50 Years Ago: Trade Relations After The War (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The other side of the New Order is the insistence on the desirability of raising the standard of living of the world’s population. Here you find the Conservative Times and the Labour leader, Mr. Herbert Morrison, agreeing about the form of words to be used. The Times (October 4th. 1941) says that the old conception of "Wealth of Nations" is "finding more positive expression in ‘the welfare of nations,”’ and Mr. Morrison suggests "the conception of human welfare as the avowed aim and object of international post-war policy” (Times, June 7th, 1941). But the magic word “welfare" and seeming agreement get us nowhere. Before human welfare can be the aim and object of international policy that aim and that object have got to be adopted by those who control the Government and that cannot be while capitalism is the established order of society. The aim of the capitalist, whether individually or through capitalist trading and industrial associations or through Governments, is and must continue to be the production and sale of goods for profit.

Governments may come under the control of men or parties which profess other aims, but so long as they have the task of administering capitalism it will be the profit motive, not the idealistic aim, that will and must determine their conduct and policy at home and in the international field.

(From the Socialist Standard, February 1942.)

Letter: Undemocratic SLP (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I read with interest your review of The Socialist Labor Party, 1876-1991 by Frank Girard and myself (Socialist Standard, October 1991). I have a couple of comments: The SLP (founded in 1876, not 1878) does not really have “a detailed blueprint for future society . . . " It is true that they publish a chart showing how industrial representation would function, but it is very sketchy, designed to illustrate rather than specify. It is unfair to imply that they claim to foresee all the details in their projected future organization of society. As to labor vouchers versus free access, the SLP is less dogmatic than generally described and has apparently modified its position somewhat. In a recent issue of their paper they concede the possibility that labor vouchers would never be necessary.

I feel the phrase "SLP’s undemocratic structure" can be misread. The National Secretary and the NEC don’t actually have constitutional power to expel members. Aside from members-at-large, a member can be expelled only by his local organization ("section"). (The extra-constitutional expulsion of Frank Girard by a National Convention is the single known exception to this rule).This fact explains why so many sections have been expelled over the years: they refused to expel a member who had fallen from grace with the National Secretary and so were themselves expelled.

While over-centralized in the view of many, the party’s constitutional structure is not so much a problem as the compliant membership which has tolerated an authoritarian leadership. In short, it has in this regard reproduced some of the ills of class society. The SLP has not been alone with this problem, of course, as an examination of innumerable left (and right and center) organizations will attest. My knowledge of the SPGB is limited. but if you have not had this problem I would be interested in knowing how you explain this.

Ben Perry 

Philadelphia, USA

Reply:

There are two factors preventing the emergence of an authoritarian leadership within the SPGB. Firstly, a democratic constitution and. secondly, a democratic consciousness amongst the membership.

Policy is decided by the membership, either by votes cast at branch meetings prior to the Annual Conference or by referendum. The EC cannot expel any member or branch; it can only lay a charge which is heard by the next meeting of branch delegates whose findings have to be submitted to a referendum.

To function properly a democratic constitution has to be backed up by a democratic consciousness amongst the membership. This really exists in the Socialist Party, in large part because we reject the whole concept of leadership— not just authoritarian leadership, but any kind of leadership—and place the emphasis on understanding. This applies both to how we sec the working class establishing socialism and to how we see a socialist party should be organised.

Workers must understand and want socialism, and organise democratically without leaders, before socialism can be established; and only those who want and understand socialism, and reject the whole idea of leadership, are admitted to membership of the Socialist Party.

EDITORS

When Labour Ruled? (4) (1992)

A Short Story from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Labour Wins . . .

When the Labour Party won the general election of June 1992 Neil Kinnock, who had something of a name as a crooner, might have burst out with the Frank Sinatra song High Hopes. A couple of years later, when he was locked in secret, desperate negotiations over an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, he might have tried Stanley Holloway’s Get Me To The Church On Time. And when the Labour Party, exasperated by Kinnock’s compulsive alliterations and wisecracks in face of yet another disastrous experience of power, got rid of him a fitting accompaniment might have been There Go My Dreams.

In fact Labour only just managed to scrape home in the election—an overall majority of seven seats was hardly a rich harvest from all those years of trimming and twisting, searching for the polices most likely to bring in the votes. Nevertheless there was a spring in Kinnock's step as he set out for Buckingham Palace, to kiss hands, bow and scrape, walk backwards, vow allegiance to the Crown and do anything provided it helped him to take up residence in Number Ten.

