Brave new world (1989)

From the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 4 January 1941 Special Issue of Picture Post was devoted to A PLAN FOR BRITAIN, looking ahead to the post-war world. It was a wide-ranging review, covering work, social services, urban development, housing, farming, education, health and leisure. Forty-eight years on it is interesting to compare what was envisaged with reality.

The introduction is a letter written to Picture Post by a Welsh worker who had left the land to become a miner.

So, one day in late autumn, when the unwanted apples were killing the grass in the orchard, I went eighty miles away to work in the mines. That night, in my new home. I found that apples were dear and scarce. The people would hardly believe that I had seen them left to rot.

Equally he found that coal, which was scarce and expensive in the country, held no value where it was mined even though nearby out-of-work miners were picking over disused tips in the hope of finding bits of coal among the rubble. He ended his letter:

Between the dear coal and the cheap cutting. the scarce apples and those that rot. I think I can see the peace aim I would like to achieve. It is security — security against war and exploitation, by man or by country. And what I ask for ourselves should be granted to the whole world.

Amen to that; as good a definition of socialism as we have heard!

WORK FOR ALL lists a number of aims (including lower Income Tax, state control and state managed investments, and a job for every able-bodied man) and outlines a "national plan" related to an "international plan”. Thomas Baiogh calls for planning control and stimulated demand to ensure full employment (in spite of the role women played in industry in the First and Second World War, he specifies only jobs for men!). He warns against a post-war boom which would “create big profits for a few and high wages for a minority of workers”, saying that "there must be no return to what used to be called 'normal' — that is, complete freedom for the speculator to make high profits". Towards the end he says:

If we are to make a success of such a system it would have to be based on practical international understanding . . . It is obvious that such planning is not possible while maintaining the traditional concepts of sovereignty. They will have to go.

What Professor Baiogh failed to grasp is that while capitalism exists the need to generate profit and the ongoing fight for markets between competing factions, nationally and internationally, will prevent the achievement of even his limited aims. The situation has not changed from that outlined by the unemployed Welsh miner.

The next two articles dealt with social security and urban planning. Most of us at some time have experienced first hand the continuous honing down of the former, and we did not need the heir to the throne to point out the hideous character of much urban development and the inadequacies of high rise and other working class housing, which turns into slums a decade after it has been built. A warning against crystal-qazing is in the pictures of hospitals, factories and housing estates then held to be desirable, which few would not condemn today.

PLAN THE HOME. Here Elizabeth Denby, described as a "housing consultant whose chief interest is planning working class homes”, puts her view of the desirable future. The first thing which strikes you is that conditions shown in a miserable slum picture of 1941 can still be found in many parts of town and country, despite innumerable promises by Labour and Tory politicians to solve “The Housing Problem" during the intervening decades. The "planned kitchen" and “spacious, sunlit, cheery" living room pictured would today be described as hopelessly outmoded and spartan, but the aim that “hot water should be immediately available at any time of day or night, at every bath, sink and basin in the house" is still, in 1989, wishful thinking for many who cannot even boast a bath, never mind constant hot water.

A PLAN FOR EDUCATION has a topical ring. The aim set out by A.D. Lindsay is to give equal learning opportunities to all children and eliminate the elitist privileges of the rich; making education from primary school to university available to all on the basis of ability rather than cash. (Incidentally, here again the writer refers only to boys, which is strange because even though Balliol, at which he was Master, did not admit women, quite a few were nevertheless going to university and had been doing so for many years.) Mr. Baker's proposals show how far we have (not!) progressed towards achieving even the very limited aims of Professor Lindsay. The need is still to train the workforce for the tasks they will be required to perform; if there has been any change at all, it is that today’s Tory government is more open about that than was the wartime Coalition of 1941.

HEALTH FOR ALL and A REAL MEDICAL SERVICE. The picture of the crowded outpatients' waiting room in a hospital is familiar; only the clothes look a bit old- fashioned. Another showing a patient getting special preventative treatment is captioned “This is out of reach of most people, who must wait for serious illness to receive attention". Forecasts of immediate free explorative X-rays, dental treatment and chiropody are especially ironic today, when not only are waiting lists growing ever longer but both examination and treatment have again become fee-charging in the case of the latter two.

The final article, WHEN WORK IS OVER deals with how we shall be spending our leisure time. Compared to the "exotic” cruises, foreign and far-away places we want (and pay for) during our two or three weeks off the chain, their expectations were indeed modest. Would J. B. Priestley say today, as he did in Picture Post, “Nor can I agree with those theorists who believe that this . . . silly style of amusement is something deliberately imposed upon the masses by wicked capitalists". While we agree with him that creative activity is a satisfying use of leisure time, his view that woman needs more leisure time than a man to enable her to "cultivate all the small graces of living and making herself and her domestic surroundings look more attractive" is quaint, to say the least, on two counts. It is not only the idea of the “little home-maker", but the notion that housework is leisure!

At the end of the Special Issue, Picture Post asked readers for their views on the PLAN FOR BRITAIN. Although too late for publication (Picture Post was long ago laid to rest) we give them now. This is not with the benefit of hindsight, but in the certain knowledge that our comrades would have said the same thing in 1941.

However good the intention, while society is ruled by the profit motive, it cannot be made to run for the benefit of the majority, the workers. Capitalism cannot be reformed to any significant degree. The only alternative is to replace it with socialism. We will then achieve not just a Better Britain but a Better World.

Eva Goodman

Notes by the Way: £3 10s. 5½d. a week (1958)

The Notes by the Way Column from the April 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

£3 10s. 5½d. a week

Miss Schulz, of the Oxford Institute of Statistics, worked out that it would be possible to feed a family of five on £3 10s. 5½d. a week on a diet corresponding to the pre-war “Rowntree” diet which in 1936 cost 21s. 7d. Readers of newspapers who heard about it were for the most part very indignant and blamed Miss Schulz.

Miss Schulz, like the late Seebohn Rowntree, was dealing with the cost of a “minimum" diet for a “working class” family.

The angry critics should be aiming at a larger target. They should be asking themselves what justification there is for a system of society which accepts the double standard of "working class" as distinct from human beings, and which concerns itself with calculating a minimum diet at a time when half the world is slipping into depression because it cannot sell its excess supplies of foodstuffs. They should ask why there should be people who can afford only £3 10s. 5½d. (or less) while other people can toss this away on a little dinner party for two or three.

Donald's Good Man Goes Wrong

From time to time the long-suffering workers have to put up with a special brand of confusion spreaders, the "progressive" clergy. One of them is the Reverend Donald Soper, idol of non-conformity, supporter of the Labour Party, regular contributor to the Tribune, self-styled Socialist and professed pacifist. His idea of Socialism is State capitalism. Hence, for example, his declared objective of “the preservation and extension of the Welfare State, so that those who are unavoidably out of work, will still belong to the community and will not be left to rot in the 'freedom and flexibility' of idleness" (Tribune, 7th March, 1958).

He spends much of his time criticising the aims and activities of his own party and clearly sees no inconsistency in supporting the war-making, capitalism supporting Labour Party while preaching pacifism and, in words, denouncing capitalism and supporting Socialism.

