£3,000 per minute (1951)

From the March 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The News Chronicle on February 1st published an article which stated that the Government had not made the people of the country realise the effects of the defence programme. How it would affect the standard of living and freedom of action of the population.

It correctly claimed that these vast sums of many millions of pounds were too great for people to appreciate without looking further into them. The article stated that £3,000 per minute every day and night for the next three years would be spent on defence.

Stating the figure in this way can certainly make one realise the effect it will have on the production of commodities for consumption and on things like the housing programme.

Think for a moment of the effort to produce armaments to the value of £3,000 per minute. Think of the useful articles that could be produced, think of the shortages that this programme will mean, and think that if capitalism did not exist, the tremendous waste of labour and materials would not occur.

The chickens have now come home to roost. The Labour Government has given proof (not that any more evidence was needed), that capitalism cannot be run in the interest of the working class.—Think on these things.

S. W. Lock

Blogger's Note:

Though this short piece is signed 'S.W. Lock', I think that was a typo and the actual writer of the piece was probably D. W. Lock, a regular writer in the Standard in the early 1950s. 

Lock joined the Lewisham branch of the SPGB in September 1948, and remained a member until his death in August 1993. Prior to joining the SPGB, he had been a member of the ILP and the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party.

Editorial: “Our Wonderful Prosperity” (1907)

Editorial from the October 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Board of Trade return issued in support of Free Trade and giving figures showing the phenomenal amount of wealth that is created by those who do not enjoy it, was recently seized upon by the Dally Chronicle in an endeavour to convince the working man that he is prosperous. The figures, however, to the seeing eye show how fundamental is the great class antagonism ; and although the “national wealth” is spoken of and the amount per head calculated, it is seen that there are not one but two nations—those who live by labour and those who live upon those who labour—and that the hirelings who live by labour stand without the pale of this wonderful prosperity.

In reviewing the figures the Daily Chronicle did not refer to the significant increase in pauperism, lunacy, degeneration and unemployment that has been apparent during the past decade. It referred, it is true, to the fact that the cost of pauperism had nearly doubled since 1861, but tried to minimise this by stating that the proportion of paupers had decreased from 364 per 1,000 in 1861 to 249 per 1,000 in 1906. These figures, however, by no means show that the conditions of the working class have improved even compared with such an unfavourable period as 1861, for it is evident to all who have any knowledge of the history of the Poor Laws that the decline in pauperism has been due (as Ashcroft and Preston Thomas point out in “The English Poor Law System”), to the progressive imposition of more onerous conditions of relief and more rigorous tests, to the compulsory stay of vagrants and to the rigorous restriction of outdoor relief.

These facts however, are carefully hidden by the capitalist statistician, and he will complacently point to the decline in pauperism until recently as proof of a decline in poverty, while in reality it shows no such thing, for it is the result of the golden rule of capitalist poor “relief,” to make conditions of “relief” so onerous that the workers will—as indeed they do—rather starve than accept of it. It is most eloquent, of the workers’ condition, that in spite of this the past few years have seen an actual increase in pauperism.

Work and Wages

All who have studied working-class conditions know that the poverty and unemployment of that class is terrible indeed, and that figures drawn from returns made from a few “aristocrats of labour” are utterly inadequate to convey the depth of the poverty or the extent of unemployment among the toilers as a whole, many of whom sink yearly into the hopeless and increasing mass of slumdom through the pressure of economic circumstances. Rates of wages are also used by many to give a totally inaccurate impression, for no allowance is usually made for unemployment, “short time” or sickness, it being so arranged that if a workman gets for six months a wage of 30/- weekly and is compelled to be idle for the rest of the year, his wages are nevertheless represented not as 15/- but as 30/- per week.

One or two items of working-class consumption are given that show a decline in price, but no allowance whatever is made for the adulteration and reduction in quality which are daily more apparent in all things consumed by the workers ; while the fact that house room and many household necessities and provisions have increased in price is rarely mentioned.

The figures given by the Liberal M.P. for Paddington are, indeed, significant enough in themselves, for they show that one million people possess nearly one half of the income of the country. Yet Liberal organs parade the growing “wealth of the country” before the impoverished and worn-out toiler as proof to him that he is prosperous.

The “prosperity of the country” means the prosperity of those who own the country, not of the working class, and those who deny the class antagonism should endeavour to explain how it is that while the so-called national wealth increases by leaps and bounds the condition of those who produce this wealth shows no improvement, but that their employment grows less secure and their toil more intense.

How Many Shares Have You? (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

How often have Socialist speakers heard the absurd defence of Capitalism that, because anyone can now own “shares” in companies, everyone is a capitalist. The argument goes on to claim that therefore the working class are no longer the deprived majority of society.

W. S. Gilbert would no doubt have retorted “if everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody”. And of course, even if it were true that most people own a handful of shares it would not alter one iota of our fundamental criticism of capitalism. Our criticism is that capitalism is incapable of solving the major social ills that it constantly creates. All it does produce are profits for the capitalist class and problems for the working class.

But the claim is false. It is by the possession of shares that the capitalist class in advanced western capitalism (a different arrangement prevails under Soviet capitalism — no less anti-social) claims most of its ownership of the means of production and of the commodities that are produced. Shares are either owned by individuals or by companies, unit trusts (the so-called “institutional shareholders”) and the like.

As far as individual shareholdings are concerned, there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the population don’t own any. In his book Unequal Shares A. B. Atkinson says that 5 per cent of the population own over 96 per cent of the privately held shares and 1 per cent own 81 per cent. That does not leave much for the rest of us. Clearly the majority of workers have never seen a share certificate, let alone owned one.

With institutional shareholdings the position is more complicated. A good deal of the shares are owned by companies whose shares are themselves privately owned. “But what about pension funds and the like?” the defender of Capitalism plaintively bleats. “They are held for the benefit of the workers, for retirement money, injury pay etc. In effect, these are owned by the workers.” Rubbish.

According to the Royal Commission on Income and Wealth (Report No. 1, 1975) only 12.2 per cent of the total number of shares quoted are owned by Pension Funds. These funds are established by large firms like ICI or Fords for sound economic capitalist reasons. And they are set up to benefit the companies (i.e. the shareholders).

Indeed it is a well established principle of British Company Law that all moneys must be used by the company for the benefit of the shareholders only. When the old News Chronicle was closing down in the early 1960s the directors wanted to pay some of the money realised from the sale of the company’s assets to the work force as compensation for their loss of jobs etc. The high court stopped them. Money given to workers was not being used in the best interest of the company it said. The only way the money could be lawfully distributed was to the shareholders.

So in order for these “pension funds” to be lawful, the company must show that they are in the best interests of the company’s owners. And they are. There are many reasons why it is of direct benefit to the company to have pension funds and it would take a whole issue of the Socialist Standard to explain them fully. But some of the more obvious ones are these: —

1. It is another bait for the work force, just as luncheon vouchers or sports facilities etc. are. Workers know too well the miserable pensions the state will pay them when they retire and “non-contributory pension schemes” are one of the things the employer can offer to supplement a low wage.
2. Once employed the worker is encouraged to feel that he has a “stake” in the company and that if he leaves he will lose his right to a pension or it may be reduced.
3. Above all, the money in pension funds belongs to the company. Admittedly it cannot actually be spent by the capitalist class, but then neither can machines. When profits are “ploughed back” into a business these are not lost to the capitalist class. On the contrary, they represent a greater accumulated share of capital than was represented by the company’s assets before. A pension fund is as much a part of the capital of a company as is the factory or the stock-in-trade, and this will be reflected in the value of the shares on the stock exchange.

