that, over the years, the names like pound, crown, florin, shilling and penny ceased to signify actual measures of weight and became the names given to certain weights of the metal in coinage as fixed by the state.

The next step in the evolution of money is the substitution in circulation of tokens for the money-commodity. First underweight coins circulated for the full-weight coins and then subsidiary metals like copper and finally almost worthless paper. This is so at present where as tokens for gold, the international money-commodity, paper notes and metallic coins circulate. In Britain the basic coin metal is copper alloyed with zinc, tin or nickel.

It would be wrong to think of money as merely a medium of exchange. The tokens can do this well enough on their own. Another function of money is that of being a standard of price. This, however, since they are almost worthless, the tokens cannot do. It is only because they are tokens for gold that they perform this function. Gold of course is by no means worthless. It is a commodity having a value of its own independent of human will. The value of gold is fixed in the same way as that of other commodities by the amount of socially-necessary labour embodied in it and exchanges with them on this basis.

To say that the paper notes and metallic coins that circulate at present are tokens for gold is not to say that there is the equivalent in gold of their face-values lying in the vaults of the Bank of England. This is not, nor need it be, so. However, the law of value can no more be defied than the law of gravity. If the face-value of the tokens is more than the amount of gold needed to circulate what commodities there are, then the tokens will come to represent a smaller amount of gold. Which means that prices will rise, or, as they say today, the “purchasing power of money” will decline. This in fact is one of the reasons for the rise in internal prices that has been going on in Britain since the beginning of the last war. The pound note of today is not equivalent to the pound note of 1947 or 1957 or even 1966.

The recent craze for gold memorial medals well shows what the money-commodity is. Until the government put a stop to it these gold metals were sold as an “investment”. Apart from speculation about a possible rise in the price of gold, capitalists know that gold can be expected to keep its value while its tokens can not. It is the same in France. Over Christmas there was heavy buying of gold. One of the reasons was a fear that the Gaullists might lose the coming election for, as one paper put it, “gold remains the traditional hedge against political uncertainty in this country”. If they have to hold their wealth idle as money capitalists prefer the real stuff.

Adam Buick

A Cloud over the Sun (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pundits, governments, capitalists and fools are always telling us that the world has changed — the system has changed — in these abrasive times of shake-out and redeployment, the whole nature of capitalism isn’t what it used to be.

Not even the Marines could fall for that one: calling unemployment something else makes a fat lot of difference to the families of the men who are out of work.

Capitalism has not changed — not since Marx and Engels first produced the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The first struggles between rival capitalists, the harsh conflict of interests between workers and capitalists, the blind and wasteful way in which worker is set against his brother worker — these things are capitalism, today.

And for the truth about “modern” capitalism, take a look at the newspaper industry, which is so fond of telling other people how their businesses should be run.

The International Publishing Corporation, which owns The Sun, issued a statement about that still struggling newspaper in November last year. The IPC declared that it intended to go on publishing The Sun after its guaranteed life was over in January 1968. This was the guarantee that Cecil King, boss of IPC, gave the Daily Herald when he took that over in 1961.

The Sun is in fact selling fewer copies each day than the Daily Herald — 1,206,000 at time of writing as against the Herald's 1,300,000 when it closed down. But by a rather sophisticated analysis IPC reckon that its new (2½ years old) baby is doing better than the dead newspaper; its readers are younger, more of them are women, more of them live in the “right” areas — all factors that appeal to advertisers.

What the IPC statement did not make explicitly clear was that The Sun’s continued' existence depended upon the unions' helping to cut production costs. That was where IPC showed its deceitful capitalist self.

For as Hugh Cudlipp, right hand man to Cecil King, made clear in a television interview, if the losses on The Sun (at present well over £1 million a year) are not cut in this way, then it will almost certainly not live beyond January 3rd, 1968.

Cecil King's antipathy for trade unions has become pretty clear during the last couple of years. His noisy newspaper the Daily Mirror, and The Sun as well, often attack unions for allowing or encouraging their members to slack, to produce too little, to strike.

Of course, the newspaper bosses are the last who should talk about this kind of thing. It is notorious that their workshops are “over-staffed”, their machines “over-manned”.

After the Second World War, when life seemed full of promise, the press lords gave in to the demands of trade unions on practically everything. The result is now that their packing and printing departments have to employ far more men than the actual production of newspapers warrants.

Cecil King is now trying to change that, in order, he says, to keep The Sun alive. Hugh Cudlipp has promised that whatever production changes may take place at The Sun, they will not be applied to IPC.

Apart from anything else, the unions would be right to mistrust that. Not so very long ago IPC closed down a whole new printing plant at Southwark because the unions would not agree to reduced manning. Only the very innocent can believe that if they had their way in this at The Sun, they would not seek to extend the principle.

The effect of IPC’s statement is typical of life under capitalism. Worker is now set against worker. The journalists, whose department will probably not have staff cuts, begin to murmur against the print and electrical workers, many of whom can expect to lose their jobs.

A.

Letters: A Long Way to Go (1967)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Long Way to Go

Sir: 

There is a great deal to be done both in continuing the pressure and education required to build a real Socialist Britain but also in alleviating the worst results of this free for all society in which it is usually the least fit that are most unable to look after themselves.

