On the pin (1964)

From the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oklahoma City, USA, has the unpleasant distinction of being the site of an experiment in discomfort. Some Oklahomans are protesting at this and there can be little wonder that they are. But experiments on human beings in the mass are not a novelty; they are, in fact, going on all the time.

Each morning for the past five months, jet aircraft have flown backwards and forwards over Oklahoma City, deliberately breaking through the sound barrier about half a dozen times between seven o’clock and about half past one. This will go on, day after day, until the beginning of next month.

The object of these experiments is to find out the effect which sonic booms have upon the people on the ground. Now that the American aircraft industry has entered the international race to build a supersonic airliner, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is trying to discover what would constitute an aircraft “acceptable” to the people it will fly over. There is no doubt that the projected airliner will be an excessive nuisance; the FAA are experimenting to find out the limits to which the nuisance can go. How much noise and other discomfort will people stand ?

There has inevitably been some protest from Oklahoma City, a small part of whose 500,000 people not see why their homes should be damaged (windows have broken, walls have sagged and bulged, plaster has split under the boom), their nerves shattered and their lives endangered (one ceiling which came down in the Negro section of the City narrowly missed a six year old child), in the cause of building a bigger, faster, noisier, more objectionable aircraft than those which already cause considerable disturbance.

The FAA has offered a conciliatory front to the protestors—they even promised to call off the experiments if the City authorities asked them to. But not all of Oklahoma’s citizens dislike the booms (we shall come to the reason for this in a moment), so no such request has been made. In any event, there is little doubt that, whatever Oklahoma or any other community may say, the world is going to be pestered by the supersonic airliners.

The protests of the people who live around London Airport have not been able to reduce the noise nuisance there; in fact, jet flights, which are the main culprits, steadily increase. Occasionally the government pulls off a dishonest trick. As the pace of competition among the jet operators gets hotter, the airlines make frequent application to be allowed to step up their allocation of flights—sometimes night flights. It is not unknown for the Ministry of Aviation to grant only part of such application, and to follow this with such a hullabaloo about their professed concern for the eardrums of the people around the airport that the fact that they have actually granted an increase in flights goes almost unnoticed.

The reason for the popularity of the big jets is that they are one of the cheapest methods of moving people over long distances by air that has ever been discovered. This means that their operator can hope to make big profits from them. If this should apply also to the supersonic liner, then that monster will before long be crashing about over our heads.

The thing which will stop the supersonic project will not be the demonstrations of the people who will be driven to distraction by it. It will not be because the thing is officially considered to be too great an assault upon human living conditions. The airliner will be abandoned if it is proved to be so crushingly unprofitable that the nations who are now racing to build it are persuaded that their economic interests are better served by dropping the project.

This has happened before. The post war years are littered with aircraft—the Brabazon, the Princess flying boat—which did not make the commercial grade. Others—the Vanguard, for example—only scraped in and were immediately an economic embarrassment. The development of the helicopter as an inter city link has been held in check not because it is a deafeningly clacking contraption (which it is) but because its operators have not been able to make it pay.

We may reflect, with a wry smile, upon the fact that up to now the most profitable aircraft have also been among the most objectionable. So we have got the jets, whose throaty scream drowns all conversation as they pass overhead at a height at which the traditional piston engine would hardly be noticed. And we have not got the flying boats, which might have been that much less of a nuisance because their airports would have probably been built on the coast. If this unfortunate circumstance is anything like a constant rule, the supersonic jets will be profitable. And we shall look back wistfully to the comparatively peaceful days when simple 707’s thundered over the roof-tops.

The Oklahoma experiments will then be consigned to embarrassed history. But other experiments, in different fields, will go on. Day after day, for example, we are subjected to investigation by what are officially known as market research organisations. Smooth, earnestly bespectacled young men call at our front doors, flick over plastic pictures of electric shavers, challenging us to identify their makers. (The writer, who has a weakness for electric shavers and who therefore devours all the ads for them, came out with full marks for this, but was disappointed not to receive a prize.)

The same young men may come back again some time later, with other questions about other products. They do not call at every house. They “sample” us, which perhaps makes some people feel like rare sherry, except that rare sherry is more respected by its drinkers than we are by our masters.

