Poland: The Ultimate Sanction (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In declaring war on the working class of Poland, General Jaruzelski played his only trump card. His coup was prepared months in advance. While he and other politicians like Deputy Prime Minister Rakowski deceived workers, negotiated with Solidarity and even pretended to welcome the wind of change, secret contingency plans were being made to restore the status quo.

With hindsight and a little belated help from NATO and the prostitute press, we can pick up various clues to this plan. After Jaruzelski, the Defence Minister, became Prime Minister last February, the Russians set up a military communications network which, after testing, lay dormant until December. Manoeuvres involved composite regiments of Poles and Russians, enabling assessment of the loyalty of each officer. After the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) Congress, Jaruzelski held a meeting of senior officers to discuss the tactics they would use if the situation deteriorated, and in September martial law proclamations in Polish were printed in Russia. [1] Within a week of General Jaruzelski becoming First Secretary of the Party, he sent “local operational groups” of the Army into towns and villages all over Poland, able to report on local officials and Solidarity activists, and ready for the take-over of local government in “phase two” of this operation in December. On December 2 riot police and helicopters attacked the striking fire brigade cadets. The General had crossed his Rubicon: war had started. The endless talks and negotiations were over. The Gdansk Agreement was in shreds.

History has repeated itself. We are reminded, in snow, ice and famine, of Kronstadt. In February 1921 Petrograd workers struck and soon gained the support of the Kronstadt sailors; Their demands were for free elections with a secret ballot, freedom of speech, press and assembly, freedom for trade union and peasant organisations, workers’ control, the release of political prisoners and the equalisation of rations. No deal, said their Bolshevik bosses: “You are surrounded on all sides . . . Kronstadt has neither bread nor fuel. IF YOU INSIST, WE WILL SHOOT YOU LIKE PARTRIDGES.” Trotsky announced: “I am . . . giving orders that everything be prepared to smash the revolt and the rebels by force of arms.” [2] And Kronstadt was crushed.

This was done again whenever and wherever workers under Bolshevik rule dared to protest, to demonstrate or to organise against intolerable conditions. At Novocherkassk in 1962, tanks and dumdum bullets were used against unarmed men, women and children. [3] There have been many Peterloo Massacres in Russia’s vast empire, demonstrating clearly that this is a dictatorship over the proletariat. It has nothing to do with socialism. State capitalism means exploitation of workers through the wages system.

The face of counter-revolution
To justify their brutal repression, the rulers use smear tactics. Always, apparently, workers are the villains. In 1921 it was alleged by Radio Moscow: “It is clear that the Kronstadt revolt is being led from Paris. The French counterespionage is mixed up in the whole affair’’. [4]

Allegations that Solidarity was dominated by “anti-socialist” elements have been repeated, ad nauseam in the last 18 months by Moscow and the PUWP stooges. In September these accusations reached a frenzied pitch: “SOLIDARITY SHOWS ITS TRUE FACE: The first stage of Solidarity’s Gdansk congress turned into a (sic) anti-socialist and anti-Soviet gathering”. Later, a headline yelled “Solidarity? No! Counter-revolution”. [5] Beneath Jaruzelski’s statement on the imposition of martial law, the kidnapping and internment of thousands of workers (the official figure is that now, nearly a month after the coup, 5,000 are still interned, incommunicado), which he described as “a prophylactic internment of a group of persons threatening the security of the state”, Soviet Weekly headlined another analysis, “the face of counterrevolution”. [5]

Deputy Prime Minister Rakowski—supposed to favour reforms—alleged: “There is within Solidarity a very strong tendency aiming at a takeover of power”. [6]

But was Solidarity guilty? Much effort went into trying to scrape up evidence for the “counter-revolution” charge. The Chief Prosecutor’s instructions “on the present methods of prosecution of illegal anti-socialist activity” (30/10/80) were described as aiming “to show that the emergence of independent trade unions is a direct result of all ‘anti-socialist’ activity”. Yet in it we find that what evidence had been found amounted to little more than suspicion and the possession or publication of uncensored documents. [7]

It is worth noting that at the beginning of September 1980 a poll held by the PUWP’s official journal Polityka (editor’ M. Rakowski), showed that less than 1 per cent of the sample thought that “anti-socialist” or “anarchic” groups had been the cause of strikes.[8] A year later, Communist Bert Ramelson argued that Polish representatives in their speeches “stressed precisely the fact of the genuinely spontaneous and understandable eruption of the movement of discontent, and minimised as of not great significance the existence of indigenous or foreign provocative elements in it”. [9]

The military coup was not the result of foreign agents manipulating Solidarity’s ten million members for sinister political purposes. It was the inevitable result of the continued stalemate between the Party and Solidarity, the ever-worsening economic crisis and the ruling élite’s determination to crush Solidarity.

Solidarity—strikes and splits

The economic crisis that Poland was in before the Gdansk Agreement was not eased by economic and political complications which followed. The worsening shortages of raw materials and spare parts were now blamed on Solidarity’s strikes. A strike in one enterprise can disrupt production elsewhere with a “knock-on” effect. Inevitably, there were many strikes.

The workers expected the government to implement the Gdansk Agreement while the government had absolutely no intention of doing anything of the sort, expecting that in time the union would be weakened by splits and could then be simply slowly broken up. The government’s delaying tactics and occasional provocations led to frustration among union members, many of whom became increasingly militant. By last September, Solidarity was thoroughly divided between militants and moderates. The government’s stalling led the frustrated unionists to make political demands: free elections to the Sejm and local councils, and “self-management councils” in the factories. [10]

Meanwhile the government was caught between the hammer of workers’ demands and the anvil of Kremlin orthodoxy. Solidarity negotiators were never sure what line the government would take: one day the sun shone and talk was of “renewal”, next day the wind blew from Siberia and negotiations were back to square one.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Solidarity members may well have been uneasy when they realised that talks about “economic reforms” actually meant closing unprofitable enterprises and making workers unemployed. Anxiety about growing unemployment weakened Solidarity. The union was becoming increasingly involved in the decision-making process. This is always a mistake for a union: to remain united, trade unions should concentrate only on representing workers’ interests in the industrial field.

Disunity in Solidarity weakened it. So did disillusionment. In many cases, Solidarity could not deliver the goods, as expected. The never-ending strikes led also to a decline in popular sympathy for Solidarity while its leaders were at times pilloried as irresponsible extremists.

The Party could not take advantage of Solidarity’s splits since it no longer played a “leading role”; it too was split. Many of its members resigned in 1980, many joined Solidarity, while others demanded political and economic reforms. Hardliners were discredited by the exposure of corruption and privilege, or demoralised by the economic crisis and lack of popular support. “In Poland now, if you had an election to the Sejm (parliament), an anti-communist front would have the upper hand”, admitted Rakowski. [11]

Splits in the disintegrating Party and a quick-fire succession of Prime Ministers were evidence of Poland's impossible political problems.

In these circumstances, rather than pursue economic and political reforms, Jaruzelski decided to copy Lenin. In the total collapse of the economy, with the prospect that by February there would not even be bread in the shops, and industry would be in a shambles, he may have glimpsed a picture of Russia in February 1920. Lenin then announced that in order to get industry going again and provide food for the workers, “we must concentrate all our efforts on this task . . . It has to be solved by military methods, with absolute ruthlessness, and by the absolute suppression of all other interests”. [12]

But Jaruzelski was more realistic when he admitted that “in the long term not a single Polish problem can be solved by violence”. [13] The situation now is that while the working class has been terrorised into apparent submission, and some production is going on, industry is hampered by the closing of telephone lines, the fuel shortage, the blacklisting of workers who refuse to sign the government’s loyalty pledge and, even more, by the workers’ bitterness. There are rumours of “Italian strikes”, where workers go to work but do nothing unless constantly prodded.

If any one thing could have been done to reunite the workers and restore their support for Solidarity, Jaruzelski did it. The idea behind Solidarity—that workers need to defend themselves against the powers-that-be—can only be reinforced by this unsubtle, military approach to industrial relations.

Unions and state power
Most of Solidarity’s demands required legislation but Solidarity had no political power. They could not even enforce the implementation of one of their most basic demands: there has been no change in the law on trade unions, only a succession of unsatisfactory drafts. Political power was needed to put into effect the demands conceded on paper in August 1980.