Enoch Powell's dictum of survival of the fittest is OK if you are healthy and in a high income group. It is because almost everyone is outside these two categories that an educated working class is so important. And it is here that the different working class organisations are so important.

I realise that there are differences in approach but with so few active, militant, politically aware Socialists I would have thought that finding and cultivating avenues of common cause and agreement were far more important than emphasising the differences.

It is because of this that the Socialist Medical Association was founded in 1936 and as it forms a focus for Socialist medical and lay workers, it allows for the production of plans for a real Socialist health system. We have no bans and prescriptions and this allows a wide variation of ideas and larger numbers of specialists to meet and discuss.

We are able lo advise a wide variety of working class organisations and as our own members come from many different groups we are able to spread our ideas widely.

Agreed that we have a long way to go: but if we all stood aloof (as unfortunately the SPGB does) from ‘main stream” politics then our society would have remained in the Middle Ages, with all the poverty, ill health and dominations by the Barons and Church.

M.S. 

London

Reply: 

The Socialist Party of Britain is prepared to cooperate with any other group which stands for socialism. This is why we have allied ourselves with our companion parties. M.S.. however, wants us to join in along with the “wide variety of working class organisations” operating in Britain. But where are all these political organisations which are supposed to have the interests of the working class at heart?

The only name our correspondent gives us is that of the ‘Socialist' Medical Association and he himself seems lo be in the unfortunate situation of both accepting our criticisms of the National Health Service and, at the same time, attempting lo support the SMA. This is, of course, an impossible feat because any analysis of the NHS necessarily involves an exposure of the SMA’s position. After all. they wrote themselves in their official journal only a couple of months ago that "everything now embodied in the National Health Service found its clearest expression and soundest advocacy in these pages". As for the complete lack of socialist understanding in the SMA, we need give only one example. One of their members recently wrote a flattering article on the health service in East Germany, praising it because its fundamental principle was that "the capacity to work will be protected by the Stale”’. Can't M.S. see that the State looks after the interests of the ruling class and is only concerned with the health of workers to the extent that it affects their working capacity and impairs their ability lo produce surplus value?

Finally. M.S. makes the point that “if all stood aloof (as unfortunately the SPGB does) from main stream’ politics and buried our heads in the sand then our Society would have remained in the Middle ages . . .” Clearly, as an argument, this is a non-starter. The Socialist Party far from standing aloof, is actively working for socialism. If we all did just that then it would not be a case of our still enduring feudalism, or even capitalism: instead we would have socialism here and now.

Editorial Committee

From a Kibbutznik

Sir: 

I have now been able to go carefully through the Socialist Standard. I have no important counter-criticism. I accept it as just about right. It is such complete Socialism that I would call it more than that really; it stands for my world-federal ideal I learned from H. G. Wells’ Shape of Things to Come long ago and which inspires me throughout life; it seems to be absolute humanism, and to be, in fact, what Marx called the last stage of full communism. I think it is all these things. I never knew you had such a full policy, and I think it utterly worthy in the extreme.

Even so, a great difficulty remains for me. All that is written in your journals is negative criticism, fully justified, with only rare, vague references to the constructive alternative. It is true there is no difference between Labour and Tory in Britain (in fact the position is utterly comical under Wilson today: he is a first rate capitalist!), that Russia and China are simply going in for state capitalism (this may be a bit more responsible than the private version, but it still has nothing lo do with the final stage of communism which Marx wanted, as you rightly suggest), and so on. But what is the programme for achieving full Socialism? The workers taking over everything, as stated in the Declaration of Principles, is far too vague as it stands.

I contend all the time, as a kibbutznik, that parliamentary government is a flop: as you say. parliaments should be abolished. Only direct democracy counts, not the indirect, voted-for representatives stuff, which just plays into the hands of the Establishment. But what is the immediate alternative? Do the workers one day refuse to go to work, march into the rich men's houses, take out the furniture, divide it up in their slum homes, set up workers' councils and run the factories as in Yugoslavia (alas. 1 fear the managerial talent is not at once available: the capitalists are skilled technicians, unfortunately, and few workers are), and hope lo have enough to make everyone fairly well off and happy? Alas, even in quite rich England, let alone poorer Spain and Peru. etc., production and transport would be in a wild muddle at once, and everyone would be in a ghastly, disorganised mess. Besides, the capitalists would start shooting. Are you for civil war? So. accepting the destructive side of your case. I now inquire for the constructive side of it. Where are the plans?

In this connection, I wonder what your attitude is to Anarchism? It seems to me that in their local self-government, without buying and selling internally, the kibbutzim have strong anarchist as well as localised-socialist elements in them. Their federations are like syndicates, nationally arranged, as suggested once in Spain, I believe, and begun to be carried out there till Franco killed them. Would you be inclined to take this as a pattern — local direct democracy leading to national workers’ organisation? If so, the kibbutzim would be giving you an excellent lead indeed.

It seems to me you have to build up somehow. A ready made over-night global Wellsian total socialism is just not practicable.

A. C. Ben-Yosef 

Door No Meron, Hagalil, Israel

Reply: 

Our correspondent rightly understands (though we wouldn’t put it the way he has) that the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain holds that Socialism can only be world-wide; that there is no essential difference between Labour and Tory in Britain; and that Russia and China are state capitalism. He goes on to ask the quite legitimate question; How will Socialism he established?