In line with his professional preoccupation with "sin" one of his contributions to confusion is to see the different capitalist national groups in terms of good and bad men. He evidently sees the “older and fatter" bandits of capitalism as “bad” and the up and coming, but as yet leaner bandits as “good.” It was inevitable therefore that his heart should go out to dictator Nasser and the other representatives of the exploiting class in Egypt. When the British and French governments started war over Suez he addressed a protest meeting at Caxton Hall (14th August 1956). He claimed to speak as a Socialist and pacifist and progressive Christian. But instead of putting the Socialist case against capitalism as the cause of war and as an exploiting system, all he could do was to condemn the aggressor capitalist groups and praise the defending capitalist group. Instead of calling on the workers to oppose capitalism (and its wars) he called for encouragement of the Egyptian capitalist figure-head, Nasser.

“I wanted to say in the name of Christianity that this Nasser ought to be encouraged and not be repressed, because I believe the root of the matter in him is good, and because it is good it is our business to evoke it by corresponding good and not to repress it by threats of violence."

But those who take sides between “good” and "bad” representatives of capitalism are asking for trouble. Just lately the good Colonel has been putting the imperialist squeeze on Sudan. Here was a chance for Soper to make an indignant protest. But we looked in Tribune in vain. Instead of loud protests there was a deafening silence.

Tribune had been rallying round Bourguiba of Tunisia, another “good" man, under attack from the “bad” French. Now Bourguiba threatens to break off diplomatic relations with Nasser, because, so he alleges, Nasser’s government has been conniving at a plot to assassinate him (Manchester Guardian, 7th March, 1958).

Apart from praying, what is Soper going to do about it?

Blood is not as thick as oil

While we are on the subject of assassination plots we should not overlook the fact that Nasser is said to be on the receiving end as well as being an instigator, for the Syrian partners in the newly united Egypt-Syria claim to have evidence that Saudi Arabia’s ruler paid £2 million to have Nasser bumped off (or was it only £1 million?). This should be a lesson to those who, rejecting the Socialist explanation of international groupings and rivalries, interpreted the evolution of Middle-East capitalism in terms of the blood bond and Moslem faith of Arab peoples. We now have Egypt and Syria facing Iraq and Jordan, with Saudi Arabia maintaining hostile aloofness. Oil and pipe-lines are the key to the situation, not race and religion or a supposed common hostility to imperialism.

The centre of interest is now moving westwards along the North African coast owing to the first developments of reportedly enormous quantities of oil under the French Sahara; with the Algerian armed rebels standing across the outlets to the Mediterranean. That is what keeps a French army of hundreds of thousands desperately trying to make the oil safe for French capitalism and for the British and other oil interests that have a hand in it.

Attitudes to the H-Bomb

As the gradations of opposition, half-opposition, half support and full support to the H bomb come to expression in the multiplicity of new organisations and declarations, it becomes a major task to know where they all stand. At one end there are the ”rely on the H bomb” lunatics; then the make but don't use or test, the make but don't test, the test, but don't use, the have but not in American planes, the keep but suspend work on, the do this now and the do it after Summit talks, the rely on good old conventional weapons, etc., etc.

The arguments between them are particularly sterile because of the tacit acceptance by all the contestants of the capitalist system of society. They can all knock the other man’s case to pieces, but none of them put up a Socialist alternative. Mr. J. B. Priestley is a case in point. In an article “H-Bomb Hotchpotch ” in the Daily Herald (5th March, 1958) he makes mincemeat of his opponents, but comes down to this in the end:—

“If this country walked out of the nuclear arms race and declared that it would defend itself if necessary with anything a man could lay his hands on, from shot-guns to bombs made out of corned beef tins, it would be a safer place than it is to-day; and certainly safer than Mr. Sandys and friends—who are gambling everything on the belief that nothing can happen . —can make it to-morrow."

Brave words, but it is a safe bet that if it happened, Mr. Priestley would be calling on us to die gloriously with our shot-guns against all the modern armoury of weapons (and probably denouncing the government of the day for not having provided better armaments) with never a thought that war because of capitalism is just as senseless whatever the arms and whichever capitalist group came out victorious.

If Priestley were a Socialist, adding his voice to the international Socialist stand against capitalism everywhere, in opposition to every capitalist government and party, he would be doing something really useful on behalf of humanity.

Labour Government and Strikes

Workers who support the Labour Party and have expectations that the next Labour Government will be different from the last should take note of the speech by Mr. Alfred Robens, who is tipped off to be their Minister of Labour. The following report appeared in the Daily Herald (21st February, 1958):—

"Originally, when private ownership of industry was widespread, a strike was intended to damage the profitability of a company and the private pocket of the owner.

“But times have changed.” Mr. Robens told a London meeting of the Industrial Co-partnership Association.

“We have moved into a managerial society in which shareholders are quite remote from actual management.

“Therefore the strike today does not affect the individuals who are managing in the way which it may have affected those individuals 50 years ago. The managing director’s salary goes on as before.”

"But it did hold up orders and caused people to be chary of investing in an industry with a black record of stoppages.

“The result is that the strike has a long-term boomerang effect of holding up investment in an industry, and so not enabling it to become more modern and reducing its profitability,” added Mr. Robens.

“It. disturbs the confidence of the customer, and it can have nothing but a harmful effect not only on the company, but on all those employed by it.”

Capitalist Culture comes to Florida

In the Manchester Guardian (1st March, 1958) Mr. Alistair Cooke told the sad story of American “progress.” 

"Until the great prosperity came along many of the smaller keys were ravishing; quiet tropical refuges of hardwood and limes and wild flowers and herons, brief reminders of the natural luxury that limestone and warm winds can breed in the middle of an aquamarine ocean. But the "developers” have been here as everywhere, and here, too—on the once lovely Marathon Key, for example—suburban Los Angeles seems to set the universal pattern : trailer camps, hot-dog stands, Joe’s Miracle Bargains in second-hand cars flaunting their strings of bulbs against the indigo night sky.

The harbour at Key West is much the same, and a town that once looked like the perfect setting for a romance by Tennessee Williams or a small domestic tragedy by William March is now the garish frowzy camp of souvenir pedlars and chrome motels and neon-lit saloons. Sometimes the sky darkens over and God pours out a deluge of punishing rain. The streets swirl and the sewers gurgle for a while in running floods. Then, after lunch, the sky is cloudless again. It is 80 degrees, and either by sea or sky the horizon is the gate of Paradise. But the aeroplane coach service and the real estate men together have converted one of the last and beautiful relics of the Spanish Empire into a Coney Island. There is no hiding place down here.”

Edgar Hardcastle

The Jarrow March (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Criticising the Jarrow March of the 1930s is considered almost a crime amongst left-wingers yet the facts are that working class men tramped hundreds of miles simply to beg with the political representatives of the capitalist class that something be done about unemployment in a particular area (an impossibility anyway) only to be treated with contempt by them

The economic slump that plunged Britain and many other countries into depression in the 1930s was felt in few places harder than in Jarrow', where unemployment soared above 80 percent, where people lived in overcrowded and vermin-infested houses and where poverty was unimaginable.