Socialists have argued for years that the control of the state machine cannot be achieved by strikes, general strikes or insurrection. General Jaruzelski has made clear to workers everywhere that he who controls the state machine is able to use it against the working class. This may be a policy of last-resort but it is effective, even when the workers are well-organised nationwide. The argument that “they can’t lock us all up” is unrealistic. They did not need to lock up all Solidarity supporters. Threats and intimidation are powerful weapons. The banning of communications—radio, TV and press under strict control, all letters censored, phone lines cut, no travelling permitted—can effectively hamper any organised or united resistance, at least for a while. The “loyalty pledge” tactic will effectively blacklist all active supporters of Solidarity and inhibit the beginning of any future opposition groups.

Solidarity had no choice but to go underground again. But there will be other movements in the future. We hope they will recognise the absolute necessity of gaining political power to prevent the machinery of government, including the security apparatus and the armed forces, being used against them. Engels wrote that “something more is needed than trade unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class”. [14] To organise only on the industrial field is to fight with one hand tied behind you.

Solidarity made other mistakes characteristic of trade unions here. They let themselves be drawn into policy-making, administrative and management questions. Talks with government ministers about economic reforms may do a lot for the vanity of people who like to see their names in the papers but they split the movement and divert attention from its real purpose the defence of workers’ interests. They also failed to realise that the strike weapon is a feeble one in a recession. They were too easily taken in by appeals to patriotic sentiment.

The best foundation for a trade union organisation is the support of class conscious workers, aware that their interests are fundamentally opposed to those of the ruling or employing class, and that within a class-divided society there can be no such thing as a “national interest". When Polish and other workers reach that stage, they will be capable of building a stronger movement, more democratically organised, without leaders, rejecting religion and patriotism, conscious of the need for political power: “every class-struggle is a political one. Whosoever repudiates the political struggle, by this very act gives up all part and lot in the class struggle". [15] Such a movement will have no time for most of the Gdansk “21 Demands": it will not be reformist. Unlike Solidarity its aims will not be “to attempt to bring the workers’ interests into harmony with the functioning of the enterprise" or “to cultivate an active attitude among workers for the good of the country and of all workers’’. [16] It will aim only to abolish the wages system and be fully conscious of the need to organise politically to that end.

Charmian Skelton

References:

[1.] Financial Times, 29 Dec. '81; Sunday Times, 20 Dec. ’81.

[2.] The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mctt.

[3.] Workers Against the Gulag, Pluto Press, 1979.

[4.] As 2, above.

[5.] Soviet Weekly, 19 Sept. ’81; 28 Nov. ’81; 19- 26 Dec. ’81.

[6.] Interview in Marxism Today, Oct. ’81.

[7.] Full text in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, spring-autumn 1980. quoted in Socialist Standard, Nov. ’81.

[8.] The Polish August by Neal Ascherson, Penguin 1981, p. 181n.

[9.] Marxism Today, July ’81.

[10.] Solidarity Congress declaration, 10 Sept. ’81, quoted from Socialist Challenge, 24 Sept. ’81.

[11.] Interview in Marxism Today, Oct. ’81.
[12.] Quoted from An Economic History of the Soviet Union, by Alec Nove.

[13.] Soviet Weekly, 19-26 Dec. ’81.

[14.] Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844.

[15.] Plekhanov, Anarchism and Socialism.

[16.] Solidarity Draft Statutes, Solidarnosc Strike Bulletin, 31 Aug. ’80 (Labour Focus. 1980).

Letters to the Editors: Sex Roles (1982)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sex Roles

Dear Editors

I would like to comment on “Who Will Do the Dirty Work?” (Socialist Standard, July 1981). To support your theory that people will do “dirty work" happily under socialism, you use the example that women "sweep and scrub the floors, dust and polish, do the washing and the washing up, change the nappies and worse . . .  for nothing" and that they do it better because it’s motivated by social need and not money. What rubbish! Women don’t do housework “most” of their time as the majority go out to work in low-paid, unskilled and unorganised jobs and then come home and do all these things while men put their feet up.

Your failure to question the sexual division of labour (in any of your few articles on women) is a result of textbook Marxism both Marx and Engels failed to question “women’s role". Housework is boring, degrading, tiring, isolating and unpaid, considered to be only “women's work". The fact that those who can employ domestics (usually women) and that “wages for housework” is an increasingly popular demand, shows that women don’t do housework because they’re motivated by “social need” but because they have no choice in the matter.

There will still be work in socialism, and unless the sexual division of labour is questioned now women will be relegated to the mothreing/servicing roles in society, which plays a large part in their inferior status (even Marx and Engels recognised that). I was very surprised that a woman wrote this article (perhaps she doesn’t mind making the tea, washing up and typing at your meetings). Using unpaid housework as an example to back up your argument makes your case for socialism less than convincing, especially to women who otherwise are probably sympathetic to socialist ideas.

Ms. Y. Howard

London NW4

Reply:
The article referred to by Ms Howard was not about the problems of women in capitalism but about the nature of work and people’s attitudes towards it. It implied neither approval nor disapproval of housework in itself. The point it made was that in socialism the conditions that make work of any kind a chore rather than a source of satisfaction would disappear.

The reason why housework was mentioned was that it seemed an appropriate example of something that most people regard as “dirty work” but that isn’t done for money. This showed that money was not the only motivation that will get people to do “dirty work" and that people will do it for “social need". Ms Howard disagrees and says that “women have no choice” about doing housework. We find this an overstatement. There is certainly a good deal of social pressure on women to engage in housework, but there is no absolute compulsion — any more than there is an absolute compulsion to be a conformist politically. It may be easier or more comfortable to conform, but this does not amount to there being no choice in the matter.

We feel too that Ms Howard seriously underestimates the number of women who actually choose to spend time and energy making their house look as attractive as possible, either because — rightly or wrongly — they feel it to be necessary for their family’s sake (“social need") or simply because they get satisfaction from it. Whether one approves of or looks down on this kind of satisfaction is beside the point. The fact is that they are willingly doing what most people consider to be “dirty work" without getting a wage for it.

The answer to Ms Howard’s view that “the sexual division of labour must be questioned now” is that it already is being questioned — by capitalism. Evidence of this is the increasing access women now have to occupations traditionally reserved for men. This is because capitalism needs to make the most profitable use of the human energies available. To push for something like "equality of job opportunity for women" within capitalism might indeed make women less bound to “mothering- servicing roles”, but only to the extent to which it suited the profit-making capacity of the system. And it would do nothing, absolutely nothing, to make people question why they have to hire themselves out for wages in the first place. It is only when people no longer have to work for a wage that they will truly be able to do the work they want to do. Nobody will be relegated to a particular kind of activity, because everyone will be free to choose. Nor will any kind of work bear any kind of stigma, so that — who knows? — the “mothering-servicing roles” might well become very popular among both men and women!

Editors

Passing Points

Dear Editors,

I subscribe monthly to your Socialist Standard. Frankly, I am very impressed by the honest “grass-roots” approach which you take towards such subjects as world nuclear disarmament, for example. However, there are a few passing points which I would like to be answered:

(a) In the light of your stance on War in general (Socialist Standard, February 1981 — "Refuse to be Sitting Targets”), how are pacifists wishing the foundation of a true socialist society going to overthrow hundreds of powerful capitalists in the world (who will definitely use the force of arms to protect their privileges) without the use of weaponry?

(b) How will unarmed socialists persuade “militia workers” — soldiers world-wide, and a potent force in themselves — to disarm and thus surrender their “livelihood”?

(c) Could you please in your reply put forward the SPGB’s argument against administration: i.e, without a representative administration, how will society be run smoothly and efficiently?

(d) How will socialists persuade workers brought up under the monetary system to accept the transition from the gold standard to a “new system of social organisation in which the means of production and distribution of wealth . . .  are commonly owned and democratically controlled . . ."  by all members of society?

Having said all this however, I thoroughly enjoy and approve of your journal: so, fellow socialists. carry on the campaign — there are not many of us in evidence.

Iain Campbell, 

Wester-Ross, 

Scotland. 

Reply:
(a) and (b) The Socialist Party of Great Britain is not a pacifist organisation. The reason we are opposed to violence as a means of establishing socialism is that we see no necessity for it. When the majority of workers want it, they will be able to use the already existing — machinery the vote — to bring it into being. And when that happens, what will "hundreds of powerful capitalists" be able to do against the conscious, collective action of millions of workers? The power of the capitalists comes from their political control and will exist no more once this control is taken over by a democratic majority of informed, convinced socialists. Nor is it easy to imagine members of the armed forces — who are also workers and would also be socialists — turning their arms against friends, relatives and fellow workers to defend a system the majority no longer wanted. Would they not rather surrender a futile, negative livelihood like soldiering for a life of voluntary cooperative work that will give them personal satisfaction and a sense of social purpose?