First of all we don’t of course suggest anything so ridiculous as dividing up the wealth of the rich. Nor do we think that Socialism will appear ready-made overnight.

Socialism will be the outcome of a process of social evolution that is going on now. The culmination of this process will be the capture of political power for Socialism by the working class and the consequent social revolution from capitalism to Socialism. It is capitalism that paves the way for Socialism. Capitalism has already brought into being a world-wide productive system that could provide a plenty for all and the people to run this system. What it has yet to bring into being is the desire for Socialism on the part of those who work for wages throughout the world. This is the only real barrier to Socialism today. If what our correspondent implies at one point is correct — if workers can’t run society without the capitalist class — then the time is not ripe for Socialism. Our answer to this is clear and the evidence for it can be easily seen by looking at the world in which we live: the working class do now, as industrial, agricultural, clerical and, yes, managerial workers, run society from top to bottom even if not in their own interest. The capitalist class play no role in production; they are superfluous. On the personal-level few are even '‘skilled technicians”. Let’s get this straight: it is the working class who run the world today without the help-of the capitalist class.

We are merely arguing that means of wealth production that are at present socially operated should also be socially owned and controlled, and that the people who run society today can and should — run it in their own interests.

But where are our plans? We have no detailed plans for Socialism. This is because Socialism can only be established by the working class once they have become socialist. It is up to those people around at the time to work out the exact forms of running social affairs in a Socialist society. It would be presumptuous and foolish of us today to predict the future. All we can do now is say where we think the general trends we see operating today are leading.

When a majority of workers have become Socialists they will organise for political power; then use this power to end private property in the means of wealth production, thus ending also their position as wage-slaves. This done, society can set about reorganising itself on a socialist basis, with production for use and free access for all to what has been produced. In such a society the government of people (and all that goes with it like armed forces, police, judges and jailers) will be unnecessary. Parliament as the means for controlling the machinery of government too will be unnecessary. But this does not mean that there will be no means for exercising democratic control over social affairs. The exact form of such democratic social control once again we can’t predict and don’t try to.

We must say, however, that in rejecting any form of election and delegation you are obviously going too far. Such a complex productive apparatus as exists today can only be controlled democratically by society through such means. If you find difficulty in envisaging world wide organisation and control of production consider that many organisations today are already world wide: General Motors, Royal Dutch Shell, World Health Organisation, International Postal Union, to mention a few. Socialist society will allow a great variety of forms of social control from the local to the world-wide. Beyond this we can’t go today.

We are opposed to Anarchism in all its many forms. At best its schemes are irrelevant for advanced industrial countries; at worst they are dangerous nonsense. Hie idea of a federation of co-operative communities, which has a long history, just isn’t practicable as a means of running the productive system of today. Everything points not to this but to social ownership and democratic social control.

Finally, and briefly, we are not for civil war. We don’t think that violence will be a part of the social revolution from capitalism to Socialism.

Editorial Committee

Greetings (1967)

Party News from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Members will be interested and pleased to learn that our comrade J. E. Roe of High Wycombe, once very active and now well into his eighties is recovering from a long illness and sends greetings to his many friends in the Socialist Movement.

That Yellow Metal again (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The yellow metal which, over the ages has been passionately hunted, coveted and murdered for is much in the news. Gold, Shakespeare's "Yellow slave" which "will make black white, foul, fair; wrong right, base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant"; "Will knit and break religions . . .  place thieves and give them title, knee and approbation, with Senators on the bench . . ."

Millions of words about it, mostly of denunciation but still it holds its place. Everyone wants it, including those who say its desirability is based on myth, and including Russia in spite of Lenin's jibe (borrowed, with modification, from Sir Thomas More) that it would come to be used for building public lavatories.

Of course there are exceptions to the mainstream of thought. In South Africa where gold production is the chief industry gold is worshipped as if it were the mainspring of civilisation and life itself.

Mr. Anthony Bambridge, business editor of the Observer (8.1.67) has had a go at putting it in its place under the title "The Mad Magic of Gold". He writes: "Gold is yellow and heavy. It is useful for filling teeth and not much else . . . 'It is a fetish', declared the Americans in 1933, the year before they once more pegged the dollar to gold. 'Dug up in South Africa, only to be buried in Fort Knox', said Keynes".

The implication of what he wrote is that the world would be better off without gold, though his immediate purpose was to attack Jacques Rueff, the "high priest of gold", adviser to General de Gaulle, who advocates that all countries should get back to the gold standard as it was operated in Britain and some other countries in the nineteenth century, the results of which, says Mr. Bambridge, "are likely to be too hideous to contemplate".

The controversy has blown up because a number of the monetary experts say the world is in danger of running into a trade decline and depression because of "lack of liquidity". Rueff and others of the experts deny this.

One aspect of the controversy has a very simple explanation. The American authorities have, for over thirty years, bought and sold gold at $35 an ounce. But because of recent trends of American trade and overseas spending gold has been flowing out of formerly huge American gold reserves and the idea has gathered strength that it may be possible to persuade or force the American Government to alter the gold price to, say $70 an ounce or even $100 an ounce. If the price were doubled to $70, every central bank and every hoarder in the rest of the world holding gold would find the dollar value of it doubled. So the authorities in France, Italy and some other countries have been acquiring all the gold they can in the hope that this will happen — they buy at $35 an ounce and hope to end up with holdings worth $70 an ounce. South Africa and Russia would also be among the jackpot winners. The private hoarders have been so busy that almost all of the gold mined in the past two years outside the Russian sphere has disappeared into private hoards.