Capitalism doesn’t give workers shares, it only gives them crumbs. Socialism will mean free access, not unequal shares.

Ronnie Warrington

Philanthropy and Profits. (1907)

From the March 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The real nature of the pretendedly disinterested benevolence of some large employers is at times laid bare even in the journals of the enemy; and capitalist “philanthropy” is then found to have a very material basis. The Berlin correspondent of the Daily Chronicle has, for example, after a visit to Essen, the following to say regarding the famous firm of Krupp :—

“Krupps are honourably known for the patriarchal benevolence which they display towards their workpeople Their model dwellings, their sick-clubs, their co-operative stores, and a great variety of other institutions to alleviate the lot of their workers, have often been described, and always in terms of adulation. For my part, I carried away a different impression. I felt that all the mature thought bestowed by the famous firm on their benevolent institutions was the result of sound business principles, tinctured by despotism, rather than the manifestation of any special leanings towards philanthropy. This is the opinion of a large body of their own employees who regard the many admirably-conducted institutions as so many chains binding the men to the firm. The chains are covered with cotton wool, but that does not impair their strength ; it only makes them less galling. A concern like Krupp’s could not afford to have a large body of their workmen disaffected ; a strike could have most disastrous consequences.

“With my Socialist friend I visited several of the model dwelling-houses, and found much to admire, but a good deal also to criticise. Rents on the whole were high, and I found a far larger proportion of the tenements than I had expected anything but comfortable. Indeed, in too many cases the dwellings looked gloomy, forbidding, and absolutely devoid of homeliness and comfort. The colonies known as Schederhof and Nordhof were dreary and squalid in the extreme. An incessant guard, moreover, is kept over the men that they do not live a life outside the works which is displeasing to their employers. Their political activities, for example, are very narrowly scrutinised. Every workman on entering Krupp’s employ must sign a document of portentous length, in which his work and his play are both regulated. He must, for example, sign that he will not attach himself to any political organisation which has as its object the upheaval of existing social or political institutions. As Socialism in the eyes of Krupp is synonymous with revolution, this means that any workman known as a Socialist is summarily dismissed.”

Back to Basics (1954)

From the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the tragic deaths of a father and five children unable to escape from a house fire in Birmingham the News Chronicle (13/8/54) reported that experiments will begin to fit asbestos hatches in the attics of the 11,000 Council-owned back-to-back houses and that the Council hopes that private landlords will fit them in the city’s 26,000 “back-to-backs.”

Disraeli is supposed to have said that in England there are two completely distinct nations, the one knowing nothing about the other; and another "wag” put it rather better by saying: “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives and if they do, don’t care.” Many Provincial visitors see London, and many Londoners see Margate and Brighton, and even see France, but the relative number of people who see round English industrial towns are few. When talking about travel who would ever think of saying: “I have explored Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, and Bradford?”

First of all it would be best to explain what back-to-back houses really are, as many Londoners and small town inhabitants may never have seen one. They do not exist in London now, and never in country districts.

Following the industrial revolution of the last century, the need for cheap compact houses around big industry was solved by building small four-roomed dwellings, two rooms up and two down, with a similar structure attached to its rear, but its front door facing the opposite direction. There is no back exit, no front or back yard or garden. Many of these back-to-backs have no sanitary arrangements (some no water), and at the end of each street there are two or four toilets, to be used by the whole street community. On a nice warm Sunday morning a small queue will be seen sitting on the curb, in their shirt sleeves, awaiting their turn.

Standing on a hill outside Leeds you can see row after row of such houses, and the News Chronicle states that there are 26,000 in Birmingham alone. It would be interesting to find out numbers for many other English industrial towns.

Here again, to quote from the News Chronicle (13/8/54): 

“The hatches will probably be made from asbestos sheeting, which could easily be broken in an emergency. They will cost £2.

The only real solution is the demolition of all back-to-back houses, but that is impossible in the near future because of the housing situation.”

Does this need any further comment, a country—the home of the Mother of Parliaments, and one of the “forward peoples,” as distinct from the so-called “backward peoples,” a county that is at present spending £2,500 million on rearmament, is unable to cure the back-to-back houses question?

The real tragedy is Capitalism—the cause of slum houses and all the rest of our troubles.

David Boyd

Socialists and the Press (1957)

From the July 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in what is claimed to be a “free country," where there is "free expression of opinion," but this must not be taken literally. It does not mean that anyone can say or write just what he likes. The Official Secrets Act and the libel laws cut off considerable areas of expression, into which you trespass at your peril. Much greater restriction arises because we live in a money world, in which capacity to make views known depends largely on what you can afford to pay. If your resources run into hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds, you can publish the Daily Worker, Daily Herald, Daily Express, etc.: if not you may have to be content with a monthly journal. But what about the possibility of the “free” expression of varied points of view in the columns of those and other journals with the big circulations? This again is a very narrowly circumscribed possibility when it is a question of securing publicity for a minority and not popular point of view, such as that of the S.P.G.B. When daily newspapers misreport matters of concern to us, or when they refuse to publish our letters or advertisements, there is no remedy—and this notwithstanding the existence of the Press Council, which is supposed to keep an eye on the conduct of the Press.

Another approach to the Press Council

In 1956 we approached the General Council of the Press about an incorrect statement (one of many in the Beaverbrook newspapers) that occurred in the Evening Standard, followed by editorial refusal to correct it (The matter in question was the practice of the Evening Standard of describing Labour Party conferences as conferences of "The Socialist Party of Great Britain.")

The Press Council declined to interfere, on the ground that readers would not be misled. (See Socialist Standard January and March, 1956.)

In May of this year we wrote again to the Press Council about the refusal of the Daily Telegraph to publish an advertisement of the Socialist Standard, the only reason given being that there is no refusal to publish our advertisements on principle, each advertisement being dealt with on its merits.

The Press Council replied on 29th May, 1957:—

“ Dear Sir,

"I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of May 27. The question of whether a particular advertisement will be published rests entirely with the Editor, whose decision is absolutely final. It may help you to quote the statement which appears on this subject in The Times every day. It reads

" 'All orders for advertising in The Times are accepted on the express terms— (a) that they are subject to cancellation at the discretion of the Editor,' etc., etc.

"Yours faithfully,

“(Sgd.) Alan Pitt Robins, C.B.E."

Of course, we don't feel at all helped. Either the Press Council approves of newspapers refusing advertisements or it disapproves, and it doesn't add anything to be told that The Times does it as well as the Daily Telegraph.

The Royal Commission on the Press

The Press Council arose out of recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Press (1947-1949). In the report of that body the question of refusing advertisements was dealt with; though we confess we cannot be certain what exactly the Royal Commission was trying to say. The relevant passages in the Report (paragraphs 529 and 530) are as follows:—

"We consider it entirely wrong for a newspaper to boycott a particular advertiser arbitrarily and for personal reasons."