The smart young men have even divided us into groups, according to the jobs we do and how much we get for it. A company director is probably in group A or B. A tool maker may be somewhere in Group C. And so on down the alphabet, until somewhere among the E’s are the people, who scrape along on National Assistance.

None of the smart young men seem to see anything wrong in this. Most of them are anxious to identify themselves with the market research herd, dressing, talking and even combing their hair to the same pattern. They could have stepped straight out of those exceedingly irritating advertisements which, by a novel stroke, tell us when not to chew gum. They look out at the world with confident eyes, convinced of their ability to sell it absolutely anything.

The reason for this sort of activity—to use a rather delicate word for it—is that capitalist industry must always be obsessed by its markets. Profit is at the moment the primary objective of production- but although it is made when the goods are produced, profit can only be realised when they are sold. It did not take capitalism long to realise that it had better try to get to know its markets. So they are constantly sampling us, experimenting on us, sending out their smart young men to put us under their microscopes.

They may even try to alter a market, to persuade us to stop buying one type of product and to start buying another. Or they may try to open up new markets, with goods which have not been widely sold before. (Any day now, for example, we shall be swamped with advertisements for central heating systems.)

In Oklahoma, as a matter of fact, some of the business interests descry a market in the sonic booms, The local Chamber of Commerce hope that, if the experiments help to turn out an “acceptable” aircraft, Oklahoma’s airfield will be developed as one of the world's first supersonic airports. Speculating on this prospect, they have already bought up a lot of land around the airfield. Hungrily they look to the business which a supersonic airport would bring them—the contracts to build and to supply, and the extra population which would come to the area. Dazzled by visions of the golden economic boom, the business men of Oklahoma City have no eyes for the distress which the sonic booms will cause to the people of the area.

Experiments are not confined to the commercial field. Everyone knows that the great publicity drive which the Conservative Party launched before their victory in 1959 was managed by one of this country’s leading advertising agencies. This agency did not rush out haphazardly, slapping up hastily designed posters in any old place. They first of all took their sample of what they call public opinion, they made their experiments and they thought around it all. Only then did they decide on the line which their publicity should take.

The lessons of that defeat were not wasted upon the Labour Party. They assembled their own force of high powered admen, who gravely discussed which line they should adopt. Should they plug Nationalisation? Pensions? Roads? Out of all this came the Let's Go slogan, and the thumbs up sign— and is it only coincidence that Mr. Wilson is now inseparable from his pipe?

All of this effort has gone into finding out what the people will bear in the way of election propaganda, in the same way as the Oklahoma experiments are supposed to find out what they will bear in the way of thunder over their heads. It has gone into finding out what political image will appeal most to the voters’ ignorance and apathy. That is why the Tories no longer present themselves as the party born with a divine right to rule and why Labour has stuffed away its cloth cap, which is now worn only at events like Miners' Galas.

Nobody is exempt from such investigations—even the investigators themselves. That paunchy, florid sales executive, poring over the latest market research returns, enunciating in careful accents through his teeth, does not escape. He, too, is part of a market, to be assessed and experimented upon. Even the chewing gum makers are after him, along with the car firms and the people who try to persuade him that theirs is the best way of suppressing his ulcers.

Capitalism exploits and restricts its entire working class. But more than that, it degrades us in a multitude of ways. It has us wriggling on a pin on its observation board, and is carefully noting our every twitch and spasm. Does that spasm indicate that we would prefer another sort of pin? Does that twitch mean that we want one with a different shape head? If there’s money in it, capitalism is interested.

Maybe the working class do not object to this. In moments of despair, it even seems that they actually like it. In which case they do not object to, they like, blatant humiliation.

But, as Vera Lynn never tired of pointing out, somewhere there is a silver lining. Whatever the result of the experiments, and whether any notice is taken of them or not, they do prove one thing. We count. Mass opinion is important At the moment, it is all mass ignorance; but if it were mass knowledge. . .  If the people refused to chew gum, or take plastic spoons with their detergent powder, if they said a unanimous No to supersonic aircraft, all these things would have to stop.

There is one obvious qualification to this. If ever people got around to thinking like that, they would almost certainly be on the verge of saying the biggest-ever No. They would be about to say No to capitalism itself, to its grisly experiments, its cynical posturings and its ruthless degradations. There is a moral in this for us all, for the deafened folk of Oklahoma, for the canvassed, sampled, classified, humiliated people of the world.

