Voice From The Back: All Right For Some (2011)

The Voice From The Back column from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Right For Some

That we live in a society that has world hunger, unemployment and homelessness is hardly a matter of dispute, but that is only a series of problems that confront the useful members of society. For others there are no social problems. “Paris Hilton has been spotted house hunting in Malibu. The heiress and reality TV star seemed to have taken a particular shine to a luxury pink stucco mansion with a hefty price tag. The rental property is reportedly costing $80,000 to rent per month. With four bedrooms and four bathrooms, the beachside mansion would make the perfect summer hangout for the LA socialite and her many friends. Paris also checked out other luxury villas, all close to the beach with gorgeous sea views. ‘Just got home. Saw some beautiful properties, so it’s going to be a hard choice to make,’ she tweeted later that day” (Yahoo News, 12 May). Could someone please tweet her that she is a useless parasitic exploiter?

The Middle Class Myth

In reviewing Owen Jones’s book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, the journalist Carol Midgely makes some valid points. “The Thatcher experiment, Jones says, repositioned working class not as something to be proud of but something to escape from. Being middle class was the holy grail. The dockers, miners, skilled factory workers and car workers of Britain have watched powerless as their jobs disappeared or were sent abroad” (Times, 28 May). Here we have Jones and Midgely making the usual mistake about class. All men and women who, because of their lack of property, are forced to seek work for a wage or a salary are members of the working class. Whether you work in a factory or an office whether you push a barrow or a pen if you have to seek a wage or a salary in order to live you are a member of the working class. 

A Dog’s Life

From time to time newspapers run obituaries of famous men and women but we had one recently for a dog! It was a rather special mutt though. You see it was a millionaire. The Maltese dog called Trouble had been left $12 million by the New York hotel mogul Leona Helmsley. “Legal battles ensued and a judge cut Trouble’s inheritance to $2 million. She was placed with Carl Lekic, the general manager of the Helmsley Sandcastle Hotel, in Florida, who had played with her many times. He was paid $5,000 a month for the privilege. He told the trustees that Trouble required $100,000 a year for a security guard (the dog had received many death and kidnapping threats). $18,000 for vet costs, $1,200 for food and $8,000 for grooming” (Times, 10 June). All this insanity is happening in a world where millions are trying to survive on $1.25 a day.

The Class Divide

When socialists speak of class division we are often accused of being outdated, but here are recent figures that prove our point. “Last year was another good year for millionaires – though their pace of growth is slowing. According to a new report by Boston Consulting Group out today, the number of millionaire households in the world grew by 12.2% in 2010, to 12.5 million. (BCG defines millionaires as those with $1 million or more in investible assets, excluding homes, luxury goods and ownership in one’s own company.) The U.S. continues to lead the world in millionaires, with 5.2 million millionaire households, followed by Japan with 1.5 million millionaire households, China with 1.1 million and the U.K. with 570,000. …The most important trend, however, is the global wealth distribution. According to the report, the world’s millionaires represent 0.9% of the world’s population but control 39% of the world’s wealth, up from 37% in 2009” (Wall Street Journal, 31 May). Yes, startling though it may seem – less than 1 percent of the world’s population own 39 percent of the wealth.

Law And Disorder

We are used to reading of gallant and dedicated police officers rounding up criminals and packing them off to prison, but what are we to make of this news item? “Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park. Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan ‘Keith’ McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry is a co-founder of the international Food Not Bombs movement, which began in the early 1980s” (Orlando Sentinel, 2 June). Feeding the homeless? What a despicable crime. Truly capitalism is a crazy society.

Disestablishment (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Establishment: and How They Get Away With It', by Owen Jones. Penguin £8.99

The Establishment, according to Owen Jones, consists of politicians, media barons, businesses, financiers and the police. They ‘manage’ democracy to ensure that it does not damage their interests. The Conservatives are its most natural political representatives, and the Labour Party in effect accepts the Tories’ main ideas. The Establishment shares mentalities but is not any kind of organised conspiracy. Its basic ideology is that of free markets and neo-liberalism, yet it is in fact completely dependent on the state.