“We have received evidence that some newspapers refuse all advertisements of a particular class. This is a different matter. We consider that a newspaper has a right to refuse advertisements of any kind which is contrary to its standards or may be objectionable to its readers. This right, however, should not be exercised arbitrarily."

This statement may have the appearance of being both clear and reasonable. It is the last sentence that makes the meaning unclear. The Royal Commission appears to be saying that it would be quite right for the Daily Telegraph to refuse all advertisements from the S.P.G.B., because the S.P.G.B. is objectionable to the readers of the Telegraph, but wrong for the Daily Telegraph to decide, arbitrarily and without giving a reason, to publish some and exclude others: but that is what the Telegraph does.

By curious coincidence we received from the News-Chronicle an almost directly opposite point of view. Having written to them about a misstatement in someone else's advertisement, a member of the S.P.G.B. received a reply to the effect that of course the News-Chronicle could not possibly interfere with statements made in advertisements.

The freedom to express Socialist ideas

The fact is that the possibility of making Socialist ideas known to the population is very narrowly restricted in this country. Newspapers and periodicals almost never give space to the Socialist viewpoint, and letters are comparatively rarely published. With paid advertisements we have somewhat better results, though refusals (sometimes masquerading under “no space available") are frequent. As the Royal Commission on the Press was supposed to be concerned with "free expression of opinion and the accurate presentation of news," they might have been expected to face the issue squarely: instead they sidestepped it by the insertion of the qualifying word "important,” (Report, page 676), and considered whether “ the Press as a whole gives an opportunity for all important points of view to be effectively presented."

Is the expression of Socialist ideas important? Certainly it isn't with the Tory, Liberal, Labour and other giants of the newspaper and periodical Press.

Not that the Royal Commission found everything to be satisfactory—far from it, and they half-understood the reason. "The failure of the Press to keep pace with the requirements of society is attributable largely to die plain fact that an industry that lives by the sale of its products must give the public what the public will buy. A newspaper cannot, therefore, raise its standard far above that of its public, and may anticipate profit from lowering its standard in order to gain an advantage over a competitor." (Paragraph 680.)

Nationalisation no remedy

We say that the Royal Commission only half understood the nature of the problem. This is amply proved by the fact that they took for granted that publication can only be for the purpose of selling and making a profit—they never considered the possibility that the only way of securing "freedom of expression" is through Socialism, when the question of sale and profit would not arise.

And they are not the only ones who do not understand. A delegate at the recent conference of the Electrical Trades Union, speaking on the Press, said:—

"An end must be put to its reports of sadism, sensationalism and pornography. We shall nationalise this monopoly so that its views shall be that of the working masses for Socialism ."—{Daily Worker, 7th June, 1957.)

It is difficult to imagine anything more contrary to every experience. We are asked to believe that nationalisation would change the Press into a vehicle for enabling the workers to express Socialist ideas. Let us look at a few facts. Where the Press has passed under direct Governmental control, as in Russia, it is not only impossible to publish a journal putting Socialist ideas for a Socialist organisation, but it is legally forbidden for a Socialist political organisation to exist at all. Secondly, the broadcasting service in this country has been nationalised for 30 years after a five year life of the original British Broadcasting Company. Do we find the nationalised B.B.C. putting over Socialist propaganda? It is in fact even worse than the capitalist Press. For a quarter of a century the S.P.G.B. has tried to get the Socialist case put on the radio, but with never a single success. Not that the B.B.C. says it will on principle not let the S.P.G.B. broadcast—nothing so crude —but each time application is made the application is refused.

One of our adverts, refused by the Daily Telegraph mentioned that the S.P.G.B. is barred from the air by the B.B.C. Those who are silly enough to think that there is some essential difference between the “private enterprise” capitalist Telegraph and the State capitalist B.B.C. may wonder why the former didn’t jump at the chance of chiding the latter for its opposition to “freedom of expression.” Instead they showed their true affinity by behaving in the same way, suppressing the Socialist case.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Newspaper Industry (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Fleet Street is a jungle”. That is not the most original and penetrating comment ever made by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, from the safety of whose mighty ramparts he could boast “I shall survive”. Which is more than can be said of the one national daily paper, one London evening, four national Sundays and over one hundred local papers which have perished in the jungle since the war.

Perhaps the most famous of these were the News Chronicle and The Star, which collapsed overnight in October 1960. There was a great deal of fuss over this, but the fate of the two papers was inescapable. Although they both had a circulation of over a million, during the last nine months of their lives they showed a combined loss of £300,000. In typical style, the Daily Mirror composed the most pointed of their many epitaphs: “A commercial failure is a commercial failure. However sad. However regretful.”

There have been no comparable deaths in Fleet Street since then but this is not to say that all the papers are bursting with health. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) fore, cast that four national newspapers will close by 1970; five dailies and two Sundays are making losses amounting to several million pounds a year. What the Manchester Guardian said ten years ago is still true:

Between the upper and the nether millstones of limited revenue and rising costs some units of the industry are being ground into oblivion.

Today, one of these units is The Guardian itself, which is losing around £1 million a year and which last December warned the printing unions that production costs had to be cut by a quarter by the end of the year.

Just as in other industries, production costs are a persistent worry to the newspaper managements. In evidence to the 1961 Royal Commission on the Press, the Daily Mirror said that its total variable costs had increased 4.2 times between 1937 and 1960, and fixed costs 2.2 times.

In this situation, wages are bound to be under the microscope; in Fleet Street they have always tended to be above average, although none of the printing workers is yet able to employ quite as many servants as some of the shareholders:

When the EIU reported last January, it pointed a disapproving finger at Fleet Street’s wages and commented that the industry “. . . is almost unique in the degree to which control of labour is in the hands of the unions.” The printing unions might well take this as a back-handed compliment to the efficiency with which they have done their job—which was, after all, what the EIU was supposed to be looking for.

Apart from their efforts to hold down production costs and wages, the newspapers are locked in a battle with each other, for circulation and advertisements. The losers of the battle find themselves in a descending spiral; a low circulation, or a high circulation in the wrong places, does not attract revenue from advertisements. This usually means cuts in quality (one of the troubles of the News Chronicle was that it could not afford to run as many pages as its rivals), which mean lower circulation and therefore less advertisements . . .

For the winners the spiral works in the opposite direction; with the exception of The Times, the cost of advertising in a national newspaper is tied to its circulation:

Advertising revenue is, and has been for some time, vital to a newspaper’s survival; without it it simply could not make ends meet. The Daily Express told a PEP enquiry in 1955 (Balance Sheet of the Press) that 39 per cent of its revenue came from advertisements; the EIU found some "quality" daillies getting 70 or 80 per cent of their incomes from the  same source and the “populars” about 40 per cent.

To attract the advertisements, the papers must themselves advertise, in campaigns aimed at industry’s sales directors. The Daily Telegraph says that on Fridays, when its colour supplement comes out, circulation goes up to 1,450,858—“. . . at just the right time for the peak weekend spending period.” (The whole idea, in fact, behind the colour supplements was to attract advertisers—as is obvious from the most casual glance through them.) Then there is “. . . the advertising medium that sells best” (News of the World, circulation 6,184,000) and “The Religious Weekly With National Appeal” (Methodist Recorder, circulation 69,568.)