Stop wriggling and get off that pin.

Ivan.

Greasy Pole: Sex, lies and leadership (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

What was remarkable about the Monica Lewinsky affair was not that Clinton had what he called a “not appropriate” relationship with here, nor that he then lied about it but that there are people—so many people—who profess to be surprised, shocked, outraged by his behaviour.

It does not have to be said, that Clinton is not the first politician to be exposed in this way and obviously he will not be the last. The sexual and political conditioning of capitalism work in combination to encourage relationships based on a recognition that, in the words of Henry Kissinger (who, it was said, knew what he was talking about) power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This was put in another way by Antonia Sanchez, who experienced—whether she enjoyed it or not is another matter—a lot of attention over her affair with David Mellor, which did so much to undermine the Tories’ Back To Basics campaign. Ms Sanchez explained Mellor’s attraction for her by reference to his influence; he could, she said, “make things happen”. This influence—power would be a better word in the case of the President of America—is given to political leaders by the workers who vote for them, who surrender their own power to change human society to a few people mandated to keep the social system in being. There are so many elements in this for what is called the misuse of this power that the abnormal becomes the normal—the misuse becomes an appropriate use of the power. So we had all those Tory sleaze merchants and their hypocrisy about personal morality. So we had John Kennedy; so we have Bill Clinton.

Lies

Of course it would have been more than remarkable if Clinton had, from the first day of his exposure, told the truth and owned up to the affair. Because part of the job of a politician is to tell lies. (When they don’t in the House of Commons—or rather when they are caught out doing it—they describe it as “misleading the House”.) all their promises, which amount to an assurance that they can control, capitalism so that it stops being an anarchic, human-destructive social system and becomes an ordered, beneficial one instead, are lies. When the promises become discredited they try to cover it all up with more lies; they blame the depredations of greedy workers or foreign speculators or mad dictators in faraway countries ...

Imagine, if we can, the speech a political leader would need to make in order to tell the truth, in order to confess to their impotence and to the deceptions they have practised to hide it. Imagine, as well, how this suicide statement would be received by the workers who had voted for the leader. Millions of people vote for capitalism because they think their leaders are not impotent and don’t tell lies.That is why the same people who were so eager to denounce Clinton over his deceptions in the Lewinsky affair were falling over themselves in their eagerness to believe him when he said the American missiles recently sent into Sudan had destroyed a factory making material to be used in biological warfare and not pharmaceutical products.

Tough

This raises the question of what kind of leader the working class would like to have ruling over them—and what kind they think they get. “Strong” leadership is usually one of the most popular kinds—except that the “strong” leaders always have to be on your side and not on your adversary’s. For example foreign leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein are famous for, among other things, a certain lack of tolerance of opposition. In fact anyone who opposed them was usually killed—and you can’t get much stronger then that. But for some reason such leaders are always known as madmen, or megalomaniacs or some such description when all they are doing is taking the theory of strong leadership to its logical end.

A Guardian/ICM Opinion poll published on 8 September assessed how strong—or rather “tough”—the voters rate Tony Blair. The prime minister will not go down in history as one of those leaders who has his opponents executed but he does give them quite a rough time, which gives him the reputation of being tough. So there would have been some dismay at Labour headquarters to see that Blair’s toughness rating has fallen from 57 percent in 1997 to 42 percent today. It is difficult to know what Blair was doing in August and September last year to justify a reputation for toughness, which he is not doing now. The only thing that comes to mind is his intervention over the funeral arrangements for Princess Diana— forcing her family to have a big public event, making sure that flags were flown at half-mast, that sort of thing. And of course coming up with the wheeze of calling a neurotic parasite the “people’s princess”.

Nonsense

If all the verbiage about leadership— about the lies, hypocrisy, toughness and weakness—sounds like nonsense that is because that is what it is. No leader, whatever their character and style, has been able to make any significant impression on the problems and the deficiencies of capitalism. That is why today tough, decisive Tony Blair confronts the same situation as weak and dithering John Major. Bill Clinton’s campaign to save his presidency was centred on the fact that as president he had the job of running American capitalism, beside which personal sexual difficulties are insignificant. Another way of putting that is that the working class should ignore such irrelevant issues and concentrate on the fact that they can themselves change society, without leaders of any kind.