In 1933 J. B. Priestley, having visited Jarrow, wrote about the town in his book English Journey.

"Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people, would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals, but citizens with a vote. ”

Not long after the publication of English Journey, in January 1934, a delegation of 300 people from Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling travelled to Seaham to argue their case with the town’s MP and leader of a largely Conservative National government, Ramsay MacDonald.

Leading the delegation was “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Jarrow, hoping to impress upon the PM the plight of the people along the Tyne and their desperation for work.

No doubt MacDonald was all too aware of the pathos of the situation and the inevitability of the 1930s’ slump and capitalism’s inability to solve it. The advice he gave the member from Jarrow was later described by her as “sham sympathy”:

"Ellen, why don't you go and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for this?”

This reply from a supporter of capitalism was as cold and smacked of the same indifference as a similar delegation received when they visited Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, regarding the opening of a steelworks in Jarrow. Said Runciman: “Jarrow must work out its own problems”.

Jarrow, it seemed, was indeed left to sort out its own problems. To a town whose ship industry had closed down and whose much-anticipated steelworks had failed to materialise, Runciman’s words were received as icily as they had been uttered and sent a shiver down the collective spine of the borough.

Distressed area

At a time when the entire country seemed to be taking part in hunger marches and protest rallies, Councillor David Riley’s suggestion in July 1936 that the unemployed of Jarrow should march to London hardly seemed original or serious in light of the fact that many previous marches had been dismissed as “communist demonstrations”.

However, the idea was discussed at length with the town’s MP and the Jarrow Labour Party executive. Eventually it was decided that any march should be the town’s march, only to go ahead with the full support of the citizens. The town council sanctioned the march and above the signature of the mayor went appeals for support. This was followed by the sending-out of letters requesting the use of services and halls in towns along the proposed route to London. As the pace of events hotted up the organisation of the march was done from the town hall and under the supervision of the town clerk. At the same time, men were also marching to London from South Wales, Cumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, all bent on expressing their grievances against the means test and the Unemployment Assistance Board regulations, which was for the Jarrow men "a welcome sign that other men felt the same as they did and were kicking, too” (Wilkinson, The Town that was Murdered, 1939).

So on a cold morning, Monday 5 October 1936, 200 marchers set out from Jarrow, ahead of them representatives from the Labour and Conservative parties to arrange meetings en route to London. Even the Inter-Hospital Socialist Society came to their assistance, sending out relays of helpers performing dentistry and medical necessities.

The marchers had hardly time to get blistered feet when their organisers were condemned by a Labour Party meeting in Edinburgh for “sending hungry' and ill-clad men across the country on a march to London”. Incensed, Ellen Wilkinson left the marchers and travelled to the Conference in Edinburgh in an attempt to rally support. Her efforts were in vain for the conference had more important matters to discuss, such as their attitude to the Spanish question and the re-armament issue—a time-honoured and typical response from the Labour Party to requests for help from the working class. Neither was support to be found with the TUC, who similarly blacked the march and advised trade councils against giving help. Wilkinson had this to say: “I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval . . . Had the Labour Party put its power behind the marchers, sent out the call for solidarity with them, then by the time these men reached London, not only from Jarrow, but from all parts of the country', the support that would have been aroused . . . would have been enough to shake the complacency of the Baldwin government” (The Town that was Murdered, p. 204-5). There was, however, no shortage of support for and working-class approval, of the march After all, 47 percent of the industrial population of the country at that time resided in areas scheduled as “distressed” or in need

of being so scheduled.

The brainwashed Trades and Labour Council at Chesterfield might have obeyed the TUC circular denouncing the march, but this did not stop the local Conservative Party from rallying to the aid of the marchers, providing hot meals and a place to sleep. The Labour Party rationalised their apathy by asserting that if they gave support to one march, then support would have been demanded of them all. This from an allegedly working-class party!

Along the route to London, members of the working class, and indeed the capitalist class, were all too ready to support the march. By the time the marchers reached Leicester their boots were falling apart. In response, the Co-operative Society’s own cobblers took it upon themselves to work all through the night without pay to repair the boots of the Jarrow men, the Co-op donating the necessary material free.

One cobbler almost anticipated socialism, saying:

“It seems sort of queer, doing your own job just because you want to do it, and for something you want to help, instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn't. ” (p. 207).

Elsewhere, at Leeds, a newspaper proprietor laid on free food and beer (no doubt providing his own newspaper with a story) and at Barnsley, Joe Jones, a miners’ leader had the municipal baths specially opened and heated in time for the arrival of the marchers. A group of journalists, following the march, even clubbed together and purchased a dozen mouth organs in an attempt to boost the morale of the marchers.

The march continued and gained support and sympathy the entire 291 miles of its journey. The men marched between 10 and 21 miles every' day and held meetings every night. After three-and-a-half weeks on the road, they reached Marble Arch tired and rain-soaked, perturbed that only a small crowd had braved the October weather to greet them.

The following day they were given permission to hold a meeting at Hyde Park. The Communist Party was already there, holding a mass demonstration to protest against unemployment. Realising the Jarrow men were in the area, they suspended their rally for an hour and asked their audience to swell the Jarrow Crusade meeting.

Humble petitioners

When Parliament re-assembled two days later, the men marched to the Houses of Parliament and handed in two petitions, one containing 68,500 signatures from towns along the Tyne. The petition presented the case for Jarrow in simple language, pointing out how Jarrow was experiencing a stage of industrial depression unprecedented in the town’s history. Shipyards had closed and the steelworks had been denied a lifeline. Once 8,000 workers were in employment. Now the figure stood at 100 with others on temporary schemes. The petition continued:

“The Town cannot be left derelict, and therefore your petitioners humbly pray that His Majesty's Government and this honourable House will realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay. ”

But there was no debate. As Wilkinson points out: “A few questions were asked .. . and the house passed on to consideration of other things.”

The marchers took it all in their stride. Wilkinson describes them as being “rather sporting about it” and how they were afterwards entertained to tea in the House. Demoralised to the point that they could not care less would have been a more fitting description of the marchers’ sentiments—men pushed and crushed until they could only accept their lot.

When the marchers arrived home they did so to a hero’s welcome. Tens of thousands turned out to greet them and bonfires burned long into the night. For many they had achieved something, even if it meant no change to their meagre existence.

Wilkinson writes of the marchers: “Many were politically educated men, who through the long, bitter struggles, knew who and what was the real enemy.” But to be honest, and not to disparage such a monumental event in working-class history', did they? Were they so educated as to think marching could better their lot and did they really think it possible that capitalism can be bargained with? Did they realise that, in truth, they were marching for the right to be exploited by a system that cared not a jot had the marchers perished to a man en route to London?

Three years later, work did come to Jarrow (more would follow as the capitalist war machine revved up) in the form of a new rolling mill. Walking through the site when the men were laying the concrete foundations, Wilkinson was greeted with: “This is what we marched to get.”