Naturally the governments which have not much gold or which for other reasons, line up with the American unwillingness to raise the dollar price of gold, accuse the gold-rich governments of not playing the game — as if capitalists ever did anything else than pursue their own interests. The Financial Times, for example, (29.12.66) indignantly attacked the Italian Government for having piled up more gold than it could reasonably need for normal trading purposes; and Mr. Bambridge was equally scathing about de Gaulle's Government. The Financial Times argued that a country's legitimate liquidity needs are a reserve of gold and foreign currency no more than sufficient to meet any temporary excess of imports which cannot be balanced by exports and therefore has to be paid in cash; but Italy we are told was "acquiring far more than her proper share".

The same writer, however, proceeded to claim that the American and British governments are a special case: they are entitled to hold more than the amount prescribed for Italy (and France) because they are international bankers. To which, of course, the French and Italian governments can retort that as far as they are concerned the American and British international banker activities cannot end too soon.

Coming back to the view Mr. Bambridge quotes (and apparently shares) that gold is a fetish with little use, this is an old notion and one Marx had something to say about. He showed (in Capital, Vol. I chapter II) that the money commodity, whether gold or silver, is able to function as such because it is, in the first place, a commodity having value like other commodities. Without this it would not have come to be the commodity in which all other commodities express their value.

Marx mentioned John Locke, who thought that "the universal consent of mankind gave to silver . . . an imaginary value", and he quoted the pointed reply given by Jean Law, who asked. "How could different nations give an imaginary value to any single thing . . . or how could this imaginary value have maintained itself?"

But though the value of the money commodity silver, or, as in the modern world for the most part, gold, is as real as the value of other commodities, and capitalism needs the money commodity, that is not to say that there is any way in which its functioning can be made smooth and stable as so many economists have supposed it could. Capitalism works by alternative expansion and contraction, booming trade, crisis and stagnation. And in these phases the capitalist attitude to money goes through corresponding violent fluctuations. When trade booms the capitalist is anxious to turn his money into commodities to reap the harvest of expected profit. But when trade turns sour, it is money alone he wants to hold. As Marx put it:

"On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination, commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere : money alone is a commodity! As the heart pants after the fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth."(Capital, Vol. I, Kerr edition, p. 155).

So sometimes there appears to be too much money and at other times too little and there is no way of avoiding this.

Of course there is one method by which the world can rid itself of dependence on gold but not one of the monetary experts mentions it — by establishing Socialism. Production and distribution will then be directly and solely to meet human need, without trade, internal or international, without profit, payment or money.

Edgar Hardcastle

Gaspers: Bricks (1967)

Gaspers from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Bricks lying idle in factory yards all over the country represent well over 50,000 homes unbuilt at a time when the social need for better and more readily available housing is greater than ever before.” (M. G. K. Timperley, National Federation of Clay Industries director, 23.12.66.)

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“We should flatten Hanoi if necessary and let world public opinion go fly a kite.” (L. Mendel Rivers, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman 30.12.66.)

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“. . . the reason for the tally trade’s existence. The gap between needing and affording. Our affluence has never been as copper-bottomed as some people would like to think” (Shirley Lewis, on “Tally Woman”, Guardian 30.12.66.)

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“Chairman Mao not only belongs to you, but also to us and to the people of the whole world. You ought to be proud of him. He is the greatest man today." (Dr. Mohammed Kashif Al-Ghita, Chairman of Iraqi delegation to Peking. Reported in China Reconstructs, October 1966.)

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“People do get swept overboard, but they often get swept back again.” (M. Lionel Cox, Secretary of Hull Fishing Vessel owners’ Association—Sunday Times 8.1.67.)

Austria (1967)

Party News from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

After consultations among all the Socialist parties the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten is now officially one of the companion parties. As explained in the December Socialist Standard the League's official journal Das Wiener Freie Wort, has carried the same Declaration of Principles as the other parties since March last year. The third issue of their journal is now available from 52 Clapham High Street, London. SW4. Price 1s.

Russian Prisons (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the more abhorrent features of capitalism is its need for a penal system. Workers who through one reason or another prefer a life of crime to one of so called honesty, when caught, are subjected to varying periods of preventive detention in the name of law and order.

It is interesting however to see that this system not only applies to countries which are avowedly capitalist, but is also a feature of Soviet Russia. Rather embarrassing for those who would have us believe that Russia is busy building the new socialist society.

In an attempt to outdo what is described as “western decadence’’ the Russian penal system has recently been streamlined in the interest of efficiency. According to Sir Leslie Scarman, chairman of the Law Commission and leader of a recent legal delegation to the Soviet Union, “Russia’s imaginative use of prisoners in labour camps was something Britain could incorporate into its legal system.”

This report, which was summarised in a recent edition of the Guardian, quoted Sir Leslie as saying that the labour camps, which he preferred to call colonies, “Were making a positive contribution to Russia’s productivity plan” and that the “Emphasis was on training them for a job.”