The accepted formula for survival in Fleet Street’s jungle is size and diversification. Two giants out-top the rest—the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) and the Thomson Organisation. Both have big investments in newspapers and publishing overseas and in commercial television. Both received EIU's admiration for being “operated as a commercial business” (Daily Mirror) and “profit orientated” (Sunday Times).

Thomsons own the Sunday Times, the Scotsman, the Western Mail and now, after the Monopolies Commission had given the necessary approval under the Monopolies and Mergers Act, The Times—a takeover which in itself showed up the plight of the newspaper industry. Thomsons also own exhibition companies, a package tour firm and an airline.

IPC, in the words of the Press Council (Report 1966), is the ". . . largest and most comprehensive publishing and communications empire in the world.” It owns the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The People, The Sun, and something like ninety weekly magazines and 123 which come out less frequently, among them Autocar, Country Life, Everywoman. The weekly total was recently reduced by one when IPC put The Statist, after a long and painfully unprofitable iillness, to sleep.

A long way behind these two groups are Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Evening News, National Opinion Polls, a stake in Southern Television and in the North Sea explorations) and Beaverbrook Newspapers (Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard, a share in ATV.) Then there are the smaller, sometimes private, companies like the Daily Telegraph Ltd. and the Manchester Guardian and Evening News Ltd. This was how the three biggest groups made out in 1965:

Correction: It should read 'Profits Before Tax'

For the future, Fleet Street’s barometer is not set fair. The competition from television will not grow any weaker; the decline in advertising revenue will probably continue; production costs will not fall. The big groups have the resources to ride the storm and to put in labour saving equipment; in 1965 Thomsons invested £2.7 million in equipment and a new paper of their’s — the Evening Post in Reading—is composed with a computer. The small groups will be hard pressed to compete with this; their papers are especially vulnerable.

The suggested remedies are not original. The EIU advised an all-out war on costs, saying that in London alone the industry could sack enough workers to save nearly £5 million a year. Lord Thomson wants the unions to cooperate: “We have to learn to use these new tools of our trade, and I hope the efforts to do so will not be hamstrung by restrictive practices . . .” (Fleet Street, the Inside Story of Journalism — Macdonald 1966.)

And of course someone had to suggest the State stepping in like a fairy godmother to save it all. Richard Brightshaw, joint general secretary of SOGAT (one of the printing unions) has “. . . called for a National Printing Corporation, backed with large Government resources, which would . . . take over ’commercial projects and ailing publications’. . .” Lena Jeger, Labour M.P., “. . . is a strong supporter of outright nationalisation.” (Sunday Times, 8/1/67).

Like most of the lamentations about the state of Fleet Street, these are based on the assumption that newspapers are sacred. In fact, they are commodities, like the rest of capitalism’s wealth. When it is applied to other industries, the newspapers always support the principle that if something is unprofitable it should not be produced. If Fleet Street is a jungle, it is capitalism’s profit motive which has made it so. 

Ivan

Editorial: A Few Words on the Atlantic Charter (1941)

Editorial from the October 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Atlantic Charter drafted by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill lays down the principles of the post-war international settlement as viewed by the U.S.A. and Britain. It has now received the general support of Russia and of the small Powers allied against Germany. It suggests obvious comparisons with the attempt to settle world affairs after the last war and with the scheme the German Government has put forward for enforcement if they are the victors. If it were as easy to dispose of awkward problems as it is to draft fine sounding proclamations we could perhaps agree about the superiority of the Atlantic Charter over the Versailles settlement and over the German plan. There is this to be said for the Atlantic Charter, that it is phrased in terms which do not envisage dividing up the spoils of world trade for the benefit of the victors. In Point 4 it pledges Great Britain and the U.S.A. that they will endeavour, “with due respect for their existing obligations” (more about this later) “to further enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”

This has been compared with the third of President Wilson’s 14 points drafted in 1918, which promised similar equality of trade conditions, but only “among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.” In other words, Germany and her allies were in effect barred.

Similarly it may be compared with the plan for world settlement recently elaborated by one of the leading Nazi economists, Werner Daitz. This was summarised in the Times (September 10th, 1941); under this plan the world is to be divided into six groups, the East-Asiatic, the Indo-Malay, the European, the African, the North American and the South American. The European, which is to take in all Western Russia and Great Britain, is to be under German dominance and according to Daitz it will have complete control over Africa, and there is to be no nonsense of equal trading conditions: —

“Europe will exercise a dominating power over the world. She will need much less food and raw materials from oversea than heretofore, but she will remain the greatest selling market for the countries producing rawstuffs. Consequently, she will be able to dictate the terms on which she buys. What will happen to Australia if Germany refuses her wool ? Or to the Argentine if she declines her beef ? Or to the United States if she will have no cotton? Europe will be able to use the fact that she is the world’s greatest consumer and the world’s intensest centre of industrial production as a political lever to control the other Lebensraume.”

Promise and Performance

But while the words and sentiments differ, what about the prospect of fulfilment? It will not be forgotten that when President Wilson had been disposed of other men and other interests actually dominated the settlement, and paid not even lip-service to the liberal sentiments expressed by Wilson in others of his 14 Points.

Already there has been questioning about that innocent little clause in the Atlantic Charter which reads: “With due respect for their existing obligations.” At the meeting of the nine allied Governments held in London, on September 24th, the representative of the Dutch Government raised objection and said “it was the view of his Government that this reservation might diminish the beneficial effect of the whole clause.”—(News-Chronicle, September 25th, 1941.)

The City Editor of the same journal supported the Dutch Government’s protest though pointing out that that Government too is asking preferential treatment for its own interest. He added: —

“Politicians, business men and leading civil servants are already busily engaged in explaining away Point 4. Some of them are even reported to have argued with scant tact; in the United States that we must maintain exchange control and trade bilateralism as permanent features of our economic set-up, since we “cannot afford” to do without them.

Bilateralism is the system of trade which says, “I won’t buy from you unless you buy as much from me.” That system is in direct and irreconcilable conflict with the equal access principle, which says, “I submit to no conditions from those to whom I sell and impose no conditions on those from whom I buy.”

If Point 4 of the Atlantic Charter means anything at all, it means adherence to the latter, “multilateral,” system of trade, and it is disquieting to find even distinguished economists setting at defiance both our signature to the Atlantic Charter and the most elementary doctrines of their own science”.— (News Chronicle, September 25th, 1941.)

So already it is plain that Clause 4 is going to have a rough passage and if its opponents have their way, to quote the News-Chronicle, “all that in practice is likely to be left of a fine principle is a fine phrase.”

Who will Slay the Capitalist Giants?