Wilkinson could only find a strange pathos in the statement. She commented:

“The grim thing is that the workers have no share in these mills. When the works are built they will still be subject to the toll of profit, the exigencies of a system where they can be closed at the will of people far away to suit a financial policy. "

Seemingly, as with the cobbler at Leicester, the stark reality of the madness, the insane logic of capitalism, had become apparent to the future Labour Cabinet Minister. But did she actually realise that the internal mechanisms of capitalism run on with a will of their own, oblivious of logic and men with Geordie accents and sore feet?

John Bissett

So They Say: Surplus to Requirements (1975)

The So They Say Column from the July 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Surplus to Requirements

The pollution free oil tanker is with us. The ships, very large crude carriers (VLCCs) are already in existence and extend in some cases to well over 250,000 dead weight tonnage. Furthermore the increase in world tonnage of the VLCCs is estimated to be 1 million tons per week from the present time to the end of 1977, unless immediate cancellations of orders are made. And why should such cancellations be made? — it is the same reason as that behind their being pollution free — the ships cannot be used.

The disastrous slump in demand for big tanker capacity which has dozens of 150,000-ton and 250,000-ton vessels laid up in moorings from the Hebrides to the Pacific, is no temporary aberration, the report (by one of Britain’s major oil companies) says. It will not reach bottom, even on an optimistic assumption on oil usage until 1979 or 1980.

Sunday Times, 15th June 75.

H. P. Drewery (Shipping Consultants) estimated in March that up to 40 million tons of oil tanker tonnage could be laid up by the end of 1975 (Shipping Statistics & Economics) and the writers of the recent report recommend that every VLCC “on order from the world’s shipyards — apart from those actually now being built — should be cancelled immediately” in order to avoid a “surplus to requirements” tonnage in excess of 110 millions by 1980.

So we have it: the classic solution to the classic problem. While the prospects for profit were good the owners rushed capital into the field, each desperate to claim as large a share of the market as possible, now the market is glutted they have a problem — there are no more profits to be found. The Sunday Times on 18th May referred to this “boom and bust” phenomenon as a “grotesque reversal of normality,” but we would disagree. Given the capitalist’s jungle there is nothing unusual here; What is to be condemned is that the jungle still exists.

A Sordid Indictment

The recent case of the fatal virus disease, Lassa Fever, brought into Britain has caused the authorities to build a “Close security laboratory” at the Microbiological Research Establishment in Porton Down, Wiltshire, to study the disease. This wing will also attempt to learn more about other similar diseases for which there are no known antidotes. The laboratory was formally opened on 9th May by its director Professor Robert Harris who said at the time:

Smallpox is child’s play when handling Lassa fever virus. There is no immunization and so people working with the agents are to some extent on their own.

Times, 10th May 1975.

It is certainly a tribute to the determination of science through the individual workers on the project that they are prepared to run such risks in order to overcome a potentially serious hazard to the health of others, but things are not so straightforward in class society. The newspaper report continued :

Asked about the possible military significance, Professor Harris said the question whether Lassa fever would make a good biological weapon depended on how much people wanted to commit suicide.

It is a sordid indictment of capitalism when medical men have to be asked if their researches might prove valuable for warfare. The journalist who asked the question cannot be accused of any personal perversity — if he had not asked it he would be failing in his (limited) function to find facts, or at least, newsprint. It reaches further when we consider that Professor Harris’ team would also be failing in their jobs should they refuse to make their findings known to the masters of the laboratory — the Ministry of Defence.

Not Important

The following piece appeared in the London Evening Standard on 5th June:

Technology and resources exist to produce enough food to supply developing countries up to the year 2000 and possibly for a generation beyond, Mr. Walter Pawley, director of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation said in Toronto.

“But,” he added “if you ask me whether I think production will in fact increase in accordance with the resources and technological possibilities, I must say I am pessimistic.''

It warranted 1½" of type. So much for these “united” nations.

The Capitalist Disease

J. B. Priestley the author had some profound comments to make in the Sunday Times of 15th June. Writing in the Opinion column he relieved himself of a stream of ill-reasoned verbiage. His topic was the “English Disease” — an imaginary ailment which Priestley, along with other self-righteous “thinkers” attribute to the English working class.

I mean English not British, because I am not prepared to discuss the problems of the Scots and the Welsh. (As for the Ulster folk, too many of them refuse to come out of the 17th Century.)

Although he fails to define the nature of the disease, the inference is clearly made that the English simply don’t work hard enough. His solution? — Self discipline.

In times gone by, he argues, the English (good table-thumping stuff this) were disciplined by circumstance. This he defines as “grim hard facts (which) shaped their lives.” We take it that he means working class poverty. But not any more however:

If they are slack and lazy, nobody is telling them to clear out and starve.

In his anxiety to point a finger at the offenders, without in turn offending the “decent” folk among whom he classes himself, he picks upon "the younger set.”

They are not on the way to self discipline, ready to transform themselves into sensible reliable citizens. Their freedom only entangles them with whims and fancies, silliness and self-indulgence. And it is largely they who are responsible for that malaise, that English disease . . .

We allow for the possibility that Priestley has entered the seventh age of man, but he really should be prepared to read other copy apart from his own. On page 53 of the same newspaper we leave the realms of fiction and return to the “grim hard facts” of capitalism. The following is the first paragraph from the article “Is your child heading for the dole?”

During the next few weeks 500,000 British school-leavers will get their first taste of working life. For a record number of them this will mean going straight to the end of a dole queue. When unemployment rises, the young always fare the worst. With almost worldwide recession, this summer’s crop of graduates and school-leavers face the least hopeful prospects since before the war.

A prospect guaranteed to be no less severe now that Britain has confirmed its membership of the EEC — an aim supported by “Writers for Europe” among those numbers the prim sage Priestley figured.

Alan D'Arcy

Mr. Priestley does not understand (1943)

From the December 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr Priestley of Postscript fame, has discovered a conspiracy. Not in the Argentine to prevent certain British capital to exploit the production of Argentine workers, or in one of the Balkan States where Kings and Presidents add the prefix ex- quite often, but here in England.

“When the war situation was bad a great many gentlemen and their newspapers suddenly developed an acute social conscience. ‘Yes, yes,’ they cried, to our astonishment and delight. ‘a new Britain after the war … no more unemployment, low wages, bad housing . . . Beveridge …. Equal opportunities. Couldn’t agree with you more.'” (Reynolds, 20th October, 1943.)

Surely, if Mr. Priestley has any memory, he shouldn’t have been astonished and delighted by such an old and well-tried chicanery as this. Does he not know that at all crises developed by Capitalist production, when its continued existence was threatened and could only be saved by the efforts of the working class, that lavish promises of a better life were made? To be forgotten directly the immediate danger was past and when the workers might have been expected to claim the rewards due to them. When they did so they could be assured of plausible reasons for the non-fulfilment of the promises. Sometimes it has been deemed better to frighten the workers and terrible bogeys like inflation are used to encourage them to adjust themselves to the new conditions.

The success of these methods is possible because a proper understanding of the social system, of which the workers are victims, is lacking.

Mr. Priestley continues :

“But since we have begun to win battles and complete victory in Europe is almost within sight, these gentlemen and their newspapers have changed their tune. We hear very little from them now about that new Britain. Their reforming zeal appears to have vanished.”