(c) The SPGB has no opposition to administration as such. We wonder what gave you this impression. Socialism will certainly need many and efficient administrators. Perhaps you are thinking of our opposition to political administrations, to governments. These are expressions of class division in society and will disappear in socialism. Government over people will be replaced by administration of things. Regarding “representative administration”, a socialist society will obviously have to delegate certain important organisational tasks to administrators; but they will have no special power or prestige over the rest of the community. They will just be carrying out socially necessary work and there is no reason to suppose that, if they have chosen this kind of work (all work will be voluntary), they will not carry it out smoothly and efficiently.

(d) We cannot hope that our efforts alone will be enough to make socialists of the millions of workers who have been conditioned by capitalism into thinking that the buying and selling system is necessary and eternal. Our argument is that from within capitalism itself come the forces (the SPGB is one of them) to convince workers that the present system, despite its immense productive power and continued raising of expectations, cannot solve the problems it produces and cannot operate in the interests of the working class. There is of course no absolute guarantee that this will happen but certain long-term trends make it increasingly likely. Capitalism, for its own needs, has already had to provide the premises for socialism — a large, organised, highly trained working class driven by its conditions to constantly look for alternatives; rapid worldwide communications and spreading of ideas; the possibility of a vast abundance of goods sufficient to satisfy all human needs; recurrent social problems which even under capitalism can often only be approached on a world scale (pollution, nuclear threat, terrorism, for example) and which thereby spread among workers a consciousness of the need for global solutions.

Editors

Ground Level

Dear Editors,

After reading your journals. I do not understand why you don’t “get stuck in" on the ground level, rather than stay aloof and say "it’s all because of capitalism". A point of view I cannot sec the "man in the street" understanding. I also think that due to this viewpoint you will lose votes to the Communist Party who will cash in by going out to the people, producing changes in the capitalist system and gradually working towards their goal. As I see your party, you are not gradualists, but expect people to take a complete change to socialism straight from capitalism. Rather than working for the people at ground level, leading to election and then the change. That’s my view anyway; but I’m only a dumb schoolboy!

R. Pullan 

Reading

Reply:

You are correct in seeing that we want a complete change of society. However we can’t agree that we aren’t getting "stuck in on the ground level". All our activity is “ground-level" stuff—organising and addressing meetings, producing literature for people to read, distributing our leaflets, pamphlets and journals (often in the streets and pubs), putting our point of view to friends and workmates whenever possible. But perhaps by "ground-level" work you mean campaigning for immediate reforms and, if so, we must confess to non-involvement in this kind of activity. Unlike the Communist Party which you mention, and other left-wing organisations, we don’t try to get people on our side by dangling reforms in front of them. We’ve seen from experience that reforms never help workers as much as may at first seem likely and we’ve seen above all that the changes reforms produce in the system don’t point towards socialism. They don’t help people to work, gradually or otherwise, towards the goal of a society of common ownership and democratic control. What they tend to do rather is to divert people from this goal by consuming all available energies and to push socialism further into the future. It’s probably true that if we promised reforms we’d get more immediate support, but we’d be getting it on false pretences and defeating the object for which our organisation exists.

You seem to think that this object is too difficult for the "man in the street" to understand. Yet we, the members of the SPGB, are perfectly ordinary men and women and we’ve understood, and you, a "dumb schoolboy” as you describe yourself, seem to have got the message loud and clear. The fact of the matter is that you’re not “dumb”. Neither is the “man in the street". We’re just all part of a system whose effect is to give people the idea from an early age that they’re incapable of organising the world themselves and of understanding how things work and that they need superior beings called leaders to do their organising and thinking for them. Don’t be conned. The working class is perfectly capable of organising society (it does it already from top to bottom but not in its own interests) and of understanding the socialist case against capitalism. When it shakes itself out of the torpor and feeling of powerlessness that capitalism visits on it, it won’t be interested in “gradual reforms" or “changes in the capitalist system”. It will want the whole loaf—socialism. And it will take it. If you understand our case and agree with it, you should join us and help hasten the day.

Editors.

Automation

Dear Editors.

I subscribe to the Socialist Standard and like you, consider that Marx’s labour theory of value provides the explanation for the origin of surplus value in general and profit in particular. However, I should be grateful if you were to clarify how automated production is accounted for by the labour theory of value. Do you think that the share of surplus value would be determined by the capital invested, notwithstanding the absence of humans from the productive process?

P. S. Maloney

London N13

Reply:

Humans can never be absent from the productive process. They must always come in somewhere. If we take as an example the making of a car, even if this object can be built by robots from top to bottom, the robots themselves have to be conceived, built and maintained by humans. And even if these robots can be built and maintained by other robots, somewhere back at the end of this kind of chain human energies are necessary to think out the production process and to fashion the raw materials needed to build the original robots. As it is the socially necessary labour time spent in doing this that determines the value of the finished car, the labour theory of value still holds good.

It is tempting to think that automation necessarily means the use of less labour power overall. But what it really means is a shift from the need for unskilled manual energies to an increased demand for more skilled workers to design and think out the increasingly sophisticated methods of production that capitalists have to develop to be able to produce cheaply in competition with their rivals. This is the pattern we have seen and are continuing to see in all the advanced industrial countries.

Editors.

Election

Dear Editors,

In article 6 of your Declaration of Principles you declare that the working class must organise for the conquest of the powers of national and local government. Would you please elucidate as to the nature of the programme that you would embark upon if a member of your party were to be elected. As you have put up a candidate for Islington South and Finsbury, I can only assume that as a contingency you have defined a programme of aims.

I believe that the wording of article 8 is too ambitious. 1 refer to one specific word really: banner. As I understand, it, your party refutes any suggestion that it should have a banner as such, so surely the presence of this word in article 8 causes confusion and invites unnecessary criticism.

Stephen Shields, 

Glasgow

Reply:

The need to gain democratic control of the state machine is based on the realisation that if the governmental powers are not conquered by the socialist majority they will likely be used against us. When a majority of socialist delegates are elected by class-conscious workers to the assemblies of local and national government throughout the world they will have only one act to perform: the abolition of all property rights and the transfer of the means of wealth production and distribution into the hands of the whole community. Socialist candidates stand in election for that revolutionary purpose and none other.

If an individual socialist councillor or MP is elected on the basis of socially conscious working class votes, he or she will do everything possible to further the interests of the working class as a whole. The state forum will be used to expound clear socialist ideas and all legislative proposals will be responded to from the angle of the working class interest. Socialist delegates will be accountable to the Party membership. 

As for the reference to mustering under our banner, we doubt very much that this is a significant reason why workers arc not joining the SPGB. The term is clearly metaphorical, as are many other phrases in the Declaration of Principles. If Stephen Shields attends any of the meetings of his local branch he will meet with political clarification, but no banners.

Editors.

Disarmament

Dear Editors,

You rightly said on page 154 of your August issue that "We insist that the mess that is human society today can be changed if we all decide to change it”. This attitude should be applied by yourselves to the question of disarmament. Your journal has criticised the peace movement, saying that disarmament and peace are impossible whilst we have capitalism and that such movements divert workers from the task of fighting capitalism. The mental revolution in the way men and women see the world, which you mention as a prerequisite of political change is unlikely to happen overnight; socialist education is necessary and this may take time. Meanwhile disarmament must not be ignored. The world may be destroyed if we allow the arms race to continue. Socialists should not take an attitude of "the beginning of the world is nigh" and sit back waiting for socialism. The world will not change for the better unless people decide to change it. Neither should we, whilst attempting to create and mobilise support for change, ignore such a pressing concern as nuclear annihilation. Just as socialism can replace capitalism if people decide to act, so can peace replace the arms race if enough people actively support it. The peace movement is trying to build up this support.

Sharon McDermott,

 Sheffield

Reply:

The SPGB does not anticipate an overnight revolution because socialist consciousness, unlike reformist moralising, is not best developed in the dark. We agree with you that “socialist education is necessary", but we do not think that it is best to educate workers about the alternative to capitalism by feeding them with illusions about how it can be made safe and peaceful. We agree that the revolution in consciousness "may take time", but we do not imagine that it will take any less time if workers who agree with us refuse to join with us because they think that the rest of the working class cannot understand our case.

The SPGB has never urged workers to "sit back and wait for socialism”. Those who merely wait for socialism, and occupy themselves in the meantime with illusory and futile “short-term measures", are the ones who are perpetuating the cause of a potential nuclear holocaust.

We would like Ms McDermott to explain to us precisely how politically uneducated, non-socialist workers are going to be able to stop the threat of nuclear annihilation within capitalism. Until she does, she will find it difficult to convince us that we are the ones who are wasting our time.