All the emphasis in the Atlantic Charter is laid on the relations between nations, but what about the great capitalist combines at home? The Atlantic Charter sees the need to protect the small nations against dominance by the larger ones if they are to trade and have access to raw materials on equal terms. But if capitalism is to continue, as Roosevelt and Churchill take for granted that it will, how is this to be done? How will they deal with the great capitalist concerns like Unilever, Imperial Chemical Industries and similar concerns in other lands? Who is going to slay these giant international semi-monopolies which are the real dominators of world trade? What is the use of saying that trade is on equal terms, a fair field and no favour, when these octopus organisations are left with their tentacles sprawling across the globe, not to mention the fact that they will naturally seek to use their great influence with governments to advance their interests.

This is the acid test of the talk of putting capitalist trade on a better basis. Is there any intention among the upholders of capitalism of reversing a half century of development towards bigger and bigger monopolies? Some twenty years ago a Labour leader, Mr. J. R. Clynes, said that his party thought it better to have a large number of small capitalists than a small number of large ones. Would Mr. Clynes or any other Labour leader say that to-day? Indeed, how could they when they are committed to a programme of amalgamation and formation of great public utility corporations ?

Is Agriculture to be Destroyed by Cheap Foreign Imports ?

There is another awkward fact to be faced by those who think that fine words about equal trade conditions are a contribution to settling the world’s problems. Are any countries to be allowed to impose protective tariffs or give subsidies to agriculture or other industries in order to save them from bankruptcy in face of a flood of cheaper products from abroad ? The News-Chronicle, true to its free-trade doctrines, says that the Atlantic Charter rules out these practices, as it logically does, but where do the Conservative Party and the Labour Party stand ? The Conservatives and many individuals in the Labour Party are already committed to a policy of protecting agriculture in Britain against a flood of imports from countries able to grow food more cheaply. What do they understand by Clause 4? And if they demand protective measures or subsidies for agriculture how will they object to Germany and other countries following a similar line for various industries ? In short, how will the trade scramble after this war be any different from that before the war’?

Twenty odd years ago the Labour Party had an answer. They were prepared to take the free trade line and let agriculture or any other industry sink or swim without aid. In their 1918 “Labour and the new social order,” they said “we ourselves object to all Protective Customs Tariffs,” and on the question of agriculture they said specifically that nothing must be done which would raise the price of foodstuffs here above the price level of foodstuffs imported from abroad.

They would no doubt give a somewhat different answer now but change is not necessarily progress, and the task of making capitalism work harmoniously is at least as difficult now as it was then. Socialists have no doubt about their attitude. Capitalism cannot be made to work satisfactorily. It must be abolished. Those who think differently, and this includes all those who have hastened to applaud the sentiments of the Atlantic Charter, should at least face up to these problems and decide where they stand.

News in Review: Rhodesian colour bar (1960)

The News in Review column from the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rhodesian colour bar
The business interests of the Rhodesian Federation are making slow but steady progress in their attempt to build up a system free from colour bars, and from the inconveniences these cause in trade and industry. In the Northern Rhodesian copper mines, for example, the owners have long wanted to be able to call on the great reserve of local African labour for all the jobs in the mines, instead of having many of them reserved for Europeans. The resistance of the white miners to these proposals led to a long strike by the Europeans in 1958. But after a year's negotiation between the European miners’ union and six of the mining companies, the latter have at last persuaded the whites to allow at least all the unskilled jobs to be done by Africans. It is significant that the African mineworkers' union, although it gave a modified welcome to the agreement, took no part in the discussions: it was the owners who argued the case against the colour bar.


Monckton and Tredgold
In the political field, the. industrial interests are also forging ahead in their struggle with the planters' government under Sir Roy Welensky and Sir Edgar Whitehead. The recent Monckton commission recommended that secession from the Federation should be permitted, even though Welensky only allowed the commission into Rhodesia on Macmillan's promise that they would not be allowed to judge on the question of secession. But clearly the capitalists of Rhodesia feel that they could count on more co-operation from African governments in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia than from the present settlers' government which controls the whole Federation. As they feel their position crumbling, the planters try to bolster their control of the government. Sir Edgar Whitehead has brought in a Law and Order Bill to give himself sweeping powers “to maintain order” (i.e., to silence any opposition which gets out of hand). This has led to the resignation of Sir Robert Tredgold, the Chief Justice of the Federation, in protest. He is to lead a new movement to get rid of Sir Edgar Whitehead. All of which emphasizes the fact that those who support capitalism in Rhodesia are more and more turning on the pressure to over throw the former ruling class, the planters.


Labour controversy
When one considers the issues involved in the recent Labour Party controversy one can only wonder just what all the fuss was about. We were told that if Mr. Gaitskell continues as leader of the Labour Party it may mean the disintegration of that party. Mr. Wilson on the other hand was said to have been of a more conciliatory nature and because of this was more likely to have kept the party united. We are not concerned here with the personalities of the individuals involved except to point out that on the question of what started the controversy, namely, conference decisions on Defence, they differed only in their respective views on how best to maintain some appearance of solidarity in the labour movement. It had been said that should the issue have been settled either way it could possibly have meant the end of the Labour Party “as an effective opposition.” Socialists would have had no such illusions. Since the Labour Party’s inception the S.P.G.B. have been pointing out that the Party in question is not so much a party of opposition as an alternative government, having an occasional term of office in an endeavour to solve the same inevitable capitalist problems which the outgoing party have failed to solve. Socialists would be the last to shed any tears should the present controversy bring about the disintegration of the Labour Party.


Breakdown ?
Unhappy days seem to be here again in the car industry, as heavy redundancies develop in France, Germany and Great Britain. The Canadians have a similar problem and have responded by persuading their government to impose stricter conditions of dumping duty on car imports.

Unemployment is an old working class problem; it is especially ironical that it should reappear in an industry whose product has been the sacred symbol of post-war “prosperity.”

Capitalism, with or without full employment, is a system in which cars, like other commodities, are made only if they can be sold. This—not the policies of parsimonious governments or perfidious car companies—is the root of the troubles in the car industry.

Many workers, with a hire-purchase heap shrouded in balloon fabric at the kerbside, thought that what they called prosperity would last for ever. For these, the redundancies must come as a shock.

Sadly, there is no reason to suppose that unemployed workers are more receptive to the lessons of capitalist society than those who are working. Boom or slump, capitalism is an insecure system and must remain so.


“News Chronicle”
The News Chronicle stuck to what it chose to call its liberal principles like a prim old Auntie watching her hemline. Whatever sordid facts capitalism produced for it to comment upon, the Chronicle’s attitude was always impeccably virtuous.

An innocent could have been forgiven for believing that the newspaper existed only to expound lofty morality.

But the end of the News Chronicle and The Star had nothing to do with principles. Simply, they sold out because they could not balance their accounts: their revenue from sales, advertising and so on did not cover their costs of wages, materials and the like.

The people who sink money into newspapers like to receive a return on their investment, which means that the Chronicle, like any other commodity, was produced for profitable sale. They stopped producing the paper when it became obvious that it had little hope of ever making a profit.

This is the sort of event about which the high-minded Chronicle often had sad and stern words to say. It is ironical that it should have fallen foul of the same commercial necessities of capitalist society.