The tune is the same, Mr. Priestley, it is just a variation. It is occasioned by the new conditions that loom up from the darkness and havoc of the war. Industry will no longer have to curb its activities for the purpose of war. There are world markets to gain and the domestic requirements of the people to supply. These peace-time projects are at present hedged around with controls and orders that disturb some capitalists.

But the workers have plenty of experience of the discomforts of short supply. In fact they are quite used to it. Even when there was an abundance of these things many workers went without, and as long as Capitalism, and its motive of production for profit remain they will continue to do so.

Certain sections of Big Business have to capture the ears of the workers. They have to gain their support in order to legislate for the purpose of giving full reign to their profit-seeking activities. The workers may be told that labour restrictions are the cause of their bad conditions, that the Essential Work order is not democratic, and that they are entitled to the freedom that has been fought for. Thus exploiting the lack of political knowledge of many sections of workers.

When industry seeks its profits once more in peacetime production there will no longer be need for Essential Work orders. Once more the threat of unemployment will take the place of the fine and imprisonment. If anyone doubts the possibility of unemployment then the controversy on demobilisation should dispel any illusions on that matter. Many times has that fear been expressed in leader columns and letters to the Press, that those who have fought and served the longest will return to find all the jobs have been snapped up.

In the same article Mr. Priestley relates the inconveniences of form filling and their like to those other rather permanent features of working-class life, unemployment and undernourishment. He sums it up with—

“Too much red tape is bad, but better red tape than chains.”

Socialists know that the wage system is the basis of Capitalism and the wage-packet the link in the chains of the worker. All our well-meaning reformers see as their greatest achievement the provision of a wage-packet for all, and so the chains are complete. We who understand the nature of Capitalism know why this is impossible, and makes the provision of the dole necessary to fill in the gaps and to keep the workers from utter destitution.

The controls that have been introduced in war time, and which many of our well-known politicians of the Left find so attractive, have been introduced by the representatives of the owning class, and when they have served their purpose they will go and other methods adopted to secure the functioning of capital. Workers will strain in vain to cage or curb it. Capitalism has its own way of working, and never to the advantage of the workers. The workers’ task is to abolish it and the evils and poverty it entails.

The socialist message is the same to workers of all lands.

The abolition of Capitalism and its wages system, and its replacement by the common ownership of the means of life with the distribution of goods solely for use according to our needs.

S. K.

A Challenge to Mr. Bevin on Post-War Reconstruction (1942)

From the August 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cutting away from the vague generalities of most of the Government spokesmen Mr. Ernest Bevin, speaking at the annual meeting of the National Chamber of Trade in London on July 15th, 1942, made two definite statements about post-war reconstruction, one on behalf of the Government and the other on his own behalf. The first need not detain us long. He said that “it was the policy of the Government to try to establish for the post-war period minimum wage regulations for all forms of employment” (Times, July 16th, 1942). In form it is somewhat ambiguous since it is not clear whether it is intended to be a permanent arrangement or only one “for the post-war period.” The probability is that it is meant as a pledge of a permanent policy. For the rest it is interpreted by the Manchester Guardian to mean not “universal standards such as those laid down by New Deal legislation in the United States, but . . . the British method of covering all industry with trade boards and collective agreements.” (Manchester Guardian.; July 17th.)

“Mr. Bevin,” says the Guardian, “at least is trying to do something now that will be ready before the good intentions have time to fade.” After the last war the good intentions did fade; so that the Labour Party in office discarded its own minimum wage policy drafted when in opposition. Let us assume, however, that this time the policy will be carried out, what does it amount to ? It will be a gain to a number of badly organised workers but it is only necessary to look at the past experience of such arrangements, with their low minimum rates, the exceptions for workers not up to the average level of health and efficiency, and the wholesale evasions, to see that it is a pledge of very modest value to the workers. Mr. Bevin’s second point is more interesting. He said: “At the end of the war we should be able to buy goods only for goods. The rentier, comfortably living on interest, would certainly be gone. It will mean that we shall have a nation at work, and that will not be an unhealthy thing.” (Daily Herald, July 16th, 1942.) The Times and Manchester Guardian reported him slightly differently. Instead of saying that the rentier would certainly be gone, they have it “would be entirely gone.” This, it will be observed, was not a pledge on behalf of the Government, but a statement of what Mr. Bevin believes will take place and of which he approves. We may digress for a moment to quote the Concise Oxford Dictionary about the rentier. The definition is “Person living on rente, person not needing to earn his living.” And “rente” is explained as of French origin, meaning “Income, especially that consisting of life annuity or dividends.”

So now we may seem to be getting somewhere. People living on property incomes, not needing to earn their living, will be gone ! (Incidentally if Mr. Bevin feared that there might be some propertied persons who would manage to escape the healthy necessity of working, he has already to hand a powerful instrument of which as Minister of Labour he has had experience. We refer to the prosecution of absentees from war work, fined or jailed under Defence Regulations.)

We are, however, going much too fast. Mr. Bevin has not yet convinced his fellow members of the Government, and was disowned by the Chancellor on the radio (2 Aug.) We may safely rule out any mass stampede on the part of the propertied class to surrender voluntarily their property and the income derived from it. An alternative is that it may be taken away from them. The S.P.G.B. has throughout its existence urged that the conversion of private ownership of the means of production and distribution into common ownership is the only way to solve the poverty problem; but Mr. Bevin does not subscribe to this. He is a member of the Labour Party, and that Party, far from seeking to abolish the rentier, prepares to establish him more firmly than ever by setting up state industries or public utility corporations and compensating the present owners with Government bonds, or stocks guaranteed by the Government. Has Mr. Bevin noticed, for example, how the rumours of nationalisation of the railways gladdened the hearts of the railway stockholders ? The Sunday Express (June 7th, 1942) reported “a slow upward move in home rail stocks. The buying is based on the theory that Britain’s railways will never return wholly to private ownership.” The Express went on : —

“That would have most important results for the 500,000 investors in railway stocks. Instead of a fluctuating income dependent on operating results, their revenues would be fixed.”

In short, Mr. Bevin, these stockholders are counting on the Labour Party establishing them in permanent security as rentiers.

Again on July 8th, 1942, the News-Chronicle reported another rise in railway stocks, and said : —

“. . . the current market explanation of the recovery yesterday was that it was inspired by statements of trade union officials that plans for the unification of the railways under a public board are well under way.”

It is then established that the rentier class, far from expecting Mr. Bevin’s Party to deprive them of their wealth and income, and make them work, are confidently looking to that Party for security as rentiers in the difficult post-war period.

There is, of course, a third alternative—that the rentier class have already disappeared or are about to disappear. It is fantastic to consider such a thing, but there are many supposedly well informed people who believe it to be true. There is Mr. J. B. Priestley, who writes that the war-time changes “are tending to bring people nearer to one level, both economically and socially. The differences between classes are much less marked” (Picture Post, June 27th, 1942). There is Lord Balfour of Burleigh, who, commenting on Priestley’s statement, approved of it and added: “I also hope and believe that such changes will continue after the war and on a great scale” (Picture Post, July 4th).