Jones provides myriad examples of the connections among the different members of the Establishment. The mainstream media, for instance, are controlled by a small group of very powerful individuals, and the press and TV provide consistently misleading coverage, which often leads to people having absurdly exaggerated ideas about, say, the extent of social security fraud. Slightly awkward MPs such as Tom Watson and Chris Bryant have been subject to nasty personal attacks and may be put under covert surveillance. The BBC too is ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’, presenting the free-market view as an apolitical stance.

While benefit claimants are attacked in the press and people who are seriously ill are assessed by the likes of Atos as capable of working, there is a whole industry devoted to reducing the tax paid by the rich and the companies they own. Big accountancy firms such as Ernst & Young help design laws on tax avoidance and then advise clients on how to get round them. They have played a part in the increased concentration of wealth at the very top of the social pyramid.

The police, however, occupy a somewhat precarious place in the Establishment. They were needed to defeat the unions in the 1980s, especially the Miners’ Strike, and Thatcher’s government gave them a big pay rise. The police PR machine became very friendly with newspaper editors. But, with the Establishment now feeling more firmly in control, the police themselves have been subject to cuts and privatisation: in November 2012 thousands of police officers marched in London in protest against cuts.

Despite all the propaganda about free markets and freeing society from the dead hand of the state, the Establishment relies on the state machine to defend its interests. This covers not just bank bailouts but also the provision of infrastructure, support for research and development, the protection of property, and subsidies to companies via benefits for the low-paid. Organisations such as the Adam Smith Institute have succeeded in setting the framework for political debate, with anything slightly at odds with their ideas seen as completely beyond the pale. It is really only on the subject of the EU that the Establishment shows a divergence of views.

Jones gives a well-researched guide to all this and much else besides, which makes the milk-and-water nature of his own proposals all the more disappointing. In the foreword he describes the Green Party’s policies as ‘a genuine assault on the Establishment’ and in his conclusion he calls for a ‘democratic revolution’. But all this consists of is nationalisation, attacking tax avoidance, increasing the minimum wage and controlling private-sector rents. This might lead to some redistribution of wealth, but it will not truly disturb the status quo.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Owen Jones’s Hopeless Agenda (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in the Independent on Sunday (26 January), ubiquitous Labour left-winger Owen Jones proposed a nine-point ‘Agenda for Hope’.  It is essentially a wish-list of reforms to capitalism, as illustrated by the first of the points:

‘A statutory living wage, with immediate effect, for large businesses and the  public sector, and phased  in for small and medium  businesses over a five-year Parliament. This would save billions spent on social security each year by reducing subsidies to low-paying bosses, as well as stimulating the economy, creating jobs because of higher demand, stopping pay being undercut by cheap labour, and tackling the scandal of most of Britain’s poor being in work. An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work would finally be enshrined in law.’

The ‘finally’ is a nice touch since the campaign for a ‘living wage’ was started by the old ILP, then still part of the Labour Party, over 80 years ago in the 1920s. Since Jones has demonstrated in the past that he has some knowledge of Marx’s ideas, he must have chosen the phrase ‘an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work’ deliberately. It is of course a modern version of the demand for ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ which Marx, in a talk to British trade union leaders in 1865, described as a ‘conservative motto’ as opposed to the ‘revolutionary watchword’ of ‘abolition of the wages system.’

Jones does not give a figure for what he considers to be a living wage. At the moment the so-called living wage which some employers and especially local councils have agreed to pay no one less than is £8.80 an hour in London and £7.65 in the rest of the country, compared with the legal minimum wage of £6.31 an hour. This ‘living wage’ is only about £15,000 for a year of full-time employment outside London. Although this would be an improvement on what many workers are getting now it is hardly a living wage in any reasonable sense of the word ‘living’.