Ivan

Who are the public? (1926)

From the March 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

The protracted “crisis” in the mining industry has given rise to much talk in the Press and elsewhere concerning the rights of the public in relation thereto. This is, of course, by no means unusual. Whenever the workers in any large industry, supplying a commodity or service in common use, offer resistance to attempts on the part of their exploiters to increase the rate of exploitation, they are attacked on all sides as opponents of the “public well-being.” Section after section of the working class have had this accusation made against them in turn until it is perfectly clear that whoever the “public” may be, they certainly do not include the workers, although these latter comprise the overwhelming majority of the population.

A somewhat different aspect of the matter is presented in an article recently published in the “Daily News” (26/l/25) entitled “The Case for the Public.” Herein it is the mine-owners who are taken to task for asserting their absolute right to their property, irrespective of the “interests of the public.”

According to the Cocoa Rag the State (representing the interests of the public) tolerates and encourages private property in all sorts of things in the belief that the public interest is best served so; but there are, it seems, exceptions, and the “News” goes on to give a list of instances during the war of the State interfering with private property in the public interest.

Returning to the mine-owners, we are told that the public has a great interest in the efficiency of the pits since this is an important element in price ! Here we seem to be getting to the core of the matter.

Who are concerned with the price of coal? Not the workers, certainly; though fatuous “leaders” endeavour to persuade them to that effect. Experience has shown that an all round lowering of prices is rapidly followed by an all round lowering of wages and that the worker has nothing to gain by a policy of cheapness. On the contrary, efficiency and economy under capitalism simply involve the squeezing of, more wealth out of fewer workers and a conse-quent increase in the unemployed.

The “News” advocates short hours and high wages—on the basis of a readiness to instal labour-saving devices ! All of which goes to show that it is not concerned with the interests of the workers but with cheaper coal. Again, in whose interest? Obviously, in the interests of the rest of the Capitalist class, who depend upon coal for the carrying on of their various profit-making concerns and who want cheaper power of all kinds in order to compete more effectively with their foreign rivals for the markets of the world.

It is significant of the degraded level to which the miners have been pushed that the Capitalist press should turn its guns for the nonce from them to their immediate exploiters. It is still more significant that the State, the executive committee of the Capitalist class, should have found it necessary to subsidise the owners rather than force through a further reduction. The “Labour” and “Communist” leaders who hailed “Red Friday” as a victory for the workers, showed thereby the abysmal futility of their leadership—to the workers.

Nothing but the sheer impossibility of reducing wages in the mining industry (without imposing heavier burdens upon the local rates) induced the Government to grant the subsidy. The resources of local bodies in the industrial areas generally and the mining areas in particular, are already so low that constant recourse to State aid is necessary. For the master class as a whole, therefore, the subsidy was the more economical of two evils. All the same, it is a burden they do not relish; hence they call on their fellow wolves to be less wasteful in their methods.

Thus our question is answered. “The State?” said the French king, ‘‘I am the state.” “The public?” echoes the British bourgeois, “we are the public.” Fellow workers, how long will it take you to realise the fact that you are disinherited outcasts in the land of your birth? That the power you place so readily in the hands of your “betters” is used only to flout and rob you?

“Public control,” or “public ownership,” whether introduced by Liberals, Labourites or “Communists,” can avail you nothing. The better organisation of capitalism means the more thorough exploitation of your class. Leave, then, these empty discussions upon the “justice or political morality of “public” versus “private” Capitalism to those whose interests are at stake. Your interest lies, in achieving your emancipation from wage-slavery. Whether you be miner or railwayman, sheltered or unsheltered, “high” paid or “low” paid, you are paid merely the necessary cost of your maintenance so long as profits can be squeezed from your nerves and muscles. When they cannot, then your “public” heritage is—the “dole” !

Nothing can help you but the conscious organisation of your class for the conquest of political power and the introduction of a social order in which “private” or “public” property based on profit-making shall find no place, but in which the means of life shall be the common heritage of all.