Mr. Priestley claimed that “many of the worst features of our pre-war life have vanished and are rapidly dwindling. For example, our fantastically gross and really sinful inequalities.” Then there Mr. Ivor Brown in the Manchester Guardian (June 6th, 1942), who fancies that we have already slipped into Socialism. “A 10/- income tax (with surtax in proportion) has given us what the Socialist orators could never do, Socialism in our time.” Ownership of a farm or factory is, he says, now only nominal, the owner “is just the employee of one or more Ministries.”

One can only gasp at the self-deception and short vision of such people and wonder how they manage to get like that in defiance of all the evidence that they are wrong. Presumably they knew about the pre-war inequality, that under 2 per cent. of the population owned about two-thirds of the accumulated wealth, and that three-quarters of the population owned between them not more than one-thirteenth of the wealth. Let us grant for the moment that at present the annual increase of the wealth of the propertied class is drastically curtailed in many instances by war-time taxation (as it was in 19l4—1918) but have they never heard how these fortunes leapt up again in the years after the last war ? Do they think that the rich are no longer with us ? Who do they think paid £6 17s a bottle for Benedictine at Christie’s sale on May 22nd, 1942 (Daily Telegraph May 23rd): £50 for six bottles of brandy, and liqueurs at £27 a dozen ? Did they not read of the £100,000 that was bid by a London builder for 130 bloodstock racehorses that had belonged to the late Lord Glenelly ? (Daily Express, July 15th, 1942). Do they ever look at the amounts left in the wills published in the Press ? On seven days chosen at random in July the Times published particulars of 55 wills. The amounts ranged from £12,000 to £426,000, and totalled £4,060,000—an average of £75,000 a head. Let us make the necessary allowance for death duties, ranging up to 50 per cent, and more on the millionaire fortunes, and even then ask Mr. Priestley if he really imagines that the position of these people “tends” to equality with that of the mass of the population. Again let him look at Whitaker’s Almanack, 1942, and see the big estates left in 1941. There are 13 of £500,000 or more, ranging up to one which is over £4,500,000. They average about £1,500,000 per head. Ten of them are over £1,000,000. Does Mr. Priestley not know the authoritative estimate that three out of four adult persons who die each year do not possess even £100 to leave to their heirs ? Does Mr. Priestley not know that in 1939 the average wage of an adult male worker in industry was less than 70/- a week, with hundreds of thousands earning far less than that. Does he not know that earnings have kept pace with the increased cost of living only where long hours of overtime are being worked ? Did he see the comment of the Birmingham magistrate on the disgrace that a married lorry driver, after 19 years’ service on the Great Western Railway, is receiving only 68/6 a week? (Daily Herald, July 16th.) Does he really affirm that there is not fantastic inequality between the position of the workers and the position of the propertied class, in war or in peace ?

This brings us back to Mr. Bevin. Does Mr. Bevin stand for the abolition of property incomes of all kinds ? Does he think this will take place in the post-war settlement ? Since his fellow Cabinet Ministers do not share that view, how does he propose to convince them ? And after that how does he propose to win the Labour Party away from its programme of stabilising the position of the rentier class? Does he agree with the S.P.G.B. that Socialism, which necessarily involves the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and distribution and all forms of property income, is the only remedy for the problems of the working class ? If the answer is yes, why is he a supporter of other programmes ? It the answer is no, what is the programme (apart from the one item of minimum wage regulation) which he believes will solve the problem without Socialism.

We make the confident forecast that no other policy will solve the problem. The propertied class will, under pressure, do various small things to meet working class discontent, but they will never be got off the workers’ backs until a Socialist majority determines to have Socialism. The post-war world will be very much like the world that went before unless the working class themselves determine otherwise.

Edgar Hardcastle

Broadcasting: A Counterfeit Reality (1999)

Theatre Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Talk of the City by Stephen Poliakoff. Royal Shakespeare Company at the Young Vic.

I find myself writing this review of Stephen Poliakoff’s rich and revealing play about censorship in the BBC in the years before World War II, the day after the NATO announcement that it viewed the content of Serbian television as so much propaganda. It is also only two days since a correspondent to the Guardian noted that whilst letters to the paper have been full of various opinions about the bombing of Serbia, no such differences of opinion have been evident in radio and television broadcasts. And, coincidentally, it’s a couple of months since an invitation to appear on the Kilroy programme was withdrawn because I wouldn’t express opinions in line with the wishes of the production team. All of which remind me of a couple of quotations which I noted when I was reading the Open University unit, “Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950”, a couple of years ago:

“The so-called ‘mass media’ serve to generate consent in their audiences by representing the real world in ways which confer legitimacy on the social order in which they subsist.” “Communication is not only about who is talking to whom, and how; it is also about who is not talking to whom and why.”

Talk of the City is a zippy, immediately accessible show which is played with great exuberance and panache by a talented cast. It offers us review host, Robbie, inclined like most comedians to embroider his material in the light of his feelings and creative impulses at the time of delivery, and who is forever in trouble with those who produce his show and would have him never depart from the script; ideas man, Clive, anxious to offer listeners an account of what is happening to the Jews in Germany in 1938, contrary to the covertly anti-semitic line of many BBC managers; and a retinue of BBC officials sensitive to government policy, anxious to tow the party line, who insist on approving every last word before it is voiced over the airways.

The programme contains the complete text of the play and foreword, “Some Background Material—BBC in the Thirties”, which offers about a dozen quotations from internal memos, the BBC house magazine, ex-employees, etc. a real snip at £2.50. Two quotations give the flavour of the culture of the Corporation in the mid- to late-1930s:

“I really believe that they (BBC managers) really thought that everybody who was doing a productive job was necessarily childish and irresponsible and needed controlling” (Maurice Chapman). “I received a letter from the Northern Regional Studio, asking me if I would talk on Repertory Theatre while I was up North. I said I would. I was then informed that a copy of my talk must be in the hands of the BBC at least a fortnight before the date of broadcasting, and that I must go to the studio to rehearse. ‘Otherwise,’ I was told, ‘the project must be abandoned.’ ‘The Project,’ I replied at once, ‘is abandoned'” (JB Priestley).

Nowadays, however, censorship is managed more subtly. Recording programmes in advance and enquiring of those who plan to take part what they might wish to say, can be used to avoid “unsuitable material” being transmitted over the airways. [My own recent personal experience is instructive, and is reported elsewhere in this issue.]

Talk of the City is a splendidly lucid piece of adult theatre, but it is also arguably historically and culturally adrift. By failing to connect with today’s media and avoiding a more substantial critique of broadcasting, Poliakoff seems to be inviting audiences to see the events of the late 1930s as an unique series of events. Socialists, however, would see them as representative of the continuing control of the cultural and political agenda by agents of the capitalist class who wish, as the Open University quotation has it, “to confer legitimacy on the social order in which they exist”.