What Jones is advocating is a legally-decreed wage increase for millions of workers. This is unlikely to have the effect he intends. It could well ‘save billions spent on social security each year by reducing subsidies to low-paying bosses’. The Tories are on to this too and favour an increase in the minimum wage for precisely this reason. On the other hand, it could lead to employers laying off workers or even going out of business, so augmenting the ranks of the unemployed and social security payments to them. Not that the cost of social security should be of concern to workers. It’s only a problem for the capitalist class since they pay for it.

One thing it won’t do is stimulate ‘the economy, creating jobs because of higher demand.’ Since the extra wages will have to be paid by employers this will not result in any ‘higher demand’; the increase in demand resulting from higher wages (to the extent that it happens) would be offset by a fall in demand derived from employers’ profits. It’s a zero-sum game. So it won’t stimulate the economy or create extra jobs. In fact, since it is profits not wages that drive the economy, the reduced profits could have the opposite effect.

Owen Jones has failed to grasp that capitalism is not a collection of random bad things that can be tackled piecemeal. It’s an economic system with its own mode of functioning that cannot be reformed by legislation to work other than as a system that gives priority to profits not wages and which has to be done away with altogether in one revolutionary change.

Proper Gander: Screening The Working Class (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Occasionally, TV companies allow programme-makers to bite the hand that feeds them. A recent mouthful was the Royal Television Society Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture Totally Shameless: How TV Portrays The Working Class (BBC4). In this insightful and engaging polemic, Owen Jones explains why it’s become acceptable for television to denigrate the working class.

As the broadcasting industry expanded from the late 50s, new opportunities arose for people from lowlier backgrounds to enter the profession. Consequently, a growing number of TV shows reflected working class experiences, from Galton and Simpson’s edgy sitcoms to gritty dramas like Cathy Come Home and The Spongers. By the mid 80s, the working class had been weakened by the decline of the unions and the rise of individualism. The media and the government started to drum into us that ‘we’re all middle class now, apart from those scrounging chavs’. The popular perception of class has shifted towards being defined by culture, according to a study by polling group Britain Thinks. Someone who listens to Radio 4 and owns a cafetière is ‘middle class’, while someone who reads tabloids and watches soaps is working class.

Worryingly, the term ‘working class’ has often become equated with the derogatory term ‘chav’. Because of this change in the way we see class, and fewer opportunities being available for people from poorer backgrounds to enter the television industry, the traditional blue collar working class has virtually disappeared from our screens. The schedules have become dominated by ‘cops, docs and frocks’, with the ‘docs’ – or documentaries – often being voyeuristic prole-baiting sneerathons. Gypsies, for example, are presented as ‘a strange breed to be prodded through the bars of their cages’. Extreme examples of benefit claimants, such as families with a dozen kids, are paraded as the tips of uncouth, freeloading icebergs. It’s now the norm for television to depict the working class as ugly stereotypes like Vicki Pollard and those chewed up and spat out by The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Jones’ argument usefully illustrates how television mirrors and contributes to the current belittling of the working class. He wants to fight back with a return to programming which reflects working class struggles honestly, and not through the distorting prism of bourgeois ideology. He doesn’t spend long enough discussing how the belief in a ‘middle class’ gives a misleading view of society’s real class structure. However, he rightly prefers to use definitions of class based on ‘wealth and power’, rather than lifestyle. After all, ‘an aristocrat who watches The X Factor is still an aristocrat’.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: It Wasn’t Socialism (2012)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commenting on multi-millionaire and Tory backwoodsman Adrian Beecroft’s description of LibDem Cabinet Minister Vince Cable as a “socialist” for criticising his proposal to make it easier for employers to sack workers, Owen Jones asked “How did ‘socialist’ turn into an insult?” (I newspaper, 25 May).

It’s a question we ourselves have often asked. Our answer has been that it’s because the word became associated with the Labour Party and the state capitalist dictatorship in the old USSR.

Although we consistently opposed both, we were unable to keep to the fore the original meaning of ‘socialism’ as a co-operative commonwealth based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use, not the market or profit, and the end of having to work for wages.  Both Labour and the Russian dictatorship failed and people were encouraged to see this as the failure of socialism.