Editors

Letters from M. Brown and G. Nesbitt will be published next month.

Men of Property (1982)

Book Review from the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, by W. D. Rubinstein (Croom Helm, 1981).

Who are the capitalists? Are there any left? Have they been replaced by the big impersonal corporations? These are some of the questions dealt with in Men of Property, an academic study mainly based on official probate and income tax statistics.

On the first question the author supplies detailed identifications and wealth statistics dating from the early nineteenth century. On the second and third question, while pointing to the disappearance of the old “larger-than-life millionaire”, he notes the rise of a “smaller, less exalted millionaire”, the wealthiest of which species are “possessed of fortunes whose size, in absolute and even relative terms, far exceed anything in the past”.

The exact amount of wealth owned by these individuals however, is, as Rubinstein points out, hard to assess. He mentions the Duke of Westminster’s estimated £4,000m, the Pilkington glass family’s probable £200m or so, Lord Cowdray of petroleum and engineering with about £150m, property developer Harry Hyams’ likely £50m and many more examples. The precise figures he is able to give relate to wealth actually left at death. These show that between 1970 and 1979, after tax avoidance, shipowner Sir John Ellerman left £52m, Count Antoine Edward Seilern, an Austrian with an estate in Britain, left £31m, property developer Felix D. Fenston left over £12m, landowner Thomas 10th Earl Fitzwilliam left £11½m, and six other wealth holders left £5m or more.

If the number of such wealthy individuals as a proportion of the total population is small, the percentage amount of wealth they own is not. Rubinstein does not go into detail on this particular point but he does refer us to sources that give the full figures, in particular A. B. Atkinson’s The Distribution of Wealth in Britain (Cambridge, 1978) which estimates that in the early seventies the richest 1 per cent of the population owned 30-33 per cent of the total personal wealth, 5 per cent owned 52-57 per cent, 10 per cent owned 66-69 per cent and the poorest 80 per cent owned about 15 percent. These figures closely parallel those produced in 1980 by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth which found the top 1 per cent owning 25 per cent, the top 5 per cent owning 46 per cent, the top 10 per cent owning 60 per cent and the bottom 80 per cent owning 23 per cent.

Finally it has to be said, for the author does not say it, that the personal fortunes discussed in this book and the power and privilege that go with them all stem from a common source—unpaid labour. The vast majority of the population—the wage and salary earners—receive as payment for their work less than the value of what they produce, the surplus going to their employer-exploiter. This is how capitalism works and why, under it, we will always have a small minority monopolising most of the wealth and the large minority—the real wealth—creators having to live as best they can on what remains.

Howard Moss

Running Commentary: Back to the Front (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back to the Front
Racialist propaganda does not come exclusively from forthright racialist outfits like the National Front. A far more menacing and insidious variety often comes from “respectable” sources and for that reason is not always recognised for what it is. During the trial, last month, of the editor of Bulldog, the Young National Front magazine, for publishing articles which were likely to incite racial hatred, some interesting information was revealed.

The articles in question included phrases urging the “white” population in Britain to “drive the immigrant invaders out of the country” and put an end to the British way of life being “swamped”. The editor was being prosecuted under the Public Order Act, 1936 for making “threatening, abusive and insulting” comments. A surprise was in store for some when David Martin-Sperry, defending the Bulldog editor, rose to inform the court that the comments should be regarded as acceptable as they had been lifted, hardly altered, from the national press.

Martin-Sperry read out original versions of some of the articles which had appeared in the Daily Express, and then went on to say to the jury, “And don’t be put off by words like ‘swamp’. They’ve been used by the Prime Minister”. He later attempted to claim further credibility for the general policies advocated in Bulldog by pointing out that other political parties shared its belief in the need for import controls and immigration control. We wonder whether members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which has promoted both of these policies, will rally to the support of the fascists and give evidence to the English courts on the worthiness of such political measures?


Vive le Socialisme
If you believe the news bulletins and the papers then you will consider socialism to exist in France. How you would square your belief with various items of news from that country, we cannot be sure.

One person who probably isn’t all that bothered what political labels you attach to the French society is Marcel Dassault. He is usually known as France’s “most active capitalist”, and looking at some of his more recent exploits you can see why. Dassault, reputed to be the richest man in France, has just gone into partnership with a state company, after buying a 20 per cent share in Europe One, the continent’s largest commercial radio station, which is effectively controlled by a French state company.

Described on the French bourse as “the biggest share deal of the century”, Dassault will be hoping that his new investment, which carries with it interests in Tele-Monte-Carlo, several publications and a record company, will greatly boost his already gigantic unearned income.

If Marcel laughs himself into a fit when he hears people talking about socialism in France, then so must Yvon Gattaz, the new leader of the French Bosses Council. He has just concluded a deal with President Mitterand and the French unions and announced that he was pleased to find “that employers’ aims were the same as those of the government”. The most important feature of the trilateral agreement was that the unions had agreed to moderation in all their wage claims. Although the shared aims of the bosses and government were not explicitly stated a critical observer might describe the situation as ‘screwing the workers for the maximum profit’.

Before we leave France, just a couple of comments worth noting from Bernard Brune, the Minister for Social Affairs. Speaking about his new plans to fight climbing unemployment Brune said: “If all works well we shall have fulfilled our promise to keep unemployment stable at 2,000,000 this year” (Guardian, 8/1/82). Then on the subject of carrying the support of the bosses for his job training centre strategies, he proudly stated: “The employers are beginning to realise we are not a lot of bolshevists or a bunch of crackpots. We mean serious business". And “serious business” is, of course, exactly what he does mean.


God Help Us!
“Trust in the Lord and Sleep in the Street” is an old saying that his Holiness the Pope would not thank you for repeating. As a devout Christian he presumably believes that material matters in life are of less importance than ‘spiritual wellbeing’ and that your destiny is ultimately in the hands of that mysterious thing called god.

If we are humble and docile and meek, so the story goes, everything will be all right and we shall “inherit the earth”. F'or someone with such entrenched faith in the powers of beneficent extraterrestrial forces, Pope John Paul places an unusual reliance on down-to-earth man-made modern medical treatment. The Vatican has just had to pay £22,482 for the 77 days the Pope spent in hospital following the attempt on his life last May. We wonder whether it was this medical treatment which was responsible for saving the Pope’s life or divine intervention brought about by the prayers uttered to the skies by Catholics throughout the world?

Now that the Pope has recovered, we learn (Sunday Times, 3/1 /82) that he is to make his debut as a West End playwright next spring. The dramatic piece written by the Supreme Pontiff as a younger man is entitled The Jeweller’s Shop and examines attitudes about love and marriage. There were internal difficulties in persuading the Vatican to release the right, as catholic director Mike Murray explained: “The problem was that the Pope cannot be seen to be entering the commercial arena".

The author’s royalty will now be paid to the Vatican. Murray went on to elucidate: “There is nothing wrong with profit in the context of faith. Mediaeval tradesmen used to pin up a sign on their stalls which read: ‘For God and for profit’. That’s the trouble, capitalism without God is hopeless”. So the unemployed and the homeless and the thirty million people who are likely to die of starvation this year and those who are simply sick of being exploited can all take comfort in knowing that the only thing missing from their lives to make capitalism pleasant, is God

Any More Fares?

The Greater London Council’s experiment with cheap public transport, soon to fade away in a puff of diesel fumes, has been depicted in the media as a personal feud between Ken Livingstone and Lord Denning. All the clichés, however, obscure the real issues as effectively as an old-fashioned London smog.

High density urban living and modern commercial and industrial practice require that vast numbers of workers travel from their homes to their places of work at set times, and then travel back again approximately eight hours later. The means of transporting this army must be effective and reliable so as not to disrupt the profit-making process. The argument is really about how the total cost of transporting workers about is to be divided between different sections of the owning class, each of course wanting to reap the greatest benefit at the least possible expense.

The history of the bickerings over whether public transport should be made to pay for itself or be subsidised shows up party politics for the sham they really are. Ken Livingstone, the “red extremist”, turns decidedly pink (or is it grey) when compared to John Szemery, a Tory councillor on the Tory controlled GLC of 1970. Szemery wrote:

   It is six years since I first proposed to Conservative Central Office that public transport in London should be provided free as a public service financed jointly from the Exchequer and from the rates. With all the resultant savings in manpower and machinery, increased mobility of labour and utilisation of public transport and reduction in travel by private car, I still think there is a good case for this. (North London Press, 6 February, 1970.)