Michael Gill

Editorial: Capitalism and Monopoly. Davids who did not slay Goliath (1942)

Editorial from the February 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

What happened after the last war is not conclusive evidence about what will happen now, but it is a very important pointer. Take, for example, the popular demand for the destruction or control of trusts and monopolies. In 1919 the Committee on Trusts appointed by the Government found “that there is at the present time in every important branch of industry in the United Kingdom an increasing tendency to the formation of trade associations and combinations, having for their purpose restriction of competition and the control of prices.”

The Committee placed on record that combinations operating in restraint of trade “are unlawful if shown to be against public policy.” They recommended the setting up of permanent machinery to investigate the operation of monopolies, and to deal effectively and promptly with abuses. In particular they recommended that the Board of Trade should have the duty of recommending “State action for the remedying of any grievances.”

Some members of the Committee, including Mr. Ernest Bevin and Sidney Webb, added some minority recommendations. While saying that they did not want to prevent the formation of combinations or associations, both because experience showed that interference is ineffective and because the formation of such combinations is desirable in order to secure greater efficiency, they urged the fixing of maximum prices to prevent excessive profits, and wanted the Government to hand over dangerous monopolies to the Co-operative Movement, or to Local Authorities or place them under State control, but not necessarily under State management.

The whole Committee agreed that the public were mistrustful of monopolies and this mistrust was realised by the Liberal and Labour Parties, both of which wanted action against them. The Labour Party, for example, had in its election manifestos a few years alter the last war “The prevention of profiteering and exploitation by rings, trusts and monopolies, not merely in building materials, but also in foodstuffs and household necessities.”

There are still to be heard voices in the wilderness demanding the control or abolition of trusts and combines, but all the speeches and promises and resolutions of 20 years ago had no important effect against the trend of capitalist industry. Whereas once the Liberals were demanding the retention of private, independent capitalist enterprise, the News-Chronicle (January 26th, 1942) can now say that “laissez faire” is as extinct as the dodo,” and a special correspondent of the Times recently wrote the following: —

“The typical British industry to-day is privately owned but centrally controlled. It is not often realised to what an extent combination, in its various forms such as price-fixing arrangements. market-sharing agreements, rings, cartels, trusts, pools, combines and plain monopolies has spread over British industry. The trade in which prices are determined by competition and in which the newcomer can enter on terms of approximate equality is now a distinct rarity. It would be an easier task, to show how in a wide range of industries, prices in the British market have been kept above the world level. There have been several public demonstrations of the art of excluding the newcomers and of hamstringing the firm that is ill-advised enough to try to increase its technical efficiency and thereby its competitive power. The great bulk ot British industry is divided into industrial fiefs fully as much as if every industry had been nationalised by the State.— (“Times,” November 29th, 1941).

News-Chronicle (January 26th, 1942) may still dream of “free enterprise controlled by the operation of the law,” and of control “designed to ensure true freedom, to exclude privilege or monopoly,” but gone are the days when a Judge would rule that a combine is against public policy as happened in 1927 (only to be over-ruled by a higher Court). In that case, which concerned the formation of a combine in the British Rope Trade, a Judge said: —

“You will never convince me that any combination of manufacturers puts down competition for the benefit of the public. Such combinations are against public policy.”

The issue has long been decided by what the Times, in a leader (December 6th, 1941) calls “the natural trend of modern industry towards monopoly.”

The present war, like the last one, will, of course, give a great impetus to the trend. The concentration of industries and trading concerns that has gone on during the war will not wholly disappear. This point has been dealt with by the “1941 Committee” of which Mr. J. B. Priestley is Chairman, in their “Planning and Freedom.” They say: —

“A scheme is improvised which drives out the small men. secures the position of the big monopolists and temporarily at least of the large trade unions. … In this case the jam which is intended to make the powder palatable is a fantastic promise about the restoration of the small firms after the war. It will be impossible to restore them. The war in fact has only hastened the tendency towards this type of monopolistic organisation. . . .”

The “1941 Committee” may perhaps overstate the case, but they are unquestionably right about the general trend. Their gloomy conclusion is that there is danger of drifting towards Totalitarianism and a condition in which it becomes “more and more difficult to preserve the democratic safeguards.”

Beyond urging every effort to safeguard democracy they have no practical proposals to offer; in which respect they are like all the other non-Socialist planners of the new world.

It is a problem to which there is no solution short of Socialism here and in the world as a whole. The Manchester Guardian’s City Editor may be right when he says (January 20th, 19-12) that President Roosevelt has not “given up his efforts to break down industrial monopolies,” but Mr. Bevin in 1919 was wiser when he recognised that experience in U.S.A. and other countries had already shown the uselessness of the attempt. Even if it were possible to put back capitalist development the result would be no more satisfactory than it was before monopolies grew up. Likewise, enough experience of alternative schemes of control or reorganisation has been seen to demonstrate that as far as the workers are concerned “the more capitalism changes the more it is the same thing.” Administration by the State in the form of nationalised railways, postal and telephone services did not make capitalism any more satisfactory, and the subsequent Labour Party programme of public utility corporations such as the London Passenger Transport Board has already had a long enough try-out to produce a situation in which ihe corporations have few convinced admirers or defenders outside their own ranks.

There will be no essential change until all the means of production and distribution are brought under common ownership and democratic control with production solely for use and the complete elimination of rent, interest and profit.

The Wrong Way (1947)

From the January 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first day on which the daily newspapers were able to increase their size—September 23rd, 1946— the Daily Herald saw fit to commence publication of a series of articles by J. B. Priestley, entitled “The Mood of the People.” It seemed strange to read on the same page, first the Editorial, which said that the advancement of the Labour cause was the task which the Daily Herald wanted to perform and, second, the article by Mr. Priestley, which was a bitter attack on the present behaviour of the workers.

"Too many people are going the wrong way,” he said, by which he meant that there is “a dwindling interest in the job. A cynical indifference as to what value is given for money received. An undisguised contempt for the customer. And too much downright dishonesty.” He was careful to safeguard himself by saying that most people are doing their decent best, and he had noticed in his own special fields of interest that the people to-day are livelier and more intelligent but, says he, the fact still remains that too many people, including a high proportion of the young, are going the ‘‘wrong way.” He claims they are losing their community sense, all pride and interest in the job—they are “rapidly becoming bad mannered, lazy and cheaply cynical.”

He points out that the workers no longer feel the threat of unemployment and poverty—that the world has been improved, otherwise such people would not feel at liberty to behave so badly in it. Whilst giving him credit for not wishing to see conditions which produce unemployment and poverty we cannot but take exception to his effort to get the workers to work harder simply for the reason that we think, and apparently we are not alone, that the world has not been improved, nor the threat of unemployment and poverty removed by the advent of a Labour Government. If workers find themselves in ‘‘an emotional and spiritual vacuum” now it must be because all the hot air exuded by Labour Party candidates to gain votes at the General Election has too rapidly risen to the skies and left a void behind.

According to Mr. Priestley we are now taking part in a gradual slow-motion revolution, and new incentives must be found to get the workers to give the wheel a shove instead of applying the brake.

All of this might be good if it were true; if Socialism were here—but, unfortunately, it is false.

Where is this revolution that is “transforming our whole society’’?

