Let’s have free access (1971)

Editorial from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Abolish money? That’s impossible.” Is it? Surely all we need to produce wealth are human beings who are prepared to work and materials from nature. So if it is impossible to abolish money, it cannot be because money is an essential ingredient of the production process.

Before we go any further let us establish what money is. The metal discs and coloured paper which people carry around with them are not money. They are only almost worthless tokens for the real thing— gold. Gold of course is itself wealth in that it is the product of human labour on nature-given material. This is an important point since many people assume that money itself is not wealth, but merely a voucher entitling a person to so much wealth of his choice.

Money is useful wherever wealth is exchanged. Exchange is a simple word whose meaning should be clear —when things are exchanged one is given in return for the other—but it is commonly confused with distribution. When things are distributed they are not exchanged; they are merely being taken from one place to another. The work involved in this is strictly speaking part of the process of producing wealth. Money, then, does not distribute wealth. Wealth is distributed by men loading and driving lorries or trains or ships or planes.

Perhaps this confusion arises because the word “Distribution” means sharing-out as well as dispersing and so fits in well with the mistaken view that money is a voucher entitling a person to such-and-such a share of the wealth that has been produced.
Historically, the most common kind of exchange has been that of equivalents and this is the only kind that need concern us now. So much wheat would be given in return for so many sheep or so many pots in return for so much cloth. This process of barter is cumbersome and becomes impractical when exchange grows to any extent. At this stage the need is felt for something that can be exchanged for anything else — money, for that is what money is, an item of wealth that can be exchanged for any and every other item of wealth. We can now see why money is itself, and must be, wealth. For, with the exchange of things of equal value, nobody is going to give his wheat or sheep or pots or cloth in return for something that is not worth the same.

Exchange implies something else, too. It implies that the wealth to be exchanged is owned by different people. After all, if one person or one community owned all the wheat as well as all the sheep, the question of exchanging them just would not arise. Exchange presupposes the private ownership of wealth.

This is why the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production and distribution will mean the end of exchange and so the disappearance of money. All the wealth that is produced, as well as the means and instruments for producing and distributing it, will belong to the whole community so that the problem will be simply to distribute it to where it is needed. This is just a question of organisation. When the wealth has reached the stores then people can freely take of it what they need. This — free access — is our alternative to money.

We are witnessing how the other alternative works in the present upset over the introduction of a decimal coinage in this country. The official propaganda, a vastly expensive advertising campaign, has been directed at getting us to understand the new system and to accept it. We have seen the photo-strips of the crotchety old lady being won round to a decimal enthusiast. We have had, coming through the door with the detergent coupons, the booklet from the Decimal Coinage Board.

And we have been told that it is all to do with efficiency. Decimals will be easier to work, the system will save money in the long run. It will bring the British currency somewhere into line with those of other countries and, as we point out elsewhere in this issue, is a step towards a common European currency. What this amounts to is that decimal coinage is an efficiency measure designed to benefit British industry and commerce, by which is meant the owners of industry, by which is meant the British capitalist class.

It has yet to be demonstrated, how “efficiency” helps the other side, the people who have to bumble through the shops with the unaccustomed coinage, the people who have to worry about whether they are being swindled in the changeover, the people whose lives depend on the wage which comes in the form of money. The interests of these people — the working class, the vast majority of society — are not concerned with “efficiency” or export drives or international trading tie-ups or rearrangements of currencies.

What the change to decimals does show up is the basic inefficiency of capitalism. The apologists for the system tell us that money is itself an efficient thing, that it oils the wheels of production and distribution. Yet here we have had a situation in which those same apologists have been telling us that money is a hindrance, that the different currency systems lead to inefficiency and we need a huge, expensive, time consuming propaganda campaign and a mighty upheaval to adjust it all.

Yet if we are interested in efficiency (as we are) there is something which is of top priority. If we want a society where wealth can move around the world freely, where it can be produced as human beings need it, we must think about a system which excludes money. The capitalist social system hinders distribution and restricts production. Its priority is not efficiency but profit for a minority. It must be swept away and replaced by Socialism, the world of free production and access.

World at Work: Slaughter of South American Indians for Oil (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slaughter of South American Indians for Oil

Oil has been called ‘black gold’. Not an inapposite comparison with the precious metal since it has meant the enrichment of a few, has been fought over by many and has reduced human beings to the most degraded levels of behaviour in the endeavour to get their hands on it.

The blood-stained hand of capitalist violence is now poised ready to deal a death-blow to a small tribe of South American Indians in Colombia. The systematic attempt at extermination of the Guahibo tribe in the Planas region by the Colombian army and settlers came to light as the result of certain Colombian clerics writing for help to the World Council of Churches. Subsequent enquiries on behalf of the Sunday Times (15 November 1970) has substantiated the truth of the letter, which the Colombian Government at first tried to discredit.

To the misfortune of the Indians “their” lands may have oil underneath and it is for this that they are being slaughtered. Many of the seven thousand Indians are virtually the slaves of the settlers and their condition and treatment at the hands of these unscrupulous men is very harsh. Their numbers are also being decimated by disease and malnutrition.

A number of Indians took refuge in the Jungle with a former police inspector sympathetic to them and resisted the settlers with violence. This seems to have given the Colombian government an excuse to crack down on them. As one settler put it: “There will not be any peace in this region until the Indians are gone”— a sentiment echoed all over the world today and in the past to justify the grabbing of the world’s wealth by a few and one to be heard in the future for as long as capitalism lasts.

Trading in the sword for a plough-share

To banish strife and discord from among the nations of the world, as capitalist politicians might put in their more lyrical and biblically inspired moments, has long been one of their dreams, and it was at one time believed that all that had to be done to achieve this happy state was to liberalise trade between countries by abolishing tariffs, import quotas and other barriers to commerce. The principal exponents of this doctrine in Britain were the Liberals. A new variation on this antique theme has been composed by an international lawyer named Samuel Pisar and he has dedicated it to Russia in a book called Commerce and Coexistence.

In Pisar’s opinion the best way of countering and prevailing over the threat posed by Russia is to demonstrate the West’s superior capacity for economic progress. Presumably what Pisar has in mind is that when and if the Russian consumer tastes the fruits of American affluence (no doubt Ralph Nader and Vance Packard can give them some advice on what to choose) the aggression in those breasts will be soothed and lowering brows unknitted by having a good splurge.

