Is Capitalism Collapsing? (1973)

Book Review from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze by Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe. Penguin. 55p.

The thesis of this book can be stated simply: British capitalism is in crisis because profits have been squeezed between rising wages, on the one hand, and increasing international competition which has prevented compensatory price rises on the other.

The authors present figures to argue that there has been a drastic fall in the rate of profit since 1964 and predict that, sooner or later, this will be reflected in a collapse of share prices on the Stock Exchange too. Increasing international competition they attribute to the end of the post-war boom. "British capitalism", they say, “has entered a crisis which it may not survive”. In short, in their view, the long-expected "big slump” is imminent.

Maybe. That there has been a fall in the rate of profit in recent years is undeniable; so is the fact that this has been the cause of a slow rate of capital accumulation in Britain. And, that, therefore, all recent governments, Labour as well as Conservative, have been forced to attack working-class living standards in a bid to increase profits, the lifeblood of capitalism.

But is this fall in profits the beginning of a "big slump” or just the downturn of another normal capitalist business cycle which will eventually be followed by a recovery? Past experience (including our own) of predicting slumps advises caution. Capitalism has proved to be more resilient than we might like.

Two points of economic criticism. First, Glyn and Sutcliffe betray no knowledge of the basic cause of inflation and indeed appear to think that it is the result of capitalist firms putting up prices. But, as we have repeatedly shown in the Socialist Standard, inflation has been caused by the currency policies of successive post-war governments. Partly this has been due to an ignorance of monetary economics, but partly also it has been political: inflation undermines working class living standards without provoking the head-on clash with the unions a direct reduction of wages would. Recent trade union activity has largely been a response to inflation and has only kept real take-home pay rising slightly faster that prices but less than productivity.

This brings us to our second criticism. Glyn and Sutcliffe grossly over-exaggerate the effectiveness of trade unions in raising wages. They attribute to the unions a major responsibility for the present crisis. For, according to them, by pushing up wages in a period of intense international competition the unions have squeezed profits. In fact there is no evidence that rising wages do squeeze profits. The working class has certainly resisted capitalist attempts to reduce their living standards more successfully than the capitalists would have liked, but this is not quite the same thing. As the authors themselves point out, in previous crises the workers have become more militant essentially only in defence of their living standards.

But, for political reasons, they want to believe the present crisis to be different. They believe that if the workers keep up their present pressure for higher wages (and if they are not “betrayed” by their trade union leaders as in the past) then capitalism, at least in Britain, can be overthrown.

Quite apart from the fact that what, in their minds, is to replace capitalism here is merely a national state capitalism (which, surely, would be subject to the same pressures from international competition to restrict working-class consumption in the interests of capital accumulation?), this is nonsense. The defensive trade union struggle cannot lead to the overthrow of capitalism precisely because in the end the capitalist class and their government have in their hands all the wealth and power they need to defeat the unions. To overthrow capitalism a conscious political movement for Socialism must arise (and not just in one country either). Otherwise, and until it does, capitalism will indeed "muddle on for ever”.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

See also -  Wish It Were The Seventies?

To Our Readers (1973)

Party News from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the possibility of the Party managing to arrange a programme in the new BBC Open Door TV series, we are anxious to obtain any material which would enable us to make our approach as varied as possible. Would any members or sympathisers who have films or photographs of Party activity (e.g. Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park meetings, etc.) please advise us as soon as possible? At this stage a note of what you have, its subject, and time run if a film would be most helpful.

Replies please to: Propaganda Committee, The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London S. W. 4.

The Workers in Ireland (1973)

Book Review from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of the Irish Working Class by P. Berresford Ellis. Gollancz. £3.50.

The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions 1729-1970 by Andrew Boyd. Anvil. 50p.

A history of the working class in Ireland is badly needed but this book by Ellis is no good. It is too hastily written, too full of factual mistakes and too biased in favour of Irish republicanism. Indeed the last part is largely a list of the various republican sects, all of which claim to be “socialist”—which means they stand for an Irish state capitalism of one sort or another. Nor are we told much about the trade union movement.