The Passing Show: Freedom of the Press (1960)

The Passing Show Column from the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freedom of the Press
In recent years many newspapers have been forced to cease publication or to sell out and merge with their competitors. No longer are only small papers involved: in the past few months papers as well known as the Sunday Empire News, the News Chronicle and the Star, have gone the way of the rest. It is a cliche that the Freedom of the Press is in practice the freedom of rich men to spread their views through the newspapers they own. Those of us in the Socialist Party know only too well that without vast amounts of capital the Socialist Standard has been able to reach only a small minority of the working class. But the conditions of entry in the newspaper stakes are becoming even more stringent than ever before. The News Chronicle lost money (and therefore, in a capitalist society, had in due course to close down) even though it had a daily readership of over one million. People other than millionaires have not been able to produce a healthy daily paper for many years: now, even the lesser millionaires must be getting worried. Once any millionaire with a taste for it could partake of the Freedom of the Press: now, apparently, only multi-millionaires are allowed to join the club.

Harmony
The news that the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to visit the Pope makes one wonder what they will talk about. At any rate, we can be sure it won't do the working class any good. For the Pope agrees with the Archbishop that capitalism is a fine system. This is from the Sunday Press (18/10/59):

  The Holy Father yesterday contrasted the appalling exploitation of workers at the beginning of the century with their present-day pleasant working conditions. Management and labour, working together in harmony, had created a new situation where the workers had never had it so well.

The reader may think that at least it is something that the Pope realises that things were bad sixty years ago. But, of course, everyone will agree that things were bad sixty years ago. The ruling class and its allies are prepared to admit anything except that the present system is bad. In the early years of the century, when the Socialist Party was already working, speaking and writing about "the appalling exploitation of workers," the then Popes were supporting the capitalist system, just as the present Pope supports the capitalist system now. In fifty years' time, no doubt, the Pope (if there still is one) will be talking about “the appalling exploitation of the workers in I960." But it does no good to attack the evils of half a century ago: they can't be altered now. What must be done is to attack the evils of today—i.e., the evils which are inseparable from the capitalist system.

Pray and work

And what has the Pope to say about the present? He gave, apparently, a “rousing warning against those who trampled the sacrosanct rights of the human person’’—but had no word to say of the Catholic-supported Fascist government of Spain, which denies the workers the most elementary democratic rights. And he rounded off with some advice which must have had every capitalist in the audience standing and cheering:

  The Pope recommended the workers to practise Christian virtues and follow the motto of St. Benedict, “Ora et Labora” (pray and work). In so doing, you will earn the treasures of heaven, he said. 

Believe that if you like. One thing is certain: you won't earn treasures anywhere else.


Monkey business
At a furniture factory in Houston, Texas, three chimpanzees have begun work sealing cushions and doing other simple jobs. The factory-owner plans to replace one employee each week with a chimp. To the factory's workers, this means the threat of the sack, the threat of unemployment. But there is more to it than that. Surely this news item underlines our present predicament. These human beings—members of the human race, which produced Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare—are now reduced to spending their working lives doing monotonous, repetitive jobs which could be done as well by chimpanzees. This is not a question of spending a couple of hours a day, or ten hours a week, tending machines, which people may well decide to do under Socialism, in order to produce enough of the necessaries of life and at the same time free themselves for the rest of the time to develop their personalities as they think best. This is a question of workers spending their entire working lives on stultifying tasks.

The Daily Herald (12/11/60) printed an article which said this should be stopped because of the harm it would do to the human ego. “. . . There are things that the human ego rejects, out of hand, without another thought. And one of those things is the realisation that one's occupation, one’s life work, could be done equally well by a chimpanzee.”

This must typify the difference in political thought between reformers and Socialists. The writer of the Herald article would stop the chimpanzees doing "these jobs, because it makes obvious the degradation of human beings involved— this, of course, would do nothing to stop the degradation. Socialists, on the other hand, want to abolish the system which leads to men spending their lives in this way.

No trivialities

From an advert, in The Times (19/10/60):

  The owner of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II has his sights firmly on fundamentals and is never decoyed by passing trivialities. A philosophy reflected in his choice of motor car. . . .

So that’s how you get a Rolls. Next time you see anyone driving a broken-down old jalopy tied together with string, don’t assume rashly that it’s because he can’t afford anything better: no, it was his philosophy which led him to choose that model. If you feel that you have your “sights firmly on fundamentals” and the rest of it—well, your philosophy clearly entitles you to a Rolls. Better apply direct.

Alwyn Edgar

Is There a “Managerial” Revolution? (1943)

From the February 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist class are able to maintain their ownership and control of society’s means of life because they have control of the machinery of government through which laws acceptable to the owning class are made and enforced. That is why Socialists point to the necessity of a Socialist working class democratically obtaining control of the machinery of Government in order to introduce Socialism. Various opponents of Socialism give other interpretations of the facts and one of the theories now achieving some acceptance is that effective control has passed, or is passing, out of the hands of the capitalist class, not into the hands of the working class, but into the hands of the managerial section of industry. A recent book (The Managerial Revolution, by J. Burnham; Putnam; 7/6)) states the case for this view. It was reviewed by the City Editor of the News-Chronicle, the argument in the book being summarised as follows : —

  His (Mr. Burnham’s) thesis briefly is this. The dominant political power was once in the hands of the great landowners, the feudal lords; then it passed to the big merchants and manufacturers—the capitalists. But capitalism is now moribund, because the people who own the instruments of production no longer manage them. The next phase is not socialism . . . but—if I may coin the word, “managism.” Power is now passing to the “social group or class of the managers,” who, in the course of a generation or so, will have achieved social dominance, will be the ruling class in society all over the world.— (News-Chronicle, August 10, 1942.)

It is interesting to observe that the City Editor of the News-Chronicle, Mr. Oscar Hobson. whose views on this matter are certainly entitled to be given some weight, can see no signs that such a development is taking place. He writes : —

  The works managers I know are not of the stuff of which revolutions are made. In this country they are singularly unvocal. They are not a class apart, differentiated from finance executives and all the rest of the capitalist hierarchy. And when Mr. Burnham sees the rise of Nazidom in Germany as part and parcel of the managerial revolution I almost scoff! Where among the Nazi leaders will he find a “manager”?

Who Controls Whom ?
Actual incidents in contemporary capitalism support Hobson’s view as against Burnham’s. All the evidence is that in Germany and Italy it has not been the case that managers have become the political ruling class, but that the Nazi and Fascist leaders, once they have achieved control of the machinery of Government, have set about acquiring or extending their ownership of industrial, commercial and financial concerns. Their actions prove that they at least do not believe that management is the thing that matters, they have gone all out to become owners. A writer in the Times recently described how the Fascist leaders in Italy have used their hold on political power to acquire ownership or shareholdings in businesses; their political control has been used to make them rich. The Times writer summed it up by saying that whereas the Fascists jibe at Britain and America as countries of “plutocrats,” i.e., countries where the wealthy have acquired political power, Italy under Fascism may be described as a country of “cratoplutes,” a country in which the Party bosses have used political power in order to acquire wealth.