Gone apparently are the repressive dogmas of uncle Joe Stalin, famous for his treatment of political opponents most of whom ended up in one or other of Sir Leslie’s “colonies”. A new era of professionalism has been adopted. Why allow perfectly fit units of production to rot in the cells of labour camps, when according to Sir Leslie they could be making a “positive contribution to Russia’s productivity”?

In all capitalist countries, including Russia, the efficient use of labour is essential to survival in the competitive nature of World capitalism. Sound economics, not sentiment, demand that Russia’s prison population be allowed to play a “positive” role in the Russian productivity effort.

It has been estimated that 75 per cent of all crime has an economic basis. Prisons are the end result of private property. How often is heard the legal platitude that “This court must protect private property” or, “Private property — no trespassing”. What is required is a fundamental change in the structure of society. The conversion of private property into common ownership would make crime redundant. In a society of free access to the means of life food, clothing, shelter, etc., the need to steal these things would be removed, for why should anyone take the time and trouble to steal what can be freely obtained?

R. J.

Class Society in Poland (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Gt. Britain holds to be false the claim that in Russia and East Europe have been established classless societies in which there is no exploitation of man by man. What exists there is a form of capitalism best called “state capitalism” in which a privileged minority exploit the wage-labour of the propertyless majority.

Despite years of propaganda, censorship and suppression the rulers have not been able to get everybody there to believe their claim. Milovan Djilas, as former Vice President of Yugoslavia himself once a member of the privileged class, is one of the best known demolishers of the myth. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1954 and jailed, he later wrote The New Class in which he argued that “a new class, previously unknown to history, had been formed”.

Now comes the news that there are a handful of people in Poland who also reject the claim that they live in a classless society. In 1966 they were expelled from the Communist Party and later tried and jailed. Their crime apparently was to circulate a document expressing their views. A summary of their views, written by two of them, appeared in the Polish émigré  journal Kultura at the end of August. Basing themselves on this, Solidarity (Vol. 4, No. 4) has been able to give a general account of their views.

They deny that Socialism exists in Poland, saying rather that what exists there is capitalism. State ownership there is “just another form of ownership” and the worker is no better off than in the avowedly capitalist countries. The real owners of the nationalized industries are, they argue, a group they call the “Central Political Bureaucracy . . . The worker is exploited because he is denied ownership rights. He’s got to sell his labour power in order to live". What he produces belongs to those who buy his labour power and exploit him, namely, the Central Political Bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is a new ruling class as it uses, for its own benefit, the workers' labour and product against them.

Although it is true that these people’s other political views are probably confused (after all the fact that Djilas declared himself a gradualist does not detract from his significance), what is important — and heartening — is to see that the Polish rulers have not been able to deceive everybody. It is also a sign of the awakening of the working class, so long subdued and intimidated. As time goes by the rulers in Russia and Bast Europe will find themselves increasingly under pressure, industrial and political, from the working class. We can expect to see the emergence of working class organisations which are independent of the bureaucracy. Of course these won't be socialist but, in the conditions of this part of the world, they would be a great step forward.

Adam Buick

The Extent of Poverty (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let us get one or two ideas straight first of all. Poverty is a conditions from which all workers suffer to some extent or another. It is a basic factor of working class existence, whether you are comparatively high or low-paid. Take the word at its full meaning “want of means” and you will see that our claim is justified, for any person who has to depend on a wage or salary for a living must have a restricted access to the means of life, and can never broaden the access sufficiently to enable him to live without the need to work if he wishes. “If poverty is relative” said Professor Townsend recently, “standards are largely determined by the income, wealth, living standards and expectations of the rich.”

How right he was. Yet because of a mixture of ignorance, confusion and petty snobbery, this important fact has been overlooked. And matters have not been helped by the arrival of ‘social security’ schemes since the end of the second world war; to the popular mind, poverty has become synonymous with destitution. The Labour Party must take no small share of the blame for fostering such an attitude. Their policy statement Labour and the New Society, published in 1950, carried the claim, for example, that “Destitution has been abolished.”

Well let us see how such a statement stands up to examination in the capitalism of the sixties. The Board of Inland Revenue report for 1963-4 showed between six and seven million people with a yearly income, before tax, of less than £275. Another 4½ million received between £300 and £500, and ten million were in the £500-£l,000 range. At the other end of the scale, about ten thousand people enjoyed (there is no other word for it) a yearly income of £15,000 or more. In fact an appraisal of the Board’s figures made by The Economist (26.2.65), suggested that two thirds of Britain’s population had no wealth worth reckoning at all.

So much for the cold hard statistics after centuries of reform and a post-war national insurance scheme, the like of which we have never seen before in this country. Now what does it all mean in terms of human suffering and degradation? You can take your pick from a mass of material appearing in the national press over the past year or two, which seems to have touched on most aspects of the misery of being poor. Running like a thread through all these articles, incidentally, is an implied astonishment that such problems still exist. Only the Socialist does not share the astonishment. The Guardian (18.7.64) for example, spoke of ‘a surprising number' of schoolchildren in some areas needing free meals at school; it mentioned also an increasing demand for local authority handouts of free clothing and shoes. Taking the Don Valley area of Yorkshire as only one instance:

In 1958-59, 200 applications for clothing and shoes were granted; in 1963-64 the figure was 500. In 1961, 2,325 children were receiving free meals; in 1962 this figure rose to 2,500.