Eric Boden

"Dear Sir —" (1951)

From the May 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are all familiar with the "write-to-the-news-paper-about-it” fiends. Any particular bee that is buzzing around their bonnets at the time is given a whirl, either in the daily paper or the local rag, more often than not bringing forth a counter blast of opposing opinions couched in varying degrees of heat from others of the same species. The most common type dashes off in high dudgeon a sulphurous epistle registering deep disapproval of the government's foreign policy or blisters the paper with an attack on the local street fighting or the unreliability of the 9 a.m. train. There is also the "is-this-a-record” type, lying in wait, ears pinned back and pen poised for the first notes of the cuckoo, or to record the remarkable age at which Grandmother finally handed in her dinner pail. For 24 weeks up to and including the 5th April the B.B.C. opened up a new and exciting "happy hunting ground” for these scribes in their programme “Dear Sir," broadcast every Thursday at 8 p.m. for 30 minutes. It comprised a very mixed bag of letters written to the B.B.C. by the public on an infinite variety of subjects, edited and introduced, by Leslie Baily. The letters came over the air with what was apparently considered suitable voices and inflections. Some letters from children were piped up as such. The women's voices were vibrant and trembling with emotion or indignation. The men, bullying or frightfully refined according to the subject matter of the letter. (Obviously fugitives from a repertory company.) Taken all in all it was an innocuous collection of letters and it is a matter for conjecture as to what precisely was the "open sesame” to the air. The letters were hand picked, as in the short time at their disposal only a very small percentage could be broadcast. Many letters were representative of dozens on the same theme. One correspondent wrote to say "Au revoir” to the series and mentioned plaintively that his 15 previous letters had not received publicity. The subjects ranged through self government for colonies, the recent Tory tactics in the house, water divining, the proposed alteration in Divorce laws, the Census, lack of women geniuses and should the Welsh language be taught in schools? Someone posed the question, "why is it that Welsh people can always sing”? A rather rude reply denied that they sang but said, "they just lament in unison,” which brought forth highly indignant letters in the come-back of the following week. A few letters turned the searchlight of publicity on some present day evils, the frightful conditions for the slaughtering of animals, some facts regarding T.B. and the starvation wage of £3 8s. weekly for waitresses who stated they could not exist without “tips.” A controversy raged for several weeks regarding the Christian attitude to war and rearmament, and it was interesting to note that only a small minority came out on the side of pacifism. The majority wallowed in a spate of words and while re-assuring us that "God is love,” were not against rearmament. Some of the letters called for "laws of war” or counselled restraint and discrimination in waging war. One Christian correspondent wrote to say that according to the New Testament the state has God's permission to make war. (Church and state have always foraged amicably together as purple patches in past history testify.) An ex-service man thought housing shortage caused labour troubles and someone else said that the worker who had a large family should have increased wages instead of family allowances.

Another brain wave suggested enclosing rabbits in wired-off tracts of land like the monks of olden days, and leave nature to remedy that blot on the escutcheon of the Labour government, the meat shortage. Another suggestion was to utilise the interior heat of the earth for mechanical purposes, and a plea was put in that crooners, male and female, should celebrate the festival of Britain by using their own language instead of that ghastly "Americanese.”

The foregoing very sketchy review does not cover the whole range of letters but listening to this programme week by week the writer was struck by the infinite number and variety of subjects with which a large section of the public concern themselves. The thought occurs, is it possible for all these widely differing people to ever think alike on one subject and act in harmony to establish socialism? Add to this the language difficulties and prejudices fostered between workers in different lands and the odds against a genuine world socialist understanding seem almost too formidable to contemplate. Last, but not least, is the absolute dependence of the workers for their picture of world affairs on the press and radio tainted with incessant and almost unconscious propaganda.

The scales are heavily weighted but the workers of the world share the common denominator of a desire to live in peace and security. This happens to be a desire to which the acquisitive nature of capitalism renders it powerless to accede. International rivalries, rearmament, the threat of war, bring in their wake steadily deteriorating conditions for the workers which should hasten their enlightenment. Here then we have the ingredients for a snowball growth of genuine socialist ideas. When the majority of the workers revise that there is no other alternative and vote for socialism, it will be “curtains” for Capitalism and no regrets.

F. M. Robins

Striking a balance (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who wrestles crocodiles for a hobby might care to test their strength further by going along to any main line London station in the middle of, say, a railwaymen’s work-to-rule and asking the seething commuters what they think about it.