In this country recently we have had some examples of how capitalist industry is controlled and the way that control is exercised. On November 17 the case of Sir Roy Fedden was discussed in the House of Lords. According to Lord Brabazon (reported in the Times, November 18) Sir Roy Fedden was chief engineer of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and was reputed to have outstanding technical achievements to his credit, among them “the most successful radial air-cooled engines in the world,” and Lord Sempill claimed that Fedden is “one of the greatest geniuses in aircraft design in the world.” But the Company, which was originally founded by Sir George White, is controlled by the family—”Never had anyone but the family and relations of it been allowed on the board. Of the present board, none was an engineer ” (Lord Brabazon). But trouble arose and when Sir Roy Fedden refused to agree to the board’s order that part of his  organisation was to be controlled by the Production Manager he was dismissed. Sir Roy Fedden’s own statement was:—

  On February 6 the Chairman gave me six months’ notice, on the grounds they wanted to make a new agreement. … I have never wished to leave the company. While negotiations were going forward I was dismissed on October 1.” (Evening News, October 31, 1942.)

Lord Sempill also stated in the House of Lords (Times, November 18, 1942) : —

  The trouble was a symptom of other troubles in the aircraft industry. Something should be done to prevent a repercussion of the same kind of difficulties in which people on the financial side made war against those on the technical side, and, as in the case of Sir Roy Fedden, threw them out of a job. The other companies specifically concerned with such trouble were the De Havilland Company,, the Fairey Aviation Company, Napiers and Sons, and Short Brothers. There was another, but the matter was sub judice and he would not mention the name.

It will be seen from this that the man with the technical knowledge was entirely at the disposal of the family who owned and controlled.

Another illustration of the vital importance of ownership was given by the case of Sir Edward Baron and Carreras, Ltd., the £5,000,000 tobacco concern. Here the position was that the Baron family hold 150,000 out of 240,000 £1 ordinary shares and it is only the ordinary shareholders who, under the articles of the company, have voting rights on the Board. The case taken to Court revolved around the question whether Sir Edward Baron, the Managing Director, should persist in his refusal to let the majority of directors make their own choice of a director to be re-elected to the Board, it being alleged that Sir Edward Baron had given a verbal contract not to use his voting rights. The Court held that no such contract had been entered into (Times, December 19, 1942), so the family group of shareholders will continue to control the management of the Company. Where, it may be asked, do Mr. Burnham’s managerial group come into this picture? It was solely a dispute between two groups of owners and their nominees, the Baron group and the minority group—nobody ever thought of mentioning the non-owning managers.

It is quite true that with the growth of mammoth amalgamated concerns the direct control of family groups declines, and that in the public utility corporations the State itself takes a hand in the appointment of the boards of directors. This is, so to speak, an interference by the capitalist State, representing the capitalist class as a whole, in the affairs of individual capitalist undertakings, but two points of paramount importance should be observed. One is that the main interest of the owners, the safeguarding of their income from their investments, is not interfered with. The second is that the creation of public utility corporations under some kind of Governmental control is not in the slightest degree the work of the managerial group but is carried out by those who control the machinery of government.

Russia also has been instanced as a country where the so-called managerial revolution, is in progress, but according to a writer in the Economist who refers to Schwarz’s ”Heads of Russian Factories” (Economist, January 9, 1943), Russia has now gone over to one-man control, the controller being the industrial manager appointed by the State. The Economist writer claims that as a result of recent changes the new type of industrial manager in Russia has as his aims : "Fulfilment of the monthly plan, a rising graph of production, absolute obedience and discipline in the workshop, and one-man direction of the plant.” He has “almost unlimited powers to establish his authority and to deal with slackness and infringements of labour discipline.” True he has to deal with the Bolshevik Party “cell” but ”the once familiar conflict between party cell and factory director has long been forgotten. The fullest unity between party and management has in fact been achieved. The manager is now only very rarely a non-party man. The Party on the other hand has evolved into an almost non-political body. All its interests and activities have been centred on the problems of production.”

Here again we see that the State and those who have its backing are supreme against other groups.

In spite of Mr. Burnham the managers will not become a new ruling class unless they do so through political control. The task of the workers still remains that of gaining political control for Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Odds and Ends: 5,000 Roubles to Win (1957)

The Odds and Ends column from the December 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

5,000 Roubles to Win

Rumour has it that another Purge is on the way in Soviet Russia. No! It’s not likely to be Khruschev or Gromyko. Its going to be those wicked jockeys at the Moscow race course.

According to Sovetskoya Kultura not only are students and young workers losing their money—and, more important—taking time off from work and study, but it appears, some of the jockeys have been "fixing” the races and making fortunes by betting on certain winners. But this is not all! Some of toe Muscovite tipsters have been tipping losers, much to toe consternation of the punters. And besides that the officials at the Moscow race course, it seems, have been violating the law by selling “hard liquor.”

Such wicked “bourgeois” goings-on! And in a “Socialist” country!—so the Communists tell us. Like workers in Britain who think they can emancipate themselves by having a little “flutter" on the 2.30 or filling in a football coupon, the Russian workers also think that betting will get them out of their poverty position.

It looks as though Russia will soon be going to the dogs!

Where do they find the cash?

In this fairy-land of the Welfare State, the News Chronicle has discovered a class of people who can afford to pay between £5 and £10 at the hairdressers; who live in apartments where the rent is between £5,000 and £10,000 a year—plus ground rent and service costs of £600 to £7,000 a year; and who own a Rolls Royce or a Jaguar costing £5,600.

The News Chronicle then tells us that “of around 23 million working-people in Britain, nearly 20 million are wage-earning. And as most of us know, on a pay-as-you-earn tax system, wage-earners never see quite a whack of their pay packets.” (21/10/57.) '

After discovering the rich—the class that enjoys all these luxuries—the Chronicle asks :—

  "Now where do the rich people who keep these markets going get their money? And how?"

Now this is where the Socially can help the News Chronicle. We have been explaining how, and where, the rich—the capitalist class—get their money for a long time. The rich get their money through the exploitation of the working-class; from the unpaid labour of the workers. In a given period the workers produce more than they receive back in wages or salaries. They produce a surplus—what Marx called “surplus value” which is the basis of rent, interest and profit. And because the rich own the means of living—i.e„ the land, factories, etc., through share and stock holding, and the workers own little or nothing of these means of life, they remain the rich, become more and more prosperous during boom periods, and are able to afford all the luxuries that the News Chronicle speaks of; whilst most of us have to put up with the 10 guinea suits or a cheap 'perm.'

One wonders how long the workers will let this state of affairs remain as it is.

Marx and Christianity

The somewhat lengthy correspondence in the Socialist Standard on religion has prompted this writer to read again the early writings of Marx on Christianity. Although he had far from developed his ideas and attitudes towards the then developing capitalist society, and although today his writings read a little archaic, his views on the Christian religion are more than valid today. In 1847, writing in the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung, he says: “The social principles of Christianity justified slavery in the classic world and they glorified mediaeval serfdom, and if necessary they are quite willing to defend the oppression of the proletariat even if they should wear a somewhat crestfallen appearance the while. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have to offer to the latter is the pious wish that the former be charitable. The social principles of Christianity transfer the reparation of all infamies to the realms of heaven and thus they justify the perpetuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare that all the villanies of the oppressors against the oppressed are either the just punishment for original or other sin, or tribulations which God in his inscrutable wisdom causes the elect to suffer. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility—” (quoted from Karl Marx by Franz Mehring, p. 131.)