Szemery’s Labour opponents in Islington challenged him to say that he stood for a rate increase to make travel free on all London Transport buses and underground trains. Obviously pandering to what they thought were popular prejudices against the idea. All change please!

Our Winston

In a speech at Guildhall in November 1914, Winston Churchill said: “The maxim of the British people is ‘Business as usual’.” Even from his earliest days young Winston must have had a clear understanding of exactly what ‘business as usual' means in a class-divided society, and why for a minority there is every reason to try to convince the majority that the present order of society is worth preserving even at the cost of “blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

On 4 January this year the Public Records Office made available the census returns for 1881 and from them we find that our Winston, aged 6 and described as a scholar, was living with his parents at St. James Place in Pall Mall. His next door neighbour was Earl Spencer (occupation: Peer and Lord President of the Council).

The Spencers had 31 servants in residence, while Lord Egremont ‘next door’ on the other side only had thirteen. The Churchills had to scrape by with a mere eight servants, including the butler, the nursery maid and the cook. Hard times indeed, but he and his friends seemed to get a fair whack out of capitalism. What was it he once said, “Never in the history of class struggle has so much been taken from so many by so few”?

Gary Jay

H. M. Dustbins: Prisoners' Riots (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day a fresh humiliation." — one prisoner’s description of life in the long term wing at Wormwood Scrubs.

Whenever there is a Tory government, and the jobs are being dished out, one who is always willing to sacrifice himself in the more harrowing of ministries is Willie Whitelaw. Perhaps this is because he is such an amiable man. Or perhaps he is convinced that being a rich aristocrat is a burden he bears more in our interests than his own. Whatever the reason, his career has been studded with crises as regular as cairns on the route up a mountain. Recently, for example, there have been the city riots and — one of his persistent concerns — the turbulent state of British prisons.

According to Whitelaw, the essence of the problem in prisons is overcrowding the relentless stuffing of men (it only affects male prisoners at present) into large, gloomy, decaying Victorian buildings which were designed to contain several hundred less than are being forced into them. This is no recent problem; six years ago (The Times 4/8/75) Roy Jenkins, who was then Home Secretary, said that it would “approach the intolerable" if the prison population reached 42,000. It now hovers around 44,000 and, as the courts do not seem eager to heed Whitelaw's regular pleas to impose prison sentences more sparingly, is unlikely to fall in the near future.

There has been no lack of effort from the legislators, to reform the problem away. The Criminal Justice Act 1967 introduced suspended sentences and even made them mandatory in many cases when the defendant would otherwise have been locked up straight away. Another Act in 1972 set up the Community Service scheme, supposedly as an alternative to imprisonment. But the numbers behind bars has continued to rise; now Whitelaw is suggesting more reforms, heedless of the fact that so many have already failed.

Overcrowding means that life for thousands of prisoners is near to intolerable. Hundreds are confined three to a cell, measuring 13ft. by 7ft., designed to hold only one. There they may well stay behind the locked door, for up to 23 hours a day. They spend their time reading, listening to the radio, sleeping. Sometimes they discuss, with a garnish of fantasy, what they did to be sent to prison. There is, needless to say, no running water or lavatory in the cell. For these men the first task each morning is slopping out, when chamber pots used for the past twelve hours or so are emptied into a single disposal point which gurglingly accepts the intestinal waste products of about one hundred bodies. The smell, as prisoners like to inform, has to be experienced — it can’t be imagined. This appetite-sharpening start to the day is followed by breakfast; in very few prisons do the inmates concede that the food is edible, let alone appetising.

Not only the prisoners struggle with such exigencies. One wrote to the Guardian (11/12/81) from Wandsworth that in that grim pile the working conditions of the officers “would try the patience of a Buddhist monk’’. The governors of Strangeways and Wormwood Scrubs have recently publicised their anger in the press — a dangerously unusual act in a profession normally disciplined into reticence. Wormwood Scrubs, a place under unique tensions, was described by its governor as a “penal dustbin” made up of “overcrowded cattle pens”.

It is assumed from this that British prisons are likely to erupt into riot. There are dire warnings of ‘another Attica’ unless something is done to ease the overcrowding. But this sounds rather like the government dodging the issue in advance. Overcrowding is usually confined to local prisons where men are held on remand or are received straight from court after sentence, to be held before they are sent on to what is called — optimistically — a ‘training’ prison.

There have been riots in recent years but these have happened in those very ‘training’ prisons where there was no overcrowding — Parkhurst, Albany, Gartree, Hull. (The disturbance at Wormwood Scrubs in August 1979 was in the long term ‘D’ Wing, which was not overcrowded. In any case that was a riot by prison officers rather than by prisoners.) A modern prison like Albany has no slopping out; the prisoners can get out of their cell whenever they like and are not normally locked up for excessively long periods. In fact such prisons have physical conditions better than those awaiting a lot of the prisoners when they are let out.

So why is there fear of fresh trouble within those walls? The moment a convict walks through the prison gate, the pressures of the place on him are as palpable as the smell. A massive readjustment is needed, to survive within the rules and the customs on which the place is run. “Few sounds can be more heart stopping than the noise made by the closing of a cell door . . . . With the closing of the door, the prisoner knows that he has ceased to be a father, a brother, a husband or a son; from now on he is — a prisoner” recalled one man. (Ron Phillips, Race Today, June 1974).

Being a prisoner means that all sorts of decisions about you — whether you actually did what the screw says you did, what job you should do in the prison, should you be released early on parole — are taken without reference to you. “The interests of the individuals have to be sacrificed continually to the interests of the institution” was how the governor of Wormwood Scrubs despairingly expressed it. One result is that the customary standards of ‘justice’ do not apply in a place which is supposed to teach its inmates to respect those very standards.

Another factor is the growing militancy of prison officers, to the point when many prisoners are convinced that it is the officers, and not the governor or the Home Office, who decide how a prison is run. This militancy is a significant change for the prison service and has a lot to do with current economic conditions. At one time the prison service was something of a refuge for the ex-regular servicemen who found civilian life difficult, without the reassurance they gained from the military routine and structure. These officers with their guardsman’s peaked caps and their burnished boots, were a walking nostalgia. Now the service is often a refuge from redundancy and the inflow of recruits from industry has meant that a para-military discipline has been undermined by a trade union militancy. It is common now to see long hair underneath the warders’ caps, much to the disgust of the old time screws.

Militant prison officers may refuse — as they recently did at Strangeways - to receive any more prisoners; they can refuse to send them to court, or to work the hours needed for prisoners to go to evening classes or to week-end sport. These actions make life harder for the prisoners. Under the tensions of prison, it needs only one incident — a particular example of repression or brutality by the officers, an abrupt withdrawal of ‘privileges’, some specially bad food — to spark off a protest which can explode into a riot.

When that happens the official pretence that prisons are humane institutions which concentrate on caring for, and ‘reforming’, their inmates is torn away to reveal the truth that they are more akin to a battleground. On one side are the staff who like to think they represent ‘society’, which actually means the capitalist precept that one class holds the position to exploit the other, who must accept their degraded status. The prisoners are ‘offenders’ — they have breached that precept, even if they wouldn’t see it that way.

Many of them are obsessed with achieving the symbols of privilege — a gleaming fast car, glamorous women, a sumptuous home. If they had the income of a company chairman they wouldn’t offend but the real limit of their ambition is a typical working class wage, so they take refuge in fantasy. Perhaps their big difficulty is an inability to draw the sort of distinctions which capitalism demands of them — to appreciate, for example, that violence is permissible from a member of the SAS but not from a robber. The courts are part of the machinery to ensure that those distinctions are drawn and to punish anyone who fails to do so. In the end the most lenient of judges or magistrates will conclude that the only way of ‘disposing’ (a term often used in court) of someone is to send them to prison.

This is another example of the characteristic of capitalism, that it attempts to solve a problem by intensifying it. There is no evidence that prisons diminish crime; in many ways they are microcosms of society outside the walls — its jungle laws, its violence and cynicism. The highest aim of the entire penal system — including the reformers — is that members of the working class should emerge from a sentence prepared to accept a life of wage servitude. It is called rehabilitation and in the unreal world of prison it is in all ways the most savage fantasy of them all. 

Ivan

A Better World to Die In (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in a strange society which honours the dead more than it cares for the living—it builds monuments to mark graves, but does not house all the living; it makes social occasions out of funerals and makes death a source of profit for the undertakers. Under capitalism even death is commercialised.