This omission is corrected in Boyd’s booklet (for it is only about a hundred pages). He describes the laws passed against and the punishments meted out to the local craft unions of Dublin and Belfast in the 18th and early 19th centuries (including, be it noted, those passed between 1782 and 1800 by the Irish Home Rule Parliament). Later these craft unions were to amalgamate into national unions, though generally on an all-Britain rather than an all-Ireland basis, much to the dislike of later Irish Nationalists. Then in the years before the first world war came the organisation of the unskilled (Catholic) workers by men like Jim Larkin and James Connolly.

Irish trade unionism has of course been weakened by the sectarian divisions amongst the workers. Boyd tends to blame the Unionists exclusively for this, and indeed Ulster Unionist employers did use sectarianism in a bid to defeat attempts to organise their workers into unions. But the blame must be shared by union organisers like Connolly who openly proclaimed their own Irish Nationalism and even that the unions in Ireland should support the demand for Irish independence. No wonder the ITGWU in Belfast remained confined to Catholic workers. The Protestant workers, with some justice, suspected that Connolly wanted Protestant / Catholic unity as much for Irish Nationalist political ends as for trade unionism.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that those who argued that the trade unions in Ireland should steer clear of politics, both Nationalist and Unionist, and concentrate on bread-and-butter issues like wages and working conditions were better trade unionists than Connolly even if they weren’t always so militant over wage demands. After all, when it comes to organising workers to defend their interests at work a man’s politics or religion is irrelevant. What is required is unity.

Adam Buick

The Economics of War (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Interesting light on the economic causes of the Second World War is revealed in an article by C. A. MacDonald in the August 1972 issue of Past and Present entitled “Economic Appeasement and the German ‘Moderates’ 1937-1939”.

The Hitler regime pursued an economic policy of autarky. This was essentially a response to the domination of the world market, sources of raw material and gold (the international trading currency) by Britain, France and America. It involved keeping imports to a minimum and encouraging exports with subsidies and, to overcome lack of gold, a foreign trade policy based on barter arrangements and bi-lateral trade agreements with credits that had to be spent on buying German goods.

None of these measures were to the liking of the capitalist class of Britain: they suffered from the dumping export subsidies represented; the barter and bi-lateral trade agreements threatened London’s rôle as the world’s financial centre; and these agreements, together with the German policy of trying to rely on internal substitutes, threatened London’s position also as the centre of dealings in raw materials.

Basing himself on recently released official government papers, MacDonald examines Chamberlain’s policy towards this threat. Chamberlain apparently believed that the German policy of autarky was sooner or later bound to fail and that, if this happened, Hitler was likely to resort to war in a bid to solve Germany’s economic problems. He also believed that this danger was realised by certain elements in the Hitler régime. His policy therefore was based on winning over these “moderates” so that they could persuade Hitler to abandon autarky and re-integrate Germany into the world liberal/capitalist system. To achieve this the British government was prepared to make various economic and financial concessions to Germany. MacDonald points out that this policy of “economic appeasement” was dictated not only by political but just as much by economic considerations. For in the autumn of 1937, after some recovery from the Depression, there was another downturn in production and trade and a rise in unemployment. Britain needed the extra market for its exports Germany’s abandoning of autarky would bring. And also, be it noted, in 1937 and 1938 both sides were militarily unprepared for an all-out war, Britain’s air position being particularly weak.

Hitler and his government, however, continued their policy of autarky and began to construct, by military as well as commercial means, an autarkic bloc in central and eastern Europe (Mitteleuropa), spreading into the Balkans and dominated by Germany. In the end, the possible removal of this whole area from the competitive world market was too much of a threat to British and French capitalist interests. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war in a bid to protect and regain access to their markets and sources of raw materials by military means. So began the Second World War.