So far from bringing peace to the world it is trade and commerce which give rise to the tensions and conflicts between nations, the military conflict of war merely being an extension of the economic struggle going on all the time. One 19th century economist bluntly stated that “When goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.” Sebastian de Ferranti, chairman and managing director of the electronics firm of Ferranti, also used strong language in describing the real situation when he referred to the support which Britain gives the U.S.A. in a speech at the opening of a new plant in Dundee. “It is an extraordinary state of affairs where our enemy in these advanced fields is encouraged and given financial support to come particularly to Scotland to compete with us” (Times, 23 April 1969). In the same article it was also reported that he had said that in the more advanced fields of technology Britain had only one enemy, that was America with whom we were at war.

The economic causes of the First and Second World Wars have been well documented for all to read, as have the admissions of capitalist statesmen on this subject. Perhaps when Pisar takes off his rose coloured spectacles he may discover this too.

Conserving Conservation

As might be expected in European Conservation Year, no positive steps have been taken to preserve the natural environment from further depredations of industrial expansion. In Britain we have been regaled with news that members of the capitalist class, anxious to make more profit and to help their sacred cow, the balance of payments, are turning their rapacious eyes to one of Britain’s most beautiful areas, Snowdonia, with a view to open-cast mining.

So far all that has been done to this end by Rio Tinto Zinc International Mining Co., the industrial concern involved, has been the placing of two applications for mining tests to be carried out at Coed-y-Brenin Forest and in the estuary of the Mawddach river.

There is considerable unemployment in the area and RTZ are playing upon this to gather local support. Furthermore exploitation of national natural resources could be said to be in the “national interest” by helping the balance of payments which is the concern of British capitalism generally. One of the ploys regularly used in getting new and controversial industrial projects accepted is to emphasise the increase of jobs, and to the unemployed this probably has very great appeal. To the socialist it reveals the degradation and servility of the worker in welcoming his own exploitation and the destruction of natural and social amenities which he and his fellow workers enjoy on rare occasions and then only briefly as a respite from the tedium of everyday life in capitalist society.

What is ultimately at stake here is the entire concept of national parks as areas of countryside of outstanding and unique natural beauty set aside for leisure and recreational purposes and accessible to anyone who cares to visit them. The Conservationists fighting the threat may win the day, but it will not be the last battle they will have to fight against the rapacity of capitalism.

The Elusive Millionaire

They seek him here, they seek him there,
The pressmen seek him everywhere.
Is he in Nassau or has he come back?
Or is he in Vegas playing Black Jack?

The most publicised man in the world today is an American multi-millionaire who has been seen by very few people during the past 13 years (he was last photographed in public in 1957) and has attracted more sensational publicity by trying to avoid it, so it seems, than any film star getting divorced for the umpteenth time.

Howard Hughes first gained a reputation as a film producer and then as a record breaking aeroplane pilot and designer. His fame now largely rests upon his withdrawal from, and lack of contact with, the world outside his hotel suite. The story of Howard Hughes’ career is not the usual romantic one of a man who went from rags to riches but of a man with a wealthy father who went from riches to super riches. No doubt Hughes could always have counted on his father to supply him with a pile of dollars on which to have a soft landing in the event of a fall.

Today Howard Hughes is the owner of a vast business empire whose value runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. To help him run it he employs an army of minions— lawyers, accountants and other experts, such is the complexity of its financial structure and so extensive are its ramifications.

Some of his minions were involved in a "who controls what” dispute which broke out (or, at least became publicly known) early in December over his Las Vegas gambling operations. Hughes, the only one who could settle the dispute, was reported to have gone to the Bahamas. He is said to have disappeared mysteriously on a previous occasion at a time of crisis in his business empire. At one stage the governor of Nevada intervened and personally contacted Hughes. No doubt the break up of Hughes’ gambling and other interests in the state could have had serious repercussions, there, since Hughes is the owner of numerous gambling houses, the state’s largest landowner and one of the largest employers (Times 7 December 1970) as well as having other property interests there.

Howard Hughes’ fortune, like the entire wealth of the rest of the American capitalist class, and elsewhere for that matter, is solely deprived from the exploitation and dispossession of the vast majority of the people by whose labour wealth in all its forms is produced.

The extremes of luxurious living and destitution can nowhere be more clearly seen than in America. Howard Hughes is just one of many Americans possessed of immense wealth, perhaps it can all best be summed up in these words "One man’s wealth is many men’s poverty”.

Spectator

The Role of Money (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

We learn at an early age that money plays an important role in our lives. Even the toddler knows that coins must be handed over the counter before he can have an ice-cream. Later we find that money, or the lack of it, will dictate the standard of our living accommodation and degree of education; it will even affect our medical treatment.

It is useless to enter the supermarket with an empty purse, though on its shelves are displayed the very items we most urgently need; these have not been primarily produced as useful articles but as commodities to be sold at a profit. Access to them is obtained only by way of the special commodity in which the value of all others is expressed — money.

Money is familiar as a means of payment and exchange, but in capitalist society it is the medium by which the necessities of life are rationed to the great majority of people so that they must retain their position as wage workers. Conversely it is also the medium through which the owning class pockets surplus value.

How then do we get money?

The privileged minority who owns the means for production and distribution — the land, factories, communications, etc. — get money from rent, interest and profit. They do not need to work.

The vast majority of people, about 90 per cent, possess only their ability to work The members of this working class must sell that ability, their labour power, to obtain money in the form of wages. Their labour is the source of all wealth yet access to the products of that labour is rationed by the size of their pay packets.

Though many look with envy at the better social conditions of higher paid workers the rights of the truly wealthy, the owning class, are seldom questioned.

“And why should they be?” Argues the capitalist. “I supply the machinery and raw materials and provide jobs for workers. The profits are justly mine and they get their share in wages".

But what are wages? Labour power is itself a commodity, bought and sold in the manner of all other commodities, and wages are its price.

Also in common with other commodities the value of labour power is determined by the average socially necessary labour time needed in production. Wages will be generally sufficient to keep a worker, and his family, at a standard demanded by prevailing social conditions. Workers whose labour is expensive to replace and maintain will command higher wages than those paid to the unskilled labourer.

Just as the working class is dependent on wages so the capitalist cannot make a profit without the employment of workers. When the capitalist buys labour power he gets a bargain, for this commodity has the unique capacity to create a value greater than its own.

Workers sell their mental and physical energies to an employer in return for wages. Then, for specified amounts of time, they work in his factory, operating his machinery on his raw materials. Over a given period the amount realised on the sale of the finished commodities will be greater than the cost of wages even after taking into account the cost of the raw materials and machinery. It is only labour power that can actually expand value. Only part of the workers’ labour time is needed to create a value equivalent to their wages; over the remaining time their unpaid labour is creating surplus value to be appropriated by the employer.

From this surplus value, now in the form of money capital, the capitalist can buy new machinery and expand his labour force so that an increased amount of surplus value can be created. However, expansion in the production of any commodity will only continue while market conditions are favourable. When sales fail to realise sufficient profit there will be a cut back in production, even if the commodity is a food crop and people go hungry.