From the moment we are born we begin the process of dying. It is difficult to speak in physical terms about “natural death”, but certain broad comments can be made. Firstly, human beings, aided by the best available scientific processes and given suitable environmental conditions, should have an average life span of seventy-five years—and could live healthily for several years longer. Secondly, given suitable environmental conditions and medical aid (including drugs), no person need die in pain. Thirdly, preventive medicine and health-preserving exercise can prolong life. In short, modern technology can allow us to live longer, to be fitter and to die painlessly. These are great social achievements but, as is usual under capitalism, humanity is denied the full benefits of them. Having created the means of extending and improving life, capitalism negates such an advance because it destroys life at an intense rate. It is a tragic paradox that the system which has enabled medical science to extend its horizons is one which creates more “artificial” deaths than it saves in avoided natural deaths.

Capitalism kills in many ways:

MALNUTRITION. Lack of decent food (or any food) kills thirty million people each year. On average, one death occurs each second as a result of malnutrition. The cause of this is not an inability of the world to feed everyone in it—in fact, we could feed every living being several times over but the simple fact that starving people cannot afford to buy food. Fifty per cent of deaths from malnutrition are of children under five.

LACK OF CLEAN WATER. Millions die each year because they do not have access to clean water. The reason is simple: it costs too much to irrigate the areas where they live.

LACK OF MEDICAL ATTENTION. In vast areas of the world health services hardly exist. In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America one doctor has to attend to thousands of patients. The mortality rate in such areas is phenomenally high. Even in Britain, where there is supposed to be a free health service, NHS treatment is second-rate and “on the cheap”, and recent government cuts have seriously affected services. Patients have died in ambulances which have been forced to drive around searching for an open casualty department.

WARS. Even in times of world “peace”, there are always local wars going on somewhere. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Biafra, Ireland, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq . . . thousands have lost their lives fighting for their masters’ interests. Modern weapons could kill us all within a matter of weeks.

CANCER. Dr. R. J. C. Harris, a leading cancer research scientist, has written that “ . . . between 80 to 90 per cent of cancers in man are caused by agents in his environment”. Many of these agents could be identified and removed, but it is not socially practicable to do so under capitalism. Harris points out how certain occupations expose workers to a very high risk of contracting cancer:

  In one coal-tar dye plant 25 per cent of a labour force of 366 men, exposed to these chemicals between 1912 and 1962; contracted bladder cancer. (Cancer, Penguin, chapter 4.)

Harris also points out that asbestos textile workers and iron-ore miners face a high risk of contracting cancer, as do people who are persuaded by tobacco manufacturers to smoke cigarettes. In Britain and many other industrialised countries one death in five is caused by cancer, yet government expenditure on cancer research each year is substantially less than government expenditure on armaments each day.

POLLUTION. Urban environments are made unclean and unsafe by industrially produced chemical pollutants which are cheaper to release into the atmosphere than to avoid or destroy. City-dwellers inhale regular doses of filthy air which cause sickness and contribute to many early deaths.

ACCIDENTS. Many of the accidents which injure and kill people in the course of employment are predictable and avoidable; but employers calculate that it is cheaper to make occasional compensation payments than to make working conditions safe. Many domestic accidents occur because it is cheaper for workers to run unsafe homes than safe ones.

STRESS. The strain of the competitive rat-race frequently leads to stomach ulcers, brain haemorrhages and heart attacks. People under stress are less resistant to minor ailments which can become potential killers. In periods of capitalist depression the suicide rate rises rapidly.

HYPOTHERMIA. Each winter many people die of the cold because they cannot afford to put on a heater. Hypothermia especially affects pensioners and the families of the unemployed. The recent spell of freezing weather led to many unnecessary deaths. It is not the case that society has a lack of energy to keep people warm, but that workers who need heat cannot afford to buy it. The Electricity Board has announced that it is cutting back on production in 1982 because it has “overproduced” in the past and there is insufficient “market demand”.

These artificial killers account for many millions of deaths each year. Even if workers think that they are immune from all of them at the moment, the insecurity of working class life makes them prime targets in the future. For those who survive capitalism's ways of killing people, old age can be a depressing and impoverished period of life. In a society which is primarily interested in workers as exploitable commodities, once a worker has passed retirement age they are often seen as a social inconvenience old workers are “problems”. Unless elderly workers are fit enough to look after themselves (which is made difficult by having to live on a pittance of a pension) they run the risk of being stuck in homes to be patronised by vicars and volunteers or to spend their final years in a geriatric ward where the old are almost punished for not being profitable any more. In the early days of capitalism old workers were dumped in the workhouse and husbands and wives were split up, never to meet again. Many old workers look back on their lives with a sense of resentment: they gave so much; they have been rewarded with so little. Capitalism is a system which condemns many of its old to die in bitter indignity. They crave respect, but who can blame their children for not respecting parents who have passed on to them such a sick and rotten world?

Proof of death entitles the relatives of the deceased to a £30 death grant. The average cost of a burial is between six and eight times greater than the government grant. In many cases the death of an aged parent is the first time for months or years that the children of the deceased will have visited them. Deaths bring out the friends and relatives to claim their share of the deceased’s wealth. All too often the pomp of the funeral contrasts sharply with the dullness of the deceased's final days, spent in loneliness. Religious hypocrites make foolish noises about going to a better place—for many workers any place has to be better. When ever they bury a capitalist who has died after years of social parasitism, the vicar usually forgets to mention the one about it being harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. (If this is true, the Pope and the Queen Mother had better take up a course in limbo-dancing.)

Under this wasteful, destructive profit system working class lives are frustrated. From birth to the grave wage slaves have to put up with conditions which scientific advances have made unnecessary. We could live and die in peace, but the majority of the working class consents to a system which dehumanises social relationships.

There is a better way to live. In a socialist society human beings will be free to live healthy lives in a healthy social environment. We will all have free access to what we need, so no one will die for lack of basic requirements to sustain life. Old people in a socialist world community will give according to their abilities and take according to their needs, as will all people, including the physically and mentally disabled. In a creative, satisfying society men and women will have no need to fear old age as an indignity, but will be respected for what they have contributed to society. In a democratic society the young will not regard the old as an inconvenience, for they will understand that they too will one day be old—and the old will have no reason to be intolerant of changes carried out by the young. Socialism will not be a Utopian society where all will live for eternity in total bliss; but the wasted lives and needless deaths which are a hallmark of capitalism will cease to be. Socialism offers a happier way of living—and a happier way of dying. 

Steve Coleman

Political Notes: Images (1982)

The Political Notes column from the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Images
The job was not widely advertised but the Conservative Party recently appointed a new Marketing Director (we are not making this up) and he at once got down to a review of the Tories’ advertising and presentation strategy (we are still not making this up).

One likely result of this review is that the famous advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi, who took time off from composing lies about things like detergents and breakfast foods to master-mind the Tories’ return to power in 1979, will be sacked.

Of course the dismal record of the Labour government may have had a bit to do with Thatcher's victory but advertising agencies and marketing directors need to believe in their power to influence people or they would resign from their jobs or blow their brains out or something equally useful.

Well the elation of those heady days, when all was going to be put to rights through the beneficient workings of the market, is now looking decidedly drab. Saatchi and Saatchi’s 1979 slogan “Labour Isn’t Working”, under a picture of a long dole queue, has recoiled so that the Tories will forever be stuck with responsibility for three million unemployed.

Not unnaturally many Conservatives, with an eye on the next election, are getting uneasy about the image they present now, as a hidebound, callous bunch of wreckers. And Saatchi and Saatchi, equally nervously, feel it does their image no good with the makers of detergents and corn flakes to be so closely associated with so unpopular a government.

Time too for the voters to reflect on the insulting cynicism of those whose business it is to sell capitalism to them, who wheedle for their support with lengthily constructed campaigns of concealment, evasion and deception.

Capitalism deprives the working class of the full product of their labour. It makes a world of conflict, terror, famine, disease. Its hall mark is exploitation, poverty, the degrading of its people. For them it is the worst possible bargain, which they buy with their sweat, suffering and their blood.


Alliance Split
Some observers of the squabble between the Liberals and the Social Democrats over who shall contest which constituency may have been puzzled by the talk of “gold” seats and “silver” seats. Was this to be some bizarre version of the Olympic Games? Is Roy Jenkins so desperate, that he plans to cut down on the richer foods and heavier wines and get into condition for the Marathon?

If the squabble goes on much longer, will the Alliance even get to the starting blocks? Unable to split on matters of policy, because it hasn’t got one yet (which raises the fascinating question of what will happen when they have) the SDP and Liberals are quarreling over the good, old fashioned issue of power grabbing.