The new Prime Minister’s first job was to appear on television, making a speech which had been written some time before. There would, he guaranteed, be no truck with the past. He knew that previous Labour governments had not been without their faults (he had spent a lot of time, as an intensely ambitious politician in opposition, studying them) but he could give his personal assurance that the mistakes of the past would not be repeated. Without actually mentioning Harold Wilson, he declared that his would not be a government dominated by one person; to the accompaniment of grim smiles from his rivals he said that we would henceforward be governed by a team. It would be a caring government, cherishing the like of the National Health Service (which it had cut back during its last spell in power) and working tirelessly for a nuclear-free world (although in the past it had started up the British nuclear armoury and had supported every one of British capitalism’s wars). It would work in harmony with the trade unions to ensure a growth in prosperity so rational and controlled that it would benefit both sides of the negotiating table (he put from his mind Labour’s history of attempting to impose statutory wage restraint and the consequent warring with the unions). He almost repeated one of the sillier assertions of his deputy. Roy Hattersley. who once babbled that "a socialist incomes policy can protect, rather than diminish, real earnings . . . ” Why should he give Hattersely some free publicity?

Inheritance

Labour made its case plain, in its 1989 Policy Review, when it announced its intention. not to dismantle capitalism and its production of wealth for sale and profit, but to "make the market work" to maintain and strengthen the profitability of British industry. They were concerned not just with using their association with unions to keep wages in check; they had worked hard to cement a partnership with the employers as well to help them compete against foreign competition. This yearning for financial orthodoxy and economic competence was welcomed by the Investors Chronicle, which thought that "Labour's economic policy . . . contains nothing to which the City objects violently on principle”.

It was as well that Labour took these precautions because, far from introducing the revolution, they had merely taken on the running of British capitalism. As a Tory ex-minister put it: "The Labour Government have inherited our problems. They seem also to have inherited our solutions". While this was perfectly true Labour’s long spell in opposition had placed it under an obligation to produce "solutions" which seemed fresh and radically different from the Tories. The traditional way of doing this—which Labour followed—was to give the old “solutions” dazzlingly new names. Wage restraint became The Culture of Co-operation and measures to increase the capitalists' profits were called Positive in Partnership. Apart from that they could only hope for luck to run their way, for something to turn up so that they could claim the credit for a period of boom. If that didn't happen—well there was always the chance of the voters again being gullible enough to blame an economic crisis on to "unfair" foreign competition or sinister currency manipulators in distant capitals or Britain's notoriously greedy and lazy workers.

 

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Lectures

But luck did not run their way. During their first six months in office a yawning deficit in the balance of trade opened up. Ministers, still mindful of that alliance with the unions, began to make coded threats about the reluctance of workers in the British car and electronics industries to be exploited as intensely as their counterparts in Germany and Japan. In the money markets, where a lot can be made and lost simultaneously—but not by production-line workers—sterling came under pressure, which was worrying for anyone who was concerned about any threat to "our” currency and even more so for the ministers who were supposed to protect it.

The world economy slid deeper into the recession which did so much to undermine the support for John Major’s government, the effects of which Labour had promised to control. Investment and production declined while unemployment and bankruptcies zoomed upwards. Although it was not the best of times to press for higher wages, the unions were under pressure from their membership to try to catch up the ground lost under the Tories. Strikes, both official and unofficial, became headline news again and the gutter press could each choose a union leader as their current bogey.

Neil Kinnock had promised to be a prime minister of action, so he quickly sent John Smith to the TV studios to lecture the workers on why they should work harder, hold back their pay claims and stop buying imported goods. "We all agree," said Smith (as if “we all" had agreed), “that we cannot spend what we have not earned. There are no quick fixes. The government must be aware of the economic realities. If that means we have to postpone some of our social ambitions, then we have to do so”. This speech was a great disappointment to the people who were encouraged to believe that the Labour Party did have quick fixes which they could apply to control problems like recessions.