Modern capitalism is a complex system and every individual capitalist may not always make a profit; but it is through their ownership of the means for production as a class that they are able to appropriate the wealth produced by the working class.

Every worker as an individual does not produce surplus value, it is in fact a social process. Workers co-operate to perform all of the tasks necessary to the running of capitalism, and it is as a class that they produce all wealth.

The capitalist mode of production has played a vital role in man’s social evolution. From it has come the ability to mass produce but paradoxically the profit motive prevents the realisation of production in abundance.

Is capitalism, as many would have it, the best of all possible worlds? Fortunately the answer is an emphatic No! There is a basic contradiction between social production and private ownership of the means for production.

When the working class understands its position in society it can, by way of the ballot box, perform the task of abolishing private property and take control of the means for production on behalf of all mankind. In other words Socialism will be established as soon as the vast majority of people want it.

With the means for production owned in common by the whole community production will be for use, not sale at a profit, with human needs the only criteria as to what is useful. With production geared to human needs the wasteful elements of capitalism such as advertising, built-in obsolescence and machinery for war will disappear.

Men will work in harmony as free individuals to produce all of the goods and services required by society and will partake of them according to their needs.

When all that is on and around the earth is owned in common by all of its inhabitants; when commodity production has given way to the production of articles for their usefulness and buying and selling is no more, the only possible part that money can play will be as a museum relic.

P. D.

Obituary: Stanley Killingbeck (1971)

Obituary from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our comrade Stanley Killingbeck of Westminster Branch has died accidentally as a result of a dental operation. Stan Killingbeck was 48 and had been a member since 1954. He worked in various parts of the country as a telephonist and always argued the Socialist case and sold Socialist literature. His help in the struggle for Socialism will be missed.

Decimalisation (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Towards a European Money System
Whatever difficulties people may meet with in handling the metric currency changes on 15 February the changes themselves will have no effect at all on the main operations of the British monetary system or its standing in world currencies. New names will be given to some old coins, and three new ‘coppers’ will appear, the new 2p, 1p, and ½p but the total amount of ‘copper’ coins, about £200 million, will not be altered on D day, nor will the notes in circulation, about £3,660 Million. One change has however already been introduced which distorts somewhat the Bank of England’s weekly figures of note circulation. This was in November 1970 when £96 Million of ten shilling notes ceased to be legal tender, thus dropping out of the Bank of England’s note figures, having been replaced by the same quantity of the ten shilling (50p) ‘silver’ coins.

After D day, as before, the Pound will still have the same exchange rate with the dollar (about $2.40), and with the rest of the currencies inside and outside the European Economic Community.

This does not mean that the changes have no great significance; this will only become apparent some years ahead if Britain joins the European Six and if the Six themselves succeed in setting their, at present deadlocked, negotiations about moving towards a single European currency.

The D day changes are a first step aimed at an eventual situation in which there will be only one currency covering the whole of Europe, just as the dollar covers the whole of the USA and the rouble the whole of Russia.

The 1957 Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (Belgium, France, Western Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Holland) did not itself provide for a single European currency but only for the co-ordination of financial policies. Since then efforts have been made towards unifying the currencies, culminating in a conference of the Six at the end of 1970 to consider a report drawn up by a committee under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister of Luxembourg (The Werner Report). The conference ended in disagreement but the negotiations will go on.

The Werner Report aimed at achieving a unified currency in 1980, to be preceded by an immediate agreement to re-direct to narrow limits the freedom of the six governments to change the exchange rates of their currencies. The breakdown of the conference took place over seemingly unimportant differences of opinion about the speed of progress to unification (the French government wanted it to be regarded as “a desirable object to be achieved in the long run”); about whether agreement on currency should come before or after agreement on other economic questions; and whether a central institution should be set up to handle the currency; but behind this are deep conflicts of interest of the dominant capitalist groups in different countries.

One basic cause of disagreement concerns the nature of the EEC. It was stated as long ago as 1958 by Professor Hallstein, former West German Foreign Secretary and President of the Common Market Commission:

  We are not in business to provide tariff preferences or to establish a discriminatory club to form a larger market to make us richer, or a trading block to further our commercial interests. We are not in business at all, we are in politics.

What Hallstein meant was that the aim was the creation of a Europe governed by a European government, an aim to which the French government has all along been opposed. Its relevance to the question of a single European currency is that it is impossible to have a single currency without a central government to control it. As Samuel Brittan put it in the Financial Times (16 November 1970):

  Monetary union and a common currency imply a common Budget, political union and some form of European Government.

This is not just a disagreement about some abstract question of “National sovereignty”: underlying it is the conflict of interests between the trading position of high cost French industry. In the past ten years prices in France have been rising half as fast again as prices in Germany—enough to make many French products uncompetitive in European and world markets. The remedy was to devalue the franc by 11 per cent in 1969, equivalent to a reduction of price of that amount to foreign buyers of French goods. German exports were booming to such an extent that in the same year the German government was able to raise the exchange rate of the German mark by 9 per cent and still hold most of their markets.

The fear of French capitalists is that a centrally controlled unified European currency would be dominated by German interests with their much stronger industrial and financial resources. Even the interim scheme proposed by the Werner Report, with its restriction of changes of exchange rates to 1.2 per cent up or down, would rule out any further effective devaluation of the franc.

The position of British exporters as regards the abnormally rapid rise of costs and the need to resort to devaluation of the pound (the devaluation in 1967 was 14 per cent) is similar to that of the French. Yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer has pledged the Heath government to accept whatever currency arrangements the Six accept before the entry of Britain into the EEC. Hence the determination of the Heath government to curb the rise in prices, and cut costs of production through the campaign against “excessive” wage increases.

It remains to be seen what sort of compromise the Six will reach about immediate currency arrangements and about the date of an eventual unified currency system for Europe.

Edgar Hardcastle

Northern Ireland 1970 - What price civil rights (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Predictably, as 1970 ended, the communications media in N. Ireland, took us over the ground we had travelled in 1970. It was a sad year for the working class and as the T.V. cameras made us relive the events so recently passed we were reminded of the graveyard, the prison cell and, generally, the hate-scene that was Ulster 1970.

Certain names cropped up repeatedly — the political dramatis personae of the grim year just passed. These were the people who were asked by the newspapers, the T.V. networks and the radio commentators to comment on events of yesterday and predict those of tomorrow. These were the new “stars” of the political scene whose fame—or notoriety, dependant on the point-of-view of the appraiser—had emerged from or been consolidated by, the events of 1970. They looked out at us from our T.V.screens or laughed at us from our newspapers, men and women who looked hale and hearty in the flush of their success, giving, with their wisdom, the requisite degree of honour demanded by the occasion.