The early Labour Party’s claim was that, by a series of nationalisations and social reforms, a Labour government would be able to gradually improve workers’ living standards and progress towards socialism (which some of them understood in the same, original sense as us). It didn’t work out that way. In office, Labour had to govern capitalism on capitalism’s terms, as a profit-making system. This inevitably brought them into conflict with workers and to introduce wage restraint and restrictions on union activity.

The post-war Labour government did nationalise coal, the railways, gas, water and electricity but mainly in order to ensure that the rest of private industry got these provided in a more efficient (and subsidised) way. It also introduced a nation-wide social insurance system and health service, once again mainly to benefit employers by providing them with a relatively healthy and more productive workforce.

Although working conditions in the industries that were nationalised did improve, the basic conflict of interest between workers and employers that is built-in to capitalism continued, and so, therefore, did strikes. An economic crisis (and the need to finance a war in Korea) forced the post-war Labour government itself to begin the whittling away of some of the social reforms it had introduced. The same happened with the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead of Labour gradually transforming capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually transformed Labour, from a party that talked of socialism even if only as a vague and long-term aspiration into an alternative management team for British Capitalism plc.

Jones noted that the word ‘socialism’“hasn’t made an appearance in a Labour manifesto since 1987.”But he doesn’t want to return to the original meaning but only to what the Labour Party used to mean by it years ago. “If socialists really were running the show in Britain”, he wrote, the banks “would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole”; the rich would be forced to pay more tax; the railways and energy companies would be taken into “social ownership”and run by workers and consumers; more social housing would be built, and a “living wage”introduced.

This is Old Labour stuff –the dream of a democratically-run wages and profits system (which, ironically, Vince Cable shared when he was a Labour councillor in Glasgow in the 1970s before following the Gang of Four into the SDP and then the Liberals).

There was nothing wrong with the sentiment behind this of wanting to provide workers with a decent and improving standard of living. It’s just that, given capitalism, this is not possible. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work in the interest of workers.

Old Labour (2011)

Book Review from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. By Owen Jones (Verso Books 2011)

This well-received book has a snappy title and the subtitle fairly summarises one of its main themes. But a careful reading of its pages, and especially the concluding chapter, suggests a more descriptive title: “Down with middle-class Conservatism and New Labour. Up with the working-class Old Labour.”
Jones writes at the end of the introductory chapter:, “Class prejudice is part and parcel of a society deeply divided by class. Ultimately it is not the prejudice we need to tackle; it is the fountain from which it springs.” Tackling ‘the fountain from which [prejudice] springs’ is open to different interpretations. But the context makes it clear that for Jones the ending of the class system by the substitution of socialism for capitalism is not one of them.

The following chapters range over the inconsistent media treatment of the disappearance of middle-class and working-class children, the horrors of Thatcherism (no argument there), and the blaming of the victims in ‘broken Britain’.

In his concluding chapter – the author develops some of his Old Labour ideals:

“Instead of economic despots ruling over the British economy with nothing to keep them in check, key businesses could be taken into social ownership and democratically managed by workers – and consumers for that matter. It would be a real alternative to the old-style, top-down bureaucratic form of nationalization…”

Nationalisation is not, of course, the same thing as socialism, nor is it a step on the road to socialism. It is one of the two forms of capitalism: state (or officials acting on behalf of the capitalist class – as a whole) and private (ownership by individuals or corporations).

“The new class politics would be a start, to at least build a counterweight to the hegemonic, unchallenged politics of the wealthy… Working-class people have, in the past, organized to defend their interests; they have demanded to be listened to, and forced concessions from the hands of the powerful. Ridiculed or ignored though they may be, they will do so again.”

With those few stirring words Jones introduces his cunning working-class plan designed to achieve the new – improved – status quo. First, step up delivery of the loaves we produce into the ample larders of the rich and the powerful. Then fight them peacefully for crummy concessions. Good luck!

Stan Parker