Losses

As the Labour government floundered about like a drunken soldier they began to lose crucial by-elections, even in places like South Wales where Tories had once been as rare as an endangered species. Kinnock’s last desperate bid to stem this tide was to try for an alliance with the Liberal Democrats. When this was frustrated by the Lib/Dems’ insistence that Labour was more right-wing than the Tories it was clear that Kinnock’s time was up. But who to replace him? John Smith’s stamina was suspect, especially after his banqueting forays into the City to win the confidence of the bankers and the merchants there. Roy Hattersley’s day was past and in any case he resembled himself on Spitting Image too closely. Tony Blair, having pushed his case as Labour's youthful future, thereby damned himself as a perpetual Peter Pan. Margaret Beckett was ambitious enough but she roused chilling memories of Thatcher. Gordon Brown was a poor TV performer, with his sepulchral denunciations of working class extravagances.

Labour felt they needed cheering up and that, as it turned out, was the crucial factor when the Men In Red Ties called on Kinnock to give him notice to quit Number Ten. In the election for the new leader, one of the candidates was Des Topper, a hardened left-winger from a Midlands mining constituency who was famous for his tireless harrying of ministers, employers and Tories and anyone else who he saw as obstructing his version of the workers’ paradise—which was actually little more than regular, reliable wage-slavery and cheap beer at the colliery club. Topper stood for the leadership as a gesture towards what he saw as Labour's forgotten principles. But to cheer themselves up the Labour Party elected him and when they had recovered from their surprise the PR and media experts closed in about him.

Changed man

True to his promise to give the workers the chance to vote for Labour's allegedly lost alleged principles Topper quickly called a general election (in fact he had little choice since their majority had disappeared in those by-elections). He then appeared on TV. to rally the nation to Labour’s banner. He was a changed man. On the advice of an expensive tailor his sports jacket and loud shirt—once his trade marks in the Commons—were replaced by a sober grey suit and discreetly striped shirt. His hair, which had once been long and aggressively floppy, was trimmed enough to satisfy a City banker. He put on some weight so that he no longer looked so agonisingly principled. His Midlands accent was tamed into a Home Counties drawl. And he learned to tell us that Labour’s anti-working class policies were socialism and to accuse anyone with any doubts about it of making it easy for the Tories to win back power.

His speech to the nation was most moving, even if it had been written by somebody else. "We recognise", he said, staring earnestly into the homes of his audience, "that this great party of ours had made some mistakes in the past. We shall not repeat those mistakes in the future. I give you my personal guarantee that we shall . . ."

Ivan

Between the Lines: Death, hypocrisy and videotape (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

DEATH, HYPOCRISY AND VIDEOTAPE

Has nobody told Stormin' Norman about East Timor? Were we not told by the trigger-happy hypocrites who gave us the Gulf War that the invasion of one country by another was intolerable and must be defeated by force? First Tuesday (BBC2, 7 January, 10.45pm) told the hitherto unexposed story of the ruthless butchery of the Timorese people which has gone on for sixteen years.

In 1975 East Timor became independent from Portuguese control and elected its own government. That year Indonesia took over East Timor, outlawed the elected government and began a process of imposing control by means of brutal coercion. It is estimated that one in three of the population have been killed since the Indonesian take-over. In sixteen years as many as 250,000 Timorese workers are said to have been done away with. This is legalised terrorism on a mass scale. It is virtual genocide.

So, where are "our boys" whose task is to defend "the good" against "the evil”? (Remember all that "Free Kuwait" rubbish? The Kuwaiti dictatorship now presides over torture and mass deportations of its subjects.) The answer is that the only American and British arms being sent into the area are being sold to Indonesia.

The governments which claimed to have fought a war in the Gulf against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait are selling to Indonesia the means to unlawfully colonise East Timor. The alleged atrocities committed by Iraqis against Kuwaitis are being committed by Indonesian state thugs against the Timorese workers as a matter of course, but, despite several detailed reports by Amnesty International, the governments of Britain, the USA or Australia (the latter being a major trading partner with Indonesia) just stand by. Of course, hypocrisy is as attached to capitalist politics as fleas are to a dirty dog. How else can the cynical, anti-human policies of defending profit and damning need be justified?

The well-made First Tuesday documentary contained shocking footage of the 12 December 1991 funeral demonstration where Timorese workers were burying a man killed by the Indonesian army. At the funeral Indonesian troops fired on the crowd, killing one hundred mourners, others died on their way to and in hospital.

Indonesian brutality has given rise to an ill-equipped campaign of military resistance by desperate Timorese workers. Such counter-violence is futile: semi-armed guerrilla fighters will be no match for American-backed Indonesian state thugs, and anyway, killing Indonesian workers in uniform will not make anyone free, just a few more graves full.