Paisley, Fitt, Devlin, Hume, Bradford, Cooper, the whole galaxy were there—the sort of super New Year political circus that might be a T.V. producer’s hang-over from the big get-togethers of the other side of show business, during the Christmas period.

As we watched these happy and successful men in gay banter over the events of 1970 and playing the role of witty prognosticators, we, for some reason, thought of Shelley's quatrain allowing the scene to let us take poetic licence with the final line:

And many more Destructions played,
In the ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like politicians telling lies!

The other actors who played the crowd scenes in the action of the previous year, the working class, were not in attendance. Hundreds of them were unavoidably detained in the prisons, a number of them had achieved the greater anonymity of the cemetery, and many more, blinded or maimed, had withdrawn from the scene. But, from the point-of-view of the stars, the production had been a huge success.

Thus, with the opportunity provided by the now traditional practice of public stocktaking at the end of the year, did we see the situation. Perhaps ours was a jaundiced view; perhaps there are important things we were leaving out. So . . . let’s put it to you!

Are we wrong in asserting that those people whose names became household words as a result of the Civil Rights struggle have now become (as we predicted they would) comfortably ensconced in the Establishment—on the less-competitive "Opposition” side, to be sure, and accommodating themselves with the same trappings of respectability as the gang they largely replaced, the old Catholic Nationalist Party? Now we can hear their voices “like a bad prayer, not overloud” lauding the virtues of law and order and, sickeningly overloud, roundly condemning the violence of which they, to put it at its most charitable, were co-instigators.

But maybe you think we are being tedious in looking only at the fact that some people have used the struggle for “civil rights” as a means of forging for themselves a political position that holds a fair degree of power and privilege. You might even assert that it was their just reward for their part in the struggle.

Well, let’s not be tedious; as Socialists we are only too well aware that capitalism will always provide the temptation to trade principles for material reward. Quite rightly we should consider the struggle for "civil rights” not in the light of the people it threw up to play the role of leaders and politicians but in terms of what it did for our fellows of the working class and what promise it gave us for tomorrow.

We know it set whole communities at each others throats; that more than a score of people died; that many more will carry the physical evidence of their participation in the struggle to their graves; that hundreds of people were burned out of their homes; that thousands of people were intimidated into leaving their homes or jobs, or both; that many thousands of pounds sterling went, in the form of fines, into the coffers of the Crown and that some five or six hundred people found themselves behind bars.

And the promise for tomorrow? Tomorrow, whenever that is, the walls of steel, barbed wire and corrugated iron will come down to reveal the scars of yesterday. The vacant lots where once stood the less-awful back-to-back slums; the pock-marks on the wall that starkly reminds us that so-and-so died here; the whitewashed, wrong-spelt hate chant . . . Thus, the promise of the tomorrow that follows the day when men of good intent, knowing not the cause of our agonies, began their nonviolent protests!

After this tomorrow, unless the working class can be won to aspirations beyond the tribal catch-cries that Unionism, in the service of capitalism, gave them — catch-cries that the leaders of the C.R. stupidly construed as the source of the N. Ireland problem — will come the long agonising days of social convalescance before there is achieved again even the degree of amicable distrust which existed in Che pre-civil rights days.

And yet the Civil Rights Movement has won a complete victory over the Government that opposed them in 1968! They have achieved a virtual unconditional surrender to their demands. On all sides the Official Machine is industriously churning out the paper reforms, the Commissions and Committees that are not reporting are still sitting, the lawyers and the politicians are working overtime and even a politician who promised to surrender his very life if one of the C.R. demands was granted is now a Minister in the Government with the job of advertising the liberality of the Government. Oh yes! the Civil Rights Movement was a success beyond measure in terms of achieving the reforms it pursued. But, as always, the reformists victory is a shallow one. None of the basic problems that afflicted the working class, Catholic and Protestant have been affected by the “reforms” and since it was the political expression of these problems that created the windmills against which the C.R. struggle was directed, these windmills, too, must remain. Even if cloaked in new forms they will remain, if anything, heightened by the tensions and bitterness of the C.R. struggle itself.

"One man—One vote” was one of the great clarions of the Civil Rights Movement. Many people outside the Province, and quite a few within, were led to the belief that some Catholics were being denied votes in local government elections simply because they were Catholics. The actual truth of the matter was that many thousands of members of the working class—and incidentally, more Protestants than Catholics—did not meet the property qualifications required by the local government franchise laws while members of the capitalist class—by virtue of their property and business directorships—were permitted multiple votes.

Now we have “One man—One vote”—well . . . no. Not exactly . . . yet! The Government are engaged in considering and planning a further local government reform measure consequent on the C.R. agitation, and agreed to by the C.R. movement, under which a number of more economically viable local councils will be brought into being in place of the previous abundance of smaller councils. In keeping with the recommendations of a commission led by a Professor Matthews, the central Government at Stormont will take over most of the more important functions previously undertaken by local authorities and the new super councils will have the status of local lavatory committees. So with our new reformed local government franchise system we will all now have an equal opportunity to vote for aspirants—if they can be found—to the freshly-reformed and impotent local councils. But even this “reform” must be waited for and, until the government have designed and have agreed the actual formula for stripping the local councils of their powers, we have the democratic equalitarianism of “One man—No vote”!

Another “reform” was the abolition of the “B” Specials—a Unionist Party “Dad’s Army” under the guise of a reserve police force. Opponents of the Specials used to deride the physical and intellectual qualities of the Specials and, indeed, they compared most unfavourably with the rank-and-file members of the regular police, among many of whom the Specials were a bit of a joke. In the mid-Fifties the “B’s” (whose title accommodated a choice of designation!) were out in force to meet the threat of I.R.A. border raids and came mostly into prominence through their numerous mishaps and accidents—which, while mainly confined to shootings of themselves, did, unfortunately, on a number of occasions, result in the loss of innocent lives.

In place of the Specials we now have the Ulster Defence Regiment which the British and Stormont governments assure us can do the job for which the Specials existed more efficiently than the latter force. Better armed, better officered and trained, and more mobile than the old “B’s”, the force contains most of the physically and intellectually salvagable remnants of the Specials and these are supplemented by the most confused and reactionary elements of the working class, Catholic and Protestant.

This is another of the “reforms” won for us by the Civil Rights movement!

A Commissioner of Complaints has been established to meet another C.R. demand. The report of his first year's enquiries and the number of complaints made would appear to indicate that either much of the criticism directed against local authorities was exaggerated or that, and this is more likely, when faced with the task of formally lodging a complaint, many people were obliged to think the matter of their complaint through to its conclusion and, accepting the inevitability of their problem as general to their working class condition and station in life, decided not to bother.