MacDonald himself doesn’t go this far. He explains the failure of Chamberlain’s policy by reference to Hitlerism as “an essentially irrational system”. But from the point of view of German capitalism was it really irrational to refuse to be re-integrated into the liberal/capitalist world market with its trading and financial system dominated by Britain and France? For some German capitalists maybe it was, but it is by no means certain that this was so for German capitalism as a whole. The creation of a “Mitteleuropa” autarkic bloc, even by military means, was just as much a “rational” choice from its point of view. Wars are not caused by irrational politicians, but by real conflicts of broad economic interest which cannot be resolved any other way. Such was the case in Europe in 1937-1939.

Hitler’s well-known “we must trade or die” speech, by the way, was delivered to the Reichstag on 30 January 1938. Chamberlain took it to be a positive response to his policy of economic appeasement. To him, evidently, this was a reasonable statement because he knew it to be true of Britain too! And it’s still true today of all capitalist states, including state-capitalist Russia and China.

Adam Buick

Is Parliament a Sham? (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in the Socialist Worker for 11 November, Duncan Hallas contends that Parliament is (1) “a sham”, (2) “a show to deceive the public”, (3) “a charade”. Otherwise it is not too bad, presumably. He says: “Parliament still matters, but its importance is largely ideological,” and: “It serves as a front behind which the ruling class conduct the struggle to preserve their wealth.”

Hallas’s evidence for the impotence of Parliament is that the government of the day does not consult Parliament but goes in for “direct negotiations with the TUC and big business as in the case of the Industrial Relations Act”; and a quotation from Professor J. Mackintosh who wrote in his book The Government and Politics of Britain that:

the old nineteenth-century role of Parliament as a body which chose the Government, maintained it, and could reject it, has gone 

and

the life of a back-bench M.P. becomes unsatisfactory, and offers little scope for achievement.

Effective Representatives

Hallas also tells us “There was a time, roughly from the seventeenth to the beginning of this century, when Parliament was in fact, as well as in law, the supreme policy-making body.” Says our scribe, quoting from Professor Plumb: “No member of the ruling class was kept out of Parliament if he wanted to get in.” But today, says Hallas, “Parliament does not contain most of the big-business bosses, bankers and financiers . . . and therefore all the important decisions are taken outside Parliament”. 

How, may we politely ask Duncan Hallas, does he prove the ineffectiveness of parliament by stating that the government negotiates directly with the TUC and CBI? Was the Industrial Relations Act read three times to the whole House of Commons and did a majority of MPs vote for it? Obviously, they did: it became law. What is this nonsense that MPs “were not consulted”? They approved the policy on which the Cabinet conducted the detailed negotiations, apart from the fact that the Cabinet (the government) is supported by a majority of the majority party in the House of Commons.

As for the statement that Parliament is no longer Parliament because it “does not contain most of the big business bosses, bankers and financiers, or the important Trade Union leaders” — there are only about 600 seats anyway, so Parliament could never "contain” all these people. But whether it does or whether it doesn’t: so what? The important point is that it contains representatives of the big-business bosses who get elected to Parliament because the electors vote for them. Incidentally, we would question the statement that Parliament no longer contains bosses or bankers.

Old-hat Appeals

But what is the inference behind all this mullarky about Parliament being “a sham”, “a show” and “a charade” (they used to call it the Gas Works too)? It is the old, old, antiquated, exploded, bankrupt notion that the workers can achieve their aims outside of, and therefore in opposition to, Parliament and the government. It is a popular idea with impatient frustrated workers who are not clear on the nature of Socialism and think (if it can be called thinking: "feeling” is more like it) that fighting "the day-to-day struggle” and "partial struggles for limited ends” in some way promote Socialism. They do not. No amount of marching, demonstration, strikes, rent-strikes, boycotts, etc., etc., makes the slightest contribution to the Socialist objective.