It has been found that many truancies from school have been because the children had no shoes to wear. Having grown out of their old ones, their parents were often too poor to buy them a new pair. This point was made in The Poor and The Poorest, a report published at the end of 1965 by Professors Townsend and Abel-Smith. They defined poverty as ‘less than 140 per cent of the basic National Assistance scale, plus housing and other costs' and on this basis, estimated the number of poor people at nearly seven millions —a rise of two per cent in the ten years ending 1960.

In a letter to The Guardian (22.11.66), Professor Townsend severely criticised government departments for the inadequacy of their surveys on the poverty problem, and mentioned specially the question of nutrition. He pointed out that in the lowest income group families (under £15 a week), there was a protein deficiency in their diets of ten per cent and a calcium deficiency of sixteen per cent. In down-to-earth terms, this means meals of baked beans and chips or bread and jam for your children, and virtually nothing for yourself, like the young mother mentioned by Jean Stead (Guardian, 2.2.66):

. . .  who is 28, looks as if she was once very pretty, but now she is worn and undernourished and her top teeth are missing. She lives on tea and cigarettes, like most mothers in poor families, and rarely has a proper meal. Cigarettes kill the appetite.

So we can begin to appreciate the all-pervasiveness of the poverty condition; there is not a single aspect of our lives it will not touch — and degrade — to some extent or another, depending on our particular position in the income scale. Food, clothing, housing, the bare necessities, and the amenities like holidays or a night at the cinema, nothing can escape. The whole quality of our life suffers.

There are those who have even let go of a once-tenuous hold on impoverished respectability and become ‘drifters’, homeless ones often sleeping rough, unable to compete in the struggle to make both ends meet. An official report published last November (which was criticised for being too low in its estimate) mentioned about 13,500 people who were without accommodation when they applied for National Assistance during a week at the beginning of December 1965. With a priggish disdain so typical of that paper, Guardian writer John Fairhall refers to them as ‘derelicts swilling about at the very bottom of the barrel.’

And having told us about the evil in no uncertain terms, what answer have the experts? The usual palliatives are offered and impertinently described as ‘fundamental’ by their authors; yet none of them could do other than keep the poor that way. For example: '. . .  more decent housing for low-wage families at rents they can afford’ (Abel-Smith, Weekend Telegraph, 25.11.66). The truth is that like so many of capitalism’s problems, this one is gigantic. Eighteen per cent of all households in the U.K. are said to be living below National Assistance levels, and such is the depth of their poverty, that it would cost about £500 millions a year just to relieve the effects on their children. In face of such terrifying facts, the “experts” have no answer.

As we said at the beginning, poverty goes hand in hand with wage slavery at whatever income level. True, not every worker suffers as much as those we have mentioned, but capitalism exerts a downward pressure on all of us and no government can do very much about it. Captured in the phraseology of Townsend (a long-standing Fabian and Labour supporter) the score reads something like this:

It will be one of the supreme paradoxes of history if social inequalities become wider instead of narrower, if poverty becomes more widespread, during the term of office of the present Labour Government. Yet the likelihood of this happening is far from remote.

Enough said.

Eddie Critichfield

A Plea for the Human Race (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well we have taken the first steps into 1967 and by now most people have probably forgotten the good wishes and the resolutions with which they welcomed another new year and have settled down to the same old grind.

Nineteen sixty six, let us remember, was supposed to be “make or break” year. So far, the Labour government have not committed themselves on whether we made or broke; like most of their instant propaganda slogans, “make or break” is something they are trying to forget. In its place, they are assuring us that 1967 will definitely be the year (just as 1966 was going to be) when the British balance of payments comes into balance.

Workers who think that the international finances of the British capitalist class have some effect on their lives will be impressed by Labour’s assertion that in 1967 they will also crack the Rhodesian crisis, take a big step towards joining the Common Market and solve many of the social problems, like destitution and poor housing, at home. Workers who think like that will be impressed by anything.

They were probably deeply impressed, for example, by an interview the Prime Minister gave to James Margach. the Sunday Times political correspondent, which was published on New Year’s Day. Wilson first said, in effect, that his government had got away with an unprecedented confidence trick on the working class:

Not many people in July would have said that we could have got to the end of the first six months of total restraint with the high degree of success we have achieved . . . the wages policy for the first six months has been carried through without a single strike on a wages claim . . .

There is no need to add anything to this; it is adequate enough comment on the docility of the majority of the trade unions in the year of Labour government grace of 1966. But more follows. Wilson went on to say what effect he thought his government’s policies had had:

. . .  the cutting out of waste —- wasteful expenditure, waste in the boardroom and a growing awareness of the need to cut out waste in the use of labour.

It is clear that Wilson hopes 1967 will see more of what he calls the “shake out and application of economic methods to management”. This may be fine for shareholders and for politicians but not so fine for those who are shaken out and who have the economic methods of management applied to them.

What this means in direct terms is that thousands — perhaps millions — of people will be out of work, will have to take jobs at lower pay, or grab one of the few places at a government training centre on a miserly grant in the hope of finding another job when they finish their course. Or perhaps it means tearing up a family’s roots and moving them and all they have to a place where another job may be found.