The SDP’s preoccupation in this is well illuminated by Jenkins’ tireless search for a parliamentary seat, in which he now threatens to subject the workers of Glasgow Hillhead to his unguent cynicism. Jenkins’ passion to get into Parliament is very much part of his need to be seen as the undisputed leader of the Alliance, to prevent Owen and Williams becoming too established at the top.

Another shaft of illumination came from the behaviour of Rodgers, who brought his old role of Labour’s parliamentary muscle man into the haggling between the two parties. When matters of political power are under discussion, Rodgers has a famously low level of frustration.

The simple fact is that the SDP/Liberals are nothing new, although their success very much depends on their ability to deceive the working class that they are. A compound of discredited Labourites and disorientated Liberals, the process which they call breaking the mould is really the rehash of the same stale ingredients.

Before long they will be inviting the workers to elect them into power over British capitalism. Time then to remember these fractious days, which revealed them for the power-seeking opportunists that they are.


Town Hall vs. Whitehall
Until the 1950s it was very rare to find a Conservative candidate in a local election. Of Labourites and Liberals there was no lack; but apart from that there were usually only people with descriptions like Ratepayers’ Association or Municipal Reform.

It is true that these same people airily emerged at general elections as active members of the Conservative Party. But they argued that local elections, about matters like keeping the pavements clean and where to erect the street lamps, should not be influenced by national issues. Politics, they said, should be kept out of the Town Hall. The autonomy of local authorities was vital; how could the man in Whitehall know what went on in Little Sodbury?

Well the Tories now openly contest local elections. Even more, as they are showing during Michael Heseltine’s current battle with local authorities over rating and expenditure, they are convinced that Westminster should be able to dictate important policy matters to every Town Hall.

The Labour Party has also changed its line. They once argued, against those phony Ratepayers’ and Municipal Reform candidates, that autonomy for local authorities was wasteful; better to co-ordinate it all under Whitehall’s benevolent eye. Now they stand up (some Labour councillors declare they are ready to defy the law, and go to gaol, on the issue) for what they call local democracy against the encroachments of a hectoring Parliament.

It has always been clear that the machinery of government exists at both national and local levels and that all must be taken over if there is to be a fundamental change in society. The argument between the Labour and Tory parties about state against local council is, like all the other disputes between the parties of capitalism, a sham fight based not on principle but expediency. Anyone concerned with a democratic society needs to look farther than that for the real issues.

How the Land Lies (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern society is sometimes praised as a “property-owning democracy” in which with one or two rare exceptions (like Our Royal Highnesses) everybody starts life on an equal footing and our acquisition of property will depend on what we desire, the extent of our drive and initiative, and generally on what we deserve. Under capitalism, it is argued, if we reduce state interference to a minimum, everybody will be free to acquire what he or she wants. How far is this notion of the democracy of private property borne out by the facts?

There are 41,879,000 acres of land in Britain but to know exactly who owns what is difficult. The most recent comprehensive investigation into land ownership was the New Domesday Survey of 1873 which was intended to demonstrate that land had become more fairly distributed since the first Domesday Survey in 1086; but the result was to prove the very opposite. Since then there has been a certain reluctance on the part of British landowners to disclose details of their holdings. For example, in 1976 the Country Landowners Association attributed their reticence to the “practical difficulties” involved in finding out what they own. But then members of the aristocracy never were able to cope with the "practical difficulties” of life.

However, the available information demonstrates that the ownership of land and property is in the hands of a very small minority. The reports of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (1975-80) show, for example, that the wealthiest 8 percent of the adult population own 91 per cent of the land. Some of these wealthy landowners are aristocrats—you may find the Duke of Buccleuch wandering about his modest 268,000 acres of green and pleasant land, or you might see the Countess of Sutherland on her motorised lawnmower gliding over her 150,000 acres. Such ownership, which cannot even pretend to be based on merit, is defended by the nobles and their sycophants as being the birthright of the golden caste. Much property is also owned by members of the ruling class who have made their fortunes from wealth created by the working class in industry. The late Charles Clore is an example. Among his knick-knacks were the British Shoe Corporation, William Hill the bookies, Selfridges, Mappin and Webb, Garrards the royal jewellers and countless properties. Clore’s main interest was in property development which he began in the 1930s and eventually went on to “build” the Hilton Hotel—although, strangely, neither bricklaying nor architectural design seem to have featured in his talents. Clore was a frank man, and when asked whether he liked art, replied “No, I like blocks of flats”.

Financial institutions—particularly insurance companies and pension funds—have also become major landowners during the last twenty-five years. Land is a sound investment, especially during periods of high inflation, and now nearly 20 per cent of the assets of these institutions are invested in property.

It is sometimes argued that the enormous wealth of pension funds, including a good deal of property, denotes a significant shift of riches to ordinary working people. Apart from the fact that what each worker contributes to the fund only really amounts to unpaid wages, it is not the case that the fortunes of the funds are the property of the workers to be enjoyed in the same way as a capitalist would benefit from his share portfolio. A miner, working hard and living in poverty does not have fewer daily difficulties because the National Coal Board owns, for instance, a 50 per cent interest in the Watergate building in Washington.

So, on the one hand there is a small minority who, between them, own most of the land. On the other hand there are those of us — the overwhelming majority — who own about as much of Britain as we can fit into our pockets. Margaret Thatcher is very fond of quoting the high proportion of residents in Britain who are “owner-occupiers”, and some people are always eager to tell you how secure their lives are, or how proud they are to be a “capitalist”, because they own their own homes. As a matter of fact, not only do most people not own their homes, but most believe they are owners are not. Most people who boast about their home ownership make lifelong regular payments to mortgage companies, building societies or banks to pay for their accommodation and are really in a very similar position to rent payers. According to the 1981 report Judicial Statistics (issued by the Lord Chancellor’s Office) 27,000 people lost their homes during that year when they fell behind with their mortgage payments and had their homes re-possessed through the courts.

Under the present social arrangements having a roof over your head depends not on need but on how much you can afford. So, to take one example, while more than twenty couples recently camped out in front of Waverley District Council’s offices in Surrey hoping to be “lucky” enough to buy cheap homes at bargain prices of £20,000 (Guardian, 7/12/81), the spacious and luxurious Heveningham Hall in Suffolk discreetly changed hands for £726,000 (Guardian, 8/1/82). Over the years there have been various suggestions about how to solve the housing problem, some less serious than others. Lady Spencer of Althorp, for instance, thinks that stately homes are an anachronism. “Of course they are. Who needs 100 rooms today? They are abnormal, and my husband and I have always thought the answer is to add a little normality”. This normality consists of throwing their place open for business occasions, conferences and to tourists. Perhaps we should all take another look at our living rooms, give them a once-over with a duster and telephone the CBI to see if they’ve already made arrangements for their next annual conference. Then there are the more serious reform proposals.

Given the chance to form the next government, would the Labour Party or the SDP-Liberal Connivance solve the housing problem? Local authorities estimated last year that there were 547,000 unfit homes in England alone, plus 1,035,000 homes lacking one or more of the basic amenities. Des Wilson, the first director of Shelter, the national campaign for the homeless, recently said:

The desperate truth now is that those of us who spoke out about the scandal of Britain’s housing problem in 1966, when Shelter was launched, find ourselves back at square one. All the signs are that this year fewer houses will be started than at any time during the last fifty years.

The well-intentioned people in Shelter are fighting a losing battle; for as long as houses are built not for people to live in but for sale or rent, then there will be a mismatch between what we want and what we get. Listening to the renewed pledges and promises from Labour politicians to “provide adequate housing for everyone” and deciding to give them one more chance will not solve anything. Under the last Labour government the rich got richer; the dole queues got longer; the high-rise hell-holes erected as Labour’s answer to inner-city slums in the 1960s began to crumble; the number of homeless grew and the number of houses being built fell.

Labour, like the SDP and the Liberals, asks for your trust in its ability to solve problems by making a good job of governing capitalism. What actually happens is that capitalism always makes a good job of governing whichever party is in “power”. The forces of the market, as the profit-system convulses its chaotic way through boom and slump, glut and dearth, are more powerful than a hot kitchen-full of politicians. The present social system entails the minority ownership (by individuals or states) of the land and the means of life, while the propertyless majority are exploited to create profits for the wealthy.

This system spreads across the world. In a television documentary last year it was estimated that from a world population of about 4,000,000,000, approximately 3 per cent own about 80 per cent of the planet (Global Report, 1981, BBC, 30/12/81). Private property society is not the only way that people can live and there is no reason to suppose that the social organisation into which we were born is the one which will endure indefinitely. In fact, the one thing of which we can be certain is that there will be change; but the kind of changed society which will exist tomorrow will depend on action today.