The tragedy of East Timor reflects vividly the crass hypocrisy of Western celebrations about the coming of "Freedom" and the decency of King Capital's New World Order. It shows just how much the Gulf War was fought for oil profits and just how true it is that if Kuwait would have been as relatively poor as East Timor and if Iraq had been Indonesia things would have been different.

AAH, FREEDOM

The government has deregulated the law relating to TV, so now we are "free" - if we pay for it (in short, capitalist freedom) - to watch two new pom channels: After Midnight and Adult Channel. Behind the Headlines (BBC2, 8 January. 10.55pm) had a discussion on what such "freedom" will mean. In future viewers will be sold little plastic cards which they can slot into their TVs in order to watch sleazy movies made for sleazy men.

The programme also discussed the new 0898 sex lines on which consumers with such desires can pay 45p a minute listening to out-of-work actresses pretending to be naughty schoolgirls or busty nurses. There is even an 0898 number on which a genuine rape victim has been paid £3,000 to give a recorded account of her rape ordeal. Sweet freedom, eh? The poor woman is "free" to sell her pathetic story and men who are excited by rape (the stealing of the sexual commodity) can listen to her for just over a quid an orgasm.

Meanwhile Decca has announced that in February it is to release a video of the most salacious bits of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial - yours to enjoy in complete "freedom" for £10.99 a copy.

If this is freedom, then it is a lunatic's conception of what it is to be free. It is the freedom to sell, to exploit, to degrade, to abuse, to drag humanity through the dirt. Perhaps someone could market an 0898 number with recordings of children being tortured in East Timor; there might be a few bob to be made out of the screwballs who will get off on that.

Steve Coleman

No to nationalism (1992)

Editorial from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political virus of Nationalism is spreading. In Yugoslavia and the late Russian Empire, after decades of forced national unity, new national splinters are emerging, echoed by the sound of gunfire. In the north-cast of Ireland both sectarian gangs persist in their absurd nationalist hatreds, while fanatical Welsh nationalists set English property on fire and Scottish nationalist tricksters preach independence from Britain as some kind of panacea for ending poverty. Czechs against Slovaks; Flemings against Walloons; Ukrainians against Russians; western against eastern Germans, and both against Turkish and other immigrants.

Commentators speak of neo-fascism being on the rise. To be sure, gangs of desperate, frustrated, ignorant workers are looking for scapegoats. In Poland they are blaming their problems on the Jews, even though most Polish Jews were killed in the holocaust.The growth of the French National Front, with its facile equation between immigration and national crisis, is a miserable reflection upon millions of people who seem to have learned little from the experience of Nazism.

The world capitalist economy is in a crisis. Millions are feeling the hardship of living under a system which puts profits before needs. Not understanding the system, they seek someone to blame. Deceived by their masters, they seek security in isolation, entombed by artificial borders which stifle the cultures of those who never look beyond them. In Britain, nationalists wrap their ugly flag around them and thank God (who saves The Queen) that they are not continentals.

The contradiction of capitalism is that, being a global system, it cannot allow petty national fragmentation to succeed. The complacent British must become Europeans, and the isolationist Americans must face up to the world slump they must share with Japan, and the Croatians must realise that even if they escape Serbian domination they will soon have to accept German economic rule.

Socialists, whose country is the planet Earth, do not underestimate the importance of cultural diversity. The notion of the whole world conforming to one uniform way of life is far from appealing. It is the profit system, with its inevitable cultural imperialism whereby those with the dollars dictate what we listen to, how we speak, what we read and where we travel, which reduces culture to lifeless conformity to the cheap and nasty offerings of a culture industry.

Socialism is a global solution to a global problem. The problem is that the Earth and all its abundant resources belong to the minority, not to the human community as a whole. The minority abuse the planet Earth for the purpose of making profits. Socialism will end minority ownership and control, place the world in the hands of everyone and produce goods and services solely for need. This will require global organisation and not national fragmentation. Socialism will put an end to every border; nation-states will be abolished immediately.

The working class has no countries. The British do not own Britain any more than the Russians own Russia, the Georgians Georgia, the Armenians Armenia or the Serbs Serbia. We, who produce the world’s wealth, must cast off the chains of nationalist illusion. We have a world to win.