It need surprise nobody that this is happening under a Labour government, who somewhere in their history have had supporters who hoped to build a world free of unemployment and who thought only Tory mine owners could properly be concerned with economic management. Labour is now a fully fledged party of capitalism, standing proudly and openly for capitalism modern, automated, shaken out, economically managed.

Why, it may be asked, the hurry? An unavoidable feature of capitalism is that goods and services are produced for sale. The profits which are realised when goods are sold go to the people who provide the capital - the investors, who invest their money precisely because they hope to get a profit. If the investors think their profit is in doubt they will usually withdraw their capital, very often in a rush. The Labour government have spent some time assuring the investors that they have no objection to profits and to make the point even clearer they have indulged in the customary juggling with taxation relief and allowances to provide what they hope will be the only incentives investors appreciate to sink their money in certain industries and areas.

But if the investors are concerned about selling their goods at a profit, it follows that they must be concerned about two other aspects of this — the price the goods can be sold at and the cost of their production. When the market is easy and the demand is high prices are high also and there is consequently little need to worry overmuch about the costs of production. When the opposite is happening — when the market is depressed, as it is in many fields at the moment — there is a severe pressure upon production costs and the employers are continually looking for ways of reducing them.

Here Labour's doctrine of economic management, and of cost effectiveness, comes into its own. Cost effectiveness means hard bargaining at every stage in buying whatever is needed for production. It means haggling with the suppliers of every nut and bolt, every envelope, every elastic band. It means pricing everything down to three decimal places of a penny. It also means hard bargaining with the unions over the cost of that most vital part of the productive process — labour power.

This is where the wage freeze comes in, as Labour's help in backing up the employers in their making a stand, at this time of troubles for British capitalism, over wages. It is Labour’s encouragement to the employers, to be cost conscious over wages as over everything else.

There is no end of this in sight. In 1967 the freeze, under whatever name, will continue and so will Labour’s policy of making British industry grudge every penny it spends on production. There will, as part of this drive, be more schemes of merging companies to bring about economies in production and to cut out duplicated research and administration. A by-product of these mergers will be the forming of larger and more powerful opponents for the unions to face. Labour have already successfully carried through their merger policy in the aircraft industry and their Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, under their new convert Sir Frank Kearton, is only just getting into its stride. When it does, it will give something to think about to those old Labour men who thought their party was opposed to cartels and monopolies which to them stood for capitalism impersonal and ruthless.

All of this is quite normal as far as capitalism goes. The balance sheets will probably look healthier for it and there may be a few more cigars smoked at the annual general meetings of some companies. There will also probably be a lot more votes for Harold Wilson. But somewhere in all this there are a lot of human beings; what about them?

Nobody has yet thought up a productive method which can do without human beings; even Wilson has not been able to dream up a future which does not have men and women. Automation and redeployment may move humans about, it may take them from one industry and put them into another (usually with not as great an effect upon overall production as the planners and the scientists claim) hut it cannot eliminate them altogether.

The trouble with human beings, as anyone who has mixed with them knows, is that they are — human beings. They are too often different from each other; they have different tastes, capacities, abilities. Some of them have what can only be called whims and foibles. They are really very tiresome.

Capitalism does not, and must not, see human beings like that. From its beginnings it has had the need to flatten individuals, as far as production and exploitation are concerned, into the same mould. The story of capitalism has been the story of the death of one individual craft after another, of the refinement of productive techniques and of the progressive separation of man from the things he makes. The first crude steam engine was part of this process and so is the most recent computer.

To capitalism human beings are units on the production line, just like nuts and bolts although needing different handling. They are part of the costs of production, a column in a ledger, a hole in a punched card, a blip on a computer tape. Capitalism tries to dehumanise men. At the moment there is enough in man to resist; so far we are not automatons.

But the pace is quickening. If the sorting machine throws out the card because the hole is in the wrong place, if the blip on the tap reads off the wrong data, then the principles of capitalism’s economic management say that human beings are not profitable to employ. The computer takes care of the rest; it makes up the final wage packet, it works out the redundancy pay. it deletes the name from the payroll.

At one time it was usual for workers to be laid off after a market had started to decline. Things are different now. The modern company, in good times, as well as bad. is always looking at its payroll, always asking itself who can be dispensed with, what further cuts can be made. Most up to date firms —the sort which Harold Wilson likes — have their own departments, staffed by earnestly spectacled young graduates, to work all this out for them. If not, there are plenty of firms outside who specialise in just this work.

The neatest and most accurate way of describing this way of treating human beings is degradation. The Labour Party are the disciples of this degradation and this is the end of what they look back on as their glorious history.

But millions of workers, shaken out and degraded, vote Labour, don’t they? Here is the unkindest cut of all. The very people who suffer this degradation — the holes in the cards, the blips on the tape — do not realise it or, if they do, will admit to seeing little wrong with their treatment. Yet they alone have the power to end it all and to free themselves so that they can begin to live like human beings

Ivan.