Gary Jay

Big Bangs and Whimpers (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where do Cruise missiles come on your personal list of production priorities? First, last, or not at all? Similarly, where do you place housing, food, clothing and entertainment? Do you know anybody who puts Cruise, Trident and Pershing II missiles first? Probably not. How is it then that over the northern hemisphere there are around 50 million people engaged in wielding weapons of destruction, servicing, administering to them, designing, manufacturing or testing new ones? Is it that the system of war production has got out of control? If so, what are you going to do about it?

Well, you could join in the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Europe; you could go and cheer E. P. Thompson at the next CND rally. If you’re good at spitting fire you could stomp church and civic halls up and down the country, fulminating against NATO and the eastern bloc, who’ve turned Europe into the world’s most dramatic nuclear theatre.

Whatever you do, whether you live in Britain, America or Russia, you’ll have to face a stubborn problem arising from the social system that the world currently operates. You’ll have to find a way of transforming rockets into ploughshares.

Nukes are nasty

At a simple level the weaponry of Europe can be dismantled and sold as scrap. When TSR2 was cancelled in the 1960s one enterprising firm cobbled together a range of costume jewellery out of components from aircraft guidance systems. Since 1945 army surplus stores have been the usual way of recycling non-strategic junk from the forces back into the economy. Quite what could be done with the 7,500 nuclear warheads deployed by NATO and the Warsaw Pact in and around Europe — their rockets, launch platforms, bunkers and control hardware — it’s not easy to say. Perhaps, without the warheads, they could all be let off in one gigantic Guy Fawkes display; or used to launch thousands of weather and communication satellites. The warheads are completely useless for anything except destroying life and wealth.

The original US “Operation Plowshare’’, which planned to use nuclear bombs to blast a wider Panama Canal, was abandoned because of the radioactive filth it would have belched into the atmosphere and because it might have started violent volcanic activity along the Panamanian Isthmus.

Projects to develop interplanetary travel for the masses are non-starters; even capitalism’s best salesmen can’t find any suckers to go on a jerky joy-ride in a vehicle powered by nuclear squibs going bang at the tail.

The US “Operation Gas Buggy", in which a chain of buried nuclear devices were detonated to produce a vast underground cavern of gas for domestic consumption, did not produce enough gas to fuel the fleet of concrete lorries that were needed to cap the surface fractures out of which the subsequent radioactivity leaked.

Nukes are nasty and aside from their intended purpose, neither NATO nor the Eastern Bloc can find anything to do with them.

Poverty and plenty

So the slogan “rockets into ploughshares’’ is misleading. But would a society that makes only “ploughshares" in the first place be enough? For even if the nuclear factories were converted to produce agricultural machinery, most third world governments do not have the foreign exchange to buy such equipment. It needs only a little imagination to work out what happens when there is overproduction of such machinery for a non-existent — market the bottom falls out of world trade. A “surplus” of agricultural produce brings about a world food shortage in this way: as investment falls, production is cut back, land is unused until the surplus is gone; but with rising demand in the developed countries agricultural produce is sucked out of the underdeveloped countries and as neglected land cannot be made productive immediately millions starve as the price of grain soars.

Behind capitalism with its nuclear big bangs you can hear the crying of hungry people. Behind capitalism without the big bangs you will still hear the whimpers of starving people.

A much more useful slogan than “rockets into ploughshares" is “transform capitalism into socialism”. Nuclear disarmers and others should consider this as an immediate priority

B.K. McNeeney

The Interview (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

I trudge off to my weekly rendezvous with the man at the Buroo, who had sent me a letter saying “we are concerned, as no doubt you are, about your continued unemployment . . I mull over some of the things he has been saying over the past few weeks: the concern for my well-being, the “helpful suggestions” on how to find employment and how I should “have no difficulty with interviews”.

It occurs to me that the blame for my predicament is being put on me. The letters I now receive when I miss one of those meetings contain blunt, as well as subtle, threats. I feel that some vile crescendo is being worked up against me by this Causa Nostra of officialdom: a terrible Day of Reckoning. I have always had this feeling, even when in employment. Yet I am not paranoid. My fears are based on experience: one can be sacked from jobs and benefit can be stopped when one does not attend interrogation—I mean interview sessions—at the DHSS. However I digress, as what I feel or how I think is of no importance to these official Mafiosi. I then think that I am taking things too personally; to them it is probably “purely business, nothing personal”.

This man I must speak with today is probably just as bored as I am with our little “chats”. He does try to be an affable character, and like me is a victim of his poverty. Just another worker—except that his house probably does not leak and doesn't have a bedroom in which the fungi flourish. Furthermore, if he wants to keep living in his house, he has to keep doing this dull, dull job. (He too has the fear of the sack.)

He can be extremely delicate in his selection of words, but notwithstanding this, I must stop being “nice” to him. For too long have I quietly listened to his naive interpretation of events. Today I will tell him what I really think. (I had thought of telling him that 1 was terminally ill to get him off my back, but after a decent interval had elapsed, he would be sending me letters demanding to know why I was not dead and, worst of all, why I was still claiming “Benefit”.) He usually asks me why I thought it was difficult to find work, and he phrased the question differently each time. He seemed to be obsessed by this question, and always returned to it. There is no doubt he saw it as one of life’s great mysteries and no doubt he would return to this theme today.

I rehearsed in my mind how I would answer him. I would inform him of the millions of other workers on the dole, as though this knowledge had only just come to my attention. I would, in a casual fashion, introduce him to the fact that capitalism is in a slump and that when this happens workers are thrown on the dole because the commodities they have been producing cannot be sold profitably in the same quantities as before; and, as the capitalists need to change their commodities into money to realise the surplus value (unpaid labour) contained in them, this unfortunate turn of events means that production must be curtailed.

When this happens in fairly large sections of industry, other sectors are similarly affected. A fall in demand for motor cars affects tyre manufacturers and the steel industry, which in turn affects the coal and petrochemical industries which, in any case, are already affected due to less demand for PVC and other polymer plastics used extensively in producing motor cars. The list of causes and effects, and effects becoming new causes of other effects, is endless.

However, in returning to my particular problem, I decided that I would inform this SS interrogator that the difficulty in obtaining employment is not resolved simply by making greater efforts to find work. (He has suggested ways of improving my “interview technique” and has given other unsolicited advice such as “getting to know something about the company involved” before interviews. Such suggestions could, at best, only help to secure a job already in existence, but could not create one which is not already there.)

This idea presupposes that employment is available if only the unemployed would look for and find it. This is an idea propagated by certain capitalist politicians such as Tebbit who urges us on to the streets—not to the barricades, but onto bikes. This simplistic notion in which Tebbit and his SS men believe (or at least pretend to believe) is not true.

The unemployed are not allowed to work at the present time. It is the capitalist class who decide whether or not, and in what circumstances, workers will work and in the present slump they have in effect told certain workers: “Go home! We don’t need you. Wait there until we need you again”.

The important fact in relation to unemployment, I will tell him, is that we live in a world in which it is now possible to satisfy everybody’s needs but the present (capitalist) mode of production prevents this potential super-abundance being realised. Unemployment is therefore only one example of capitalism’s inability to use its resources for the benefit of the whole community. The wealth that could be produced by the world’s unemployed would be very useful to the millions of impoverished people were it to be used to satisfy human needs.

But capitalism does not, and cannot, work that way.

I will tell him that, having made all these discoveries and having realised that a potential for super-abundance exists, it follows that the way to make this abundance a reality is to get rid of that which stands in its way: the capitalist system itself. In answer to his question, I will inform my interrogator that capitalism with its periodic and inherent crises is what makes it “difficult to find work” and that my unemployment (and that of everyone else) can be abolished by the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. This will involve also the abolition of employment, as there will no longer be a capitalist class and a working class. The people will still be there, but they will not belong to a particular class, as socialism will necessarily involve the abolition of classes and with it the exploitation of one class by another. Socialism, I will explain, will be:

A community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. (Capital, Vol. l, Ch. 1.)

Socialism means a world without wages, prices and profits; a world without P45s, UBL18s, UB40s, A14Ns, U12s and all the other paraphernalia.of capitalism. Socialism will enable human beings to live in a society in which production will be carried on in accordance with the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

While trying to organise in my mind an exposition of the Labour Theory of Value, I arrived at the office. After exchanging the usual meaningless pleasantries, the question horribly arose: “What difficulties have you found recently in looking for work”, I gave him the answer I had prepared. He said I had “an alarming attitude”

Johnny Cadillac