Is it a revolution to have caused the Bank of England stockholders and the owners of a few other large concerns to exchange their stock for Government securities—their stake in a corporation for a stake (of greater security) in the National Treasury. Is it a revolution to have introduced the payment of family allowances—which will have a depressing influence on wages? Is it a revolution to introduce social ” security ” schemes, which with their niggardly increases merely bring pre-war pensions and doles approximately in line with the present cost of living?

These are the sort of things for which the voters voted. For reforms—not revolution; for patching up the old society—not for transforming it; for capitalism —not for Socialism.

Mr. Priestley, flirting with Russian “stakanovisin.” says that in order to get the best out of men and women a system of ‘‘functional privilege” should be introduced—different baits in different jobs—until there is plenty of everything for everybody and everybody can buy what they like! Here we have the crux of the matter and find that these articles are only another form of apology for present-day capitalism. Simply the old argument dressed up in fine phrases—the workers should work harder to put the country on a sound profit-making basis, rebuild its export trade, then, when a surplus has been produced, sit back and enjoy it to the full.

No wonder Mr. Priestley cries, ” Away with dry and dreary economists—we want a psychological approach” !

"Give us a carrot or two!”, he pleads.

The capitalist class has been dangling carrots of all shapes, sizes and descriptions in front of the workers’ noses for a century or more! Yet Mr. Priestley wants a carrot!

For the past seven years the workers have been exhorted by all means of propaganda to eat carrots instead of oranges—yet Mr. Priestley wants more carrots.

Now we have a Labour Government promising all sorts of goodies in the misty future—yet Mr. Priestley still wants more carrots!

As workers we can’t understand the man. ”A little elementary psychology,” indeed—for whom?

Look around you, Mr. Priestley—there is no need to go to Russia to use your powers as a “trained observer.” Is the economic position of the working class in our society basically different from what it has been since the birth of capitalism? Has the Labour Government expropriated the wealth which the capitalist class call their “private” property, but which is the accumulated labour of millions of workers extracted from them during tens of decades of vicious exploitation? Have they taken it, and are they administering it as the common property of the whole of society? And, in doing so, have they thereby removed the necessity for all workers to find a buyer for their ability to work before they can acquire the wherewithal to eat, drink, clothe, and sleep? Is it no longer necessary to find a market for and to sell at a profit the things which are produced?

The answer to all these questions is- NO!

How, then, can there ever be plenty of everything for everybody under such conditions?

It is common ground for all economists that a "sellers" market exists to-day—almost anything that can be produced will find a willing and eager buyer anywhere in the world. As a consequence, all nations are producing as much as they can in order to sell as much as possible in the markets available before they become saturated with goods. When the markets become saturated, and there are signs of it already, prices and profits will tend to fall as a result of competition which will become keener and keener as supply exceeds demand. As a result of the imminent fall in prices the capitalist class will he driven to cutting costs, and this will be done by decreasing wages and staffs and getting more work out of each worker left employed. Thus when there is plenty of everything will he precisely the time when the majority of the people—the working class—will have less money to spend, and a greater inability to buy the goods they have produced.

It is no good Labour spokesmen prating about full employment and social security—they can provide neither so long as profit-making is the aim of production, whether this latter be State controlled or privately controlled. The whole mentality of the Labour Party clearly shows that there is no intention of producing goods solely for the use of the community, and the fact must therefore he faced that in carrying on production for profit they are acting as the agents of capitalism, and against the interests of the workers.

The Labour Party, with roseate phrases, has taken its stand as an allegedly working-class party, and now that it has obtained power it is faced with the insoluble problem of running capitalism and yet trying to satisfy working-class demands. It cannot do this, and must not be surprised, therefore, if the workers’ instinctive revulsion to increased exploitation becomes apparent.

Although some of the tendencies of the modern working class ay he obnoxious to those whose minds can conceive of no better world than one in which goods are produced for sale, it seems to us very questionable whether they are going the wrong way. Perhaps they are instinctively going the right way, and when instinct gives place to knowledge, we have no doubt they will sweep away every vestige of capitalism, including all its intellectual apologists, and set up a society in their own interests based on the common ownership of the means of wealth production.

Then, there will be plenty of everything we need and no need to buy anything.

N. S.

An Inspector Calls (1950)

J. B. Priestley

From the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the B.B.C. broadcast a play by J. B. Priestley entitled “An Inspector Calls.” It concerned an influential capitalist and his family who are visited by a police inspector, who is enquiring into the tragic suicide of a young girl.

It would appear that all the members of the family had at one time or another known this girl, and, it became apparent as the inspector questioned them, that each one had in some way contributed to the circumstances that led to her miserable end.

The capitalist had employed her in his works but had dismissal her for her part in a wage strike. His daughter had been responsible for her dismissal from her next job in a gown shop, and his son had discovered her on the streets where poverty had driven her, and left her pregnant and destitute. Finally the wretched girl turned in desperation to the local charitable institution for fallen women. But alas! even this miserable crumb was refused her, largely due to the vindictive and respectable spouse of the capitalist, who happened to be a prominent and influential member of the committee.

The police inspector then reveals himself as a moralist in disguise and proceeds to denounce this family, who, hidden under a veil of respectability, were capable of so shamefully treating a fellow human being. This attitude, the bogus inspector claims, will bring dire and terrible results to society unless people do not quickly have a change of heart. If only the wicked capitalist had not victimised the wretched girl for striking for more money, if only the young man had contained his sensual desires, if only people would stop persecuting others and learn to live harmoniously, man helping man instead of kicking each other in the posterior on every available opportunity—and so on, the world would be a better place. This is the gist of the moralist's attitude towards human behaviour, assuming all the time that it is man and not society which decides his relationship with his fellows. The Socialist recognises that man’s relations to man are dependent on very material conditions. In other words, our behaviour, our morals, even the way in which we amuse ourselves, can be related to the method which society employs at the present time to produce and distribute the things we need.

Man is not born with an inherent instinct to perform all the most insidious and diabolical cruelties to his fellow creatures. The capitalist does not oppose workers’ demands for higher wages and better conditions because of a desire to see millions of people squirm in poverty, filth and degradation. His economic position dictates his policy and if he ignored the rules he would soon find himself ousted from the markets by more astute members of his class, and possibly flung into the exploited class himself.

It is the capitalist system with all its ridiculous contradictions and anomalies that puts class against class, race against race and nation against nation. It is the capitalist system that twists and perverts people’s sense of values so that they are shocked and disgusted at an unmarried mother but accept and condone the mass murder and butchering of millions of helpless people.

You do not need to delve into the mysterious labyrinth of the human mind to discover the reason for man’s inhumanity to man. The fault lies not in man but in man’s inability at the moment to understand and grapple with the economic machine which dominates his whole outlook and relationship with his fellow beings. Once man has discovered the real cause of his problems, there is no power on earth that can stop him sweeping away capitalism and introducing a new form of society based upon different economic laws.

This will not only abolish man’s persecution of man but also the economic problems of war, insecurity and want. These things are the root of all the mental phenomena and disarrangements which our psychologists and moralists would have us believe can be cured and finally abolished if only we could learn to control ourselves a little better.

G. L.