Of course the basic cause of the problems which occupy the Commissioner is not within his terms of reference. The problems must remain even if the Commissioner does manage to remove religion from the filing index of capitalism's misery.

And yet another “reform” . . . ! A Central Housing Authority, perhaps even filled with competent, maybe even, dedicated, people but still faced with the problem of providing “working-class” dwellings in a society where homes, like all other commodities in capitalism, must ensure a profitable return to the usurers and financial spivs, that equals or surpasses other fields of financial enticement.

And again! Pledges and legislation to ensure that religious discrimination will be removed from the public sector of the labour market. This “reform” might ensure that when two unemployed workers seek one job, one of them will be discriminated against on grounds other than religion.

And the most ludicrous of all the “Civil Rights” demands: abolition of second-class citizenship! O pious ghosts of yesterday! What did they mean? Did they mean that the working class would have the same freedom from poverty, the same standard of living, homes, education and holidays as are enjoyed by he owning class in our society? Of course they didn’t! It was typical of the empty and ill-considered ideas of the civil rights leadership and indicative of the abounding political ignorance of those who followed them that they should have paid lip-service to such absurdity. To suggest that all could have equal freedom, equal opportunity, equal citizenship in a society in which a small minority class own and control the means whereby the rest of us live, and to bring workers into the streets and into conflict on the basis of such a “demand” is not simple stupidity, it is political madness!

To Unionism in its entirety, the whole rotten set-up, its politicians, its “respectable” businessmen, its church leaders, its judges, magistrates, spies—every bit of its foul apparatus, forged with calculated cunning to protect the economic interests of the exploiting class in Northern Ireland—to this crew, severally and severely, must go the discredit and blame for the foulness that is bigotry in Ulster. They built the bomb!

To the “Civil Rights” leaders, including the Trotskyites and “Lefties” who were merely playing the “entryist” tactic, whose ignorance of the nature and purpose of Unionism’s bomb, whose failure to understand either that bigotry was simply a device for confusing and exploiting all workers and that Unionism was simply capitalism dressed in the costume of local requirement or that only Socialism and the complete abolition of capitalism could ensure “civil rights” for the working class, must go the discredit and blame for igniting the bomb.

Meanwhile the working class have died . . . the arsonist has done his work . . . the Catholic and Protestant magistrates impose their mandatory cruelties without concern for the fact that the same system that made them and which they exist to protect created the material of their labours. Outside, in the arena, the slaves clamour for each other’s blood. Thus, freshly reformed! capitalism in Ulster, 1970.

Richard Montague

Aspect: Relative Wages (1971)

The Aspect column from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month we refuted the suggestion that Marx held that under capitalism the amount of goods received by the working class would gradually fall below the poverty line. We showed that by “misery” Marx could not have meant absolute poverty of destitution because he stated on a number of occasions that working class misery would grow, even if wages were high. Finally, we promised to examine in this issue the concept of “relative wages”.

Marx first introduces this concept of  in Wage Labour and Capital, one of his early lectures on economics dating from 1847.

In section IV Marx distinguishes three relations involving wages:

First, the actual sum of money the worker receives from his employer which he calls “nominal wages” and which we would now call “money wages”.

Second, the actual amount of goods and services which at any time this sum of money will buy, or “real wages”.

(In this age of inflation workers are all too familiar with this distinction.)

Third, says Marx, “wages are, above all, also determined by their relation to the gain, to the profit of the capitalist – comparative, relative wages”. Relative wages, he goes on, “express the share of direct labour in the new value it has created to the share which falls to accumulated labour, to capital”.

Marx himself had not invented this idea; it was originally put forward by David Ricardo. Indeed at this time before he had fully worked out his theories Marx could properly be described as a “Ricardian socialist”, as the followers of Ricardo who gave his theories an anti-capitalist aspect were called.

Relative wages (i.e., the workers share in the product of their labour) can fall even though real wages (i.e., the amount of goods they receive) have risen, as a simple example will show.

Because value is measured by the amount of labour expended over time, the total amount of new value produced in a given time will always be the same (provided the skills of the workers remain unchanged). Thus if productivity increases and more wealth is produced in the same period, then the prices of each individual commodity will fall but the total value of all of them together will remain the same. Assume that, as a result of an increase in productivity, prices fall by 5 per cent. If wages remained unchanged, then real wages would rise by nearly 5 per cent. Relative wages, however, would be unchanged. But say money wages were to fall but not by as much as prices. The workers would still be better off in terms of the goods they received but their relative wages would have fallen.

As Marx put it:

  The share of capital relative to the share of labour has risen. The division of social wealth between capital and labour has become still more unequal. With the same capital, the capitalist commands a greater quantity of labour. The power of the capitalist over the working class has grown, the social position of the worker has deteriorated, has been depressed one step further below that of the capitalist. (Wage Labour and Capital, section IV)

Nearly twenty years later in 1865 Marx returned to this theme in another popular lecture on economics. Here he assumes that wages fall by as much as prices, which would mean that the workers would be no better off materially, and comments:

   Although the labourer’s absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his relative wages, and therewith his relative social position, as compared with that of the capitalist, would have been lowered. If the working man should resist that reduction of  relative wages, he would only try to get some share in the increased productive powers of his own labour, and to maintain his former relative position in the social scale. (Value, Price and Profit, Chapter XIII)

We are now in a position to say in what sense Socialists think the working class tends to become worse off as capitalism develops. They tend to become worse off in terms of the value of the amount of goods they receive compared with the value of what they produce. Saying that under capitalism the share of the working class in the wealth they produce will tend to fall is quite a different proposition to saying that the amount of goods and services they receive will fall. Most of those who accuse Marx of having believed that capitalism would reduce the working class to starvation have failed to understand this key distinction, which he took over from Ricardo, between relative wages and real wages. Relative, rather than real, wages is what tends to decline.

Capitalism is not to be justified by comparing the standard of living of most workers today with the lower standard of their grandfathers’ yesterday. The valid comparison is between what people get today and what they would get if modern industry were commonly owned and geared to producing for use not profit.

In any event, the case for Socialism does not rest on capitalism producing a poverty-stricken and down-trodden working class. Indeed, if capitalism were to do this Socialism would be impossible because it could not be  established by what Marx called “one level mass of broken wretches past salvation” (Value, Price and Profit). Socialism, both for its establishment and for its functioning, demands people who have learned the technical and social skills needed to live in a modern technological society. It is by training the working class in this rather than by completely impoverishing them that capitalism undermines itself and produces its own grave-diggers.

The case for Socialism rests on the fact that a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production can provide a better life for people who are now members of the working class, in terms of quality as well as in terms of satisfying material needs, than can capitalism.