The workers can march the shoes off their feet, and in some cases literally have, for any reform they fancy from "ban the Bomb” to “lower rents” and "abolish the non-cohabitation clause”. It all does precisely nothing for Socialism. The very fact that they are doing this shows that they want the reform of capitalism.

If the International Socialists regard Parliament as a sham, what is their "revolutionary party” going to do? Are they going to refuse to nominate candidates and contest elections? If not, will their candidates fight on a straight Socialist programme? And will they then stop supporting the Labour Party at elections? If they fight the elections on the reform slogans in their present programme they may get more votes than the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Though "Nationalization of the Land, Banks and major industries” is a bit moth-eaten and many of the major industries — steel, gas, electricity — are nationalized already.

In a further article in the same paper for 18 November, Hallas expresses the view that the State machine will not obey the orders of a Socialist Parliament. The judges and police will not enforce laws repressing private ownership, the generals will not suppress pro-slavery rebellions. This is backed by the usual Marxist quotation employed by Lenin:

One thing especially was proved by the Commune, namely that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes.

From this Lenin concluded that the working class must smash the State machine. What Marx and Engels had in mind, obviously, were the bureaucratic excrescences of the French Empire. In other words, a parliamentary Socialist majority will dispense with those parts of the State machine that Socialism does not require.

When you think it all out, the end determines the means. If you think that the only way to get Socialism is to persuade a majority that capitalism cannot be reformed in their interest you must be in favour of electoral methods. What the workers will do with their political power when they take it, nobody can know in detail. Whether it will need the help of force remains to be seen. If on the other hand you stand for:

"A Minimum Wage of £25 a week."
"Five days’ pay for five days’ work.”
“Equality for Women.”
“Against secret diplomacy."
“Against Nuclear Weapons.”
“National Liberation.”
“Nationalization of the Banks."

—and many other things, you are not International Socialists but National Reformists. (Anyway, probably the best way to alter those things is Parliament.)

Final Arbiter

The people who count in the end are the voters. If they won’t vote for Socialism, they won’t fight for it outside Parliament. Anti-Parliamentarianism, at bottom, is the old Anarchist-Syndicalist Direct Action nonsense, which leads directly to the prison cell and the firing squad. And the policemen and soldiers who will quell the riots, like the judges and warders who commit rioters to prison, are recruited, paid and instructed by a government department — headed by a Cabinet Minister, instructed and appointed by Parliament.

Horatio.

More Censorship (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Censorship has won another small but significant victory in the granting of an injunction which prevented a programme being shown on TV last month. The subject of the programme, the American pop-artist and film-maker Andy Warhol, is unimportant — it may well have represented the title of one of Warhol’s films, Trash. What does matter is that whatever it had to show or say was, at a few hours’ notice, suppressed: the populace was not to be exposed to unorthodox thought.

The facts of the case were curious. The applicant for the injunction, Ross McWhirter, was able to obtain a hearing and judgement almost immediately. For once, “the law’s delays” were apparently suspended; a facility to be envied by anyone who has spent the usual months waiting for satisfaction from the courts. The allegedly offensive programme was not seen by anyone responsible for its suppression. McWhirter brought his action, and the judges gave their decision, on the basis of accounts in the preceding Sunday’s papers.

This in itself shows the dishonesty of one of the strongest claims of advocates of more censorship. A television film, or even one at the cinema, can, they insist, be seen inadvertently by children or the easily embarrassed. When its contents have been described and publicized, however, it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to watch except by choice. So the suppressive brigade have, as was thought, never meant what their “humane” arguments say. Their position is simple. They want nobody to see what they disapprove of (except themselves, by implication immune from the crudeness and susceptibility of the rest of us).

There is nothing exceptional about people wanting to ban what they dislike: “it oughter be stopped” is a common cry in innumerable contexts. In most cases the plea is recognizably hopeless, squashed by the status quo. But in the fields of politics, sex and — to a lesser extent — religion, the status quo is all ears. Here, the would-be censors are its aides, drawing attention to threats to the stability of society. “Society” means, of course, the capitalist system.