Rusted Iron Lady (1992)

Book Review from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economy Under Mrs Thatcher 1979-90. By Christopher Johnson. Penguin, 1991. £5.99

This is a generally readable account of the economic policies pursued by the Conservative governments under Mrs Thatcher, containing a useful appendix of statistics on everything from trends in economic growth to changing employment patterns. Johnson, a specialist adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, shows that even on Thatcher's own dubious terms, her governments were a decidedly mixed bag—with notable failures to deal with unemployment, inflation and economic growth.

Though Thatcher is usually portrayed as a clear-sighted, no-nonsense politician, this book goes some way towards undermining the image by hinting at the very real confusion of her governments with regard to the conduct of economic policy. Though Johnson only touches the surface, there is a definite recognition that a core confusion of Thatcherite economic policy was on the subject closest to her heart—inflation.

Throughout the 1980s Conservative governments showed themselves to be hopelessly unclear about the cause of the persistent rise in the price level, and proved themselves incapable of halting the phenomenon to which they attached so much importance. Early intentions to slow the rate of growth of the money supply foundered on an inability to understand exactly what constitutes money, and from that point on government policy plumbed the depths of confusion. In the long-running farce since then, inflation has been blamed on a multitude of factors ranging from high wage rises to low interest rates, excessive government expenditure to incorrect tax policy and beyond. Everything, that is, except its real cause—the policy pursued by all governments alike since the Second World War, of printing an excess issue of inconvertible paper currency in an attempt to secure a buoyant economy.

While the stubborn rises in the price level continued to bewilder Tory politicians, the policy aims of economic growth and low unemployment also provoked confusion among the ranks of Thatcher's ministers and advisers. All her governments were marked by a tension between those who thought so-called "monetarist" policies on state expenditure and trade union reform could pave the way to truly lasting economic growth, and others, who, in their more realistic moments, took a rather different view. This realistic perspective, forced on the Conservatives by events, was summed up by former chancellor Nigel Lawson in 1990, who told the House of Commons that "there always have been economic cycles and there always will be economic cycles".

We might add to this remark that there will always be economic cycles so long as capitalism lasts, and that only socialism can put an end to them. Similarly, only social ownership of the means of living with production solely for use can provide the framework for the abolition of poverty, homelessness, crime and those other afflictions of capitalist society that flourished under the now rusted-up Iron Lady, none of which her economic policies proved capable of solving.

Dave Perrin 

Obituary: Ian Jones (1992)

Obituary from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with sadness that we report the unexpected death of comrade Ian Jones in November after missing several Executive Committee meetings due to trouble from asthma. He still had a few years to reach retirement age although he was working a shortened working week. Ironically for a fighter for a world without money, he spent his working life in the employ of National Cash Registers, a multi-national corporation whose activities epitomise what our present society is all about.

Ian hailed from Birmingham and it was there that he joined our local branch in 1951. A few years later he moved to London and transferred to the old Paddington branch, of which he was an active member in the fifties and sixties. He was an occasional speaker for the Party and also wrote for this journal (under the initials "IDJ", his last article appearing in our December issue).

Ian was keenly interested in the theatre and his early articles were reviews of plays by Arthur Miller, Arnold Wesker, Eugene Ionesco and others in which he developed the theme that "if and when the development of a socialist theatre is possible, giving voice to Socialist ideas, aspirations and criticism, it can only be through the medium of 'social' theatre that it can be accomplished". For years he was the stage carpenter of the Questors Theatre, Ealing, and when it was his turn to direct a play he made a brilliant success of Ibsen's The Master Builder. In the fifties when Bertolt Brecht was the cultural figurehead of the odious Leninist dictatorship controlling the German (un)Democratic Republic, Ian was able to prove to a number of us, by chapter and verse, that Brecht's compromise with the oppressive system was of secondary significance as compared to the profoundly Marxian insights which the body of his humanistic drama and poetry provide.

Ian was a musician as well as being a man of the theatre. His first love was the piano, and in recent years found much satisfaction in working with a choir in his home area of Wallington in Surrey. He had reason to be proud of the fact that when his only daughter went to college to study music, such was her accomplishment with the violin she became leader, whilst still a first-year student, of the Cardiff University Orchestra.