Notice (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sadly we have news that Rudolph Frank died in Vienna on Wednesday January 20th. He had been ill for a while. He was 87 years of age and until Xmas had been very active. An obituary will be in the March Socialist Standard. We extend sympathy to his family.

50 Years Ago: H. G. Wells as Historian (1971)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is Mr. Wells’ opinion that the ruling class of today can be persuaded by reasonable, humanitarian arguments or by far-sighted self interest to bring about a ‘re-adjustment’ of society which will gradually abolish exploitation and class distinctions. This opinion we cannot share. It is opposed by the whole teaching of history. No ruling class when faced by discontent and revolt ever acted in such a manner. To expect our present rulers to do so is to wallow in superstition rather than stand foursquare to science.

Why does Mr. Wells make no mention whatever in his review of the nineteenth century, of the Paris Commune? This was no mere political episode, but an object lesson in sociology, and, as such, one of the most significant occurrences of the centenary. Mr. Wells is no ‘drum and trumpet’ historian, but to him as to the common run of bourgeois historians, the Commune is taboo. With its 100,000 working-class victims the Paris Commune tears aside the veil of hypocrisy and humanitarian cant which envelopes the social relations of our day and reveals naked the power lust of the capitalist class. The more recent history of the class struggle in Russia, Finland, Germany and Hungary but confirms and strengthens our view. It is indeed difficult to conceive that Mr. Wells, with his knowledge, really believes in the tactic of moralising the capitalist class. In the present writer’s opinion, Mr. Wells knows better. But as an experienced and ‘successful’ writer and journalist, camouflage (to be polite) is one of the tools of his trade. 

(From a review of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History by R. W. Housley. Socialist Standard February 1921).

Enoch Powell on Inflation (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before he jumped on the racialist bandwagon, Enoch Powell was a man who spoke of the futility of attempts to make capitalism work other than in accordance with the economic laws of profitmaking.

Powell returned to this theme in a speech he made in Scotland on 20 November, in which he revealed that he is one of the few politicians to have some understanding of the cause of inflation.

Inflation is a currency matter. If, with the level of production and trade remaining the same, the amount of currency in circulation is increased this will inevitably lead to a rise in the general level of prices because increasing the supply of money in these circumstances is in effect to depreciate the currency.

If the government were to decree that from tomorrow all notes and coins would only be worth half their face-value, this would automatically cause all prices to be doubled. What was today priced at £1 would be priced at £2 tomorrow. When the French government decreed that from 1 January 1960 a franc would be worth a hundred times what it was before, this, in accordance with the same principle, automatically cut all prices in France a hundred times.

Doubling the amount of currency in circulation would tend to have the same effect as halving their face-values. The face-value of the notes and coins the government issues is arbitrary. They can fix them at any rate; divide them anyway (and alter this division, as they are doing with decimalisation), and call them any fancy names they choose. There is however a real relationship, which no government can alter (which we cannot go into here except to say that it can only be explained adequately on the basis of the Marxian Labour Theory of Value), between the amount of goods on sale and the money-commodity of which the notes and coins are but tokens.

A specialised means of exchange, currency (or money in its original sense) is needed so that the goods on sale can be bought and sold efficiently without having to resort to barter. If coins and notes could only be used once, the amount of currency needed would have to equal the sum of the prices of all the goods on sale. In fact the notes and coins can be used more than once and do circulate, but at any given time their “velocity of circulation” can be assumed to be constant.

This means that once the face-value of the currency has been fixed by the government there is, for a given level of production and trade, a given amount of currency needed. If the government issues more than this they will depreciate the currency already in circulation. If they were to double the amount, for instance, then the purchasing power of the currency would tend to be halved. Each note and coin would then have to cover only half the value of the transactions it did before. Everything else being equal, £1 would gradually depreciate until it would buy only what 10s. did previously. All prices, in other words, would be doubled — just as if the government had decreed a halving of the face-value of the currency.

Powell expressed this view clearly in his speech, “Inflation”, he stated, “is a matter of money”, and went on:

  If, during tonight while we sleep, a nought were to be added to every sum of money, we should still wake up to be doing the same things and producing the same tomorrow as to-day—neither ten times more nor, for that matter, ten times less. We should be neither better off nor (apart from some slight inconveniences) worse off. But we should have undergone an almighty inflation, which was only painless because, in my imaginary, simplified picture, I supposed it to happen all at once and uniformly.
   My example brings out another vitally important point, too. It not only shows how inflation is, as I said, to do with money and only money. It also illustrates how helpless everyone is to prevent inflation if money increases while everything else stays the same. Nobody, in short, can prevent the consequences of an increase in money.
  Let us imagine that, instead of happening magically and painlessly overnight, and uniformly everywhere, the same increase of money had been injected like water flowing into a lake or cistern from a sluice or a valve at one end. Sooner or later the same result would have been arrived at in terms of prices, wages, pensions, etc. etc., but think of the wage claims and strikes and pensions increases Acts and all the rest that would have been involved in the process. That picture is close to real life; and looking at it, we realise that, whether they had liked it or not, all concerned could not have helped their incomes or their prices rising tenfold. It would have been impossible for anything else to happen, and no law, compulsion or tyranny could have prevented it.

This economic law — that the general price level will tend to rise in proportion to the extra amount of currency issued, sometimes called the Quantity Theory of Money — was known to the Classical economists of the 18th and 19th centuries and was accepted by Marx. It came to be rejected by later economists in the course of the so-called Keynesian revolution. Governments acting on the advice of these Keynesians, issued more and more currency without considering the effect. The result has been inevitable: continually rising prices as the currency depreciated.

Prices can of course be affected by other things. Individual prices are affected by supply and demand, by monopoly conditions or by changes in productivity. The general price level goes up and down in the course of the business cycle and would be affected by a change in the value of gold. But the main reason why prices have risen since the war has been the over-issue of paper currency by the government.

Politicians are not usually original thinkers and the ideas of most of them, in both parties, reflect those of their mistaken Keynesian mentors. In their ignorance they have blamed, depending on their political prejudices, either the trade unions for asking for too large wage increases or the big monopolies for using their special position to raise prices. Powell, who has often spoken out against the lies of his fellow politicians, has not hesitated to do so here:

   Wage claims, wage awards, strikes, do not cause rising prices, inflation, for one simple but sufficient reason — they cannot. There was never a strike yet which caused inflation, and there never will be. The most powerful unions, or group of unions, which was ever invented is powerless to cause prices generally to rise . . .  In the matter of inflation, the unions and their members are sinned against, not sinning. In the matter of inflation, the unions and their members are as innocent as lambs, pure white as the driven snow.