It can be argued that capitalism does not need the traditional family and conventional morality today. It has been dependent on them too long, however, for most of its supporters to be willing to discard them. The view the majority take, therefore, is the one expressed by a well-known entertainer in a libel action some years ago. Asked to comment on homosexuality, he said he believed it was “subversive of the family”, and that is how large numbers of people see any departure from established morality. What is meant is not the family as a human entity, but the family as a support of capitalist society.

None of this is to say that censorship is a conspiracy. It can be; but its normal motive is belief that the “accepted” order is the only feasible one. Indeed, the tightest bondage is round those who profess to be critical of society but think social restraints are necessary: capitalism has them truly by the short hairs. Few people saw anything wrong with President Nixon’s remark, in rejecting the report of the US Commission on Pornography, that since good books elevate the mind bad ones must lower it. 

The presumption made invokes the old question: “Which way is up?” Elevate means rouse, uplift, put higher. The high thoughts, in Nixon’s estimation, would undoubtedly be ones leading to humility, patriotism, diligence, and the ideals in general of the society he represents. The statement in fact is like a coat with sleeves turned inside-out. The inner meaning is that if a book is seen or presumed to “elevate”, in those terms, it is in the running for being “good”. If it points the other way, it must be “bad”.

What nonsense, one might say: except that it is pernicious nonsense. Idiot arguments and humbug conceal the fact that censorship of anything means the suppression of knowledge and experience. Ross McWhirter’s action, was presented as moral; the truth is that it was anti-social.

Robert Barltrop

Students and Workers (1973)

Book Review from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The French Communist Party versus the Students by Richard Johnson, Yale UP.

The French Communist Party is one of the two mass Muscovite parties in Western Europe. It is in fact the main party supported by the organised industrial proletariat in France; and is led by ex-industrial workers who have always had a profound distrust of "bourgeois intellectuals" (i.e., radical-minded, university-educated children of business and professional people). These, for their part, have had an ambiguous attitude towards the French CP: respect for the fact that it is the main party supported by industrial workers, but also qualms about its bureaucratic structure and dogmatic ideology. Until the 1960's, argues Johnson, they had been prepared to forget these qualms for the sake of having access to the working class through the Party. "Outside the Party", they thought, "we are nothing", a fear the Party's bureaucrats exploited to the full to get them to toe the Party line.

Towards the end of the 1950's the CP's student section began to adopt a mildly critical line (that of the more flexible Italian CP in fact). The bureaucrats reacted by accusing them of betraying the working class because of their bourgeois origins.

May 1968, however, marked the final break between the radical students and the CP. Humanité, the daily CP paper, described those who took part in one riot as members of "certain groups (anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc. ) composed in general of sons of the big bourgeoisie and directed by the German anarchist, Cohn-Bendit". Cohn-Bendit replied in kind by speaking of "Stalinist shit".

Many of the students explained the CP's "betrayal" on the grounds that it had become bureaucratised and the victim of its parliamentary strategy (the CP's immediate aim was, and still is, an elected "popular democratic government" with Party Ministers). Johnson rejects the "bureaucratisation" view by pointing out how, on the contrary, the French CP has been extremely flexible, zigging this way and zagging that way on Moscow's orders. Instead, he sees the CP's attitude as a ritual response dictated by its whole ideology (the working class as the sole revolutionary class; the Party as the sole legitimate representative of the working class; and the Party leadership as the sole infallible judge of working class tactics). To back up this view he points out that the Maoists and certain Trotskyist groups also denounced, on ideological grounds, the student movement at "petty bourgeois" and denied that there was a "revolutionary situation" in 1968.