The principles of Socialism teach courage, confidence, pride and the understanding of capitalism and the need for a new system of society—Socialism.

Marx and the Trade Unions

The following merits repetition:

 “ . . . the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their insistence against the encroachments of capital,, and abandon their attempts of making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. .. . 

At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate workings of these every-day struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing the direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the Conservative motto, “A fair day's wages for a fair day’s work” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages system! ” . . .  

Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.” (Value. Price and Profit, pp. 92-94.)

Peter E. Newell

Abundance and Poverty (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago, under the above caption, the now defunct News Chronicle, in a leading article, asked “is it really beyond the wit of man to devise a means of sharing out more fairly the world's bounty?" This was by no means the first challenge to society to meet the paradox of want in the midst of plenty, and the report that to-day, in Toronto, thousands of children are starving, provides ample evidence that the challenge has not been met

The statement comes from Dr. Morris Zeidman, a Presbyterian minister who runs the Scott Mission, which has “opened its doors to feed the hungry children of the city’s unemployed.” Referring to a woman who could not drink the soup provided, a mission worker said, “Some of these people have been subsisting on so little that they now find it hard to stomach ordinary food ” (The Guardian 10/3/61).

Is this, we may ask, part of the heritage of freedom for which members of the working class fought and died in two of the bloodiest wars in history? Must people go without the basic essentials of life at a time when productivity has increased to heights never known before? When man was the slave of nature, shortage and want could be explained in something like intelligent terms, but to-day, when his productive capacities are virtually unlimited, he must find some other answer.

Thirteen years ago, Lord Boyd Orr, then Director-General of the World Food and Agriculture Organisation, could say “There was no difficulty about producing food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed in the countries that needed it?’’. Seven years later, the Oxford economist, Mr. Colin Clark, remarked that in two years no authority had disagreed with Professor Dudley Stamp, who pointed out that if Danish agricultural standards were to be practised on the available cultivable land, there would be enough food produced to give an excellent diet to probably seven times the world’s present population.

What Lord Boyd Orr and Mr. Colin Clark failed to recognise, or at least make no mention of, is the fact that however capable man may be of producing wealth, it is ultimately the question of ownership which decides whether or not he will partake of that wealth. Food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, and the fact that it eventually may satisfy hungry children in Toronto or elsewhere is incidental and of secondary importance.

The answer to the News Chronicle’s question will not be found in the speeches of politicians and economists; if it could, the question would not be asked after a century of Parliamentary Statutes and fact-finding Commissions, designed to reform capitalist society in the interest of those who make it tick.

A. F.

Death of a Daily (1960)

From the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fleet Street was knee deep in a flood of crocodile tears. “We didn’t want to do it,” cried Lord Rothermere. "Neither did we,” wailed Mr. Cadbury. Nevertheless, it had happened, and The News Chronicle was no more. Publication had ceased with the last issue on October 17th, and the whole of its assets had been purchased by The Daily Mail. Its sister paper, The Star, suffered a similar fate and was gobbled up by Lord Rothermere’s Evening News. According to the last figures available at the time of writing, a sum of about £1,925,000 changed hands in the deal, with a further payment of £1 for every former Chronicle reader whom the Mail manages to retain.

Everyone will be familiar with the various reactions as the bombshell exploded in the world of journalism, ranging from the plaintive last tribute of the Guardian to the baffled rage of the 3,000 or so workers who overnight found themselves without a job. The general public reaction was one of surprise that even with a circulation of over a million, The Chronicle could not escape this fate.

Somehow, we are told, nobody had really expected it to happen, even though rumours had been circulating for some time before—rumours which only a few hours previously had been dubbed as “without foundation” by a spokesman of the Rothermere Press. Could it be credible that the sizeable body of opinion represented by the Chronicle could be blandly ignored? Yet there it was. And clearly the cloak of secrecy had been pretty effective, as many dumbfounded readers found when the Daily Mail was dropped through their letterboxes for the first time on October 18th.

It is this calm fait accompli which stands out so starkly from all the hullabaloo and wringing of hands. Doubtless, many of the older readers of the Chronicle will not be able to resist a comparison of this with the unctuous lip service to “principle” which has characterised this paper in the past (it even banned racing from its columns in the earlier days). Probably the Guardian leader of October 18th summed up the opinion which many held of its contemporary when it mentioned “. . . the attempt to give to a popular readership . . .  a fair impression not merely of the events of the day but of its culture, its unsmart values, its enduring humanities.” Certainly this was an impression that the Chronicle tried to create about itself, and of course, it was never tired of flattering its readers with its “purity" of approach.

One of the sickening hypocrisies of Capitalism is the implication behind the sales talk, that service to the public is pursued for its own sake. But the News Chronicle was no different from other dailies in that it was run with a view to profit. Advertising revenue played a major part in this and when, for various reasons, advertisers were no longer prepared to use its columns, when in fact the paper was no longer a paying proposition, then the “unsmart values” were promptly sacrificed, and Mr. Cadbury sold out. Possibly this will rank as one of the slickest deals in the history of journalism, and as usual, the people who really suffered were working men and women.

Much has been made of the apparent concern of the employers over the pensions and compensation payments to the staff. How far is this true? The Observer suggested that the sale took place to compensate the staff, yet almost in the same breath, we are told that the very profitable interest in Tyne-Tees Television had been retained. Such touching concern did not apparently induce the directors to part with this sideline. In any case, there were a number of courses open to Mr. Cadbury other than the closure of the paper, but if they were considered, they were rejected. Certainly, one of his erstwhile employees, Mr. Frank Barber, had no doubts about the parsimony of the whole affair. In a scathing television interview, he described the compensation proposals as “meagre.”

The unpalatable truth is that there are no “unsmart values” in a world of private property relationships, although the Chronicle has for years supported this illusion. Its readers were really led to believe in its integrity of purpose and even that sophisticated supporter of capitalism, The Guardian, said that “ it went down with all guns firing.” Nearer the truth was the furious assertion by one correspondent who alleged that the paper was sunk without a whimper of defiance coming from it.

Do not let us get too nostalgic about the passing of the Chronicle. It was always a supporter of British Capitalism right up until its undignified exit from the scene. Do not forget that it has after all only fallen a victim to its own practices, for during its lifetime it took over no less than four other newspapers. With its disappearance, the battle between the remaining giants will probably get that much sharper, and maybe in the not too distant future, we shall see a repetition of the same lying denials that accompanied the demise of the Chronicle, as yet another journal is made ready for the block.

Whichever goes next, it is as well to remember that they are all fervent supporters of the capitalist set-up. The whole sordid story of trickery, deceit and falsehood can come as no surprise to us—it is so typical of a world of dog-eat-dog. When interests so demanded, the reputation of the Cadburys for high principles and good labour relations was worth very little, and quickly gave way to a calculated and cynical move which threw 3,000 workers out of employment. A facade has crumbled as far as the Chronicle is concerned, but the rest of capitalism continues its wearying existence, embodying all the shabbiness and double-dealing with which we are so nauseatingly familiar.

Eddie Critchfield