Powell would no doubt be surprised to learn that, in more poetic language, he is echoing here the views expressed by Marx in Value, Price and Profit, still an invaluable guide to trade union activity. Powell went on:

   There are millions who . . . look with bitterness and hostility on the shops, on the manufacturers, on the importers, on the shareholders, who (they imagine) are making themselves rich by putting up prices against the consumers and the poor, and thus driving the workers into fresh rounds of wage demands and wage increases. It is not so — for a very simple reason: it cannot be so. The biggest, the greediest monopoly ever created or imagined is powerless to put up prices generally . . .  In the matter of inflation, monopoly is perfectly irrelevant.

All this is very true.

There is, however, an ambiguity in Powell’s position as expressed in other parts of his speech. At times he seems to be suggesting that “government expenditure finances inflation”. In fact, as long as government expenditure is financed out of taxes it is as irrelevant as trade union action or monopoly as a cause of inflation. It would only be inflationary if it was financed by issuing more currency, and then the cause would be the extra currency not the way it was spent. Nor of course has Powell any understanding of the underlying value relationship between the money-commodity and all other commodities we referred to earlier.

In commending (at least in part) Powell’s analysis of inflation we are not in any way endorsing his policy for dealing with it. The government could cure inflation if it was prepared to face the political and industrial consequences by strictly controlling the amount of currency issued, but an end to inflation would not leave workers any better off. Their trade union struggle would have to and should continue, whatever the currency policy of the government.

We are concerned with understanding how capitalism works not with a view to suggesting what policy the government should pursue, but with a view to showing how it can never work in the interests of wage and salary earners. Like Powell, we know that capitalism can only work according to the laws of profit-making. Unlike Powell, we realise there is an alternative — Socialism. To achieve that is our policy.

Adam Buick

Where Conquest goes wrong (1971)

Book Review from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where Marx went Wrong, by Robert Conquest. Tom Stacey. 30s.

In this very readable book Robert Conquest presents his views on Russia, China and the other countries under Communist Party Rule, contrasts them with the Western World and attempts a criticism of Marxian theories. Many years ago, he was. for a short period, a member of the Communist Party: now his main concern is to attack the lies, pretensions, failures and savageries of the Communist Party regimes. In this he is very much made at home but unfortunately his wide knowledge of what goes on under the Communist Party dictatorship is not backed up by an equal understanding of the long-term trends at work behind the facade of “Marxist” slogans. Instead of seeing Russia as it really is, a great capitalist power bearing features derived from the history and social structure of pre-1917 Tsarist Russia, he sees it as a kind of corrupt and degenerate ‘Socialism’, more or less influenced by Marx; this in spite of his own recognition that much Communist policy is in flat contradiction to Marxist theory.

It follows that only a small part of the book actually deals with Conquest’s criticisms of Marx. The title, in order to fit the major part, should be Where the Communists Went Wrong and it would have only the most tenuous connection with Marx.

Some of the author’s criticisms of Marxist theory raise issues worth consideration but his treatment is marred by a peculiar defect of vision: he cannot see the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

It is not that Mr. Conquest does not know of us; he has on occasions paid tribute to the Party’s freedom from the dishonesty and cant that is a hall mark of the “Leftwing” parties. When therefore he deals with the attitudes of various bodies claiming to be Marxist and attacks what he regards as their errors and illusions why does he not notice our distinctive attitude? We can appreciate his difficulty. If he had done so he would have had to qualify a dozen or so of his remarks about Marxists by adding "This does not apply to the Socialist Party of Great Britain.”

When he was planning his book, and if the thought of including the SPGB ever crossed his mind, he would have had to plan us out of it. Voltaire said: “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Conquest, in order to make his criticisms of Marxian theory credible simply had to disinvent the SPGB.

This is not just a question of acknowledging our existence; it is crucial to the kind of case he makes against Marxism. He writes for example that his “Main objection to the whole Marxist attitude is . . . that it is a system of dogmas and. as such opposed to the Western tradition of independent thinking.” He can justify this as a criticism of Russia but it is quite invalid for us.

At its formation and since, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has not followed a set of dogmas but has evolved lines of its own not to be found elsewhere — its attitude to war and violence, its insistence on the need for the development of working-class understanding and acceptance of Socialist principles, slow though this must be, its open democratic organisation, its attitude to the conquest of the machinery of government, its rejection of a programme of reforms, its attitude to nationalisation (State capitalism), and to leadership.

A general acceptance of Marxism if compatible with these attitudes it is not open to the charge Conquest levels against it.

There is little that is original in Conquest’s approach to the criticism of Marxism. He takes what is now a common attitude, that of conceding some value to Marx’s historical materialism while dismissing his economics as being hardly worth bothering about. He disposes of the economic theories in less than three pages.

He makes the point that the essence of Marxian economics had already been stated before his day by “all the great economists of the English school’’, not noticing that among other things, Marx made the important new contribution of recognising that what the worker sells is not his labour (an idea which ran into a dead end and explained nothing) but his labour power.

Conquest’s “disproof” of the Labour Theory of Value is the following:—

it was clearly untrue — as has been pointed out, an oil well jetting suddenly in one’s garden has an instant exchange-value without any work being done at all.

If Conquest would look at what Marx wrote he would realise that Marx, very sensibly, was dealing with the normal conditions of the production of commodities in a capitalist system, not with things "passing strange and wonderful”.

The normal procurement of oil does not consist of oil wells jetting suddenly out of gardens all over the place. If it did in accordance with the Marxian labour theory, the value and price of oil would drop very sharply and Royal Dutch and Shell would not need to spend upwards of £100 million a year on oil exploration.

Another of Conquest’s criticisms is that Marx, in Volume I of Capital, came up against the dilemma that surplus value is created by the workers but the trend is towards a decline in the number of workers relative to the amount of capital invested in plant and machinery etc., and therefore the rate of profit must fall. He writes: “This was plainly untrue at the time and Marx himself finally noted the difficulty but set it aside for later treatment which he never gave it”.

Almost all of this is wrong. Long before Marx, economists were trying in vain to understand the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. It was Marx who found the logical explanation, and Marx who also explained why that tendency was partly offset by counteracting influences. This was done in Volume III of Capital and, as Louis Boudin pointed out in his Theoretical System of Karl Marx,

Most of the third volume, and particularly those portions which are supposed to modify the first volume, were actually written down by Marx, in its present form, before the publication of the first volume.

Conquest also has a go at what Marx wrote about “increasing misery” — or rather he has a go at what Marx did not write.

What Marx wrote was

as capital accumulates, the condition of the worker, be his wages high or low, necessarily grows worse.

In Conquest’s version this becomes “the more the capital invested and the greater the production, the less will be the wages paid for labour”. (Italics ours in both quotations).