Undoubtedly there was no such situation at that time (even though these groups' conception of a revolutionary situation is radically different from ours). A revolutionary situation did not exist because the great mass of workers in France, industrial and white collar, were not socialist-minded. They were merely discontented, wanting higher wages and some reforms—which they got and returned to work leaving the students out on a limb. On June 12 De Gaulle banned a number of student anarchist, Trotskyist and Maoist groups and, beating the drum of "law and order", on June 30 won a resounding electoral victory. The student groups' attempt at "revolution" in an non-revolutionary period had strengthened the forces of reaction.

Adam Buick  

The Enemy on the Left! - Tribune (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

The antics (no other word will do) of the pseudo-socialists of the world — needless to say they are by no means confined to this country — fill just about half the acreage of every day's papers, so it is difficult to pick one or two items out of the available abundance for discussion in this column. If one sees something particularly gruesome from, say, Foot or Wilson or Nyerere (they are all socialists now, of course, even the grotesque Amin) one knows that tomorrow's press will produce something even more heinous. However, it should be instructive if this month we look at an item from one of the best-known left-wing papers in this country.

Tribune has of course been associated since its foundation with all the best Labour lefties from Nye Bevan (late, but I fear, unlamented) through his successor at Ebbw Vale, Foot, along with Atkinson, Allaun, Heffer and the rest of the menagerie. A few weeks ago they ran a piece getting all hot under the collar about a remark made by Reg Prentice who is on Wilson's front bench and is in fact his Minister for Unemployment designate. It seems that this pseudo had the impudence to say that a figure of 400,000 unemployed was "acceptable" and the Tribune pseudos were quite ready to tear him to pieces over it. First let us just have a think about the statement itself (which was not repudiated by Wilson or any other front-bencher to my knowledge). If one includes dependents, it means that about a million members of the British working class must find it acceptable to be members of the non-working class (I know they would find it acceptable if they were made members of the real non-working class, the capitalists, but I don't think that's what Prentice meant.) It appears, therefore, that the Labour leadership find the fate of a million people living on doles and social security in our so-called affluent society to be acceptable. How jolly of them. Whether it is acceptable to the million poor devils themselves, or whether anyone but a lunatic should support a party which finds this sort of thing acceptable, well, you don't really expect Labour politicians to lose sleep over that as long as they're all right Jack.

But the Tribune types are different? You could have fooled me. The Foots and the rest were all there at Westminster keeping their Labour government in power a few years ago when the unemployed figure was not 400,000 but 600,000. Acceptable or otherwise, Tribune MPs had to accept it, didn't they? And of course there was only one reason why the figure did not rise to a million (i.e. at least two million people suffering from the pernicious disease of capitalism) while Labour was in power. And that was that in 1970 the electorate threw them out, so that the honour of achieving the million was won by the Tories. It has long been clear to all but the wilfully blind that capitalism will produce its ups and downs in unemployment along with the other evils which afflict society, irrespective of whether the capitalist managers call themselves Tories or Labour (or, god help us, socialist). And it is just another of the crimes of the lefties that they hypocritically deride the Tory government for doing exactly the same sort of things which their own party did before them.

L. E. Weidberg

Socialist jailed in Sweden - "Times" uninterested (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a copy of a letter sent to the Editor of The Times but not published.

Sir,

Presumably it was the unexpectedness of the suggestion in the Freedom House study that civil rights are at risk in Sweden that led you to headline (2/1/73) this aspect of Peter Strafford's report from New York. It comes as no surprise to us. At this very moment our comrade Ake Spross, who shares our stand against all war whether classed as national defence or imperialist aggression, is in prison for refusing to join the army of a country much publicised as a haven for G.I.'s objections to their government's current war. His incarceration may be less harsh in other countries but the very efficiency of Swedish state-capitalism will ensure that upon release employment prospects in his chosen field will be considerably diminished.  Sweden as a refuge evidently does not extend to the Socialist objectors to service in her own forces.

Yours truly,

K. Knight,

2 January 1973                                                                                                              General Secretary

Socialist Party of Great Britain