Christopher Wren's son had chiselled in Latin on the North portico of St Pauls "if you want a monument, look around you". Reapplying this advice, I have looked around my bookshelves and see a handful of volumes which between them give the measure of our departed comrade. These were either given to me or acquired on my behalf in the course of his assiduous rounds of second-hand and remaindered bookshops throughout the home counties. They serve to reflect his broad and deep Socialisr culture and knowledge.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's collection of West Coast "beat" poems, The Coney Island of the Mind, given when first published in 1959, is a happy reminder of the introduction Ian gave many of us to this whole new wave of American libertarian thought and sentiment. An old edition in mint condition of Kropotkin's memoirs stands near to a fine copy of the book William Morris wrote jointly with Belfort Bax, Socialism, ITS Growth and Outcome. documentary refutation of the hoary myth of Morris as the unscientific utopian "dreamer of dreams". Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy, a book of major importance to Party thought, published by Gollancz in 1940, one of the surviving voices of classical continental Marxism, uncontaminated with Leninist distortion albeit flawed with a certain amount of Social-Democratic reformist illusions. Such were the kind of books Ian was so adept in tracking down and making available to Party members.

E.S.G.

Uncommon Tragedy (1992)

From the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1968 the journal Science published an article by an American biologist, Garrett Hardin, entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons". Its central argument, that common property leads to ecological ruin, has since become "part of the conventional wisdom in environmental studies, resource science and policy, economics, ecology and political science" (Human Ecology, No 1,1990).

Hardin did not exactly break new ground. Others had already elaborated a theory of the commons along similar lines. Nevertheless the publication of his article struck a chord at a time of growing environmental concern. It echoed the prevailing ethos of ecological pessimism articulated by the emerging environmental lobby and, more particularly, by the authoritarian anti-humanism of its neo-Malthusian wing.

Hardin set out to demonstrate the implications that different systems of property rights had for the sustainable use of natural resources. As the title of his article suggests, his main concern was with a system in which these resources were held in common (in the sense of not being monopolised by anyone).

Unrealistic model

He gave the example of a rangeland on which a population of herdsmen were able to graze their cattle without restriction. While the benefits of adding a head of cattle to his herd would accrue to the individual herdsman alone, the environmental costs of this decision would be shared by all the herdsmen. Thus, from the individual's viewpoint, these costs would be largely "externalised". That would encourage him as a rational economic actor to increase his herd still further—and thereby become richer—since the benefits would outweigh the private costs this entailed.

The problem, according to Hardin, was that every other herdsman would be inclined to do the same and thus, ultimately, the combined effect of their actions would be to increase the number of cattle on the commons beyond its carrying capacity. In short, common ownership of the rangeland will lead to tragedy. That the private ownership of the cattle might be equally implicated in his scenario was a point that appears to have escaped Hardin's notice.

Some economists have tended to see the solution to this problem as something to be imposed from outside or above: leave the existing system of property rights intact but introduce measures such as cattle taxes or quotas to force herdsmen to reduce their stocking rates. An alternative approach, favoured by Hardin, is to enclose, or privatise, the commons. Private ownership, goes the argument, would compel the individual herdsman to bear the full costs of any decision to increase his herd and thus persuade him to maintain a stocking rate compatible with the sustainable use of grazing land. It would also provide the necessary incentive to upgrade pasture because the benefits of doing so would be similarly "internalised".

Both these approaches concur on one fundamental point: there is no possibility of an internal solution to the "tragedy of the commons". After all, if there was, there would be no reason to expect a tragedy. Yet it is precisely on this point that the theory is coming under fire.

Wherever a commons has existed it has been associated with a complex pattern of institutional rules governing a distinct community of users; unregulated open access regimes are more typical of sparsely populated frontier zones. As John Reader puts it:

“access to the commons was restricted by entitlement; use was regulated to ensure that no individual could pursue his own interest to the detriment of others. Far from bringing ruin to all, the true commons functioned to keep its exploitation within sustainable limits.”  (New Scientist. 8 September 1988).

There are numerous examples that bear this out, from the traditional Japanese village to Pacific island communities. Some have emerged only recently, such as the case of a number of Turkish coastal fisheries, but many contemporary examples have been in existence for hundreds of years. Indeed, it is the very persistence of the commons as an institution which testifies, in the view of some, to its inherent stability.