The Passing Show: Thoughts on Youth and Age (1967)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

When you’re in your teens. forty is such a long way off, you can't begin to imagine what your life will be like then. It seems such a great age, that perhaps you secretly think you’ll never reach it. And as for sixty, seventy or eighty — quite inconceivable. Yet the population of Great Britain is said to be ‘growing older’. That is, the proportion of pensioners to the rest is increasing— old people arc being kept alive longer than they used to be. So, capitalism permitting, the youngsters of today are the oldsters of tomorrow.

Now there's no particular virtue in being young or old, though some people (like Alan Freeman or Wilfred Pickles) may try to suggest that there is; "'Ave some respect fer yer elders!” was yelled often enough at children in the thirties, and ranks almost as absurd as that baffling commandment “’Ave some respect fer the dead!" hissed at us as we played our game of marbles in the gutter, oblivious of a passing hearse. Respect for the dead seemed a contradiction in terms, but as for our elders, perhaps they thought that survival alone in the days before the war justified their demand. Or was it perhaps the desperate clutching at something intangible—a last plea for some sort of recognition before the harsh world of capitalism turned its back on them for good?

In those days, little boys were still told to be seen and not heard, but that’s something we hear much less of nowadays, because little boys are not only seen, but are often determined to be heard as well. Why is this? Well, capitalism of the sixties differs superficially from that of thirty years ago. It’s as if the ‘age of youth’ has burst upon us like a storm cloud; every other advert features someone in their early twenties. “It’s great to be young and with it,” is the theme that’s hammered home, but not just for the sake of it. The ‘young' market is worth many millions, which it certainly was not in the old days. A 1959 survey by Dr. Mark Abrams, for instance, estimated that those between thirteen and twenty-five were drawing about £1,480 millions a year in wages. He mentioned the manufacturers’ ‘problems’ in trying to appeal to the (then) new market, and added that “. . . there is now a business as well as a moral and psychological necessity to understand young people”.

Which gives us our first clue to the reason for the post-war switch in values — if such they can be called. What with the technical developments boosted by the war and the labour shortage which has persisted in Britain more or less ever since, young workers are in demand as their parents seldom were. It’s your money they’re after, and to that end they will encourage you to speak your mind. You, Mr. and Miss 13-25, are the guinea pigs of their market research. In fact, as far as the manufacturers of certain types of goods are concerned, you are their market, and goodness knows how they’d get along without you now.

Add that to the undoubtedly greater importance of youngsters in the productive processes of capitalism, and the pace of modern existence with the accent on youthful fitness to withstand it, and it is not altogether surprising that the spotlight plays so persistently upon youth. Some think that the world is their oyster — that is, if they take too much notice of what the newspapers say. But it’s still very much a capitalist world, and the oyster is there for the lucky few, young or old, who own the means of life. Most boys and girls have to work for a living after they leave school, and that means the usual problems of getting by.

And what about the attitudes of the young towards modern society? Are they really such rebels, and do they differ in this respect so much from their elders? True, teenagers often do not see eye to eye with their parents on such matters as jobs, pocket money, sexual life, and so on (This last aspect of junior’s conduct is a constant source of horrified criticism; sour, grapes some say). Many have joined protest movements like CND, Anti-Apartheid etc. Their parents in the thirties joined the PPU, anti-fascist fronts and the like, and felt every bit as strongly about them.

Perhaps the outlook of youth can sometimes be called ‘unconventional’, but that’s nothing new. What matters is that it has never up to now been sufficiently unconventional to start questioning the very basis of our social system ; for it is the sad truth that objections to the Socialist case are much the same, whatever the age of the heckler at our public meeting. Young people generally accept capitalism, though like the rest of the working class, they kick against its effects at times. Professor F. Musgrove, of Bradford Institute of Technology, was nearer the truth than perhaps he realised, when he summed up the results of a survey in this way: —

No doubt there are youthful 'contra- cultures’ which support values which differ from, even invert, the values of the adult world . . .  But the broad picture of (Western) Youth highlights the continuities of outlook and belief between adolescents and their elders. (Guardian 22.4.66).

It is the Socialist who insists that the private property basis of society is the cause of the world's ills, and that only the common ownership of the means of life will end them. That is why our Party makes no false distinctions between young and old in its ranks —- the need for Socialist understanding is vital to everyone, irrespective of his age. Young people we are of course delighted to have join us, but there will be no segregation of them into a special ‘Section’, with all the sickeningly patronising attitudes so typical of the other parties. In the Socialist Party they have equal rights with every other member from the day of their enrolment.

We have tried to show that there is no intrinsic virtue in being young, old or anything else. The whole question must be viewed in its social context, and today that means within the bounds of capitalism, geared to the production of goods for sale, and the profit motive. Youngsters have become more important within this setup, while at the other end of the scale, old people rot out their remaining days on the scrapheap, though many of them could still make a valuable contribution to the running of a sane system. It would no doubt be a different story if the ruling class could find a way to use old age pensioners as a profitable source of labour power.

But capitalism is a wasteful and oppressive system for workers of all ages. It frustrates us at twenty, gives us ulcers at forty, and makes us apathetic and resigned at sixty-five, if we last that long. Of course there are many differences between young and old, and obviously their needs and capabilities differ, but it is capitalism which fosters the spurious divisions, and encourages animosities between various age groups. Whatever our age, we all have an overriding interest in the establishment of Socialism. Then, there would be no earthly reason that all of us should not be able to work harmoniously together, and in that sense forget our ages.

E. T. C.