Because workers who strike and thereby cause their fellow workers a lot of trouble in getting to work, or buying essential food, or keeping their homes lighted and warm, are an example of those people—others might be corrupt politicians, hardened criminals, revolutionary socialists—without whom, we are told, the capitalist social system would be a cosy, sympathetic, fulfilling experience.

There is, of course, no argument about strikes causing problems. Sometimes they mean widespread inconvenience—like power cuts when electricity supply workers are taking action—or danger, as when the firemen went on strike. At other times the results are less immediately apparent—for example the effects upon prisoners’ existence of the prison officers' campaign for higher pay.

Now there is no reason for anyone actually to enjoy the effects of a strike; sitting in the candlelight when you would prefer to be watching Bruce Forsyth, or waiting in the rain for the phantom ‘bus not to arrive are hardly satisfying ways of spending time. So it often happens, that the frustrations of the people who directly suffer through a strike—like those commuters at the stations, late home from work — are vented exclusively against the strikers, who are seen as lazy, greedy and careless.

This propaganda line is set in a long, dishonourable tradition. During the general strike, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who was widely admired as having one of the most efficient brains in the world, wrote in the government’s mouthpiece, the British Gazette,

The real victims of a general strike are what is called the common people—the men and women who have to labour hard day by day, for their own livelihood, and that of their children . . . 

Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, saw it in starker, more threatening, terms, writing in the same newspaper:

The general strike is a challenge to Parliament, and is the road to anarchy and ruin.

The same type of argument was used almost fifty years later by Ted Heath when the combined effects of the miners’ strike and the work to rule by electricity workers and train drivers provided the political excuse for the three day week in industry. And more recently the hospital works supervisors were subjected to mounting pressure about the effects upon patients of their dispute. On October 23, the Daily Telegraph reported a consultant surgeon saying that “It is impossible to say that any given patient has died as a result of this dispute” but few days later, on October 27, the same newspaper was more definite: “At least 30 people have already died needlessly, in pain and considerable discomfort, because of the Health Service works supervisors’ dispute — and the death toll is rising daily, medical experts confirmed last night.”

Which gives the final touch to the popular image of the striker—lazy, greedy, disruptive and, if need be, a killer as well. Yet many workers who might accept this image themselves come out on strike. Is there, then, another side to the picture?

Failure 
The first thing to be said is that strikers are not the ungovernably omnipotent figures they are made out to be. Strikes often fail, with much damage to the workers who have taken part in them. One historical example was the general strike and then the long resistance of the miners until they were literally starved back to work. More recently, in 1971 the Union of Post Office Workers called the first national strike in their history, transforming the friendly neighbourhood postmen into another threat to the livelihood and the constitutional safety of British capitalism. Four months later the postal workers, defeated, settled for a little more than they had been offered before the strike began. And last winter the firemen — again, this was their union’s first ever national strike—beaten by a combination of a lack of support from the TUC and the use of troops as strike breakers, went back to work on the government’s terms.

There was a lot of sympathy for the firemen, who ran a skilful publicity campaign, but it is questionable whether this feeling would have long outlasted any deaths in a fire for which the strikers could have been blamed. Yet to be successful a strike has to be disruptive, or even dangerous and much of the negotiation which surrounds it is about how effective, in these terms, it might be. And if, after the negotiations, a strike is called, who is to “blame”? The strikers? Or the employers? Neither have given way; both have been prepared to see disruption and danger rather than surrender without a fight.

It is worth looking at a couple of recent examples, to put the matter into some sort of balance. For some weeks now social workers in a few areas—Liverpool, Newcastle, Tower Hamlets—have been on strike for what amounts to a demand for higher wages. This has provoked a lot of derisory comment on the lines that capitalism is unlikely to be brought to its knees by being deprived of social work. “Forget the social workers, let’s get on with it” wrote a Liverpool Tory MP. “Social workers?” said one Newcastle mother in The Guardian, “I don’t care if I never see one again.” On the other hand there was evidence that the strike did cause some problems, even some suffering. Said The Guardian on October 13:

  A social workers’ strike has forced a judge to send two juveniles to prison . . . The boys' solicitor said after the case: “Social workers say they care for people. One wonders how they would like to spend up to 22 hours out of 24 locked up in a cell under the tender care of the prison officers.

And New Society (26/10/78) reported on the strike in Liverpool:

Whatever others may say about social workers, and about their strike, the clients are in no two minds. “They should definitely get more. They’ve helped me a lot with me nerves and helping to get me out of here,” says one young mother in a block fit only for demolition . . .