Carlisle Ford Runge has presented a cogent critique of Hardin's theory (American Journal of Agricultural Economics, November 1981), in which he argues that it is not the existence of a commons that is the problem but uncertainty in the context of interdependent decision-making. Hardin assumes that the decisions reached by his herdsmen are made in isolation from one another. A more appropriate model, Runge suggests, permits communication between the parties concerned. In this way a compromise could be struck between them which results in a better outcome than would otherwise be possible.

Within actually existing pastoral societies such mutual assurance is secured through the institutionalisation of rules that allow herders to adapt their behaviour in the light of the expected behaviour of others. Once established, herders have a vested interest in maintaining such rules through the exercise of moral sanctions because of the high opportunity costs involved in finding an alternative. Group size may be an important consideration insofar as it affects the transmission of information within, and the cohesiveness of, the group.

Significantly, Hardin felt compelled to qualify his theory in his response to Reader's article when he explained that the title of his article should have been "The tragedy of the unmanaged commons" (New Scientist, 22 October 1988). But since the commons as a rule are not unmanaged, this made the whole relevance of his theory questionable.

Land enclosures

When we look at the historical development of private property it is abundantly clear that what characterises this process above all is its coercive nature. The gradual demise of the commons in Britain from the 15th century onwards was not the result of their decline into ecological ruin. It was the deliberate result of the state's policy of land enclosure to meet the agricultural capitalists' demand for more land.

This same process of land enclosure is still going on in many parts of the Third World today. In the colonial era, conservationist arguments were often used to justify the appropriation of other people's land. Communal tenure was dismissed as "primitive" and "unscientific", and conducive to poor economic performance as well as environmental deterioration. By and large, these same attitudes continue to inform the policies of many post-colonial regimes. As Vink and Kassier point out, there are "numerous examples of livestock development projects in sub-Saharan Africa which have, implicitly or explicitly, been based on the tragedy of the commons hypothesis" (South African Journal of Economics, No 2, 1987). Such projects have sought to substitute private for communal tenure but have been "characterised by a pervading sense of failure".

There is scant evidence to show that environmental management of rangelands has improved as a result of introducing private ownership. On the contrary, the undermining of communal institutions in the Sahel and Southern Africa has led to increased overgrazing. Land enclosures in drought-prone semi-arid areas preclude the application of traditional risk-avoidance grazing strategies involving the movement of cattle to less vulnerable areas. Moreover, the commercialisation of agriculture accompanying the spread of private tenure tends to make the private rancher vulnerable to the vagaries of the market. So, while, in theory, private tenure may induce them to maintain sustainable stocking rates by internalising their environmental costs, economic pressures often force them to disregard these costs to ensure short-term viability.

The social consequences of land enclosures have almost invariably proved calamitous. While some may benefit—usually government officials and multinational corporations—the high transaction and enforcement costs (such as stock-proof fencing) preclude most from participation in such schemes. This results in large-scale land eviction, increased inequality and rising discontent.

The small yeoman farmers evicted by the Enclosure Acts in Britain had little option but to migrate to the towns were some prospect of employment awaited them. In much of the Third World today, however, urban employment opportunities are few and far between and are declining still further under the current fad for "structural adjustment". Many of those displaced by land enclosures tend to end up in the more ecologically marginal areas which are subsequently degraded under this strain.

Property and pollution

Despite his advocacy of private property, Hardin had to recognise its limitations where it concerned other kinds of natural resources to which—unlike his example of a rangeland—it was difficult, if not impossible, to prevent open access. As he put it. "the air and the waters surrounding us cannot be so readily fenced".

But he saw the tragedy of the commons reappearing here in another form, as pollution, when a "rational man finds that his share of the costs of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them". Even where privatisation on a limited scale could be introduced the basic problem would remain:

“The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream—whose property extends to the middle of the stream—often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door.”

For Hardin, the solution to this problem necessarily entailed some infringement of the rights of property owners. In this regard, he saw a role for the state. However, the difficulty with this approach is that, though the state may have more room for manoeuvre, it is subject to the same competitive pressures that face industry on which it depends for its tax revenue. Ironically, state enterprises are often among the worst transgressors when it comes to pollution.

Hardin's theory of the commons is basically an attempt to vindicate the principle of private property in respect of the Earth's resources. As such it can be shown to be both empirically suspect and theoretically unsound. In the counter-arguments it has provoked, we can glimpse the potential of a sustainable alternative to the imposed monopoly on what should be our common heritage.

Robin Cox