It is possible to agree without reservation with one of Conquest’s observations about Marx’s Labour Theory of Value that “its influence on modern economic thought has long been negligible”— but so much the worse for modern economic thought.

He has complete confidence in modern economists. Is it not due to them that "the standard of living has gone up enormously in all the Western countries and. though no economy can be called crisis-proof in any general sense they show themselves able to control the allegedly inevitable cyclic crises”.

Conquest appears not to be looking at the same world that we see. We see the British, American and other governments fumbling along from one crisis to another, not knowing what to do, with the economists giving contradictory advice or admitting that they are baffled, or saying, with economist Galbraith, that of course there will be another 1929 crash and depression.

If he believes that these are evidences of capitalism being under control he will believe anything.

One development of thought among economists should particularly interest Conquest and others who accepted the claims of the successors to Marx. Thirty years ago Keynes warned the capitalists that the only way to save capitalism was to create full employment. Now, faced with the manifest failure of the Keynesian dream, a new school of economists is emerging, telling the capitalists that their system is in peril from inflation and the only way to save it is to have more unemployment.

Edgar Hardcastle

At Home . . . and Abroad (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

Is inflation a real issue, or something blown up by the politicians? The Tories, just like every other government since the war, came bustling into power with assurances that they had the answer to it. And, as Heath has said more than once, there are votes to be won (and lost, although no politician likes to mention such a terrible prospect) by the party which can convincingly claim that they have done something effective about it.

They would probably feel safer if the people who are really supposed to know what to do—the financial experts, the economists and so on—did not look quite so much like blind men trying to find their way through a fog. If a few of them could at least agree on a solution it would be comforting to Westminster. But some want “cheaper’' money, others “dearer” money; some want lower, some higher, taxes; some see the solution in a statutory wages policy, others in a voluntary one; and so on. These, let it be remembered, are the men who say that capitalism can be controlled and organised to operate in the majority interest.

There are in fact many signs that British capitalism is under great pressure and that some sort of a crunch is not far off. December saw some spectacular failures in profits, with British Leyland and ICI showing the way and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board in really deep water. Despite all the claptrap about “our” interests, this is what the crisis is all about—the prospect that British industry is not meeting the first requirement of capitalism that it makes money.

The government’s first remedy for this is an anti-trade union Bill (just as the Wilson’s government was). A great deal of nonsense gushed forth when the Bill was debated, from both the “left” who completely forgot what Wilson tried to do and from the “right” who professed to see in this master stroke from the Tories the first signs of everlasting peace on the union/employer field. The fact is that whether there is a Bill or not, indeed whether there are unions or not, the class struggle is an unavoidable fact of capitalist life and will go on in some shape or form. One explanation for the confusion on both wings is that neither of them understand that fact.

For a time, despite the Bill, the government’s policies seemed to be in disarray but they pulled back some ground over what looked like a minor victory in the power dispute. (It was in fact a relative victory, depending on where you chose to say the battle started; in terms of wage restriction the workers can be said to have gained something.) Everyone who sat in the gloom, cooking their sausages over a candle, during the power cuts probably experienced some anger, although it may not always have been directed against the workers. Strikes and other industrial action is bound to affect people’s lives and if the power workers are so vital then why do they have to fight so hard to get their rise? Why aren’t they living like stockbrokers, who could go on strike tomorrow without putting anyone's life or comfort in danger?

Abroad

It has rather slipped out of the headlines recently, but there was a mammoth disaster in East Pakistan, not so long ago and it was still there, despite all the sacrifices on the Stock Exchange. It was a classic of capitalism’s simple inability to deal with its problems. The basin of the River Ganges is an area noted for its disastrous storms. So why do people live there? Simply, because they are too poor to move—and too poor to get out of the way when trouble approaches and when the disaster is there they are too poor to get help. It was a typical inglorious, inhuman muddle of a system which claims to be the most efficient possible.

To the east of this particular disaster, the war in Vietnam raged on, with the resumption of bombing of the North. In America the Calley trial lifted the veil on what it is like to be engaged in the war. Vietnam is sickening and it raises sickening passions. Yet here again a politician won votes on the promise that he would do something about it. In reality Nixon has been as helpless as his predecessors and, as the electoral return and the anxieties of the Republican governors show, his importance may cost him the votes he won. Meanwhile, the blood still flows.

Obituary: Tom King (1881-1970)

Tom King at the 1905 SPGB Annual Conference.

Obituary from the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is our sad task to record the death in a Manchester hospital late in December, of the last of our founder members, Tom King, aged 89 years. We recognise, of course, that it is not only our loss but that of his family to whom we extend our deep sympathy.

Tom led a full life and like so many pioneer Party members was a respected craftsman, in his case, in the sphere of water and heating engineering. He grew up in Hertfordshire and it was as a member of the Watford branch of the Social Democratic Federation (founded in the year of his birth) that he came into association with that group of men and women that was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the contradiction between the Marxian theories of their economic classes (run in Watford by Jack Fitzgerald) and the political opportunism and reformist programme of the Federation.

In 1904 they were to make a clear break following a conference at Burnley, they made history by setting up the first working-class party in the world to be based upon the clear-cut scientific Socialist principles, the first to recognise that political democracy within capitalism can and must be used for revolutionary ends, the first to be wholly democratic in structure, without leaders or led.

Because of the strong foundations upon which it had been built, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was proof against the myth that Socialism was the outcome of the Russian revolution and from 1917 in our journal, the Socialist Standard, consistently pointed out that it was state capitalism that was being developed under Bolshevik rule.

Through both world wars this firmly knit organisation remained loyal to the idea of international working-class solidarity.

The research historian will not find the name Tom King listed among the initial members although his wife-to-be figured early on as the Watford Branch Secretary under her maiden name of King. It was to confuse the authorities when he was 'on the run' during the first world war that Comrade Wilkins came to be known as Bill France and then, being settled in Manchester, hence called Tom King for the rest of his life.

Sixty-six years after playing a part which will guarantee him at least a modest place in history, the Party he helped found, remains largely unknown to the vast majority of workers in this country and the capitalist system he sought to replace by world Socialism continues in being with the tacit support of those millions of people. Yet progress has been made, however slow, however little in relation to the immensity of the task. We do not stand alone. Our sense of loss on the death of a pioneer is shared by comrades as far afield as Vancouver and Stockholm, Boston and Vienna, Auckland and Jamaica — small in numbers but resolute in their determination to carry forward the often unromantic but none the less revolutionary work of making more Socialists.

William Morris, who had also broken with the SDF, wrote of the Socialist future as he imagined it might be in his book "News from Nowhere". In those happier days to come he supposed that toast would be drunk from time to time to the memory of those who had struggled in the early days to make it all possible. Tom King was one such.

E. S. G.