The attacks upon the social workers ignored the fact that it has not been just their strike which has denied their services to the “clients”. The Labour government has been responsible for an economy drive imposed on local authorities which has resulted in serious cuts in social services; this has been going on for years and it has no discernible end. On 26 October last, for example, The Guardian detailed some of the effects of the economies planned in Birmingham, among them the closure of nineteen establishments for children, including three residential nurseries and a home for handicapped children.

Health Service

These cuts are being enforced on the grounds of economy—to balance a budget. For some reason this is aceptable to many people, while the efforts of social workers to balance their budgets, by getting higher wages, is not.

The resistance to the hospital supervisors’ claim was also based on government policy—this time on the official limit on wage rises, to which workers in places like hospitals are specially vulnerable. “Just not on,” was the response from David Ennals, the Social Services Secretary, to the supervisors’ claim for a 15 per cent bonus. When the dispute was over the Sunday Times accused Ennals of agreeing to a settlement which had been available to him before the dispute began, which indicates that he, too, was ready to gamble with patients’ lives.

Whatever the truth of this, it is clear that any suffering caused to sick people originated in the government’s policies, to which the workers’ action was a response. These policies are still operating and in the case of the Health Service are responsible for a seriously declining standard of treatment and facilities :

   Standards of care in the health service have drastically worsened through lack of money, more work and shortage of nurses, the Royal College of Nurses said yesterday.
   A delegation from the college yesterday told the Secretary for Social Services, Mr. David Ennals, of untrained staff being left in charge of hospital wards, neglect in basic nursing routines, and inadequate supervision of learners . . .
   Mr. Ennals is accused of exploiting his staff. “It is an indictment of those responsible for the health service that a response is only forthcoming when there is a threat of strike action . . .” (The Guardian, 31/10/78)

So if (and it is a very big “if”) the nurses were to strike, and patients were to die as a result, who would be to blame—the nurses struggling for a living wage or Ennals who has exploited their reluctance to struggle? And who is responsible for the people who are already dying, through lack of facilities in the health service, much of it aggravated by the Labour government’s economies?

Policies like pay restraint were designed without any reference to human needs but to protect the interests of the British capitalist class, on the established principle that profit is good and loss is bad. When they draw up such policies, governments are aware that, directly or indirectly, people will suffer burdens additional to those which capitalism ordinarily imposes upon them. But little, if any, account is taken of this.

Strikes are not acts of bloody mindedness; they are an unavoidable result of the class division of capitalist society, which sets the non-owning majority against the owning minority. This struggle is about the division of wealth; it is not a matter of morality, of strikes with “justice ”on their side or of employers in the “right”. Like all struggles, strikes are a matter of power; if the workers can exert the greater pressure upon the employers they will win, as they have done in some recent, famous cases. But when the situation is reversed—as it was in 1926—the employers will ruthlessly assert their superiority and grind the workers to defeat.

How long capitalism endures is a matter for those who suffer under it and who are misled by it—the working class. They have the power to establish a society of harmony. We are talking here about a massive movement of ideas—no less than a majority revolution to overthrow one social system and replace it with another, an historically unique act. Beside that, wrestling crocodiles is gentle exercise with far fewer rewards.

Ivan

Pathfinder: Brave New Epsilons (2010)

The Pathfinder Column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine going to a job interview in twenty years time. Chances are, you’ll have to take along your ID, your CV, and your personal genomic profile. One of the gene variants an employer might be looking for is Epsilon 4, which is thought to significantly increase your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Some notable genome self-publishers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker are choosing not to publish the Epsilon 4 part of their genome, perhaps understandably. As one researcher remarks, “I wouldn’t want to know whether I’ve got one and I certainly wouldn’t want other people to know” (New Scientist, 13 February).

The problem for workers is, genome-sequencing is already in the 3-figure dollar range and it won’t be long before we will be expected to provide a genome survey in order to get work, just like house sellers will now be required to provide the buyer with a house survey. The more privileged members of this brave new capitalism will no doubt ‘do a Pinker’, but workers in all probability will not be allowed to keep quiet about Epsilon 4, or anything else for that matter, and will be entirely at the mercy of what the bosses decide they don’t like. Unless more workers start inserting copies of this magazine into their jeans, we could all end up as Epsilon-class workers.

‘Just out driving my new Toyota Prius. Text later. Can’t stop.’
Possibly last month’s best SMS joke. In the midst of the fuss over the large-scale recall of the accursed vehicle, some engineers are doing the predictable thing and, with a knowing stroke of the greying whiskers, remarking that “O’course, they be too damn complicated these days, too much to go wrong. That’s their problem right there, I tell ‘ee.” Although the Prius problem was entirely and mundanely mechanical, speculation also centres round another of Toyota’s products, the Lexus. The more that modern car designs move from mechanical to electronic systems the greater the risk of electromagnetic interference (EMI), and designs like the Lexus with electronically-controlled acceleration or ‘drive by wire’ are now thought to be at risk of EMI-induced ‘sudden unintended acceleration’(New Scientist, 13 February).

Meanwhile, reports that increasing sunspot activity is likely to interfere with sat-nav systems provide a double-whammy (‘Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises’, BBC Online, 10 Feb). One can envisage whole convoys of flashy car drivers all roaring off down arbitrary highways like bats into hell, the blind leading the blindingly fast. Still, it could be worse. At least dodgy cars are being recalled these days. If the free-market capitalists got their way we might return to the unregulated days of the notorious Ford Pinto, whose manufacturers allegedly decided to pay off accident fatalities’ families rather than stop selling the dangerous car. All in all it makes you think about oiling that pushbike.

Public no longer believes poll findings, poll finds
Two recent polls commissioned by the Times newspaper and the BBC suggest that the UK public are becoming more climate sceptical, no doubt because they imagine the unusually heavy snow on their front lawn has blanketed the entire world and heralds a ten thousand year ice age. As the snow piled up, so did the column inches, with journalists speculating about why climate catastrophe has fallen so out of favour (see for instance ‘Climate scepticism 'on the rise'’, BBC poll shows’, (BBC Online, 7 February).

Favourite theories are the East Anglia email scandal, the hopeless effort at Copenhagen, and most recently the raw wet omelette served on the face of the International Panel on Climate Change by their careless and spectacularly erroneous claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, rather than the original and more accurate date of 2350. Interestingly this error has been traced back to an article in New Scientist, which observed that the panel has been ‘severely criticised for citing a non-peer-reviewed magazine’ (see New Scientist, 23 January, p5 – in a very small box).

But wait a moment, isn’t everyone getting a bit carried away? Scientists can make mistakes, can’t they? In fact the ability to make and identify mistakes forms the basis of all science. There may be some buffoons out there bonkers enough to think that if scientists get one thing wrong then they must have everything else wrong too, but that surely can’t apply to the whole population.

In all the journalistic hoo-ha about rising climate scepticism there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of poll scepticism, yet are the polls really significant or just a blip? As most people no doubt realise, polls are the journalist’s best buddy but make for unreliable real-world guides, especially in areas other than elections where they are unlikely to be corroborated later by hard facts. In the first place, they can be designed to produce the findings the poll-funders are looking for (or else, if they don’t, the funders don’t publish the findings). Even supposing the funder is genuinely disinterested in the findings (the BBC and Murdoch-owned Times are not climate sceptics so presumably weren’t hoping for this result, unless the idea was to manufacture some controversial headlines) there is no peer-review or general oversight of the polling methodology employed. What suggests the polls are a blip is the timing. One would, for instance, have to question the wisdom of asking people standing in two feet of snow whether they were especially concerned about global warming at the present time. One further wonders whether the BBC and the Times will be doing follow-up polls in flaming June or blue-sky July. Finally there is the question, admittedly a cynic’s recourse: do people tell pollsters the truth anyway, or merely make a little devilment out of the business? Why would they lie, you might ask? But equally, why shouldn’t they? Anyone who doesn’t believe this is possible has clearly never filled in a market survey report on branded products. In view of all this, does anyone apart from material-hungry journalists actually believe in polls? Maybe we should have a poll and find out.

Note to self
Lastly and a propos none of the above, a quick word from our BBC economics advisor Robert Peston:“It's plainly better for banks to make profits, than not (unless you are actively working for the destruction of capitalism)” (BBC blog entry, 16th February). Ok Bob, now there’s an idea...

Paddy Shannon